No Pablo Neruda
Essays on life, work and literatureArchive for September, 2010
Unfolding
There was a time when sex was like unfolding. Long limbs, clothes, bands from hair, and growing in the process. There was a time when sex was attached to the revelation of the self – each damp hand on a bit of bare flesh was illicit and illuminating – an exciting new parcel of knowledge. Lips suck, mouths open, eyes shut, legs splay, groins nudge, bodies lift, tongues on everything, lovely.
I want to dig out a hole in the ground beneath my feet and emerge back in the circus of my youth where I drank too heavily and lusted over rock stars. When I took men to bathrooms and let them touch me beneath the cover of darkness while a bar full of patrons were equally shameful.
Dusty, youth coloured memories, out of reach now that I am all propriety. What a lacklustre way to grow old and die.
Nice Suits and Good Hair
It is impossible to deny that she always looks good. The reasons why she always looks good are manifold. Firstly, and perhaps predominantly, it is because her mother, who dotes on her, buys her new clothes whenever she sees something that might be suited and ships them to her wrapped in tissue paper, newspaper, and bubble wrap so that her daughter can unfold them and sigh over receiving yet another lace top that her wardrobe barely has room to contain.
She also spends much more time than most in preparing for a social occasion. She will easily spend two hours showering, shaving, buffing and then self tanning. After her skin is moisturised and well prepared, she will then spend another forty-five minutes blow drying her hair so that it sits softly around her face. Occasionally, she experiments, and she does her hair in looping ringlets that hang over either of her broad shoulders.
Once her hair is done, she prepares her make up. She takes her time putting on primer, then concealer, than foundation and finally powder, then delineates her eyes, eyebrows and lips with pencil. She uses a very expensive rouge which smells as good as perfume, but which is not, ultimately, as good as the Dior, Chanel or Givenchy perfume she decides to use. No ‘Sunflowers’ for her. Not even Clinique ‘Happy’ would be good enough.
She demonstrates her ability to be well maintained and beautiful in public. She has a soft, unprepossessing manner and she never drinks too much – or, at least, if she does, she hides it very well. She disagrees succinctly with people, without malice, or any colour in her cheeks, and if she does not know anything she just feigns a confused, blonde look and raps whoever she is with playfully on the arm.
She holds glasses elegantly, sits elegantly, slides new sandals off her unblemished feet and makes people feel equally welcome in her company. Whatever she does, she is unruffled and expensive. Far too expensive for anyone else in the world to afford. And so good too! You wouldn’t think it possible for such a woman to be as kind as she is beautiful, and yet when you ask her about her interests she cites charity organisations and contributing to the community. It would be enough to make some people feel very badly about themselves if they did not also so deeply want to be her.
Years from now
Ten years from now, they are living on a farm outside of the city and their daughter, Alice, is running barefoot through the house. There is a light summer breeze which flows through the hallway from the front door to the back and the smell of jasmine and water droplets from the rotating sprinkler on the lawn.
Ten years from the now there is the prescience of a party and the oven is warm. Platefuls of cornflake crackles are being baked and salads of tomato, iceberg lettuce and lemon zest are stirred in white bowls. There are people milling, cars pulling to a stop on soft gravel and a shower being switched off as a naked body, clean now, emerges to dress.
There is satisfaction, contentedness, love and matrimony – there is family, friendship, shared thoughts and common interests. Photographs of the years that have passed are framed and hung on their walls and spiders are left to live a long, happy life, in the corners of the lofty ceilings. It is particular to them and perfect, serene in its simple homeliness and it doesn’t seem to ridiculous to believe it is all eternal.
A mouthful
No one would say that Marie was beautiful. For that matter no one would say that Marie was pretty. She had the awkwardness of prepubescence hanging off her twenty-one year old frame and a fat bottom lipped sulkiness which was deeply unappealing.
Yet she didn’t seem to notice that she aroused no interest, and she lolled about on Sundays with her cotton bikini on, flipping through the pages of a dog-eared looking adventure novel while the other girls her age were giggling, and sharing cans of coke through multicoloured straws.
She didn’t want to be one of those girls. For as long as she could remember she had never felt a shred of envy. She was happy just to be what she was, even if that was unpleasant. So those summer days, which she recalls now, in middle age, have the dusty coloured glow of an old movie. They are bright in her mind and saturated with a sense of contentedness.
She was the only girl, anyway, of all of them that would dive headfirst into the rushing surf and not come up until her breath was burning her lungs. She had the lung capacity of a boy, a big solid ribcage and a steady diaphragm that let her gulp in air and blow it out in a fixed stream for a solid minute.
It was something made her famous, even if it equally attracted comments that she was half seal or part dolphin. What did she care? She felt good when she emerged and the baggy seat of her bikini bottoms smacked against the underside of her buttocks. The salt water dripped off the ends of her russet coloured hair and caused a shiver of delicious sensation from her nipple tips to her slightly swollen stomach. It was electric – it was how a person reaffirmed they were alive. She concentrated on it when she was bored, confused or stressed and reminded herself that she was better than all this – she was verging on immortal.
so you know
Well, she felt as if she had lost her identity. She was less herself than she had been. She was conscious of every error and stressed over every fault, exacerbating them by the unrealistic demands she made of her flesh. She felt odious, large, horrible, excretory – a mass of shit, sweat, tears and secretion – a primitive ape of a woman with a retarded ability to communicate and doleful, aching eyes.
She hated this reversal of herself. It was as if she had twin selves, and the former, the better, the more free, had stepped back in order to let this domestic and moderate and self-conscious version take control.
She felt unloved when she should be happy in love. She felt none of the neatly wrapped niceness of being newly in love. Rather, the principal emotion which dogged her persistently was a sort of nervous tension. She was mostly averse to being in love, as it sat so unwell with her.
She blamed herself for her innate neuroticism and him for his aloof, inscrutable glance. She pictured a hundred thousand housewives before her with their white hands clamped firmly in oven mitts, throwing up plates of burnt food in disappointment that nothing they do will invoke a sensitive, consistent look of love. That is how she felt – disappointed at what she could not present, nor be, nor realise through the limited faculties available to her.
And she realised that this was an indecorously long process – it put all parties out. She wound herself tighter than a ball with worry wondering when, or what would break the awkwardness of their love affair. Tenderness or words of love or a sudden softening of her difficult, rebellious body. Any one of these, perhaps, or none of these – and only wasted years, left by the wayside of her youth, would remember them.
