You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

MAGGIE

Maggie was an acquaintance of mine at The University of Oregon. Although she was attractive and had a delightful personality, we never dated, at least not during our college years.

Upon completing course work for a degree in Architecture, my plan was to wandered across the country looking for a metropolitan area in which to initiate my apprenticeship. New York was my choice. I rented an inexpensive tenement and found a job with a large architectural firm. That should have been enough to satisfy me but for one important component of a happy life. That was companioinship. The city, though packed with people, can be a lonely place.

Now and then I would have a phone conversation with friends back home. On one such call, after I had mentioned how difficult it was to meet people in this city. My friend said “You should look up Maggie, she moved to NYC a couple of months ago. He had her new phone number. I wrote it down, not knowing if I would act on it.

It felt good to think that I could contact someone, especially a woman, from Oregon. Eventually, I found the courage to call her. We agreed to meet for dinner near her Greenwich Village apartment. I following directions and, deep into Greenwich Village I found her address. It was a shop in an old, but well maintained, two story brick building. A shop selling women’s apparel. Similar buildings lined both sides of the street. At first I wondered if she lived in the dress shop. Looking further I saw a side entry with stairs to the second floor. At the top of the stairs I entered a short, sky-light lit, corridor with two doors. I knocked on the nearest one. An attractive brunette of my age answered the door. She didn’t seem to be the same person I had known in college. Had she changed? She was shorter than I had remembered. Was I thinking of someone else? We exchanged introductions. It was Maggie. She invited me in.

Her apartment was comprised of three small rooms: a living-dining-kitchen combination compressed into a narrow space with a window in the far wall. A bedroom alcove could be seen through a glazed door to the left. A door to the right which I presumed to be the bath room. It had been a warm day. The window was open. The muffled sounds of conversations and of cars passing slowly could be heard from the narrow street below.

She put on a sweater, and we walked a few blocks to a restaurant on 7th Avenue. Dinner with her was delightfully filled with conversation. We talked about what had brought us to New York City, of all places, so distant and different from our small town on the opposite coast. We shared stories about mutual friends. After dinner, we strolled around The Village ending back at her door where we said good bye and agreed to see each other again. A warm summer breeze followed me as I walked home across Manhattan through Washington Square Park to the Lower East Side. All the time, thinking about the past evening and my new friend.

Planning to see her again and wanting to avoid another expensive dinner in a Greenwich Village restaurant, I called Maggie to invite her to come to my apartment for dinner the following Friday. She thanked me for the invitation and suggested that I come to her place for dinner instead. I accepted.

That Friday, with a bottle of wine in hand, I walked to Maggie’s apartment. We had a lovely dinner. We talked about growing up in Eugene. We reminisced about the beauty and power of the forests and the ocean, places that we missed. It was clear that we had formed a bond. A bond initiated by loneliness and cemented by the trust that comes from growing up in the same community, far away.

The evening flashed past quickly. I must have made some feeble groan about walking back to my place at 10:00 PM, when Maggie said, “You can stay here.” Soon we were in her bed. We snuggled, enjoying the warmth and feeling of each other’s bodies against our own. Then we were making love. These happy evenings became a weekly affair. During the week, we would talk to confirm the Friday plan and for me to get a shopping list for our dinner. We routinely met at her place. Occasionally, we would walk around The Village after dinner, but we spent most evenings in her apartment, with dinner, conversation, and wine. When we were tired, we behaved like a married couple and went to bed to enjoy the wonderful pleasures of sleeping together. Our morning breakfast was always sunny and cheerful. After breakfast, having things to be done on the weekend, we would go our separate ways, until the week had slowly crept by until once again it was Friday, when we could be together again.

Though I felt a deep affection for Maggie, which I am sure was mutual, it was not that powerful heart-pounding feeling of falling in love. Our’s was an affair of loving companionship rather than emotionally charged romance.

On our third or fourth Friday together, she mentioned that she had gone to concert by a musician, Tim Harden. His home-town band had found sufficient success that he was playing in Manhattan. She was very enthusiastic about this concert. She had been a fan of his for some time as he too was from Eugene. Two weeks later, she mentioned that she had gone to another of Tim’s concerts and that she had been able to meet him.

On a Friday, about a month after that when, after dinner, and after we had talked the evening into night, I said that I was tired and ready for bed. Maggie turned to me with a deeply concerned look and said “I’m sorry to have to tell you this Tod, but we are not going to be sleeping together anymore.” There was a long pause. “What’s wrong?” I asked “I think I am in love with Tim.” she said. I can’t remember anything that was said after that but it wasn’t long before I was walking home, out of the sleeping Greenwich Village, through the Fall chill of an empty Washington Square Park, passing among the silent tenements on my way back to my lonely fifth floor walk up flat in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

END