Trojan Horse

An hour later, Randall had twice as many groceries as he normally bought and several meals planned. On an impulse, he picked up a dozen carnations and hid them at the rear of the cart. They dropped the stuff out, then went out again. He helped her shop for books, sat with her while her car got an oil change, and visited Heloise for tea. When it was all over, he was exhausted.

"Could you handle this every Saturday?" she asked. He groaned.

Instead of dates, they went out for coffee, visited bookstores, and he tagged along on her everyday errands. He met her parakeet, Pete, and developed a rapport with him. He vacuumed her apartment at least once. During the day, he resumed his work for Marc, figuring that they should let a nice interval pass before resurrecting Architectural Necromancy, this time as a limited liability corporation, since Marc already had suspicions that his wife was straying. Did our entire generation make bad marriage choices, Randall wondered, or are we simply facing an unusually difficult task?

The months flew by, and soon they were in the last weeks of what Randall called their trial period.

"So, how did it work?" she asked.

"I feel relaxed," said Randall. "But I always look forward to the next one."

She said nothing, but merely nodded. He thought about it, and knew what to do.

At the one year point, they were at tea at Heloise's when the elderly lady mentioned that she had difficulty reaching her upper shelf lately. "Let me move all that stuff to a lower area," Randall suggested, and they went off to the kitchen. There he asked her a question after moving the blenders, bowls, and spatulas to a lower cabinet. Heloise thought, and called his grandmother. A few minutes later, she gave him a nod.

Back in the living room, Randall topped off Tricia's tea. Then he dropped the spoon and fell to his knee to retrieve it. What appeared in his hands however was a small velvet-covered box. Tricia dropped her teacup.

"Did I pass the test?" she asked.

"With flying colors," he said. "Would you make me the happiest of men?"

She threw her arms around him then, and Heloise said into the phone, "Call the pastor."

They scheduled the wedding for spring in the church to which Heloise had gone for her entire life. "I'm not really a Christian, more of a Nietzschean," said Tricia, "but I believe in something. Life has too much beauty in it to be godless and for death to be the end."

The night before, Randall lay nervous in his bunk. He would need to find a house, he thought, especially if children might appear. He needed to bring back his company. His heart was light and full of hope, something he did not recall at all from his previous married years.

At the wedding, he almost fell over when the priest addressed his bride by her full name: Arlis Patricia Thurston. She became a Hansen shortly thereafter, and flung herself into his arms for the traditional kiss. He realized that it was the first kiss they had shared, and that for the first time in months, he had a raging hard-on. "Save that for the honeymoon," she whispered, then nibbled an era.

"Arlis?" he said.

"Heloise liked it," she said.

"You know, so do I," he said. "It's distinctive. Fits you."

They shook more hands of relatives, friends, and well-wishers than he could count at the reception, then hopped on a plane to Kawaii. He had saved some money, but not a ton, so they stayed in a little apartment complex style hotel that had seen better days. After spending the day in the shade watching the waves, much like he did in Galveston, he took his new bride to bed.

"I wish I was a virgin," she said. "I wish I had never had a 'first' marriage. I wish I had never dated. I feel like I'm buried under baggage." She burst into tears and he held her, then took her to the little balcony to watch the sun set. He rubbed her back and held her hand. When she was calm, he sang her one of his terrible Led Zeppelin covers. She said it wasn't as bad as she thought, then burst out laughing. At that point, he began removing her clothes.

As the camera pans away from the small hotel room on a small island in a vast ocean, with the restless inscrutable waves passing by, the sound of metal clanking along concrete echoes into the infinite night, but this time, it almost sounds like laughter.

For an epilogue, the years must zoom by. Randall and Arlis married and had four children in their medium-sized house in League City. He made a career out of restoring old homes and historical buildings, but moved up to project supervisor. Marc divorced his wife. Gwen eventually married a rising member of the state assembly and had four children as well. People who knew her said that she was unchanged, but that the shallowness and egocentricism fit right in to her new milieu.

Randall grew older, contemplating time and again a line from Blake: "Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night." His life, he felt, turned out to be sweet delight, since no matter how much they struggled or quarreled, he and Arlis (formerly Tricia) returned to the same place of contentment, of enjoying each other and hoping the other would never go away. He did not doubt that Gwen never experienced this, nor could she, since she lived in a universe of herself and within horizons of her ego.