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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: Character Based
- Published: 06/18/2024
Donny Juan
Born 1945, M, from Boston/MA, United States![Donny Juan](/storage/story/3061439B-F1A2-7D3A-F0DB-37B6D413264E_1718709378-image(232x285-crop).jpeg)
“Donny Cantrell’s got a gift with the ladies!” Elliot Brookside was gesturing with his eyes at a blonde haired youth with a wispy mustache and engaging, thin-lipped smile.
Fifty feet away on the far side of the door leading into the kitchen, Donny was, jibber-jabbering with, Stacey Porter, a willowy redhead. One arm nonchalantly draped over the girl’s shoulder, Donny listening intently while the redhead, oblivious to everything else going on in the dining room of the Gibson Family Resort, chatted energetically. An amalgam of Errol Flynn devil-may-care bravura and James Dean dreamy-eyed youthfulness, Donny Cantrell had half the waitresses at the vacation spot engulfed in a romantic lather.
We were working the summer season at the Gibson Family Resort. Elliot Brookside waited tables, cleaning up after the family-style meals. Weekends he also managed the flowerbeds – peonies, coneflowers, pansies and a scattering of black-eyed Susans and salvia - and did grounds keeping. I was holding down the trumpet section in the house band. The rustic vacation resort situated on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee drew a steady clientele from neighboring New England states as well as southern Canada and Quebec.
“Donny’s a regular Casanova,” Elliot added. Thickset with a disheveled mop of auburn hair, in the two weeks we bunked together I never once witnessed Elliot brush his teeth or change his underwear.
“Romeo.” Not to be outdone, I flung the word back at him.
“Better yet, Donny Juan.” Elliot let loose a raucous belly laugh. “I dub Don Cantrell our modern-day Donny Juan!”
I dub Don Cantrell our modern-day Donny Juan! Elliot’s observation was clever enough, but from my vantage point Don Cantrell didn’t fit the mold. He was no wolf, womanizer, seductive rake or lothario.
“I saw him over by the lake couple nights ago, sitting on a bench with Stacey.” Elliot gesticulated in the direction of the redhead, whose porcelain skin was dappled with a light sprinkling of freckles. “It was pitch-black. No moon… no nothin’.” “They were snuggling so close their legs twined together like freakin’ pretzels and –”
“If it was so dark,” I interrupted, “how could you see what they were doing?”
Elliot became momentarily flustered. “Bottom line, Donny’s a horny bastard who gets whatever he wants.”
“That’s for sure,” I agreed. In my own way I, too, envied Donny’s effortless ease.
“With all the hot babes,” Elliot shifted gears, “who you got eyes for?”
I cringed. Elliot couldn’t ask a female staff member to pass the salt shaker at the breakfast table without some salacious intimation.
“Alice Blackwell,” I replied.
“Alice?” Elliot tapped his cheek with a muddled expression. “Oh yeah… beaky nose and no tits.” Clearly Elliot had crossed Alice off his list of desirables, erased her name and telephone number from his little black book. “We did a shift together on clean-up in the kitchen yesterday. Not much of a conversationalist.”
* * * * *
After breakfast I grabbed my trumpet and headed down to the water’s edge. In a juniper tree several dark-eyed juncos erupted in a distinctive chitter-chatter as I made my way along the gravelly trail, but the black and white birds with their elongated tail feathers flitted away as I approached the water. In an isolated cove a good hundred yards from the last cluster of cabins I unpacked the instrument and blew a series of long tones in the low register. The sound was quickly muted, swallowed up by the surrounding hemlocks bordering the huge lake.
A half hour into my practice routine I heard the sound of approaching feet. A fishing rod draped over his shoulder, Donny Cantrell was standing next to a clump of lowbush blueberries bursting with inedible, pebbly fruit. “Caught a thirty-six-inch pickerel here earlier this week and wanted to see if he left any close relatives behind. Mind if I join you?”
“No, of course not.”
Laying the rod down, Donny unclasped a small tackle box filled with an array of lures – jigs, spinnerbaits, spoons and jiggly, rubber worms. Choosing a red and white, Donny waded knee-deep into the warm water, began casting and retrieving the line. Sufficiently warmed up, I blew the spit out of the horn and gravitated to a series of intermediate level etudes from the Brandt Studies. Ten minutes passed before Donny returned to shore. “No luck… not a single bite.” He traded the metal lure for a plastic hula popper and headed back out into the shallow water.
