Vanilla Man
What was there about life, Bob Walker wondered, that made being 47 years old and just divorced for the second time seem like not such a big thing? It was a much bigger thing the first time, back when he was 31 and the world was still his oyster. She got the house and the kids and most of the savings account that time too.
This time around, Bob figured he couldn’t do much worse. Besides, it was her house to begin with. What the hell did he want with a fifteen-year-old split level anyway? The driveway needed repairs and the roof was about one more winter away from new shingles. By then, Monica would have someone else in her life who would be more than happy to spend his vacation sweating on her roof. Monica always managed to find someone. After all, she managed to find him.
That was the worst of it. Not only was Bob losing a wife and a home, he was also losing a job. The only thing worse than marrying the boss’ daughter, in Bob’s estimation, was marrying the boss. In this case, the boss was the Managing Editor of The New Times Journal. Bob was a senior staff writer when a late night editorial meeting punctuated with daiquiris and high expectations led two months later to wedded bliss and, for Bob, an instant promotion to Associate Editor. The funniest thing about it, if indeed anything funny could be gleaned from the entire sordid affair, was that the piece they originally met to discuss was rejected, only to be snapped up by The Atlantic a week later. The author, then unknown, was now demanding six figure advances.
Did Monica secretly blame him for their failure to sign the author? She never let on that she did, not even during the worst of the proceedings. She was tired, so she claimed. Tired of the same old thing day after day. Bob was apparently one of those same old things she was tired of because he was among the first things Monica jettisoned as she sought a new beginning. Out of her house, out of her office and out of her life. At least she gave him two weeks severance pay. He wasn’t sure he should push his luck and ask her for a reference.
So where to from here? Bob asked himself that question time and time again as he rolled down Interstate 70 through the heat of a Central Kansas afternoon. His car radio was tuned to an oldies station from somewhere east of him. They played one of those silly-assed songs that he hated as a teenager but couldn’t stop singing to himself during the commercialssome bubblegum melody about staying together or breaking up, what’s it gonna be? A moot point, Bob decided. Monica was in their house in Denver and he was...where exactly, he didn’t know.
He hadn’t thought it out too well, he’d decided after loading his belongings into his Cherokee that morning and driving east into the sunrise. After his first marriage ended, Bob went homehis real home, in Indiana. That was no longer an option. Both his parents were gone now and his childhood home belonged to strangers. He didn’t even know their names. Hell, he didn’t even know the names of his neighbors in Denver. Work. That was the thing that ruled Bob Walker’s life. It was work that got him where he wanted to be, not idle chat with neighbors.
It was also work that got him into this fix. While he was banging away at his keyboard on this story or that article, someone else was banging away on Monica. Where had she met him? Bob didn’t have a clue. He could have been the bagboy at the local supermarket for all Bob knew. What he did know was that the guy was where he should have been and Monica wasn’t objecting. The notion that this would someday make a great story caused Bob to chuckle under his breath. Bob thought everything would make a great story.
Which brought to mind still another problem. For as long as he could remember, Bob was an observer of rather than a participant in life. Even in school, during extracurricular functions, there he’d be, pad and pen in hand, scribbling facts, figures and observations while the other students danced or played or whatever. Maybe if I’d lived instead of watched, Bob mused as he rolled across the endless plains, I wouldn’t be here now. Maybe.
On the other hand, it might just be the writing that will keep my head above the waterline, he thought. He’d known divorced men over the course of his lifetime who’d wallowed so much in their own self-pity that they became little more than dronesshells that resembled men. He’d interviewed some of them for an article he’d written at Monica’s urging the previous year. What a drag, spending night after boozy night sitting bleary-eyed in singles bars interviewing men whose lives were in the toilet and who seemed for all the world to have no interest in pulling themselves out. Bob tried and failed to separate his distaste for these men and their dead-end lifestyles from his inborn writer’s objectivity.
“This article is shit, Bob,” Monica sniffed after throwing the manuscript back at him. “You make these guys all sound like soap opera rejects.”
“They are soap opera rejects,” he retorted. “I didn’t meet one man who wasn’t on a full-time pity party the whole time. To listen to them talk about their ex-wives, you’d think they’d be dancing in the streets that they were away from them.”
