5/4/10

ME AND HEMINGWAY IN BELGIUM
Michael A. Kechula


Two days after Christmas, I experienced a scene right out of a Hemingway novel. Only this was in a café in Belgium. Hemingway would have preferred it happen in Spain, preferably during the Spanish Civil War.

Six of us were around the table: Rene, the woman I’ve loved all my life, and her husband; Jana, her younger sister, the woman I’ve also loved all of my life, and her husband. Finally there was Adolpho, father of the two sisters.

Twenty years had passed since I’d seen any of them. We met for lunch in Brussels. Hemingway might have shifted the scene to Havana on a scorching, humid day with renegade police randomly checking passports.

Rene was in her mid-forties and plump. Jana, four years younger, was just as matronly. Hemingway would’ve painted both women as maturely magnificent, still shapely and lustful, with one or both barren. He would’ve had one or the other, or perhaps both, creep into my tent on a hot African night at the base of Mount Kilamanjaro.

Their father hadn’t changed a bit. He was a short man, part Italian, part Portuguese. Hemingway would’ve put a snowy beard on him and made him a towering, exceedingly-robust, elephant hunter.

As to the husbands, I’d never met either. Rene’s husband, who’d occupied my place in her bed for twenty-odd years, was a stick and the spitting image of the guy who’d hosted the 1970s, wacky, TV series, The Gong Show.

I asked myself, How can I be angry with somebody who looks so comical although he stole the love of my life? Hemingway would have given him a flask from which he swigged continuously while he sized me up for a bloody street fight.

The other husband was all spit and polish. Career military officer. He had the no-nonsense look of a warrior. I didn’t begrudge his place in Jana’s bed for the past twenty-three years, as I’d never expected to occupy it anyway. Not to say I didn’t pine for the opportunity. Hemingway would have given him binoculars and a knapsack crammed with dynamite to blow a bridge during Spain’s Civil War.

Rene arranged for me to sit next to her. I didn’t expect to be so stirred by her nearness. I glanced across the table at Jana. I didn’t expect to get so wound up at the sight of her blonde hair slipping down over her forehead. Jana never knew I loved her so deeply from afar. She couldn’t have guessed I’d picked her as Rene’s successor, once Rene threw me away for the host of the Gong Show. No way Hemingway could have improved on this potentially explosive, middle-aged, double-triangle.

I couldn’t believe what Rene did during that a lull in the conversation. She told everyone about the time my drunken, raging dad lunged at her, and I had to pick up a chair to fend him off, while she escaped. She sounded very wistful about that.

That was not the time and place to bring it up, as it showed how extremely protective of her and how heroic I was. Hemingway would have appreciated the drunkenness of my dad and my gallantry. And how Rene cleverly found a way to pit me against her husband, who looked like he’d run and hide if anybody threatened his wife.

She seemed to be saying, “Look at Harry, he protected me from his father who was in a drunken, unprovoked rage. You, my husband, are so complacent...you’ve never had to risk danger on my behalf. But next to me sits Harry, who as a boy of 16, stood his ground and was ready to whack his dad with a heavy, chrome kitchen chair to save me.

Later I thought, Why did you leave me, Rene? I put my life on the line for you, and that wasn't even good enough to make you mine forever? I couldn’t even go home that night I stood up to my dad. He would’ve taken me apart. I slept outside in the cold, fearing for my life. Didn’t that even come to your thoughts when you were evaluating if you would marry Gong Show or me?

I wondered how far I'd have to go for a woman in order to have her not leave me for another. What would I have to do to keep the affections of a woman who’d care for me in a steady, sustained, and predictable way?

I couldn’t come up with any answers.

I decided that when I finally saw the Almighty, I'd ask Him about the creatures he named woman. Especially the woman named Rene. And her sister, Jana.

As I ate my dessert, I pondered how Hemingway might have described that celestial confrontation.


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Michael A. Kechula's fiction has been published in 123 magazines and 33 anthologies. He’s authored 2 books of flash fiction stories: “The Area 51 Option and 70 More Speculative Fiction Tales,” and “A Full Deck of Zombies--61 Speculative Fiction Tales.” Both eBooks available at www.BooksForABuck.com. Paperbacks available at www.amazon.com.