Finishing my practice session, I put the horn back in its case. “There’s a girl here at the resort I’d like to know better.”
“And who might that be?”
I was staring at a clump of winter berries next to a larch. The bush was covered with a profusion of greenish-white flowers, but, as with the inedible blueberries, the plump red fruit wouldn’t appear for another few weeks leading into the fall. “Alice… Alice Blackwell.”
Donny cracked a conspiratorial grin. “The reticent brunette… hardly speaks more than a handful of words in mixed company but wise beyond her years.”
“Yes, that’s her.” I couldn’t help but remember Elliot’s crass assessment. “The other night I saw her curled up in an Adirondack chair lost in a paperback. I asked what she was reading and she said, ‘One of the Victorian writers… Thomas Hardy’, then she held the book at arm’s length so I could read the title - Jude the Obscure.”
I was stymied, tangled in an emotional logjam without a clue how to keep the faltering light banter alive. Alice waited discretely before finally lowering her eyes back to the printed page. Jude the Obscure – in that brief moment, Alice Blackwell seemed an ancient Luddite at heart, the kind of woman who would have been perfectly content to forego all modern amenities - to churn butter from freshly milked cows, darn her husband’s socks and forego her air-conditioned Honda Civic for a horse-drawn buggy.
Donny Cantrell chuckled and pursed his lips in a wispy grin. “My father,” he observed, sending the conversation momentarily skittering off in a new direction, “worked for a liquor distributorship that handled high-end whiskeys and wines”. “He once told me that only a connoisseur, someone with a highly-refined appreciation of delicate bouquets, could appreciate the subtle differences between a bottle of Chateau Montelena and a Hectare Cabernet.”
“I never was much of a wine drinker.”
“The former,” Donny elaborated, “costs upwards of a hundred dollars for a slim bottle; the latter runs three bucks and ninety-nine cents.”
“Alice is the Chateau Montelena,” I agreed. “I knew that the minute I laid eyes on her, but the woman put a hex on me. I go catatonic every time she’s near.”
Donny cast his line toward a strand of water lilies and reeled the lure in slowly, tugging at the line every so often to imitate an injured minnow. “Sounds like anticipatory fright.”
“More like full-blown panic attacks, where I can’t string two foolish sentences back to back.”
Finally Donny fastened the wet lure to the top of the pole and, pressing a small lever on the underside of his reel, locked the spool in place. “Nothing much biting here today.” Wading back to shore, he said, “Go get your horn.”
“What?”
“Grab your trumpet and bring it down to the water’s edge.”
Retrieving the instrument, I returned to the sandy shore, where Donny reached out and with an index finger gently tapped the bell of the instrument. “Tell me something interesting about what your holding in your left hand.”
“Where are we going with this?”
“Imagine yourself out somewhere on a first date with the enigmatic, soft-spoken Alice Blackwell and you can’t find a solitary thing to say.”
“My worse nightmare!”
“Tell me something intriguing… clever about the horn,” Donny repeated.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“It’s not rocket science,” he insisted. “Anything that comes to mind no matter how trivial will do.”
Reaching down, I began unscrewing a silver cap from the bottom of the valve casing, and three brass washers slipped from the cap into the palm of my hand. “I put these inside the valve caps.”
“For what purpose?”
“Back in the nineteen-forties, swing era and bebop trumpeters stacked silver dimes in the caps to improve slotting and tone production.” “It seemed like nothing but the tiny weights made all the difference in the world.”
“Clever trick!” Donny stared out across the huge expanse of water where in the hazy stillness Mount Washington loomed six thousand feet in the air. “There’s a foreign flick playing at the Wolfeboro Cinema Saturday afternoon. Take Alice to the movie and then go for desert at the coffee shop two blocks down.” “Tell her about your family, life dreams, existential angst, hobbies, interests, musical goals and, when all else fails, the brass washers you stuff in the valve caps.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s life,” Donny insisted. “I found it interesting. On a first date you need to relax, enjoy each other’s company.”
“There’s no romance in brass washers.”
“It’s safe and serviceable,” Donny shot back. “The romantic mush comes later, once you break the ice.”
I returned the brass washers to the valve cap. “You really think so?”
Donny cuffed me on the side of the head. “Chateau Montelena or Hectare Cabernet – which wine do you prefer?”
