Speaking In Tongues

There sits an obscene devil in me who is fat and unscrupulous and who orgies in my mind with harems of countless beautiful women who are nothing more than whispers of smoke or apparitions. Like what is left of fireworks after they explode. Or the smoke of a dwindling cigarette. He exists in my uncertainty. He is harmless, but he wrecks things because I let him. He pilots me and I am his machine. He destroys my concentration, mostly. A few marriages and relationships along the way were speed bumps of his fancy. But though I said it all before of others, she was different.

It wasn’t at all because she looked like Riley Reid, who I had seen bent and twisted in the most immoral and unnatural ways. I’ve never been an aficionado of adult film, but she is the one I knew well and I had found myself in darker times searching for and trying, as I suppose men do, to put myself in the perceived fortunate position of the particular unsavory beast who at that moment in time and film accompanied her, so to speak, demoralized all the while about the prospect that I was one in a long line of piggish men, or rather, that I ever had been so low as to wish to be.

I didn’t realize the likeness until later, but when I realized it, it was too much to ignore and it depressed me to the point that I began to fear that I had been morally corrupted along the way and that my attachment to her was more a sinister matter of lust rather than a romantic purview, and so it remained as a quiet but lovely thought for me to return to at times when I needed such to dwell upon. Such a hole to burrow in and roost like a hollowed log or trunk. But she, Victoria, eclipsed all thoughts of the adult actress so much so that I never searched for the latter again once the correlation was dutifully made, and any incidental thought or view of whatever precarious position Ms. Reid performed in the licentious duties of her enthralling occupation, or with what throng of man or men with whom those acts were wantonly committed, those heathen thoughts were supplanted nicely by that of my sweet and innocent Victoria, who tragically I do not expect to see again but in my dashed reveries, my cinematic memories that are a channel of their own.

Let me digress, Victoria worked at the book store on Edith Avenue. Edith Avenue named after Edith Wharton, this being Ms. Wharton’s adopted hometown. Not her real hometown, but one she visited when she wrote several of her novels. She stayed in a cabin up by the lake. I don’t know why she visited here of all places. No one does, but she migrated here like some fat old bird to a branch of her favor. As far as I know, Edith Wharton had no ties here. Maybe it was the quaintness of it. The quiet. The peace. The upstate affords certain luxuries the city inexorably does not.

Victoria. Victoria. Her name rolls perfectly off my tongue. I sat in the parking lot between the book store and the coffee shop and fix my hair in the rearview and take deep breaths, part my hair over to the side, and compose myself. I call it off if I don’t look decent and come back when I feel I do. There are days I look all of my years and days I look three quarters of them. Nonetheless, there were other people who worked in the store who might wait on me. She may be stocking shelves. So all may be for not. But if I timed it just right, it would be just the two of us for a fleeting moment. She and I over a copy of Moby Dick, or Lolita, or Brave New World, or whatever it was I would buy that day. 

There was always a look of familiarity about her which I chalked up to some sentiment like serendipity, or that of fables and fairy-tales. It was “meant to be,” or we were lovers in a former life, or kindred spirits, those sorts of hokey things that seem to infect the rationality of housewives and teen girls, not middle-aged men. Those things you read about on social media and in terribly bad romance novels. But I was consumed by it, whatever it was and I spent a great deal of money there on books I read simply for the sake of knowing them thoroughly in case she asked me about it the next time I was in, though she never did. She may have said this or that about the book I bought, saying something like, “Another classic, I see,” or, “Oh, I’ve heard this was good,” but she never asked me my thoughts on This Side of Paradise or The Count of Monte Cristo. But she always smiled when she saw me and read my book title and the author’s name aloud and I was pleased to hear her say, “Alexandre Dumas,” with the silent s. It ever so pleasantly rolled from her tongue and over her pink glossy lips.

On that same day, I learned that she took two years of French in high school and so I spent the next week studying French online before I went back in and bought another book. It was pleasing to me in the way she said “in high school,” for to me it sounded like she had graduated. Or perhaps it was simply a wishful inference on my part. She was forever afterwards Mademoiselle to me, which when I said it, made her giggle in such a way that inadvertently exposed a youthfulness I was trying desperately to see past. I had no idea of her age and the thought that she could be less than 18 frightened me and my prospective dreams so much so that I shuttered it away, buried it deep in my better judgment. Yet, still like a Tell Tale Heart, it called out to me in that horrible bone-chilling cry. I only knew that I was at least twice as old as her which made me uncomfortable until I saw her and all scrutiny of any moral measure, of any scruple or standard, melted fast away. It returned, only when she had sufficiently faded away from view. 

When I spoke simple French to her she was the way Mortisha was with Gomez and his silver tongue, but only with a coy giggle and a sweetness she seemed to be saturated in, the iridescence of which was as distinct as the glittery eye shadow she wore on occasions that bade me to stare longer than I would normally. I was like a man looking at Medusa, turned to stone. I would excuse it to being deep in some tedious thought other than in the blissful toils of her, which was a blatant lie. She must have known I adored her or she is the least perceptive person on Earth. She must have known that I came in for her and only for her because all the books I bought I could have bought online for much cheaper than full retail.

Once, preemptively deflecting from this supposed suspicion, I had used the excuse that I didn’t like ordering anything online for fear that someone would steal my banking information, which was but another lie I spit so fastidiously like a desperately hungry spider to keep the aims of my infatuation secret. At times, I sought to ask more of her and her life, to know more than that which I surmised from a glance or a look, or a brief comment, but I always faltered. Maybe I possessed the innate knowledge that some things ought to remain unknown.

She was a good girl, I knew. Or so I decided, prejudiced by my adoration of her. It was all over her face, though. It welled in the pools of her eyes. It secreted from her skin through beautiful pores that were good like rain puddles are good. She blew over me, through me, as though I were made of nothing and she were all the ocean and the wind that came of it in the fury of a discrete but forceful hurricane. I must of been a sight, standing there as though I were unaffected like a weather reporter on a beach too long, afraid to move for fear of being toppled, as though my big two year-long secret would spill out of my ears all over the creaky hardwood floor for all in the bookstore to see, and my Victoria would laugh at the foolish old man as I lied there on the floor with all my secret desires and dreams spilled about me, naked in my vicarious ambitions.

