City of Grace

By Marvin Cotten

Vinny Northrup is trying hard not to lose it. Seems Someone up there likes him. Or is out to get him. Or both. Maybe it's just the way his geeky mind works, detecting patterns in seemingly random events, or do the coincidences, the déjà vu, all the uncanny quirks of fate really add up to something? When he literally digs up buried treasure to win a magazine contest, he celebrates finishing graduate school with a year spent in France. Living on the cheap in the alpine city of Grenoble, one enchanted evening he sees a beautiful stranger across a crowded room. A wiz at deciphering complex puzzles, can this socially awkward "nice guy" figure out the enigma that is la femme? A little help here!

A slightly reformatted version of the author’s real-life experiences, City of Grace is part romance, part travelogue, part wistful memoire. Funny, touching, inspiring--but always quirky, this inaugural novel was a winning entry of the 2010 National Novel Writing Month.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marvin Cotten
• Release date: Jul 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452454078

Book preview

City of Grace

A fictional memoir

Marvin Cotten

Published by Asphaleia Publications at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Marvin Cotten

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover photo: Grenoble by Night, 2004, by Olivier Fruchart. Used with permission.

Puzzle questions are based on puzzles appearing in D Magazine in the early 1980s, and in particular those comprising the Great Cadillac Treasure Hunt contest appearing in the April, May, and June 1983 issues.

Citations include:

Robert Burns, To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church, 1786

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890

Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair, and Some Enchanted Evening, from South Pacific, 1949.

Sir Philip Syndey, Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet I, 1581

William Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

One

I remember the exact day it all started. It was the fifth of February.

It was a date that would live in infamy. Date in both senses of the word. And as it turned out, one day in my life I wouldn't have missed for anything.

It was a hit-and-sink day. Her name was Susan, and we had been dating just over a year. I have to admit that dating me had never been the dream that little girls have of their prince charming. I'm a geek, okay, there, I've said it. Yes, a geek, at least, is one of the nicer ways to put it. Über-geek, if you really want to know.

A word-geek, to be exact. They say there are two kinds of people in the world, people who like word humor and people who don't. And they always end up dating each other. That was Susan and me. The lady had a wonderful sense of humor and a beautiful smile, but not only did she fail to properly appreciate my rather finely-tuned puns—bilingual puns, for crying out loud—but she didn't even get them.

For some unknown reason, she also did not appreciate the valuable resource she had in me. I mean, who wouldn't cherish the presence of a walking grammar- and spell-checker? She did drop a hint once or twenty times to, how did she put it, keep your blankety-blank corrections to yourself. She didn't actually say blankety-blank of course.

So, yes, I'm a little bit anal retentive. Only, I say renal attentive instead, because it's one of my favorite puns and virtually no one picks up on it. Are you starting to get the idea now?

Anyway, I remember break-up days the way people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. That morning, a Monday, I slid out of bed at the crack of noon, as usual. I was a grad student at Buehler University, linguistics, don't you know. I was in my last year and only had a couple of afternoon seminar classes, along with my thesis, titled: Eureka! The function of foreign phrases in everyday English.

I didn't have a date with Susan, but there was a message on my machine when I got back to my apartment after class, asking me to meet her at the bookstore coffee shop, one of our places.

I was pumped. I had been planning to do some work on my thesis that evening, but I dropped that at the chance of seeing Susan. It was a little surprising to have her ask me out like that. Things like that tended to work only in one direction. Deep down, I think, I had a nagging feeling that I was more into our relationship than she was. I could never figure out why.

Here she was though, probably missing me so much since Saturday night that she couldn't wait to see me. She was there waiting for me when I arrived. The look on her face was not particularly encouraging. Then she called me Vincent. I really can't blame her for that, since it is in fact my name. Vincent Northrup. Only, she never called me Vincent, or almost never. Usually it was Vince, occasionally Vinny, when she was in the mood. Vinny was usual for most folks. She liked it a bit more dignified. But Vincent" was a little too dignified, overdoing the gravitas, just a bit. It was instantly clear Susan had something heavy to say. It was going to be one of those talks.

