When Dion first laid eyes on Mary Effingham she was being thrown out in the street by her soon-to-be-ex-husband. She was not visibly embarrassed as she crouched on the sidewalk in the cold, miniskirted, fumbling to retrieve the scattered articles of clothing which lay around her.
Dion witnessed the scene of domestic savagery from the passenger seat of a car parked at the Colquitt curb alongside the Effingham’s apartment building. It was cold for a Houston November, surprisingly though not bitterly so. His companion, at that moment of initial vision, was Alastair Berenson. They had driven up in time to see Mary’s husband hurling heartfelt if silent words (the car windows being rolled up) at her bent shoulders. He then proceeded to close the door upon her with force it was assumed, and volume also. Whether she had come out of the apartment to retrieve her abused garments or whether they had followed upon her actual exit, it was not possible to say. The choreography of the dispute seemed somehow important.
Alastair opened the car door and said:
-That’s the girl I told you about. Mary Effingham.
He was employing his normal tone of voice, low and conspiratorial.
Dion gazed at the crouched and shivering figure and replied:
-Unforgettable entrance.
They had come to the place which was the scene of Mary Effingham’s shutting-out on a mission which Dion felt to be a ponderous waste of time. Alastair had been badly burned several months earlier by a drug deal turned sour, to mix guerrilla metaphors. It was therefore with elation that he had woken Dion that morning, having just gotten off the phone with an old friend of his, a brawler turned Marine, fresh on leave from Lebanon. Alastair now had the chance to recoup his losses of the previous disaster, for his friend was in the possession of six ounces of purest heroin.
For Alastair it was a prospect of profit and excitation, for Dion one of dreary nights to come, while the apartment was made the source of dispensation.
Alastair’s friends, as he said often enough, were uniformly an intellectual lot, but as yet Dion had seen nothing to anchor such a claim to brainy affluence. What he did see was the progression of petty neurotics, hemmed in by greed and catatonia, the twin rewards of the born again addict. Alas, it was a source of income for his friend, who was he to deny him access to transient pleasure, however much he might have preferred that Alastair was a dealer in fries and burgers, zipped snugly, legally, in minimum wage overalls.
While Dion waited, breathing in the perfume of one too many clove cigarette butts decomposing in the ashtray of the car, he watched Mary. Having gathered all her clothes together, she unzipped a small maroon jacket, stuffed them inside and zipped it back up, tying the arms in a casual knot. Setting her bundle on the pavement she went up the stairs to her door and drew across the threshold a black and battered guitar case. Laying it on its side she opened it, lifted the guitar gently by its neck, made a number of vague passes over it with her fingers and set it back.
It was an act of touching protectiveness.
The instrument which she handled with such devotional tenderness was a common assembly-line Stratocaster. Nevertheless there was something unnatural about it.
Later, in the warm comfort of Alastair’s kitchen Dion wondered whether it was simple prejudice, the sight of a woman with such a long-established and phallic symbol of male domination. Had Beauty flipped off Philosophy she would have had his vote.
But. But there was indeed something. A quality of strength which Mary seemed to draw from her guitar, as though it were her protector, while transferring to it a quality of appreciable gentleness which it would not normally have had in the hands of a male. If this impression may have been gathered upon his first sight of Mary, it was also to remain at the center of their relationship, and the core of his understanding of her. That he was never able to resolve his feelings as to her real nature, or the degree to which her own prevarications and dissemblings and deceptions aided in this ambiguity, is not to give anything away. The impression of an alternately complex yet utterly transparent person remained, the two faces of the coin spinning forever without resolution.
When precisely Mary vanished from the sidewalk Dion did not notice, intent as he was on the gruesome spectacle of Alastair skipping towards the car with epileptic ardor, a demented hilarity transfiguring his face.
The ride home was an aorta-tapper, even for Houston, Texas. But in this instance it was all Alastair’s fault. His helial happiness at his acquisition of the heroin turned to leaden paranoia when he spotted a police car two blocks away. Dithering at the possibility of a confrontation with the law, Alastair slowed to 15 mph, an act more provocative of suspicion than had he left a swath of burning rubber across Montrose Boulevard’s nonexistent esplanade. And thus they journeyed home, in a state of acute and silent discomfort.