Chapter 27 – The Only Woman He Ever Loved
Thursday evening June 5, 2008 – 11:45 PM
At roughly the same time that Frank Newlan was making his way back into O’Toole’s Tavern and Grill for another reinforcing shot of liquid courage, his former girlfriend from years gone by, Marianne Plante, lay sprawled out on the edge of her bed, despondent and tearful, as she struggled to compose a letter.
Plante wasn’t quite sure what she was going to say in this letter, but she was hoping that the words would swell from somewhere deep within her heart.
Over the years, Plante had attempted to write similar letters, but every time she did, she would inevitably find herself trapped in an epic internal struggle of good vs. evil, which would ultimately result in her ripping up the powder-blue stationary into little pieces and, to be on the safe side, she would burn the evidence in an oversized ashtray as well. However, this time she was determined to go through with her covert communiqué, and she prayed for God to give her the strength to send out the desperate SOS to its intended recipient.
“After all, how hard can it be? Just put the sheet of paper in an envelope, stick a stamp on it, and drop it in the mailbox,” murmured Plante. But deep down inside she knew full well that it was a task which was easier said than done.
Meanwhile, Plante’s husband Tom was an immovable object, drunk and passed out downstairs on the sofa, oblivious to the TV, which was tuned in to the Celtics game.
Luckily, Plante’s two preteen daughters were already asleep by the time her husband had come home and immediately started hollering at her for no good reason…and now twenty minutes later there he was, out like a light, blind to anything and everything around him.
Before we delve too deeply into Marianne Plante’s plight, we would first like to inform you, the dear reader, that, these days, Ms. Plante goes by her married name which is Mrs. Thomas Willis. Nevertheless, in deference to our flawed protagonist, Mr. Frank Newlan, unless otherwise necessary, we will refer to his high school sweetheart by her maiden name, just as he still does.
The Willis’s currently reside in the quaint little town of Tewksbury Massachusetts, a tiny suburb about 15 miles north of Marianne Plante’s childhood home of Medford Massachusetts; the same hometown where she blossomed and came of age; the same hometown that housed some of her fondest memories; the same hometown where she came to know and love Frank Newlan. But of course, that was a long time removed from where she stood today, perched on the precipice of a failed marriage.
Plante couldn’t remember exactly when her dream life, married to her dream husband, living in her dream house, began to take a decidedly sharp, hairpin turn for the worse, but the one thing she knew for sure was that she was miserable these days, and to make matter worse, all of a sudden, her husband was accusing her of cheating. And if that weren’t bad enough, along with the emotional abuse that Tom Willis had been heaping on his wife for so many years, he was now trending towards becoming physically abusive to boot.
Plante’s husband never actually beat her, but he would force himself on her sexually, and then he would make her feel guilty with his psychological taunting. One day Tom Willis would grouse about her cooking; another day he would nag that the house was a mess; and just about every night, right before bedtime, he would complain that she was getting fat. But the worst critiques came when he would insist that she was an unfit mother, just because she occasionally had one too many drinks.
And in retaliation, Plante would bitch-and-moan until she was blue in the face.
“I can’t help it if I’m bored…maybe if you’d come home once in a while I wouldn’t have the urge to get so drunk,” became her words of lament, but invariably her grievances fell on deaf ears.
Plante loved her two daughters more than anything in the world and she would sacrifice her life for them if came to that, and in her way of thinking, it was her husband who was the neglectful parent, not her.
And as we all know, more often than not, when a marriage begins to slowly dissolve in this manner, at some point, both husband and wife contemplate looking for shelter in the arms of another, and sadly the Willis’s marriage had reached that breaking point of no return.
Marianne Plante was no fool. Not for one minute did she believe that her husband was working late all these nights while she was sitting at home, alone, crying her pretty little eyes out…and so he had no one but himself to blame if, lately, her hungry heart had a tendency to stray like a cat in heat. Sure, Tom once caught her on the phone with a man she met at the supermarket. And sure, Tom caught a man leaving their home one night while he was pulling into the driveway. But as far as she was concerned, she was lonely, and she had every right to have friends, even if they were male friends.
Not surprisingly, Tom Willis didn’t see eye-to-eye with his wife when it came to flirtatious behavior. You see, he had old fashioned values. He believed it was OK for a married man to be out and about on the town, carousing, and maybe even engaging in a meaningless dalliance now and then. But when it came to hanky-panky, he was a firm advocate of the old saying that it was a man’s world, and that a married woman belonged in her home taking care of her children, no exceptions.