My lust for her I could not deny. I woke up sweating thinking of her. I made terrible errors at work daydreaming of her. Seeing her in the fleck of a customer’s eye for a moment, or in a ray of dusty sunlight that dribbled through a glass window. Another of that Beelzebub’s orgies of imagination in my smutty head. I could hear him laugh. I could hear her moan. It was relieving that I did not have a spouse or a significant other to saddle me with a greater burden of guilt or it would have been all too much to bear, remedied poorly with alcohol, separation and divorce, or worse, couples’ therapy. But as it were, it was all too much. My lust was in vigorous conflict with the sincerity of my adoration, romantic and puerile, tender in a way. But I was baptized in sin when I saw her. There was no salvation from that. My mind was a torrent of emotional upheavals, a blazing cauldron, and my desire for her ran wild as white foamy rapids over the defenseless jagged boulders of my otherwise impenetrable morality. Either way, I would die. Either drowning in the undercurrent of suppression, or in the waterfall that waits when such lust inevitably subsides. When that cerebral devil sleeps.

Her father and mother owned the bookstore and were devout Christians, well respected in the community. They incorporated the Jesus fish on the sign and I suppose were fishers of men because on the counter at the checkout there were all sorts of religious pamphlets and brochures about saving your soul and repenting and promises that it is not too late for salvation and quotes of scriptures for the taking in nifty little holders. John 3:16. Romans. Matthew. Mark. Something, something, something, which all added up to some number that was critical to my existence, I was sure. But I had no time for math. And all those Bible verses swirled there in my head like fat happy fish in the clear water of a glass bowl, all those agonizing faces of Christ being crucified for me, and the candles and the plastic bags of unleavened bread stacked up in pyramids, which all compounded my infatuation for her.

There was no possible outcome that would be favorable to all. To me, to her parents, or to her. It was bound to end in heartache for someone and I thought for a moment, rather, I felt for a moment, like a soldier in olive green wool standing over a grenade with her and her parents beside me, all in fatigues. And I dove on the grenade so they should survive as Christ was crucified for the ungrateful bastards who lived then, and they who were yet to live ungratefully so. For Riley Reid and the beasts nailing her behind a dumpster in an alley. For the goobers jerking their junk at all her pretty pixels.

But when I think I am that noble and impervious to the ways of the wicked, I sadly realize I am mistaken and it is all a lie. The worst lies, I’ve been told, are the ones you tell yourself. I feel that I only would jump on that grenade so to avoid the possible outcome of my own humiliation and having to live and linger on having been rejected by her. Armless, perhaps. Legless. Heartless. Blind to all else besides her. Forever with that dreadful ringing in my ears in the paralyzing moment that it occurred, what words it was she chose to strike me with.

I stand in line behind some fat lady in a polyester sun dress who smells like ham and mothballs and the sweat of a scrawny man and her own malodorous musk. I look down at my feet as though that grenade lies there at my toes. I can describe it. It is silver, not green. It is more like a candle stick or a dumbbell than a pineapple. And what is packed inside of it is pure humiliation. Exposure. The fat lady pays for her vampire novels and I am standing there at the counter and Victoria is in front of me once more. In a tight pink fuzzy sweater. I am paralyzed in the moment. The devil in me is having a cigarette.

The Lord’s Word. That is the name of their bookstore. The family’s surname is Lord. Victoria Lord, daughter of James and Rachel Lord. And James and Rachel are standing there behind their perfect beautiful daughter, the product of the union of their sperm and egg one fateful night eighteen or so years ago, which is a date no one celebrates but which ought to be known as Conception Day on all the calendars. Victoria is a grand name but quite a misnomer in her case and there in line I brainstorm other names she could be called that might suit her better, but the thought leaves me and I am standing there with Ethan Frome in my hand and Mrs. Lord smiles and compliments me on my taste of literature and asks me if I ever been to the Edith Wharton cabin which is by their home, she says.

It is preserved, she goes on. A beautiful yellow cabin by the lake, nestled in some Canadian hemlocks and pines. She says they own it and keep it as Ms. Wharton favored it. Doilies, I imagined and gobs of books and china for tea. She said there was an old typewriter on a beautiful mahogany writing desk. And a metal bed with cherub finials on it that watched Ms. Wharton sleep. I say that’s nice so many times that I realize I must sound like a fool as Victoria looks up at me and grins and types my book’s price into the register which is one of those antiques with the numbers and dollar signs in a glass window. They simply don’t make them like that anymore, I had told Victoria more than once, admiring the cash register for the sake to speak. But I don’t say it now because Mrs. Lord is going on and on about the cabin, and the pillows, and the loft. She has me in her jaws.

“She may have written Ethan Frome in that very cabin. A copy of it, a first edition, sits on the mantle above the fireplace. It’s a cozy little place. Charming! Wouldn’t you say it is charming, James?”

Taking his cue, James replied with the smile of a bear bribed by a fish, “Charming! Just the word for it.” He pecks his wife on the forehead and disappears to a backroom, not suspecting me of anything. She goes on to say they wanted to rent it to would-be writer’s or avid readers or Wharton enthusiasts, but there seems to be fewer and fewer people who appreciate Ms. Wharton these days, and writers are a rare breed in these parts, she says. She jokes that they are like dodo birds, which I did not get at first in the haze of my adoration of her daughter. I laughed anyway because she laughed. 

And then I proffered a fateful lie that felt as though it left my lips too anxiously with the furious passion of a kamikaze pilot. The lie that was to change everything, for better or worse, rooted in my percolating desire for their daughter and that which would spin my life into their fateful family web, whether they would know it or not, for all eternity. Such an innocent passing thing to say. I said, “I’m a writer. I would love to write in that cabin.”

Rachel, I recall was the old woman in the Bible thought barren who became pregnant late in life and birthed John The Baptist. A very important woman in world history. This Rachel looked like that Rachel must have when she realized she was pregnant by the grace of God Almighty. Victoria, meanwhile, bagged my book as she always did and handed me the bag with her wrist bent like a swan’s neck and with that perfect smile of hers that made me lost in time for a few seconds.

I was staring at her smile and the crinkle of her nose when her mother birthed John the Baptist on me and asked if I would like to rent the cabin and write something. The great American novel, I believe it was she said. And I felt the way a rat must feel when it discovers a hole in a house and safe passage to the pantry. Then ashamed, I looked away from Victoria and said I would be delighted and that I have vacation time from work next week around the Fourth of July and would take it for the week of, if available.

Rachel put her happy hands together as though in joyous prayer and said that I could have dinner at their house if I wished, and that breakfast would be delivered to me each and every morning by one of the children, Victoria I presumed or so I fantasized to be among the couriers. I nodded in agreement and we spoke of a price and I agreed to whatever it was she said, Victoria’s perfume lingering there and intoxicating me to the point of a blissful delirium akin to nitrous oxide. I felt so light on my feet that I could float away like the fly that orbited me, pestering me as though he were an emanation. I agreed to pay for dinner at the family home, which Rachel said I would be able to get to by a golf cart they provide, and I agreed to breakfast as well. I agreed to the deluxe package because there in that moment, being so near to her, I would have agreed to anything in the world. And when Rachel asked about a Mrs., I was all-to-happy to make clear there was no Mrs. Me, there was a vacancy and a want to satisfy the position.

