I Wish I Didn't Love You So

I took a job while in college at a funeral home near the campus. It was spring of 1958 and the flowers on the crabapples and cherries were in bloom, and a line of new television sets glowed in Beasley's Electric shop window. It was the dawn of a new age, the newspapers heralded. The Russians launched rockets to space and the Americans followed. 

Somehwere between all of that, there was an ad in the paper — mortuary assistant, it read. It claimed it was the perfect job for a college student, and I believed in such things as fate which was a silly holdover from my youth that seemed to cling to me. I was, after all, the last child to get rid of his baby fat, or so my mother liked to tell everyone.  

I figured the job would be arranging flowers or telling an endless line of sad people that I was sorry for their loss. Empathizing. Mourning myself as though I also knew the person, and knew them quite well. I was part of the family. Or maybe I would be putting those purple flags on the fenders of cars and telling everyone in the softest voice possible to turn on their high-beams and follow the car in front of them to the cemetery as closely and as safely as possible. But it was none of that. 

A better title for the job would have been "body washer." If I wasn't wheeling someone to a room to be emblamed or to another room for some beautician or family member to do their hair or makeup for the funeral, that is what I did — I washed bodies. It was a sort of sponge bath with some kind of translucent liquid soap in warm milky-water that was supposed to give the skin a lifelike luster for the showing. It did wonders for my hands. 

Most of the people I bathed were over 80 years-old with the tiredness of life apparent on their worn bodies. We all become ridiculous caricatures of our former selves eventually, I can say. A person wears their age at some point in life. Gravity has its way. Their youth betrays them. Their backs are misshapen. Their thin skin sagging and wrinkled all over, which didn't bother me at all after I bathed one or two. But as I did the first two, I thought I would quit and take a job someplace where things were much simpler. Where no one got a post-mortem erection like some obelisk, or twitched a sudden and final hurrah that scared the hell out of me. 

The pay was decent and I was in college with plans to go on to medical school so not working wasn't an option. Further, I had some sense that working in a funeral home with bodies would be a good experience to put on my application for medical school when the time came. I could embellish my duties. "Mortuary assistant" leaves a lot to the imagination. 

"Beware of the sleeping beauties," Cliff, a cantankerous coworker, warned me with a wry grin. He was a light-skinned gaunt old man who looked like a cross between a ferret and a sack of dead bones and who worked at the funeral home for forty years. Since right after the first War, he said. He looked like a body that had woke up and crawled out of a casket. He was also a mortuary assistant, but he no longer washed bodies. Gave that up long ago, he boasted. He drives the hearse or he arranges flowers and greets people at the door — as morbid as he looks in a certain light.

"You're not Prince Charming and she is not only sleeping," he whispered. "Don't forget it, pal."

I didn't know what he meant. The people who came through were old and sickly and as they lied there it looked as though they were meant to be there. As though this was some hotel and they checked themselves in because they were tired and worn out. And at last, they were at peace. No bills. No taxes. No sickness. No drama of living. Beauty wasn't in the description. Beauty had faded from them long ago. Been drained of them by their toils and labor. By too much sun or too much work. By too much love, or rather, too much love lost. By age and stress. All that was left of the ones I had seen was a wrinkled gray prune. A sack of old bones and pudding for blood.

I never saw any children because they were handled by the mortician, Frank, or Frank's father, Fred, who was semi-retired but kept his hand in the family business when Frank needed the help. So I didn't have the trauma of handling a dead child and the child's parents were at least at ease that their child was handled with the utmost professionalism and not by some college kid working part-time through pre-med school so he didn't have to flip burgers in a diner. There were only a few children and the thought of them made me incredibly sad, but if I was to become a doctor, it would be something I'd have to get used to. Be impervious to. I would have to see bodies, not people. 

Every time I saw Cliff, he grinned at me and playfully winked so that I knew he was reminding me of his most ambigious warning — beware of the sleeping beauties. I thought of the seven dwarves. I thought of a poisoned apple. I thought of that glass coffin and the prince's kiss. I excused it to Cliff being an eccentric old man who entertained himself by being peculiar. 

It was summer of the following year and I was working Thursday, though I was normally off Thursdays. It was hot and humid and the funeral home had air conditioning so it was a relief to work. I normally worked Fridays through Sundays. Sundays were always the busiest days. I was trying to pick up extra hours and the other guy they hired quit and dropped out of college because he wanted to be Elvis Presley. He greased his hair back and bought a motorcycle and rode out of town. I was only taking Mondays and Tuesdays off, which I needed to keep up with my schoolwork. It seemed that hardly anyone died on those days for some reason, and even when they did, they could wait to be washed because most people put funerals off until Saturday if they can so that no one had to take a day off work. Even your funeral gets scheduled against other people's schedules. They will try to make your death as convenient as possible. 

It was near the end of my shift on that Thursday that they wheeled her in from the back of the hearse which had picked her up at the hospital. I was in the lounge having a cup of coffee enjoying the cool of the air conditioning when she came rolling in. The squeaking of the wheels of the guernsey gave her arrival away. She was going to be it for me that day. The last one.