* * * * *
Later that night I was lying in my two-tiered bunk. Directly above Elliot Brookside was snoring like a runaway freight train. He still hadn’t brushed his filmy teeth or went in search of a fresh pair of underwear. I was remembering an incident from earlier in the week.
We were toasting marshmallows in the fading light of an early evening campfire near the water’s edge. Alice Blackwell was there along with Donny and a scattering of wait staff and housekeeping crew. Alice turned to Donny. “What you did at breakfast this morning sure was nice.”
“I do tons of nice things,” he returned drolly, “but which one are you referring to?”
“That new guest… the old woman with the aluminum walker.” Around nine o’clock in the morning, an elderly lady lugging a canister of nasal oxygen hobbled into the dining room on an aluminum walker. The woman’s face was mottled with roseola, the blotchy redness meandering from her left nostril to the underside of a wrinkled chin. A pair of yellow tennis balls was firmly wedged onto the front wheels, but halfway across the floor the contraption became mired on a throw rug and the woman was stuck in place. Donny came to the bewildered woman’s aide, freeing the wheels and escorting her to an empty table. Once the she was settled, he sat down on an adjacent chair and with an elbow propped on the table and balled fist tucked under his chin made leisurely small talk until the woman’s meal arrived.
“The old geezer…,” Elliot chimed in, “between the pancakes and all that yakking, she never come up for air.” Elliot took a healthy swig from a bottle of Budweiser. Having managed to pilfer a six pack from the liquor storage cabinet, he was making great headway singlehandedly destroying the evidence.
“She and her husband kept honeybees throughout their marriage,” Donny continued. “He passed away last August.”
“Honeybees… well that’s a hoot!” Alice’s eyes brightened. “Tell me more.”
“She said honeybees are clever as hell, the way they keep the hive meticulously clean, nurse the brood and slavishly tend the queen’s every need.” “She said that, unlike humans, bees are truly social creatures. People cheat on their spouses, lie, steal and indulge in all manner of perversity. We get everything ass backwards, topsy-turvy and, in everyway imaginable, are the defective species.”
“Defective species… what a shitty thing to say!” Elliot took a healthy swig of the amber liquid and tossed the empty longneck into the bushes.
Donny yawned and stretched his limbs. “I’ve got to be up early tomorrow.” It did not go unnoticed that, after he said his goodbyes and drifted away in the darkness, Stacey Porter, who had been lounging by the fire, hurried off in the same direction.
“Donny Juan… Donny Juany… Donny…” Teetering back and forth on his heels, Elliot was sloshed. “Couple of horny bastards.”
“It’s not what you think,” Alice hissed but refused to elaborate.
Several minutes passed in tense silence. I flicked my eyes in the direction of Elliot Brookside, who was now lying on the grass sound asleep, drool dribbling from his puffy lips. “A bona fide, card-carrying member of the defective species,” I mused.
Several revelers began tossing dirt on the smoldering camp fire. As I turned to leave, Alice confided, “As much as I admire the man, there is something unfathomable about Donny Cantrell.” “Each time we meet,” Alice spoke in a hesitant, plodding manner, “I feel like I know less about the guy than previously.”
“We’re only here for the summer,” I replied. “How well can you really know a person in that limited amount of time?”
“No,” she cut me short. “It’s something different but for the life of me…” She left the fractured thought dangling in the humid, late-night air. The flickering light of the dying campfire embers caught her face in bold relief. “It’s like a traveler visits a train station, approaches the counter and says, ‘I need a ticket.’” “The clerk asks, ‘Where to?’ and the fellow says, ‘Well, that’s just it… I’m not terribly sure… don’t really know.’”
The moonless night was shrouded in a thickening mesh of fog and clouds. In a marshy bogged that nestled up against a shallow cove an encampment of bullfrogs began an a cappella chorus of thudding base tones. An owl hooted as a stiff breeze set the foliage rustling. I understood perfectly well what Alice Blackwell, in her hit-or-miss fashion, was getting at. No matter how close you got to Donny Cantrell you came away empty-handed.
* * * * *
Saturday late afternoon when I returned from my date with Alice Blackwell, Donny Cantrell was patiently waiting at the staff cabins. “How did it go?”
“I followed your advice. Everything went reasonably well.”
“What about a second date?”
“There’s a musical comedy at the local theater.”
“The Village Players?” Donny cracked a goofy grin. “The theater is one of the best in the region, not that there’s that much competition in sleepy Wolfeboro.” Overhead a brown hawk was riding the upper air currents circling the shoreline. Swooping lower the huge bird came to rest in the upper branches of a white cedar. “Anything else you’d like to add?”