But I was no writer. I was a fraud. A con-artist. I had never written a thing in my life but for a poem to some girl in seventh grade or so who never even acknowledged getting it, and who never looked at me again afterwards, thus discouraging me from any future efforts. I was a boring pharmacist at a boring chain store on every corner in America, and after writing papers in college on things related to pharmacology, I never wrote anything more.

I suppose that was going to change because for one week I had agreed to stay in that cabin and as a matter of principle I knew I had to write something. So I read Ethan Frome, a novelette which hauntingly mirrored my condition but for the point that I had no paraplegic bitter nag of a wife to hinder my pursuit of the young girl I loved. But my conscious was that overbearing old hag. And the more I thought of the girl and indulging in the pleasures of her, simply in thought, it woke and yelled at me for my betrayal. It always knew, bedridden and perpetually dying, yet it would never admit to the knowledge it possessed which made it all the more sinister. It would simply just harass me for an unspoken indiscretion and the vows I broke with my thoughts, coveting another woman.

When I told my coworkers that I was going to spend my week of vacation in the Edith Wharton cabin just outside of town rather than in Bermuda or Cancun as I had discussed, they laughed. When asked what I was going to do, and upon replying, they laughed more. No one could imagine me writing anything. But the incidentals of a two year-long book buying binge was that in all my spare time I read and became a reader which opened a door in my mind that had been closed for years. Since I was a kid reading Hardy Boys books or those illustrated biographies of American Presidents.

I read every book I bought at the bookstore, just in case Victoria asked me about one part of 1984 or The Great Gatsby or Wuthering Heights. I never wanted to be unprepared. I wanted to say the exact right thing at the exact right time, as though my dialogue was written for me by Ms. Wharton herself, less the tragedy of Mr. Frome. I wanted to make her laugh in some way or to have her see me differently than the next guy, or the last. If I had a tail of feathers, I would have flaunted them. I wanted her to see some quality in me that she did not in a boy her age. I wanted her more than I wanted anything in my life and that desire was not going to subside with all the therapy or alcohol and hookers in the world. She was carved indelibly in the precipice of my mind as the presidents are on Rushmore.

I replayed the day’s interaction that night at dinner as though it was perpetually occurring. A TV rerun. Her parents are the two happiest looking people on the planet. They recognized me because I had been in so frequently, and they thanked me for coming and Victoria smiled sweetly. She has no idea how I feel, I finally decided. The World War that rages madly in my body, waged over her.

They don’t suppose I am in love with their daughter because they are good people who have good thoughts of everyone until they are shocked by the reality which occurs despite their fervent prayers and cheery altruistic optimism. And even those terrible events are cast aside and recycled to more pleasant ones for they are champions of forgiveness and life lessons and grace. Their sole suspicions of everyone is that they are good and the only person who can sully a reputation is the person himself by actions counter that. And even then, they believe in repentance and salvation and the words from all the fliers on the counter of their bookstore that float around in my head like bees over wildflowers. The face of God himself looks upon me like the sun. I order another drink to calm down and to hopefully think of her less for a while until she inevitably returns. Because she always returns. The devil stokes her flame with his resilient poker.

I suppose I could look at it as though God was making her so prevalent in my mind and that she and I are a product of some fateful providence, but that old hag of a conscious I am wedded to still, only allows me to think that way for so long before she calls out to me to complain of her pain and misery, with no regard to mine, and to accuse me of not caring about her anymore and that I do not love her and that I am breaking my vows. And though it is all true and I do not love her, as she says, and though I stand there with a pillow in my hands as she miserably sleeps ready to press it upon her hallowed face and to relieve myself of her hatefulness and needling the way Ethan Frome must have, I relent because she has such control over me. I am a man bound by his invisible strings.

The days finally past and I pack my things for the trip. I bring a ream of paper, which I bought at the bookstore a few days earlier, though to my dismay, Victoria wasn’t working. I decided to write my desire of her in some tangible and therapeutic way so that it might serve to exorcise her from me as though she were some kind of demon to be dispelled. I might write a beautiful story. I might write a horrid one. It hardly mattered. I might write an end to our lopsided affair and be done with it once it was spelled out in ink, the way that it would be. I do not know the outcome for I had never wrote anything. Maybe writing would be my catharsis and I would save on the price of therapy I wouldn’t need. But I don’t know. This was to be my Mayflower.

I had given thought to moving to another city. Work at another pharmacy on the corner of a street somewhere else in America. Maybe Oregon. Or Utah. The job wouldn’t be any different. The store would be the exact same. It was all the same. Same people with chronic pain trying to get opiates refilled. Grannies with diabetes and old men flirting with the single mom pharm techs who sometimes flirt back. Maybe if I were a thousand miles from her, she would fade from me and there would be someone who I could admire to a lesser extent that would soothe the sting of her passing like a salve of sorts. It was then in the car on the way to the cabin that I decided I would have Victoria pass away in my novel or novelette, and I would move on elsewhere. A blueprint to the life I would live afterwards was being drafted by the appropriate committee in my mind.

But such cannot be expected to go so easily, I’ve learned in life. In some fifty years, I know the way to erase a person does not lie in words on a page or by willful exorcism. I knew I was only fooling myself and I needed the embarrassment of my failure to recover or else I would never. I needed to put forward that I had interest in her romantically and for her to reject me in order to recover or else it would go on and on regardless of where I lived and what I did. It needed to occur so that I did not spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened had I tried to express to her such affection. I would be filling pill bottles in Tulsa, Oklahoma thinking of her, seeing her still in people’s eyes and filtered sunbeams. So I was then determined that I would make a pass and end it once and for all. And in my humiliation, I would leave town, tail between my legs.

I was so resolved when I unpacked my things into that little yellow cabin to do so that I caught myself smiling in my reflection on the car window. It must be the way soldiers are resolved when they are conscripted to serve in some unfavorable war. Against all odds. Ready to meet their fate, the extent of suffering and pain of which they will endure being the only remaining variable to be known.

I could see Ms. Wharton on the porch sitting on the rocker, sunlight streaming through an elm tree, descending upon her. She appeared and disappeared as the leaves moved and she was reading a book or writing something in a journal pad, ideas for another story, perhaps, posthumously, of course. It is one thing I expect that holds true after death, writers will still write, but their stories will not be on paper or in books. They will be in the wind and in cottonwood spores and nearly invisible specs of inspiration that float down the way the sunlight beams in resilient rays to find a host and to be born into words at last. Or maybe with fireflies at night or in the croaks of frogs and crickets.

