Love and Other Consolation Prizes




He found Juju’s business card in his wallet and handed it to his friend. “Call my daughter—her number’s on the back—let her know that I’ve found Gracie.” Then he tucked the note in his pocket and headed downstairs.

Pascual leaned over the banister. “Kuya, wait, where are you going?”



ERNEST HAD WORRIED that the new Alweg Monorail would still be jam-packed—overflowing with tourists, even in the early evening—so he skipped the electric sky train and parked as near as he could to the Century 21 Expo’s south entrance, which was mercifully uncrowded. He paid $1.60 for a general admission ticket and pushed his way through the turnstile while hundreds of bells chimed in the distance. Once inside, he felt like a desperate kid again. Everything smelled new, like sawdust, concrete, and blooming flowers, with a hint of cotton candy and candied apples lingering on the breeze.

Ernest inhaled the haunting scents and walked as fast as he could among the thicket of people. He weaved his way through the crowds, past the Interior Design and Fashion pavilion and beyond the snarling stuffed polar bears of the Alaska Exhibit, covered in fake snow. He felt a wave of nostalgia. So much had changed, beyond the location. The long, elegant dresses, petticoats, and colorful parasols were gone, replaced with a rainbow of short dresses and leather boots. Cinched waists had become soft, bare midriffs. Dark French curls had given way to frosted beehives and soaring bleached bouffants. And the decorum of suits and hats had been updated with Bermuda shorts, denim, and sunglasses.

The elaborate neoclassical architecture, the Grecian columns and faux marble arches that decorated his memories had been replaced as well, supplanted with visions of the future made manifest in painted steel and soaring walls of pastel concrete.

The expo made Ernest feel as if he’d stumbled out of H. G. Wells’s time machine and into a strange future where he didn’t quite fit in. He was a Morlock in a world of Eloi, more of a workhorse than a show horse, as he wended his way through the throngs of beautiful, chattering, modern people, who all seemed to be speaking in different languages—Chinese, Japanese, the romantic languages of Europe, sprinkled among the assortment of American accents.

Fortunately the Space Needle made it easy to orient himself as he saw a line of visitors trailing away from the base of the new landmark—hundreds of people, so many that they blocked the entrances of the IBM Center and the General Electric Building, and the sleek rocket-shaped concept cars in front of the geodesic dome of the Ford Pavilion. After fighting his way through the crowd that loitered near a bank of lockers and a row of seashell pay phones, Ernest found the ticket window.

“I’ve lost someone,” he said to the clerk, as he scanned the crowd. “I think she might have wandered up to the observation deck. She’s not well, plus she’s afraid of heights. My whole family is out looking for her, if I could just…”

The clerk looked at him as though he’d heard a million excuses to cut in line and a million more sob stories about missing children and misplaced wallets and purses. Then the man lit a cigarette and checked his clipboard. “Name?”

“Ernest Young, looking for Grace Young.”

The clerk flipped to the end of his paperwork and then said, “No need for the sob story, pal. You’re on will call.” He handed Ernest a VIP ticket and shouted, “Next!”

Ernest regarded the ticket, confused but grateful, as he walked to the entrance to the elevators. While waiting, he gazed up at the rotating restaurant that sat atop the pitched columns, five hundred feet above them. Thousands of feet higher, rivers of clouds stretched across the sky, slowly drifting beyond the tip of the needle, which made the spire appear to lean, as though millions of square feet of concrete and iron were falling. Ernest had to look away to keep from feeling dizzy.

“Gracie, what are you doing?” he whispered to himself as he watched the golden elevator capsules, one descending, and one rising. He could see faces in the elevator windows, some happy, some nervous and scared.

Once inside the building, he crowded into the lift as a tall elevator operator in a short dress welcomed their group with a cheery smile and a brief introduction. As they ascended beyond the ground-level visitors’ center, Ernest heard a rhythmic booming, drumming, and the brassy strains of trumpets and trombones. The World’s Fair Band emerged into view below, dressed in white and yellow, parading down the street. The musicians seemed like a throwback to Ernest’s first fair, except their caps were now emblazoned with the spiraling pattern of a hydrogen atom. As though on cue, a pair of fighter jets streaked across the sky, split in different directions, and wiggled their wings at the fairgoers below, who waved pennants and caps. Ernest swallowed, remembering how an identical jet had flown overhead and crashed on opening day. A married couple on the ground had been killed.

Ernest closed his eyes as the ground fell away beneath them. Then he opened them and for a moment was transported to 1909. He was back in the hot-air balloon, rising above an entire world that was celebrating the future.

He blinked as the elevator slowed and the view from the window portals was blocked by steel girders and slabs of concrete. When the doors slid open, Ernest stepped out into a crowded black-tie party, where finely dressed men and women were celebrating with glasses of champagne. Ernest felt underdressed and certainly uninvited as he scanned the room for any sign of Gracie. He worked his way through the room and around a grand piano. He held his breath as he stepped into the open air of the observation deck, felt the wind, appreciated the towering height. The sun was setting, kissing the tops of the Olympic Mountains, as boats on Lake Washington and Puget Sound switched on their red and green running lights. People milled about with cameras, elegant couples, posing, smiling, waving exposed squares of Polaroid film. Ernest searched for Gracie as guests and dignitaries mingled together, waiting for their snapshot smiles to develop. He circumnavigated the deck, ignoring the view of the fair below as he searched.

Then he saw a familiar woman, but much older, in a pearled gown as white as her hair. The spitting image of Madam Flora, she was walking toward him, also scanning the crowd. Her blue eyes lit up when she saw him, greeting him with open arms and a smile that he’d never forgotten.

Maisie.

They met amid the current of people, two stones in a river that eddied and swirled about them. The lines of age, the extra curves and wrinkles, the heaviness of time and circumstance had caught up to the Mayflower, just as those years had accumulated on him. Her hair was short, like when they’d first met. And instead of a hummingbird hat she wore a faded antique ribbon pinned to her shimmering dress. He recognized it as a commemorative souvenir from Hurrah Day.

“Hurrah,” she said, but the word came out more as a question.

“What are you doing here?” Ernest asked. He stood stunned, gazing at the smiling face he hadn’t seen in decades. “And do I call you Margaret now?”

She beamed. “You can always call me Maisie if you want to. No need to stand on ceremony. I’m too old to care what people think of me now. And I was about to ask what made you call me after all these years, but…”

Neither one spoke. Instead they hugged each other, held on as though each couldn’t believe the other person was real. Then they hugged again.

“Well, I can see by the look in your eyes, this meeting is a surprise to you,” Maisie said. “Just like the first time we met…”

“All those years ago.”

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