Willis wasn’t quite sure what his wife was up to lately, but he was determined to find out, one way or another. Of course, with him spending less and less time at home these days, he realized that he was unable to keep an eye on her himself, and so he decided on the next best thing; he decided to find someone who could keep an eye on her, strictly to satisfy his own ingrained insecurities.
And sure enough, Tom Willis came up with the perfect solution; a private detective.
Over a week had passed since Willis hired his friend, Brent Blain, owner/operator of the Boston Intelligence Group, to spy on his wife Marianne. And in that time she had been observed acting very suspiciously, but so far nothing overtly incriminating had been uncovered by the seasoned private eye.
However, Willis had procured Blain’s services for the next month, so it remained to be seen what he would come up with. But as far as Tom Willis was concerned, the Boston Intelligence Group had better not find any compromising evidence pertaining to his wife Marianne. Otherwise, she was going to be in for one messy divorce, and he would make damn sure that he got the kids. And on top of that, whatever asshole dared to mess around with the wife of Tom Willis was going to be in for a rude awakening.
“Maybe even a deadly rude awakening,” grunted Willis on more than one occasion, which, in a roundabout way, leads us full circle, right back to an inconsolable Marianne Plante and her tearstained letter; right back into the scheming mind of John Breslin; right back to the untimely demise of Fred Miller; right back into the oncoming path of Frank Newlan.
And so as fate would have it, on this beautiful early June evening, as Newlan was in the process of getting obliterated at his local watering hole, his dear old high school sweetheart was about to make a monumental decision.
“I’ve had it with this life…I’m gonna do it this time…I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna get in touch with Frankie,” whimpered Plante as she took pen to paper like she’d done so many times before.
To help motivate her, Plante rose unsteadily from her bed and proceeded to retrieve a tape which was hidden in the corner of her sock draw; not a VHS adult film tape as many a man has been known to keep in his sock draw, but an old cassette tape marked with the words “Marianne’s Mix Tape” on the label. Side A of the tape was also marked with the words, “Love Songs” while Side B was marked with the words, “Breakup Songs”.
The tape had been sent to Marianne Plante via US mail, eons ago, by none other than Mr. Frank Newlan.
A sampling of the tunes on the “Love Songs” side of the tape included “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues; “And You And I” by Yes; “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp; “Melissa” by The Allman Brothers; “Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel; and “More than a Feeling”
by Boston (a song which, coincidentally enough, included a lyric that referenced a woman named Marianne).
…
Newlan once met the lead vocalist for the band Boston, Brad Delp, at a local club where he was fronting a Beatles cover band, and on a whim, between sets he timidly approached the singer’s table and asked him about the Marianne in the song, “More than a Feeling”.
After a brief introduction, Newlan went on to recount how he had an old girlfriend who was named Marianne, and how the song’s lyrics held an added significance to him, and how had always been curious about the identity of the woman in the song.
And although Delp was reluctant to discuss the origins of the song, Newlan’s acutely keen intuition picked up on a glimpse of sadness emanating from the shy troubadour’s warm smile as they discussed his band’s deep album cuts.
Newlan could have sworn that he even detected a hint of misty dew forming in the corner of Delp’s cloudy eyes, and so, sensing that he had touched a nerve, he changed the subject, and they chatted amicably about music in general for a moment or two.
“Now that’s a true artist and one hell of a down to Earth good guy…you’d never know he was a rock star,” mused Newlan as he turned and walked away from the friendly and extremely gifted musician.
About a year after this encounter, Newlan was shocked and saddened to learn that Delp had committed suicide; a note found pinned to his body read: ‘Jai une ame solitaire. I am a lonely soul.’
As the word of Delp’s death spread, Newlan scoured the internet, searching in vain for an answer to a riddle which could never be properly explained. And as he grieved for another fallen hero, he agonizingly thought to himself, “Maybe sometimes the pain in these three minute pop songs is the real thing after all.”
…
And speaking of three minute pop songs, on the “Breakup Songs” side of “Marianne’s Mix Tape” were tunes such as “Mixed Emotions” by The Rolling Stones and “Can we still be Friends” by Robert Palmer (although, this particular song was actually written by another one of Newlan’s favorite artists, Todd Rundgren).
A couple of Rundgren’s songs also graced the tape, including the achingly beautiful ballad, “A Dream Goes on Forever”. The song’s lyrics were so powerfully heartbreaking, and yet somehow at the same time hopeful, that they never once failed to leave Newlan with a spine-tingling case of the goose-bumps.