I don’t believe that ideas die. Or souls and desires, for that matter. No. They must live on. I knew it was my imagination rather than Ms. Wharton’s ghost, but I refused to part with it because it would take imagination to write something that I intended to write, and if the ghost of Ms. Wharton needed to be summoned to do such a thing, then so be it. I was happy to have her so long as she did not impart upon me a bitter and crippled wife.

I sat down and wrote something of my life to begin. A background. A fabric upon which to weave something more. Sitting in church with my mom. My dad was home with a hangover. The pleasing sound of the typewriter tit-tatting along to the melody of his snoring. There were church hymns and people smiling and saying hello. I liked the way that the church smelled. I liked the shiny collection plates and the donuts in the parlor.

The cabin butted against the lake and was a short distance from the Lord’s beautiful home, which sat up the gravel drive a ways and was wonderfully secluded from the world. This was the country. It was cooler than it was in town and the aromatic smell and the serenity of simple animals being genuine and at peace bade me to open a window and listen and breathe deeper than normal. It was an exchange of air and with it, an exchange of mindsets. An immediate draft invited itself in and the white crochet curtains danced across the wood floor like a beautiful bodyless bride. The following is what I wrote, which sounds like something I would tell a therapist if I was to involve a therapist. The thought occurred to me, and I suppose that if all else fails, one would be employed. Rather Freudian, I suppose, I wrote of sex since it seemed central to my dilemma and how boring sex became with previous women who came and went from my life in the unheralded way in which they do.

Those women I knew, strangers now, who having sex with was a simple part of their required routine. Another chore on a list. They who casually open their reluctantly shaved legs and close them like they are folding bath towels. The same women who handled me with all the delicacy and anticipation they would the dishes. And they who would hardly ever without too many drinks open their mouth for anything other than dinner. The boredom of that was all too much for me to stand, let alone for me to voluntarily imprison myself within the constraints of their disingenuousness and to partake in any further so that every year more it would be only less than it was when I first agreed to live without pardon. Less liberties until I was in a simple cell of block walls and toilet. But I paroled myself from my jailers, not as an exorcise of selfishness, but in the interest of self preservation, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All those Jeffersonian ideals.

Same legs opening like the Lincoln Tunnel for another man, then another, and another as though the men were the same or merely an understudy and this a dramatic continuous play. They don’t have legs, they have toll gates. But this American Beauty, the rare genus of rose, it would be a christening in cotton sheets. That which I never had. It would be something special, Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492, D-Day, Lindy flying the Atlantic, Ruth’s first home run jaunt around the base path, or the very first draft of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. It would be no less than the sum of those events.

It had been a long time since it was special for me. A very long time. It had been Riley Reid and I for a few years. First a boring housewife who would sometimes open hers, sometimes not. A few bar whores who washed up on the beach of my better judgment, with whom I tried to keep romantic passions to no avail and who reset into bar whores again after it was over. A few divorced moms who were fun for a while but who inevitably became as stale and pasty as powder mashed potatoes left out in time, feigning passion as a courtesy once a week or so as long as I played with their kid and said the right things when I was supposed to say them. Fucking when the timer went off, same as the oven bell for the cake.

Then there were hookers. A long string of them, enough to wrap around a Christmas tree a few hundred times, each her own little special ornament, easily forgotten until the occasion returned, wrapped in paper and dug out of a box and hung up for a while. They were pretty at first, then gaudy in good light. I could not argue against their efficiency. But the novelty of them miserably faded and they sunk to the bottom of that inevitable sea of boredom and misery when it was so evidently only about money and a means to their fix. The rent they said they needed to pay, the kid they needed to feed, was contradicted by a string of dots and bruises on a polka-dotted arm. They were actresses in their rawest form. However in their defense, a hole in the wallet is better than a hole in the soul.

So perhaps fate and boredom brought me here. My boredom infatuated me to Victoria and not her splendid beauty that was undeniable, and this was less about romance and love and more about lust and conquest and things I did not want ever to admit. There was that turmoil in me, that incessant warring between good and bad intentions, and sitting in front of the old typewriter tit-tatting, I paused to take in a cool breeze from the window, and perplexed by it all, I wondered of the purity of my intentions. I suppose if I could profess my love with no desire to act upon it, no clumsy or graceful effort, I could say they were pure. But if I felt no less satisfied in telling her how beautiful she is and how I admire her, then I knew I was a mere heathen.

A telephone began to ring about a quarter of six and I answered it, always having felt obligated to answer a ringing phone. It was one of those old telephones. The black candlestick jobs with the rotary dials. The cord was straight and not curled like a pigtail, so I knew it to be a true antique and not a replica. It was Rachel on the other end, and she said in a most excited voice, that dinner would be served at half past six or so and if I wanted to get freshened up and find the golf cart which sat under a tarp behind the cabin, I could go ahead and drive on up.

So I bathed in the clawfoot tub and shaved and dressed in a simple outfit. A nice black shirt and black pants and some black boots I favored. It was no accident. I recalled once at the bookstore that Victoria wore a Johnny Cash t-shirt and we had a brief conversation about him and how she admired him, so numerous times I wore all black hoping to kindle some subconscious flame. I may have spoken at times in a deeper and slower voice than normal, and of the few things I packed was a CD player and a couple Johnny Cash records. Maybe the music, I thought, would draw her to me. But I cringed feeling myself to be something of a vampire, lecherous in a way. Nonetheless, I drove the golfcart to the top the hill where the Lord house was and parked in their driveway next to a gold Tahoe.

Their house was a large cabin. One of those huge obscene monstrosities you might see on a real estate TV show in Montana or Alaska. Behind their cabin was an enormous emerald green pond circled in pines and there was an inground swimming pool between with no one in it besides an empty donut life preserver which leisurely floated from one end to the other.

There was a basketball hoop in the driveway and several bikes tossed aside which likely belonged to a posse of young children who I assumed had traded their outdoor luxuries for a game system of some kind. Or perhaps, knowing the Lord’s, I chuckled, mandatory Bible study. But in the middle of my observations and assumptions, she appeared on the deck above me, smiling and waving in a sun dress. My God, of all the times I had seen her before and swore she could look no more beautiful, she had outdone herself yet again.

Victoria showed me in to the dining room and dinner was soon served rather formally and less homespun than I thought. I think they felt I carried some dignity I did not being a pharmacist. As though I were a man of great importance and not simply a glorified pill pusher. I spoke to her father about the pharmacy business and he asked me about several prescriptions he took for this and that and I advised him of better and cheaper drugs for his issues, which was what he was after, and he thanked me cordially. But I squirmed in my seat, knowing the true reason I came was not to have dinner with the family, or to stay in Edith Wharton’s silly cabin, but to be closer to Victoria and I was akin to a jigger. I felt like Humbert Humbert who had married that obscene imbecile woman he detested, only to be closer to Lolita.