"Suicide," George muttered as he pushed her to the elevator across the floral carpet. He often revealed the cause of death as a subject of morbid interest. "Might sad. Lord, have mercy on the sweet girl." George was a stocky dark-skinned man and his voice was like velvet, so much so that it was a pleasure to hear him say anything at all. He was from Kentucky and moved Northeast to get away from the South in 1938. He found work with Fred and Frank at the funeral home. Said he couldn't figure why all black folk didn't do the same. When Cliff was off, George assumed his duties. He drove the hearse, arranged the flowers, and greeted people at the door. Frank called them "day and night" or "night and day." He often sung it. 

Frank was the boss and was a homosexual who was an avid tap dancer. Sometimes you could hear him tap dancing through the building when he wasn't embalming bodies. Every floor was tile and he wore his tap shoes everywhere he went so that he could tap at any moment if the mood struck him. His boyfriend was a banker and a baker. Every holiday the funeral home kitchen was full of baked cookies or cakes decorated for the occasion. No one went without as their generosity was overwhelming. No one ever met Frank's boyfriend, which seems like such a puerile title for someone's significant other when they are both well into adulthood. A lack of proper words for such things afflicts the English language. 

George left her with me and gave me a pat on the shoulder which was his way of passing the body off to me. He never exactly said, but sometimes he left his large hand on my shoulder a little longer, or he squeezed a little harder, which I took to mean that he was imbueing in me the Holy Spirit. Passing it off like a baton in a relay. Or, at least, trying. I imagine he said a silent prayer for me because he was kind in that way. He cared for people more than most. He was a devoutly religious man and often professed his love of the gospel. Hardly a day passed when he didn't quote "The Good Book," as he called it. He was a Bible thumper through and through.

I was alone with her in the cleaning room. Frank was upstairs tapping in his office. Sometimes I'd try to guess what song he was tapping to because the radio or phonograph was too low in volume to hear it. I would hum along to the clip and clop of his gay feet until I got it. "Blue skies," I guessed as I slowly removed the sheet from the body. And "Blue Skies" it was. 

It isn't that I haven't seen a beautiful woman before in my relatively short life, the shortness of which I am conscious of, because I had. They weren't a foreign species to me. I had seen them in markets and magazines and inside those television sets in Beasley's Electric shop. I had seen them at fairs, and in school, and on the beach in the summer, and practically everywhere they were to be seen. It is only that I hadn't seen anyone who quite perfectly matched my previously unrealized and undefined sense of beauty before that moment. 

Maybe it was augmented by the fact that she lied there so perfectly still and I hadn't before then realized how still a dead person does lie. All animation so abnormally stricken from her. Even the slightest of twitches and blinks and the most modest of breaths and exhalations did not exist and there was nothing I could do to purposefully or accidentally wake her that would disturb my captive admiration. All my senses, logic and rationale, were immediately arrested in a moment of rapt enthrallment. Habeas Corpus was suspended. Imprisoned was my good sense.

She made me realize what every other body did not. What watching a Marilyn Monroe movie did not, either. She made me feel a way that no other living soul could and the tragedy of it immediately took my breath, and with it, a part of my soul. I went from a young man free to a man convicted, tried, and soon to be executed by the hopelessness of an ill-fated affair.

Sleeping beauties, I could hear Cliff say in my ear. His horrid hot breath from cigarettes and black coffee humidifying my brain like Charles Foster Kane murmuring his last fateful word, dropping that snow globe with the last syllable. Sleeping beauties. Absent the "beware of" prelusion. 

She must be to whom he referred, in general. A beautiful young woman who tragically passed somehow. And there she was, naked on the table in front of me, absent only her soul. The sheet like a shroud on the floor below her small bare feet. A perfect beauty. A rose cut in its bloom, unaware of its clipping. I stood there in awe, not sure what to do. Not sure how I felt or why I seemed suddnely not to function as routinely and properly as I had in my simple duties for better than a year. This gripping paralysis was foreign to me, yet certain and undeniable. It was as though I were in the hand of God Himself, who made me regard her. Who brought her to me, however tragically. 

I read the chart that came and she was 20 years old — only a year younger than myself. Her name was Scarlett Loeffler. I had never known a Scarlett in my life, but surely reading her name evoked memories of my mother's favorite movie, "Gone With the Wind," and this Scarlett looked much like that Scarlett. They had the same black hair and porcelain skin, but surely this Scarlett had a better disposition. There wasn't a hint of cruelty or manipulation upon her face. She had kind and soft features that seemed, in their present state, incapable of hardening or forming to something scurrilous and spiteful. She had whisky-colored eyes that gleamed in a prepetual scintillating barlight. Drinks never drunk. 

Lord, how I wondered. Suicide, I contemplated in a stupor. It seemed so improbable. Why? I covered her up to be decent. I decided I couldn't wash her, yet I knew I couldn't ask someone else to do so because I would be too embarrassed as to why they would assume I couldn't. It would be indicative of my youth persisting and my unprofessionalism as a future doctor. A clear indictment of immaturity. I would be but a greenhorn in the eyes of whoever knew that a pretty young woman, recently deceased, got the better of me, a green and guileless schoolboy. A jejune rube late to maturity and unsophisticated in medical matters that might involve those of the opposite sex. Nothing besides a callow moppet who is quite clearly, and problematically, a virgin. I would then be forced to wear the blight of that ignonimious V on my forehead, forevermore. 