“I’m going to marry the woman.”
“Marry Alice Blackwell?” My head bobbed up and down. “And is your intended spouse aware of this latest development?”
“Discussing marriage is a bit premature, but she’s my twin soul, future life partner, and I can’t imagine living with any other woman.”
* * * * *
A year and a half passed.
Hearing my wife’s key in the front door, I eased the mouthpiece from my lips and laid the trumpet back in its case. Alice hung her jacket in the hall closet. “Getting ready for tonight?” She gestured at the reddish indentation where the brass instrument had been resting up against my top lip for the better part of an hour. Inadvertently I reached up with an index finger and rubbed the moist tissue.
A wedding reception with a five-piece band had been booked six months earlier - eight to twelve at the Ramada Inn, unless the frivolity spilled over into the late-night hours. “Just running through some scales and arpeggios, “I confirmed. “More to the point, how did your visit go?”
“I showed my parents the ultrasound pictures.” A wispy smile brightened her habitually stolid features and then dissipated, vanish in a heartbeat. “They’re ecstatic… over the moon!”
I wrapped my arms around her burgeoning waist. No matter that the baby’s arrival was still six months away, everything had changed. We were a threesome, a family now, Alice assuming a maternal glow, a sedate peacefulness even more endearing than the inchoate allure that originally attracted me.
She shuffled into the kitchen and began brewing a cup of herbal tea. “And what were you doing in my absence?”
“Breaking in a new mouthpiece.” I went back into the other room to retrieve my horn. “It’s the same basic size and dimension but a heavier blank.”
Alice studied the hefty mass of metal jutting from the back end of the horn. “Cripes! It resembles my swollen belly except full term.”
“A pregnant mouthpiece.” I chuckled at my wife’s witty metaphor. “Yes, well the extra mass darkens the tone and adds richness.”
“What happened to all those brass washers?” she asked. “When we first met, you were stuffing washers in the bottom of the valve caps.”
“That’s old school,” I insisted, shaking my head vigorously. “Far better to add extra metal to the leadpipe. Here, let me show you.” Raising the instrument to my lips, I blew a melodic scale in the low register.
“Sounds nice, but you always had a pleasant tone.”
I replaced the new mouthpiece with my original model and repeated the scale. “Hear the difference?”
“To my tin ear,” she hedged, “both sound equally good.”
“No, listen more closely.” I played a series of broken arpeggios followed by a slurred classical passage from the Arban Studies then repeated the same series of notes on the new mouthpiece. “There’s a noticeable difference,” I persisted. “The tone is mellower and notes slot evenly so intonation is more precise.”
“Very nice!” My wife noted noncommittally as the kettle sent up a shrill whistle. Back in the kitchen she poured the steaming water into the cup. “I just hope that when you teach our daughter to play, you don’t infect her with your nuttiness.” “More importantly, we need to decide upon the child’s name,” Alice sidestepped the musical ephemera, “and start arranging the baby’s room.”
“Don Cantrell called while you were visiting your parents,” I announced. “He wants to get together… a light lunch at an outdoor café in the Back Bay, then deep sea fishing on one of those Boston Harbor charter boats.”
“Not something he could do when he was living in landlocked New Hampshire,” Alice observed. Six months earlier shortly before Christmas I received a letter that Donny had abandoned scenic New Hampshire in favor of a studio apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, traded his beloved Lake Winnipesaukee for the Charles River. “Why don’t just you go,” she continued. “What with the baby, I’ve got a million things to do.”
The sun had gone down, the dusky twilight fading away to darkness. A car turned onto the street, sluicing a wash of silvery light through the window as it snaked its way down the street. “If it wasn’t for Don, you and I literally wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“We,” Alice interjected thumping me on the chest. “You left out the most important party!”
I ran a hand lightly over my wife’s swollen belly. “Yes, that’s true.”
Alice began folding a load of freshly washed clothes which she had run through the dryer earlier in the day. “Did you get to meet Donny’s significant other?”
“Jake… yes, very nice guy.”
Alice grabbed a maroon sock and fished through the basket for its mate. “When did you first learn Donny was gay?”
“The last night of the summer season before they shut the resort he stopped by the cabin to set the record straight.”
Donny Juan(Barry)
“Donny Cantrell’s got a gift with the ladies!” Elliot Brookside was gesturing with his eyes at a blonde haired youth with a wispy mustache and engaging, thin-lipped smile.