I tried to console myself in my estimation that she was better than 18, but if she qualified, she did so only by months rather than by years. And when over roasted turkey and gravy the matter of Victoria’s age at last surfaced like a drowned body, I was happy to know that she was a freshman in junior college at the local branch university where I once lectured.

It was like there was no one else at the table besides for her and I. Her mother and father disappeared into the wallpaper and her older brother and four little brothers and sister and their three cousins from Iowa vanished in the pattern of the tablecloth. And for a solid five or so minutes, Victoria and I conversed upon the local university and of the professors she favored and of those she did not and of her class work and electives and tier requirements thus to satisfy and satisfied thus, and then finally of her major, whereupon Rachel as though birthing another John the Baptist there at the dinner table, interjected that Victoria was going to be a pharmacist. Of all things, she added. And I repeated, of all things. And the connection was made as to why they so eagerly wanted me to come stay at the cabin and to have dinner, so that I might advise the girl for there is an entire generation of people who believe that such connections need to be made in order to ensure the success of their children or loved ones. But in truth, nothing of the like is required, nor has been since the days of apprenticeship.

I must have had quite a perplexed look upon my face at desert for Rachel asked me if dinner was agreeable and I ensured her that it was. She went on to question me of desert in her gentle but concerned interrogation. And so I praised her blackberry cobbler like I never praised blackberry cobbler before, and I even complimented the coffee, though it was bland and lukewarm. I said I intended to write late into the night and Rachel went on to tell me that there were numerous things to do over the next week and listed them off, from boating and canoeing to horseback riding, swimming and hiking. They said I could ride the four wheelers as well, or dirt bikes if I dared, but I said I would be making no use of those. Their recommendations stopped short of the one thing I wanted to do and my stomach ached in my guilt for thinking of it there at their dinner table.

The perplexed look was merely an expression of my curiosity as to whether Victoria and I ever discussed my occupation, or if it were a matter of fate that she happened to choose my career of all careers. Either way, it favored me in that fate smiled upon us, or she had chosen deliberately to be a pharmacist because I was. And as I finished desert, I had the inkling that Victoria wasn’t merely a sweet and polite soul, but that there was a mutual affection between us for I caught her looking at me as often as I looked at her. And perhaps it was the amber of the Edison bulbs in the pendulous light fixture overhead, but she appeared to have a lascivious expression upon her face, which caught my attention.

Of all my earlier boastfulness of freedom got, I was no less her caged bird, a silver trinket she wore on her neck that I had never seen her without. Then there in my head was not a devil, but a parliament full of people, various forms of me, and arguments were being made for and against my pursuit of the girl. And those that said I should pursue her, but not all the way to intimacy, harped upon this observed and undeniable mutual interest, her eyes and lustful smile, and her chosen career path, and the fact that if not me there would be some dull professor or some drunk college boy who wouldn’t appreciate her in the way I would, who would give her less than she deserved for that is the way of men, to give only that which they are required to give to tender their desired result. To whack the pinata until the candy bursts to the grass. To give women less than they deserve whether by an emotional and physical inability to give more, or by simple carelessness or laziness. Some men cannot truly appreciate a beautiful creature such as Victoria and rather than pleasing her as she ought to be pleased, as I desired to do so often in my reveries, they would use her like a vehicle to their own pleasure. As that devil uses me. Therefore, it is my very duty to intercede man’s certain buffoonery, and dare I say his dubious treachery.

“Absurd!” shouts a plump man across the aisle. He is me plus eighty pounds and twenty years stuffed like a sausage in a gray twill suit. “The girl is half our age and any ostensible argument that we are waging this war for anything but our own selfish pleasures is a dubious treachery in itself and an all-out attack on truth! We must look for someone more our age and stop chasing silly pipe dreams to no end!”

Then poof, they were disbanded like someone might dream of congress or parliament being vaporized by alien laser rays, and I was expressing my gratitude for the meal and saying my goodbyes. It was dark out and the night brought with it a certain mystery and new ambience the day did not, and it was cooler and more odorous, and the frogs and crickets and nocturnal chorus of the night creatures lilted me, rising above the putter of the golfcart’s small engine and the gravel crumpling beneath the fat rubber tires as I descended the hill back to the cabin.

All the while for the short ride my mind was completely blank as it hadn’t been in years, as though no conscious thought occurred. Or if it did, it lay in wait as lazy nocturnal predators do ever so patiently for the cry of some stray whelp. But to realize that I was that whelp, the stray from my spiritual self, hit me the way Paul must have been blinded by the light. And the sinful desires I had of Victoria were the cries that would find me jawed by the inevitable predator of sin, and I drew the conclusion that my salvation teetered there in that night, more so than in any other.  

I resolved that I should pack my things and go, and I would have done so never to return to that bookstore, but their hospitality beckoned me to stay. It was a simple matter of etiquette that forbade me to leave. Perhaps I could feign illness after a day or two, but no one would believe that I got ill after dinner and left on the first night. They would have assumed I was rude, or that their accommodations were inhospitable in some way to a distinguished gentleman such as myself, so I could not leave that impression upon them. So I further resolved to stay the week and then taper off visits to the bookstore so not to tease myself with thoughts of Victoria any further. Not to look at her from a distant shelf with a copy of Gulliver’s Travels in my hands. By official decree, I was withdrawing my troops from the war that was otherwise endless and lost. I was the bird in the cage that would fly when opportunity arose. It is difficult to admit you are beaten in this life, but I was.

So I sat down to the typewriter and began to write of my one-sided love affair with the mademoiselle and decided that I would re-title her name and leave the story in the cabin upon the book shelf. Perhaps, someone might read it someday and sympathize. The thought of someone sympathizing with me gave me some irrational sense of comfort, which may in fact explain the popularity of counselors and therapists. A figurative shoulder to cry on. I would give it some sad ending because sad endings always make for better stories. Then there was a creak on the porch which distracted me. It could have been a wind, or a raccoon, or Ms. Wharton agreeing with the sentiment from her rocker. Ethan Frome was certainly marvelous as it was. It would not have been what it was with a sugar on the ending.  

There is a certain indelible sadness in being resigned to a fate less than the sum of your desires. And it manifests in both a physical and emotional exhaustion which I immediately began to suffer. I poured me a drink of whiskey on ice and made a pot of coffee to battle the inevitable blues of realizing that I would never know her in the intimate way I dreamt of for so long. To share with her a romance that could never be undone despite all the therapy or time in the world.