Another example of the type of sad songs of love-and-loss which Newlan had hand-selected for the mix tape was the Billy Vera tune “At This Moment” which included a scorned lover’s “give me one more chance” plea, delivered on bended knee.
But the pièce de résistance on Side B of the homemade tape was the song “Babe” by the band Styx. This was Plante’s favorite song back in the day when she and Newlan were an item, and Newlan, who was known to overanalyze lyrics to the nth degree, had a feeling right then and there that this tune was going to come back to haunt him someday. How could it not, what with lines that chronicled the story of a man who felt as if he had no other choice but to walk away from his one true love?
Even to this day, if perchance the song “Babe” were to be played by the DJ on the soft rock radio station while Newlan was tooling around town in his car, his reflexive reaction would be to immediately change the station. And truth be told, he really had no choice in the matter, because he knew full well that this futile out-of-sight, out-of-mind defensive recoiling was his only hope at avoiding the inevitable pangs of heartache which were bound to overtake him and swallow him alive. Otherwise, if he elected to listen to the song, he ran the risk of falling apart at the seams, on the spot, which in turn would have forced him to pull his car over, regardless of sentimentality, until the tune ran its course, for fear of getting into an accident.
But other than the heart-wrenching Styx song, “Babe”, which was off-limits as far as Newlan was concerned, he was a sucker for a tear-jerking ballad any day of the week, and whenever he’d crank up one of these silly little love songs while taking a joint-smoking cruise with his partner in crime, Bruce Reardon, the cynical Reardon would end up putting the screws to Newlan with the same age-old question, over and over again.
“Frankie, what the hell do you see in these sappy, emotional, mush-filled songs anyway?”
To which Newlan would just shrug his shoulders and contemplatively reply, “Hey everyone has different tastes in music… and I guess I’m just a sentimental old fool.”
And while there is probably nothing dramatically out-of-the-ordinary about someone sending a mix tape of meaningful songs to a former lover in a futile attempt to win that person back, there was something on this tape that was rather unique.
Newlan, being the amateur musician that he was, owned a rack-full of rudimentary recording equipment at the time, as well a Casio keyboard, complete with a built in drum machine, and so each side of the aforementioned mix tape began with a Frank Newlan original song written specifically for Marianne Plante. The song on Side A of the tape was simply titled, “Marianne”, while the song on Side B was entitled, “Fade Away”.
Newlan wasn’t a sound engineer by any stretch of the imagination and his equipment wasn’t sophisticated enough to produce a quality recording, but he managed to come up with a haunting intro to the song, “Marianne” by repeatedly whispering the word “Marianne” on one track of his multi-track tape recorder, and the words “I wanna marry you” on another track.
The fruits of his labor might not have been so memorable if it weren’t for the fact that Newlan somehow rigged up his guitar effects box into his singing microphone, and he recorded the intro with as much echo, reverb, and delay as he could muster. The final outcome of his tinkering was that the words “Marianne” and “marry you” overlaid each other on the master tape and bounced from speaker to speaker, and he made the special effects even more pronounced by adding a touch of fade and pan to the already altered vocals.
When Newlan played the recording back for the first time he was stunned by the chilling results of his experimentation. He wasn’t much of a singer, but the flanging sound-effects masked the deficiencies in his voice just enough so that his confidence soared, and with a ragged determination he resolved to himself; “Someday I’ll send her a copy of this song.” And of course, as we have learned, Marianne Plante now held that very copy in her hand.
Plante decided to play the A Side of the tape, and she clumsily sang along with Newlan’s raspy voice, since, by now, after hundreds of repeated plays over the years, she knew every word by heart…and at this time we would also like to present these same words to you, the dear reader, for your consideration:
MARIANNE (words and music by Frank Newlan)
Marianne, Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you
Marianne, Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you
The time for me is coming soon to put down all my toys
Walk out the door on my own and face things like a man
But boys will be boys and I might never change
Can’t you see I’m finding it oh so hard to change
But all I can hope for, is that I do all I can
Can’t you see I need you
Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you
Marianne, Marianne
I’ve got to live up to my mistakes and fight right back with all it takes
Build a home in this angry world and find my peace of mind
I promise you the Promised Land, if you promise me your hand
You know what you mean to me, now it’s up to you
You said they’d catch me when I fall
But I love you more than them all
Can’t you see I love you
Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you
Marianne, Marianne
I know you get so afraid, we’re growing up so fast
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But you’ll never know how much I’ve paid, ‘cause you’re my first and last
Someday we will meet again, pack our bags and run away
Build a home in the country side, and watch the world grow old
And I’ll hold your body next to mine
‘Til the winter chill becomes sunshine
Can’t you see I need you
Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you
Marianne, Marianne
Should all my dreams fall apart, fall apart and fade away
I sincerely hope that in your heart, I still have a place to stay
Because more than all the precious gold, scattered across the land
More than anything in this world, I need your love so bad
I’ll try to say, best as I can
I’m in love with you, Marianne
Can’t you see I love you
Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you
Marianne, Marianne
Marianne, Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you
Marianne, Marianne, Marianne
I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you, I wanna marry you
And so, there you have it, written in stone for all time; Frank Newlan’s ode to Marianne Plante.
