Kathleen Valentine (2 page)

My Last Romance
in our beach house and the recording had been released in April, shot to the top of the charts in a matter of weeks and slowly drifted back down but was enough of a boost to the band to make this tour a great one. I was straddling Johnny when I wrote those words for him—laughing and groaning at the pressure of his engorged desire throbbing inside of me.
"‘Hugs and kisses’?" he laughed when he read them. "Hugs and kisses? Is that the best you can do? How about fucks and suckings?"
I laughed and then ground my hips against him gasping for the thousandth time that week. Pressing my mouth to his and capturing his tongue with my teeth—trying to suck his soul into mine.
Our time together was gone in an instant. My bags sat in my hotel room not knowing which way they would be going. In the afternoon sunshine I lay on top of him willing our flesh to grow together so it would be impossible for us to ever be apart again—Siamese twins, joined at the crotch, impossible to separate without losing both lives. "We’ll be together," he whispered for the hundredth time. He had to go to Europe. He had to talk to his family. There would be questions, of course, but they would understand. They would love me as much as he did. Our lives would splice together like our bodies did now, he said.
"Don’t cry," he said.
"I’ll always love you," he said.
That was the last time I ever saw him.

The first year I avoided being away from the house for more than a few days for fear he would call and find me gone. Silvio and I barely spoke. I moved into the guest room and, while there were no fights or recriminations, the tension between us was terrible.
The second year I cried a lot. Then I began drinking. It was Silvio who saved me. It was Silvio’s love—contrary to every aspect of his character that I had known in all the years together. I would lie in the darkness of my room sobbing—sometimes I didn’t even know what I cried for. I cried from disappointment and from longing. I cried for all the impossible dreams and misplaced desires. I cried for the girl who had run away from home so many years ago and tried to return to innocence through a man she didn’t even know. And it was Silvio who would come into the darkness and take me in his arms. He would hold me against him and sing softly in my ear and tell me I was loved and wanted and his darling girl.
The third year we took the band to Europe. Our engagements in the States had dwindled away like my fantasies. Now with a smaller, more versatile band we travelled across Europe performingin Holiday Inns and Ramadas. Slowly Silvio and I developed a new understanding of each other and if he noticed that I spent afternoonsin cafés scanning the crowds for blond curls, he made no sign.
For ten years we made our home on cruise ships and in American resorts abroad. The Seventies brought disco, polyester leisure suits, and The Silver Saints to the cocktail lounges of middle America. By now Silvio and I were like an old married couple. Age and economics had worked their mischief and, despite our respective foibles, the fact remained that we worked well together. We were a team. I moved back into his bedroom and he compensated me by giving up his infidelities. For whatever it was not, it most definitely was a partnership that worked.
As disco lay dying, we enjoyed a few years of celebrity in the big band revival in urban areas. But we were weary of travelling and keeping working bands together was occupying more time than performing. It was time to retire. We reopened the beach house and relaxed for the first time in all our years together. Silvio began gardening. I began making stained glass and set up a shop in the garage. We entertained a lot. We fell in love again. It was nice.
Then I bought that damnable record. Now I am haunted with memories, restless with anxiety, hating myself for the longing I cannot banish from my heart. I look at my watch. 9:30. I start the car and drive back across the jetty, headed for Avenue L.
The street is still except for the shriek of cicadas. I park my car. The garage door is closed but I walk down the driveway anyway. The palmettos clatter in the morning breeze and I smell fresh coffee. Behind the house a picnic table under a banyon tree holds a plate of donuts, a newspaper, and a coffee pot. How can such a peaceful scene set my heart pounding? For a moment I turn back, afraid.
"I knew you couldn’t stay away from me," a gravelly voice says and he laughs. He is standing inside the screen door with a coffee mug in his hand.
"I’m sorry," I say, "I thought you would be open."
"Will be eventually," he says, "but I’d be honored if you had a cup of coffee with me."