But my fingers labored across the keys making sluggish strikes and I realized then that I had lost the war of inspiration. And it felt so damn bad that it was as though a layer of myself had died and decayed inside of me, left to rot, and all I was left to do was to vomit or cry on the paper. It was as though I was at my own funeral, unimpressed with the words spoken of me and the arrangements made. It must be the way they write those books I find to be drab and painful. They do so without any inspiration.

Ding. Tab. Slide the bar back over the page. Go. Tit-tit-tit-tit-tit. The Underwood was getting its work having sat fat and lazy for nearly a century, perhaps. I gave up the coffee and drank myself to oblivion and passed out outside in Ms. Wharton’s rocker, perhaps in her lap, and perhaps suckling her tit, or if it makes you feel better, her teat. Then the night was handed over to day and all the old familiars were back again. The knowns. That is how day and night can best suitably be dissevered. By knowns and unknowns. And there is such day and night in me. All that I know of myself, and all that I never will, the latter in the majority.

All the same, I woke up to birds, loud and obnoxious braggadocios birds squawking over something in the canopy of the trees, boastful of their freedom. An empty bottle, responsible for my headache, rolled around about my heavy feet. It was just after dawn and I thought to go to bed for a while. So I turned on the air conditioner in the cabin to take the humidity out of the air when I saw the Underwood with one piece of seemingly fresh paper in it, rising up like a blanched headstone. I thought I recalled trailing off about lacking inspiration without the prospect of the mademoiselle and removing the paper from the typewriter and stacking it in a neat pile of ten or so other pages so to start fresh in the morning. I inspected what I must have left in the Underwood and was surprised to see that it was a single line, a single question, which outweighs anything that I have ever before read or been asked: Do you love me?

I hadn’t typed this question. That I knew. I am not some introspective self-endeavorer, some soul spelunker after the depths of my own virtues, or the lack thereof. I knew I hadn’t typed it. It was preposterous to say or to even think that I had. Therefore, she must have. Sometime in the night when I was passed out on the porch, she must have made her way down and typed it to me to find when I woke up and then to somehow answer. Perhaps, at breakfast, or at dinner, or somewhere in between. I would have to answer her yes because yes I love her as much as I loved anyone or anything before. Love is relative to that which you have to give and it is only faulty-thinking to believe that it is any more than that. Some of us have little while some of us have much, but so rarely do levels match so that people are adequately paired. I have never met my equal.

Before I could lie down the phone rang and I answered. An invitation to breakfast, or an offer for breakfast to be served to me. I chose the latter, hoping Victoria would bring it. I bathed again, shaved, brushed my teeth and gargled, and dressed. By the time I sat down to the Underwood to type more on the matter of my infatuation with her, there was a soft tittering upon the door fitting of her. And through the glass pane I could see her silhouette, sunlight showering her, and a morning breeze tussling her hair. I opened the door and she smiled much as she did at the bookstore, but I realized then that it was the first time I ever stood across from her with nothing between us. Nothing but a brown paper bag, which I suspected contained breakfast.

“Fresh muffins, strawberries, blueberries, and two egg and cheese croissants. Would you like some coffee, Mr. Dunleavy?”

I almost couldn’t answer. I almost didn’t recognize my own name. I was happy I had bathed or I would have been rather embarrassed. I didn’t suspect that I would have been confronted with the reality of her this soon, so I was unsure how to proceed so early in the morning. My brain was in a haze still. I forgot the question she had asked me and when I said, “What did you say,” it came out in a slur of words which she deciphered and smiled back asking if I would like some coffee. There was a pot in the cabin I hadn’t noticed and when I nodded yes she began to make it. She laid my breakfast out for me on the table and prepared two mugs and it was like we were a couple. We were, if only briefly in time, paired and coupled.

An emergency session of Congress in my head convened. My sovereignty was under attack and war was inevitable. There were arguments and speeches being made. But which war would I choose to wage? Still in the luxurious position of at least having the illusion of choice, I deliberated there on the spot. Choice One, that of a blundering old perverted man against a young innocent girl. Or Choice Two, the one of the wise-old man with scruples and resistance who rises above the wicked intentions of a hormonal teenage girl in her rye that cannot still make proper decisions of her own in a body of which she is still learning to navigate through wolves she is yet to fully understand. I am one such wolf, Jack Dunleavy, long in the tooth, but a wolf nonetheless. I could hardly concentrate on breakfast for all the hullabaloo in my head when Victoria reached across the table and grabbed my hand.

“I came to serve you breakfast, but also for your answer. You were passed out when I came down last night. I was hoping you were awake. So I typed it out for you and now, well, I wish to know. All those days in the bookstore when you would look at me and I would look at you, two years or so of glimpses and kind words and hellos and goodbyes and not one outward gesture that you might want anything more of me than to just to look. So I have to know, do you love me? And by love I mean it in the very loosest sense.” The slick grin that tailed her script said it all.

She stood up and untied her dress as a Turkish trader might for goods she is sure of that she wishes desperately to part with. As though to display them just might sway the answer of her prospective customer to her favor. I am a man haunted by the ghosts of his imagination, and such cannot be raised or expelled by any manner of adjuration. I am stuck with me, fifty two years of being me, of not understanding who I really am, of loyalty and disloyalty, being wishy-washy, as it has been said, and I fear it to be a terminal condition.

But in this instance, against the rally of cries of the conservatives in me that wish not for change, who most entirely get their way with me and have controlled this sovereignty from the beginning, and against the liberal minority who wished for me to merely flatter the girl, flirt with no substance, live a little in the moment but within restraint and the respect of her being, there was a sudden and savage coup d’etat. And a sovereign political entity that has reigned in relative peace and certainty for half a century, that minded his manners and ate his vegetables and washed behind his ears and never chewed his fingernails and cleaned his messes and never broke curfew, or told a lie, and who slept eight hours every night and took his medicine, suddenly faced a national razor of great efficacy. And in their blood arose my passion.

I took her in my hands and kissed her strongly, our teeth clashing as two ships, tongues lapping like salty waves, furiously and passionately as though to inveigle the other's soul as quickly as possible, to capture the flag, then receding, stabilizing to regroup and make it last longer for God and Queen. The bloodletting in my head continued all the while, grossly fat and obtuse, and wiry, decrepit politicians hobbled and dragged to the guillotine by their ears, heads rolling as my fingers dove to the soft skin of her navel and down to the hair above her lady door.

There was no way of quelling the rebellion or stabilizing the government when my fingertips trespassed in her. I was in the thralls of violent revolution and what would be bore out of it was a mystery to me that I cared not to ponder in the midst of my fingers skinny-dipping in her syrupy pudendum. And the warm gush of fluid reminded me of being a child and shoving my hand in a pumpkin for an instant, and then of something else, someone, sometime other. No one clearly came to mind for Victoria eclipsed everything and everyone I had ever been with. She was perfect and desirous in every way and responded to my touch with both a servility and a robust eagerness that I had experienced before quite not.

