The Girl No Boy Could Love
Prologue
Two years ago
I’m at the kitchen table sharing a mutually agreed upon last meal with my soon to be ex-wife when a text message comes across my phone. In a reversal of standard roles, my agent states that she has a story for me. I ignore the text in honor of my wife. Had I done more of that through the years, we would not be at dinner with divorce papers between us. In any event, the evening is a success, if such a dinner can be viewed that way.
I see my wife to the car and watch as she drives towards the next chapter in her life. Needing a distraction, I pull my phone from my pocket and look again at the text. It’s late, too late for business calls in my mind. However, she texted me, and this was an unusual exchange. Moreover, we have enjoyed a wonderful, if not always monetarily rewarding, professional relationship. I call her.
Pleasantries: she apologizes for my upcoming divorce, and I for disappearing during the ordeal. Then she hits me with the matter at hand. A distant cousin has recently lost her husband in an overseas rafting incident. To the cousin’s surprise, the husband left an unusual and delicate request in his will. Though the will left everything he owned to his spouse, it also charged her to find an agent/writer to publish an indiscretion he'd had shortly before their wedding.
Apparently, he’d not disclosed this incident and the wife was doubly hurt, because of the loss of her husband and the fact that he’d held this secret through twenty-six years of marriage. Nonetheless, according to my agent, the wife had honored the will by opening the safe with another present, so as to not give in to any temptation to censor any part of the information. My agent was now in possession of the contents of the lock box, offering me the opportunity to investigate and tell the story.
“Why me?” I ask. My agent represents more successful writers than me and even has longer standing relationships with some of them. As I expected, she believes I can use the work. I’m at a mid-life crisis, of sorts. My last two novels have failed for lack of passion, my marriage is over, and I have no inspiration to write. I could argue against none of these, so I skeptically agree to review the material.
A month later I’m in California having brunch with my agent, discussing the known details of this story. The wife’s name is Heather Jones-Harding. Her husband was Maurice, Reese for short. Both come from the upper strata of the social economic pool. They’d met during senior year of college and were instantaneously drawn to one another. Heather had shared with my agent that, as she recalled, Maurice was drawn to her nature as much as to her—whatever the hell that means. He’d called her pure, traditional, beautiful. The two wed early fall of 1996.
Maurice had opted out of the standard bachelor party in exchange for permission to take his RV on a thirty-day road trip across the southern regions of the country. Heather knew, and Maurice did not hide, that a big reason for the trip was to get his head right, clean out his closet, so to speak. There were either skeletons in the south or unfinished business. Either way, Heather wanted them gone and so permitted him time undisturbed.
It was during this trip that he encountered young Tamara James and shared in an experience that they’d take to their graves.
I ask my agent, first, if she’d looked over any of the material, and second, does she find anything interesting about this story. If so, what? Admittedly, I don’t see it. Sounds like yet another beautified story of unfaithfulness. Surely, I am not objective in the matter, being myself a victim of spousal infidelity in the name of love.
The answer is yes, on both accounts. She’d thumbed through the material over the last few weeks. Initially, she’d shared my reservation. However, after careful reading she’d become convinced that an exceptional story awaited to be uncovered. Not so much for the contours of the story, after all, the triangle love story is nothing new. The true gem in this story, she declares, is the third wheel, Tamara James. I ask her to elaborate. She declines. Rather, she posits the challenge: take a month to review the material, and if I decide to write the story, she guarantees she’ll find a publisher. Her only condition: all edits must be performed by my former editor. Though I have no problem with any such arrangement, getting my editor on board might present a challenge. After all, she just rode out of my life, divorce papers in hand.
Nevertheless, I tentatively agree. If she can get my editor on board, I’ll give it a thirty-day review. We shake hands, share a friendly hug, and then she’s on her way, I’m on mine.
I could write a novella of my journey in getting to know both Maurice Harding and Tamara James, but I will provide here only what’s necessary to understand the compilation of this narrative.
Let’s begin with an affirmation: I believe this story to be true, as far as imagination will admit. The six months of research I conducted has convinced me—no, convicted me—to believe this. And my journalistic integrity persuades me to believe that the reader will agree with me on this. If I have in some matters over-romanticized, it is only because in the two months it took me to write the draft of this story, I’d become possessed of the heroine and her ill-omened quest.
Why is this story important? Who should care? Every writer wants the world to read their work, and this is a love story, and as such should speak to and for anyone who has loved or wanted to love. Yet in a narrower sense, this story provides proof to the stoic that love exists, hope for the broken, healing for the scarred. In the least, the story confirms what Maurice said to Tamara, “Actions all have reactions.”
In some ways, I am more attached to this story than any other I have written. With The Girl No Boy Could Love came a sense of duty to present the characters in their strengths and fears, their unrealistic idealizations of one another, and their tragic reality.
As to the question of accuracy and authenticity, I should state the obvious: I’ve never met either Maurice Harding or Tamara James. That does not mean, however, that I am without primary sources. Much of the contents of the safe box were letters, poems, and short prose narrative written by Harding, himself something of a writer. I will discuss Tamara’s contribution shortly, but the reader should understand that, on top of my access to primary documents, my journalistic travels have tread two distinctive paths, emotionally and geographically.
Firstly, and far less challenging, I travelled the west coast, from San Bernardino to Seattle, in search of Maurice Harding. Because he was for all of his life a person of means, it was easy to track him. Heather provided details as to his person, strengths, and weaknesses. There were not many other people to interview, evidencing Maurice as something of a loner. He’d come and gone in this life, apparently living much of it to himself.
Tamara provided a greater challenge. Almost three decades removed, the faculty at her high school remembered nothing about her. She’d never held a job in Chicago, nor had she attended an institution of higher learning. The most peripheral sources available were Washington Park neighbors and a greyed lady named Catherine who works at a bakery in Savanah, Tennessee. Coming closer to Tamara, both parents survive and proved invaluable in helping recreate Tamara in the pages that follow. They expressed both pride and jubilation that their daughter’s story would be told, notwithstanding my disclaimer that this work would cast her habitual indiscretions before an audience far wider than Washington Park.
There’s not much else to say until you have read the story for yourself. Be warned, though small in size, this story moves with a force and power all its own. For what it’s worth, beta readers found themselves in a conundrum. They ended the story with a completely different view of Tamara James than the one they began with. One went so far as to tell me that this story gave her the strength to follow through with her wedding commitment. Others have claimed to identify with Tamara on some level or another. By all accounts, Tamara James was magnetic, but that readers of this story should hold such sentiments leads me to believe that maybe, just maybe, I succeeded in telling her story.
I hope you believe what I have written. The core details can be verified by letters, poems, journal entries, etc. Disclaimer; I have taken license to one particular detail, a recurring theme. In one fashion or another, all sources agreed that Tamara believed she’d known an elusive figure was coming. She’d called him the man in the hat. Whether she’d foreseen this through vision, premonition, or even dream, is impossible to determine.
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