by Editors

Chronicles of The Shade

	Episode 2 – Lara’s Song

June 2007.

Nearly six years had passed since Lara had told Lance that she had to leave him.  It was not that she loved him any less.  It was because she knew that something terrible had happened to him, something that would fester and claw at their relationship until nothing was left.  She knew that it had happened during his trip to the Himalayas. She often thought of him, but she knew that it would be useless for her to seek him out.  She knew that he would have to come to her.  He would have to convince her that he was whole again, or at least that he could be made whole with her help.  If he never returned, she would still have her memories of their time together, brief though it was.

Seven years earlier she had decided on a lark to read economics at the London School in non-degree status.  Her undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a scholarship student, were in literature and drama.  Her friends told her that she had really majored in connoisseurship.  She had also graduated from Alma Maynard’s Philadelphia School of Dance, and afterwards she had given classes in ballroom dancing, her favorite being the Tango—the dance of love.

She was not that much interested in economics—she at the time having taken a sabbatical from her position as a film critic on the Enquirer—but she thought that anyone with a liberal arts degree could easily handle “the dismal science.”  In fact, she had felt fairly dismal just before she enrolled, having heard that her first love, one Sam’l Hargo, the purser on the cruise ship Maricopa, had perished at sea in a violent storm that took the lives of more than half its complement.

One evening Lara decided that she had suffered enough reading about the Laffer curve and supply-side economics.  It was the same silly stuff that Lanny Crudlow prattled on about on MSNBC.  They were still talking about Adam Smith and his “invisible hand.”  Invisible hand, indeed, she thought.  It seemed to her that large corporations, in their headlong lust for privatization and profits, had raised the middle finger of that hand to the average worker.  Where was the sense of community?  Where was the spirit of sacrifice and sharing that FDR had instilled in the American people?  All his programs were being dismantled, bit by bit, to feed the hungry maw of corporate America.  Lara decided that she needed a drink.

She was sitting at a table at The Red Lion Inn enjoying a glass of Chardonnay when she noticed a man staring at her from the crowded bar.  He was an American, she surmised, not only from the way he was dressed, but also from the fact that he had a glass of whiskey on ice in his hand instead of a pint of bitter.  Dressed in a black Cashmere pullover and grey slacks, he didn’t have that nubby look that allows anyone with a sharp eye to pick out an Englishman.  Lara had two sharp eyes, and she was not shy.  She used them to stare back at him.

Then he set his glass down and broke free from the crowd to approach her table.  She looked him over.  He was of more than average height, thinning black hair going grey at the temples, ruggedly handsome with high cheekbones and a tanned complexion, and with the walk of an athlete.  He stood before her, a slight smile on his lips.  “Pardon me,” he said disarmingly, “but are you Salma Hayek?”

Lara laughed in spite of herself.  Friends had often commented on the facial resemblance. She was reminded of the announced casting for the film Frida and answered cleverly, “Only if you’re Diego Rivera.”         

“I think I could be,” the man said.  “All I’d have to do is gain thirty pounds and take a couple of art classes.”

Lara had never experienced that sort of pick-up line before.  She asked if he would like to sit at her table.  “Only if you’ll buy me a drink,” he said.

That did it.  She was hooked. “I can’t be Salma Hayek, she said.  “I don’t have her eyes.”

“Yes, I can see that now,” he said, looking into her large and shining indigo eyes, “but I can overlook that because everything else seems to be in place.”

Lara felt herself blushing.  He sat down at her table and motioned for the waitress.  “I drink Glen Levitt,” he said.  “How about you?”

Lara pushed her half-finished glass of wine away.  “I am particularly fond of single-malt Scotch whiskey,” she said, “and I’d be delighted to drink it with a fellow American.”

That was the start of an intense love affair.  Only later, when it ended, was Lara reminded of what falling in love really meant.  When you are falling you have the exciting, delicious feeling of speeding through space so fast that it takes your breath away.  It is only when you have stopped falling and hit the ground with a jolt that you realize what a risk you took.  Lara had taken that risk before, with Sam’l Hargo, but the shock had not been nearly so great as it was with Lancelot Stanley Carter, II.

Sam’l Hargo was a sailor, the older brother of her best friend, Delores. His mother had intended to write ‘Samuel’ on his birth certificate, but she had instead written ‘Saml’.  Later, one of his elementary-school teachers added the apostrophe, and he was Sam’l from that day on.  Lara fell in love with his image in a photograph Delores had shown her of her handsome brother, Sam’l.

When Lara was fifteen, she attended a “Quince” party at Delores’s house for several classmates. After the guests had left, the two girls retired to their separate bedrooms, Delores’s parents having left for another party with friends. Lara went to the guest bedroom, which had formerly been Sam’l’s room. As Lara lay sleeping, an extraordinary thing happened. Sam’l returned from a sea voyage, duffel bag on his shoulder, to find a young girl sleeping in his bed.  Suddenly, Lara opened her striking, sapphire eyes and saw Sam’l standing beside her—standing beside his own photograph.

“Who are you?” he asked huskily.

“I am Lara.”

