An American Tale
By José Rodríguez
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 José Rodríguez
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Denver, Colorado
His first trip to the Strip in Las Vegas had left him in awe of the glitter, of the waste of water in the desert, of the crowds walking and rolling along the boulevard and teeming inside the outlandish casinos. His second trip had been like going to the McDonald’s down the street from his house with the smell of fries spilled on the floor. He had seen the haggard faces of casino workers after long shifts and decrepit gamblers throwing away their money down shiny slots to be rewarded with noise and lights, and he had hated himself for seeing those things.
Why could he not be like anybody else and just enjoy himself? His hypersensitive perception distorted normal life into half truths and ironies yet he could not get to the gist of things, to the whys and the hows, his insight getting mired on non-essentials that made his anticipated discovery of life's truths a disappearing mirage in the desert. He envied clods who got a kick out of eating at the NASCAR café whereas he could see nothing but a corporate attempt at deceiving him by giving him heroes he didn't care for, and he hated both the deceiving and the fact that he was too clever to be deceived.
There had been two moments of achieved satisfaction in this trip. He had stopped by a highway mirador in Utah to admire a landscape of mesas and canyons under a bright sun. He sat on a rock and took in the sights, breathing in a cold desert air. He had become enthralled by the sight of an eagle gliding over the rugged terrain with the smoothness of a celestial god. A crowd of screaming kids disgorged from a minivan and herded by their loud mouth parents had put an end to his bliss.
Later, he’d had sex with a whore he had met in the lounge of one of the casinos. The short climax had been worth two hundred and fifty dollars. It had not been true companionship but he had enjoyed sex without emotional strings and had satisfied his curiosity over the flesh of a stranger.
Now he sat in his car stuck in the Denver afternoon rush hour, crawling his way through potholes and around orange cones. As the car’s stereo played Bob Dylan, he realized that he had divorced his wife only to fall into the lonely routine of a bachelor existence just as constraining as the shackles of a loveless and childless marriage. Something was amiss if his happiest moments of late had been sitting on a rock looking into the desert and screwing a whore. Whatever wasn’t right with his life, he couldn’t put a finger on what it was.
As he usually did on the way home from work, he stopped by the grocery store. With basket in hand he moved through the aisles not so much looking for goods but checking on the strolling humanity. He applied what he knew to be his flawed looking glass to the unsuspecting customers crossing his path. They came into view and he analyzed them and discard them and kept on moving, wondering how off the mark he had been in his judgments because he knew that his perceptions of other people were as flawed as people tended to perceive him. He envied people who could come into the store to buy groceries and walked away with just that. He always walked away with some groceries and the mental snapshots of the strangers he had crossed paths with.
He needed a hobby to occupy his wondering mind, something more enlightening than ruminating over stranger’s mental snapshots. He tried reading the usual fare of bestsellers but they left him as empty as prime time TV. He even tried a literary tack and picked up James Joyce's Ulysses but after a few pages he asked himself, what the hell is this crap? Since this first and last try at keeping his mind entertained, he had come back to his stacks of Car and Driver magazines as his source of mental stimulation.
As usual, he walked with the basket in his hand. If a particular person caught his fancy he would follow that person around; very disturbing of course, but he made no distinction between genders or ages, just as if he were watching animals at the zoo, and he had consummate discretion.
While he was looking for trash bags, he came behind a woman of about forty, her tight dress shaping her generous rump as she leaned forward to reach for a jar of sauce on a lower shelf. When he tried to squeeze past her, she shifted her weight on her pumps and her hip touched his.
"I'm sorry," they said together.
Her subdue fragrance was one of extraordinary femininity, something he had never smelled before, expensive and uncommon stuff.
Without further words or meeting of eyes he kept moving to continue his quest for trash bags.
That night, and the nights that followed, he lay on bed basking in her remembered fragrance, a memory so fresh and clear that he felt she was next to him. It was a smell of orchids – he didn't know what an orchid smelled like, or if they smelled at all – but he fancied that it was a scent of orchids, moist and tropical, soft and penetrating, and that she, with her voluptuous and lascivious nakedness would lie on a bed of such flowers, next to him. At times this fantasy gave him an erection.
It had happened before that snapshots stuck in his mind like the hook from a pop song that keeps on playing itself to no end between the ears. Such obsessions would subdue, their power drowned by the flow of new images. But this snapshot was different; it had attached to it a scent and a touch, the softness of a mature and soft flesh. His imagination metamorphosed her image into the Venus she wasn’t, but he didn't care because he knew that her scent and touch had remained intact. He marveled at his olfactory memory working so well. Of course he could remember and distinguish particular smells such as gasoline or ammonia, but he had never been so stimulated by the delicate scent of a woman who had become embedded into his mind so deep in such short a moment.