The matter wasn't that I've not washed a woman before. I have washed many grandmothers and mothers and those who looked like the great aunts of someone and librarians and lesbians, and those ladies you see at the bingo halls and Red Cross campaigns and beauty parlors. Gray women with sagging breasts that no longer seem like breasts, rather like some sort of contorted floppy winesacks that are sold on Indian reservations made from genuine buffalo leather. The inevitable outcome of age — that leathery sag. 

I had with great calm and rectitude washed these Daughters of the American Revolution and these aged lumpy candystripers with gravy-colored skin and chain-smoking secretaries without the slightest qualm or dilemma. But this woman, who was near my age, I could not touch, rather, I stood in complete crisis looking over her as though she were fine art and I, an overwhelmed schoolkid in a museum. 

I stood there and stared after I pulled that white sheet up near to her chin so to cover the breasts that had already been exposed and were permanently burned into the most pleasing part of my memory. That made me blush in their simple yet raw allure. In the delicacy and forbidden fruit of their perfect pear-like shape, still living on a limb that was not, but that appeared as though it was not exhausted of its youth in the least, let alone its life. 

All that was left of her that was exposed to me in the cold basement beneath the flourescent light was her beautiful face upon which I gazed and in which I saw an eternity of missed opportunities. Moments that never would be because I hadn't the chance to know her before she took her life for whatever reason she did. I wondered how close she lived to me. If we went to the same school or church. If we had missed each other in the misfortune of passing, unlucky as I were. 

I couldn't stall forever. Frank's feet reminded me of that as they tapped the refrain of "Singing in the Rain." I thought to release one limb from under the cover at a time and wash her that way. I could hardly touch her for I felt for the first time like a pervert because I was naturally attracted to her to the point that a pulse didn't much matter, as nefarious as that may sound. That I was lost in the delusions of necrophilia and falling in love with her in minutes, in blinks, as the lights hummed and Frank's feet sounded like thunder above doing his best Gene Kelly. 

And she, Ms. Scarlett Loeffler, looked heavenward with her eyes wide shut as my mind toiled to the possible nomenclature of what this was for I, since a boyhood that wasn't so long lost, have defined everything, labeled everything, so that I knew exactly where to put it — feelings no less than physical things. 

The matter before me of course was where would I put her in my heart? Was this to be all there ever was? Me washing her limbs, respecting her no longer relevant modesty, and then turning her over to Frank to have her blood drained and organs stripped. To be stitched and sewn shut. Glued up. The works. To have her mother dress her and do her makeup and present her to friends and family where everyone would say such depressing things as "it is such a tragedy," or remark as to how "it is a pity that someone so beautiful would do such a thing," as though beauty somehow should make one invincible. Or that ugliness ought to make one more prone. 

I was going mad. I was weak and my eyes fluttered with every schism of the flickering lights within which I was imprisoned. And I knew, in my heart, that she was the one — Scarlett Loeffler was my intended, my soulmate, despite being tragically sacked by her own hand. Thus, my soul was less by her death and I grieved in my moment of both rejoice and awe of having found her. There wasn't time for just one emotion in a time like this. 

There was some manner of an appeal to heaven in the way she looked upward. A deep and yet impassive despair evident upon her face that was lovely depite it. I decided to open her eyes to see their color. To make her more natural. And she gazed at the lights above her as though she was desperately searching for something lost. Then her arm fell from the table and I jumped, startled because of it. It wasn't unusual for a limb to fall in such a way. Usually though, it only occurred when the body was obese for the tables were rather narrow, but plenty wide for someone as petite as Scarlett. 

I placed the estranged arm back with her body and noticed that it was the arm with the fateful cut which had been sewn postmortem. It was an awful sight. A wicked and grotesque wound incongruous to the body it marked. Hasty stitchwork. Jagged lines and black stitches that formed what appeared to be an assembly of beastly teeth. It wouldn't matter, thoigh, since her arm would be tucked in the coffin, but carefully I bandaged it with great care as though she were living, or as though I could deny the wound its efficacy. 

It was then that she blinked. I thought at first the occasional scintillation of fallible light might have beguiled my eye, but then she sat up, straight up, and gasped, the sheet falling from her chest. There she was, naked again, upright yet still, like some carved Michelangelo masterpiece from an Italian museum tragically misplaced in the basement of a funeral home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is a very long way from Heaven. 

I stumbled backwards and fell to the ground overturning the basin of milky-water from the cart. It made such a ruckus that I knew I had probably alarmed someone upstairs. From the ground I looked up and there she was, still sitting upright as though she had only been sleeping. Yet still, disoriented, she gazed ahead and reacted not at all to the bumbling mortuary assistant that was me who struggled to get to his feet because of the slickness of the floor and being ill-equipped in worn sneakers. Sure enough, moments later, George called down and asked if I was alright and I yelled back, yes, I was fine. Just knocked over the bath, as we called it. Thankfully, he didn't come down or else the secret would have not been mine alone. It all might have been ruined. 

Then she spoke. "Where — am I?" 

"Um."

