Soledad

Soledad

     With plenty of grey hair to spare my return to academia finds me too old to be there but too emboldened by years not to. But my quest for math is a romantic notion where the fountain of youth is a maiden in whose eyes my insecurities reflect as they did so long ago when my true love saw into my soul.
     One fine day I get an A on my algebra exam. The apple of my eye laments her uncharacteristically poor performance on the test. So I hand her mine to answer her uncertainty about a formula. She glowers at me. “You showed me yours to brag about your grade. You are so transparent.”
     When the professor steps out to consult her colleague Cassie draws a horizontal 69 upon the plastic in the overhead projector. To make her meaning even clearer, she surrounds the cozy numbers with hearts and xo. But while the students snicker I turn the plastic sheet right side up upon which she restores it to its suggestive position. “Math need not be cold and calculating. And you are long overdue for a lube job on the pretension that clogs you with the need to be right.”
     I reply, “Sorry about my misunderstanding.”
     She says, “John, your perception was warped by your ego. Now watch the teacher will get the meaning perfectly well even though her mind is cluttered with numbers.”
    Upon dismissal, I escort Cassie back to her dorm much as a knight with his lady. She looks above at the clouds. “Looks like some bad weather headed our way.”
    I reply, “Yes, the weather does look rather inclement.”
     “You think you are the king of the English language,” she replies.  
    But after classroom flirtations, she makes her discovery that I am not just playing crazy but the real thing. Until one fine day when the assignments are handed out, the teacher flunks me with lips curled like a queen about to declare war. And my major changes with the utmost haste to theater and stagecraft.
     We, fledgling actors and actresses, sit gathered before a performance of cart wheelers in motion. From somewhere on the roof comes a sound like hooves. I joke to the guy next to me “Must be horses.”
     He glares the coldest stare. Then before my very eyes is the embodiment of the queen of the sciences. She is the very same woman who put sex into math with risqué projections scrawled on the overhead that fateful day that my airs got in the way. Cassie says, “Well you’ve discovered my major. Funny you never asked me before. I would have been glad to tell you. I’m to be cast as Juliet in the college ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ production.”
     I reply, “Cassie, I’m a bit too old to take the role of Romeo. But you should be smashing.”
     She says, “Don’t be jealous. I’m sure you’ve played that part many times.”
     “I don’t know what drove me to re-enroll as a non-traditional student.”
     “Could it have been that college is the perfect way to impress women with your education which makes it a better dating place than a nightclub? Besides, those places are too blatantly prurient for a closet sensualist like you.”
     “I certainly haven’t impressed you.”
     “If I had a nickel in my pocket for every cerebral guy I went out with airport security would think I was carrying something most unladylike and investigate me in a backroom.”
     Our pursuit of the liberal arts finds us enrolled in the same poetry class. There our professor keeps the classroom deliberately dark so that with its Cathedral high ceiling it will provide a church-like feeling for us young poets to show respect for the craft with the sacred silence.
     There is a projector machine to put up our work that we especially want to share with the class. But each time Cassie takes advantage by placing her poetry directly into the machine without waiting for the professor to do the honors. Her poems are invariably about sex.
     So after one class, I dare to ask her out for a production of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” put on by the college theater department. She says, “If I want to see a roach crawling around I need look no further than my kitchen sink.” She brashly tells me what she thinks of me, that my ego trip is to sit at the throne of the group which makes me the beating heart of pomposity in her book.
     She shakes her lush curls and laughs like a medieval witch on the hunt to expose hauteur. Then she dashes out of the room like Peter Pan on the run from a Broadway show which ran too long.  
     I chase after her in hot pursuit until we arrive at the abandoned football field with its knee-high grass. She pushes the mower over the tufts and I yell, “Soledad!”
     She shouts back, “Yes, this is my only solitude!”
     And I watch her make a path through the grass while blazing a trail through life.