No Pablo Neruda
Essays on life, work and literatureArchive for Prose
You Should Date an Illiterate Girl
Credits go to Charles Warnke via (I think) Vivian (please tell me if that’s not your name!) from http://grumpyoldgranny.tumblr.com. I
You Should Date an Illiterate Girl.
Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.
Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Just, wow.
Out From Here
Warning: Rude post alert. Seriously, don’t read it family members. I really mean it. I like writing these stories, but I have trouble when I think you may read it. For the sake of my literary career, do not read this.
They sat in a little bar in a popular district of the city. It was very late at night, so the bar was almost empty. One other man was slumped against the counter, a dripping glass of beer left beside him.
The bartender was a young, Chinese girl with old eyes. She stood with her butt propped against the back bar and her gaze on the screen fixed in the corner of the room. Cantonese pop songs were playing.
Adele was at a table at the open front of the bar and Andrew sat across from her. He was still wearing corporate attire, but the night had damaged his style. His grey suit was rumpled and he had pulled off his tie. He had undone the first three buttons of his shirt to reveal a little wiry, mousey brown hair on his olive coloured chest.
He looked much aged since she had last saw him, yet his age did nothing to disappoint his attraction. There was a crude selfishness to him that appealed to her. The freshness of youth was at odds with his character. She preferred him with thinning, graying hair and soft cheeks.
“Who knew we would be back here again,” she said. She felt a little awkward. While she was attracted to him she was also partly disgusted with the last ten years of her life. What had she done but lay waste to them? All the endeavours she’d made to make good on her talents had been sunk into bottles of wine and a few bad love affairs where a history of maltreatment had made her callous and cool.
Lost, surviving on an inheritance she did not deserve, she searched for him impulsively and they organised to meet. Oddly, he did not seem surprised to hear from her.
They gazed across the table now, his blue-green eyes looking steadily into hers. And what did he see, she wondered. The years had been fairly kind to her – etching her face with a few lines but not touching the span of her waist or the lustre of her hair. She still had a quiet sensuality, despite dogged attempts to quell her erotic sensibilities. Those sensibilities only helped to get her into trouble.
She dropped her gaze, confronted by his look, and reached for her glass. The wine didn’t taste good, but she drank it.
When she lifted her eyes again he was still looking at her – detecting the library of sadness trapped inside her chest. She wanted to tell him how she had felt her whole life as if she were searching for something. She made decisions believing that she was guided by a higher order and that after laboured efforts to ‘create a life’ she would be rewarded by a quiet self-contentedness. The self-contentedness never came and, instead, she slowly became an animal, just like everybody else.
Where she had always been unthinkingly generous, she now considered herself self-serving. She decided that the right way to live was to simply collect up as much as one could and sit atop the pile, happily, fat on it all, until death came. He lived like this – had always done so. She had laughed at him for it once but now she wanted to join him – they might be very good allies.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he replied finally. “I always had a feeling about us.”
“Did you?” She felt a little hurt. Hadn’t she hid her pervish impulses well enough? “I was never that sure.”
“The last time I saw you – it must have been seven years ago – I had this feeling that we would end up here, or somewhere like this, together.”
Adele glanced around the bar. It wasn’t unclean, but it had a vibe of grimeyness about it. The bleak lighting and the soft colours from the tv screen showed up the splashes of mud on the walls and the floor. The smell of food from the kitchen was a little musty and sweet at the same time. Cooking fat seemed to permeate the fibro ceiling and cling to the yellow skin of the girl behind the bar. It was awful in a kind of free way. There was a desperateness to these kind of places that Adele found she liked. She felt capable of being lost and also welcomed – as horrible and mean as the surrounds, free of her own useless expectations of goodness – just a mite or a roach or a stink upon the air.
“It feels wrong too, though. Like I’ve made some kind of mistake.”
“You can’t fight who you are, Adele.” He said.
Tears pricked her eyes – but, oh, how she wanted to be someone else.
She studied Andrew’s face for a moment. The blue-green eyes and the loose pink lips – what if she believed in love with him? Would it save her?
She reached across the table and touched his fingertips. The pads of her fingers then undulated over his knuckles. His skin was so soft.
For a moment her past was caught in a parallax. Hope suddenly flared up in her breast and she shivered with disgust. Why was she giving up so soon? Why wasn’t she striving still – working and loving and dreaming, yearning toward a quiet home full of solid, good-hearted people? Couldn’t she fight this meanness in her?
In response, Andrew sighed and slid his fingers between hers roughly. He gripped her tightly and pulled her arm so that it was stretched taut across the table – like being strung up.
“I’m married you know,” he told her. She nodded – she knew. Or, at least, she had guessed.
“I don’t mind.” She said.
“Do you want me to leave her?” He asked. She shook her head.
“It makes no difference to me if you do.”
“Where will you live?”
“I have an apartment in the city. I’d just be happy to have you there now and again.”
“What if I wanted to leave her? If I’d prefer to be with you always?”
“I’d think you were mad.”
He tipped his lips in a smile and released her hand. “You’ve got a very hard opinion of yourself. Why do you think everyone else is so good?”
Her gaze flit to the bartender and the man at the bar once more. Even though neither presumably aspired to much, she thought them better than herself.
“Because I know too much. I see too much sometimes. And I think it makes me cruel. Ignorance also has a sort of beautiful vulnerability about it – a beauty that I cannot hope ever to possess. I imagine myself doing the most extreme things and I know I could do them. I have a capability in me that reaches from the most ascendant loveliness to the most despised cruelty. I think this is how God must feel, glutted on as much fierce blackness as he is with light. It is a torture. I think God must be very tortured.”
His eyes had narrowed in a seductive manner. He was aroused by her words – by her. If only she could tell him how much she didn’t wish for this. How could even the most awful admission inspire love?
“I want to take you from here.” He said.
“Where?” She asked him.
“To your little flat. Is it far?”
She shook her head.
He pulled some notes from his wallet and left them beside their glasses then stood.
She hailed them a taxi from the front of the bar and they rode in silence to her apartment building. The lights about them flickered over their faces as they navigated the crowded urban streets through the night. She paid the taxi driver when they arrived and entered a six digit key into a pad at the front door to the building.
Inside the foyer the cloying humidity of the air outside was relieved by the suck and rush of a high-powered air conditioner. It made the foyer seem light and almost soundless. Irrespective, there were scents. The neighbours cooked into the night or wedged scented plug-ins into wall sockets to try to blot out the smell of festering cat litter.
They stepped into the elevator and she pressed the 23rd floor. It rose soundlessly. One side of the elevator was all glass. Through it, one could see the city spread out around them like a glittering skirt. It made her feel inviolably small when she was above it all. She felt that she could bend over and blow and knock the tops from buildings.
On the 23rd floor they exited and he followed her to her apartment. It was a beautiful apartment with a glass frontage and modern furniture that she rented along with it. She turned on some dim lights and put her keys on the black granite counter top in the kitchen adjoining the living room.
She walked into the centre of the living room and stood there, with her back turned to him, and her arms folded across her chest. His feet were soundless on the thick carpeting as he crossed to her. The first knowledge she had of him was when he put his arms around her sides and held her, pressing her back into the fat of his belly and the dip underneath his chin.
She was too tall for him, she thought with a laugh. Her head was level with his and so she had to tip her face to the side in order for the crux of his neck to shape against hers.