Fifty feet away on the far side of the door leading into the kitchen, Donny was, jibber-jabbering with, Stacey Porter, a willowy redhead. One arm nonchalantly draped over the girl’s shoulder, Donny listening intently while the redhead, oblivious to everything else going on in the dining room of the Gibson Family Resort, chatted energetically. An amalgam of Errol Flynn devil-may-care bravura and James Dean dreamy-eyed youthfulness, Donny Cantrell had half the waitresses at the vacation spot engulfed in a romantic lather.
We were working the summer season at the Gibson Family Resort. Elliot Brookside waited tables, cleaning up after the family-style meals. Weekends he also managed the flowerbeds – peonies, coneflowers, pansies and a scattering of black-eyed Susans and salvia - and did grounds keeping. I was holding down the trumpet section in the house band. The rustic vacation resort situated on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee drew a steady clientele from neighboring New England states as well as southern Canada and Quebec.
“Donny’s a regular Casanova,” Elliot added. Thickset with a disheveled mop of auburn hair, in the two weeks we bunked together I never once witnessed Elliot brush his teeth or change his underwear.
“Romeo.” Not to be outdone, I flung the word back at him.
“Better yet, Donny Juan.” Elliot let loose a raucous belly laugh. “I dub Don Cantrell our modern-day Donny Juan!”
I dub Don Cantrell our modern-day Donny Juan! Elliot’s observation was clever enough, but from my vantage point Don Cantrell didn’t fit the mold. He was no wolf, womanizer, seductive rake or lothario.
“I saw him over by the lake couple nights ago, sitting on a bench with Stacey.” Elliot gesticulated in the direction of the redhead, whose porcelain skin was dappled with a light sprinkling of freckles. “It was pitch-black. No moon… no nothin’.” “They were snuggling so close their legs twined together like freakin’ pretzels and –”
“If it was so dark,” I interrupted, “how could you see what they were doing?”
Elliot became momentarily flustered. “Bottom line, Donny’s a horny bastard who gets whatever he wants.”
“That’s for sure,” I agreed. In my own way I, too, envied Donny’s effortless ease.
“With all the hot babes,” Elliot shifted gears, “who you got eyes for?”
I cringed. Elliot couldn’t ask a female staff member to pass the salt shaker at the breakfast table without some salacious intimation.
“Alice Blackwell,” I replied.
“Alice?” Elliot tapped his cheek with a muddled expression. “Oh yeah… beaky nose and no tits.” Clearly Elliot had crossed Alice off his list of desirables, erased her name and telephone number from his little black book. “We did a shift together on clean-up in the kitchen yesterday. Not much of a conversationalist.”
* * * * *
After breakfast I grabbed my trumpet and headed down to the water’s edge. In a juniper tree several dark-eyed juncos erupted in a distinctive chitter-chatter as I made my way along the gravelly trail, but the black and white birds with their elongated tail feathers flitted away as I approached the water. In an isolated cove a good hundred yards from the last cluster of cabins I unpacked the instrument and blew a series of long tones in the low register. The sound was quickly muted, swallowed up by the surrounding hemlocks bordering the huge lake.
A half hour into my practice routine I heard the sound of approaching feet. A fishing rod draped over his shoulder, Donny Cantrell was standing next to a clump of lowbush blueberries bursting with inedible, pebbly fruit. “Caught a thirty-six-inch pickerel here earlier this week and wanted to see if he left any close relatives behind. Mind if I join you?”
“No, of course not.”
Laying the rod down, Donny unclasped a small tackle box filled with an array of lures – jigs, spinnerbaits, spoons and jiggly, rubber worms. Choosing a red and white, Donny waded knee-deep into the warm water, began casting and retrieving the line. Sufficiently warmed up, I blew the spit out of the horn and gravitated to a series of intermediate level etudes from the Brandt Studies. Ten minutes passed before Donny returned to shore. “No luck… not a single bite.” He traded the metal lure for a plastic hula popper and headed back out into the shallow water.
Finishing my practice session, I put the horn back in its case. “There’s a girl here at the resort I’d like to know better.”
“And who might that be?”
I was staring at a clump of winter berries next to a larch. The bush was covered with a profusion of greenish-white flowers, but, as with the inedible blueberries, the plump red fruit wouldn’t appear for another few weeks leading into the fall. “Alice… Alice Blackwell.”