At the time of that brief contact, he hadn’t had the foresight to follow her and take a better look. Maybe he’d had been ashamed at her being old enough to be his mother; perhaps the sensorial experience had not yet bitten into the marrow of his imagination. Whatever the reason, he now regretted it. He had glanced at her pleasant face where thick and dark eyebrows arched under a well-coiffured black hairdo streaked with silver. But what he remembered most vividly was her dark blue eyes, eyes that met his, before he had run down the aisle chased by his own embarrassment.
He had gone back to the store many times to patrol the aisles but neither she nor her perfume was there. He found his obsession amusing rather than disturbing, the innocent product of his unoccupied mind and sensitive nose.
Time weakens memories until they disappear into unintended forgetfulness or what is left is but a gray shadow of its true self. His memory of her had been reduced to such a shadow when, one Saturday, he caught a whiff of orchids at the mall. An instant flash of remembrance jolted him; the silkiness of her hips, the roundness of her shapely calves raising from her pumps to hide pass the hem of her dress, all came back to him as if it had never been almost forgotten.
He turned around and there she was, standing almost next to him, rummaging through her purse. Her dress was more elegant and stylish but she was the same woman. He imagined walking up to her and smelling her neck, feeling her breasts getting squashed against his chest, of getting lost in that scent. She looked at him, unblinking and expressionless. Realizing that he’d been staring at her, he blushed and tried to speak, but no words came to him.
"Well, hi there," she said. Her face was an unreadable mask.
"Hi," he answered. His eyes, which had moved down to the expensive necklace against her pale bosom, would not respond to his wishes to move somewhere else.
"Can I help you?" She smiled, ivory teeth enclosed by a bright and fleshy redness. His eyes moved back to her face.
"I..."
"Yes?" Her smile and direct gaze made a clod out of him.
"Sorry, I don't know what to say."
"Have we met before?"
"Yes, by accident. Grocery store."
"Oh, yeah. I remember."
Her answer took him by surprise. That he remembered her was a given but her, or anybody else, to remember him, that he didn't expect. Maybe he had been too abrupt when he’d said sorry, or maybe he hadn’t smell too good after a day of running around the office.
"I remember you because of your perfume," he said.
She mentioned the perfume's name, something French and unpronounceable.
"Why do you remember me?" He dared to ask.
"Nice buns," she flashed a naughty smile and walked away, her hips swaying atop high stiletto heels. His eyes stayed on her until she disappeared in the crowd. Wondering what was going on, he sat on a bench next to tired and disgruntled husbands waiting for their wives. After thinking it over for half an hour, he was as confused as ever.
Nice buns, she had said. Old enough to be his mother, but sexy and appetizing, as classic as an old movie star, of the black and white days. Her wealth fit her like one of her tailored dresses, as much part of her as her own skin.
From that day on his obsession went from amusing to disturbing. Naked on bed he would masturbate thinking of a woman whose name he didn't know. Dating women his age had become a routine that fulfilled a biological need not satisfied by self-stimulation, but Mrs. Robinson, that is what he had started to call her, was a tantalizing unknown. Excitement built into the pit of his stomach, an excitement akin to the sensation felt when approached by the prostitute in Las Vegas.
Instead of pondering unanswerable questions and philosophical dead ends, now he wasted mind power thinking about her, making love to her, undressing her item by item, peeling off silks garments until exposing her tender and milky flesh unmarred by tattoos or piercing gadgets. He found himself fighting erections at work for a woman probably twice his age that he knew nothing about and whom he called Mrs. Robinson because he didn't know her name, and had no idea if he would ever see her again.
Regardless of the poor intelligence he had on her, the excitement of the chase to come endowed him with new energy. Remembering that she had said he had nice buns, he stood naked in front of the full-length mirror in his room, squeezed his butt cheeks, and said “Yeah, baby!” a la Austin Powers.
Every day after work he walked the aisles of the grocery store where he had first seen her. As often as he could, he went to the mall to search for her. Nordstrom was his favorite hunting ground because he suspected she shopped for the best. While stuck in traffic he peered into luxury cars. He had made his mind she drove a Cadillac, a candy apple red Cady. Older people still liked those. He also checked Lexuses and Mercedes just in case.
He continued masturbating while thinking of her, involving her in the most illicit and shameless sexual machinations he had ever dreamed of. But after many weeks that had turn into months his persistence had yielded nothing. Even though she was still very much in his mind and his libido, his pragmatism allowed him to function as society would expect, dating and screwing women his age, and avoiding the pits of marriage as if they were burning coal under his feet.