His dry lips bounced against her collar-bone. At the same time, his right hand drove up to roughly grab at her breast. She could feel the sharp head of his cock straining against her arse.
How did this arouse him, she wondered. All this sadness that lifted and billowed and wafted around them like a vapour? Her preference would be to glide through the windows and fling herself into the air. She didn’t want to die, but to soar. Sex was so grounding – it came from a soil smelling place.
He turned her about and swept the hair back from her brow. His quick little fingers darted over her cheek to her neck and then again to her breast, kneading the pillowy softness. She flinched a little at the roughness of his touch.
Unsatisfied by that, he clasped the back of her head and pushed her mouth forward into his. Their wet lips collided, teeth knocking, and his tongue invaded willfully. He tasted beautiful, that was true. His mouth had an exotic maleness to it that made her stomach stir and the folds of her sex get wet. On cue, he pressed his free hand against the fabric of her skirt and clutched the juncture between her thighs in a vise like grip.
They made love on the floor of the living room. When they were both totally naked he forced each of her legs into an arc either side of his hips and bent over her as he entered. The sweat on his brow dripped on her face and was wet underneath her hands as she roamed over his back. How could she love this? But she did, in turns. She felt physically alight as they made love, and, spurred on by it, began grabbing and clawing at his face and biting his neck as if she were attacking life itself.
Afterward, lying side by side on the rug she rolled over and propped herself on one elbow. She ran a finger down the centre of his body, over the protrusion of his stomach and through the blacker hair that was circling around his limp cock to the damp head of his cock itself, tucked away under his grey foreskin. She toyed with the slit and then fished her fingers through his pubes, cupping his balls.
“From here I came,” she said, with a sad smile. “I should have always known that this is was all there was to follow.”
He turned his face on an angle and looked at her. There was a hollow sadness to his eyes too.
“We can love, you know, Adele.” He said. She laughed tritely. “Can we? I should like to see you try.”
He dove his hand back into her hair again and pulled her mouth back on to his. Her hands fell onto his chest, her arms imprisoned by the strength of his embrace.
The hardness of his kiss softened and then became tender and speaking. His tongue now was delicate on hers and his lips were looser, lighter on her own.
There was love in the kiss – and it surprised her. For the second time that evening, tears wet her cheeks as she felt again – even in the midst of all of the misery – hope stab its fork into the ventricles of her heart.
You and Me
The delicate slope of her brow was a constant distraction for me. While I tried to devote myself to my studies, time and again I found my eyes lifting and tracing the cleanly delineated line of her face.
She sat by the window and behind her the yards of the school were fresh and green. The spring sunlight that filtered through the classroom window cast a lovely halo around her. I wondered if she had chosen this spot in particular. Perhaps she knew that my eyes would be drawn to the light, my body craving the crisp air and the sweet smell of roses which blossomed in thick bunches all over the walls of the school. I would later learn that she was not so calculated. She simply eased into beauty – or it eased itself about her.
She was not the first woman I had admired, but she was the first I had loved. I knew I loved her from the moment I set my eyes upon her. It was the sudden way she laughed – her still face, with all its symmetrical beauty, would suddenly break into a wide grin and there was a disruption that was almost awkward. I loved that laugh, that smile – I wanted to lick it from her lips.
I doubted very much, though, that she felt the same way about me. I knew who I was. I stood before the mirror and stared dejectedly at my wide hipped body, the small orbs of my breasts and the unruly blonde hair which curled around my face. There was no innate symmetry to my features. My eyes were wide and blue but fringed by short, unimpressive lashes. My lips were a very candy coloured pink but too small for rapturous kisses. No one would tip me back and smother my mouth with their own.
Yes, I knew who I was. I had, in some respects, accepted my lot in life. I was the admirer and not the admired. It was my duty to capture the fey way a beautiful girl tipped her head and smiled. It was my duty to draw from words the few apt adjectives that would imprison beauty in text. It was not my role to be unclothed and caressed – that role was reserved for other, more lovely creatures.
And so it surprised me when I caught her attention one day. I had been running, racing across the fields toward the school, certain I was late for class. My cheeks were hot and sweat prickled between my breasts. The thick cotton of the uniform was riding up my thighs, exposing the tan skin that covered all my flesh.
I realised that there was no reason for haste when I saw, dotted near the door, a few students casually waiting for the bell to ring. They were happy in their groups, contentedly gossiping and touching each other in a fond, amicable way. And there was she – my admired. She looked up just as I slowed my pace, but I was still breathing hard.
“I thought..” I began to explain, my breath catching. She smiled at me – that warm, wicked spread of her lips.
In the lunch break she had undone her brown hair and it hung loosely down her back. It was so very fine, it caught in the breeze and stuck to her white cheeks.
“You’re ok,” she assured me. “We have a little time. Why don’t you sit with me?”
Had she known how much the invitation shook me to the core, I doubt she would have extended it. While there were rumours of girls doing private things to each other late in the night, there was an undercurrent of hostility felt toward such acts. Those fondling fingers and wet mouthed kisses that took place in unlit corridors and boarding rooms were never spoken about vocally. Two girls who had once been dear friends could so easily slip apart from one another – horrified by the impulses of their growing bodies.
So if she knew how fervently I felt for her, I was sure she would have turned her pretty face away. I would have been met only by the perfect, wan outline of her cheeks and the gorgeously curved back of her head.
I tried to suppress my delight and sat down beside her. I bent my legs beneath my body and attempted to smooth my skirt smoothly over my thighs. I was still breathing hard, my breasts rising and falling from the exertion of my run across the yard.
She reached out and picked something from my hair. Inadvertently, I flinched.
“What’s this?” She asked. I glanced at her tiny fingers. She was holding a small feather – mottled and grey.
“Oh,” I blushed deeply. How to explain?
I had been sitting high in the boughs of a tree at the very furthest edge of the school yard, my back along the outstretched arm and my eyes staring up into the dotted light which crept through the foliage. It was there that I dreamed my most vivid imaginations regarding a free future – a future where I loved women openly and passionately and was loved in return – a future where I didn’t disguise the size of my body or the hot look in my eyes. This girl that I was, several years hence, was such a startling, romantic thing. I loved her, though I knew, also, that I would never be her.
“Where have you been?” She pressed, tipping her head on the side.
“At the edge of the yard,” I admitted.
“In trees?” She guessed. I nodded sheepishly.
She giggled. “You’re strange. I realise that.”
What did she mean? It struck me that I may have given myself away. So deeply did I feel love for her, how could it not betray itself in my eyes?
“Will you show me where you’ve been?” She asked.
I was mute. I couldn’t possibly take her to my tree - into my dreams.
“We don’t have time,” I tried. “Class starts soon.”
“We have time,” she disagreed. “Please, I want you to show me.”
I want. I want. I want. Oh gosh, wanting is such a hard thing. She used the word so carelessly. I, of course, knew all the colours of want. Want plagued me in my sleep and sat beside me all the day. Want turned my every thought to her. Wanting made me shy, and foolish, ungainly, and ashamed of myself. So desperately did I need her, I was afraid of myself.
“Ok,” I said quietly, knowing that I would forever regret the missed opportunity.
We both rose and she dusted herself off. her uniform settled pristine around her. With her, there was never a movement out of her place. Even her gait, as we walked at a good pace toward the edge of the yard, was long-legged and lovely. I was a little behind her as we walked and so I could admire the very straight line of her back, the way her arms swung loosely by her sides and her shoulders slumped backward, jutting her small breasts out. There was an elegance to her stride that I did not possess.
