Waking Up in Eden (20 page)

Now I spent much of my time outside the office in a bathing suit and flip-flops. Even the elastic strap of a swimsuit sometimes felt too restrictive, so alone on weekends at the cottage I'd wear only a
pareo,
a beach scarf, as a sarong. The scented breezes and easy lifestyle made me want to shed my old skin along with my clothes.

I was totally alone. I took off the swimsuit I wore for gardening and ate the mango naked. Why not? No one could see me. Juice ran down my arms, but I didn't care. I tentatively started a forgotten ballet step. Then it came back to me in a surge of remembrance, and I danced a waltz, spinning around the yard in leaps and pirouettes.

O
N MY MORNING JOGS
, I kept running into the oversexed Poseidon with whom I had shared the outdoor shower at Poipu Beach in my early days on Kauai. In my mind I called him “The Surfer.” His name was Cal. One Sunday morning after a swim I confided to him that I wasn't quite sure about my snorkeling technique. “I float on the surface and look down, but I haven't figured out how to dive,” I confessed. “I'm afraid that water will go down the tube.”

“That's not so hard to learn. You want me to show you?”

“Yeah. That would be great.”

“When do you want to go?”

“How about right now?

“Okay. I'll get my gear from the car.”

I watched as he returned carrying a surfboard under one arm and a net bag of masks and snorkel tubes in the other hand. Barefoot, he wore only a faded pair of surfing jams. He carefully laid the board on the sand and dug one hand down the front of his swim trunks, pulling out a small plastic bag of bread crumbs. “Fish food,” he explained.

He waded into the water, floating the surfboard. “Hold onto the board while you gain confidence,” he instructed. Underwater,
through my mask, I watched as he dove with powerful strokes, his hair floating around him in a nimbus, like an angel's. He released handfuls of food, drawing toward him mobs of fish. Small fish twisted and scattered in zigs and zags. Bigger ones raced to his hands, grabbing crumbs in dazzling antics.

Diving together, gesticulating underwater to a companion, and allowing myself to be pulled into deeper water reminded me of slow dancing. Our heads broke the surface at the same time and we reached for the board, breathing hard. One of his hands grazed mine as he grabbed hold, and the touch was warm, flush from the cold water that brought the blood to the surface.

“That was great,” I said. “Can you show me how to blow the water out of the tube when I come up?”

“That's more advanced,” he said judiciously. “You're getting tired. Do baby steps. You've had enough for today.”

I nodded meekly. We got out of the water and toweled off, our bare skin close and salt-kissed. “Thanks a million,” I said as I walked away. I had become accustomed to the order of my life and didn't entirely welcome the reentry of sexual anticipation. It generated fear as well as excitement, as it was both certain to be fulfilled if I wanted it to be, yet uncertain enough to be unpredictable, the kind of taut lust that gathers force and speed until it becomes unstoppable. I remembered the febrile blood rise that could spill into a headlong, risky, full-speed-ahead torrent. Let loose, it could fly me to the moon or break me on the rocks below. Perhaps the only thing more dangerous would be to say no. I was aging. Sometimes I worried that I had forgotten how to do it anymore.

I turned and called out, “Come for lunch sometime.”

• • •

T
HE NEXT WEEK
he telephoned. “I'd like to take you up on your offer for lunch,” he said.

“What do you like to eat?” I asked, immediately imagining luscious tropical fruits, a composed salad.

“Sandwiches,” he said simply.

He arrived on Saturday, a half hour early. I was outside, unloading my saddle from the car trunk, sweaty and disheveled after a morning ride.

“You're early,” I yelped. “I'm filthy. You're going to have to wait while I take a shower.” I shooed him to a chair and handed him a stack of magazines. “I'll be quick,” I promised as I backed away, struck again by the power of his physicality.

Back in the kitchen, my hair damp and curled from bathroom steam, I hurriedly gathered sandwich ingredients and laid them on the counter. “Chicken all right?” I said in the over-bright voice of the nervous as he came into the room.

He didn't answer. From behind, his body circled mine, a bare tanned arm catching me by the waist and pulling me backward against him.

“Why don't I give you a back rub?” he whispered.