It was. In fact it was the last those talk that we were going to have. It was February 5, as I told you. I would at least have had the bright spot of saving the expense of buying a present for Valentine's Day. Only, I'd already bought it.

So that is why, six thirty seven in the evening found me on my sofa drowning my sorrows in a six-pack of Dr. Pepper. Being a teetotaler made it hard to wallow in self pity properly, but I did the best I could.

I wasn't going to make any progress on my thesis that night. I flipped through the channels, but it was a vast wasteland. It's always a vast wasteland, of course, but that had never stopped me from joining in the waste. Only that night none of the televisual rubbish seemed remotely inviting.

I was just opening my fifth can, when my roommate walked in the front door. One thing I have to say about John is when you need a friend to commiserate with when she takes your heart and stomps that sucker flat, John's just the guy for you. Goodness knows I'd seen him through dozens of such cases. For once I'm not really exaggerating.

At this point, I have to tell you about John. I don't want you to get the wrong idea, because John is one of the nicest guys you'd ever have the privilege of meeting. A really nice guy. Unfortunately, he's the kind of nice guy that the expression nice guys finish last is all about. I would never, ever, use the word loser to describe my friend John. But other people did, plenty of other people, I'm afraid. Actually they tended to pronounce the word looooooooser.

We'd roomed together since our Freshman year. A mutual acquaintance had pegged me, when he heard John had rented a two-bedroom and was looking for someone to share the rent. I think as I look back on it that it may have been a prank suggestion, or a kind of sociological experiment. See, if I am the word über-geek, John is the numbers über-geek. What I mean is, John didn't have a perfect score on his verbal S.A.T., and I didn't have a perfect on my math S.A.T. This gave us at the same time a tolerance and even appreciation for the other's geekness, while our separate fields of mania kept us from any kind of direct competition.

I was a city boy, however, and John was decidedly a country boy. He was from Ohio, or Iowa maybe. I'm pretty sure he wasn't from Idaho. Anyway, he was from another state, one that has farms.

He had been in the 4-H club. He raised a sheep—not sheep, a sheep. Its name was Benedict, for some reason. I'm not sure why. A pig I'd understand. Association with breakfast treat of the same name, and all. Not a sheep. Still, I don't think I'd be able to come up with a better name for a sheep, though I've never tried.

The first time I met John he was wearing a T-shirt he'd had made. It had a photograph of Benedict on the front, and Nuttin' but Mutton on the back.

I think it used to impress the girls back in Omaha, or wherever he was from in Illinois. Actually, no it didn't.

In fact, John was the one human male who walked the earth less adept in dealing with the fairer sex than myself. In fact it was downright embarrassing. Not that I was embarrassed at him. I was embarrassed at me. It was like he was a reflection of me in one of those giant magnifying mirrors.

He'd do something dopey, I mean downright clod-brained, because of some girl. And the worst part was not how dumb it was for such a smart guy. It was how painfully clearly I saw myself in his dopiness.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!

Or words to that effect.

Once in our sophomore year, he fell for this one young lady--Meredith was her name. I have it on good authority that she did at least give him the time of day. John got that far, at least. Once he had the hook in him though, he didn't give up easily. That's one way he is particularly embarrassingly me-like. Neither of us takes no for an answer. Heck, we both have a hard time taking get lost, creep for an answer. And we can always find a way to give it one more shot.

On this occasion, John's one more shot was the powerful effect of green M&Ms as a love potion. Actually, the urban legend was that it was an aphrodisiac, but love potion was John's 4-H take on it. Do you know how many one-pound bags of M&Ms it would take to fill up a gallon jar with just the green ones? I don't either, but John did.

It only took him two weeks. I admit I helped him sort them out. The job at least had fringe benefits of pretty nearly unlimited supply of all the other colors. By the third day, though, this inducement had largely lost its luster.