Donny cracked a conspiratorial grin. “The reticent brunette… hardly speaks more than a handful of words in mixed company but wise beyond her years.”
“Yes, that’s her.” I couldn’t help but remember Elliot’s crass assessment. “The other night I saw her curled up in an Adirondack chair lost in a paperback. I asked what she was reading and she said, ‘One of the Victorian writers… Thomas Hardy’, then she held the book at arm’s length so I could read the title - Jude the Obscure.”
I was stymied, tangled in an emotional logjam without a clue how to keep the faltering light banter alive. Alice waited discretely before finally lowering her eyes back to the printed page. Jude the Obscure – in that brief moment, Alice Blackwell seemed an ancient Luddite at heart, the kind of woman who would have been perfectly content to forego all modern amenities - to churn butter from freshly milked cows, darn her husband’s socks and forego her air-conditioned Honda Civic for a horse-drawn buggy.
Donny Cantrell chuckled and pursed his lips in a wispy grin. “My father,” he observed, sending the conversation momentarily skittering off in a new direction, “worked for a liquor distributorship that handled high-end whiskeys and wines”. “He once told me that only a connoisseur, someone with a highly-refined appreciation of delicate bouquets, could appreciate the subtle differences between a bottle of Chateau Montelena and a Hectare Cabernet.”
“I never was much of a wine drinker.”
“The former,” Donny elaborated, “costs upwards of a hundred dollars for a slim bottle; the latter runs three bucks and ninety-nine cents.”
“Alice is the Chateau Montelena,” I agreed. “I knew that the minute I laid eyes on her, but the woman put a hex on me. I go catatonic every time she’s near.”
Donny cast his line toward a strand of water lilies and reeled the lure in slowly, tugging at the line every so often to imitate an injured minnow. “Sounds like anticipatory fright.”
“More like full-blown panic attacks, where I can’t string two foolish sentences back to back.”
Finally Donny fastened the wet lure to the top of the pole and, pressing a small lever on the underside of his reel, locked the spool in place. “Nothing much biting here today.” Wading back to shore, he said, “Go get your horn.”
“What?”
“Grab your trumpet and bring it down to the water’s edge.”
Retrieving the instrument, I returned to the sandy shore, where Donny reached out and with an index finger gently tapped the bell of the instrument. “Tell me something interesting about what your holding in your left hand.”
“Where are we going with this?”
“Imagine yourself out somewhere on a first date with the enigmatic, soft-spoken Alice Blackwell and you can’t find a solitary thing to say.”
“My worse nightmare!”
“Tell me something intriguing… clever about the horn,” Donny repeated.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“It’s not rocket science,” he insisted. “Anything that comes to mind no matter how trivial will do.”
Reaching down, I began unscrewing a silver cap from the bottom of the valve casing, and three brass washers slipped from the cap into the palm of my hand. “I put these inside the valve caps.”
“For what purpose?”
“Back in the nineteen-forties, swing era and bebop trumpeters stacked silver dimes in the caps to improve slotting and tone production.” “It seemed like nothing but the tiny weights made all the difference in the world.”
“Clever trick!” Donny stared out across the huge expanse of water where in the hazy stillness Mount Washington loomed six thousand feet in the air. “There’s a foreign flick playing at the Wolfeboro Cinema Saturday afternoon. Take Alice to the movie and then go for desert at the coffee shop two blocks down.” “Tell her about your family, life dreams, existential angst, hobbies, interests, musical goals and, when all else fails, the brass washers you stuff in the valve caps.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s life,” Donny insisted. “I found it interesting. On a first date you need to relax, enjoy each other’s company.”
“There’s no romance in brass washers.”
“It’s safe and serviceable,” Donny shot back. “The romantic mush comes later, once you break the ice.”
I returned the brass washers to the valve cap. “You really think so?”
Donny cuffed me on the side of the head. “Chateau Montelena or Hectare Cabernet – which wine do you prefer?”
* * * * *
Later that night I was lying in my two-tiered bunk. Directly above Elliot Brookside was snoring like a runaway freight train. He still hadn’t brushed his filmy teeth or went in search of a fresh pair of underwear. I was remembering an incident from earlier in the week.
We were toasting marshmallows in the fading light of an early evening campfire near the water’s edge. Alice Blackwell was there along with Donny and a scattering of wait staff and housekeeping crew. Alice turned to Donny. “What you did at breakfast this morning sure was nice.”