She seemed to gain immediate function of her incapacitated senses as she looked around and made eye contact with me. I slipped again like an oaf, but caught myself before falling. My shoes squealed like ensnared minks — or how I would imagine ensnared minks to squeal. I was dumbfounded. I immediately assumed it was an error of the hospitals. But I was stunned and happy. Excited to tell George tragedy had been miraculously averted, praise Jesus! Set to share with Frank that we have one less customer. Maybe I'd call her parents who must have been so distraught. What a happy call that would be. Maybe I'd be in the newspaper, the thought raging to conflagration, burning any sense that I might have had. 

I ran to get George who came downstairs with me. I simply told him that I had something remarkable to show him. I didn't say what because I still didn't rightly believe it myself or know how to describe it. But when we got to the basement, Scarlett was lying on the table as she was before. Deceased as she was before. Her eyes wide-open still.  

"What is it, son?" he asked. 

"No. Nothing. Nothing at all." I was lost and befuddled, stymied by the sudden turn of events. There she lay as though she hadn't got up only seconds ago. George gave me a hearty pat on the back and went back upstairs. His boots trailed off and I stood there and gazed at the beautiful girl wondering if I had simply gone mad. Or if this was some hopeful, yet delusory daydream. 

But then she sat up again, almost as soon as he was gone. And I thought to call him back but realized that this was between her and I. This was our secret. If I called him and he came back, she would again lie down and I would look like a fool. And this time he might insist that I talk to Frank or go see a doctor. To everyone else in the world, perhaps, she was dead. But to me, and to only me, she was very much alive. That is the way it was. 

She looked down at her left wrist which was bandaged. Made whole yet not whole at all. A mere subterfuge. She began to take off the bandage until I implored her to leave it on. You need to heal, I said. 

"Are you a doctor?" she asked. I didn't answer. 

"You're alive!" I proclaimed excitedly. I was only moderately less fanatical than Dr. Frankenstein in the gory movie. Yet she was emphatically more lovely than that monster. I reveled in her awakening. I covered her with the sheet and she turned her legs over the edge of the table and stood up, holding on to my arm, wearing the sheet like a toga. At first, unsteady on her feet, but quickly she found her footing and she didn't wobble at all. 

"Help me," she implored. "Please, will you help me?" 

I didn't understand. I didn't know what it was that I could do for her. I could no longer hear Frank tap dancing, which I knew meant he would be coming down the steps soon to take over. Maybe George had talked to him already. Thank you, Leonard, he would say. Everyone else called me Leo, but Frank called me Leonard. I was never in the room for what he does. For the embalming process. I considered it gruesome and I cared not to be a part or to think on it.

"Come with me!" I urged. I had no plan, but I knew I had to get her out of there. We had to go somewhere until it could be figured out. 

With the sheet wrapped around her and my arm around her shoulder, I escorted her up the stairs and out the back door. We didn't see anyone on the way, fortunately, or else the matter would have been far more complicated for us both. She stopped and bent down to take off her toe tag, apologized, then we hurried on. I put her in Frank's new yellow Buick with the white-vinyl top and white-wall tires. He had let me drive it once before, but only to the grocery to get coffee and filters. I told her to wait and I ran back in and retrieved the keys from his office. Thankfully, he was not there. He was probably downstairs looking for her, the body, as she was, clutching his doctor's bag full of grisly instruments. He was probably looking for me as well. 

It would make no sense to anyone. It hardly made any sense to me, but it was so, and such as it was, I couldn't deny it. Love is not a logical or sensical emotion, nor simply a state of mind. The history of the world is a series of irrational and chaotic events whose origins are predicated upon some form of love, or one of its derivatives. Its children and stepchildren. Illegitimate or otherwise. Love is equal to life and death. It is equivalent 

to consciousness and unconciousness. It is another state of existence without which we are lost and of which we are bound at some point or another — usually, when it is least expected. 

"Where are we going?" she asked shrouded in the sheet and sitting proper and upright beside me. Her life fully restored, though it had just been extinguished. I put the car in drive and rolled down the hill to the highway — Route 1 — which would take us to Rockland, Maine where my father owned a vacation home. A beautiful old seaside Victorian home that no one ever stayed in besides for us some summer weekends when he took mother and I, always telling us what it would be someday that it wasn't now. A new window here. A new door there. The porch would be sanded and stained and painted another color. The rocky seashore would be dragged, rocks removed and stacked in a large pile up the beach so it will only be smooth sand for us to walk on. 

My father looked longingly at the ocean when we went up there. I recall him standing there with a half-grin gazing out. He didn't shave for days and there was stubble on his face. He smelled of liquor and cigars. Sometimes he would rub his bristly chin that I liked to touch. Sometimes he had a cup of coffee he'd sip. But no matter, he'd always say the same thing to me as I stood beside him. From when I was knee-high to when I was as tall as him. "There is life in the water. There is another world there."

Then the memory vanished. 

"Rockland, Maine," I told her. "I have a house up there." Of course, I lied. It wasn't my house. But it was in a way. Surely, if my parents died, it would be willed to me. Unfinished as it was. Still a beautiful home. "I suppose I've done a poor job introducing myself. I'm Leonard Baxter. But, please, call me Leo."

She smiled. Seeming to enjoy the courtesy and formality of the introduction. "I'm Scarlett Loeffler. My mother used to call me Lettie. But I don't prefer it."

