A Sort-Of Love Story

Once upon a time there was a little brown-haired princess who loved to skate and cook and to say what she loved. She lived in an expensive condo with a guard out front who opened the doors and accepted the packages that came for the princess. She liked to live in the expensive condo and have the man standing out front at all times, and she liked to receive packages.

One day the brown-haired princess was out skating, and skating, and having a marvelous time telling those around her about the number of BMWs in her condo's garage, when she met a toad skating in the same direction.

"Hi," she piped. "I own an expensive condo."

"You're cute," said the toad. "Let's have coffee."

Over coffee the toad learned that the cute princess also liked to snow ski. She also liked to water ski. She also liked to jet ski. She was also learning how to golf. She sold loupes and everybody loved them and she sold a lot. Also she leased a Jeep Cherokee. Also she loved to swing dance, and even took lessons in it.

"What's a loupe?" the toad wanted to know. The toad was rumpled and unshaven but fancied that he held a full set of cards in the brains department and, because he liked the Princess very much, wanted to listen carefully.

"A loupe is a pair of glasses that dentists use," said the princess.

"Oh," said the toad.

They sat and drank their coffee and the princess smiled a smile of blue hyacinth and chirped away and the toad was enchanted. An enchanted toad, he was. And after meeting for coffee he climbed into his 10–year-old car and went home and sewed the missing buttons back on his shirts.

By and by the princess and the toad came to skate together often, and one day were out skating when the princess encountered one of her friends, the big friendly bear. The big friendly bear rolled up to them with his great belly forward and laughed a deep laugh that accompanied absolutely everything he said, and the princess hugged the bear and they talked about their swing-dancing adventures. For the big friendly bear was the animal that had gotten the princess interested in swing dancing.

"The big friendly bear is a great swing dancer," the princess said. When she smiled, her eyes became little painted daubs of mirth.

Swing dancing, they called it, though persons of a certain age—the princess's mother's age, for example—had only called it dancing, for they had known no other kind.

The princess and the toad and the big friendly bear skated awhile along the river pathway. And the big friendly bear kept them entertained with his big friendly laugh, a laugh that started out pungent and diminished quickly—"HENH henh henh henh," was usually how it went. But what it lacked in endurance it made up in frequency, and the princess and toad were never long away from its hearing.

"We could skate around the river twice or just pretend to be tired and stop after one," said the big friendly bear. "HENH henh henh henh."

"I need a snow cone," the bear said soon after. "It's been an hour and I haven't eaten anything. HENH henh henh henh."

Things went on. The princess often found herself skating first with the big friendly bear and then with the toad, sometimes both together, and often with numerous other animals. Nothing so delighted the princess' heart as stopping by an inn on a summer's eve, and entering therein, and hoisting a merry bumper or two, or three or four, in company with her animal friends, and moving herself into the very eye of the company, where she could be petted and admired, and touched and adored. Any time a question arose about boyfriends in her life, she would say, "It's not easy being easy." Sometimes she said this four times in the same night. "It's not easy being easy." That usually put the question to rest--though not to permanent rest. For if the animals had pondered it, they would have understood they had received no answer at all. But this contributed all the more to the mystery of the princess.

One such night she sat in a pub and sang with the animals, and the singing went on and the singing went on, withthe princess at the center as usual, and talking about how she had purchased her own house, and was impressed by it, and had correctly estimated the cost of fixing her roof, impressing the roofers, and was impressed by it, and that her condo project had a great many Mercedeses and Cadillacs in its parking garage, and wasn’t that the most impressive thing of all.

“HENH henh henh henh,” said the bear, looking at her, as the toad was. And she was sweet and dimpled and demure and the greatest little egomaniac the toad had ever seen. Not a great talker, certainly, but marvelously skilled in the language of the flesh. She could work up a kind of grand oratory of the physical, and shape and modulate it with the skill of a rally speaker.

And the toad realized: First, they seemed to be an official couple, he and the princess, yet had never attended any function as such—certainly the mark of an official relationship, and maybe they should talk about it.

Of course this never worked with the princess, and that was the second thing he realized: You just couldn’t pin the princess down on anything. And there were all these other animals. The squirrel and the ferret, the emu and the sloth, and all adoring her like their mother or something else. The toad wandered home to think about this, leaving the princess singing in the inn.

And a few days later, when she called before boarding a flight and asked him to pick her up at the airport—she was selling loupes in a faraway land--and he got into his car in the 90 degree heat, and drove round and round the airport waiting for her to say she’d arrived, getting chased out of hiding spots by airport security, his dog panting in the back seat—only to be called an hour later and told she’d made other arrangements and got a ride from someone else, he decided, yes, she was too great for one toad alone. Her fame was too exalted. She belonged to the forest. It was perhaps selfish of the toad to have ever thought otherwise.

And so he let her sing at the inn with the other animals and stayed home himself. And she lived happily ever after, and he lived happily ever after, and went skating as often as he could and allowed some of his buttons to come off his shirts.