Havre, Montana waited for spring. The town always seemed to be waiting for spring.
That’s what the desk clerk at the Quality Inn where the seminar was held told her when she checked in.
She sat in the back row. Silently cursed her sister for encouraging her to attend. Then she cursed herself for listening to her sister who had never given her a decent piece of advice, or for that matter, anything of value in her entire life.
The speaker was from Reno, Nevada. A young man with an old man’s stoop. His hair was thinning, his face narrow and his spindly arms too long for his body.
She didn’t care for his voice, thin as his hair.
Now and then he would accelerate into a staccato burst to help him skate over any uncertainties, of which there were many.
Whenever his speech sped up, he smiled. It was a fake smile, shallow and venal.
He liked to paste it on to serve as a distraction. All it did was amplify his vacuous rambling.
He told them the difference between love and solitude was much like the difference between birth and death. At first, the women in the room seemed to give this notion respectful but restrained consideration.
Then a woman in the front row of the cramped meeting room in the Havre, Montana Quality Inn asked him what love requires and what love demands.
This seemed to catch him off guard. He slipped into a snippet of a rehearsed segment from some other banal lecture. He rattled off a list of the forces that conspire against love. It was a predictable list, a poorly cloaked rant against moral standards, sexual identity and racism.
And then, without missing a beat, he told them the real problem was that women were defined by men. Not just objectified but deformed and debased, subjugated, even enslaved. Then he began to cry and apologize.
Right away, every woman in the musty room hit on the same diagnosis.
The crocodile tears of a creep.