“Ah, then you must be my Lara,” he said, as he bent over and took her in his arms and kissed her innocent lips.  It was Lara’s first kiss.  What more is there to tell?  One moment Lara was a mere child, and the next she was in her lover’s arms. Lara’s heart and soul had been opened to Sam’l a dozen years before Lance Carter came striding towards her at The Red Lion Inn.

Lara and Sam’l were lovers for four years before Sam’l married the woman his parents had chosen for him.  Somewhat surprisingly, his bride’s name was also Lara.  But this Lara looked more like Julie Christie than Salma Hayek.  About the time Lara Lane Lamont was born, several new mothers in Philadelphia had named their daughters Lara.  They had all read Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, and the peasant girl who had inspired the Russian revolution bewitched them.  Our Lara was bothered early on by this association with a Russian peasant woman, and she was even more annoyed when the blonde-haired and full-figured Julie Christie played Lara’s part in the film.  This was why our Lara insisted on using her mother’s maiden name as the middle name in her own.  Lara Lane Lamont could easily be associated with connoisseurship, but never with a Russian peasant.

Lara was devastated when Sam’l told her during a restaurant dinner that he was going to marry the other Lara.  He told her that they could continue their affair in spite of his marriage.  Our Lara was horrified.  She told him that if he married the other Lara, then that would be an end of it.  Sam’l became possessive.  He insisted that his love for her was greater.  Lara stormed out of the restaurant and Sam’l followed her.  He told her to get into his car.  She said she would rather walk home.  He grabbed her arm, but she pulled away.  Sam’l shouted at her, and she shouted back.  He slapped her face and she began to cry.  Sam’l said he was sorry, entreating her to forgive him; but she would not.  Finally, she got into his car and he drove her home.  She sat in silence as far from him as she could, pressed up against the passenger-side door.  When they reached her house, Sam’l again attempted to apologize, but Lara would have none of it.  She ran up the path to her house, key in hand, and quickly opened the door.  That was the last Lara saw of Sam’l Hargo.  She did not attend his wedding.  When her friend Delores wrote her years later to say that Sam’l had died, Lara shed the tears one keeps in reserve for a first love, but she did not grieve.

Now alone in her apartment in the D.C. suburbs, Lara thought of her two lost loves—the one irretrievably lost, the other not quite lost but perhaps still wandering.  She remembered how happy she and Lance had been, how similar their thoughts and value systems were.  He shared her love for great literature—for the works of Boccaccio, Dostoyevski, Ibsen, Faulkner, and Dreiser.  They both enjoyed reading Oscar Wilde and the short stories of O. Henry.  Lara had inherited her love for literature from her father, Louis Lamont, a French Canadian who had adopted the United States as his own with a devotion that only an immigrant can really feel.  Her father had also taught her to love the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Together they had frequently visited Constitution Hall with its polished banisters and the sweet-smelling wood of the floors on which American heroes had walked and argued.

 Lara still missed her father greatly. He had died during her sophomore year at Penn.  Louis Lamont’s death seemed to make her mother colder and more distant.  She and Lara simply did not share the same interests.  Jane Lamont reverted to her maiden name shortly after Louis died, and it somewhat annoyed Lara when her mother, who was quite attractive, would laughingly refer to herself as “just plain Jane Lane.”  After graduation Lara got an apartment in south Philadelphia, and she saw her mother infrequently before her mother’s accidental death in London five years later.  Plain Jane Lane, returning to her hotel after a shopping spree at Harrod’s, looked carefully to her left before stepping into the street and got hit by a lorry coming from her right.  Lara’s first, grieving trip to London was only to recover her mother’s body and return home.  How different and magical the city was on her second visit when she could share it with her lover.

Lara made Lance promise that when he finished his M.Phil. thesis he would meet her in Philadelphia.  It was to be the coming summer, when Lara’s term was finished and Lance had received his degree.  She wanted to show him where she had grown up.  She wanted to share with him a ride on the ferryboat up the Delaware River. She wanted to show him the architecture of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” thrilled visitors as it appeared immediately as they entered the central doorway.  She wanted to share her past as they planned their future together.

Most surprisingly of all was that Lara and Lance shared the same progressive political views.  Despite the wealth that Lance’s father had bequeathed to his son, Lance remained blessed with the common touch.  Although he had the accouterment of wealth, it was worn lightly on his person, and he had no affectations.  He thought that FDR was a great president, perhaps the greatest, and he thought that B. A. Liar, then the governor of Texas, if nominated by the Repugnican Party and elected by the people, would be the worst president ever.  Lance and Lara would sometimes meet halfway between Oxford and London, he driving his Mercedes 500SL down to Henley-on-Thames, or to Marlowe, and she speeding up the M-4 in her Mini Cooper to meet him.  They would sit by the fire in a local pub, he with his whiskey and she perhaps ordering a Pim’s Cup.  They would talk politics.

“What do you think about this likely Repugnican ticket of Liar and Chancey?” asked Lara, as they sat in The Black Boy pub, just down the road from Henley.

“If the American people are stupid enough to elect that pair, then they probably will get what they deserve,” answered Lance.

“But Lance, then you wouldn’t be getting what you deserve, and neither would I.”

