As guys, we are all pretenders to Bill Murray’s throne.
Sometimes we wear the jester’s cap of “Caddyshack,” sometimes the crown of “Lost in Translation.” What starts as a yearning to be cool in time becomes a compulsion to reflect.
There are, of course, many Bill Murrays to choose from: Army goof (“Stripes”), pilgrim soul (“The Razor’s Edge”), weather grouch (“Groundhog Day”).
Or sometimes a Bill chooses us.
Between boarding a recent flight in Denver and renting a car in San Jose, Calif., I realized my trip was an abridged re-enactment of Murray’s latest deadpan search for the self, “Broken Flowers.” For men, the search usually involves a woman; in my case someone I’ll call Lisa, the one who got away.
Ten years and a few relationships later, I wanted to tamp down any stray what-ifs and reaffirm that she had chosen a happy life. I wanted to see how much of my love, if any, had been mythology – if only to help me drape new myths on a future woman.
“Broken Flowers” is more a painting than a film, static, with shadings and a story your imagination nudges along. The premise dangles much more: a tired lothario goaded into visiting four ex-lovers because one may have borne him a son 19 years ago.
Me? Well, my journey didn’t start with a
mysterious note alleging paternity. And, no,
my Sonoma County itinerary did not include surprise visits to four past flames.
Didn’t have to. Lisa packed enough intrigue on her own.
For 10 years, she had been the face of Meg Ryan and Kate Beckinsale in romantic comedies I actually liked; the blend of beauty and heart that equals radiance. It’s not that I hadn’t made a go of it with other women. But between relationships, my ideal gradually slipped back to Lisa.
On his own plane-and-
rental-car journey, Bill Murray as Don Johnston drifts toward whatever fate lies ahead with the four women we assume he has wronged. He either wants to avoid it or, at this point in his life, simply sees all outcomes as equal.
In the five years since moving to Denver from Boston, I had done a fair imitation of Don. A failed relationship back East still smarted, and it became easier to choose women who couldn’t hurt me.
When my last serious relationship ended about two years ago, it reaffirmed that I could want more. The next fall, a DU law student put my heart on alert for about a month until an old boyfriend tugged her back. But the gift had already delivered: a long-missing balance of affection, restraint and devotion to the moment that I hoped to re-create with someone new.
Then, this past summer, Don tapped me on the subconscious and said something like, “Go see Lisa. Can’t say I see the point, but that’s me.”
On the summer night we met in 1995 she was shooting pool – all sexy women seem to – with a nice- enough trainer fellow I knew from the Y. Lisa would later say she found me aloof, but really self-protection had already kicked in. January meant grad school in Boston, so why take up with anyone now?
Lisa, with her blue eyes, English skin and a J.Lo posterior, intercepted me in the same pool room that October. Remember me? she asked. No, not right away, which gave us our first chance to tease each other.
The romance was always tentative. Disappointed by men who included the father of her 4-year-old girl, Lisa didn’t trust easily, and my Boston plans further scrambled her affections.
Yet our energies fed off each other: her insistent curiosity and my bohemian certainties. A physical and emotional chemistry grew. My friends loved Lisa, and I could imagine helping raise her daughter.
After January, we kept something alive through phone calls and letters. It wasn’t enough, even though I tried to convince both of us it could be during my 2 1/2 years in school.
By May, when a wedding brought me back to the Bay Area, Lisa was seeing a guy she seemed to dislike. It wouldn’t last, but the pain had been sown.
We got drunk in San Francisco, one pledge of my devotion for each pint of beer. What if I transferred to an MFA program in the city? The problem was, I adored Boston, and Lisa knew it.
If you lived here, she said, everything might be different. The woman I now clearly loved was getting used to me.
“I didn’t fight for her properly.” The mantra looped in my head as the Golden Gate appeared, announcing Mount Tamalpais and Marin County on the other side. The wine country and Santa Rosa, its capital, awaited.
In a proper fight, I would have decked the anti-Cyrano within me who let Lisa slip away 10 Mays ago. That needy, melodramatic suitor so scared of getting what he wanted told her that fall not to visit Boston after she had already booked a flight. So noble, that guy – telling himself he had to respect her relationship with a new man.
“You look great!” I said as we hugged.
“So do you!”
No longer boyish with a silly goatee, I could still pass for a younger guy. And Lisa … only the tiniest of crow’s feet had stepped between her and the 20-something who made “boys and old men come alive,” as Danny Elfman once sang.
Always dynamic, Lisa had become a satellite spinning even faster. All paths and projects spilled over with optimism, from her black belt in karate to her husband’s political campaigning. She bit happily to the core of life.
Between mouthfuls of burrito on an outdoor patio, we caught up, sharing plans and dreams much as we had a decade before. Unspoken but clear was how much we still liked each other. A familiar affection shined in her eyes, the flicker of a romance that had ended well after all.
Dinner was punctuated by her little boy’s singing, courtesy of the ringtone on Lisa’s cell. Behind the warbling notes, each time her husband called, was a no-doubt tighter voice reminding her to bring back takeout or asking again when she’d be home.
As we drove back to my car, the calls seemed to increase like contractions. You couldn’t blame him: A guy who used to be crazy for Lisa had returned to Sonoma County for some dubious reason. I felt like a burglar who needed just a little more time.
We parked. The phone fell silent, as though the man on the other end, a long-ago rival I’d never met, had decided, “You get this much time to state your business.”
The mantra returned, this time out loud: “I didn’t fight for you properly.” Lisa listened to my litany of regrets, then reaffirmed what she had shared during the car ride: She had been a mess back then too, skittish, scared to commit. And ultimately grateful that she had not endangered her relationship, the one that would become a marriage, by visiting Boston a decade ago.
In the span of a breath, my 10-year illusion of control dissolved into the closed air of the car. It had not been up to me to gain her heart; it had been up to both of us to find each other, and we couldn’t. I had not driven her away. She had driven herself, along a bumpy road that would lead to a solid marriage with a man who had never left her area code.
“We could have been good together,” Lisa told me without teasing or regret. She was simply tracing a path not taken; she was telling me I had been worth the trouble.
So my affection hadn’t been misplaced; no important part of Lisa was a myth, a product of infatuation. Amid the faults I never got to know intimately, she remained a keeper.
My calm wasn’t shattered when her son resumed singing in intervals, his father signaling, “My wife’s got a home to go to.”
On the drive back to San Jose, Don Johnston turned up the soundtrack for my trip, Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti.” Then he turned to me.
“Feeling pretty good about yourself, aren’t you?”
“Kind of serene, actually,” I said.
“Well, she’s only one woman,” he replied without elaborating.
The lights of Oakland and San Francisco winked at each other across the bay as we crossed the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge. “Did you ever have a best girl?” I asked.
Don stared ahead. I continued.
“My last serious girlfriend in Denver, the concept threatened her. When I called her my best girl, she said, ‘Aren’t I your only girl?’ Because ‘best girl’ does imply others – others that you’re no longer with, which is the point.”
Robert Plant launched into a new song. It was probably “Houses of the Holy,” a head- bobber that Don did not bob his head to.
“But didn’t she know,” I said, “at that time and place, that she was the one?”
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