One night he took a young woman with overdone hair and nice breasts to a fancy restaurant. This date had proven hard to crack and his experience on these matters told him that nothing worked like an expensive meal and wine to make tough cases like her spread their legs, the reason d'être of polite dining as far as he understood it.
In the restaurant’s lobby, as he and his date entered, he saw her, radiant in a short strapless black dress, embroidered stockings, high heels, jewels sparkling like candles in a chandelier, a fur coat sexily wrapped around her creamy shoulders. Any other older woman in the same dress might have looked ridiculous, even a slender young one, but she looked stunning to him. When it came to dressing up, she knew what, how and when. Their eyes met and he flashed his James Bond smile. It didn't matter to him that his date was hanging from his arm like a fruit basket, or that an old man was hanging from Ms. Robinson’s in the same fashion.
She reciprocated the smile on the sly.
He felt like dropping his date, walking to Ms. Robinson, taking her into his arm and walking out of the joint – screw that polite conversation bit and get to it. He felt an erection coming up, and he knew his dress pants would not keep the bulge down so he stayed put and turned around trying to distract his mind to avoid an embarrassment. From the corner of his eye he watched as her party followed the hostess into the dark bowls of the restaurant, noticing how she kept her askew eyes on him until she passed behind a wall.
"Who is that?" his date asked him. After all, the young one was not as obtuse as not to have noticed his interest.
"Some friend of my mother," he said and there were no more questions from his date about what she had called that old mamma with the stuck up butt. He and his date dined on the opposite side of the building where Ms. Robinson and her party were sitting. He and his date ate, drank and flirted, he playing his cards on the table in front of him but wishing he was sitting at the other table where the stakes were higher, winner takes all, double or nothing.
"Where is the bathroom?" he asked the waitress. She directed him to the opposite side of the building – to her side.
"Excuse me for a moment," he said to his date who was already bubbly with wine. He did need to relieve his bladder but he also had hoped to catch a glimpse of Ms. Robinson, and he did and she noticed him standing by the bathroom wall. There was a slight smile from him and a discrete counterpart from her. As he came out of the restroom he found her standing in the hallway looking like she were ready to go into the ladies room but he knew better. She had been waiting for him, stalling for time in front of the men’s bathroom. This time it was not the aroma of orchids with the unpronounceable French name that greeted him, but nevertheless an indescribable divine fragrance shrouded her. Where does she get this stuff? He wondered.
"Nice to meet you again," she said offering him her small, warm and soft hand with immaculate manicure and he took it without hesitation. The hormones in his blood spun faster but he was determined not to flounder like he did at the mall. A small piece of paper had ended up in his hand as she went into the restroom floating on a smile, sneaking away like a feline. He dropped his hand and the message in his pocket, all very casual and smooth. She would appreciate his finesse. James Bond could not have done it better.
That night he got to play with his date's young breasts. His date didn't realize that his extra hard erection and willingness to please were inspired by the old mamma with the stuck up butt. Ignorance facilitated her pleasure and pragmatism voided his guilty conscience.
After he got rid of Young Breasts the morning after, he started to ponder about when would be the best time to call Ms. Robinson. There was no doubt about calling. The concealed paper had a phone number hastily written in well-rounded letters. He could play it cool and wait a couple of days so as not to look too eager, but he was desperate so he called that Saturday morning. The number was not available. I will try again later. Of course you dimwit, he kept on mumbling, I will call again and again until she answers or my dialing fingers wear out.
His next attempt, sometimes after lunch, succeeded.
"Hello," Ms. Robinson answered.
"Hello," he said, nervous.
"Who may this be?" she asked.
He couldn't answer because no reasonable answer crossed his mind. To her he was as mysterious as she was to him. After a pause he spoke.
"You gave me your phone number last night, by the bathroom."
"Oh yes, you're the guy from the mall."
"And from the grocery store."
"I remember."
"Nice buns," he said half ashamed.
"Do you have a name, nice buns? Or you would rather be called that?" She giggled and the sound tickled his ear.
He said his name and she said hers. Brenda. Now she had a name. There was a lull in the conversation. His groin throbbed and he wondered what she felt.
"I’d like to meet you." He had mustered all his wits to sound nonchalant.
"I bet you do." Again, that ticklish laugh came through the receiver.
"Are you always this bubbly?" he asked.
Their first meeting occurred at the Starbucks by the mall. After a friendly handshake they sat across each other. His heart beat hard enough to pop out of his rib cage. Their small table brought him closer to her. Her attractiveness was not magazine cover material but it had a mysteriousness and raunchiness that would draw the attention of many a man who crossed her path. She held his stare and smiled, half sneer and half something else he could not describe or explain. Her eyes flickered and thick dark eyelashes fluttered.