At the very edge of the yard we entered a sudden copse of trees. The bright spring light which had been warm on our heads was now disguised by the foliage of weeping willows and the grass underfoot had grown sparse.
We were far from the road here and far from the school. The voices of the other students couldn’t be heard and there was nothing – no sound, no murmur, no distraction – from the serenity of the place. She tipped her head to the side again, listening. I heard them too – the birds which jumped from tree to tree and nested and roosted and called to each other.
She turned again, her lips pursed. The little feather was still in her fingers. She twisted it on its stem and looked at me knowingly.
“Maybe you’re a little lark too,” she said. “You come here and you flit around with your friends.”
She was smiling, but I felt offended. I wondered if that was how she saw me – small and ugly, with a thin beaked little mouth and nervous, flighty movements.
She turned away from me and walked directly through the bank of trees to the willow where I always sat. It was perfect for it – the base was all gnarled and mottled by cuts which had grown over to create easy handholds.
She reached high and put one foot on the base, stretching herself up. Her uniform rode up the back of her thighs. She had such pale, very white skin. I wanted to press my mouth to it. Desire shot through my body like a spark. I so fervently wanted to meet the back of her legs with my lips, close my eyes, and simply touch her skin. I thought it would be cool – like polished marble.
I neared her from behind as she continued to climb. She gripped on tightly to the tree until she was up about the leaves and crawling on hands and knees onto the steady branch where I would lie. She sat with her legs dangling off the edge. One brown school shoe looked ready to fall.
She patted the bough beside her as an invitation for me to join her.
Here, I showed some grace. I knew this tree – I knew where every bulge extended and vein of bark flaked. I could move up its steady, solid torso with balletic speed. The same steps which she took hesitantly, I took boldly until I was also in the midst of the leaves and the light was faint and dappled. I moved along the branch and sat beside her, a hand’s distance apart.
We sat there silently. I was so rapturous, I could not think of a single thing to say. I fingered at the bark and it peeled. An ant made its weary way up my arm. And then, soft, there was a rustle in the leaves and a bird darted out, avoiding our clumsy bodies and swooping high into the air between the other willows. As it left, another small feather drifted down, carried on unseen eddies, and landed on my thigh.
I looked at the feather, as fragile as the one she had pulled from my hair. It felt like a kind of portent. Perhaps she was right about me – perhaps my true form was somewhere underneath my heavy body.
I was about to brush the feather away when I saw her hand extend. With precision, she picked the feather up by its stem and held it between us. I lifted my eyes to meet hers. She wasn’t smiling, but there was a bright light in her warm brown eyes.
“When will you let me see your wings.” She asked.
“I have no wings,” I said softly.
“You’re lying to me.” She replied.
With the feather held aloft, she extended her arm and she brushed it down the side of my cheek. Helpless to quell my feelings, I closed my eyes. I could almost imagine the feather was her - that it was her delicate white finger tracing my cheek, and now my lips, and then the line of my neck and the dip in my collarbone.
When I opened my eyes finally, my heart beat was fast and I knew I was deeply coloured. I stared at her steadily and she returned my intent look.
Very suddenly, she leaned forward. Like the unexpected wing of a bird to the air, like a lifting to flight, I felt a flash of her wet mouth hot against mine. It was so quick. In hindsight, I am sure it only lasted a bare moment. But for me, it was a moment long enough to know every facet of her face. In that kiss, I felt the fringe of her thick lashes. I learnt the scent and taste of the inside of her mouth. I finally came to understand that she was warm, not cool, and that her flesh had the texture of a peach. She was lovely. She was more real than I had ever imagined her – more visceral and meaty and sweet.
When her body moved in again, and her breasts pressed against mine, and her little fingers danced over my hands, claiming my fingers between her own, I was suddenly, beautifully, full of the knowledge of her.
Now I knew where the wings were. I felt them growing from my heart. I was no longer that ungainly girl – that weighty mess of heart and loin – I was brilliant and free, capable of soaring to such magnificent heights.
Lay Me Here
Warning: slightly rude post alert.
She entered through the front door, allowing in a gasp of cool air. Her knitted cap was pulled tight on her head, holding down her wayward curls. There was a sudden flush of colour to her cheeks as she acclimatised to the warm room. The fire was crackling softly, throwing up licks of black shadow on the walls of the cottage.
“It’s unbearable out.” She said. “I can barely move, I’m so cold.”
“Come sit by me,” he invited her. She took off each of her dusty coloured gloves and unbuttoned her thick winter jacket before walking across to the room to the seat where he sat by the fire. She gazed for a moment, intensely, into the flames, lost in the torrent of her thoughts. He noticed her fingers itch and knew she wanted to write. She was burning with stories – delirious at the prospect of an open evening which could be filled with unknown faces and heroic journeys.
“Just rest,” he encouraged her. “For a while.”
She glanced down at him and smiled, running a hand up over the back of his head and touching his forehead. He tilted his head back and his lips made contact with her palm. She adjusted her hand in response and held his cheek – sweetly attentive.
Finally obliging, she sat on the rug covering the wooden floor by his feet and leant her head against his knee. He ran his fingers through her curls and settled one possessive hand on her neck. Her chest was heaving up and down heavily, almost as if she were falling to sleep.
“Stay with me,” he murmured and she muttered something softly in reply.
He didn’t want to break the beautiful silence of the moment by telling her how much he wanted her. If he lifted her up into his arms now, burying his face between the unbuttoned sides of her shirt and into the cleft of her breasts, he would destroy the perfect permanence they were contentedly enjoying.
And yet – he ached for her. She had been gone too long and their days had been too full for him to take her by the hand, lead her to their little room overlooking the lake at the back of their property and make love to her with the fierce devotion he felt. Perhaps this moment wasn’t so special after all – perhaps it would be heightened by the interruption of his lips on her mouth and the smooth curve of his hand cupping around her heavy breast.
Would she mind laying waste to solitude to hear his soft and guttural breaths as she slid over him? Her eyes always lit with quick fire when he was in her mouth and his face tipped back, exposing his throat. She had told him once that the upward view of his heavy-lidded gaze and parted lips was one of the most erotic things she had ever seen. She loved the tan hollows of his neck and the soft brush of his lashes on his smooth cheekbones. She found him beautiful.
And when they did make love he would hold her, wrapping his arms around her body beneath the cotton sheets and they would continue to kiss, sleepily and happily, until fatigue rippled over them and they both drifted into sleep. The permanence of the moment could only be extended by the impression of their bodies together.
So, his hand scooped, holding back her hair and he leant forward in his chair to kiss the errant curls at the top of her neck. She turned her face around, her eyes shut, and offered a supplicant mouth, that melted into his at the barest insistence, softening around his lips. He licked inside of her and she greeted him, mewing with pleasure, and the heavy rise and fall of her breasts quickened under his welcoming chest.
No Drought
WARNING: family members, this is a very rude post. I seriously advise against you reading it. I am going to put a big image under this caption so that you have time to turn away. It cannot be unseen. Do not read it. It will make you feel really awkward.
Image credit: Bebe and I, Lexington by Nicholas Nixon
It was an odd situation that arose between the three of us. Right at the point when I thought our love was going to disintegrate, we found him and he joined us and the careful twosome we had always been was now made of three in love and loving individuals.