There was 500 years of Shakespeare in her. All the sonnets, the plays, the players, the actors, even the thoughts that never materialized to words. All the muses. All the art in the world. The empires. The dynasties. Ancient Egypt. Cleopatra. All the good music. All the drugs. The acid. The booze. Salvador Dali. The Vegas lights. All the worthwhile books and oodles and oodles of paradises lost and found and lost yet again. Tons and tons of red roses all buried in her silk perfect purse.

I worked her with my fingers the way a blind musician works strings of an instrument, dictated by the sound produced rather than the procedure of practice. We kissed still. We stumbled as conjoined twins would, cocooned in our lustful sac, bound by ropes of bother all the while unshackled from over two years of mutual restraint. A vase of flowers fell and shattered, a glass followed, an empty wine bottle, a framed photograph of Edith Wharton who may have been in 1920 writing of this very happening, only to scrap it later when the content proved too racy for contemporary readers, thus, why we were cast off to some future time to meet here like this. Our time being now. Materialized long after her death no different than a story on paper when at last its read and lived. We were a story in life perhaps typed on this very Underwood, left on a shelf of our own. Her cliterature. Edith Wharton smut.

We made our way to the bed. Breakfast abandoned on the table. Coffee being forlorn in the pot, dripping, dripping, the pot huffing at its uselessness. She soaked and webbed my fingers and puddled in my palm. Tight and streaming as my fingers became her soul’s riverbed. And all the lurid terms for the stages and states of feminine wetness I ever read in those dirty magazines that I was never supposed to read, in the only previous insurrection against my sovereignty, I swear it, scrolled across my mind like newsflashes on the bottom of a frantic TV. Vazz, vajayjuice, cwinge, fecum, snatch cunk, snail trail, water boarded, spunk, vag pulp, flash flood, supersoaker, wizard’s potion, nooch juice, slitquid, brothel broth, pajama snot, cunny batter, snatch batch, hip juice, bingo dot, poonani tsunami, kitty sweat, baby gravy, malty, vedgie, splooey, nut goo, mango chutney, girl gravy, facial bird bath, taste of home, dog water, flapsnot, bollock yogurt, wanties, cumsicle, joy juice, gineslime, cumscuttle, girlcum, boxsnot, pook, kitty chowder, trib, holey water, sewomen, fetus juice, lemon squeeze, vulveeta, spooge, heam, oyster sauce, cooch juice, cherry sauce, slup, ball syrup, quim, blemen, chumming, poonspiration, railroad gin, coontang, poonshine, on and on and on.

It all rolled across my dirty little eyelids, and I realized I was never as decent as I purported myself to be, never was above porn, married moms, and hookers, and this moment was not of Edith Wharton’s progressive future writing, her endeavors in erotica, but the crux of my own degeneration and my repressed story. That which I never before had the ability to tell or to live.

This was the lump sum of all my lust. Every desire I ever had and never acted upon, every pass I missed, every boner that came and went, every opportunity lost or taken from me, it was all being paid out to me right here and now and it was as though I had won the Powerball Lottery and was blowing my wad all at once.

And when I had her for dinner, her thin legs wrapped around my neck, she arched her back as though to lose herself entirely inside of me, to slip down into my throat as though Disneyland was in my guts. I felt unsavory, like one of those beasts, or Pennywise in the gutter having coaxed her down, but the feeling passed and I persisted. She moaned and writhed seemingly possessed like Linda Blair, and my tongue crucifixed her unholy hole. How wicked I felt for a moment in my debauchery. Like I had hornswoggled her decency and her parents. A wolf gorging himself on the sum of all his ripe desires at the expense of their flesh and blood.

But it was too late to turn back now, my face buried in her rose bush, my tongue pillaging her cunny tunnel, and my face soaked in her love nectar. Her lobster sauce. Her foof juice. Her gut gravy. I was the first face to be here, I felt for sure, so it was no less than an Apollo 11 moment for me and my rover of a tongue bounced across the rocky lunar surface of her unchartered moon pie where I would plant my flag. I ate and suckled and ate and suckled and she gushed badger poison out her succulent beav-cleav and I graciously lapped it up until my face was a glazed donut of both pride and shame.

It was then, there at that very moment in time when I saw her beautiful face across the expanse of her naked body, between her beautiful sloped yet perky tits that I realized she bore an uncanny resemblance to Riley Reid, the porn star, down to the shape and texture of her eyebrows and the art of her eye-shadow. Had they to make a movie of Riley Reid’s life, or a high school musical production, it was Vitoria who would be cast to star.

And as though by some sort of telekinesis, she began to purr nonsensical words like I remember women in my mother’s church purring when the reverend, Old Spice, I called him, stirred them up just before the men broke out and all hell broke loose and mom said they were “speaking in tongues.” And when I asked mom what they were speaking about, she said “salvation” just before she too caught the fever and I sunk down into the pew hoping to disappear into the gum on the bottom of my shoe. I often heard my mom and dad speaking in tongues in their bedroom when my dad struck out at the bars.

But Victoria said the same obscene words that Riley Reid said when she was being piped in a garage by a dirty mechanic named Tony. And she said the same lurid words Riley Reid said when she was being shafted in the jail cell by a fat guard whose keys melodically jingled like Salvation Army bells in department stores at Christmastime.

I knew it was no coincidence then. As my throat became her Niagara Falls, I realized then I was not with the Christian girl at the bookstore who I had admired for two years, who aspired to be a pharmacist. I had been introduced to another girl who I had not before met. I was with the possessed protégé of a celebrated porn star, who in times of desperation like me, watched Riley Reid be bounced and balled and battered all over our cellphone screens.

But her perspective was the mirrored opposite of mine, and here we were, early morning in Edith Wharton’s cabin, only a few hundred yards from her house, so that if the windows were open her parents or siblings might hear the foulness of her in the thralls of ecstasy, screaming the most indecent things she has ever said. They might hear her speaking in tongues as my tongue assaulted her gibbler. Her pink taco. Her cum box.

I have never been a speak-during-sex type person, but when my tongue felt as though it had beat the speed-bag of her clitoris as much as it could beat it, and I pulled down my pants and prepared for the next phase of my colonization of paradise and she parted her legs a little further to accommodate, I asked her if she knew who Riley Reid was. And she lit up like a Roman candle and asked if I knew her too. I knew before she said anything else that she wore her hair and eye shadow in such a way, she plucked her eyebrows just so, as a subtle message to whoever, that she was a goblet of such desire to be had.