As you peruse Newlan’s very personal if somewhat schmaltzy lyrics, some of you might sympathize with his yearning quandary, while others might instead see a pathetic man clinging onto something that never really was.
Newlan’s old friend, Bruce Reardon fell into the latter category, and he spent many a night with Newlan back in the 80’s after his breakup with Marianne Plante, trying to convince him to forget about her once and for all.
“There are plenty of fish in the ocean…it’s time to move on,” Reardon would plead to his best buddy who was going through a period of deep depression. And as Newlan was prone to do, he sheltered his heart by quoting a song which he deemed meaningful to his condition, such as the Doobie Brothers tune, “What a Fool Believes”.
“Bruce it doesn’t matter what you or anyone else says because…well…you just can’t change what a fool believes,” was just one Newlan’s many clever rejoinders meant to mask his sorrow and deflect the pain away like an armored shield combating a sword-wielding warrior in the days of yore.
Ironically enough, years later, Newlan would return the favor by helping to guide Reardon through a similar situation when his previous fiancé called off their wedding engagement.
But in any event, regardless of what we might think of Newlan as an idealistic lyricist, or as a conflicted person, as the love songs tape played softly in the background, the object of his affections all those years ago, Marianne Plante, neatly composed the following letter:
Dear Frankie,
Surprise! It’s your old friend Marianne Plante (although my legal name is now Marianne Willis). How/what are you doing these days?? Hope all is well.
I’m sure you’re surprised to hear from me after all of these years, but for some reason I’ve been thinking about you lately and I decided that its high-time I should write to you and somehow try to express what’s been on my mind for so long now.
I know that things didn’t end well between us, and that we were both young and immature, but I’ve come a long way since then as I’m sure you have too. I remember when I gave you my high school picture I wrote on the back that I’d never forget you, and one thing you need to know is that I have NEVER, ever, forgotten about you, Frankie.
I still regret that I never came to see your band play after you made it out to the nightclub circuit (although I’m sure you were great!), and even though I know you never became famous like you dreamed about, in my eyes you will always be a star.
My mother told me that you work at Tafts University now. She’s been working there for almost 30 years herself (actually since around the time when we first met). She also told me that you bumped into her and reintroduced yourself, and that you asked for me, which must have been hard (or then again, maybe not).
She mentioned that you’re living in that fancy luxury high-rise complex in Medford near the mall, so I imagine that you must be doing OK for yourself. She said that you even have a view of Boston…NICE!! She also told me that you’re still single. So why no one special in your life yet??!!
I know I told you when we broke up that you should forget about me so that you could make room in your heart for the woman who you really belong with…but honestly a piece of me is glad that you haven’t found her yet, because at times I think that maybe we were meant for each other all along. Does that make me a bad person?
As for me (as you know from my mother), I’m married, and me and my husband Tom have two beautiful daughters. We waited a while before we had kids (Tom was a little slow in that department), and although I love my daughters more than words could ever express, I wish I could say that I’m happily married. But I imagine that all marriages go through rocky periods at some point or another.
Well I’m sure I’ve bored you enough for now. I hope you don’t hate me for sending you this letter. I don’t want to mess up your life like I did before. I guess I was just was hoping that maybe we could put the past behind us and be friends again. The truth is I miss you Frankie.
BTW: I drove by your complex one day while I was down that way visiting my mother, and I saw the address on the sign out front so I stopped in the parking lot and wrote it down. I know this sounds crazy, but I could almost feel your presence, and I kept looking for you to hopefully pull up and recognize me. Of course we probably both look different by now…it’s been a long time Frankie.
Love,
Marianne
PS: Maybe I’ll call you sometime, you know just to say hello. I looked you up in the phone book which was easy since you’re still the only Frank Newlan listed in Medford!
