My Coleus Romance

by John Paul Tegner

So I was free. The inheritance that Aunt Blanche had put aside was mine all $475. I was twenty-one, hundreds of years younger than I would ever be again, and Arrow Bend, Nebraska, was hundreds of miles away.

There was instinct to guide me, and something more a few hushed words overheard and remembered: "They say all big cities are full of them. They say they meet in bars and have secret signals.

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On my first day in the City of Light and Life I found a room that looked out on palm trees and pink oleanders. On the second day I found a job as summer replacement at a gas station.

The job wouldn't start for two weeks. My landlady and I agreed that this was good. In two weeks I could see a lot of sights. "I'll make out a list," she said. I fared forth with the list in my pocket, but I got no farther than the nearest bar.

I ordered beer and nursed it along. I hated the stuff. I still do. For hours I sat there. People came and went, and there was nothing, there was nobody. I tried other bars. I asked myself, how was this thing done? What were the secret signals?

But the next day Ah, the next day!

—

Frankie and Teddy's.

I was in a bar that I'd chosen because of its name I'd been there half an hour or so, when a man came in and sat down by me. I looked at him in the bar mirror. He was somewhere in his forties, I thought. His hair was pale blond and his eyes were pale blue. He was plump and pink and clean, and his mouth was tucked in at the corners as if he were pouting and smiling at the same time.

All at once he raised his hand and began to pump it up and down. He was looking at me in the mirror. Was he waving at me? Was this one of the signals? No. His watch had stopped again, he said. Sometimes if he gave it a shake Ah, there it went. What time did I have?

I told him.

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