by Adrianna de la Rosa
(05/22/02)
He had given her the name Adrianna de la Rosa. They had chosen names for each other during the early stages of their writing. His was Valdez. She had sent him a card depicting four archetypes of women in Mexican art. This symbolized aspects of the feminine. Two of them were virginal; one in an orange grove and the other a Madonna. One had a lace mantilla. But the one that she identified with was the rebel. She looked like Jane Russell in an old film, breasts thrusting against the filmiest cotton, with a brace of bullets slung around her shoulder. She told him that she looked like this. Perhaps she wanted to believe it herself.
She loved the idea of his pen name, Valdez. It was like Emiliano Zapata. Ready for anything. She wrote to him about Mexico and places she had been. Pools and water and the swallows dipping there with the bougainvillea petals falling all around her into blue as she floated on her back.
She had sent him a card, and inside it was a tiny nosegay comprised of a red rose and some angelica. She said that his writing was getting in under her skin and doing a little dance there. This was so very true. He had written to her about wanting to kiss her lips both high and low, and she read this letter over and over again until the paper was nearly crumpled from her folding and refolding.
She had seen two films that had made a profound impact upon her. One was The Piano and one was The English Patient. She liked the depth and intensity of these male leads. She loved the way that Harvey Keitel traced the tiny hole in Ada's stocking under the piano, and how it made her halt in her tracks. It was the same in the Cave of Swimmers. She loved these films. She wanted that feeling again with a lover. That deep and that intense. They both had Scorpio rising.
So when his first letter came and the stamp was a yellow Stearman plane, she knew this was a sign. It was the same plane from the second film. He had a post office box, and it was there that she sent her letters to him. She illustrated them with pen and ink drawings and color. His came to her on yellow legal paper with different stamps. He wrote with an ink pen, as did she. But he had such curly serifs they might have been out of another century. They were, and so was he.
He lived in a writer's house. A plain old Victorian painted shades of white, perched above the sea. There was an emptiness to the house. She loved the spare bachelor cleanliness of this. It was so entirely empty. She felt more peaceful there than she had anywhere in her whole life. He was twenty years her senior. This didn't matter. Somehow he knew her as no one else ever had.
She loved the way that he smelled. Clean like the sea and the wind that blew down from the hills. She wanted to inhale him fully and travel over his body with her nose. Valdez. He was sweet like the seaspray and the jasmine that grew in his garden.
One night she wanted to go down on him. This wasn't like any other time with a man. She just wanted to, because she loved him. He never pushed or asked for this -- in fact, just the opposite. Maybe he was afraid of her. She was shivering so very much that night -- quivering, really. She positioned herself over him, and her pearls fell over his penis like a bridle. She wanted this as she had never wanted anything, for the aesthetics of it. Her lips crested over him, and the pearls roped him, as she slid up and down the length of him. She was so naked, and he didn't have any curtains in his house. Anyone could have seen, and she didn't care. This was so unlike her. He did this. He made her feel like being open. He made her feel so very free.
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
