preview-the couple part 1+2

Thursday, August 19, 2010
preview-the couple-part 1
preview-the couple-part 2

fiction
edward w pritchard

draft 1
Most people, even if they are not married, have someone who functions as their partner, and when I worked as a night manager at a hotel I met an interesting such couple.

He wore white shoes, gold jewelry, expensive clothes and drove a bloated American car. Polite and refined he was the consummate salesman; always on, a little too charming, sometimes, and attentive to the names and peculiarities of those about him; even those of us who worked at the hotel. He stayed extended stay at the hotel and kept odd hours coming in often at 5AM, glib and fresh, and then tipping with twenty dollar bills, real money in those days. He was very popular with the hotel staff and he insisted that we all call him by his first name although he was nearly sixty, and he called us all by our first names as well which he always remembered. I was the only employee who he called Mr. and then my last name, although he did often call me green shoes, implying that I was like a New York stock broker, a little stuffy for a nineteen year old but he trusted me and often gave me little jobs to do of a confidential and furtive nature.

Primarily the jobs consisted of helping to pass the appropriate message to his in town girl friends, of which there were many, since he was generous with his money. Beautiful each, but past their prime and aging in our small unimportant city. He was undependable-
- new--09/11/2010-

end preview -part 1
start part 2

[was undependable] and the women of our town liked it. At least at first, chasing him and waiting changed their tolerance but by then he moved on for once he had something he no longer esteemed it.

He often used the hotel lobby as his waiting room, he stayed in a small single with no frills; and if I was working he had to butter me up a little to use the lobby because I disliked distractions while I worked. At least until I got the books in balance for I worried like a Mother over an only child with my work balancing the books and closing out yesterday's business at midnight today until I was dead certain that none of the hotel clerks had ingeniously but incompetently done something to cause me to spend the next 8 hours frantically searching the NCR tape for a twenty four cent error in the beverage debit column.

The woman waiting for him in the lobby was not one of his usual girls but rushing in for work at 10:59PM I knew she was waiting for him. I ignored her and actually forgot she was there, she was so non-intrusive, rare for his friends. But, looking up across the couches and chairs by chance I noticed her look, at 11:30 exactly, at a slip of paper she was clutching. She had waited while I was here one half hour and one minute, then walked shyly to the desk to talk to me; using my Mr. -- name she asked me to help her find him; worried that he was missing.
end part 2