"Scarlett it is then." 

She nodded in satisfsction and gazed out the window. Her left arm still bandaged, which she rubbed gently now and then like someone might rub a genie's bottle. A sorrowful look overcame her just as a cloud overcame the sun. 

"What happened to me, Leo," she asked without looking at me. Her eyes were affixed to something alongside the road. The animation of the changing beachside, perhaps. Or maybe it was the silver guardrail that went on for miles without changing at all. "I don't remember anything. I remember that I was in my room and I had a pair of scissors. I was drinking my mother's sherry. My parents were gone. I was so alone and so cold. I was so tired of being alone." 

"You're not alone anymore, Scarlett."

She looked at me with tears in her brown eyes. Ice in the whisky. She didn't reply in words, but she smiled and there was a sincere warmth in the gesture. I dreaded that she might ask where I worked or what I did and if so, I'd have to tell her that she was pronounced deceased by a doctor at a hospital and sent to the funeral home to be prepared for burial. Where I would have bathed her. I don't know that she knew that, and I was afraid to be the one who had to remind her. Unless she asked, I would not divulge anything at all. It was all so strange. But I was in love and I didn't know what else to do.

"Are you hungry?" I asked. 

She turned her head and smiled at me. I nodded. Then I thought it over and realized we had to get her some clothes first. So we stopped in a small town on the way to Rockland at a department store. I parked along the curb in front so that I could bring things to the window and she could nod if she approved or disapproved, though she thought the whole thing silly and said she would wear anything I chose. She wrote down her sizes for me on a piece of paper after I insisted. It is peculiar for a man of my age to buy women's clothes as no woman would ever send a man to buy something as personal as clothes for her, but it was against no law so I simply had to endure the hairy eyeballs of the mousey clerks and the suspicion of the lady who helped me pick out a few things for my "invalid sister." 

Then I saw a beautiful black dress modeled by a headless mannequin and I thought she would like it. Or that she would look lovely in it. So I counted my money to be sure I had enough and fortunately I did because I was just paid yesterday and hadn't deposited anything into my savings account, which I regretted not emptying before we left New Hampshire, knowing that I would need it for an extended stay in Rockland. It would mean I'd have to go back soon to get more money. I was terrible at planning ahead, especially in a pinch. Espeically with money. 

I didn't know what I intended to do. I only knew that I was doing it. I was reacting to a situation that had no clear right or wrong response but that forced me to do something. And in those times, as my father said, you can only do what feels right. This felt right. Though I had stolen a car. And, possibly, a corpse. But the hospital clearly made a mistake. Though Scarlett only lived when it was just me. I couldn't explain that to anyone without them considering me crazy. But I knew that I wasn't. I told myself I wasn't. 

The lady gave me the change and I hurried to the car. There was a police officer standing there and I panicked. My life was over. 

"Is this your car?" he asked. 

"Yes," I cleared my throat.

"Well, you're illegally parked, son. Move it or I'll have to write you a ticket."

"Yes, sir." I threw the packages in the trunk and got in quickly. Scarlett was slumped over with her head on the passenger side window which he tapped with his nightstick. 

"Is she alright?"

"Um. Yes," I replied. "She's only sleeping."

I pulled off quickly and just as I did Scarlett came to. We stopped at a roadside rest a few miles down the road and I gave her the boxes from the trunk and she got dressed there in the car as I stood guard outside. She put on a pair of Capri pants, shoes and a black sweater. I didn't buy her underwear. It was too personal. She said she didn't mind. She looked even more real than before with clothes on. She used a red ribbon from one of the boxes to tie-up her coal black hair. 

I asked her if she wanted to listen to the radio. If she liked rock 'n' roll music. I offered to find her a program. She said she didn't prefer it. She was much more of a Pperry Como kind of girl. I smiled at her reply. She put on a pair of Frank's sunglasses from the glovebox and tied a silk handkerchief she found over her head. She looked like a moviestar. As we drove in search of a diner, I looked over at her. Again and again, I looked at her. But looked is not a good enough word. Gazed. Gawped. Stared. Ogled. Something of them all. She sat with her legs folded beneath her, seeming to be enjoying herself. Enjoying the drive. I was in love and I knew it would never be the same. A part of my youth was gone as though it melted away there in that car. They never tell you that when you're a kid. It will just disappear like that. But it does.

We got to a diner and I invited her in but she declined to leave the car. 

"I can't go inside," she confessed. 

"Oh." I had almost forgotten what I already knew. That thing about people. 

"I can't be around them, Leo," she said looking through the diner window at the patrons and the waitresses bustling around. "I don't know why. I just can't. Only you." 

I knew that if I took her inside she would revert back to that Snow White-like slumber. That which I dare not name for it hangs over us all like an ominous cloud and more so Scarlett, who had just been in its palm, but who has been granted some kind of strange reprieve by it to flatter me or to experience for herself that which she will mortally not. The strange realization that perhaps she loves me as well, or could possibly love me, lifted my spirits and imbued in me a deluge of euphoric optimism of which I was entirely unfamiliar. But I couldn't tell anyone. No one would believe me. No one would ever believe that you can love a body. 