I nod. "That sounds nice."
The Captain disappears and I hear a cupboard door slam, then the screen door screeches open and he trots down the steps. He is wearing a red Hawaiian shirt with hula girls. A white fishing cap pulled low over his forehead shades his eyes. His beard has been freshly trimmed and he carries a cup and saucer in his other hand. As he pours coffee I talk idly about the weather but it is obvious he doesn’t much care what I think about the heat here so I come to the point.
"I bought a record here last week that’s made me a little curious. I wonder if you could answer a few questions for me."
He cocks an eyebrow and offers me the plate of donuts. "Maybe," he says.
"Where do they come from, the books and records? Do you keep track?"
He shrugs his thick shoulders and breaks a donut in half.
"Sorta. Got a few folks who come in here all the time with stuff to sell. Most of it comes from people I never see again though. I keep their names on file just in case anything personal turns up." He grins his wicked grin.
"You’d be surprised the stuff you find in some of those books. Love letters, tax returns. I found a deed to a house one time and an envelope full of dirty pictures." A chuckle rumbles up through his enormity. "Ya call people up and say, ‘Hey, I got the deed to your house here, or your old lady’s nudie pictures’ and they say, ‘Oh yeah, I wondered where I left ‘em.’ Once I found an envelope with five hundred dollars in it and I’ve found a bunch of wills. People are goofy." He shakes his head.
"Well, that’s sort of what I wanted to ask you about," I say feeling myself sinking deeper into a place I’d be better off not going to.
"What did you find?"
"Just..." I take a deep breath. "...just a message. It made me curious. On the back of that Silvio Santini record,
My Last Romance
, there was a message to someone called Johnny Angel. I was wondering if you knew where that record came from."
The Captain frowns and looks down into his coffee cup. I cannot see his face but his bushy white brows twitch as he thinks. "Can’t say as I remember," he says finally. "I did notice the message but it didn’t seem important or anything." He reaches for the coffee pot.
"Please," I say. "Please try to remember."
"I dunno," he says. "Lots of those old 78s have shit written on them. Never anything special though."
"I know," I say, embarrassed, "but this one was different. It seemed like there might be a story in it. It piqued my curiosity."
He is quiet for awhile chewing a second donut. "Probably is. There’s a story in everything," he says at last. "You want to hear a story? I’ll tell you a story."
He takes a deep breath and then he looks up directly at me. "There was this boy, y’see, nice kid but dumb. Not much education, nothing formal anyway. His old man was a shrimper and a sorry son of a bitch. His mother was a nice girl who wanted to be a school teacher but she got knocked up when she was seventeen, got married and spent the rest of her life with her nose in a book. The kid, he liked to read, too. Got a lot of fancy ideas that way—he didn’t want to end up like his old man. He thought he was gonna be somebody so he joined the Navy when he got old enough. He hit it lucky. The war was over and even with all the rumblings in the world things stayed pretty quiet. Dumb kid though—he wanted excitement.
"Well, this kid, he stayed in the Navy and travelled around a lot but mostly his world happened in the stories he read —adventure stuff, brave assholes and exotic women. His head was full of romantic foolishness. So, anyhow, time comes when the kid has a couple of weeks leave and him with some money burning a hole in his pocket. The port his ship was in had this big resort area—you know, all kinds of entertainment and stuff—so the stupid kid bought himself some fancy duds and got a room over there. He didn’t care what happened as long as it was exciting."
He takes a sip of his coffee and my stomach turns to ice.
"Then this amazing thing happened. He met this woman. More than a woman—a goddess. Stupid kid just about pissed his pants when she smiled at him that first time. He couldn’t believe she would even talk to him, a knock-out looker like her. So the next thing you know the damn idiot was lying his fool face off to her. He’d have said anything to make her pay attention to him. Christ, he told her all these damn lies about having a rich family and shit about going to Europe—tried to make himself a big shot, somebody a lady like her would care about and, son of a bitch if she didn’t go and fall for it all.
