Michele Bravo in the Hall of the Mountain King, Ch 5

I.

The next day, Michele returned to her hotel room after her driving tour of Gettysburg. She tossed backpack and camera onto the bed and went into the bathroom for a long, cold shower. She’d been spent the day driving hither and yon on the Gettysburg driving trail of the various locations around the battlefield, and although her car had excellent air conditioning she’d gotten out on several occasions to walk around the various sites she’d visited, and overall she was feeling hot and grubby.

Refreshed after her shower, she sat on her bed and fired up her laptop. Then she checked her email. She’d received a response from her friend in Fredericksburg. She opened it, and found that he was delighted to hear from her, and would be even more delighted if she made his home her base during her week’s stay in northern Maryland. And he’d be delighted to act as her guide to the caverns of northern Virginia.

It had been a couple of years since she’d visited Fitz (Alex Fitzhugh), and since she’d be coming to his apartment from a different angle she looked up driving directions on Mapquest, and printed those out on her portable printer.

She arrived in Fredericksburg the next day in the late afternoon, and since he’d specified he wouldn’t be home until after six pm, she spent a couple of hours at a Barnes & Noble, browsing among the books. At six, she headed for Fitz’s apartment.

“How was your drive?” he asked, taking her suitcase from her and carrying it into the bedroom.

“Great. But I’m longing for a hot bath.”

“You and your baths,” Fitz laughed. “You should have been a mermaid, you like water so much.”

“I’ve often thought so.”

“May I join you?”

Michele tapped his hard chest with a smile. “My first bath after a drive is always all about me. But I’ll be having another bath later on tonight, as you well know. And if you’d care to join me then…”

“I’d love to.”

“Well, then. I’ll be back in twenty minutes, and we can catch up on old times.”

II.

They ordered in Chinese food, and spent the evening talking about old times.

Then, because he knew she liked it, Fitz said in his best James Mason impersonation, “What’s your pleasure, my dear? North By Northwest or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?”

“Tough choice,” Michele mused. “Cary Grant and James Mason, or Kirk Douglas and James Mason…I’m in the mood for Twenty Thousand Leagues…”

“I love this movie,” Michele mused, as Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre attempted to escape onto an island which, unbeknownst to them, was inhabited by cannibals, “But it also broke my heart.”

“What do mean?”

“Well, I saw it when I was very young, thirteen or so. Must have been one of the first full length, live action films I’d ever seen…graduating from the Disney animation classics, you know? And it ignited a love of oceans and underwater exploring….” She broke off to yell, “Run, you poor fools, run!”

After Douglas and Lorre were once more safely aboard the Nautilus, Michele continued. “And I also got my first crush, ever. My first crush on an actor and my first crush on a guy, ever. James Mason.”

Fitz nodded. “I can see it,” he said judiciously.

“I love his accent and his face and everything,” returned Michele with a grin. “But, remember, I was thirteen, and I had no idea that movies I saw on DVD were, you know, fifty years old. So I asked my mom if we could rent another movie starring James Mason, and the very next day she came back with one called 11 Harrowhouse.”

“I don’t recognize it.”

“Oh, it was about a lowly clerk in a diamond merchant company who decides to steal a million dollars worth of diamonds from his employer. Starred Candace Bergen and Charles Grodin. James Mason had a supporting role. And this movie was filmed – as I found out later, of course – in 1974. 20 years after he’d filmed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

“Ah, oh.”

“Exactly. From one day to the next the man I’d intended to marry when I grew up had aged 20 years!”

She joined in with Fitz’s laughter, but she was telling the truth. At age 13, she’d had her eye on Captain Nemo, alright!

“Worse than that,” she continued, “he’d been 45 when he played Nemo and he was 65 in this movie. I was just…stunned, shattered! But that’s not the worst of it. I asked my mom how in the world this could happen, you know, that someone could be 45 one day and 65 the next, and that’s when she explained that movies lasted forever. And the final irony…Mom had one of those film encyclopedia books, and she looked him up…Mason had actually been dead since 1984. He died two years before I was born!”

“Bummer,” said Fitz.

“You got that right,” sighed Michele, dipping a fried cream-cheese filled wonton into sweet and sour sauce and then popping it into her mouth. “Of course after that I’d learned my lesson. Oh, I got crushes on actors… Cary Grant, Peter Lorre…”

“Peter Lorre?”

“Hey – when he was young he was in pretty good shape! You saw him as Joel Cairo in Maltese Falcon, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but…”

“And in his Mr. Moto movies, he could do ju jitsu like nobody’s business. Though I confess that once he gained sooo much weight I sort of lost interest…”

“I should hope so.”

“Don’t be mean. After all, he had some kind of medical problem that played havoc with his weight. But, anyway, I watched a lot of movies and TV after that, and had crushes on a lot of actors, but I’d learned to separate actors from their roles by that time. But James Mason will always remain my first love. And anyone who can do a James Mason impersonation….”

Fitz grinned. He leaned toward her, “You may call me…Captain Nemo,” he said, in an exact replica of Mason’s voice.

“Oh, baby,” Michele murmured, running her hand down one of his pecs. “Talk Mason to me.”