"Take out it is then," I smiled. We ate in the car in a grove of ambrosial pines where no one would disturb us. The spot had a wonderful view of the ocean which was framed by a couple perfect Norwegian spruces and looked like a secret window. But it was not our ocean. Our ocean was ahead up the road some forty miles. I wanted her to love it. I wanted her to feel alive again and not to think about the black spot that was not so long ago. I wanted to erase it from her memory, if I could. If there was a way. 

In some moments, I know now, you don't think about forever or even the next day. You think about only now. Because it sits in your mind and there is no room for anything else. It is a crowded room. Nothing ahead and nothing behind you. Love sits in your mind and there is no voice of logic or reason. No place for common sense or doubt or anything else. It consumes you as much as you consume it. And there you are consumed without even realizing you ever had been. As though it is how it always was and nothing is unusual about it at all. 

I turned the radio on. No Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry. No Buddy Holly and his Crickets. We listened to a station that would play Perry Como. The Ink Spots. Frank Sinatra. Vaugn Monroe and The Moon Maids sung "I Wish I Didn't Love You So." 

A breeze carried in off the ocean and through the pines. I breathed that coniferous air and when I did it was as though I was breathing for the first time. I wanted time to stop and to live in this moment forever. But time never does. If anything, it seems to speed up when you are not aware. 

When we got to the house she was enamored. At first by the lighthouse nearby which was an unoccupied relic of yesteryear. It was a tall, cylindrical and white leviathan. Part of it was crumbling, estetically more so than structurally, buy it only enhanced its charm as vulnerability often does. I promised her we would go up in it after we settled in, though I realized that I had never been inside it. 

The way she looked at the house must have been the way I looked at it once. The large seaside Victorian built in the 1880's and uninhabited since 1932 or so when my grandparents died. It was willed to my father. I didn't know my grandparents, nor how they died. No one spoke of their death, so I assumed it was something tragic. I assumed it was murder-suicide. I had seen pictures of my grandmother. Photographs in pure silver frames that are still in the house. A painting my grandfather painted of her which hangs in the stairwell. She was a tragically beautiful woman. The sort that can vex a man with a glance. 

Scarlett gazed at her at the foot of the stairs with her hand resting on the elegant finial that was a mermaid stained mahogany-brown as were the spiraled stairs, the spiraling banister and the spindles. An elegant green-and-gold runner made an inviting path up the stairs which we took. Three bedrooms up and a third floor which was an open room with a large glass window that had two wing-back chairs and a bronze-plated telescope to view the ocean. That was my favorite room in the house. 

It wasn't much different than it was from when I was a kid. Only smaller. The hardwood floors creaked with every step and it smelled of old pipe tobacco, brandy and wood varnish. The sole light in the room was a dimly-lit pendulous light fixture, a bronze chandelier with electric candle lights which cast a universe of fantastic shadows across the spacious room. Scarlett barely said a word but was clearly in awe. Especially in the observatory, as we called it. The telescope was meant for stargazing, but was just as good for seeing distant ships, or the humps of whales surfacing, or the fins of dolphins or sharks through the foam-capped waves, scouring the coast. 

It had been a few years since I had been here. Fortunately, I remembered where the key was kept. I forgot that my grandmother's clothes hung in the closet where I sometimes hid when I was small. My grandfather's clothes hung in another. His were far less extravagant than hers. Old clothes from the teens and twenties. Tweed suits and sequined flapper dresses and ostentatious hats with peacock and ostrich feather plumes. Pearls and pocket watches. Big gem rings and dangling earrings in wood boxes like pirate treasure. There was so much I had forgotten. 

For most of that evening we dressed up and humored each other with the antiquated yet elegant style of grandparents I didn't know. It was before suit pants were replaced by blue jeans and dress shoes by mass-produced rubber-sole tennis shoes. Scarlett taught me how to do the Charleston. Then we settled on clothes, and as the evening gave way to night we lit as many candles as we could find and turned on the dim electric bulbs. Then we sat outside on the wrap-around porch that was yet to be sanded, had drinks and dinner, and breathed the warm salty sea air as though it were therapeutic. We breathed in new life and exhaled the old. And for a few hours that evening, everything in the world was brand new and nothing hurt. 

The candle on the table flickered at the whim of the sea wind and we both smiled and laughed in the euphoria of a few too many drinks. I only knew how to make old fashioneds by watching my father make his. He was a surgeon when it came to making a drink. It seemed by both the manner in which he mixed the ingredients and the serious look upon his face as he did so that he knew precisely what he was doing. I tried to emulate him. I tried to pretend as though this wasn't my first time drinking but it was. It might have hit me a little harder than I presumed it would for as we walked to the beach for a moonlit stroll, I sung that Vaughn Monroe song from earlier, very loudly and very poorly, which made Scarlett laugh. 

I wish I didn't love you so. 

How true it was, but what a foolish thing to ever wish. To not love something or someone that you do. Or what a poor way to tell someone you love them by saying you wished you didn't. The rocks on the beach had never been dragged or removed so we had to navigate through the jagged rampart as best we could. It was our good fortune that the moon was drunker than we, fat and bright, lit up like an enormous electric candle. 