"He’d never had a woman before—just his dream women. And here’s this gorgeous beauty falling in love with him and didn’t he feel like the worst goddamned liar on earth but he couldn’t stop. He was that nuts about her. They only had a little better than a week together but that was the best time of that sorry bastard’s life. He loved her so much he would rather have died than have to face what she would think of him if she found out what a good for nothing liar he was."
The Captain shakes his head. "Poor bastard. Poor ignorant bastard."
"What happened?" I can scarcely breathe.
He looks away from me. "He lied some more. He made love to her the last afternoon before he had to report back to his ship. He made love to her for probably the thousandth time and then he told her some more lies and he kissed her gorgeous mouth one last time and never saw her again. He was too ashamed of his stupidity and his lies."
"He never tried to see her again?" I feel tears clawing at the back of my eyes. This can’t be happening.
"Not for a long time. He finished up his hitch in the Navy and then signed on the crew of a tanker. It was the perfect life for a lying bastard like him. He sailed all over the world, met a lot of women, slept with as many as he could. Eventually he drank enough and worked enough and fucked enough that he forgot what he’d done. But he never forgot her." He looks directly into my eyes and I see the blueness, faded from decades of sea spray and tears.
"Is that a true story?" I ask my voice quivering.
He looks away. "Maybe. Sometimes it’s hard to say what’s true and what isn’t."
"What happened to him?"
The Captain thinks a minute and then seems to cheer up. "Oh, he died I expect. Maybe got washed overboard during a hurricane or caught the clap from some dark beauty and died. Or...." He stares out into the street. "Maybe he got tired of all the lies and all the running and gave it all up. Maybe he went back to the town where she lived and, when he didn’t find her, he just settled down there and stayed for the rest of his life. Maybe he opened a used book store and forgot all about the past until one day a pretty lady walked down his driveway and started asking questions." He stares at me through a storm of fractured memories.
Then a smile spreads across his battered face. "Or maybe I’m the world’s biggest bullshit artist and I told you all that to make you feel romantic so I could talk you into going inside with me."
My head feels like it will burst and my throat is burning. I push myself away from the table. "I have to go," I say struggling to my feet.
"You sure?" He reaches toward my hand but then draws back.
I nod and hurry down the driveway hiding my face. As I open my car I turn back. He stands before his shop watching me with eyes no longer innocent and a glitter on his cheek that reminds me of a tear caught in the light of a paper lantern hung in an ancient pin oak tree. A faint scent of mimosa drifts through the air as I turn the ignition and speed away.
Silvio stands on the porch in his white terry cloth bathrobe sipping coffee from a mug. He looks so tan. I wonder why I hadn’t noticed that before. As I get out of the car he leans against the trellis and lifts his mug in greeting, sun filtering through the wisteria washes a beautiful violet light over his strong features. He looks more handsome than anyone I ever remember seeing. Those black eyes are still deep and full of fire. I hold them with mine as I climb the stairs. He doesn’t move as I draw close and slip my hand inside his robe and caress him where he most loves me to caress him. He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.
"I love you, Silvio," I whisper, fondling him, feeling him twitch and quiver.
His smile is breathtaking and just a little stunned. "You better watch it," he says. "You’ll shock the neighbors."
"The hell with them," I say greedily kissing his throat and chest. "We were doing this before most of them were born."
He laughs and puts his arm around me taking me into the house. "That’s right," he says, "we sure were."
And in a little while the earth moves.

ASA

Listen. Those are mockingbirds. They always sing at this time of evening. Their song is my signal to pick Asa’s flowers. Tonight I’ll pick daisies and blue bonnets. Sundown isn’t far off and I try to go see him every evening at sundown. Oh, I do miss now and again—especially if the weather isn’t so good. This winter was a long one and some evenings I just don’t have the gumption to climb his hill. But he understands. No one ever understood me like Asa.
