It's a Bobby...

I wait five minutes. I take a deep breath as if I just enrolled in Meditation for dummies. Gingerly I spritz the Teddy Bear with a dash of English Leather. I do a quick hair check to make sure everything is in place.

Justin asks me what I am doing. He states that we are finally going to get together to work on the skit.

I tell him that I will be back in five minutes.

 

He tells me that Eagle scout Josh will be pissed.

 

I tell him I don't care.

I am the only one in what the British populace refer to as a lift. The lift has mirrors on 3/4th of my body. I keep the Bobby behind my back. I have the Teddy Bear constable occluded behind my back.  The elevator feels like a motorized esophagus as it creeps up one floor. the doors breaking in the middle as if a flower, as if sprouting.

Harmony is waiting for me.

She seems to hop into the elevator with a little skip. I press the button L for lobby. The

lift descends but somehow it feels like it is going up at the same time.

“I bought this for you.” I say, removing my arm from behind my back in a motion reminiscent of a maître-d chauffeuring a patron to a table. Harmony blushes.

“I thought you might like a souvenir from your European sojourn to squeeze when you get home.”

“It’s teddy bear dressed up as a Bobby.”

 

A smile rains from Harmony's lips.

“It’s not a ‘Bobby’ it’s a David.” I tell her. Her face transitions from the color of honey to the color of cheap wine cooler.

 

“Now I can call you up at night and ask you how your David is doing and if you squeezed him today."

“Harmony smiles.

 

“Or I can ask if David is in your bedroom. Or if David slept with you last night. I can ask you if you spent the night with David last night and if you cuddled with David all night long.”

Harmony appears less amused.

 

I tell her it is only a joke.

 

She can feel free to laugh.

 She smiles again.

 

I turn and lasso my arms around her torso in groping shawl-like fashion. She is 5 ft.2. Inches. My lips seem to bud and fall into the canvas of her prominent forehead. I want to apologize for being so maladroit at lunch. I want to thank her for last night. I want to tell her that I will never be able to listen to U2’s w/o/w/o you again with reflective over her countenance on that perfect spring night on the river Thames.

I reel her in close. It is like my every pore is trying to absorb and sop up her every solitary pore. As if to blend and become one with her.

 I wonder if she will let me kiss her. If my gift to her will warrant a long-overdue make-out session.

The interior of the lift is coated with glass, if I open my left eye I can optically perceive myself reeling harmony into me from seven different perspectives, the most prominent being the clasped elevator door with a fissure leaking down the center. Harmony is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She is wearing a Mickey mouse watch She said that after this morning she just couldn’t wait to get out of that dress.

 

There is a hiccupping bling. On the fissure the doors orchetsrally part and why find the world around us scattered and agog, those in red coats arriving on the last bus from Windsor ready to board. I see Elias Das. I want to ask her in a very Conrad Birdie sort of way if she pinned the Queen.

 

 

                                        

 

The mustached-trench coat boy is milling around the lobby again. Harmony holds her British constable attired Teddy Bear in front of her like she just caught an errantly tossed bouquet. She tells me thank you again.  She tells me that she loves it. A girl with glasses and hair spray brushes past me and for a second I think it is Rachel Greene. Both Vivian and John Major are in the lobby talking with several bus drivers. The tour guides and the bus drivers eat with us every night.

 

I look at the gilded stag in the center of the room. I was thinking that maybe Harmony and I would just sit on the couch when I grab her hand and begin to tug.

 

“Hey let's go outside.”

 

She the holds the teddy bear in front of her with both hands and tells me that this is really special, in a monotone suggestive that she is thanking the academy. Rose is in the lobby. I pretend I don't see her. We head straight for the doors. It is like we are on our own calendar playing chicken with the years of time. We are not allowed to independently leave the hotel on our own volition without being escorted by our counselors. We are breaking the rules of the Young Columbus ’93.

 

Harmony looks down at her stuffed animal as the automatic doors seem to clap open. It is the nicest day of our voyage so far.

 
 The earth is bleeding spring.

“Lets walk around the block. They won’t kill us. We won’t get mugged.”

 Harmony smiles. We are not walking far. We are holding hands. For a second I feel the London exhaling of London pass through my bodies. I squeeze Harmony's hand. We take a left on Harrington Gardens, walking in front of the front of the hotel.  I can see the international flags saluting above the Gloucester sign. I am pretty sure I can make out my room . The houses across the street are white Victorian houses which are enjoined.

“It’s just amazing,”

Harmony says what.

“I mean, I met you only five days ago in Stratford.”

Harmony smiles. I wonder if Harmony had the same feeling that I had when I met her on the dancefloor. I wonder if she felt a connection. I wonder if she thought I was someone else a first the way I thought she was someone else at first.

We take a right on a street called Ashburn place. We take another right on Courtfield road. We are intrinsically just walking around the perimeter of the hotel.

  Harmony states again that we really shouldn’t go too far.

 

 

 

The traffic hisses by in a breath of hurried sentences of loss.  It still does a brain fart every time I see a vehicle scuttling down the polar opposite side of the road.

 

 

“How is everything with good ol’ Lynn Minton?”  Harmony looks down when she smiles and informs me that everything with good ol’ Lynn Minton just happens to be fine at the moment.

 

“Tomorrow’s the big day. There’s about twenty of us and about twenty British youth with whom we will all be meeting. She wanted to have me prepare a question and answer session about topics that are germane to teens today in our society.”

 

 

   I inquire if everyone who attends the meeting will be featured in Parade.

“Lynn says that it will just be the crème de la crème so to speak, but she said that since I assisted her in orchestrating the event that she promises to get me in with my picture and everything.”

 

 

It is London. It is spring. We are all alone. The steady hush of traffic continues to brush past in gaseous droves. Harmony looks down at her stuffed animal again as if it is some kind of newborn. Without granting a calculated thought to my action I turn Harmony around so that our shoulders our facing each other. My arms stretch in almost callisthenic posture, fingers forming a laced web descending around the totality of her anatomy, knowing that she batted me away from kissing her on the Thames last night I kiss her forehead the moment my wreathed limbs slide south down her back, below her jeans, upper thigh, hoisting her up like a steeple, my vision now burrowed near her midriff.

And she is laughing. She is giggling. For a moment I look up. She is holding the teddy bear I have deemed a ‘David” and she is laughing. And she is smiling.

 

 After all this time I have finally made her smile.

 

Somehow there is a looming tangible sadness. Somehow we only have one day left.

 

 

 

One full day left in England and then all of this will be nothing more than a reverberated whisper.

 

One full day left and all of this will be gone.