Festivals of Light (A Nocturne)

I watched her brown doe eyes widen with excitement as she paused,
just inside the doorway of the disco. She looked dazzled for a few
moments, like a deer transfixed by oncoming highbeams. Her soft oval
face was bathed in a spinning carousel of color by the light reflecting
from the shimmering globe that hung suspended like a planet from the
ceiling of the dance floor. Then, like morning fog kissed adieu by the
sun's illuminating rays, the rapture of the moment burnt away. Clarisse
peered shyly, timid as a fawn through the smoke and the glittering
bodies in motion. She was looking hopefully for the refuge of a table,
a drink and a friend. I stood up and waved to catch her
attention.

"I thought that you'd be seeing John again tonight," I said as I
watched her drape her velvet brown blazer over the back of her
chair.

"John and I called it quits yesterday," Clarisse shrugged, her
indifference surprising me as much as the information that she'd
imparted.

I was surprised to have her join me, but grateful for her company.
Tenatively, I reached for her hand. She started, then looked away and
flagged a waitress down to order a Jack and Coke. Cast securely in my
bittersweet role of a confidante, I reached instead this time for the
solace of my drink as I listened to her.

"I just got sick and tired of all the games," she blurted out suddenly,
as though I was omniscient enough to grasp the skeins of her last
relationship from that cryptic statement and weave them into a pattern
that would save her the labor of having to attach further details to my
mind's loom.

"I suppose you know how it is," she sighed disgustedly. The hurt that
she'd pretended not to feel earlier had taken hold of her enough by now
to visibly fluster her, so she took a moment to avert eye contact with
me by fumbling in her purse for her cigarettes. "God," she finally
continued, in a voice that still betrayed a hint of pain, "I'm sick of
people. I'm sick of men who couch their words of love in a huckster's
honeyed pitch. They'll take you for what they can, then fade away into
the evening. I'm here tonight to just listen to the music," she
apologized, punctuating her resolve by pulling her long auburn hair
back and settling comfortably into her chair.

"You know," she observed after awhile. "Love is like a carnival. When
you're a child you're bewitched by the spinning lights. They promise
you magic as they dance and whirl about like lurid visions in a
wizard's palantir. Then the music seizes you and you become rapt in the
ecstacy of the motion of the night."

I watched Clarisse in silence as she let the music take her away from
the hurt. To be sitting across from her, so close, yet to have her so
oblivious to my presence....it made me feel inadequate. I longed to
reach over and to shake her, to slap her, to say "damn it, I'm here.
Talk to me for God's sake!"

Silently though, I watched her as she nursed her drink, and her image
of a carnival began to burrow its way back into my mind. I remembered
my first disillusioning experience in that festival of light. I could
still hear the raucous voice of the carney reverberate down the years
of my memory.

"Step on over and play the game," urged the carney with a voice that
made me feel as uncomfortable as a leer. "It's easy to play. even you
can win it."

His scam-hardened face studied me intently, now plumbing the depths of
my gullibility as he took my money and handed me two scuffed white
tennis balls that had lost their naive new look seasons ago. Then he
pulled a switch that set metal deer in motion, mechanically cavorting
amidst stands of tin trees, paper-mache hills, sponge bushes and
plastic astroturf.

"All you need to hit is one, Butch," he sneered, my money now securely
in his grasp. My throws sailed as errant as the abandoned dreams that
had led the carney from the farm to his gradual decline into a sideshow
grifter. He'd developed into a bullying sham of a man whose life was
spent in the shadows of the midway, peering at the world of illusion
and deception through dull, tired eyes, wander-hardened into slits of
hostile bitterness.

I'd noticed his wife that night, too. The kind of woman, like Clarisse,
who would fall for a guy's line of crap, then spend the rest of her
life gauging each day a success or failure by what temper her old man
returned home in. She, like Clarisse, had harbored visions of romantic
love and dreamed of the prince who would appear and transform her life
with a kiss into a fantasy of matrimonial bliss. Her dreams had
evaporated in the dry heat of reality. Would Clarisse find love, or
would her dreams be as brutally quashed? I sighed as I looked at her.
She was sitting back in her chair with her eyes closed, letting the
music color her emotions as though she was a mood ring.

"Would you care to dance, maybe?"

The alien voice permeated my consciousness slowly, like the sound of an
ambulance coming up behind me on the highway. I watched Clarisse open
her eyes and glance up at the stranger. She managed a polite smile, but
she shook her head. It was sort of a "thank you very much but I'm not
into dancing" rejection. Anyone with at least a Cro-Magnon's
sensibilities should have been able to decipher it.

"Would you care to dance, maybe?" he repeated, as persistantly annoying
as the alarm that wrenches us from our dreams. Clarisse looked up at
him, visibly annoyed now. The young stranger stood above her with his
hand extended toward her. He was oblivious to all of the nuances that
unmistakably signalled denial.

"Oh, what the hell," she whispered, just loud enough for only me to
hear. "What can one dance hurt, anyway?"

I watched Clarisse take the young man's hand. As she rose from her
chair the colored snowflakes of light spun swiftly across their faces
as though driven by a blizzard of desire. The dark haired stranger in
the shaggy gray sweater looked at her with the rapt expression of a
young hunter smitten with buck fever. As they moved to the dance floor
I sadly watched her. I should've been more persistant. I would've loved
her. Now she was probably as doomed as a lame deer being pursued by a
wolf over a field of hard-packed snow.