I was fifteen years old the first time I laid eyes on him. But I knew in that sure-fire, deep-down kind of way that I’d never love nobody else. He took the breath right out of me. Right now, I close my eyes, I can see him just like he was there in the morning sunshine. He was bent forward sawing on a board balanced across two saw horses, his curly brown hair falling over his forehead and those sinewy-lean muscles in his back and shoulders sparkling with sweat as they moved back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... He had his knee up on that board holding it down so’s he could saw it and his tan trousers pulled tight across his hips and thighs. Lord, I didn’t know nothing about men then but I knew he made my legs feel like I was wading upriver in ice water. My hands, they itched to stroke those drops of sweat away from that sun-toasted skin. And, other things I felt, I didn’t know how to call them...
Asa wasn’t what you’d call tall. Taller than me by a head but I always was a runt. His shoulders, oh Lord, it seemed to me they just blocked out the world. And he was so brown—I decided then and there he was made for me.
He was twenty-two and how I loved to look at him! He had come to see my Daddy cause he’d admired the gun stocks Daddy was known for making. When Asa got a look at the curly maple stock on the thirty-aught-six Daddy was oiling down his eyes near fell out of his head. Right then Asa had him a mind to have it.
"Can’t part with this’un," my Daddy says to him. "This’un’s for my daughter. She’s as fair a shot as any man but I reckon I got enough of this maple for one more."
But Asa was the feckless sort and didn’t have no money. He was a good enough carpenter and folks was happy to pay him but he weren’t the kind that could hold onto money. My Aunt Shoog told Mama that Asa had a taste for wine, women and song.
But Daddy never could say no to a man what admired his work so he said he’d make Asa a deal. He said we could do with a new chicken coop and a fence around the yard and that would be just about the same amount of pay as a rifle like mine. Asa liked that idea just fine.
Every morning at the crack of dawn I’d hear his whistling as he come walking up our road. He had this cute, bouncy way of walking and he wore his black hat pulled down low over his eyes. When he grinned his teeth was whiter than Mama’s fresh laundered sheets flapping in the summer breezes. Asa whistled a lot while he worked—songs I didn’t know. I imagined they were what cowboys whistled to their horses late nights out in the Palo Duro Canyon trying to protect themselves from red wolves or the restless spirits of murdered Apaches. The veins along his forearms were thick and stood out like a map of the Guadalupe River. He had a rich, thick West Texas drawl—not like the nasal twang of the boys here in the hill country. Oh, and how he could look you over!
I’d stand by the kitchen window watching him till Mama came looking for me scolding like an old brood hen.
I told him I was seventeen. Either he believed me or he didn’t care. Sure didn’t take me long to get his attention though. I knew I was cute and he had that eye—that eye some men have that twinkles when he looks at you so’s you can’t even pretend you’re not thinking what you’ve been thinking right along.
The first time he kissed me he put his hand up under my skirt and squeezed my bottom. Lord, I nearly fainted right there in the dust. We was in back of my Daddy’s tool shed on a scorcher of a July afternoon. I can still hear the buzzing of the flies in the quiet and the wet pressure of his dense body pushing against mine. I brought him a cool glass of iced tea and he drank it straight down in one long swallow letting the icy liquid roll down over his chin. Then he backed me up against the toolshed and covered my mouth with his sugary, lemon-flavored one. And his hands... they were every place they had no business being. I tried for about half a minute to push him away—didn’t fool him one bit. He just laughed at me.
"You’re likin me, aren’t you?" he said, his hand sliding down under the waist of my undies.
"You’re horrible," I said slapping at him. But he just laughed. He always laughed.
From that moment on I was his—body and soul. He got to know every inch of me that summer but I was no fool. I knew when to stop him. By the time September came he was crazy to marry me. And I was crazy to let him.
