Molten Lava

She was hot. Now I don’t mean the kind of hot that means sexy, or that her appearance would make you weak in the knees, but she had a fire, a passion that you could see in her eyes, and you knew the minute you saw her that beneath her skin her blood flowed like molten lava, just waiting to erupt with the joy of living.

That was what attracted everyone to Leslie, her exuberance for life, and everyone wanted a piece of it, wanted to make it their own somehow. Some fell head over heels in love with her the moment they met her, others clung to her like groupies or disciples, wanting to fill their lives with excitement, or somehow learn her secrets. But it was only those who managed to get close enough to her that knew just how hot that fire really could be, and I knew, because I was one of those who fell in love with her.

I was luckier than most, because I actually believed that she loved me too, and instead of smoldering in the ashes of unrequited love, my spirit soared like a phoenix, reaching heights I never knew it could achieve. For three glorious months I felt the flames of her love caressing my senses, every nerve in my mind and body alive, waiting for its touch. I woke, slept, and breathed in that fire whenever it was directed towards me, as if it were the oxygen in the air and I needed it for my very survival. I was obsessed, and I needed nothing else.

Before I had met Leslie, I had felt there was something missing in my life. Sure, there had been the occasional spontaneous trip where I’d just take off for months at a time and go off looking for that illusive something, and other than not telling anyone when and where I was going, I basically lived a responsible life. This time though, things were different.

Leslie’s attention seemed to fill that empty place inside of me, and I lost sight of everything else. I stopped attending my housing coop meetings, let my subscription to Writer’s Monthly slide; I even brushed off my agent’s pleas of “Jane, please get back to me” left on my answering machine. Things that would have normally had me rushing off to take care of, no longer seemed to stay in my focus long enough for me to pay them any heed, nothing, that is, besides Leslie.

Money happened to be one of those things that I no longer concerned myself with in flavor of my newly found obsession. Of it, Leslie seemed to have an endless supply, and because I was along for the ride, I never asked about it. She bought me a bike so I could travel with her, a chrome and black Honda Shadow, that I had mentioned to her once that I had always dreamed of owning, and together, side by side, we hit the road without a care in the world. We were free.

For those three months we traveled the continent, coming and going as we pleased, and never outstaying our welcome in any one place. Leslie always seemed to know someone wherever we went, an ex-lover, or an old friend that would never turn us down, and you could see it in their eyes and in their body language, whenever they were near Leslie, just exactly why that was.

I was just the necessary baggage that they had expected to be tagging along, so Leslie’s ex’s put up with me. But this one time in a small town in Saskatchewan, when after riding most of the day, both of us tired and hungry, we arrived on the not so welcoming doormat of a farmhouse owned by an old flame of Leslie’s. Wanda, I think that was the woman’s name, had apparently only been expecting Leslie.

As we pulled into the driveway, and before the dust even began to settle, we both heard the squeak and slap of the screen door and heard Leslie’s name being called out in excitement, and then nothing. Both Leslie and I took off our helmets and looked up at the same time, and we both stopped dead in our tracks when we saw Wanda just standing there, still and speechless, at the bottom of the stairs.

It seemed like ages before anyone spoke, all three of us just standing there staring, and no one saying a word. Finally, I just had to say something, and stepping forward I reached out my hand and said: “Hi, I’m … “, but I never did get the chance to introduce myself, because just then, all hell broke loose.

“Don’t you step another foot closer”, this Wanda woman, or whatever her name was, said. But she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes never once left Leslie. “How dare you come here with that woman, after what you put me through. You have a lot of nerve.”

“Aw Wanda, please; all that is ancient history, and I thought you and I had resolved everything. Don’t you remember, we both agreed that it was best if we …”

Just then a saucepan came flying through the air, clattering against the gravel, and bouncing off of the front tire of Leslie’s Harley.

“Wanda, please baby, we’re tired and…”

“Don’t you please baby me! WE never decided anything, you decided. You decided to sleep with Rebecca, and YOU decided that a weekend off skiing with Janice would somehow be good for our relationship.”

“But you told me yesterday that we could stay, and it’s late, and we’re tired. Can’t we just come inside and we can talk about this in the morning?”

“We’ll do nothing of the sort”, and with that, Wanda turned and went into the farmhouse, slamming the screen door behind her.

