Twenty Four
BBC Radio One’s Friday Night Floor Fillers is booming. I am wielding a mascara wand with precision. It is 10:30 pm.
My jeans are tight and ride low, hip bones jutting visibly, defiantly above the waistband. These hips, and wide hoop earrings, and tall tall shoes – they reflect my contradictory emotions. I am brave and beautiful. I need attention to prove this. I am confident and strong. My heart is raw and ruined, and I want everyone and no one to know.
I hear Tracy descend from her attic room. She stops in front of my door, smiles. "Ready?" I say yes, and we walk down the narrow hall, down the last flight of stairs, and through the stained glass front door. We spill onto the street, two pairs of high heels, two sets of red lips. The club is only a few blocks away. I am excited, and so close to crying. I want to meet boys. The more boys I can put between my current self and the woman I was one month ago, the better.
Past the Indian takeaways we walk, past the fish shops, past the clusters of bright young things parrying and thrusting in the street. We meet Kelly at the door to the club, we pay our cover, and we’re in. The music is loud. My shoes stick to the floor, my elbows to the bar when I order my Smirnoff Ice. Tracy has a gin, Kelly a vodka cranberry. Even our drinks say "I’m just a girl." They are not girls, they are fairly ferocious and insatiable women. They have taken strangers to hourly hotel rooms in Las Vegas. They have picked up men in truck stops at 2am, and discarded them a half hour later. They are like men in this way, and I want to be like them. Callous. Unpenetrable.
Men drift into our orbit and out again. My voice is talking at them, my mouth moves, my hands touch my body, drawing their eyes, drawing attention, but I am not there. I am thinking too hard. I feel guilt at this betrayal. My love is still bound up, and I shouldn’t be doing this, because what if he changes his mind? I can have everything before me, but what is before me is not what I desperately want. My eyes are bright, my voice is bright, I am a mandolin string thrumming with tension and ready to break.
We dance. The music booms, and there are lights. It is only women dancing, performing for the men who stand in an awkward circle at the edge of the dance floor. Openly watching, selecting. A man puts down his drink and slides our direction. He is behind me, and the girls watch but pretend not to watch, keeping an eye. The man gyrates for a moment, and then hits me in the ass, hard. Winds up like a baseball pitcher and smacks.
The mandolin string breaks. I turn around and beat his chest with my fists. I am all a-rage, pounding, sobbing hard. You asshole, I cry. You jerk. Don’t touch me, don’t ever touch me. The slap stings, the humiliation stings, suddenly I feel like everyone can see beneath my jeans pocket to the red outline of a handprint throbbing there. The man is furious but restrained. Didn’t my clothes, my dancing tell him that this was ok? That anything goes? The women I am with each slide an arm over my shoulders and pull me away, muttering curses at the guy who took it too far. He shouts his British inflected insults after them – Slappers! Are you raggin’ or summat? What the hell? Bitches are crazy.
I’ve lost it all, the bravery. They pull me out the doors.
I don’t remember what happens after this. I remember the impression of my companions observing me from the distance of dozens, possibly hundreds, of lovers. They know too much. They don’t find me weak, exactly, nor naive, because I’m not. Exactly. But they know and I know then that the gulf between us will always be. Judge not, and I don’t, but for me their sexual choices would be self destruction. In the alcohol fueled drama of that moment, from beyond the pain of my cold dead heart, my ramrod straight and schoolmarmish conscience whispers thanks that I found this out in ten minutes, rather than ten disastrous months. Very early, instead of way too late.
The handprint throbs, red on my skin. My eyes are also red. The waterproof mascara doesn’t run.
Twenty Five
The car radio is booming. I am riding with Jennifer and Erin, on our way to a weekend visit in South Carolina.
My jeans are still tight and ride low. My earrings, my clothes are still singing the same song, but a little more tastefully these days. A few successful dates and bounteous female support have buoyed me. I love my companions, I love the October drive.
We pull up the drive of the comfortable house, park on the side. We are enthusiastically greeted by the family that lives there – a pair of parents, a pair of glowing newlyweds, a handsome, roaming son, home for the weekend. I know that I find him tremendously interesting when he utters a deliciously dry delivery of a joke in the car. He has since said that he found me beautiful, on first sight. He has since said that he found me smart, after the initial brief conversation. I say – I know.
I fall in love with him on a Saturday night, when we sit quietly on a bench on the front porch of his home and he tells me these things in a very matter of fact and gentle way. He has a delicacy of manner that belies his firm sense of himself. It is a rare thing to find a well-developed moral code housed in such a respectful and genial soul. He politely asks for my contact details. I still have the scrap of legal pad with his email address and phone.
Three years later, almost to the day, all of the people in that house stand up beside us in a small church on the South Carolina coast. The sun sets, and we drink champagne.
Thirty
Five years have somewhat dulled the delicacy of our interactions. The bloom was definitively off the rose a couple of weeks ago, when I caught our baby’s puke in my hands and we spent two long and noisy nights listening to each other’s bathroom-bound misery. He’s held my hair while I blew neti-pot loosened snot into a sink. I’ve rolled my eyes when he uses decidedly indelicate speech while playing zombie video games. It seems unfair, almost, that the person who wins your heart and life gets the prize of seeing you at your worst. The British man with his wide palm and dirty mouth never had to suffer my morning breath.
I spent some time the other day re-reading our honeymoon adventures. I’ve been dreaming of white sand, blue water, a room by the sea. The man I love with me. Both "men" I love, this time around. We would teach Jack to snorkel. We would eat conch fritters. We would lounge, eat, sun, and smile. We would be surrounded by flowers.
Maybe on the way home I should pick up some frozen conch fritters and a bouquet of bougainvillea. Or reasonable substitutes. We can recapture the magic, even on a chill grey February day.
Sunday marks the start of the first spring month.