I first detected the direction of my husband’s desires at a dinner party. Though he was always faithful and usually concealed the object of his attraction, it was so apparent to me that his dark blue gaze rested on a young, good looking man seated across from him. I leaned across in my chair and whispered in my husband’s ear, “You want him, don’t you?”
His body stiffened. While I had no doubt that these thoughts had crossed his mind, I don’t think he was yet aware of them. He had grown up in a time that did not allow men to have their natural proclivities. He could love me fiercely, passionately and openly, but he could not do the same with men.
I recall him turning to me and his eyes beneath his thick dark eyebrows seemed a little sad.
“What do you mean?” he said, attempting to sound unaffected. I simply smiled and slipped my hand over his, beneath the linen table cloth, squeezing between each of his knuckles in what I hoped was a reassuring manner.
Later that night he turned way from me in sleep. His body curved in on itself like a little child. I sat up in bed with my head resting against the wall and I watched him sleep under the silvery moonlight – that beautiful husband of mine.
I stretched out my hand and dusted it across his hair. I felt so tender toward him. I wondered at how much he had repressed.
I had experienced liberty – I knew the touch of a girl with as much familiarity as I knew the touch of a boy. I had tasted sweet young lips licked over with too many coats of liquid gloss and I had caressed the hard, stubbled jaws of men. I was a woman with a past and the richness of it made me self content.
I was afraid that my husband had not experienced this beautiful privilege.
Over the next few weeks he drew further and further into himself. I was living with a ghost. While the thread of tenderness could still be detected, he was away from me. It was as if my comment had offended him.
Of a morning, I would gaze across the steaming top of my coffee and drown in the sight of him. He was still handsome. He was still young in my eyes. I saw virility in the sinews of his neck and the vibration of his heart beat beneath his hair dusted flesh. But what could I do? Scores of literary works spoke of the seduction of a young innocent female – men follow these stories when they want to draw a woman from herself and open her up to the pleasures of the flesh. There are no such texts when a woman is faced with the prodigious challenge of flattering her husband’s sexuality.
And so I waited – calculating that I would have my moment – that he would betray himself.
And one day he did.
We were alone for the day and in our quiet corners of the house. I was reading with my legs tucked beneath me and my head tipped toward the milky morning sunlight streaming in through the living room window. He was in the kitchen, taking apart a defunct clock and trying to insinuate its hands back into motion.
There was a knock on the door and I glanced up. He called out that he would get it. I waited and a moment later I heard his voice, hearty and happy, greeting another voice that I did not recognise.
When they entered the living room I started at the strange, adjunct beauty of our guest. “This is Clive,” my husband says. “A friend from school. We haven’t seen each other in years.”
How funny, I mused, that I feel as if it has been just as long since you last smiled like this.
We spent the evening on the back porch with a jug of mixed spirits shared between us. As the evening settled in and the humidity did nothing to lift we gave into the liquidity of our limbs and were reckless about keeping careful postures. I remained quiet as my husband and Clive spoke. I watched them with keen interest. I saw the way my husband would reach out a hand and touch his friend’s shoulder and the way Clive would look back fondly, his chest puffing out in a silent invitation. At the same time there were glances my way. They made cautious and furtive checks on my continued presence. I wondered what they saw. My blouse was loose and the skin between the vee of my breasts visible. Sweat pooled and dropped. I was breathing heavily. I felt aroused.
After time, Clive’s gaze dropped, over and over, to the upward arch of my breasts and to my mouth. With equal measure he looked at my husband – at his thick lips, so pink and feminine against his starkly male face.
In contrast, Clive was bronzed and brown and curled. He had a long lean body and a gentle and animated way of talking. He was impossible not to like. The very whiteness of his teeth was an invitation to me. I leant a little further forward in my chair. I let one side of my skirt lift.
The conversation rambled and turned somewhere intimate. They recollected things they had done – women and men that were not spoken of. Clive went silent and looked at my husband with longing. My husband flushed with guilt.
I prevented him from indulging in it. I put one hand out, touching Clive’s thigh and they both looked toward me. I felt expected to do this. It was my duty to coax them both out of their mute censure of their longings.
I stood and led each by the hand to the glasshouse that came off the porch. I pulled an old rug off a daybed and lay it on the floor then unbuttoned my blouse and took off my top. I removed my bra and stepped out my skirt. I stood naked in the foliage clouded moonlight and waited for them to make their next move.
First Clive, with a sudden boldness, approached me from behind. He stood with his rough flannel shirt against the wings of my back and pushed my hair to the side so he could nibble on my neck. My husband watched. I held out my arms and after a long pause he drew near.
We sank down onto the blanket and I gazed down lovingly at my husband while Clive fiddled with his belt and his zipper and freed himself. While Clive helped himself inside me, I grazed my hands over my husband and undid the lower buttons on his shirt. I sank my hand into his pants and I put my fingers around his cock, easing it free. He was already hard and so genuinely excited that his eyes looked pained.
“Ssh,” I murmured. “It’s ok.”
I descended to kiss him and took his thick lips in mine, sinking into his mouth with a doting ministration while I guided one of his hands to the crevice between my legs. He touched the foreign cock inside me and shuddered from the upsurge of a deep seated and little respected wave of desire. I barely touched him before he poured himself all over me and at the same time , Clive gutturally moaned. We were all locked in that moment in a fierce passion that none of us had ever experienced.
The beauty of our night together was not a thing any one of us could turn our back on so we settled into easy domesticity. Clive in our bed. Clive at the kitchen table in the morning.
When I left for work I kissed them both and when I woke from a fraught nightmare I was nursed by the solid, male nearness of both their rugged forms. I felt perfectly captured in a rare embrace.
Now my days I number gratefully. I smile with a raw candour and I experience life as a series of loving touches. When I blow the steam from the top of my coffee, I gaze through the mist at sweet loving eyes and I am not embarrassed or ashamed of this world I have created. It was what was intended for us. We have let ourselves into it.
Untied
Rude post alert – not to be read by the author’s family members. That means you, my stepdad and my dad.
That room – the white light coming in from the street lamp outside. The yellow glow in the hallway and the sound of your television playing.
That bed – the light blue sheets you bought after I left, so neat on your bed. New pillows, new quilt, and all those small reminders of you. Your watch on the shelf, assorted coins, a pair of cufflinks.
I pour my love into you.
You enter and ask me to take my clothes off. I do as you say. I want to be made love to the way I have been – I want to feel you behind me with your arms about my hips and your lips on my neck. I want to have your neat little smile trace the line of my neck and descend to the indentation of my clavicle. I want the merest hint of your tongue on my flesh as your hands lift and rumple up the fabric of my top. Undress me this way – undress me slowly. First expose my stomach and tell me it is beautiful. Hold the curve of my belly and let me pretend that one day you’d like to feel it swell. Find the small band of my waist and try to span your fingers across it.
When you finally touch my breasts, do it with more fervour than you would touch me elsewhere. Hold on to my breasts with a possessive grip and only then, at that moment when I am straining back into you and the soft end of me hits the hard part of you, remove the sleeves of my shirt from my shoulders and reveal me to the air.
That night, the way it went, with your familiar body just a tan line beneath me, I wanted to weep from the coldness. I wanted to pour myself into your eyes, with a fierce courage I show nowhere else in life. Those twin blue pools which display no more love than a still river bed could have taken me in – instead, they resisted. You drag yourself away, over and over, to some other place – I know it well. A world inhabited by twisting, plastic bodies – women who sit on their knees and raise up supplicant, made-up faces while you spill your seed all over them. Women without hearts. Women without hopes. Women who won’t reach for your hand in a crowded shopping mall or seek out your arms to be held by.
