Chester
by Molly-Ann Leikin

I met Chester on a hiking vacation while travelling with a tour group in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Chester was a tall, skinny, distinguished-looking, charming, witty, failed Parliamentary candidate from the Bahamas. He was born in a bucket, and educated himself, making a fortune in real estate. His British accent was alluring, he lived on Abaco, his own, private island, and longed to be a writer.

Like me, Chester was travelling alone.

When I am on vacation, and people ask me what I do, I make it a rule to change careers, and have done so every holiday for the last ten. Chester's summer, I was an in-vitro cardiologist, figuring there wouldn't be too many fetus' on the the trail needing valve jobs, so I'd be okay. It's not that I wanted to distance myself by lying. It's just that I needed time away from my job, like everyone else, and having a different profession insured that the conversation would NOT be about show business.

Chester trevelled light - with just a few blue and white striped Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, one pair of Rockport shoes, khaki pants, several photos of his ten grandchildren, and his own, world-class concoction, mosquito repellent, which had enjoyed a 99 7/8% success rate for 41 years and 3 months.

We met over a bowl of Special K at breakfast that first morning in Halifax, and were old friends by the time we realized we were taking the same hormones - me to prevent osteoporisis at some later date, and Chester to fight off prostate cancer.

Middle age romance. Jesus...

Chester was a good joke teller - as good as I am - and for ten days straight, we entertained everyone in our hiking group with yet another story about the two guys from Poland, or the three nuns trying to get into Heaven.

Not unlike me, Chester was a practical joker. He had more "kid" in him than any child I've ever known. When we arrived at an almost deserted beach, the ladies in our group went skinny-dipping, and when we were all submerged in the Atlantic, Chester called out from the shore to "look - look at the ship!" All of us naked ladies quickly turned and gazed out to sea. But there wasn't anything on the horizon. Oh well, we thought, Chester must've had too much wine with his peanut butter/sardine sandwich at lunch.

But when we came out of the water, our clothes were gone. So was Chester.

And a fat woman from Quebec with kitten tatoos, got upset with our bare buns and called the cops.

We made the front page of the Charlottetown newspaper. The reporter on duty that day recognized my name and knew some of my songs, so it came out that I was a writer, not a cardiologist. I know my "NYPD Blue" and when the police haul you in, you have to tell them the truth. Cipowicz always wants the truth.

So now Chester knew I was a writer, and he wanted to be one, too, so for the rest of the trip, we talked non-stop about the book he desperately wanted to write and how hopelessly blocked he'd been. He'd taken extension classes, went to writers conferences in Canada and Connecticut, hired private tutors, paid ghost writers. He played tennis with book publishers in New York and London, and he still couldn't get his story on paper.

As we hiked through the potato fields, past the house where "Anne of Green Gables" lived, and I swatted three giant mosquitos with every step, I kept telling Chester, just like I tell my clients, "write what's in your heart. Don't censor it. Just write what's in your heart". Seven hundred times a day, every day, I said "Chester, write what's in your heart".

But nothing was coming out. Even with all my coaxing and support. The only thing that was changing was my skin, which had been violated repeatedly by the mosquitos, who ignored Chester's magic remedy, and left me looking like I had some sort of bumpy, red, maritime plague.

Chester stepped in to rescue me, insisting that I wear one of his blue and white pin-striped Brooks Brothers shirts, which was actually thick enough to discourage the insects at last.

Oh, Chester...

I wore his shirt for 9 days, and returned it the last night of our trip, apologizing for not having it laundered because there were no dry cleaners on our hiking trails and no valet in our hotel. Although I offered to take the shirt to LA with me to have it cleaned there and FedEx'd to him in Abaco, Chester was adamant that it wasn't necessary - his "man", Diggs, would take care of the laundry situation.

Then we said goodbye, promised to write, remember, exchange trip pictures, and thanked each other for the good walk. "Just write what's in your heart," I said to Chester one last time. And he was gone.

The next morning at four, when the bellman knocked on my door to make sure I didn't miss my plane, he handed me Chester's dirty shirt. Oh? Sleepy as I was, I just figured my Right Honorable Mr. Right had changed his mind about the laundry. So I stuffed his garment into my suitcase, and on the way home from LAX, left the shirt at Brown's Cleaners on Montana, begging them to wash it quickly, so I could get it into the FedEx to Abaco by the next day.

Walking through my front door in Santa Monica, I heard the phone ringing. It was Chester. He'd already left ten messages. Had I read his letter?

What letter?

The one he'd apparently stayed up all night to write - the twelve page, single-spaced, long-hand missive he'd written, saying, at long last, what was in his heart - the letter he'd rewritten from midnight until three-fifty a.m. the night we said goodbye - the letter he'd stuffed in the pocket of his Brooks Brothers shirt, giving the bellman $100. US to make sure I got the garment before I left Canada.

Oh my God.

I put poor Chester on hold, got on my knees right there on the kitchen floor, and called the cleaners, imploring them to check the breast pocket for my first-ever love letter from an almost member of Parliament. But the pages were gone, disposed of by an over-eager launderer from the province of Canton.

I'd been in a thirteen year relationship with a man who was afraid to commit anything to paper beyond "luv, Ed" on my birthday cards. So a twelve page letter - my God - my head was pumping and Santa Monica was spinning around my jet-lagged little heart - but I just plain had to tell Chester the truth. His letter was gone.

I never saw Chester again. We spoke often, and he always said "I love you" before we said goodbye. We made elaborate plans to meet in Paris and Sydney, but there were always tornadoes or hurricanes, or he had to take his granddaugther to a finishing school in Basle, or we were rained out for Wimbledon and then he crashed his black Jaguar into a Wendy's burger pole on the way home from his yacht club.

I don't know if Chester is still in Abaco, or anywhere, for that matter. I think of him sometimes in the morning when I take my Premarin, or when I play the song I wrote about him, the only one I wrote that I never recorded.

Chester is still smiling on my piano with the rest of the gang in our mandatory group photo in front of the van on the ferry back to Nova Scotia. I still tell his jokes, they still make me laugh, and all these years later, I still wonder what he wrote in his letter to me.

I hope he finished that book, I pray he got a publisher, and I wonder if I'll ever get another shot at somebody feeling that much for me. In a world where I have to check every syllable to make sure I'm not giving myself away or needing too much, it's comforting to know that one summer night, in a B & B in Nova Scotia, a man who ran for Parliament had me in his heart, and needed twelve pages to tell me about it.

You can write about your loves and disappointments, too, and turn them into wonderful songs. Make sure you record them, though.

And if you see Chester, tell him I'm going to Ireland this year.

Write well!

© 1999 Molly-Ann Leikin

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