by Adrianna de la Rosa
(09/04/02)
She took almost nothing with her when she fled her marriage. She didn't
want anything that could remind her of the past. Who was she? Something
different. There was nothing in her tiny studio. The glamour of
nothingness. She loved it. Bare walls, bare grey carpeted floors and the
promise of the Moorish tub behind the louvered shutters.
She made her bed out of down comforters right on the floor. It was like a
nest. Very Zen. This bed was all about pillows, softness and the density
and lightness of poured white cream with lace edges. She took an
Italianate mirror and propped it into a corner. The bed radiated out from
the mirror which served as a headboard, straight out of the corner,
diagonally. It was the most immense thing in the room. She placed stems
of stargazer lilies on the floor next to her so that as she drifted off to
sleep she would be enveloped by their perfume. Stacked around her bed were
books by poets. Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver and Rumi were her
companions. She could sleep softly with the sweetness of flowers and the
sweetness of the poets whispering delicately in her ear.
His first letters were so erotic that she began to touch herself just
thinking about him. This was before they ever met. She thought about how
his hands might feel coursing up and down the length of her body. And he
kept writing her about it. About things he was going to do to her. She
wanted him to enter her from behind while they gazed into the mirror over
the sea of frothy creamwhite pillows. This was the stuff of endless
fantasy. They hadn't met each other yet. His letters stroked her in her
mind's eye. She could feel him inside of her. Their letters flew back and
forth to each other sometimes two a day like a kind of dance where the
words wrapped themselves around each other like the exhausted limbs of
lovers. They found each other in the dark. Out of the dark.
They revealed all their details slowly to each other. When he came to her
place for the first time he said "Absolute elegance." But it was so
simple, really. When he made love to her that night he said "Look at this
arm, look at this leg" and he stretched them out and up as he caressed
them, marvelling at something while he kissed them. She was wet, wetter,
wettest under his probing fingers, just noticing herself and the things she
hadn't felt for years melting under his touch and beginning to meld and
flow into him. Everything about him was sexual and deep. He had it in his
bones. He was in control of everything the way a man is, or can be with a
woman. She was his for this taking. Open sesame, opening. The rich scent
of the lilies enveloped them along with the incense and the candles burning
and twinkling in the distance. They fell back into each other, falling
bodies adrift in a sea of pink and white cotton and the float of the
comforters, lost for a moment and outside reality yet held within an
iridescent, incandescent bubble of so much beauty that they both had tears
in their eyes that first night. Just because of the tenderness of touch
and how beautiful that is when it is done kindly and with the heart
attached but without strings. Like a dream. Like a deep dream sequence
unfolding under moonlight.
Later she would spend the night in his bed. It was a futon. She looked
around the room he called home in his house. There were so many masculine
elements. He slept in a tiny little room they named the cubby. It had
once been a walk-in closet. It was this incredibly tiny little contained
space with a door that faced the sea and high curtainless windows that the
moon shone through, just big enough for a bed and an old oak captain's
chair. His bed was hard like a man is hard and lean. He was tall and thin,
lean bone and sinew. He had shoes and cowboy boots and ugg boots and
sailing shoes all lined up and a row of different pipes he had smoked once
and camera equipment, like toys the way almost all men have. He smoked
cigars called Grenadiers. There were silver spurs and braided horse whips
from the time he had been a cowboy. And all his sweet smelling clothes
that he hung to dry on an old fashioned clothesline that caught the morning
sea breeze drifting uphill in his garden.
His sheets were old and worn and unmatching. The first thing she did was
to ask his favorite color. It was burgundy. So she bought him sheets and
thick plush towels in the way that women try to reform and add softness to
the males they find. He slept with a gun under his pillow. At first this
excited her. She had never been around guns or males that had them. For a
long time he had lived in Texas where they have a different set of rules
and codes than California. It was a little scary, but exciting. She
wanted him to fuck her long and hard with her head banging against that
pillow and her hips arcing and pounding up into his. She wanted to wear
only her cowboy boots while he did this. She loved everything about this
little room and the way he made her feel there, in that bed. In the
morning the light from the sea poured in over them. There was a great
peace to be had just looking at the colors of the sunrise or the calm path
of the moon and the thousands of stars. Lying on their backs they loved to
listen to the rain running off the eaves in winter. The tiniest rooms are
usually the most intimate aren't they? When she came into the house she
wanted to go there first. Right into that little room and pull him down on
top of her and start a sequence of his long slow kisses. They listened to
Ry Cooder alot. His Indian album "A Meeting by the River." The music only
added to the trance that she felt in his embrace.
He used to write her about what it was like to feel the body of the woman
melt into his. And she was melting for the first time in her life. He was
like the other, wilder half of her soul. He was like freedom she could
taste for the first time in her life where rules she had always had to
follow and codes and locked doors went right out the window and straight
down the drain. He lived life without any fear. And he breathed this
courage into her. Into her bones. He wanted her to come into his house
freely. He would say "Baby, just turn the knob and push." But she came
from a house where the doors were always locked and barring out intruders.
This was her marriage. And what once upon a time felt like safety now felt
like strangulation. He was all about ease. And the freedom of doors
unlocking. This is how she was able to come. Because he unlocked her.
Because he turned the knob and pushed.
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