For a few moments everything was quiet except for some muffled clanging and banging inside of the house. Then Wanda reemerged, carrying an assortment of dishes and pans and she began hurtling them through the air in our direction.

Just as a teacup smashed against the ground beside me, its tiny pieces plunking against the leather of my spats, I saw Leslie gesture with her head for me to get back onto my bike. So as glassware shatter to pieces around us, and pie pans bounced and clattered, we quickly turned our bikes around and jumped on the throttles. Leslie first, and then me following close behind like always, we made our escape down the gravel road and back onto the highway.

About a mile and a half away, we turned onto another dirt road and then into a hayfield. Leslie slid off her bike and down onto her back into the tall grass, laughing as she tossed her helmet aside and kicked off her boots.

“Did you see the look on her face when she came out with all those dishes; if looks could kill! … And that teacup just missed your head! Maybe I should have warned you to keep your helmet on!”

Laughing, I joined Leslie in her makeshift lodging, the tension of the encounter and the days ride evaporating from my body in minutes. She had that way about her, an easy way about things that made you forget the gravity of any situation. It never occurred to you to question anything, or to worry about what was coming next. The moment was all that mattered, and with Leslie, life was good.

We spent the night in that hayfield, making our supper from the basic supplies we habitually carried in our saddlebags. The roaring hum of the eighteen-wheelers kept us awake well into the wee hours of the night, until finally our laughter faded away to exhaustion, and we fell asleep in each others arms beneath the stars.

That’s one thing that there always was with Leslie, laughter, but there was a point when that too finally faded away. I think that was when I began to feel jealous of the affections that were always showered onto Leslie. Maybe not so much the affections, but it was Leslie’s reaction to them that finally began to take its toll. Let’s face it, she loved the attention she got; she even thrived on it you could say. But the thing was, she was never stingy about returning those affections, and so the very thing that made her so attractive to me in the first place, was ultimately the thing that tore us apart.

We were in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when the shit finally hit the fan. We had been staying with another one of Leslie’s ex-girlfriends, a potter with a name I could hardly get my tongue around at time, let alone spell for you now. For some reason, the woman’s name reminded me of a summer’s night breeze, and her personality was very much like that as well, refreshing and light. She was easy going, just like Leslie, and she welcomed both of us with a broad smile and a warm embrace.

Unlike a lot of Leslie’s ex’s, this woman seemed to take my being there in stride. She didn’t seem to have a jealous bone in her body. It was my aching jealous bones however, that had caused the problem for us this time, and they’d been aching for quite some time now, having been all bent out of shape since the day I’d caught Leslie kissing and fondling some woman in a bar back in Denver.

Of course Leslie told me that she’d never do that again, and of course I believed her, but something naive died in me that day, and something pure and simple died between Leslie and I as well. The more I tried to hold onto her, the further she pushed me away, and so it was only a matter of time before she took solace in the undemanding arms of another.

That’s how I found her that day in Albuquerque, in the summer’s night breezy woman’s arms.

I had been out in the driveway working on my bike, changing the spark plugs and adjusting the timing, and I needed something to drain the oil into next, so I went looking for our host to see if she had anything that I could use. The last I knew, Miss Breezy had been teaching Leslie how to work the clay on the potter’s wheel, but when I entered the studio I didn’t see them and had thought they had gone back into the house. I was just turning around to head back out of the door when either something caught my eye or I heard something, I don’t remember which, but there on the tattered and faded mat on the floor lay the two of them, their arms wrapped around each other, their bodies covered with the slip from each others hands, totally unaware that they had an audience.

I must have gasped, or made some other sound loud enough to break through their total absorption of each other, because just then, both looked up at me.

Then the most awkward few moments of silence I had ever experienced in my life happened. I remembered thinking at the time how funny it seemed that neither looked the least bit remorseful, and I might even have laughed out loud. But I didn’t stick around long enough for that joyful invitation to join them that I had imagined being offered next. So still carrying the greasy rag that I had been wiping my hands on, I ran out of the door and back to my bike. I jumped on the throttle as hard as I could and screeched out of the driveway; the abandoned crumpled rag and tools scattered across the pavement, left behind as evidence of my hurried departure. I had to get away.

I rode as hard and as fast as I could, barely aware of the traffic surrounding me, until finally the rational thought that I didn’t have any idea where I was going penetrated the fog inside my head, so I let up on the gas and turned into the first motel that I saw.