That world – it has a complicated geography, which I often think was pockmarked and scarred by pain. The impenetrable surrounds which keep the wild mess in were built by you many years ago – a long time before me. I have tried and failed to scale those walls, imagining each time I set my hand on stone that if I gave it one more shot I would be able to see into the beautiful, unchartered wildness that is you.
Each time I failed. Our lovemaking that night verged on beautiful. For a moment, when you were finally inside me and I crept near your face, either of my thighs beside either of yours and the dark dust of hair up your pelvis touching my stomach, there was a lovely feeling in the centre of me. I know that feeling – what gives it life and makes it burn away. It is not the artificial sex you watch on your television screen, or the perfect woman you are waiting for – it is desire borne of concomitance. Finally, when you see another person and feel an irrepressible urge to drive into them, be under their skin or of their skin or simply near their skin, the eternal part of you that has no past, no scars creating walls, rises from within you and enters me. As mine rises from within me and enters you.
The feeling was too brief – I thought of you as I came. I don’t know what you thought of – perhaps it was my mouth, which you always feed on so hungrily. The only time you are truly passionate.
Afterward, I tried to kiss your sternum - the place where the feeling quietly resides – but you refused to let me. Those twin threads which could have been bound tapered away, isolated and lonely. Lonely and alone.
Resonance
She remembered when she had first written about the theatre. It had been a long, stumbling story full of mistakes. She hadn’t ever really captured the impatient babble of noise that passed across the audience while the lights were still up. Nor had she figured on the almost desperate sense of loneliness which could grip a person in a very large auditorium.
To her right, her husband was seated with his eyes fixed on the stage. He was like this. He would not move, nor speak nor engage in any other kind of small act of attention until the curtains were cleared and the well of noise around him died down to a few nervous coughs and softly voiced questions.
Unlike Pat, who was anxious and fidgety with a nervous, darting gaze, John, her husband, was still and centred – self-confident in the axis of his world.
She loved and hated this about him. Loved it because it meant that he could make efforts at sheltering her when she was all over the place and not making any sense in her rapidly moving brain. Hated him for it, though, because it also showed up her deficiencies.
Though they had not yet had any children, when they did, she knew that he would be calm about them, treating them with the same diffidence he would a bunch of cats slinking around a cool floor, while she would be almost manic with worry. While he shrugged off bruises and scrapes, she would lay awake at night numb with concern that their little chests may stop moving – and what then? How would she make sense of life then?
This was the direction of her thoughts, commonly. She was totally incapable, for the most part, at fixing on the small, ordinary nuances of daily life. She regularly took in everything – her mind was not confined to her seat – it was also querying the purpose of the entire audience, fixing an image of the theatre from the perspective of an omniscient God and wondering whether there was a chance that the first faint strings of the cello piece could be heard by the stars.
She felt the hate more than the love at that moment in the noisy theatre. She cast a quick glance at her husband and his stubborn expression. He was so controlled and very contained. She found it a little cruel that he could be impervious to her presence beside him.
She let out a barely audible sigh and tried to calm herself. Calm was why she had come to the theatre in the first place. Though the initial moments before the concert began made her feel awkward and not fully formed, when the music began and the deep melodious strings started punctuating the warm air, she was transported. The strings had always hit her right in the heart – when nothing could still her fractious nerves, the music penetrated. She often assumed that this was because it plugged into something – the unseen vibratory world which motivated all life. Her mind could not calculate those vibrations nor do very much to resonate complacently along with them. Music though, like good literature, had a power. Rhythm, which is so intricately a part of the way things work, could prove meditative beyond any other form of relief.
Finally the lights dimmed and the voices of the crowd went down to a respectable level. There was a long, mood inducing silence before the curtains were audibly drawn back on a long figure situated under a pale white light. Behind him, an orchestra was established but still shrouded in gloom. Just this figure, seated and bent over his cello, demanded attention.
And he had hers – oh, in an instant. Pat leant forward in her seat as he began to saw the most delicious sounds out of the body of his cello. His eyes were closed, his hair dusted cheek turned away from them and his chest concave as if he couldn’t take the pain of the beautiful music he was creating. She longed to see the colour of his eyes or the glint of his teeth – something personal and private about him. The man was captivating – a single point of lucidity in her chaotic world.
She realised, with a flinch, why she was who she was and why she had married who she had married. As the music lifted and carried over the theatre in long drawn out strains, building in tempo and wrapping about her heart with two firm fists, her love for her husband washed away and she was in love anew. She felt intimately connected with the artist on the stage and but for her self prepossessing sense of propriety, would have moved herself over the seats in front of her to be closer to the belly hugging sounds of his cello.
You could not love a woman like Pat in any ordinary sense of the word – her husband, with his cool indifference to her and his sort of stalwart patience of her quiet madness, was as normal as Pat could get. If she was to be a part of common society – moving along common streams without revealing her splendid unusualness – she required someone who would not pay heed of them. She had to be quashed, repressed, ignored and put down, so that she would stay simple and plain and nonviolent.
Though the longing for violence loomed great in her mind. She was unsure how long she could fully ignore it. The violence she thought of was not of the destructive kind, but one of mad, divine love for all things. It was violent passion she thought of and all that it could encourage: loose limbed and long hours of lovemaking where the solar plexus heats and a tight, painful connection forms between the skin; art which is vibrant and rude and attacks the eyes with a fierce look – which shakes one from their fragile, and ridiculously numb understanding of the world – which gives them glimpses of death; friendships that are as much like love as romantic love ever may be; and experiences which verge on being supersensory – which are so exquisitely beautiful in the artful manner in which they come together that it becomes impossible to question design.
Yes, she wanted to give into that violence which claimed her lungs so frequently and, perhaps, which was what gave voice to all of her anxieties and worries. Perhaps it was the repression of that violence that did her so wrong. Perhaps if she removed herself from her husband and her hushed, mediated approach to life and stepped into this other world – this world of deep melodic chords that invoked the spirit – she would watch her worries blink into oblivion like disbanded stars.
Dare she? Dare she take that step? Where would she go if she did? What would become of her? Must she kiss those dreams of quietly sleeping babies goodbye and grieve for the ordinary home she would never have and a lack of conventional security? She looked again at her husband and there he was still – unmoving, blue gaze unflinching, aging before her eyes so rapidly that she could already smell the stink of disinfectant in the hospital when she would one day weep for him as he died. How dare she defy this? These bonds which are formed by precedence and mores are sacred.
And yet, she knew she would. She knew she would leave him and give into her violence and the draw of the stories she had spent three decades penning, with the same material grace as the artist on stage. His tones which hung in the air and then dropped, leaving a metallic taste of blood on the tongue and sense of missing in the heart, were the same tones which thundered in the atoms of her flesh, day in and day out. So that they may not tear apart, she must find the thing with which they best resonated. Turning to the stage again, she saw that thing, or close to it. The immediate recognition gave her calm and her small worries began to cease like tiny, self-imploding stars.