“I do tons of nice things,” he returned drolly, “but which one are you referring to?”
“That new guest… the old woman with the aluminum walker.” Around nine o’clock in the morning, an elderly lady lugging a canister of nasal oxygen hobbled into the dining room on an aluminum walker. The woman’s face was mottled with roseola, the blotchy redness meandering from her left nostril to the underside of a wrinkled chin. A pair of yellow tennis balls was firmly wedged onto the front wheels, but halfway across the floor the contraption became mired on a throw rug and the woman was stuck in place. Donny came to the bewildered woman’s aide, freeing the wheels and escorting her to an empty table. Once the she was settled, he sat down on an adjacent chair and with an elbow propped on the table and balled fist tucked under his chin made leisurely small talk until the woman’s meal arrived.
“The old geezer…,” Elliot chimed in, “between the pancakes and all that yakking, she never come up for air.” Elliot took a healthy swig from a bottle of Budweiser. Having managed to pilfer a six pack from the liquor storage cabinet, he was making great headway singlehandedly destroying the evidence.
“She and her husband kept honeybees throughout their marriage,” Donny continued. “He passed away last August.”
“Honeybees… well that’s a hoot!” Alice’s eyes brightened. “Tell me more.”
“She said honeybees are clever as hell, the way they keep the hive meticulously clean, nurse the brood and slavishly tend the queen’s every need.” “She said that, unlike humans, bees are truly social creatures. People cheat on their spouses, lie, steal and indulge in all manner of perversity. We get everything ass backwards, topsy-turvy and, in everyway imaginable, are the defective species.”
“Defective species… what a shitty thing to say!” Elliot took a healthy swig of the amber liquid and tossed the empty longneck into the bushes.
Donny yawned and stretched his limbs. “I’ve got to be up early tomorrow.” It did not go unnoticed that, after he said his goodbyes and drifted away in the darkness, Stacey Porter, who had been lounging by the fire, hurried off in the same direction.
“Donny Juan… Donny Juany… Donny…” Teetering back and forth on his heels, Elliot was sloshed. “Couple of horny bastards.”
“It’s not what you think,” Alice hissed but refused to elaborate.
Several minutes passed in tense silence. I flicked my eyes in the direction of Elliot Brookside, who was now lying on the grass sound asleep, drool dribbling from his puffy lips. “A bona fide, card-carrying member of the defective species,” I mused.
Several revelers began tossing dirt on the smoldering camp fire. As I turned to leave, Alice confided, “As much as I admire the man, there is something unfathomable about Donny Cantrell.” “Each time we meet,” Alice spoke in a hesitant, plodding manner, “I feel like I know less about the guy than previously.”
“We’re only here for the summer,” I replied. “How well can you really know a person in that limited amount of time?”
“No,” she cut me short. “It’s something different but for the life of me…” She left the fractured thought dangling in the humid, late-night air. The flickering light of the dying campfire embers caught her face in bold relief. “It’s like a traveler visits a train station, approaches the counter and says, ‘I need a ticket.’” “The clerk asks, ‘Where to?’ and the fellow says, ‘Well, that’s just it… I’m not terribly sure… don’t really know.’”
The moonless night was shrouded in a thickening mesh of fog and clouds. In a marshy bogged that nestled up against a shallow cove an encampment of bullfrogs began an a cappella chorus of thudding base tones. An owl hooted as a stiff breeze set the foliage rustling. I understood perfectly well what Alice Blackwell, in her hit-or-miss fashion, was getting at. No matter how close you got to Donny Cantrell you came away empty-handed.
* * * * *
Saturday late afternoon when I returned from my date with Alice Blackwell, Donny Cantrell was patiently waiting at the staff cabins. “How did it go?”
“I followed your advice. Everything went reasonably well.”
“What about a second date?”
“There’s a musical comedy at the local theater.”
“The Village Players?” Donny cracked a goofy grin. “The theater is one of the best in the region, not that there’s that much competition in sleepy Wolfeboro.” Overhead a brown hawk was riding the upper air currents circling the shoreline. Swooping lower the huge bird came to rest in the upper branches of a white cedar. “Anything else you’d like to add?”
“I’m going to marry the woman.”
“Marry Alice Blackwell?” My head bobbed up and down. “And is your intended spouse aware of this latest development?”
“Discussing marriage is a bit premature, but she’s my twin soul, future life partner, and I can’t imagine living with any other woman.”
