by Adrianna de la Rosa
(02/05/03)
"Because we don't know, we get to think of life as an
inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times,
and a very small number really. How many times more will you remember a
certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part
of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps
four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will
you see the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so
limitless."
--Paul Bowles, from
The Sheltering Sky
She liked to look at the harvest moon through his windows as it rose over
the mountains in a huge golden orb. She would listen to Cassandra Wilson
singing "Harvest Moon" and dream about him when she was alone. Some part
of her was there with him and some other part was lost in a mystery. Maybe
she was dreaming because to look at the reality might be too harsh.
He wanted a photograph of her. But she preferred to be ephemeral like
smoke or like the scent of an unnameable incense. She wanted to waft her
way through through his house leaving only traces. Nothing tangible. In
this way he would want her as a memory of something once experienced and
lingering in the air, pure substance. She wanted to leave her essence
drifting through his memory all over his house. All the different places
he had taken her, made love to her. He would remember these, and when he
walked through the rooms, she would always be there with him like a
trace or a vesper. Like something lingering. She felt that he would
always want her to come back if he didn't have a permanent record of her.
If he didn't have solid evidence.
She wanted to linger delicately in his mind and in his soul, leaving her
scent there like a cat might when it rubs up against something it loves.
Because she loved the way he handled her. He knew all about animals and
how to touch them. He had been around horses all of his life and he was
used to gentling them. She learned how to become quiet under his hands.
They could both hear the train blow when it went by their dwellings.
Sometimes they would be talking on the phone and he would say "There goes
our train." She would lie back into the softness of her bed while he
talked her to sleep and the whistle blew by. She could have listened to
the depth and resonance of his voice forever. He could calm her, like he
calmed horses when he was a vaquero in the high Nevada deserts of his
youth. He told her to touch herself while he was talking. But she
wouldn't. She preferred him in the flesh. If only he had known how much
she wanted to just bend into his will. But she wouldn't. Maybe she
couldn't. Maybe this was because of her age and how much she had already
figured out about life by 40. He kept telling her how rare this was. How
rare this relationship might be. But she didn't want to think this. She
didn't want to give him this much power over her destiny as a woman. She
was thinking about how she might want others. Just to see how it was with
her newfound knowledge. Her new ability to come. He gave it to her like a
gift, and it didn't have many strings attached yet.
He had traveled among the Maya once upon a time. He liked the idea of
sleeping in hammocks and slashing through the jungle while huge blue
butterflies flitted overhead. He made her a pan called a comal. It was
the sort of pan these Indians used, and it looked like a cookie sheet but was
much thicker. He made breakfast all the time in this pan for her. Eggs
and homefries that he taught her how to make by boiling the potatoes first
and then frying them up carefully. They both called this a kind of "cowboy
breakfast." He fixed the toast on a little camp toaster that fit over a
burner on his stove and it was the best toast she had ever had. He would
fix her coffee as she loved it with half and half and tons of sugar.
"Coffee malteds," he called them. It was going to take years to season the
comal properly. She left it there with him in his charmingly old fashioned
kitchen that faced the sea. In that house full of fleur-de-lis hinges
and old fashioned doors. Every time she ate with him she could feel her
legs spreading open like maple syrup pouring over a stack of pancakes. She
wanted to sit with him and have him reach for her again between her legs
while he ate breakfast at 6:00 pm . She wasn't going to say this though.
Not in words. There were so many things she could not express out loud.
She was mute when it came to her heart around him. For all his rough edges
he would only eat with linen napkins.
He always called women "Sister." From his time in Texas perhaps. He would
say "Sister, let me tell you what..." and bang down his fist on the table
when he was trying to make a point. This was the second thing that scared
her. What he called his "adamance." Because with men you never know where
this might go. There is always that fine line between the genders that you
dance on carefully if you are a woman. But she trusted him implicitly. He
had already raised one family. But he was wild, and she wasn't sure about
where and how far he might go with anything. He was a Gemini with so many
different directions in his spirit. And his temperament was as mercurial
as quicksilver running in her hand.
There were so many things she just took for granted. But the biggest thing
was his love. Because it was real. She had never experienced this. And
so she couldn't trust it. She couldn't trust herself.
Man in the Moon is a continuing series.
Man in the Moon
Man in the Moon: 2 Baths
Man in the Moon: Lace
Man in the Moon: Gazing
Man in the Moon: Valdez
Man in the Moon: Naked
Man in the Moon: Lipstick
Man in the Moon: Beds
Man in the Moon: Clouds