“Well, go fix it or find some other people to talk to or something. I can’t put this in the way it is.”
So he fixed it. He re-worded some of the less dismal of the tellings and “The Confessions of the Divorced Man” ran to rave reviews the following month. That nearly half of it was fiction didn’t seem to faze the readership one whit. Bob was a hit. The magazine enjoyed a record readership that month and Monica treated him like she did when they were newlyweds again.
That lasted just under a week.
“Maybe I should stick to fiction and forget about articles,” Bob mused as he slowed to negotiate the exit ramp. His increasing discomfort told him it was pit stop time and there was no sign of a rest area. He’d answer the call of nature and then continue rolling toward the summer sunset. What he should have done, he thought with a grin, was written a fiction piece about his own marital Armageddon and submitted it to The Atlantic. What a perfect coup that would have been.
The weather-beaten sign caught Bob’s attention. COLD BEER was about all he could make out from a distance, but upon closer inspection after slowing down, he could read the name of the establishment. MAXIE’S. A cold beer sounded pretty good to Bob. Perhaps, he thought, Maxie could even point him in the direction of a good, cheap motel. No way I’m driving all night, Bob told himself.
Using his writer’s imagination, Bob tried to picture the interior of Maxie’s. The place would be dark and smell of stale beer and sweat. There would be at least one dusty stuffed animal mounted on a shelf over the bar, its teeth bared in a frozen snarl. The aging jukebox would sit in the center of one wall and spew out country music like an audio avalanche. Maxie would be a fat, balding former truck driver who never met a stranger.
Before he could complete his mental image, Bob rounded a curve and nearly missed the place. Maxie’s was a white clapboard structure sorely in need of a coat of paint. So far, Bob decided, so good. The gravel parking lot contained three pickup trucks in various stages of decay, a decades-old station wagon with the rear bumper missing and an assortment of older model cars, brethren to those gracing the back row of the used car lot in Bob’s old neighborhood. His almost new Cherokee stood out like a well-polished sore thumb.
Bob stepped into the bar. It was dark, as he knew it would be, but not as dark as he’d imagined. The odor was that of fried onion rings. Bob’s first reaction was that he was hungry. He realized it had been over six hours since his last meal.
After visiting the rest room, he stepped to the bar. There was no sign of the heavyset trucker he knew had to be somewhere in attendance. The bar was completely unoccupied. Maxie’s other patrons huddled around the heavy wooden tables upending mugs of beer and conversing among themselves. His intrusion into their domain caused only a momentary lapse in the routine.
The only thing consistent with Bob’s visual image was the jukebox. It did indeed dominate nearly one entire wall, but was silent as a chrome and neon tomb. Bob decided that before he took his leave, he would peruse the
selection of music just to satisfy himself that there wasn’t a record in the machine that didn’t twang.
“What can I get ya?” inquired the female voice from behind the bar. Bob had been gazing at the yellowed photos taped to the wall and didn’t see the woman approach.
He turned to face her. She had a vaguely homespun quality about her and probably was attractive in her younger days, Bob decided. Certainly she didn’t fit into his preconceived notion of what the bartender of this sort of place ought to look like.
“A beer, please. The colder, the better.”
“My beer is always cold. Only way I’ll serve it.” A mug appeared in her hand as if by magic. She filled it with the golden brew and slid it in front of Bob in a single, smooth motion.
“A buck fifty, unless you want to start a tab.”
“Not this early in the day,” Bob remarked as he reached into his pocket. He fished a five out of the tangle of keys and coins and dropped it onto the bar.
“You’re new around here, aren’t ya?” She eyed him with what Bob took to be suspicion as she laid his change in front of him. “Least I’ve never seen you before.”
“I’m just passing through on my way to...who knows.”
She chuckled. “Yeah. We get a lot of folks in here on their way to Who Knows. In fact, I was on the road to Who Knows when I took over this place.”
“You own this bar?” Bob hoped his look of surprise wasn’t too obvious.
“Lock, stock and pickle jar. Been here going on six years.” She extended a slender hand. “Name’s Maxine Edelmann, but you can call me Maxie.”
“Bob. Bob Walker.” He shook the offered hand. “Nice to meet you. Nice place you have here.”