I was brave if only for the fact that I was drunk. I took her hand and guided her as though I knew better than she the way to the beach that was only a small plot of open and inviting sand. We sat there in our roaring twenties clothes like Gatsby and Daisy in a scene Fitzgerald scrapped, privy to only him and the characters he described. This was our novel being written as we lived it. Not published nor shared with anyone else. We were the young and beautiful in a secret world on vacation from reality and somewhere beyond us a careless writer wrote all our words and actions. My impetuosness and her improbable existence. Maybe our author was God. Only He could have granted her this clemency. God, my God. Heavenly Father whose eye is that golden monocle of a moon. 

Scarlett confessed to me everything. Fears and broken dreams. Her loveless mother. Her dimwitted father who was distant and aloof. Her hopes and dreams that I feared would not come to fruition because of that which had brought us together, and that which I felt was stalking us still. We sat there listening to the ocean lap the shore. Our bare feet burrowed in the sand. Our hands behind us, holding us up. Poseidon eavesdropping between breaks in the waves. It was sobering, in a good way. It was enchanting. She didn't say anything about what happened the night before. It was one confession she didn't offer me. Not yet. It was as though had she spoke of it, reality would crash in and wash it all away as though it were as fragile as a sandcastle.  

So we didn't speak of it. But there were moments in between when she would gaze off out into that moonlit ocean and go someplace where I couldn't follow. Some place where I wasn't allowed to be. We climbed back up the rocky shore careful of the soles of our feet and to the path that led to the house which was lit up for us like a Christmas ornament for the lights we left on. 

My dear Scarlett. I wrote her love letters in my mind as we walked, as we breathed,, though she was right there with me and not a thousand miles away someplace else where only the cursive ink of elegant and far-reaching penned words could connect us. No two people are apart so long as they dream of being together. So long as their bond is pure and their fantasy of each other is genuine and compelled by love and not lust. So long as they desire to be loved by only each other and their happiness, their true happiness, is found only in each other's company. 

Scarlett said she wanted to take a bath so I ran the water for her as she poured herself a glass of wine and waited. She smiled contentedly. She got undressed in front of me as I turned on the phonograph and played an old record. Some orchestra music with a woman singing about love and love lost. They go hand in hand, she explained. I thought to confess that I had seen her naked before, at least, I had seen her breasts, but I did not. And looking at them a second time was no less enthralling than the first. She stepped into the claw-foot tub and I didn't leave the room. She got on her knees and moved slowly and seductively through the bubbles, biting her lip and looking back at me. I shut the door behind me, rolled up my sleeves, knelt down and bathed her in a much different way than I would have bathed her before. Every part of her I lathered and massaged until her body was no longer foreign to me. Until it was, as though, my own. And my hands, as though, her own. 

We made love in a blue room on an black-iron bed with a white chenille bedspread and a comfortable mattress that was more like a cloud than anything I'd ever known. The springs of that bed sung like a chorus of angels. I don't know that I had ever been in that room before as the art on the walls was uncommon to me. The many faces staring back, who I considered only for a second or two, and only in hopes they did not make her go away while we made love or thereafter. If it is possible for a person to die inside another, or to live inside another, equally, or to give another the entirety of one's soul, I did so then without restraint. Without wanting anything in return. I've heard that premature lovemaking can spoil a romance. I've heard that it cheapens what is and gives the devil his door in which to ruin love, but it wasn't that way for us. We hadn't the time to be proper. Her body fit perfectly against mine and I didn't want to relinquish that which was so charitably given, and that which I received in return. It was the purest of moments in which I proclaimed my love, and she graciously accepted. 

"I love you," she whispered afterwards faintly, her face perfectly struck in the flickering light of the room's sole candle that dwindled too fast. She said it in such a way that it stayed in me and dwelled. And when I replied the same, it seemed, somehow, woefully inadequate. Though I said the exact same thing, I didn't. Not in the way she had said it to me. 

The next morning there was the sound of seagulls outside. I recalled the same sound from my youth and I took a deep breath and exhaled softly. I recalled the light of the sun streaming through the windows the way it did now before clouds overtook it and it was swathed in an abysmal shade of gray that seemed even more lifeless than the black of night. I kissed her good morning, but there was no response. She was cold. 

I don't know what I said or did then. Only the faces of the paintings on the walls could say for certain. I bawled. I plead to God in Heaven to awaken her. I petitioned the anonymous author of our romance to keep writing our story or to at least give us a suitable ending that might stretch out to a decent age, or to let us bear a child. Let us have a wedding. Lend us at least one more chapter. One more page. Then I cursed him and the cruelty of it all. Scarlett gazed up at the ceiling with her eyes open wide, her lips slightly parted and with a contented look upon her beautiful yet somber face. I lied in bed with her for several hours not understanding what had happened or why that it happened. Only that it did. And no amount of tears or imploring was going to change it. 

I got dressed in the tuxedo suit I found in my grandfather's closet. It fit perfectly as though it were tailored for me. I wore his tophat and gloves. I made myself another drink and then another while thinking what I should do. The day dwindled fast. Maybe if I waited long enough, Scarlett would come back to life again. Or maybe if I kissed her one more time. Then I got her dressed. I was going to dress her in one of my grandmother's beautiful dresses, but instead I chose the black dress I got for her at the shop along the way. She hadn't seen it. I figured I would wait for the right moment to give it to her. I suppose this was it. This was, after all, the only moment. 