I'll bet you think it didn't work, right? Well, in a way yes, in a way no. He delivered them to Meredith in the usual way; that is he dropped them on her front porch, rang the doorbell and ran. He had a note on the jar, of course, clearly identifying himself as the benefactor.

The plan never included her sharing the green M&Ms with her new boyfriend, however. That's not the way I understood it, at any rate. That was a March and the two of them were married by May and they had a baby by Christmas. Tell me green M&Ms don't work.

I think John gave up on Meredith somewhere around Thanksgiving, this time. I was there to pick up the pieces, fortunately.

This time around, however, he was the picker-upper of my proverbial pieces. I was a bit of a mess, I must admit. Technically, you can't get drunk on Dr. Pepper, but I was in the sugar and caffeine equivalent. You won't think less of me, I trust, if I mention that Kleenex played a supporting role in my recovery plan. Big boys only cry when the world comes to an end. So I had a good excuse.

John’s sympathy was long on pizza, short on tact. So we reconvened at our local haunt, a pizzeria across from the campus, on University Boulevard. Solace in the form of a large with extra cheese, sausage and pepperoni. Odd thing about John and pizza: as a rule nothing on his plate was supposed to touch anything else. God forbid his peas should meld with his mashed potatoes. Meat has its corner and bread knows its place. He doesn’t like lasagna for that very reason, because there everything is mixed together. You would think the same would hold for pizza, but it was a blessed exception.

Now for the tact part.

Well, on the bright side, it saves you the cost of Valentine’s Day again, he offered.

Yeah, except I’ve already bought it, and I even had her name engraved on it. So I can’t even take it back. Wait, what do you mean again"?

You know, like Chris, four years ago, minus two days.

Holy carp, that’s right, February 7! We had this same conversation about Valentine’s Day.

"Yeah, déjà vu all over again, as they say."

"More like déjà voodoo. I think I’m cursed. Now that you mention it, Alice dumped me my senior year in high school on February 4."

That was before my time. Let’s see, though: fourth, fifth, and seventh. That does begin to look like a trend.

Not my week, apparently.

I wouldn’t leave the house on February 6, if I were you.

Thanks for the superstition.

Numbers don’t lie.

You’re the numbers guy. I’m the word guy, remember.

That reminds me. I’ve got something you’ve got to see.

He rummaged into the canvas bag he always carried and plopped a magazine onto the table.

The perfect thing to take your mind off of Susan.

On the cover were the words Treasure Hunt.

Forget who? I quipped.

Vinny, you can win this thing. I’m sure of it.

I flipped through the pages and found it. First prize was $25,000. Remember, that meant something back then.

It was a three-part game, starting with this issue. The first round was a puzzle, a word puzzle.

I got this from some guys over at the U, John continued. They took a whack at it and then decided it needed some serious geek power to crack it. So they dropped it on me. Only we both know I’m not the right geek for this. Looks just like the puzzles I’m always seeing you doing.

He was right. Every Friday the local paper printed some a bit more challenging than the daily dumbed-down crossword that ordinary people could finish given enough time, or even the more respectable New York Times puzzle. So every Friday’s main task was to conquer the London Times crossword, without par for its enigmatic style of clues; then the diagramless crossword puzzle, clues without a face; then the cryptograms, coded messages in a substitution cipher. My favorite though was written by a local genius, who always worked two or three levels of complexity into them, palindromes, all the letters rearranging to make a familiar quote, and most of all clues that would have done the London Times proud.

It just hit me that you probably don’t have any idea what I mean when I mention these deliciously cryptic clues.

Okay, here’s how it works. Each clue looks like a fairly ordinary, though sometimes nonsensical phrase or sentence. Only, each of these contains a couple of parts. Somewhere, usually at the beginning or the end is a definition in some form. The rest of it involves some kind of wordplay that also indicates the answer, though in a different way. Of course it’s phrased and punctuated in order to