Her perfume wafted across the table and caressed his nostrils. Was he the victim of expensive perfume or there was something about her that triggered his hormones? He didn't know and didn't care either. He took a deep breath and let the aroma take him into rapture.
"Since the first moment we met, there has been something about you that has attracted me to you," he said.
"And what is that?"
"Many things; yet, nothing in particular."
"Then don't be particular and tell me one of those other many things." Her smile captivated him.
"Well, for starters, your scent," he said. "You know, it drives me insane."
"Is it too strong? I don't want to reek of it." She laughed with a coquettish mannerism.
"Oh no. Is not the quantity; it's the quality, so ... nice."
"Thanks. Tell me more." She felt back into her small smile.
"You dress sharp, and you have class, you know, spades of class." He blushed because he wasn’t one to compliment a woman, and the few times he had done it, his compliments had been half lies designed to get laid. This time he was being truthful and for that he felt embarrassed.
"Thank you for noticing, darling."
The “darling” reverberated in his ears and his hormones churned in his blood stream. He felt a stab of pleasure in his groin. He saw himself and Brenda through the eye of a black and white camera, stylish and witty as forties movie stars on a wide screen.
"You're welcome."
"Go on," she pleaded. "Adulation is quite a pleasure."
"I could go on for a while, and I don't even know you."
"Perhaps if you were to know me better your adulation would diminish or disappear."
"No way. I like what I see." His face felt hot, ready to burst. He had flirted before and saw it as a stupid game but this time he felt like he was hunting dangerous game armed only with a spear. She, the prey, was a real dame, a well bred and heeled female of exquisite maturity, not some young thing with a loud mouth. He played his cards with care and thought. His usual poker face had abandoned him and he wore his excitement on the skin, on plain view.
"I do too," she said without blushing, her smile turning small but inviting.
He wanted to grab her jeweled hands and kiss them but the tacit understanding that discretion would be a treasured quality stopped him from showing public and perhaps unwanted affection. Now what? he thought. He wanted her but her enigmatic facade hid her feelings. He had what he had longed for within his grasp but, like a hungry miner standing in the heart of the jungle holding the diamond he had long prospected for, he found himself both rich and lost at the same time. His mental dilemma was interrupted by her words.
"You like staring at me, don't you?" Her eyelashes flickered on purpose but he didn't know that.
"Sorry ... I didn't mean to do that."
"You don't need to say anything, darling."
"I find you tantalizing. Don' expect me to explain why."
"Attraction is more than the addition of small things," she said.
"Much more," he said.
The ensuing silence didn't embarrass him because there was plenty more said through their mutual stares that it could have ever been spoken.
"Do you have a place?" she asked softly.
"Yes, down the road, north of Arapahoe."
She stood and grabbed her purse. He also stood.
"I will follow you," she whispered. He nodded. They walked out together. He held the door open for her in their way out. Her scent made him dizzy. By the time he got to his place he had a painful erection. They made love and for him it was the best ever, beyond explanation or qualification. Her skin fair and soft, her curves enticing and accommodating and her thick dark bush inviting. He caressed her with the determination and excitement of a conquistador looking for Montezuma's gold. Every inch of her body he touched, kissed and sniffed, and every one of those inches was better than the one before. As they rolled in bed, they spoke.
"I'm married," she said.
He kissed her for an answer.
"I'm divorced," he said. "And I intend to stay that way."
She kissed him. He sank his eager fingers in her plumb flesh and discovered a soft and pliable femininity willing to embrace him with a unique warmth and aroma. Her detached yet rather willing method of lovemaking had a feline and mysterious quality, as if she knew something about his body that he himself didn't know. From the first moment she touched him he felt she knew the ticklish and erotic spots of his body as if they were tattooed on his skin; and yet, to him, she was the unknown. Every time he laid a hand on her or caressed her, a new sensation moved across his fingertips and he could not satisfy his desire for more fast enough.
The lure of a married woman in his bed, of an older paramour, perhaps a little Oedipus complex – he never figured out what was behind his attraction to her, and he didn't care or couldn't explain it or understand it. For the first time ever he had accepted his condition and enjoyed his situation. He questioned no one about why, how or what's next. His perennial list of things to have and to do drop out of his consciousness, replaced by one desire, to be with her and to feel her body next to him. He became lax in his ways, imperturbable in his emotions, detached in his dealings with others because only she mattered and only she filled his mind and heart. He occupied his mind on the question of the enigma she was.
Her husband was the old man he had seen at the restaurant, she told him that one afternoon as they embraced in bed.