Five Lives
The first life she wished she had was one of little responsibility. She dreamed about the tiny bedsit which would be littered with coffee stained second hand books and cheap bottles of wine. This life held a fascination because it left a person open to things. It was never time to go home and it was never time to wake up. She shifted in existence and was where she wanted to be at any time. The normal occupations which other people suffer were not a part of this world – no, she had a flitty, airy quality that meant any opportunity could be grasped. Campervans and youth hostels in beach side towns and bands that played in out of the way places. Passion with another artist and a dreamy complacency both made warm her imagined flat.
She would achieve the first life by relinquishing guilt if she should shirk responsibility at any time in the future.
The second life she wished she had was of a woman living somewhere pastoral. She imagined her married and quiet in her way. She imagined this woman going out into the woods on her own and sketching the tubular shapes of flower heads. This woman had a vibrant inner life that didn’t appear to touch the surface – perhaps it only came to when her tall, broad husband slipped her bra from her shoulders and put his hot mouth on her upturned breast. Fingers in thick, wavy hair, and a glorious still gaze that said ‘I am ok right now with all that I have.’ She admired this woman’s stillness and simplicity – her connection to the earth. In her own sphere, perhaps she could be neared to the second life by travelling out of the city limits, finding paths to walk, breathing, being alone.
The third life was coloured by money. She saw herself very well dressed, milling with other very well dressed types in a dimly lit foyer as a light bell sound indicated that it was time to converge on a hushed theatre. She smelt the careful mix of good perfume with clean hair and the bitter tang of a gin and tonic fizzing in the hand. This life, with its taxi rides down lamp lit streets into the hush of the night to be welcomed by a lushly furnished apartment of parquet floors, whispered of success, but also of a cultured and considered enthusiasm for the arts. She let herself linger in the lithe silhouette of the third life and feel her heartbeat become rapid as an orchestra plucked the first poignant note of a piece designed for splendid theatres and an audience with the reverence of a crowd of church goers. This woman seemed so far away – how could she reach her? By spending what money she had on well made dresses and theatre tickets, trading drinks with friends at commercial establishments for the faintly stained carpet of an auditorium, and by taking in beauty, where she could, in her simply surrounds.
The fourth life perplexed her, but finally she fixed on it, remembering with a rush the excitement of being in the close presence of the famous. She imagined the fourth life in a sun drenched apartment in Los Angeles, her hair grown long and her breasts loose beneath soft t-shirts, her tight arse in a skinny pair of jeans. Each morning, the fourth life woke and wandered the streets in a pair of bug eyed sunglasses, ordered a latte then flicked through the latest gossip mags to see what was said about her. Evenings at Chateau Marmont, dinner engagements, parties dressed in gifted clothes. When work arose, which it would, she would sink into it naturally, languorous, unafraid of the eye of the camera or the almost lie of pretending to be someone else for the sake of telling a story.
This life – this fourth life was so foreign to how she presently existed she felt almost ashamed to admit it. She could not see any possible way for it to be in reach. She did not want to have her face planted before a camera and to reach glory in that manner. But perhaps she could dress up a little more – pretend to be someone else, now and again, without any attendant shame. Perhaps she could take the time to make her face look beautiful like a star sparkling and seek out the company of the better known.
The fifth life. Ah delicate thing. Her most soft. She dreamt of home. She thought of someone who had the quiet comfort of their family about them. The quiet comfort of their home town. She thought of the simple pleasure that comes with a short drive between your parents kitchen and your two bedroom house. The familiarity of a fridge humming, the certainty of a linen cupboard full of collected sheets. In this life she was most herself – spending weekends with her father on antique buying trips and concluding the evening in front of the glow of the TV with a well read copy of the Poseidon Adventure open in her hands. Those lovely cold days at the beach with the raging surf licking at her toes and convincing her that the life she was given, which she has, in some part, relinquished, was always meant to be. The fifth life was a return, populated by loved faces and the most readily in reach. Frequent plane trips, the wandering of old routes and regular communication – she would try, with fastidious devotion, to keep a stronger hold on her past.
Boarded Up
This other time – when the office was a place of grandeur and dark wood panelled desktops and books cases – I smell it even now: the soft, musty aroma of stale cigarettes which he puffed out into the morning air, long hairs of smoke blown into erotic shapes by the rotating fan set on the filing cabinet.
The little office – with its neat windows facing onto the grey bricks of the building next door. Occasionally a pigeon nestled on the sill, ruffling up its feathers or catching the rain which sluiced down from the roof of the building. The windows are almost opaque now – there is a dark orange layer of dust which covers the top quarter. The bottom three are sealed up by old marketing billboards – the grinning faces and plastic looking food stuffs are amusing to the modern observer. When did we think this was the height of fashion? What consumerist bent made us believe that a particular item, over another, would draw together our slowly disintegrating families?
He has left a chair in one corner – it’s covered with rat droppings. He never cleared away his paper work. There are printer reams with small holes down either yellowed side spilling haphazardly from skewed shelving. For a minute, I fantasise about collecting it all up. If I laboured away with soap and hot water and half a dozen towels, most of the grime would wash off and I could hammer and nail the discarded items of furniture so they become usable.
Perhaps I could take the sign and hang it back in the street – Beacon and Bros. What would I fashion myself as? Perhaps a lawyer or an accountant or a marketing guru. He has left piles and piles of consumer catalogues on top of his desk – there is, no doubt, something to be revived. I am the queen of reinvention – the determined grit of a small businessman is in my veins.
But I couldn’t ever really take over this office or pour through its contents because it still stinks of the fatuous, wet smacking sounds of extra marital affairs had here. The office drinks which turned into psychedelic forays. That one time when Nancy took off her top and showed her bell bottomed breasts. That other time when Neil pressed the pretty new secretary up against the Ficus and put his hand on the edge of her underpants. It reeks of these things and one other thing – the sweet decomposing flesh of his dead body. Only newly gone, but for many years he was dead here. Now I see it. Now I know it.
This glorious king of his commercial castle – blown to shit just as soon as he realised how facile were the tenements on which it was built.
The Sigh
She hesitated over the connection. There was no problem with her laptop, the issues were internal. She had wanted this a little while ago – what had changed? The same insistent ache burned between her legs, and her heart was trotting out a quick little rhythm. Yet these physical burdens were inexcusably repressed by a sudden attack of shyness. She did not want him to see her. She did not want to be forever captured by his eyes and by his computer screen.
He had allowed her to see him – what he didn’t also realise was that the audio worked. He was sitting quite properly at a desk in his small hotel room. She thought that he looked very tired. He was still wearing a suit shirt and a pair of wire framed glasses. With elbows propped either side of his personal computer, he rubbed tiredly at the loose skin beneath his right eye.
She typed a message into the chat box: “Having difficulties connecting”, she lied. “I don’t think my old computer is up to it.”
She saw his eyes trace the words as they appeared instantaneously before him. He leant back in his chair and he sighed deeply. The sigh cut her to the quick. She immediately turned off the audio and visual connection. The sigh was real and very personal – the kind of sound a person expelled when they were totally resigned to their abject aloneness.
In a moment the disconnect between her prior wants and the act of perpetrating them was comprehensible. While the desire to undress herself and touch herself and watch him touch himself was a real, physical, lovely thing, it was hollow without the flirtation of human intimacy. She wanted the sigh – she wanted to be human next to him with her quietly electric presence and provide him with comfort which extended beyond mere desire. To tempt him with the shadow of all she could offer was traitorous. She was ashamed that she had heard him sigh – that she had let herself be so close yet so far from his heart.