My Mama and Daddy would have liked to kill us both! I was too young, they said, and he was a good-for-nothin. We didn’t care. We were so much in love. Nowadays folks would say we was just in heat. Girls today know everything. All I knew was what Asa taught me but he taught me plenty. Oh, I do remember it all.
Growing up in the Texas hill country when I did you didn’t learn much of anything about sex. When you were fixing to be married your mama sat you down and explained your wifely duties to you. My Mama said a good wife obliged her husband. She said to just close your eyes and let him have his manly ways and think about when you had babies. She said once he got you with a couple children if you was lucky you’d both be so busy there wouldn’t be no more time for that foolishness. I prayed she was wrong—cause I loved every single thing Asa did to me. Why, my Mama would die of shame if she knew the things Asa taught me—but that was after we was married. I made sure of that.
We got married on the autumn equinox when the sky was brittle cool and the smell of fresh cut hay filled the air. Mama and Daddy didn’t have much to say—mostly they was just glad I wasn’t showing a baby. They didn’t know how smart I’d been.
There was a party and dancing. Mama made half a dozen sweet potato pies and Daddy brought out some of his good hard cider. But me and Asa didn’t care. We just wanted it to be over so we could go to our little house tucked away in the woods. We just wanted to toss aside the new white and blue bridal quilt on our bed and start our married life.
I thought I knew what loving was all about. I thought our summer of scorching afternoons and steaming hot nights had prepared me for being a married woman. What a silly girl I was not to know how much better it would be. The first time Asa put hisself inside of me I thought my eyes would pop right out of my skull like two hickory nuts roasting in a fire. I got so lost in him I didn’t even know there was a world past the walls of our bedroom. Didn’t care, neither. I felt like a cake of fresh cream butter melting in the heat of an August afternoon. All I wanted was Asa, every minute of the night and of the day.
I tried to be a good wife. I kept our little house as clean as I could. Sometimes we’d go to Mama and Daddy’s for Sunday dinner but we never stayed to gab—not on a lazy, sweet-smelling Sunday afternoon when everything was still and we had other ways to use that time. Sometimes Asa’d take me hunting with him but we never fired a bullet. What we did standing up against them old pin oak trees would frighten every jackrabbit in the county.
Not that our life together was perfect, mind. He had a temper, that one. We had our rows and I spent more than enough time turned over his knee! I learned there was no point in fighting with him cause he always got his way and I just got me a real sore bottom. But I never stopped being crazy for him. He’d go off to work and all day long I’d lay in bed feeling his hands and his body all over me. I’d stand by the kitchen door when I knowed he was coming home for dinner. I’d get my first glimpse of his hat coming up over the rise and I’d go flying to him. Most nights dinner just sat there getting cold.
Four years went by and we didn’t have no babies, I don’t know why. In a secret little part of me I expect I was glad cause babies need a lot of caretaking and I was scared by what Mama had said—that once we had babies we’d be too busy for all our loving. Mama and Aunt Shoog fretted about it all the time, too.
"Are you doing right by him?" Mama would ask me.
"What do you mean, Mama?" She scared me when she talked that way. "I’m a good wife." I told her. "I have his dinner ready when he gets home and if he has to go back out and do more work at night I always wait up so’s he can have some love when he comes back—no matter how late it gets."
I didn’t tell her I gave him sugar morning, noon, and night.
But she and Aunt Shoog kept fretting. I heard them talking it over whenever they thought I wasn’t near enough to hear.
"I don’t know what’s the matter with that girl of mine," Mama would say, "she must not be doing her wifely duties is all I can think. If she don’t get him a baby pretty soon..." She shook her head. "It’s too easy for a man to wander off if he don’t have a family to keep him home."
"Don’t go blamin her now," Aunt Shoog said. "It’s more a case of that busy bee scatterin his pollen too far and wide."
"Don’t talk nonsense, Shoog. That don’t make sense, bees don’t make pollen."
"Maybe not," Shoog said lighting herself a pipe, "but that don’t mean he ain’t the problem."