I laughed at the clichéd pretense. “I don't think that's such a good idea,” I said, intent on the lettuce.

In reply, he spun me around in one sure motion, laughing as he bent his head. Our mouths touched, our breasts cleaved, but I kept my feet a teenager's chaste distance away. With easy nonchalance, he reached up my skirt, cupped a cheek, and pressed me to him, from chest to knee. We spun and strained, I nearly gasping when he released me.

“Just a little back rub. It will relax you,” he said levelly.

“Oh, no, no,” I protested like a high school girl in the back
of a car. He had unzipped my skirt and slipped it down to the floor. His hands roamed under my T-shirt as if I were already naked. Silently, he turned me against him and started walking us to the back of the house. In the small bedroom he pulled off my shirt with one hand, then turned to the bed and picked up two pillows, stacking one on top of the other. He released his own surfing jams with a pull of a string and kicked them off. Oh god, I heard myself say over and over, where did he learn this? I erupted so quickly, with such overheated response that I saw him smile in amusement. Then, over my shoulder, in the oval wall mirror, I glimpsed a reflection of him on his knees, his slim body so hard and muscled that he could have passed for twenty. Oh, man, he breathed, his only loss of control.

Like a deflowered virgin, I was pinned to the bed, stunned, in pain and bewilderment, face pressed to cool, ironed sheet. Had it been so long that my body had lost its shape, or was he Superman? I had heard about this from older women friends, a trick of nature foisted on the menopausal.

While I lay motionless, he rose and grabbed his shorts. I heard water running in the bathroom. Lunch, I gasped. I'll get lunch. I threw on a loose dress that was hanging on a hook behind the bedroom door, and went into the kitchen to finish the sandwiches. I set a pretty tray with mats and napkins, and brought it out to the small outdoor table off the back porch. “You know I was a journalist,” I gushed, in a flood of girlish confidences about my work. I wanted him to know my full story. He didn't volunteer much, and I sensed my résumé recitation was an error. I stopped talking in midsentence. Even to my ears, asking him intently about surfing seemed like condescension, but I tried. He answered shortly, indulging the uninitiated.

“How about some mango ice cream?” I asked. “Mango is supposed to have aphrodisiacal powers,” I teased. “Although you don't need it.” He laughed, his eyes smiling into mine.

C
AL VISITED EVERY
week or two, or three, never with any regularity or habit, and we coupled in the same animal, often wordless, swiftness. We exchanged the least amount of information or preliminaries. We both knew we had entered into a game, an unstated pact that kept ourselves unknown to each other, as if we realized this was an odd, suspended time and should remain mysterious, almost anonymous. Sometimes it was stand-up sex on the rug before we even got further into the house. Or we would start on the couch with some opening pleasantries, then he would rise as if time was wasting and unbutton my shirt. It was usually serious lust, although once I rolled off the couch by mistake and laughed so hard it broke the spell. No one noticed any change in me, and given the nature of our limited activities, I would not be introducing him to friends. Yet a shiver ran through me when we arranged an assignation, and I'd spend the day in flushed anticipation. I experienced a quickening of senses, a reawakening of the sense of play, forgotten in all my earnest pursuits. I remembered watching a pair of squirrels as they chased each other in the sunlight, sometimes one catching the other, dissolving in a mass of gray fur as they wrestled together, turning somersaults.

I learned that Cal had built a decent business as a jack-of-all-trades handyman, in constant demand by the condo community. “Oh, work,” he shrugged. It was all done for the surfing, his one true obsession that had brought him here from the West
Coast twenty-five years ago and kept him doing anything to remain.

Sam the cat retreated outside during our liaisons and stayed away until long after Cal left. At bedtime on those days, I would have to go out in search of her in the starlight. Often it was so dark around my cottage that I did not see her approach, but would feel her weaving around my ankles in greeting until I picked her up and slung her over my shoulders. Those nights she kneaded the quilt and sniffed in disapproval at the smell of a stranger before settling into her habitual roosting spot between my calves. She then turned her back on me, closing her eyes. She liked being the only object of my affections and did not care to share our bed.

