A Catcher In The Rye

Victor was comfortably seated in the chair inside the big auction hall. His eyes wandered lazily to the podium in front of him where a clean shaven man wearing gold rimmed spectacles and a armani suit was resounding a hammer on his desk. The hammer count had reached two and the eighteenth century painting up for the auction was due to be sold for six-thousand dollars at the next stroke of the hammer.

Victor yawned. He wasn’t particularly interested in this auction stuff. He wondered how on earth could he land at such a dull place on such a lazy sunday afternoon.

“Perhaps I would have been better off had I gone to catch some upcoming movie or just hung out with my friends at their place”, he thought.

He started cursing himself for the lousy idea of visiting the auction hall at the Town Center to kill time. He cursed his friends for not telling him how boring it was and he even cursed God for giving human beings the stupid intelligence to invent such a process as ‘auction’.

“Why do they have to make a big fuss about selling items in such a way. They should just put the items with their price tags on display and let the buyers decide. It would be so less boring that way … and quieter … maybe interesting …”. His thoughts were interrupted by a sharp pain in his neck.

“Ah! Well, God’s way of revenge by giving me a pain in the neck”, he thought. Little did he know that the Mighty power had a sense of sarcasm too. Turning his head towards right to stretch out his neck muscles a bit, he caught sight of a figure sitting two seats beside him. Under normal circumstances, Victor would have ignored the person and turned his head back carrying out his stretching excercise.

Yet, these were not normal circumstances as per Victor’s perceptions and for the following reasons(which he was able to think out later) …

First of all, the face was too strikingly beautiful to be ignored.However, what struck him more was the way in which she was looking at him. Her big blue innocent eyes were transfixed on his face as if penetrating and searching for something. For a moment, Victor felt like a living reflection in her watery eyes. He felt a sense of connection too.(Perhaps both of them were allies united against the common enemy of the boring auction unfolding before them or was it a moment of pure serendipity? For reasons not clear to this day, Victor never could find out why he felt that sense of connection!)

And then a strange thing happened. Victor suddenly felt a sense of drowning. His head was spinning or rather everything around him seemed to be revolving … the auction table , the hammer , the person with the gold rimmed spectacles , other people in the chairs … only she seemed to be fixed in her chair gazing at him with the same intensity as before. “Whats happening?”, Victor thought to himself. In a moment of sheer panic, he squeezed his eyes close and flinched them tightly to come back to senses once again. And when he opened his eyes, he was in for a surprise.

“Do you or do you not?” , she was asking him.

The sun was shining brightly on top of his head. Yet, it was not hot but almost comfortable in that garden. He felt the aroma of the flowers around him which seemed to give him his sense of reality back. “Such a beautiful day and a beautiful place to be in”, he thought.

“Do you or do you not, Victor?” , her voice was a bit louder now.

“Do I or do I not what?” , Victor quipped back and instantly realized how stupid his remark was. Determined not to let the damage go any further, he replied back before she could respond, “Yes, I do dear. I do love you.”

Somehow, Victor could see she was not happy on hearing this. He wondered if that was the right thing to say but then decided to act cool. She was again staring at him with that strong gaze making him wish he had his sunglasses on. There was a moment of awkward silence as both of them looked at each other, the hunter ready to shoot down the target and the prey not knowing what to do.

“Enough , I’ll take charge of the situation and bring it back under control”, Victor thought.(At that very moment, he heard someone inside himself smirking for the pretension of false bravado) . However, a determined man as Victor was, not to be ruffled by internal or external criticisms of his own abilities, he opened his mouth in an attempt to utter something but was quickly snapped off by her voice.

“Describe it in seven words then!” , she seemed to be saying.

“Describe what?”, he foolishly asked back.

“Your love …” , she seemed to be glaring at him in anger now.

Of all the difficult situations Victor had managed to successfully counter in his life, he always had a cue as to how he could bail himself out in those times. But here was a rarity of a mess he was in. He was no poet and certainly not a magician with words and yet he had been asked to describe his love in seven words. He had a grim realization that his whole future depended on the next seven words he would speak.

“Even Shakespeare wouldn’t be able to do it”, he thought.
Realizing that time was running out and he could do with the internal sarcasm later, he began to race his mind around the options he had. He could say “I love you” twice but that would be only six words. “What if I added a ‘and’ , it would be ‘I love you and I love you’ … seven words as demanded” , he thought. However, seven words as they were, they didn’t sound appealing enough to Victor for he had a slim sense of understanding romanticism somewhere deep inside. He decided to keep this option as a backup in the eventuality of finding nothing concrete.

“Shucks! Why seven, why not three or why even a limit to the words?” , the voice within him again cried out frustrated at the unfruitful attempts to resolve such a hopeless situation.

“Damn! I wouldn’t be able to figure this out”, he thought as a few more moments elapsed. He wracked his brains a bit more and just when he was about to give up, he got a faint recollection of a short beautiful verse of a poet expressing his terms of endearment to his lover.
“What was it … O Love! O thy … nopes … it started along the lines of ‘O Mighty love’ … no … it was somehow love being mighty and a teacher and all of this was tied up together … ah! if only I had some more time …”

“Victor!!! Seven words and you can’t even do that.” , her sharp voice sounded almost menacing.

“Seven , right , seven … ” , he repeated after her trying to buy himself more time.

She looked at him with a feeling of disappointment now. She slowly turned her back towards him and started walking away. And it was then he suddenly recalled the entire verse. And to his delight he realized the verse was seven words and so perfect for the situation. He almost felt happy now.

“Wait! I got it … I got It … seven right , seven … I got It, I got it!” , he cried after her moving figure, desperately raising an arm as a signal for her to stop.

“You got it , sure?” , her voice was cloyingly sweet now.

“Yes, I do … I have got it … in seven …” , he said rather stammering.

“Ok. Seven it is then …” , she said with a chuckle.

The crashing of the hammer on the auction table woke Victor up with a jolt. He found himself standing with his left arm raised in the direction of the auction table. The crowd in the hall seemed to be watching him agape with a sense of amusement.

“Congratulations Sir! The painting is yours in seven thousand dollars” , the man in the gold rimmed spectacles doing the auction said to him.

“The auction is closed now for the day. The buyers will be escorted to backstage for payment and taking their purchased items” , the auctioneer announced.

Victor slumped back into his chair with a thud. His first impulse was to look right and catch sight of that woman again , to ensure it was not a dream and everything was alright and he had not been strapped off by seven thousand dollars. He saw her vague figure moving away to the exit amongst the crowd. He wanted to run out too , to catch hold of her , to tell her those seven beautiful words he had so painfully thought out. Yet something told him that the moment had passed away. (And so our great Victor didn’t make an attempt to rush after her)

“Excuse me sir , would you please step this way for the payment” , the heavy voice of a guard snapped his train of thoughts.

Slowly, he stood up and begin to think about the situation he was in. The girl was gone, there was no one to listen to his poetic verse and he had to make a payment of seven thousand dollars which he didn’t have at the moment nor could afford to pay with the savings he had.

“Well , whats more worse , to express yourself in seven words when you are poor at words or to express out seven thousand dollars from thin air when you are poor at your bank balance” , Victor thought and couldn’t help resist a chuckle.