"Is he good to you?" he asked her, warm and exhausted from lovemaking.
"He is OK."
"He looked old."
"He is."
"Why?"
"Why what darling?"
"Why did you marry him?"
"I was too young to know better." She smiled.
"Am I too young to know better?"
"I was a lot younger than you are now." She kissed him on the lips and murmured into his ear, "someday you may realize you have made the same mistake I made but by then I would have enjoyed every minute spent with you."
"Enjoy Every Minute,” that was the banner he flew over the ivory tower of their idyllic and adulterous relationship. It fluttered gently in the breeze of his everyday routine.
He ha settled into the routine of chasing after her by playing phone tag and by sending her rather sexually descriptive emails, which she answered with eroticism sans foul language. She was the mistress of deceit as she managed to always come to their clandestine meetings conducted at his place. Now and then she managed to meet him at hotel rooms; the seedier the room, the more sexually aroused she seemed to get. At these motel encounters she wore the most daring lingerie. Seeing her mature womanhood on such revealing outfits made his hormones race faster than if he had seen her stark naked.
He didn’t care whether his feelings toward her were love or nothing more than unbridled lust or perverted fetish. Even if he’d known for sure, it would have no difference. The idea that she belonged to him was all that mattered.
"My husband is a very jealous man," she said on another of their afternoons together.
"I would be too. I would never let you out of my sight," he said, and he meant it.
"You are nothing like him."
"Do you think I could not be jealous about you?" He squeezed her breast and rubbed her nipple.
"His jealousy is unhealthy."
"Mine would be wholesome."
They both laughed and that was the end of the subject.
Afterward, he ran her words through his mind many times and always came empty handed. Jealousy was foreign to him, an incomprehensible concept. He knew about its causes, symptoms and consequences, just like he knew things about the Ebola virus, and just like Ebola, he’d never experienced it; it only happened to other people.
Unlike other women he’d dated, she mattered to him. She was the one he couldn’t keep; the one he could not show affection for in public; the one that aroused him with her mere scent; the one that one day won't be there anymore and he will be helpless in stopping her from disappearing from his life.
"What is going to happen to us?" he asked her one day.
"Why do you worry about it?” she answered. “Don't be silly."
"You answered my question with a question."
"Did you expect an answer to your question?" Her small laugh tickled his insides.
"Am I asking too much?"
"Yes. There is your answer."
"You haven't answered my first question yet."
Her smiled disappeared between her now hard set lips and she turned away from him, staring at the window. He followed her gaze but only saw the evening rays sneaking through the vertical blinds and floating on rails of dust. He awaited for her reaction to his words but she revealed none. The white walls and ceiling turned a melancholic yellow that appeased his desires for a definitive answer. There was no answer, and if she gave him one, he probably wouldn’t like it. He embraced her and pushed her back on the bed for another round of lovemaking in the twilight filtering out through the blinds and chased away by faltering breaths and the smacking sounds of lips on skin.
The routines of his life before he met her were not much different than those from his new life. Their furtive encounters added the spice to his otherwise bland existence. Had she been marriage material, he would have convinced himself that he was in love with her. Also, had she been a candidate for marriage, he wouldn't have got too close to her, afraid of losing his independent and lonely and selfish life. He pondered these contradictions but could not arrive at a conclusion. Fantasizing about her seemed much more satisfying.
She called him a cold fall day. The sky along the Front Range had no traces of any impurity, natural or man made, which could blemish its magnetic ozone blue. The pristine quality of the weather that day was to remember for a long time because it was a juxtaposition to the murkiness inside him after he received her call.
"I cannot see you," she said before he could say his greetings.
"What about Sunday then," he said
After a long pause she said, "I meant ... I cannot see you, again, ever...”
Her words stopped his heart from beating while he tried to gather his wits.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"My husband found out about us. He had a private eye follow me."
"Bastard," he said, not sure whether he meant the PI or the husband or both. "Are you OK?"
"Yeah. I'm fine but our thing is over. I'm sorry."
"Hold on..." but before sounds could be massaged by his open mouth into unintelligible words, or any words, she ended the call.
"Good bye," she said and hanged up. Click went the phone in his ear. The motor that had propelled his existence ran out of fuel while still moving along on cruise control, nary a worry about the future. Now he was stranded too far along to go back to where things had started.
On the following days he mulled what to do next. He couldn’t think straight; instead, hormonal rushes sent him to the bathroom to masturbate. No matter how hard or often he did it to seek exhaustion and relief, all he got in return was a brief sense of disgust while his sexual desire for her grew stronger and overtook his common sense like weeds growing on a manicured garden.
