Meditative Moments

Just thinking about Hutch’s women sometimes makes my eyeballs hurt. Imagine what it must do to him! Here’s a mild variation on that theme, with my slash muse tugging at the edges of the page. She didn’t get her way this time, but she’s satisfied that by the end, I’ve seen to it that Hutch has begotten a clue.

In meditative moments, Hutch had come to see and accept that he liked dangerous women. It wasn’t right, but he craved the thrill. Could almost see himself getting back with Vanessa someday. If she ever showed up again with an offer on her lips, he just might take it. He’d never tell Starsky that; not after what the guy had seen her do to him, and all he’d done to help him get over it. The hell of it was, though, that after her, most women just seemed bland. Even risk-addicted stewardesses like Molly Severin were too safe. He was a sucker for the edgy ones.

Like Jeannie. He wondered afterwards what she’d really been about. Whatever it was, he’d paid dearly for it, with nothing to show in return but a vague mistrust of pleasure and a lifelong debt to Starsky. It wasn’t right to blame Jeannie; she’d only had a nightmare past she wanted to put behind her.

Abby hadn’t, but then she wasn’t pushing for a future, either. That alone was edgy enough for a girl who grew up toeing the front lines of the Sexual Revolution in fuzzy pink slippers crocheted by her grandma, but her commitment to exploring her sensuality with him more than made up for what Hug once called her “danger deficits.” She’d even started to share in the darker side of his professional life, but when she got more of it than she’d bargained for, she saw him as a nightmare past she wanted to put behind her. He couldn’t fault her any more than he had Jeannie. Was he wrong to expect her to be braver than that? Maybe he’d gotten too used to Starsky. He’d have stuck it out, no matter what. Hell, he had, time and again. Jesus, he’d even been there to soften Abby’s parting blow. Too bad you couldn’t get that kind of loyalty out of girls.

So it was, in those meditative moments, that Hutch approached, but abruptly avoided, the truth. Too bad he meditated only after suffering emotional wounds. He could have benefited from more meditation, but he certainly didn’t need more wounds — though, for him, they seemed inevitable.

For example, after going alone to a former art teacher’s latest exhibition in Westwood — one he’d originally planned to see with Abby — he noticed a lovely woman standing out on the sidewalk in front of the gallery, examining a flat tire on a car that looked as sleek and tasteful as the clothing she wore. Given the neighborhood, it amused him to think the car and her haircuts could also be in roughly the same price range. Because God, what hair! The hues of wildflower honey in sunlight, it fell in perfect shimmering disarray as she hung her head over what he guessed was that day’s very last straw.

“I’m a policeman,” he managed to say to her back, extending his badge into her peripheral vision. “Can I help?”

The lovely woman stiffened sharply for a second, then turned to face him, offering a smile of such grateful beauty that for a long time, he forgot to breathe. It was magical to him that at that moment, something of equally vital importance seemed to have slipped her mind, too.

“Hello,” she said with a gush of wonder. “I’m…my name is Gillian.”

Never had it pleased him more to serve the public than it had over the ensuing twenty-five minutes.

Three weeks, four days, and seventeen hours later, Starsky took him home, put him to bed, and stayed there with him, like he was a kid holding a dead puppy, listening to him try not to cry.

Eventually, when he became detached enough from Gillian’s death and Starsky’s compassion to start meditating again, he lit a candle out in the greenhouse and stared into it to clear his mind, to make room for a little wisdom. Instead, familiar questions hummed out of the flame at him: Why bother? Why love? What for? What’s the point?

He felt something cold grip his heart. He quickly blew out the candle and went to bed.

At the end of a long shift the very next night, a few minutes after eleven o’clock in a run-down Italian restaurant down by the docks, a contract killer inadvertently provided Hutch with one answer to all the questions that would intrude on his next meditation session.

That session was an exercise in emotional torture that began in an ambulance and didn’t end until after dawn the following day, in the intensive care ward of his least favorite Bay City hospital.

While he held Starsky’s hand and waited for him to wake up, he ignored the presence of others and quietly told him what he’d figured out. It didn’t matter that it might be a long time before he could say the same things to him again. For once in his life, just knowing he was right was enough.

*****