The Very Thought of You

I took her in my arms and we danced. She glided lithely across the kitchen floor like a soft and nimble broom in my calloused hands. Nimble as a mouse by night. My hands were a little wet from doing dishes but she didn’t complain. She never complains which is what makes her so tolerable. Desirable, even, I say without feeling I am betraying the ghost. 

“We’ve never danced so well,” I said to her with my face gently pressed to the warmth of her soft cheek.

“We’ve never danced at all,” she replied grinning at me. I realized she was right. We hadn’t. I was simply confusing her with someone else. The ghost.

The kitchen tile floor was cold, and lukewarm dishwater rested shallow in the sink. The faucet dripped melodically as though in an effort to harmonize. The song played on my phone which sat on a loaf of bread by the sugar jar. A crackling Al Bowlly singing The Very Thought of You. I knew it well. It was our song. Long ago before this person existed. This trespasser, I indicted her silently in my mind. Before I existed. Before I was in diapers and toilet trained. Before I learned my letters, played baseball, and graduated high school. Before I was ever in love, or thought I was, for the first time. Long ago in a house like this. But not this one. With a woman like her. But not her.

“Have you ever heard this song before?” I asked hopefully, disappointed already by the inevitable answer I knew was to come. She smiled and giggled as we made small circular passes with careful feet that felt light as though they were made of clouds.

“No,” she replied. “This isn’t my type of music.”

In her answer I felt a current of sadness, as though I had put a butter-knife in a socket of depression and clung to it in my despair. I pressed my head despondently to her neck and closed my eyes knowing damn well where I was going.

In an instant the kitchen was gone, replaced by a dining room and a dark-wood table pushed aside for the very purpose of our evening dance. To make room for our broad ambitious celebratory sweeps. We danced almost every night I got home from work and she smiled and laughed in that lighthearted way she always did. There was gold wallpapered walls, a dangling bronze light fixture, and the song playing on a phonograph rather than on my phone. The record spun slowly, but too fast still. It was a moment I wanted to preserve, to live yet to pause. I don’t want the song to end. I never wanted it to end.

I feel her hips in my hands. The sequins of her favorite black dress she wears for me that are like tiny scales over her mythical body too beautiful to be real. My face is still to her neck as though burying itself from reality. Lost in time as I am, drunk on a love lost. Back in another time and place entirely, through a portal of a specific melody that ferried me against my will into her arms.

“Are you okay,” she asked. “Don't you like this song, darling? It’s our favorite song.” She is not the same woman as the intruder who I began the dance with, and this is not the same house or time. Only Al Bowlly is the same. Only the lovely crackle of the record. Only Ray Noble’s orchestra. They don’t change but everything else has.

I wish the song wouldn’t end, I whisper in a vain complaint to her. Her soft skin smells of chestnuts and lilac and I had nearly forgotten the feel and pleasure in her. The electricity of her body. I hold her close to me and slow the pace of our feet so that they barely move at all as if it might preserve for a while longer what I knew by logic that could never be preserved. 

“You’re a fine dancer, mister,” she says as she always does.

I swallow as I always swallow and reply, “You're not too bad yourself, sugar.” 

That was her pet name. I knew when the song was over and when I opened my eyes she would be gone. So in vain I hoped that Al forgot to stop singing or liked the sound of his voice so much this time that he continued on, but he never does. And the orchestra hit their last note and Al sung the last lyric and all there was left for me was the static of a lonely needle dragging through empty space and time, like a slow heartbeat in a deep cold grave.

A sink full of lukewarm water returns under the slow dripping faucet. A few dishes left in the bottom of a soapy abyss. My phone sits again on the bread loaf by the sugar jar spewing advertisements between songs because here in this foreign world, in these modern times, there is no room for static or empty space. Everything is filled and full or it is replaced because everything is available and had in an abundance the other life never knew. Everything has been consumed and there are no silent moments for reverence.

No other song does it to me. No other song ever brings her back to life like magic. And although I could listen to that song anytime at all and dance again with her, I never intentionally do. Maybe it is too hard, or that I don’t want to cheapen it, or to be unfaithful to my current life and those who are faithful to me. Or I simply want to avoid this awful vacant feeling afterwards of standing alone in a quiet room, or worse, standing with someone who isn’t her, lying about what I am thinking. Or maybe, I just don’t want her to get tired of me.

There are no gold wallpapered walls here or black sequins in my hands, though I can still see and feel them at times. My current girlfriend had excused herself to bed and I was alone in the kitchen with the excuse that I would clean up and be up in a while. But I stood there catching my breath and thought of the ghost I’ve always been chasing, wondering if she is in a kitchen somewhere, her hands still a little wet from dishes, having just heard our song and having just danced with me in her memory, but someone else in reality.

And maybe he said to her that he has never heard that song before and it wasn’t his type of music and he went up to bed before her and she is in the kitchen collecting herself as I am in mine. Looking at the sugar jar. One hand on the counter, taking a deep and slow breath, holding back a tear and saying a prayer, some vague petition to an ambiguous creator I am not always sure about, then a thank you to that someone I used to know in another life when Al Bowlly released records and much of the world was lit in gaslight or in no light at all. When there was such a thing as silence and shadows and stillness. And I say to her though you’re gone, in another life passed, or lost, or stolen, I still dream and I still hold on to the very thought of you. 

Then I go to bed and hope to dream dreams I never dream. And I am without her until the song happens to play again, or until we meet somewhere, sometime, once more. I hope that we do. In this life. Maybe at a wedding where we are both guests and they happen to play our song which compels us both to venture out onto the dance floor. And she just so happens to come without a date as did I, but even if she did not come alone, I would still ask her to dance for there is no trespass but for those who trespass against us. We were together first, after all. 

           I was meant to find her, or she to find me. In this life, as in the last. It is a contest of sorts. A purpose that I cannot excuse to whimsy or generous thought. So I wait for a telephone to ring, a doorbell to be pushed, a stranger to run into, a smile to return, an umbrella to share, a letter to be written, or a song to play. Our song. Somewhere, someday, once again, if Mr. Noble’s phantom orchestra doesn’t mind too much.