Monday Morning Escapism
Imagine waking up early in an empty house and feeling free. There is a warm breeze through the open window of your bedroom and the yellow gold strains of sunlight are sifting through some low clouds and making patterns on the dusty floorboards.
You can smell row after row of crop drying quietly and hear in the distance a burr of a tractor. Now and again the shrill bark of a bird punctuates the air but is swiftly replaced by an almost silence. Ceaselessly, the summer breeze makes a whispering noise like an inland ocean.
You raise yourself from bed and walk down to the modest kitchen with its dated cabinets and aroma of vanilla beans and fresh flowers. While the coffee percolates you open the front door and you step out onto the porch, breathing in deeply.
There is a trenchant restfulness about the scene around you. You are isolated and yet you have never felt so full of feeling. The land, with its remarkable contrast of buttery brown and bright blue, is the closest you have come to seeing what you believe is the face of God.
The haranguing sadness of your past drops away like a literal weight freed from your breast. You forget.. who? The man you should have never married. The woman who scorned your love. The family who have all passed away. The children that you never had. The career you entered into ill advisedly.
Once the coffee has perked you pour a big cup and you select a dog-eared paperback from a pile by the door – strange, old-fashioned novels that you have scouted from general store display stands and backyard rummage sales. You take a seat on the creaking porch chair and let the wind continue its easy cadence over the bare soles of your feet and through the thin cotton of your nightwear.
You go into a steady pace of breathing, drink your coffee and turn back the first yellowed page – as lost in the worlds of magnificent and magical wonder penned by an author as you are in the very moment. There is nowhere to go, but here, and nothing to seek, but this.
Garbage
I thought he was vile, the way he always had his hands buried in the body of a car and a thick coating of stubble over his chin and jaw. He never spoke two words to me – I invited him in for a glass of water and he growled no. When I spoke to my aunt about him she said he had never set foot in the house – he had bad blood with my cousin and it infected his relationship with my extended family.
So it surprised me that night when he put two hands on my waist. He approached from behind and spread his fingers wide over each of my hips. I involuntarily flinched, imaging the grease marking the fabric of my dress. But contrary to whatever I thought I felt, I didn’t stray from his grasp. I knew it was him from the smell – a little sweat soaked and beer infused. I turned around and met his eyes, glittering the dark with a disturbing intent.
“What do you want?” I asked. He nodded at me and replied “You.”
“You don’t even like me.” I noted.
He didn’t say anything, so I suppose he agreed. I didn’t know what to say – this man was disliked by my family and he disliked them, so why was he so near now?
He moved his right hand from my hip and he roughly cupped my breast. At the same time, he dropped his face and brought his mouth within an inch of mine. I wanted to close the gap. He felt enormous against me – a hulk of a man – and almost dangerous. But when I touched his cheek and the gravelly scrape of his beard there was an unexpected tenderness about him. The skin on his cheekbones was soft and he closed his eyes when I grazed my fingertips across it.
So I closed that gap and I kissed him, sucking on his full bottom lip and pressing deep, deep back into the dark shadows of the garden while the party played on without us.
Helpless
The imagining starts like this – I am meeting a man at the gates of Luna Park. He is a person I used to know. We are older and more beautiful than we used to be. He smiles at me as I approach and I lean in to give him a kiss on the cheek. He smells herbal-like and musty, but also fresh and of the sunshine.
We walk to the park and we go into a little theatre. We sit on little chairs and we laugh. When we come back out into the light we amble down the centre promenade and amuse ourselves, lightly.
It starts to get dark so we buy some food and we sit on the deck at the edge of the park – we dangle our feet above the water.
We talk a little – he is more entertaining than I remember. And then I catch him looking at me, just that moment too long. I meet his gaze and grow quiet and he bends his face forward and we kiss – a soft, longed for kiss. It is warm and tasteful, messed up by his hands and by his very firm body which I can feel beneath his soft sweater.
We go back to my little apartment and undress. He lays naked on the bed and I admire him for a long while before I crawl over his body. He is beautiful and I feel beautiful. And we make love just the way we used to.
Pretending Really Hard
Pretend very hard now that you are sitting at a cafe by the beach on the Gold Coast and you’ve ordered a huge breakfast, populated by lean sausages and grilled vine ripened tomatoes and potato fritters with some baked beans and fresh slices of avocado and maybe a ring of baked pineapple with some very crusty bread and you have a large, strong coffee and some orange juice and some slivers of bacon and a zesty mayonnaise with diced anchovies. Imagine all of this, this rich meal, and the warmth of the sun beating down and the cool breeze coming off the ocean and the knowledge that you have absolutely nothing to do.
Get through Monday by keeping the image in your head. Imagine yourself fit – fitter than you’ve ever been – and brightly dressed in something loose and flowing and maybe something special around your neck. You aren’t scared, but content, you know the world’s ok. Maybe you’re even in love. Sure… there he is, approaching the table as you eat.
After you’ve eaten and all that food has had time to digest, let’s go for a swim. Dive into the water between the red and yellow flags and let it wash you up in its good embrace.
More musing..
Late at night when the house is all somnolence, a hush takes over the two bodies on the couch and there is an inclination by one which bends the other. She lays beneath him and he trails a hand down the vee of her shirt to her stomach, looking upon her – more than the intimate touch, the reflection of herself seen in his eyes gives her faith in the concept of the eternal soul. The kinship they’ve forged has indelible bonds and it rails against finiteness. They are matched, a symbiotic union which only life itself could have created. She comes to a sudden understanding of the loss of a widow – a loss that is not at all to do with the absence of familiar things, but which goes deeper, into our very human bones.
Pack Animals Pt 1
The family was like a pack, stacked one on top of the other – the oldest boy with sandy blonde hair, a broad forehead and serious eyes, below him twin girls with dark red hair, the one born moments before the other a little wiser in her outlook, the baby was also a boy, only six, quiet and sensitive with light brown hair.
In a townhouse, in a crowded urban street, under the tundra of a baking sky but sheltered by old oaks that stood as long as the stone, they crowded in around each other, growing before the watchful eyes of their parents and all of them loved.
On warm evenings they walked the streets and talked, stopped by shop fronts and knelt to collect leaves. No destination was ever in mind, it was simply good enough to navigate and experience the almost sea softness of the breeze and the delicate sounds of other families collecting up a brood and relaxing into the night.
In the evening, the wife waited while the husband opened the front door and the four between them ran along the hallway, cluttered with coats and shoes, books and discarded toys, to the big stone floored kitchen and the glass folding doors which they pressed open to let in the remaining vestige of light – there was never enough. Not enough light, nor life, nor closeness, nor energy to sustain them.
The wife cooked them a meal and the husband poured her a glass of wine. As the twilight dimmed he set a movie on play and they piled onto big, plush couches to escape into miracles and fantasies. She had one on her lap, another at her knee, absent mindedly toying with the hem of her frayed jeans, and if she leant back she received the secure embrace of him – just a tip of the head and his mouth grazed hers and for a moment, the eldest boy disappeared, so too the twin girls and the little one was silent. All time and thought ceased when he kissed her - just as it ought to.
One Day
He zipped up his Goretex jacket before leaving. Through the window of his studio apartment, he saw drizzle.
He walked to the train and he thought “I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.”
He felt like nobody was noticing him – they were all so preoccupied in their own thoughts. What point was there, anyway, in being alive, if you weren’t alive at all?
Sometimes he didn’t doubt that there was something beyond human existence. Because only connection made a life worth living.
