from
My Last Romance
8:53am....93
degrees
The bank sign over the neon
blue seagulls blinks. The day has scarcely started and already
it’s past ninety. A thin, watery haze rises from the pavement
making me feel like I am driving into a dream. Whose idea was
it for us to live in this insufferable climate anyway? Why in
God’s name did we think once we got old we would want to
sweat? It boggles my mind.
I don’t even know what
I am doing up at this hour. I rarely see daylight before noon.
I don’t know what this strange restlessness is in me these
days and it seems the only time I have to myself is while Silvio
sleeps. We’ve been retired for years now but he can’t
fall asleep before three in the morning. A lifetime of playing
music half the night and partying the rest—in those years
nobody went to bed before the sun came up. You can’t break
the habits of a lifetime just because you get old.
The restlessness is tormenting
me. Silvio hasn’t noticed so far. Of course Silvio not taking
notice of me is nothing new. Oh, he liked my voice well enough
when I started singing with the band. Almost as much as he liked
my big boobs and dangerous curves. ‘I like my women like
I like my cigars,’ he used to say, ‘well-packed, juicy
and easy to ignite.’
That was me alright. He was
the hottest dance band leader in the South when we met. The war
was only a few years behind us and everyone wanted to party all
night, dance till dawn and burn each other up with the kind of
passion you can only find in the old records left from those days.
Do I sound prejudiced? I watch
the kids today with their confused morality and their predictable
sexuality and I feel sorry for them. Everything is accepted and
nothing is fun. Look at them! Jogging along in the hot sun, sweat
pouring off of them. Look at their faces! Do they look happy?
Nobody in my day would dream of jogging. We danced. We mambo-ed
and we cha-cha-ed and fox trotted all night long. We tangoed and
tangled and drank and kissed and felt each other up and never
wanted to stop. Look at these girls—thin as teenage boys!
Like little pretend men.
Women in my time had chests—the
bigger the better—straining against lace brassieres and
bouncing under whisper thin silk blouses. We had hips a man could
get ideas about and we knew how to use them, too. I could change
the course of a man’s life just by turning around in my
pink charmeuse evening dress—the one with the cute V dipping
all the way down. And then there was that gold tissue faille that
was so low in back and so artfully draped in front that men would
stare at me and say, “Darlin’, what do you have on
under that?”
I’d tilt my eyebrow
the way I’d practiced in the mirror—maybe a thousand
times—and say, all innocence, “Why, rose-scented talcum
powder, sugar. What else?”
Oh, we were women alright.
A man could have just about anything he wanted, he just had to
figure out what it took to get it. He had to work a little bit.
Talk sweet. Make you tingle. The other day I was listening to
this relationship expert on the radio. Relationship expert? My
lord. She said that she “advocates a mutually beneficial
relationship with latitude for individual development.”
What the hell is that? No wonder these poor girls go running down
the streets in this ridiculous heat! It’s a genuine wonder
they aren’t screaming.
from
Damian
The fishing boats
are coming in, skimming across the blue waves. You can tell them
by the plumes of white gulls that puff out behind each boat awaiting
the cleanings the fishermen toss overboard. I lie here on this
narrow bed wrapped in late afternoon sunshine and afterglow. Damian
is smoking on the porch. Through the open door I can see the rich
brown of gnarled arms and the languid wisps of smoke. This is
the hottest part of the day and, were it not for the salt-saturated
sea-breezes which forever after this summer will fill me with
erotic longing, I would not be able to bear being inside. But
just now I am too lazy and love-drenched to stir.
Damian’s house is little
more than a shack by my reckoning, a wood-shingled house near
the wharf here in the fishing community tucked next to the commercial
docks. Farther down the harbor are the picturesque wharves where
the yachts and sailboats of the privileged are moored. They bobble
in the lapping waves bearing legends such as “My Folly,
St. Petersburg” or “Blues Palace, Marblehead”.
But here at the commercial docks there are no such displays of
pleasure. Here are working boats—battered, patched and laden
with traps, ropes, nets, and other indistinguishable paraphernalia.
Here the mountainous piles of lobster traps obscure the view in
winter and the overpowering odor of fish fills the summer. This
is the third week of August and in less than ten days I will be
gone—back to my ivy-covered walls and book-lined apartment.
Back to a world where women who have achieved the status of Associate
Professor do not spend afternoons lying naked in a fisherman’s
cottage waiting for their lovers to finish their cigarettes and
return.
from The Haven
“Tell about Uncle Stash
and the narwhal,” Lenore says as Rob tumbles her down into
the white cloud of her new, big-girl bed.
He looks back at me over his
shoulder and rolls his eyes. Lenore lies there smiling up at him
with her tiny pixie face, her tawny skin flushed and rosy from
her bath, her big black eyes and wild tangle of midnight black
curls impossibly dark against the whiteness of her pillow. She
laces her plump fingers together and slips the forefinger of her
right hand between her sweet, little lips where she will pretend
she is not sucking it. “Pwease,” she adds.
“You’re turn,”
I whisper and he smiles that gorgeous wide white smile of his.
Even now when the first dash of gray is shimmering through his
own black curls that smile can make me giddy as a girl.
“Of course,” he
says, settling down on the edge of the bed and tucking the comforter
around her little body.
“Uncle Stash was a mariner,”
he begins.
“That means he worked
on a big ship in the Atwantic Ocean.” She says it with perfect
seriousness, her eyes watching his face enraptured.
“Yes,” Rob says.
“He worked on a big ship in the Atlantic Ocean. And sometimes
that ship went up through northern seas where there are icebergs.”
“Like whole big mountains
made out of snow, fwoating in the watew,” she adds.
“Yes.” I can tell
by the way his cheekbones rise that he is smiling. I cross the
room to the wall of windows overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and
gaze up at the long, spiraling tusk mounted in brackets above
the center window. “And where the Northern Lights...”
“Wowa bow-alice,”
she corrects him.
“Aurora borealis shimmers
in the night sky...”
From the windows in our daughter’s
room you can see the gold flash of the lighthouse beam far off
on the outer islands. The sun is gone now and the sky glows the
color of the last violets clustered under the yew hedge bordering
the sea cliff below. Stars emerge. It will be a glorious night—one
of the last warm nights of this year.
“...and Uncle Stash
said to the man, ‘hold up there, you can’t kill that...’”
“‘...hold up there,
SON...’,” Lenore insists. It is important to get every
word absolutely correct.
“‘...hold up there,
son, you can’t kill that, that’s a narwhal...’”
“One of God’s
most be-yooo-tiful cweatuwes....”
“One of God’s
most beautiful creatures.” Rob agrees. Sometimes I wonder
who loves this story more, Rob or Lenore? I reach up and dust
the tips of my fingers over the surface of the narwhal tusk and
am surprised, as I always am, at how fragile it seems. Though
it is Lenore’s most cherished possession she is only allowed
to hold it when she is sitting in Rob’s lap. I never hold
it with her. I can’t. Now it hangs here in the pristine
beauty of our little daughter’s fairy princess bedroom in
our estate house on the hill. But once it hung over Stash’s
narrow, bachelor’s bed in the dusty, tremulous silence of
the Seaman’s Haven down on the waterfront where mariners
from every corner of the planet escaped for a few nights ashore
away from the rugged bleakness of their solitary lives
© Copyright 2006 Kathleen Valentine, All rights reserved.