"My girl says she waits up for him when he works late," Mama said in that low worrisome voice of hers.
Shoog snorted. "What kind of nails do you reckon he’s drivin that late at night, sister?"
Sometimes Mama’s silences was scarier than the words she had to say. "I knowed he wasn’t husband material but you can’t tell my girl nothing." My stomach knotted up something horrible at her words.
Shoog took a long draw on her pipe. "Maybe you best be glad she don’t have no youngsters to worry for."
I don’t know if we would have got babies eventually. I still get queasy inside when I think about our last morning together. He always looked so sweet in the day’s first light, cuddling up with me all sleepy and tender. He loved me for a long time and I kept pulling him back. It looked like snow outside and I didn’t want him leaving me but he wanted to go hunting. He’d loaded shells the night before and I packed his rucksack. He told me to stay in bed and wait for him. He said it would keep him warm out there in the woods knowing I was at home, curled up in bed waiting for him to come back to me. He kissed me before he left—bit my lip and my belly button.
That was the last time he touched me.
It was mid-afternoon when the knocking started. I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to do as I was told, stay in bed and wait for him. But the knocking wouldn’t go away.
He was dead, they said. A terrible accident, a stray bullet. Another hunter found him. My Daddy was with them and when I started screaming he hugged me to him harder than he ever had in my life.
I don’t recall a long time after that. I kept chewing at the bite he left on my lip as though by keeping it raw I could keep him with me. Daddy took me back to stay with him and Mama but I just stayed all day in bed trying to die. Trying to get closer to my Asa. When the snow came I’d walk out in it in my nightie until Daddy come after me and carried me back kicking and screaming.
I hated my own body. I hated it’s miserable aching for him. I’d fill the tub in the wash-shed with water so hot it scalded my skin raw and soaked in it until I was half-conscious. When Spring came I’d walk six miles to the Guadalupe and lay in the icy water turning numb. Mama and Daddy feared I had taken leave of my senses. And they were right. Suffering like that is nothing a human woman should have to bear. Maybe that’s why God let Asa come back to me.
Late one night as I tossed and turned, wretched with longing, he lay down beside me. I felt him. I felt his body slip down alongside mine. I closed my eyes and breathed him in—the smell of him, the warmth coming from his sweet body filled my senses and I did what I always did. I let go of everything and let him have me.
Slowly life became tolerable again. I could bear the days knowing that at night I could lay down and wrap myself up in Asa.
Time goes by so quickly when you are in love. Nothing else matters. I kept him all to myself—no one else needed to know about Asa and me. I knew I couldn’t let on that he’d come back. Except for my nightly trips to put flowers on his grave I suppose folks thought I had gotten over him. What fools! There’s no getting over a man like Asa. Other men tried to come between us—some had the nerve to talk to me about marrying them. It threw me into hissies at first but then I let it go—they couldn’t know about me and Asa—how close we were. How close we still are.
Sixty years is nothing when you have Asa to come home to.
I know folks say I’m a crazy old lady—ditsy as a titmouse. They see me passing by with my arms full of flowers and they whisper to each other. Pathetic old fools. I look at the husbands of the women who used to be my friends and the ones that aren’t dead are old and feeble. I fail to understand how a woman could climb into bed with one of those weak, wrinkled old farts. Makes my stomach turn thinking of them climbing over me. My lover is young and handsome and virile. He fills my nights with unimaginable bliss. My Asa never changes.
My knees crack as I kneel to place flowers on his grave.
"I’m coming to you soon, Asa," I tell him. And I know it won’t be long until we really are together. God has forgiven me.
The power of my love is so strong it wipes away the thing I did to keep Asa mine. I’ve been punished long enough. God let me know that when he sent Asa back to me. Mama was wrong—I knew how to keep him mine. My bullet put his body in this grave but I know he’s not here at all. He’s at home—stretched out naked in my bed. Waiting for me to come home and sink into his heat.