Page 193 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 163

them before.
He stepped from the curb in front of the Elephant Walk bar to study
the traffic. He calmed himself with a thought from the sixties: whenever
you get separated at a demonstration or a rock concert, the best thing is
to stay where you are. When he could no longer stand the tension, Ryan
jumped into a taxi idling at the curb. Back at the Victorian, the Vette was
gone from the garage. Kick’s favorite jacket was no longer hanging inside
the front door. Ryan came to the only logical conclusion about his lover’s
sudden disappearance.
He knew what had happened.
A woman in a new pink 1979 Cadillac Eldorado sat screaming in the
middle of the Castro and Alvarado intersection. She had been edging her
mammoth car out onto Castro at a corner made almost blind by the steep
angle of the hill when she rammed the bullet-nosed front end of the red
Corvette gunning its way up the climb in the fast lane on Castro.
The impact bounced her twice precisely between her seat and her
steering wheel. All around her a thick shower of red fiberglass rained down
on her windshield. She reached instinctively for her wipers, and through
the falling debris she saw for the first time in her life the most beautiful
blond man she had ever seen sitting in the cockpit of the car that seemed
to freeze forever into this moment of terminal shatter.
The noise and the red shards of the exploding car body made her
clench the wheel with both her thick bejeweled hands. She cried out and
thrashed while the blond man sat motionless and cool and invulnerable
waiting for the pieces to land and the tangle of auto frames to finish their
incredible wrap.
The accident was almost as Solly had predicted hours earlier at his
birthday supper.
“One thing I know for sure,” Solly Blue had said. “Indulge me on this
occasion of my birthday to be philosophical. By thirty-five a man knows
in his heart of hearts that everything good that can happen to him has
already happened. Then comes a time when you finally sense that every-
thing else you have coming to you will be bad.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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