I sat on the porch and watched the seagulls work the beaches like ticket scalpers at ballgames I remember from when I was a kid at Fenway. Back in the mid-to-late forties after the War. They looked like these seagulls in retrospect, pointy noses, black-framed glasses, their heads capped in ruffled discolored derbies. They squaked the same thing over and over as they spastically stepped here to there. Then, when the ballgame started, when the tide came in, they flew away. 

When I went back to the blue room, Scarlett was still there. Lying still in that black dress. I couldn't bring myself to say it, but she was as she appeared. I thought maybe all those oil painted portraits on the wall might have affected her. One last hope. So I turned each of them around and waited. I sat in a chair close to her and breathed. That is all. But nothing changed. She remained the same and it was all terribly hopeless. 

As I took her hand I noticed a piece of paper folded and tucked in her palm. It was a note. She had beautiful cursive. She wrote that she wished we had met in life, but since we hadn't, she was happy we met as we did. She wrote that she loves me and knew if we made love it would be only once, physically. Though people, she wrote, make love much more than just in bed. They make love with words and gestures. Some, though, never make love at all, even after a thousand nights in bed. It was all worth it, she went on. Besides, death doesn't end it. If I can haunt you, I will, she promised. "In this very house when you feel the chill of a draft, know that it is me. Upon the beach, that distant apparition, that patch of unusual and shapely fog, that will be me as well. If there is a way, I will come back to you. For it was too short-lived. But it is, nonetheless and regardless, forever.

Love dearly,

Your Scarlett"

I picked her up and carried her out of the house. Neither of us wore shoes. She looked stunning in black. The skirt of the dress danced in the wind as did her long wavy black hair. Fat raindrops fell and then relented. I was descending the steps to the beach when an ominous trail of cars sped up the road towards the house. Still a little ways away. Far enough away. They didn't matter. They were like ants in a row doing what natural instinct dictates. What logic and reason demands of them given this particular set of circumstances. 

The ocean licked my ankles and lapped the sandy shore and my bare feet sank a little and the white-capped waves beat against my shins and my knees until I was suddenly up to my waist. It was as though the ocean reached out its arms to take her from me. But I didn't let go, so it encouraged me more persuasively to relent, understanding its obligation and my desire without a word being spoken between us. In that instant, we became the water. She was weightless in my arms as I stood there unflinching. The tophat blew off my head and floated away like a capsized boat and raindrops again fell. Brakes squealed and cars parked. Doors furiously opened and shut and people from up at the house began to shout inaudible things. Things of which I had no interest to hear. 

The water was at my chest and occasionally I would get a mouthful. I was standing on my toes. It seemed to swirl around my feet as though to coax me. Something nudged my leg. The water so much stronger than myself. A force so much more than just water. I unclenched my fingers and she lied on my hands briefly before shifting off the way a sailor's body is slid off a shipdeck, carried out with the tide, the black of her dress swaying around her like a drunk shadow against the blue-green water. Her hair flowing wild in the current. Her eyes open for I hadn't the heart to close them, desperately wanting a last look of their amber luster. 

I dreamt, prayed, hoped, wished every possible possibility that she would come to life once more, but I knew she wouldn't. I realized then that I had her letter in my pocket whose ink bled over the page and which I lost as well. I stood there and watched her sink and drift out to sea without consideration or thought of much of anything other than her. 

The memory of my father returned to me just then, as he was probably among the onlookers from above who caught a distant look of me standing out in the ocean he knew all too well. I had my hand upon his leg again and could feel the coarseness of his hair under my soft palm. He looked longingly out into the sea as though he wished he were out there somewhere, sailing or drowning. It didn't seem to matter which in his eyes. 

"There is life in the water" he assured me. "There is another world there." 

I smiled at him. He would understand that I couldn't be without her. That becoming a doctor or living in the beach house would never be enough for me. I swam out after her. The sky was as gray as the water was black. I lost her for a moment with the violence of a collapsing wave, but suddenly there she was again. The current pushed her into my arms where she belonged. I held her. Kissed her. Then I took a deep breath and there was only us. 

I woke up sometime later lying on my back, bereft on the beach, coughing up sea water. It was dark and I was cold. But I was numb. The sound of the waves swished by my ears melodically. There was seaweed in my hair. I coughed up more water and my throat burned. I lied there for a while then I noticed lights on inside the beach house, which helped guide me up the rocky path. I hadn't turned them off, I realized. I cut my foot on a rock, but it didn't matter. The pain of the cut was far less than that of my grief. I went inside and stripped down to my underwear. I tied an old shirt around my foot. Then I went up to the observatory and sitting in one of those wing-back chairs by the window was my father. 

Out the window in front of him was the black ocean rippling under the shimmer of a hungover moon that was twisted up in a blanket of clouds. He didn't seem surprised at all to see me. He had a drink waiting for me and handed it to me as I sat next to him. The ice jingled in the glass. I guess he had seen me coming up from the beach. 

"We will get through this," he promised looking out into the ocean as though it were his. "Tell me about her."

I took a long drink. Then I did. And we got very drunk.