Restlessness poked at his nerves during the day when he left his mind wander off the work at hand. His sleep faltered at night with interludes of erections and lustful thoughts. He called her non-stop to always hear a nasal voice in a recording telling him that her number was not longer in service. The mechanical voice was as relentless as he was in calling a disconnected number; still, with each attempt the flimsy idea of maybe-this-is-the-one-call-that-makes-it-through forced his finger to dance on the keypad.
Once dumped he knew better than to try again but that rule, he had rationalized, applied to his other past and gone lukewarm relationships, to the other half-hearted attempts at finding the right woman. But his relationship with her was a bond of flesh, semen, blood and unbridled desire, of a want that burned like boiling oil through the thin skin of his civility.
Finally, he convinced himself that her phone was disconnected, that he wasn’t dialing the wrong number and that the recorded message was not a fluke. Frustration or rage – he couldn’t distinguish between them – flared up inside him. Instead of giving up and accepting a new stage in his life, he decided to switch to a non-existing, never before spoken of "plan B." Working on this new plan, trying to give it shape and substance, soothed him for a time by creating the impression that he had things under control.
He knew she lived somewhere off University Avenue, behind a guarded gate. He drove past the gate a few times. Now what? he asked himself. Assuming he could get through the gate, he didn't know her place. She had mentioned a big house but every house he could see from the bottom of the hill was as big and looked as empty as a warehouse. That is why she had sought him, to relieve the emptiness and lifelessness that permeated into her from such houses. Why had she chosen him to be her lover? He was sure he wasn't the only available candidate; perhaps the most naive and easier to manipulate, or easier to get rid of. Perhaps he was only one of the many gigolos already at her beck and call. But no matter how hard he tried to configure his next moves with the precision of a military strike, his mind got diverted into mundane mulling that yielded no benefit.
As a kept woman she didn't have a job. He remembered reading on the newspapers how estranged boyfriends and husbands ended up killing the women they loved, or used to love, by showing up at their work despite restraining orders and coworkers being nearby. The thought of him behaving like those men flashed in his mind but with such a brief and feeble intensity that it did not have time to bother neither his intellect or common sense, or morality, qualities that had became unwanted baggage from the moment he met her.
Her Cadillac came from a local dealership. Camping on the sidewalk and waiting for her to bring the car for servicing could take months but was a workable option. He could also set camp in front of the gate to her neighborhood, or the one he suspected of being so. Both options were liable to bring unsolicited attention upon him. Not for a moment he stopped to think about what he was doing could be considered stalking. From the desperate schemes that ran through his mind, he chose to carry out what he called the Gym Plan. She had mentioned where she worked out, and activity she engaged upon to fight boredom more than to achieve physical condition because as she had said, she only liked sweating when making love. This information she had given as conversational filler, said once and forgotten but not by him who remembered every word ever said by her. Because of the same reason, her visits to the gym were few and short but he arrived to the conclusion that his loitering around a gym would be far less suspicious than loitering on the sidewalks across gates and car dealerships, plus the place is air conditioned and he would be in the shade.
His life’s routine had been upset, again, by her, and there was nothing he could do about it. On hindsight, he knew that he had been rather naive by not gathering more information on her and her whereabouts; by God’s sake, he didn’t even know her last name! He knew every square inch of her anatomy, every hair on her body, and yet he had never bothered to learn where she came from, her full name, how to get to her house. He knew her body as if it were his own, yet he now had to admit that he didn’t quite knew her on the sense that she still continued to be the unknown, the deliciously and erotic unknown.
None of his schemes worked out. The hours spent searching for her, waiting for her, chasing after her, were for nothing. He felt chasing a ghost made out of intangible flesh, hormones and delicate and expensive perfumes, but a ghost nevertheless, untraceable and consumed by the daylight of his new days without her, hiding from him, perhaps forever.
He continued to live under the appearance that nothing had changed. Coworkers didn’t notice his longings for her, his pain at her absence. His few acquaintances didn’t notice either. He survived in an automated mode that allowed him to do his job and keep a reasonable social life. But at night he lay on bed naked, stroking his member, thinking of her, masturbating over and over, chastising himself for not having being more cunning and not learning more about her. He couldn’t believe he didn’t even have a picture of her.
The cliché that time heals everything was nothing but a load of crap to him. His pain may soften and its edges may not be so sharp, but he knew it would never go away, like a bullet embedded in a healed lung. His pragmatic side told him to move on, and he tried, but he kept on masturbating everyday with her image in his head, his fingertips remembering the touch of her supple skin. Back to Las Vegas he went. He stopped by the side of the highway again but this time only saw a hot and harsh landscape of dirt and rocks that meant nothing. Inspiration Point was gone for him. He screwed two whores this time, and it was good, but not like being with her. The rubbing of genitalia and its effects was not much different, but her fragrance was not there, her shallow breathing, her eagerness to touch, grab, asking for more, none of that was there. Money couldn’t buy those things.
