Tears for Fred

She was in tears.

This time, it was not because she had had yet another disagreement with her husband, the gaping differences between them - he was in his early thirties, she only approaching twenty - again illiciting reactions that told of her age.

It was not because of her immediate family, a trying bunch that spanned the globe -Canada, the U.S., Jamaica - but returned home in concentrated form on a regular basis, looking to draw her in to some emotionally dizzying conflict.

Nor could you attribute her reddened face and wet cheeks to me, a recent addition to she and her husband's household, a skinny, love struck bachelor permitted to set up some semblance of a lover's lair in the spare bedroom just off of where they slept. God knows I certainly could have been held liable for her it; as a roommate, I contributed very little to the household (it would take a wife, years later, to train me in the art of domesticity), unfairly forcing her to play hausfrau to the two overgrown children who called themselves the men of the house.

No, the cause of her mini breakdown - one so severe that it required hugs from both her husband and myself, a first! - was the death of a perfect stranger - well, perfect only if you exempt the frequent appearance of his films on television.

"Now I'll never get to dance with him," she sobbed, setting me to wonder how many more women in the world were, at that exact moment, experiencing this same feeling of irreparable loss, this same distinctly female realization that a far-off, fanciful elevation of themselves to a lithe, graceful and carefree form was suddenly never going to be.

That summer afternoon, all of the news reports, in hard, no-nonsense tones completely at odds with the lighter-than-air persona he so memorably projected, were confirming it: Fred Astaire was dead.

Though it was a minor moment in her life, one that I doubt that in conversation today, some twenty years later, she would even remember, there is a part of me that would like to think that in that moment, my young roomie had become a woman - a conversion that even the harsher realities of her life - her precarious marriage, her dysfunctional family, her burden of servitude - had failed to do.

Then again, that's probably just the romantic in me. Mine, I suppose, unlike hers, has yet to die. Why would it have? After all, it is not contingent on a larger-than-life life support, the likes of which kept hers, in trademark tux and tails, so vividly alive.