Year by year, soul by soul, he’d lost his connections and the depression was plaguing him.
He couldn’t sleep at night, he was mute at work and he ate alone. If anyone spared a thought for him, it was probably only to say ‘Who’s Andrew? Oh yeah – the smart one.”
Education had mattered, but only while his mum was alive. Now that his mum was dead there was no one left to prove himself to.
He had no romance in his life – no woman – there’d only ever been one and she hadn’t seemed to like him very much. And there probably never would be a woman – depression was like a forest fire, it made people back away.
So what did it matter, to him or to anyone, if he took his life today.
He would check in for work – and he stepped off the train and he checked in for work – he would send that last email – and he sent that last email – and he would sit for a moment and wonder if he should leave something, a note or some explanation for what he was doing. He doodled on a notepad to the right of his laptop and all that he left, in the end, was a flower.
He took the fire exit stairs to the top of the building – the location of the building was convenient. It backed on to an alley that very few people passed through and cars were only parked on one side. When he hit the concrete, he wouldn’t damage someone’s vehicle and he could make sure that no one was hurt.
He stood on the edge of the building and he looked down – he could already feel himself tipping. The wind was whipping at his Goretex jacket and he was crying.
Before he could start thinking the thoughts that came rushing up, colourful memories of his parents home in China, he dropped, opening his arms out and shutting his eyes so he wouldn’t see his descent. It felt good, he wasn’t afraid.. but a moment before he hit he thought hopefully for a second “Maybe I will survive it.”
Whoever you were, someone has left you flowers.
Yesterday’s Kiss
They had been waiting for it for a long time so he wasn’t going to rush it. It felt strange to even be in the room.
Hours before they had been sitting politely across from each other having dinner. They drank too much red. She always did and he always did if someone else was. In the spirit of all that red drinking he’d touched her hand and that – innocuous as it may sound – was more than enough.
When he touched her she felt all the thing she had been waiting for. Sure, she thought she had come close before. There were near misses, and true loves, and deep lusts. But his hand on hers felt like something else altogether. Finally, there was a place for her in the world, tethered by skin.
When he invited her up to his hotel room, she agreed. Standing in front of him now, she wasn’t totally composed.
When she had pictured it in her mind, which she had a thousand times over and a thousand times more during the flight, she had pictured the two of them both sort of falling into it. He would start a lopsided kiss, which she would meet, and the two of them would scramble to get rid of their clothes until they were naked, one on top of the other.
It wasn’t happening like that. Rather, they were standing in front of each other like two teens who had never had sex before. He was looking at her lips and her neck and the slope of her breast and he was blushing – not obviously, but she could detect it.
She was so decently dressed that his nervousness struck her as strange. They may as well have been sitting across a board room. Why the high colour?
Maybe he had been having the same fantasies after all. Perhaps over all these years, while he had been equally flirting with true loves, and deep lust, and great friendships, he’d been courting romantic ideas about what this moment would be like when the two of them finally came together.
One had to wonder why it took so long. The energy in the room had something certain and outside of themselves about it. It seemed to her, and to him no doubt, that everything romantic in their lives to date had been leading to this. So why then all the delay.
She couldn’t speak for him but her own life had taught her that there was a time for everything. Like her own mother’s second marriage, which was love -full, true love could be hampered by the most menial of things – corporate ladders, poor finances, good relationships.
And so it had been with the two of them – divided by continents, and by professions, and by deep romance.
Until now of course.
‘Do you want to take my clothes off?” She finally asked him. She didn’t think he would do it otherwise. He looked at her.
Yes, ok, it was strange. They had been friends for so long that the thought of him taking her clothes off was unusual, to say the least. Though couldn’t he see she wanted him too? Wasn’t that look in her eye enough to make him less hesitant.
He touched the edge of her shirt and slid it off her shoulder so that it fell on her upper arm. Her sheer bra showed, her nipple evident beneath it, pink and hard.
She didn’t want to interrupt the air with any more words. Let him show her what he had.Tonight, it could be soft, it could be slow, it could be passionate, it could be hard. She wasn’t exactly sure what it would be. She only felt a frisson that it was the First time and, if they played their cards very right, it would not be the last.
He slid the other sleeve off and her top pulled around her waist. He had long arms, long enough that there was still distance between them. He decided to close it, placing one hand on her back so that he could pull her in against him. At the same time, he dropped his face down and angled his mouth wide over hers.
Yes, finally that too – the first kiss.
Many years ago she had been kissed in the bar by a Frenchman. He proved to be an unreliable sort, but the kiss was memorable. It was the first time she felt as if she had been the one kissed, as opposed to the other way around. Being kissed by the Frenchman made the whole world slip away – the way it is described in a romance novel.
After that kiss, she had vowed that the man she married would provoke the same feeling – and so here it was again. Thank God.
His kiss was done to her – received by her. His lips were soft and his tongue gentle. Was it him or the way he did it, she wondered. It was entirely possible that the passion in the kiss was the consequence of so many years passing before it came about.
Then again, passion is often beyond the simple rationale of a human being. The kiss may just be touching into the well of feeling that keeps dredging up in human DNA, generation after generation, without any practical cause.
.. tbc..
Future Forward
Just keep it together, keep a steady hand. At least, get your lipstick on. He hates it when you wear red, but I know it looks good. The other husbands will admire you. Don’t flirt too much though, you don’t want to look desperate. It’s not as if you would do anything anyway. Not that it doesn’t cross your mind.
I wonder what it would be like. I have always had a thing for Alex. I never could understand why he married Lisa’s friend’s mother. She’s nothing to look at. Not that it’s all about appearances, but it’s not as if she has a sparkling personality either. She has two little sparrow legs and never says a word. Doesn’t like a drink.
That reminds me, better not forget the Moet. Dear God I hope we don’t get latched on to again and have some other wife drink all the Moet. Last time I barely got any of it and had to drink the free stuff. I am sure it’s the cheap stuff that they serve free which gives me a headache. And I DO NOT want a headache. I want to get home early enough to read my book a bit in front of the fire.
Ah, at least there are these small pleasures. My marriage may be a total sham, but I take a lot of pleasure out of reading. I feel like I’m somewhere else. Perhaps I’ll start something new.
Shit, is that the time? We’re going to be late. There won’t be any decent spots left on the oval. Why do they do these silly things anyway? Well I know why, of course. It’s to squeeze more money out of us to pay the headmasters ridiculous salary. He probably earns more than I did in all my years of law.
Maybe I should go back to law. But who the hell will take care of Taylor and Evan. I don’t want to hire a nanny. I know he says I can, but I was raised by my mother alone and my children will be too. I guess I’m old-fashioned that way.
Frankly, I hope he goes straight to the office after this. I can probably get the kids to bed early and let the dog in. He says he knows when I let the dog it, but that is such rubbish. He never knows. Allergies my ass. The only thing he’s allergic to is love. I blame his mother for it. She is apoplectic at the sight of love and so he’s developed a deep-seated aversion to it. Like it’s a sign of weakness?
Whatever happened to me? I used to be so passionate and romantic in my youth. Oh God, it makes me laugh. All the stupid things I did. I took some real risks. Still, I became what my mother wanted – successful, beautiful, comfortable. You can’t really beat that. And I know I will write my novel soon. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
Perhaps I should have an affair. Now that at least will give me something to write about it.
Oh, he’s calling me. Time to go already I suppose. Fuck this. I really wish I could just run away.