Of course he was pussy whipped, he knew that, and he laughed at himself because he had thought himself too smart to fall for this malady more prone to occur on a teenager enamored of his first love or on an older man snarled by a younger woman. He didn’t fit any of those two categories, he who had women at his disposal, now found himself pussy whipped by an old mama with a stuck up butt, and he couldn’t explain why or how it happened, but he had the disease and there was nothing he could do about it.
Months went by and he started to date other women, and he made love to them while fantasizing he was making love to his paramour, and his unsuspecting lovers mistook his energy and passion the wrong way and could never understand why the relationship didn’t worked out, but at least he got a reputation as a enthusiastic lover and his bed was never lacking of female companionship. He kept on loitering on the usual places, the gym, the mall, the supermarket, the streets close to what was supposed to be her home, the car dealership, but his hopes had dulled and he expected nothing from these endeavors but still kept at it because hope was all that was left together with his memories of her embedded into the deepest interstices of his brain as if they had been branded in there with a hot iron.
Hiring a private eye came to his mind, but he had nothing that could get a gumshoe started on the right track, and he could not bring himself to confess his twisted passion for an older woman to a stranger. He imagined the investigator’s smirk when he explained to the man what he wanted done – crazy nut – The man would probably take his money and he would never hear form him again, and then what?
Back he went to the usual places, and he kept on making love to other women while thinking of his missing lover, and his obsession he kept under tight wraps, but by no means it was over as that bewildering obsession controlled every minute of his life but he did his best to hide it, and he did a good job. As he put it to himself, he had become a master of disguise but he wondered for how long he could keep it up. At some point things would have festered long enough that something ugly was going to pop somewhere. He had no idea when or how or what, but he was sure that his unbalanced life would eventually have to crash somewhere so things would even out. That was nature’s way of keeping things straight and no amount of will power or cunning from his part could stop it.
Summer turned into fall and the days grew short but the stubborn parched grasses of summer still hung on the foothills and to what was left of the prairies that had escaped Denver and its suburbs’ coat of concrete, asphalt and water thirsty gardens. The sunsets had been outrageously beautiful, a symphony of radiant saffrons and crimsons befitting Martian vistas, because of the smoke spewed by grass and forest fires burning the desiccated land from all directions.
He was sitting on his apartment’s balcony with a beer in hand, watching the spectacle of beauty and destruction when somebody knocked on the door. Without looking though the peephole he opened the door. He had told himself many times to be more careful, but every time the bell rang, he forgot his own advice.
It was her.
Her dark hair was up in a bun that made her eyes bluer under her dark eyebrows. Her long earrings shone like diamonds when the sunset light went through them, but of course, they were diamonds, he thought, or something equally expensive. No words came out of him, they couldn’t, his tongue paralyzed by her presence. He sniffed the air and that smell of orchids almost wiped him out. He grabbed the door to steady himself.
“Are you going to ask me in?” she said with a soft smile and voice. He stepped aside to let her in, his nostrils flaring to absorb more of her essence. The door closed and she turned around and before he could say anything, she planted a delicate kiss on his lips, and another, and another. Her smell made his libido almost jump out of his body. They kissed and embraced and nothing, but absolutely nothing mattered to him that moment, the world be damned, hell be damned, she is the only thing that had meaning at that moment. Without saying a word they ended up in the bedroom where they made love as another fiery sunset got sucked behind the Rockies.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why were you gone, and why did you come back.”
“Did you miss me?”
“Terribly.”
They made love all night, and he asked her if she didn’t have to go home to her husband, and she said that her husband was gone, for good.
“Where?” he asked.
“Gone to hell, where he belongs.” He looked at her with quizzing eyes.
“Did he die?” She did not answer; instead, kissed him.
“Well?” He pressed for an answer.
“Yes, the bastard is dead.” Her face set into a hard expression. He kissed her neck and nibbled on her earlobe and decided to not stir things up because he wanted her to stay with him for the night, and for the next day, and the day after that, and then forever. With the old man out of the way, his minded filled with possibilities that both please him and scare him but that didn’t stop him from making love to her, again.
Next morning he had to go to work. He proposed to call sick but she said no, and promised to be back that evening.
“I don’t know if I can wait that long,” he said.
“It will be worth it.”
