STEPS

CHAPTER ONE A love story

Spring 1983. I stepped over the threshold of a restaurant and made my way towards a table full of friends. I was late. I was always late.

The room I'd left behind resembled a turbulent sea; many outfits in collapsed pools on the floor as though the bodies once occupying them had vanished. My bed a barge, floating above this body-less sea, overloaded with tops and bottoms and shoes and bags, belts and... stuff.

I never knew what to wear. Despite the forward planning and the hour dedicated to actually dressing, nothing seemed appropriate during the many final inspections. I was competing those days; there was the need to appear as something other than the very self I competed against.

I was blessed with a slim and perfectly proportioned body. My hair, for the first and only time in history, fitted the fashion. Long, chestnut-brown and naturally curly, it needed only a smoothing gel to eliminate the slight frizz. Others spent small fortunes undergoing perms, often resulting in fuzzy, distended hair-halos.

These were my glory days. The awkwardness and shyness of youth abandoned, the new persona popular, sought out, gathered up in circles made of artists and musicians, dancers, show-people. Joints passed around in shadowy night-club corners; scotch flowing, drunken and stoned merriment a vital part of most sojourns into the night.

As was the case usually, I'd settled on the plainest outfit: black leather pants and a coffee-with-milk hued top, its wide neckline leaving either shoulder bare, depending on my movements. My penchant for boots whatever the season had in this instance translated into a matching coffee-colored knee high pair with flat heels. ChaneI no5 sprayed copiously and then, I felt perfect enough to leave the house.

I noticed immediately the stranger among my group of friends and after sharing an initial indifferent glance, I sat opposite. Then followed the usual introduction: "Lis, this is Bill," offered up by my boyfriend's best mate seated on my right. "Her name's Elise but we like Lis better,"

The first innocuous words between us: "Hello Elise." "Hi William."

Of course he smiled then. He was no plain "Bill", at least not in my mind.

"I like that," he said.

"It suits you better." I smiled back, his greeting reaffirming my initial and too hurried finding: Neither of us liked our conveniently shortened names.

Changed selves emerged within those first few words. These followed by more words and more words, each added one increasing in relevance. I assumed I was meandering again, bartering language through which to appraise this new possibility. Supposing this connection was likewise solitary, independent of others. The verbal exchanges limited, spread between other conversations; too much distraction those early moments to understand how each word was leading, always leading towards.

Then a slight and assumed accidental instance of William's foot touching mine under the table. I looked up and across expecting the usual casual apology. I was instead drawn to piercing dark eyes, their depths at once absorbing my surprise and reflecting my immature inadequacy, my inexperience.

I noticed fine laughter lines, a gentle smile. A good man, I surmised. But what did I know, barely twenty two and awed by this sudden magnificence presented in velvet-toned suppositions?

His stature was slender, yet the ensuring hours created of him a giant. Something was changing me; there was an upheaval, an awakening. I lived this first time experiencing acute hunger, thirst. The supposition I had been asleep and only now through a chance encounter woken and needing vital sustenance. Only now.