Out of the Ether

We always claimed to have been introduced by a mutual acquaintance, a judge's widow of some prominence as it happens. This was true in so far as it went, but it was also contrivance. The doyenne did introduce us, but I had never actually met K until she chaperoned my first date with Susan at a place called the Green Hills Grill that no longer exists any more than my thirteen year romance with one of the most enigmatic creatures to have stalked the earth. She was an innocent and a seductress. She was educated to a fault, yet could lapse into the Appalachian drawl and lazy grammar of a semi-literate. She had great physical beauty, but what brought her to it was a pathology that could have killed her. I was looking for a dalliance in a personal ad in Nashville's version of the Village Voice, a paper they gave away in grocery stores. I had composed some pap about doing quantum mechanics with my sleeves rolled up. God, she was lovely-her raven hair to her shoulders, her pallid skin ivory around ruby red lips, sad brown eyes that if you did not know her would capture your attention or your heart. It was not my intention to embark on anything more than a fling, but she rapidly insinuated herself into my life and that of my family who really did travel in high cotton and the same social circles as K-if not an even more rarefied society. I had no way of knowing on that casual first encounter on July 3, 1995 how much joy or pain Susan would come to bring me.