* * * * *
A year and a half passed.
Hearing my wife’s key in the front door, I eased the mouthpiece from my lips and laid the trumpet back in its case. Alice hung her jacket in the hall closet. “Getting ready for tonight?” She gestured at the reddish indentation where the brass instrument had been resting up against my top lip for the better part of an hour. Inadvertently I reached up with an index finger and rubbed the moist tissue.
A wedding reception with a five-piece band had been booked six months earlier - eight to twelve at the Ramada Inn, unless the frivolity spilled over into the late-night hours. “Just running through some scales and arpeggios, “I confirmed. “More to the point, how did your visit go?”
“I showed my parents the ultrasound pictures.” A wispy smile brightened her habitually stolid features and then dissipated, vanish in a heartbeat. “They’re ecstatic… over the moon!”
I wrapped my arms around her burgeoning waist. No matter that the baby’s arrival was still six months away, everything had changed. We were a threesome, a family now, Alice assuming a maternal glow, a sedate peacefulness even more endearing than the inchoate allure that originally attracted me.
She shuffled into the kitchen and began brewing a cup of herbal tea. “And what were you doing in my absence?”
“Breaking in a new mouthpiece.” I went back into the other room to retrieve my horn. “It’s the same basic size and dimension but a heavier blank.”
Alice studied the hefty mass of metal jutting from the back end of the horn. “Cripes! It resembles my swollen belly except full term.”
“A pregnant mouthpiece.” I chuckled at my wife’s witty metaphor. “Yes, well the extra mass darkens the tone and adds richness.”
“What happened to all those brass washers?” she asked. “When we first met, you were stuffing washers in the bottom of the valve caps.”
“That’s old school,” I insisted, shaking my head vigorously. “Far better to add extra metal to the leadpipe. Here, let me show you.” Raising the instrument to my lips, I blew a melodic scale in the low register.
“Sounds nice, but you always had a pleasant tone.”
I replaced the new mouthpiece with my original model and repeated the scale. “Hear the difference?”
“To my tin ear,” she hedged, “both sound equally good.”
“No, listen more closely.” I played a series of broken arpeggios followed by a slurred classical passage from the Arban Studies then repeated the same series of notes on the new mouthpiece. “There’s a noticeable difference,” I persisted. “The tone is mellower and notes slot evenly so intonation is more precise.”
“Very nice!” My wife noted noncommittally as the kettle sent up a shrill whistle. Back in the kitchen she poured the steaming water into the cup. “I just hope that when you teach our daughter to play, you don’t infect her with your nuttiness.” “More importantly, we need to decide upon the child’s name,” Alice sidestepped the musical ephemera, “and start arranging the baby’s room.”
“Don Cantrell called while you were visiting your parents,” I announced. “He wants to get together… a light lunch at an outdoor café in the Back Bay, then deep sea fishing on one of those Boston Harbor charter boats.”
“Not something he could do when he was living in landlocked New Hampshire,” Alice observed. Six months earlier shortly before Christmas I received a letter that Donny had abandoned scenic New Hampshire in favor of a studio apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, traded his beloved Lake Winnipesaukee for the Charles River. “Why don’t just you go,” she continued. “What with the baby, I’ve got a million things to do.”
The sun had gone down, the dusky twilight fading away to darkness. A car turned onto the street, sluicing a wash of silvery light through the window as it snaked its way down the street. “If it wasn’t for Don, you and I literally wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“We,” Alice interjected thumping me on the chest. “You left out the most important party!”
I ran a hand lightly over my wife’s swollen belly. “Yes, that’s true.”
Alice began folding a load of freshly washed clothes which she had run through the dryer earlier in the day. “Did you get to meet Donny’s significant other?”
“Jake… yes, very nice guy.”
Alice grabbed a maroon sock and fished through the basket for its mate. “When did you first learn Donny was gay?”
“The last night of the summer season before they shut the resort he stopped by the cabin to set the record straight.”
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Denise Arnault
06/19/2024I loved the way you drug us through the misconceptions, the demonstrated Donny's true character. Bravo,
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Barry
06/20/2024Thanks for your kind feedback. Believe it or not, thirty years ago I actually did play trumpet at a lakeside resort in New Hampshire and met the prototype for Donny Cantrell in the resort kitchen. The real-life Donny was every bit as thoughtful and compassionate as the fictional character, however, the part about finding a future wife was 100% pure fabrication!
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