I paid for my room in advance, and bought a half a dozen mickeys of Jack Daniels from the sneering desk clerk, and I found myself sitting on a broken down mattress in a rundown room, just outside of Albuquerque, on route 66, not knowing or even caring what I was going to do next. That’s how Leslie found me the next day when she finally caught up with me.

It was about eleven in the morning, and I had just refreshed my supply of whiskey and was focusing on the task of consuming them as quickly as possible when I heard a quiet knock on the door. Out of habit more than anything else I opened it, and there stood Leslie. Without an invitation, or speaking a word, she entered the motel room, and dropping both of our saddlebags onto the floor, she sat on the edge of the bed.

Again, out of habit, I joined her.

We didn’t say a word to each other, but our love making felt heavy with sadness, and the next day, without even discussing it, we headed back in the direction from which we came. We stayed together for a couple more days after that; Leslie said something about wanting to hook up with a friend in San Diego, and for the first time in three months the commitments and deadlines that I had left behind in Vancouver began to weigh heavy on my mind.

We said our goodbyes just outside of Bakersfield, where highway 99 connects with Interstate 5. We hugged each other awkwardly, and we recited the usual things that people say when parting. We told each other that we’d keep in touch and that we’d look the other up if we were ever in their home town, but we both knew the truth of the matter; what we had shared had run its course, and it was time for us to go our separate ways.

Leslie said that I could keep the Shadow to remember her by, and since my savings were dangerously close to depletion, and I had no other means of returning home, I accepted her offer. I caught one last glimpse of her over my shoulder as I pulled off the northbound ramp and onto the highway, and then she was gone.

I think the hardest part of that journey home alone was getting use to hearing the sound of only one bike. For three months my Shadow and Leslie’s Harley purred together side by side, in perfect unison. It just didn’t sound right to me with only the one engine, and the single hollow sound of it echoed the emptiness I felt inside the whole trip home.

My apartment looked smaller and drearier than I had remembered it being, and I was greeted with a mountain of bills and a full inbox of messages from concerned family and friends, and from my agent, worrying about my ability to meet that deadline that she had worked so hard for me to get.

For the next couple of weeks I hardly left my apartment. I spent most of my time sleeping, with the occasional trip to the corner store to restock the refrigerator with frozen pizzas, ice cream bars, and beer. Mechanically, I began to write replies to my family and friends, telling them not to worry, that I was fine, and apologizing for yet again going off without informing anyone of where I was going or when I’d return home.

I wrote to my agent and assured her that I indeed had a story to write and that I wouldn’t let her down, and could she please arrange for me to get another advance since I was running low on funds.

Eventually my life began to take on something of the rosy colour that I kept insisting to everyone that it was. I made that deadline that my agent had been so worried about my being able to keep, and many more after that, but occasionally, whenever I’d feel my normal life feeling too normal, I’d take my Shadow out onto the open road and feel the freedom of wherever it took me. During those times I’d think of Leslie and what the two of us shared, but it wasn’t until three years later that I would ever see her again.

I was at a convention in Berkley and I was having a drink in the hotel bar with my partner Diane, just before we had to catch the bus to the airport to make our flight back home to Vancouver, when who saunters into the bar but Leslie.

She hadn’t changed a bit. She was still surrounded by a bunch of starry-eyed woman, all wanting to somehow make her magic their own. For a brief moment our eyes met, and my heartbeat quickened at the memory of what that once could do to me. But this time the fire didn’t seem quite as bright as I had remembered it being, and there was something that looked very much like loneliness in her eyes that I had never noticed before.

I’m not sure if she recognized me from across the room; there wasn’t any acknowledgment in her fleeting glance. My hair was also shorter than it had been, and I no longer lowered my eyes when someone looked directly at me like I used to do.
Watching her from across the room like that, it suddenly occurred to me that even though I had learned a lot about freedom and unselfish loving from Leslie, there were a few things that she could have learned from the experience as well, and it made me very sad to think that she hadn’t.

“You look far away; are you thinking of another story?”

“Huh”, I said, focusing my attention once again onto the smiling woman sitting across the table from me. “Not a new story, an old one”, and finishing off my drink, I continued, “C’mon baby, let’s go home.”