Her parents, she said, never would know, but she hoped that maybe someone would recognize the likeness of her effort. She asked me as I began to probe her if I felt she closely resembled her and when I said yes, which was a vast understatement for truly she was Ms. Reid’s doppelgänger, she shrieked in delight and transformed further into the character of someone I did not expect to know. She even had Riley Reid’s welcome mat of pubic hair above her honeypot. She said that she had thought of getting the same tattoos Riley Reid had down her spine, but decided that was going too far.

I asked if she ever thought she would do porn, and she pulled me into her and whimpered before proclaiming that she was doing one now and this would be all the porn she would ever do. After this, she would be decent again and wait for marriage. Then with all the discussion aside, she opened her mouth as I thrust into her and she cried as though from a script which I’ve heard Riley Reid recite countless times. And her face expressed the exact expressions Riley Reid expressed, and when she opened her eyes and noticed me noticing, she smiled sinfully at me, bit her lip, and then carried on.

Morning became early afternoon, then late afternoon, and our marathon romp waged on, seemingly without end. It was as though she were the last woman I was ever going to saddle. She was my Little Bighorn and I was guns blazing on that hot Dakota hillside, shot up but still standing, hot blood running down my legs. I bent and twisted her. I throttled and pounded and slapped her. I gently caressed her and ravaged her to the point that her skin was red with Indian burns and bruised before we were even finished.

We were every scenario. I was her stepdad, then her stepbrother, then her masseuse. Then I was two black guys in a gas station bathroom. Then I gang-banged her with me, me, me, me, me and me all taking turns. Then simultaneously three of us assailed her orifices, which opened like wild orchids open. Then she was a student and I was the reluctant teacher. Then she was the babysitter. The neighbor. The nerdy photographer in the darkroom. The pizza delivery girl. She was everything that day I remember Riley Reid ever being.

I bent and twisted her some more. I put her legs behind her neck and ate her like a Vegas buffet. Her slots gushing bountiful girl juice jackpots so plentifully I had to push her up and hold her between my ravenous laps and gulps so not to loose any of her succulence to the sheets. My hands on the back of her thighs leaving fingerprints on her flesh. Her eyes rolling back in her head like plums and oranges and lucky number sevens. Sweat all over glistening and sticking us together in a suction that broke only with a concerted thrust. Her mouth open and moaning. Screaming. Speaking wildly like a faithful Pentecostal, drunk on the Holy Spirit.

She nearly passed out a few times. She screamed because there was no one to hear us but for the ghost of Edith Wharton, and maybe some raccoons or squirrels out the window who do the same thing at night for all that I know, just like this. She was one incredible collage of every porno I’ve ever seen Riley Reid ever do.

And I oiled her like they oiled the tinman. Like she had been out in the rain for forty years and couldn’t move. One hole at a time. There was plenty to go around. All stowed up from every time I ever saw her. Every book I ever bought off her. This is Gone With The Wind on her face. The The Alchemist down her gullet and Cat’s Cradle painting her ovaries. And this, to top it all off, is The Road deep, deep in her ass.

I would never have thought myself capable of such a terrific feat. Such luck. I’ve had good sex before. I’ve had bad sex. Good sex that makes you feel like you’re the stern of some impervious Viking ship, a ramrod, some mythical creature that walks on three legs with armor for skin and twelve heads and as many dicks, some Casanova especial. The bad sex, though, had been enough at times to never want to do it again. To join a monastery and find my salvation within those holy walls. Walls that keep out all the bad. All the fear. All the embarrassment in a world brimming full of it. All the disappointment of the inevitable. All the tragedy and doubt.

But I slugged on and Victoria was my Maserati. The reason why I never cashed in. Why my marriages didn’t pan out. Why I had to endure whore after whore, crazy after crazy, prude after prude. It was all worth it. She was my parole after 25 years to life of boredom and sacrifice and mortgages and loans and pill pushing. She was my repentance. My salvation. Edith Wharton, eat your heart out. Maybe her and I are but a story you wrote 100 years ago in this cabin, on this Underwood, and put upon a shelf. And if so my gratitude to you is boundless and not repayable. A price too steep, one might say of her. But we became real, materialized somehow, and are no longer indebted to you. We became more than just your thoughts and ink, we are independent of you now. But as in real life, I am not sure where the story ends or how much more is left to be read, only Edith Wharton knows and she is dead.

Regardless, the week went on and we met several times a day, usually in the cabin, to continue our affair. Once or twice we were in the woods. In a canoe. And on my last day, my last night, as she lied in bed, I contentedly sat and tit-tit-tattered at the Underwood. I contemplated us, knowing that although she naively avowed that it can and will go on forever, never addressing obvious impediments, I know like my stay here that is fated to expiry, so too are we. To an end of some sort, a closing chapter and a last page.

I feel a certain undeniable sadness because of it. I very much am Ethan Frome with a different ending. Having gained the girl only to understand that he will inevitably lose her. That he would be old and withered one day near his end, while she still would be young and spry with half her life ahead of her. My love for her would calculate and gain interest to be worth more than all the world itself by then, and I could buy her loyalty in that regard, guilt her to stay when I am old and gray and my health fails as Mrs. Frome had done in her own wicked contemptuous way.

Or I could simply leave it as it was this week. A brief and beautiful affair that left us both nonetheless indebted and satisfied in that it culminated to more than a missed opportunity. I might let it go on. I should let it go on, at least a little further. But it could never be as good as it is now. She might get pregnant, or her parents might learn of us, or we might both be happy in love.

I paint a portrait of words looking at her as she lay robed in only a sheet. Words are forever. These words from this typewriter on this page will live when she and I do not. Time cannot be possessed and at times it runs from us like a stray dog. It seems never to rest or to sit on us the way we would like it to at times. There will never be time enough and everything will end in some measure of grief. There is no end that will ever satisfy any of us adequately, but acceptance for whatever may be is the only way to have any peace in this world.

And while I’ve gained her in reality, I am not unaware that I have lost her in that beautiful dream of anticipation. Of going to that bookstore and seeing her, standing in line and waiting for her to smile at me and read the title and author of my book, as she always did. How long until she floats on away from me? What is there left to be redeemed and given? To be had and admired? I know it is dearer to me because she is my dream, and my final affair of any real consequence. I do not know what I am to her.

She stirs, takes a deep breath, and then falls back asleep. I smile at her. Even as she sleeps, time passes, and I age. At some point I will forget her face. It will blur or distort in such a way in my memory that will make it unrecognizable. We make ghosts all throughout life that are vapors of old desirous dreams. We haunt the hearts of old lovers, just as they may haunt us. But it must be a dreadful thing to have no dreams left to be dreamed. No time. To have only sleep.