Convergence

It was the spring of 1976. She was working as a cocktail waitress at Cajun’s Warf – one of the most popular bars in Little Rock. It’s still there. An impressive, wood shingled structure resembling a fancy beach house - two stories with a large deck that hangs out over the Arkansas River, its lights reflecting in the dark water below. It was Monday and she usually worked upstairs by herself on Mondays. Tall, with long blond hair and bright blue eyes, she had a way with people, an easy smile and graceful presence. She was married, but separated. At the beginning of the year she had left Fayetteville and her husband and his crazy friends and moved into a tiny garage apartment in Little Rock near the Division Street warehouses, trying to make some money and finish school and start over and let go and find herself. She was twenty-three.

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He had seen her from across the room the week before, weaving in and out of tables and chairs on a packed Saturday night with a try full of drinks, gracefully picking up empty glasses and replacing them with full ones. He was from New York, a northerner displaced among the deceptively subtle yet strict mores of southern culture. He was recently out of law school and practicing as an associate out of the single room he rented from the two partners at the firm. He lived in the room as well and every morning he would fold up his Murphy’s bed, throw his personal belongings into the closet and move his desk into the center of the room to begin working on his cases. It wasn’t much, but it didn’t bother him. He had always had a willingness to go where his fortunes took him. He had traveled across the country and back, protested Vietnam, climbed mountains in Colorado, dived wrecks in the Caribbean, been married, divorced, driven a red sports car, but lost it to his ex-wife. Now he drove a huge, brown, 1970 Oldsmobile with a dying muffler. He could never say exactly why he did anything in particular at any given time – it always seemed as though the decisions were made for him and all he had to do was hop along for the ride. In the same way, he wasn’t sure what it was that drew his eye to her. But he couldn’t deny it.

A few days later he had asked Debbie Steinman, whom he played tennis with a few times and also worked at Cajun’s, who it was that he had seen that night. Debbie told him that her name was Donna and that if he wanted to talk to her he should stop by early on a Monday night because she worked upstairs by herself.

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It was Monday night, around nine o’clock. The upstairs at Cajun’s wasn’t too busy so she had time every now and then to stop and talk to her friend Bobbye the bartender. Debbie had told her that a guy had been asking about her. She had seen him come up the stairs and just stand by the jukebox for a few minutes. A young lawyer from New York who liked to rock climb and scuba dive, Debbie had said. She was curious, but not too interested. You get hit on a lot as a waitress, it’s the nature of the job and she had always been careful to keep things professional.

She stole another glance across the room. He had the tall, thin build of a runner with jet-black hair and wire-rimmed glasses, dressed well, but not too well. She pretended not to seem him looking at her. She turned her back to the stairs and fiddled with something behind the bar, grabbed her tray and headed over to one of the tables. As if he had finally summoned together all his courage he started towards her and she stopped and let him walk the last few feet. He smiled and then looked away and said something she couldn’t understand.

“Um, excuse me?” she said, leaning forward and cocking her head a little.

He looked embarrassed then, cleared his throat.

“Hi, I’m Marty,” he said in a distinct New York accent.

“My name’s Donna.”

“It’s nice to meet you. And, um, I was wondering if it would be okay if I called you sometime?”

She studied him for a moment. This wasn’t her style, but there was something about him that made him seem a little different. He had a certain look about that made you know that at that moment he was paying attention to you and only you. She had told herself that she needed to be on her own for a while. And besides, legally she was still married. Would he care? Should she tell him? But there was something about him. She smiled, pulled her notebook out the pocket of her apron, wrote something down, handed it to him.

“Are you free on Saturday?” she said. “I’m going to the circus, if you’d like to join me.”