“I’m not so much afraid of them,” replied Lance.  “I’m afraid of the cabal that will try to run the country as an empire if they get the chance.  Have you read that series of documents they call ‘the Project for the Great American Millennium’?”

Lara had read these documents, a series of letters that advocated regime change—by stealth or by force—in any country that would not acquiesce to the demands of the United States.  “What’s interesting to me,” said Lara “is the roles that the wives of the signatories of these letters play in this plan for world domination.”

“Oh,” said Lance, “tell me about that.”

“I’ll tell you about three of these women and what their jobs are.  First, there is Lemon Chancey, the wife of the man who would be our vice president.  She’s head of the Federal Arts Council, where she advocates censorship of any art form that doesn’t have a political theme of  “us above them all.”  Then there are the wives of the Krappen brothers, Lon and Ron.  Lon Krappen’s wife, Snooky, is our representative to NATO, where she advocates using NATO forces to forcibly supervise elections in South America.  Ron’s wife, Karma, heads the Institute for the Study and Uses of War, and she’s invented dozens of scenarios for subduing recalcitrant nations through the use of creative warfare.”

“They sound like the three witches in Macbeth,” said Lance with a smile.

“You don’t know how right you are!” exclaimed Lara.  “Every Halloween they gather around their cauldron at the Chanceys’ mansion to fix a meal to share with their husbands and plot the fate of the world.”

“I bet I know what’s in that cauldron,” said Lance.  “It’s got to be eye of newt and hind of swine.”

“Don’t forget the sow’s blood and the grease from the murderer’s gibbet,” said Lara, laughing. Then they both laughed together, trying their best to make light of what augured to be a very serious problem.

Those were happy times, thought Lara, as she prepared herself a cup of Murchie’s Black Currant tea, drawn from a packet sent to her by a friend in Victoria, B.C.  It was late afternoon and Lara was feeling sad.  It was about this time of day nearly six years earlier that Lance and Lara had their penultimate meeting in Philadelphia.  Lance had come to visit in her Society Hill home, and they were sharing martinis in her well-appointed drawing room.  Lara had inherited the house when her mother died, but she had never liked it that well.  It had too much of her mother in it and not enough of her father.  She had been thinking of selling the house and moving to D.C., where she could be closer to Lance.  She could teach dance in D.C., and she felt sure she could get a job on the Post doing what she was doing in Philadelphia.

Lance arrived late and he appeared distraught.  Lara felt that there was something on his mind that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her.  She remembered the unsatisfactory dinner they had shared when he first returned from Katmandu and the hurried kiss goodnight.  This time Lara was determined to make him tell her what was standing between them.  With her characteristic firmness and straightforward manner she set down her martini glass and told him that, whatever it was that was bothering him, she wanted to know what it was.  She could handle it.

“Give me your hand,” she said, as she reached forward with her own.  Lance put forward his hand, and she took it in both of hers.  “Now I want you to tell me everything that happened to you when you were trapped in the ice.  There’s something bothering you and I want to know what it is.”

Lance withdrew his hand from her grasp.  “I can’t tell you that.  Maybe someday I’ll be able to do it, but now I can’t.”

Lara was insistent.  “Lance, if you don’t at least make an attempt to confide in me, then I’ll think you don’t love me the way I love you.  I just want to help you get over this, whatever it is.  I want to know the truth.”

Lance rose suddenly from his chair, nearly spilling his drink.  “You can’t handle the truth!” he said, with uncharacteristic violence. Only later did he remember that this was Jack Nicholson’s line in A Few Good Men (the film directed by Robert Reiner), which he would repeat again in other circumstances six years later.

Lara’s eyes widened.  What monster had she stirred from its sleep? She put out her hand to him again, but he pushed it away.  She was reminded in a flash of the last time she had seen Sam’l Hargo.  He had slapped her face.  She didn’t want it to happen again.  “I think that you had better leave, Lance,” she said.  “Maybe when you’re in a better mood we can talk about this again.”

Lance bounded to the door.  “I don’t want to talk about it now, and maybe I’ll never want to talk about it!” he shouted.  He said nothing more as he rushed out the door, got into his car, and drove away at high speed.  A week later she found him, dead drunk, on the pavement outside her home.  That was when she had sadly told him that it was over.

Since that last meeting, Lara had not seen Lance, nor had they spoken.  On her birthdays she would receive a card from him.  It was always signed, “Love, Lance.”  That was all it ever said.  Finally, she sold the house in Philadelphia and moved to the D.C. suburbs where she got a job as a film reviewer and occasional arts columnist for the Post.

Lance must have seen her work, because just two weeks earlier she had received a letter from him congratulating her on a column she had written.  The letter was ambiguous, but it seemed to contain the germ of something about to spring to life again.  It said that he was working on a project that he would like to discuss with her when it had been completed.  When she read those words, her heart fluttered.  She felt a premonition that all these years of waiting—like Penelope waiting for Odysseus—would now perhaps be coming to an end.  The wanderer might now be nearing home.

 

To Be Continued….

Next Week, Episode 3:

“PRESIDENTIAL  PASTIMES”

 

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