There was a strange sound from outside, like what you’d hear
walking barefoot over broken glass; the sound to the rain dripping onto the
deep snow outside. “You said there were
twelve nights you spent together. I was
listening and I counted 11. What
happened on the twelfth night?” Sally asked.
The regular looked at her.
He had never really noticed her before.
Like him, she was young, a regular in the neighborhood, but not so much
at the bar. He racked his brain, but
realized he had made no effort to count the love scenes. He wondered at her ability to grasp that item
and keep track of it. He’d never looked closely at her before. She had black hair that had been dyed blond,
he judged from the roots. She had
classical good looks her clothes were tight but stylish. Before he could pay more attention, the
stranger drank the second of the last 4 glasses and began to speak.
“The twelfth night was the last night I would spend with her. In many ways it was the most important to me,
because at that point in time I had committed to myself to make this bizarre
relationship with her work. I had not
told her, but did not think I needed to, because she welcomed me into her house
and into her bed.
Before we had sex, we had an extended domestic scene. We made cookies together for a friend of hers
or perhaps a party. I forget which. While I worked on this, she made dinner,
which was good, but which fades in light of subsequent events.
Don’t condemn me for this, but it is important to the story. It was not the first time we had oral sex,
for that was something she was particularly good at, but it was the first time
I had oral sex with her. It was not for
any aversion, for everything about her attracted me and nothing about her
offended me.
Instead, it seemed to be related to a spontaneous act. We were taking a bath and I went down on her,
nearly drowning in the process. She seemed
surprised and I asked her why. She said
I’d never done it before. Somewhat
spontaneously I added that it was something that I associated with a couple in an
exclusive relationship.
She had pulled back and at the first I mistakenly thought it was
just the pleasure of it was too great. Her
words were not descriptive, “I thought you didn’t like it was what she said. I
told her that whatever aversions I had to anything else, with her it was particularly
pleasurable to me.
In the narrowness of the bath it was a difficult feat that I
didn’t fight over, but I experienced something similar in bed, although
otherwise the lovemaking was as intense and for me, at least, as pleasurable. It did not last as long for us, a couple of
hours perhaps, but we were both exhausted.
The streets of the city were in shambles and the pressure on her must
have been tremendous. For my part,
everything continued towards the inevitable showdowns in court, my position
getting stronger with my sense of true value, but the ultimate outcome
remaining as uncertain as ever.
I cannot tell her how much I want to make her happy, but I am
thinking as I lay beside her that when I told her, joking I believed, that to
me this is something that should be between a couple in an exclusive relationship,
her expression seemed to change. Even
then it might have been too late, even if I’d realized that her change in
expression was pulling back. I did think
to myself that for someone so good at giving oral sex, she seemed quite surprised. I mistook the look of surprise for perhaps a
excess of pleasure, perhaps even discomfort, but I now know it was a reaction
to the words that accompanied it.
The action barely changes, but change is coming. Change is
inevitable. There is so much content for each moment it is difficult to go to a
new idea without spending time completing the last.
A candle burns. A glass of red wine, the sweet bitterness.
It tastes faintly of my lover who is far away; separated by distance and
by time. I can no longer taste those lips on mine, but I can taste them
in the wine. Paine allegedly did his best work tipsy, if not intoxicated.
Hemingway was either a drunkard in fact or at least he believed himself to
drink heavily through his characters who were rarely far from a bottle.
Is it necessary for all great writers to suffer an addition, of alcohol,
drugs, perhaps madness or love is enough.
Rum as well as brandy were the drinks of the American Revolution.
The sugar tax was one of many causes of the revolution. Perhaps the
major cause was less about freedom and more about fortune. The desire to
buy cheaply for the common man, the desire to avoid financial obligations to
the empire by the more prosperous, the desire to avoid unnecessary regulation
and taxation for the merchant. Well, in the end they all lost their war
against tyranny. Taxation without representation is a given in the long
freed colonies, at least responsible, answerable representation. We are
all effectively enslaved by our government as all rulers eventually corrupt and
enslave those unwilling or unable to bear the high price of freedom,
sacrificing self and child to the insatiable appetite of true freedom.
I am too big a coward for such, even though I realize that
cowardice is a false emotion. I am less
than nothing. Nothing would be boring and irrelevant, but I am dangerous.
A menace to those who love me and those who are ambivalent to me but are
in proximity to me. I am knowledgeable of what is around me and am,
unconsciously, unconscious to anything but my own comfort and safety. The
worst people in the world are unable to see their own evil and thereby attain a
certain grace of innocence. Not I. I know of the evil that lurks within
me. The inability to sacrifice myself for others. I was, once, in a
state of grace and having lost everything as a result of avarice in a position
to live for others and to become something greater than myself and for a short
time, a very brief time lived in that state. A state of virtue.
But this is my road to virtue and back. I started black heart that
I am and there I have arrived.
The black heart of selfishness is a coward.
I know that existence is about change. I know that decisions
can be made with impunity because they've all been made before.
"Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right
without making someone else unhappy." I know this, and yet I am too much a
coward, despite my knowledge that I can act however I chose, to act if it makes
someone unhappy. I cannot even make myself happy. I know how to
make things right at least for myself, and I cannot even do that, much less
make things right for anyone else even if I desire it. It is little
enough that I can write about it.
And I have been called this very night an arrogant ass. It
was suggested that this was a genetic defect which I passed on to my son who I
would say is more guileless than arrogant, but then I was also both arrogant
and ignorant.
It is important to know that part of my personality is shrewd and
clever, but the other part is unable to hold a grudge, no matter how willing I
might be otherwise.
As a result of that arrogance, I barely lived being so unaware of
death that it statistically amounts to a miracle which brought me to the point
where I had sufficient wealth, by the cleverness and credit and frugality to
take part in the real estate speculation that would lead, as a result of my
lack of suspicion inevitably but most indirectly to despair, then virtue.
But we were talking about wine. It deadens the pain enough
for me to talk about the vacations we failed to take together, the things that
we would never see together in the world, the beds to sleep in together, the
hot springs to share as the snow falls and melts in our hair, the idea of
getting far enough away from everyone else that we can be naked together until
we are too tired to go on and have no choice but to go back to the world of
other people. Even there when we are together we would have been alone, protected
by our love which acts like a shield keeping everyone out. My lover and
the pain of loss are never far now. Despair was no longer in the future,
it was becoming my constant companion.
When we separated this time, her finality unmistakable, I stopped
carrying my cell phone. Before it was my constant companion, hoping to get word
from her, but now it only represented the emptiness inside of me. Its messages were empty things that had no
meaning for me as if it were written thousands of years before in a dead
language.
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