Eiffel Tower

We’re in the ballroom of the Fox Chapel Field Club, decorating for the prom, exactly the kind of thing I’d never be caught dead doing except, of course, for Virginia. I’ve even coerced some of my friends into helping and we’re actually having fun, especially since there are none of her toxic jock pals around to poison the atmosphere. The lame prom theme is "Springtime in Paris," so we’re all goofing on that "Oui, Oui, Oui! Non, Non, Non!" making dumb jokes and laughing, Virginia and I pairing off to work closely, even intimately, together.

Finally we tape up the last Eiffel Tower and stand side by side at the edge of the vast rectangular room, surveying our work. "Great job," she says, putting her arm around my shoulders. "Thank you so much. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Charlie." We’ve spent a lot of time together over the years, but I’ve never felt as physically close to her as I do at this moment – I want to put my arm around her waist and pull her even closer, right next to me. I see my friends staring, bug-eyed, and I can almost hear them urging me do it, do it but I can’t – we are, after all, both of us about to go to the prom with other people – but that’s not it, really, it’s more that if I were to try and she pushed me away I simply couldn’t take it, I’d be devastated.

After a while she lets go and I realize that it’s too late, the moment’s passed and there’s no way to ever get it back. My friends look at me, disgusted, shaking their heads – they can’t believe I’ve blown a chance to do what I’ve been talking about all these years. Even Virginia seems disappointed, still friendly but decidedly more distant as we say good-bye and go our separate ways to get ready for the prom, and in the end I feel as bad as if she had actually rejected me.

That opportunity still haunts me, not as the decisive point in our relationship exactly, but more as a microcosm of it, emblematic of my fatal inability to reach out and grab the beauty which so tantalized me for fear of the hell that would result if it were snatched away.

Jump cut forward thirty years.

We’re in the same Field Club ballroom, even on the same side of the room, heavily modernized, but still with the same general dimensions. Again it’s the kind of thing I’d never go to except for Virginia, one of those charity events where you buy a place at the table and pay an exorbitant amount for a meal in order to support a worthy cause. She’s cast a wide net to drag in my donation – we’re hardly even acquainted now and I haven’t seen her for a couple of years – trying hard because she’s so devoted to the cause, a rehab place for teens called New Dawn Farms that helped one of her sons escape a nasty drug problem. Of course it was easy to get me, and to my family’s consternation we’re there, working on the rubbery chicken and watching an insanely gleeful presentation about addicted kids.

When the lights go up there she is, working the room, thanking her friends for showing up. I stand as she makes her way to me, buttoning my suit coat, and, my god she still looks wonderful, as beautiful as ever in a dark blue dress and pearls, truly pleased and grateful to see me. We hug and after she greets my wife and kids, she stands there next to me and puts her arm around my shoulders "Can you believe it?" surveying the room proudly, and once again I think that if I could only reach around her waist and pull her to me she’d finally be mine, all those years of regret erased, but now there’s not just a boyfriend and girlfriend to consider, but a wife and a husband, children, entire families – and still if I knew she wouldn’t pull away I’d probably do it, no matter what the consequences.

And suddenly I feel vertiginous and unsteady, as if the whole room’s rising, as if we’re in a huge elevator slowly ascending, taking us all inside a vast framework of steel and iron, raising us into an airy place of no contradiction, no past or present, up into the Eiffel tower.