Every once in a while, perhaps in some memory of heat, Sam refused to sleep. She paced the floor in the bedroom and yowled, no matter how long I ignored her. In defeat, I would get up. Before I could fully open the front door, she squeezed through the narrow opening with rocket speed and disappeared into the night. Across the road lived a big, gray tomcat that bothered all the females in the neighborhood. One morning Sam slinked home, a golf ball–sized swelling on her back. It was infected, probably a fight wound or a love bite, diagnosed my vet, Dr. Nishimoto. He cut the pus out. See what happens when you go out and tangle with boys, I cooed. But it was too late.

Back in my thirties when I was looking for a second husband, I once followed a suggestion in a meditation book: Before you go to sleep, ask your God for a companion who is compatible in mind, body, and soul.

When I met one, it just about killed me.

The guru had forgotten to mention a fourth ingredient — unmarried.

After that romance ended, I used to lull myself to sleep by remembering our cocooned arms. After far too long, I willed myself to forget.

In a traditional narrative, my affair with Cal would be considered as the moment when the heroine Embraces Life. Yet I knew it only constituted a pleasant diversion, no more, no less, a welcomed shot of life that did me more good than a year of spa treatments. I had known the soul-soaring fecundity of true love but didn't miss the havoc it usually brought. For now at least, the dalliance with Cal made me feel like I had gone to Las Vegas, won the jackpot, and left town before I lost it all.

With amusement, I discovered that Isabella Bird had had a fling herself. A larger-than-life, sexy, and entirely inappropriate one. After Hawaii, she sailed for California with born-again exuberance to continue a planned journey throughout the West. No longer the proper Victorian clergyman's daughter, she had unleashed a new Isabella, free to kick up her heels. She described herself as a reckless lady “with the up-to-anything and free-legged air.”

In Colorado she hired a guide, a cultured English gentleman turned frontiersman known throughout the region as Mountain Jim. A surviving photo of Jim shows a middle-aged, handsome man with shoulder-length golden curls and a swashbuckling air; he wore a patch to cover an eye lost in a bear fight. He lived a ruinous life devoted to whiskey and rowdiness.

Isabella and Mountain Jim set off alone together to conquer the 14,259-foot Longs Peak. Snow, frozen temperatures, and altitude sickness nearly turned them back, until Jim tied a rope
around Isabella's waist, pulling and dragging her to the top. Fascinated by his erudite conversation and desperado looks, she felt inflamed with attraction for him, fanned no doubt by the melodramatic mountain landscape.

But once back in her Estes Park cabin, she announced that she needed to see more of the Colorado Territory and fled for several weeks. On her return, Jim declared his love. Unfortunately, he also unburdened himself with a lengthy, alarming confession of the depths to which he had descended.

Although they were an improbable match, Jim stirred Isabella in every sense, probably for the only time in her life. In a letter to her sister, Henrietta, she confessed in pre-Freudian innocence that she dreamed that he had fired his gun at her!

“There's a man I could have married,” she wrote to Hennie, although adding that he was a man “no sane woman would marry.”

She and Mountain Jim parted tearfully. A year later, back in England, she received word that he was dead, shot in the head by an acquaintance.

I
STILL HADN'T COMPLETELY
shrugged off my 1950s imprinting that decreed the traditional family as ideal. I wasn't the first woman to be deeply torn between social convention and desire for independence. But that these doubts still lingered at middle age, surprised and even embarrassed me.

Why was there no steady man in my life? I could not readily explain. Various answers to The Question had occurred to me.

Perhaps a deep-seated lack of self-esteem controls my choices, sabotaging the chance for love. I don't try hard enough. When I could be squeezing into a sensational dress, whipping myself
into an enthusiastic countenance to go out and scintillate prospects, I often prefer to stay home with a book. I am too introverted. Maybe too extroverted. Too bossy. Too strident, too opinionated, too confident. Too cranky. Way, way too picky. Perhaps the wounds and scars from previous tries left me hiding in a shell of self-protective defenses. Or had I been
too
lucky in love, experiencing it so profoundly that I couldn't accept less? I had adapted to a solitary state that kept me at a middle distance from others, close but not too close, guarding my privacy and requiring fewer compromises. Fate and destiny set me on a different path.