ENTHRALLED

"I said," said my wife," How was your day?"

I had been staring out the window, and frankly had been staring out the window for a long time. I had a vague recollection of the front door opening and closing, and I think I remembered my wife shouting hello, and I very well may have shouted hello back or said something in response, but there's no telling. My thoughts had been elsewhere.

I said "Ask a different question," and turned away from the window.

"Huh-oh," my wife said, following me into the kitchen. "What happened?"

"Nothing horrible, just one of those uncomfortable little things that you have to deal with in the business world," I told her as I resumed chopping onions. "I had my annual review today."

"And?"

I put down the cleaver and looked my wife in the eye. "Jim thinks I need to be more 'goal oriented.'" I said it with an edge, both sarcastic and menacing, arching my eyebrows for effect.

"What does that mean, does that mean you're in trouble?"

"Nah," I said, scraping the onions into the spagetti sauce. "Jim and I sat down, and he told me what I'd accomplished, and recited my commissions off a chart he printed out, and gave me my annual merit increase, which is nothing to sneeze at, by the way, and told me that I was doing a bang-up job." Jim had actually used that phrase. He actually told me I was doing a bang-up job of architecture. "And then he told me I needed to be more goal oriented." I stirred the sauce.

My wife looked at me sidelong and asked suspiciously "What did you say?"

I looked at her. She was hanging on my last word, breathlessly waiting on the next. I love my wife. But she's a sucker. "I looked him in the eye until I had his full attention and said 'Jim, I don't understand what you're trying to say here.' I asked him if I wasn't producing, and he said I was. I asked him if I wasn't satisfying clients, and he said of course I was. I asked him if anyone had complained that I was lazy or slacking off, and he said, no, absolutely, of course not." I gave the sauce a wholly unnecessary stir. "And then I told him about Michelle Gay." I looked at my wife. She had a suspicious look in her lovely green eyes, one thin black eyebrow arched in tension, but still, I had her hooked. "Have I ever told you about Michelle Gay?"

She shook her head.

"Michelle Gay was a girl I knew in high school. We were never very close, kind of came from different places and hung out with different crowds, but we knew each other enough to say hello. She was good looking, had soft brown eyes and long, wavy honey-colored hair. She had that soft high-school-girl body, full hips and breasts, and she was just coming into the bloom of adulthood. Still, like I said, we ran with different crowds, and I didn't ever think much of her, and I certainly didn't see her as a possible love interest. I suspect it was mainly because my group was geekier and poorer than her group. It was also something about her. She was aloof, and she was smart enough to fool people into thinking she was smarter, and pretty enough to get away with it.

"Our second year in high school we were in the Drama Club together, so we became a little more aware of each other, talked a little more often, but we still weren't what you could call friends. Then, one afternoon, after school was over, she happened to walk backstage during rehersals for a play; I was back there playing techie. I felt her presence behind me, looked over my shoulder to see who it was, and I guess I nodded hello or something, since you don't talk during rehersals, and boom, right then and there, it happened.

"I swear, I could feel it happen; there was just that electricity. Maybe it was the way I nodded, the way the stage lights hit me, maybe I was striking a dramatic pose, but right then and there, Michelle Gay fell wholly, completely, irrevocably in love with me. It was completely against her will, mind you; I was,after all, below her station, but just the same, in a matter of moments she was enthralled with it. And then she was suddenly just full of emotion, and she had no idea what to do with it, and she fled the backstage area. And the next thing I knew, she was gone.

"And nothing happened for about a week. We didn't see much of each other, and when we did she would freeze, a fawn in the headlights of an oncoming truck, and I was so shocked and delighted to be the object of her affection that I was struck dumb, too stupified to speak. Eventually she decided to make light of it, started telling people she had a crush on me, and eventually the crush ran its course and she was over me.

"Unfortunately, I had fallen in love with her by that time.

"Hey, I was seventeen, too. Or sixteen, I think I was a month or two younger than she was. Anyway, the very idea that she might be accessible was enough to get her on my mind, and as the days crept by I thought about her more and more, and in my mind she became smarter and more beautiful. And I was enthralled, and I didn't know what to do with it. So eventually I wrote her a poem, and I gave it to her, and she read it. And then she put her arms around me and told me she loved me like a friend. I tried to talk her into believing there was more to it, that she still had the remains of her crush and that we could fan that into love. She remained unconvinced. So we sat there on a bright May day in the shade of a maple tree after school and she comforted me, and we hugged for a long time, and eventually that lead to necking that we both knew was just necking. We became friends after that, although not what you'd call close friends, and remained so until we went off to college, and after that I never saw her again.

"But the important thing is that we were enthralled. We found out it was possible to have emotions so strong that we didn't know what to do with them. It's happened to me since then, of course. It can happen with a smile from a friend or the way the sun strikes a building or an unexpectedly good song coming on the radio; it can be the most profound understanding or a fleeting moment of wonder. But it's the most important thing in human life.

"So I told Jim all this, and said 'My goal is to be enthralled, Jim. And I think I'm meeting that goal. I think I'm more valuable to the firm for it, too. I think every firm should have at least one member who still remembers what it feels like to be seventeen and overwhelmed.'"

I love my wife. But I also like making a mook of her. She was staring at me intently, hanging on every word. Then, finally, a shrewd look came into her eyes, and she cocked her head slightly, looking at me askance, and said "You're a big, bald liar."

I broke into a grin and proudly announced, "Yes. Yes, I am."

"You didn't tell Jim any of that, did you."

"Not a bit of it."

"What did you actually say? Really this time."

"Jim didn't have anything to recommend as management advice, so he told me, jokingly, to be more goal oriented, and I told him I'd be pro-active about it."

I stirred the sauce some more and turned the heat down. My wife picked up a knife and, in that way she has that scares the hell out of me, began cutting up a tomato while staring out the window, not even looking at her hands or the knife or the cutting board. Her purse was still hanging from her shoulder; it swung along in time to her knife strokes, banging lightly against her elbow. After a moment, she said "Why the love story?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I just thought of her on the way home from work. No idea why."

Another moment went by. "And you never saw her again?"

"Nope. And I hope I never do."