“It’ll do. Keeps the wolves away from my door anyhow. So tell me, Bob Walker, does whoever you’re leaving know how to get to Who Knows too?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“You might as well be wearing a big, red sign. Guy like you in clothes like that this far from a town of any size has gotta be getting away from something.”
“Just a lot of bad decisions. The only two things I ever found worth doing in my life were marriage and writing and I’m not worth a shit at either of them.”
Maxie’s eyes widened a bit. “A writer, eh? Can’t say that I’ve ever had one of those in here before. Don’t read much myself. No kind of time with this place. What is it you write?”
“Human interest stuff mostly. Why people do what they do. That sort of thing.” Bob downed a third of the beer in one swallow. He was thirstier than he thought.
“Well, why do they?”
“Why do they what?”
“Why do they do whatever it is they do? You said that was what you wrote about. You must have at least a few answers by now.”
“I wish I did. About the only thing I know for sure is that the more I study the human condition, the less I understand.”
Maxie gave Bob a look which he thought best to ignore. He wasn’t sure whether she was asking these questions of him because she was truly interested or just to make bartender-type small talk. It occurred to him that his uncertainty only served to underscore his last comment.
“Then why do it?” she asked.
“I guess it’s because I never get tired of listening to peoples’ stories.”
Maxie gestured toward a table at the rear of the bar. “What about those guys? I’ll bet they’ve got stories to tell.”
Bob turned to glance at the subjects of her statement. “They look like ordinary guys to me. I can’t imagine any of them having anything interesting about their lives, at least nothing interesting enough to make people want to read about them.”
“How do you know they aren’t interesting? Maybe the problem isn’t them. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you just need to dig down deep enough to find the story.”
Bob sighed and took another long drink. “I suppose digging into a person’s soul takes a better man than me.” That it took a far better man than him, Bob wasn’t quite prepared to admit out loud.
He downed the last of his beer and held the empty mug up. Maxie placed a fresh one in front of him without missing a beat.
“You want a story? I’ve got a good one I’ll share with you no charge. When I was a kid back in Chicago, my folks owned an ice cream parlor. I worked there from the time I was old enough to see over the counter until they closed the place and I went into my first marriage. That’s another story.
“There was an old guy who came into the shop every day at the same time and always ordered the same thingone scoop of vanilla in a sugar cone. Every day, the same time, the same thing. Vanilla in a sugar cone. We used to call him The Vanilla Man. I think he came in every day for at least five or six years and never ordered anything else.
“One day, he didn’t show up. We didn’t think much about it at first. We thought maybe he was sick or something. People did get sick once in awhile. Then the second day, he didn’t show up again. By the third day, we began to wonder.
“About a week after his last visit, a woman we’d never seen before came in and introduced herself. She was Vanilla Man’s wife. We never even knew the man’s name, much less that he had a wife. She told us he’d died the first day he didn’t come in for his vanilla cone and she just wanted us to know.
“Then she said something that always stuck with me. She told us his last words to her were: ‘I wish I’d ordered the Pistachio.’ The man went through his entire life and never tasted pistachio. I decided then and there I’d never let that happen to me.”
“That’s interesting,” Bob replied. “But I don’t see what that has to do with the conversation we were having before.”
“I think that’s your problem, Bob. I think you’ve lived nothing but a vanilla life and you just don’t want to sample the pistachio. Those guys over there,” she gestured toward the table. “They might not be what you consider exciting, but I’ll bet they have a lot more pistachio in their lives right now than you do.”
It wasn’t until almost two years later that Bob Walker, newly married and traveling with his bride from one book signing to another, found himself in Maxie’s neck of the woods again. His best seller, a gritty examination of the lives of everyday people, was dedicated to Maxie and her laser-like penetration of his soul. His plan was to present Maxie with an autographed first edition and introduce her to Carole at the same time.
“You’ll love this lady,” he told his new wife. “If it weren’t for her, I’d probably be covering high school football games somewhere in Wisconsin now.”
Bob had no trouble recognizing the turn-off. He’d always know the way back here. He swung the Cherokee into the empty lot. Something didn’t look quite right.
Maxie’s place was closed.
Bob walked slowly to the front door. He was still several feet away when he saw the hand-lettered sign.
‘Out of Business. Gone in search of the Pistachio.’