Jayla Mile. Chapters 7 & 8

7. Going for Gold:

At seven o'clock on the assigned Friday evening Jay walks from her class at the Lilac Circus to the street of the lowlit Club Intime. She intends to stop and have a cigarette a block away from its canopied entrance, while pondering her next move. It seems foolish, this rendezvous, an invitation to the kind of trouble she’d decided to be through with. Man Trouble.

But she glides through the cool October dusk, her body taut, her being intent upon reaching her destination and the man, the man with the eyes of sinful cyan. And so when the Club pops into sight, she keeps moving, heading straight inside. Sliding into an elegant booth, she orders a glass of wine.

In the past, this spot has served only as a brief stopover, a last call on her late night city tramping. Now, in the soft, leather-cushioned seclusion of the booth, she waits - or rather, doesn’t wait, because now, safely hidden in a dim corner, she finds she doesn’t really expect him.

And then he is there, smiling and more at ease than the night before. Decked out in a smart but stiff three piece suit that makes him look a distinguished pushing-forty and yet as if he never left prep school, he carries what appears to be an oversized lunchbox but is actually a briefcase.

His hair is cropped boy-scout short. Her hair is mostly hidden beneath a black Basque beret, so she’s looking very Left Bank, holding a cigarette with inch long ash and dressed in the usual ink-black. He slips into the booth, orders a beer and lights a cigarette.

A moderately amplified pianist dribbles tinkling cocktail notes into sparkling cocktail glasses, while swizzle sticks tap tabletop time. Chatter and laughter grow high as the night wears on, past happy hour, sliding and tinkling and crashing into what will become desperate hour for some.

8. Some:

Rosie Mile tried to forget with drink all the nonsense people were apt to say and think about her and her affairs. Specifically, the love affair she’d been having which her husband had discovered. At his cuckolded insistence, Rosie bid goodbye to their only child (“I’m going away, Jayla. And I won’t be back.”) then vanished for good. It was as if the earth had swallowed her up, just as her ex-spouse had intended.

But years later, when the outlawed Rosie Mile settled down with a man who owned a farm, she wrote Jay and asked if she would like to come for a visit. And so, ten years after she’d last seen Rosie, Jay went to see the mother who had not after all been swallowed up by the earth, but who only tilled and tended it. And lived on it with a man in a big yellow house.

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