by Adrianna de la Rosa
(06/19/02)
Why was it necessary to write themselves into new realities? It was
dangerous and yet they did it anyway, stretching for something. Lost parts
of themselves. The parts that needed to be made whole.
They wrote their haiku onto the walls of the house by the sea. Shadows.
He would sit looking at her from his chair by the side of the bed.
Marveling at something maybe she might never understand. How had they
arrived into each other's lives? She traced his shadow in outline there
with a pen, faintly, all the while knowing that someday it would be painted
over and embedded into the walls and history of the house.
There was a dining room table that faced the sea in front of two large
casement windows, and the room had a pot-bellied stove that emitted so much
heat that being naked in the wintertime made sense. High on the wall was a
plate rail from Victorian times that traveled the circumference of the
room. She placed candles there and flowers in a series of antique glass
bottles that had been unearthed under the house years ago. The candlelight
cast a magic spell over both of them and added to the trance they found
themselves in together. They sat there over the many dinners he created.
She marveled at the soups he made, especially the ones with little calamari
stars. Sometimes they just gazed at each other quietly.
After dark they engaged in shadowplay against the flickering lights. He
had never seen this. How you take your hands and make animal shapes like
the heads of deer against a blank white wall in silhouette. They made
these animals and had them croon and stroke each other. Everything they
did together had a form of veiled eroticism.
He liked to massage her. He had learned this in Japan between wars. He
told her stories of the baths he had had there and the whore who came
suspended in a net over him that he twirled and twirled until he came. He
told her about the noodle vendors and the young girl he fucked from behind
on tatami mats with her parents serving tea not two feet from them.
She only half believed him. But then again, he was one of those men who had
really grasped life for all it had to offer. He had done so many different
things. A woman never really gets this chance. She liked that he thought
she was brave for leaving. Maybe brave for writing, too.
They made haiku in their sexual postures. He fit her perfectly, like a
hand in a glove. She would say, "take me in the Japanese way," which meant
from behind on their sides. He told her he couldn't last very long in this
position and it was true. She did something to him and she never even knew
what this was, exactly.
He liked to bathe her like a child. She had gorgeous soap handmade from
glycerin shot through with designs. Green Tea and Facets of the Sea made
by a small California company. He bought her a sea sponge and then he
washed her. He did something to her skin that caused her to catch on fire
because he took so much time and no one else ever had. She lay in front of
him between his thighs, head resting back onto his chest and they talked
amidst the bubbles till the water grew cold and they had to add more. He
liked his baths hot and deep. So did she.
You have been in these postures before with others but not
quite like this because somehow you feel more love or something trying to
get in inside you and this never was there before and now here it is and
you want it to just keep pushing until somehow entered and fragmented his
essence knows you like no other and you can't escape it. You have to let
yourself be known, entered, penetrated, fragile, female. There is no way
to keep him out, no way to keep him at bay or from reaching something core
about yourself. In yoga they call this the subtle body. All that is
ethereal. He can find this and he finds it through your skin.
After the bath that night she put on her black lace unitard, except that she
wore one of his old plaid flannel shirts over the top because it seemed
obscene after the nakedness of that bath and the depth of his touch; and she
spent three nights there with him and became afraid that she might lose her
edge and the small infinitely jagged piece of power she still held out over
him.
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