And so Marianne Plante completed another letter addressed to Frank Newlan, but this time she actually got up the nerve to tiptoe past her comatose husband and slip on out the front door. This time she got up the nerve to make her way beyond the white picket fence that bordered her neatly landscaped front yard. This time she got up the nerve to walk on down the street over to the mailbox and open up the lid…but just as she was about to drop the letter in the box, at the last minute she hesitated and had second thoughts.
“Why am I doing this? I ruined the poor guy’s life once already. God knows what this will do to him,” she pleadingly debated with herself as a tear ran down her cheek. At that point, she had lost her nerve, and she was just about to turn around and go home, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a black car sped by with its headlights turned off.
The rumbling automobile startled Plante, and her jitters caused the letter to slip out of her right hand, while her left hand still held onto the slightly opened mailbox lid. And as fate would have it, this unintentional convergence of destinies sent the envelope falling serendipitously into the slot; so like it or not, it was too late for Marianne Plante to do anything other than to accept the notion of karma in action.
“Oh well, what’s done is done. I guess it was meant to be. God must have wanted me to send that letter. Everything happens for a reason…and whatever happens next…good, bad or indifferent…it’s out of my hands,” whispered a decidedly indecisive Plante. And although she had resorted to speaking in well-worn clichés, her mood was cheered considerably by the mere act of pondering the unknown consequences that the letter might bring wandering into her life.
As to whether a high power had a hand in delivering Marianne Plante’s letter to Frank Newlan, we cannot say, but what we do know for a fact is that the driver of the car which startled her was none other than Brent Blain, Private Detective extraordinaire of the Boston Intelligence Group.
…
Dear reader, while the text of Marianne Plante’s letter only hints at the depths of her despair, the amateur psychiatrist in
each of us might find ourselves stumbling upon a veritable treasure trove of confusion, buried deep within the lines of her scrambled words, if only we were to look deeply enough. On the other hand, one of the more concrete details that we are able to ascertain from her missive is the fact that her mother, like Newlan, was also employed by Tafts University.
However, Mrs. Plante’s office was located in a building on the other side of campus, and for the longest time their paths never crossed. In fact, Newlan didn’t even know that she worked at the University until one seemingly insignificant day about nine years into his tenure at Tafts, there happened to be a going-away party in the cafeteria for a woman in the Accounting Department who was leaving for a new job, and on the other side of the room Newlan spied what looked to be a familiar face…but he couldn’t quite place it.
Not knowing what else to do, Newlan consulted with his know-it-all colleague Bob Parant, asking “Hey Bobby, who’s that woman sitting over there in the corner?”
And when Parant replied, “Marie Plante,” Newlan almost fainted and muttered his favorite words of disbelief; “Man, you can’t make this shit up.”
“Thanks Bobby…finally some information I can use for a change,” sarcastically exclaimed Newlan as he excused himself, and with some trepidation he ambled over to the mother of his long lost, but never forgotten, lover, and quietly said hello.
As Newlan and Mrs. Plante exchanged pleasantries and got caught up on the state of affairs in her daughter’s life, his observant intuition became in tune to the fact that she never once mentioned her son-in-law, and she also appeared to be quite interested in the fact the he was still single.
Newlan and Mrs. Plante must have chatted for at least a half hour, and when it finally came time to say goodbye, with a twinkle in her eye, she offered her regards; “It was a pleasure talking to you Frank… and I’ll let Marianne know you were asking for her.”
And so with a pang of nostalgia lingering in his suddenly aching heart, Newlan listlessly retreated from the conversation, but just the same, he thought to himself, “what a small world, bumping into Marianne’s mother like this…I’m glad to hear that she’s doing well. But wait a minute…I never said I was asking for her.”
Newlan wistfully wondered about the encounter with Mrs. Plante for many months afterwards, and in his impressionable mind he agonized over whether the chance meeting could somehow be a sign from high up above, apprising him that he might someday be miraculously reunited with his high school sweetheart. However, as day after day went by, and nothing miraculous in the least happened, he came to a sad conclusion.
“Give it up…she made it clear long ago that it was over between us, and that I needed to get on with my life…so why am I still thinking about her all these years later when I know full well that she’s a married woman and the mother of two young kids?”
And yet the truth was that Newlan had never really completely gotten over Marianne Plante, and being the hopeless romantic that he was, sometimes late at night, he still longed for…the only woman…he ever loved.