She gave him her new cell number and he ringed it while she used the bathroom, just to make sure it was not a phony number designed to appeased him. A cell phone beeped inside her Versace purse. His spirits soared and his boldness made him dig through her purse and look for her driver’s license. The photo was gorgeous, a truly photogenic gem. He read her last name and address and memorized both, then put everything back. When She came out of the bathroom, he had already written the information on a pad on the kitchen counter. This time he would be ready for her next disappearing act. He hid the pad face down under the phone book. He walked her to her car and watched her go, taking a good look at her license plate number and rushing upstairs to add that one to his dossier on her.
He felt so smart about his cunning ways, and as the day moved through its hours he realized that last names change, people move and car tags come and go like the geese outside his window at work. Dam it!
He called her from work and she answered and he whispered sweet nothings and she laughed on the phone and the bulge in his pants grew to obscene proportions but he didn’t care. She was there for him. What’s next? He saw himself living with her on top of the hill, in the old man’s house but then he felt like the pool boy, like a gigolo servicing the old lady. Not good. He saw her living with him at this apartment, neighbors and their gossip be dammed, but then he knew she was used to good living. A cramped apartment was not her style. They should move to a far away place – maybe France or Italy – and live their lives as they saw fit. But really, the only thing that mattered to him was that she had come back, and he was ready to do whatever it took to keep her.
As promised, that evening she stopped by, and to his surprise she asked him to come to her place. She drove her car and the guard at her exclusive place opened the gate for her and gave her a polite salute without she having to stop. He sat next to her on the passenger seat and a knot rode with him inside his stomach; he had never been in a posh location like this, next to a rich and beautiful woman like her, going up the hill, passing houses as big as motels scattered among manicured landscapes that had stayed green despite the drought and water restrictions, or perhaps those restrictions only applied to the common folk outside the gates, to the little people like himself.
Her Cady passed through an automatic open gate that she had activated by pushing a button on her dashboard, and another button opened the five-car garage inhabited by a Big Ass red Corvette and a giant SUV. She parked next to the Corvette and both got out of her car. The grandiose house had been intended to be imposing but he thought that it had been overdone; it reminded him of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. The only things missing were the slot machines and their racket of noise and flashing lights. She took him upstairs to the biggest bed he had ever seen in real life and both ended up naked and tired and full of each other on a sea of twirled silky sheets.
“I need your help,” she said while playing with the hairs in his chest, wrapping them around her fingers and pulling on them. He said nothing, wondering what she was up to. She had never asked him for anything. This would be interesting, he thought.
“It’s about my husband.”
“He is gone, right?” he said.
“Well, yes and no.”
The riddle puzzled him and his face showed it.
“Come with me.” She put on a short robe embroidered in gold, her voluptuousness trying to escape from underneath the silk garment. She stepped into high-heeled shoes that matched her robe. No bunny sleepers for her. He got up and only put his pants on and followed her barefooted as they made their way down three flights of stairs and into the basement. They walked in silence and he was happy just watching her rump swinging under the robe and her shapely legs rising from her shoes and disappearing under that same robe.
When he stepped into the cold concrete basement floor, he regretted not having put shoes on. The basement was huge; it looked like and underground parking lot but without cars, and better lit. He reckoned that it was as large as the house’s footprint. He could see nothing but a forest of steel posts scattered throughout the empty space in front of him and a few boxes next to the stairs. A room next to the stairs had to be the closet that held the furnace and the water heaters.
“It’s cold in here,” he said. “Even in summer.”
“Yes it is,” she said. She had stopped next to a big meat freezer, the chest type with a lid that flips open. His mother had one of those in the garage and it had been his job as a kid to dig stuff out for dinner. She opened the lid and he automatically leaned forward, expecting to see packets of meat wrapped in wax paper, bags of frozen vegetables, and maybe a bucket of ice cream.
What he saw didn’t register at first. It couldn’t be, his brain refusing to recognize that his eyes were not faulty. The naked and frozen body of a skinny elderly man encased in a gray and spotted skin covered with frost rested at the bottom of the freezer. His face was contorted into a ghastly and frozen laugh, his yellowed teeth peeled like a growling dog. The yellow eyes were open and each looked in a different direction.
He looked at her. She stood next to the cooler, one hand still holding up the lid. Her robe had come undone, or had she done it on purpose? Her thick pubic hair a dark forest against her snow white flesh and her breasts hanging like heavy globes on her chest. She had put a foot forward, like a model posing on the runway.
“Meet my husband,” she said and her free hand, palm up, pointed to the corpse as if she were a game show hostess, showing off the merchandise to be won. She didn’t smile though. Without closing the lid she moved and stood in front of him, looking straight at his eyes. She kissed him with that delicate touch of lips that never failed to ignite him, and this time was not different. They kissed long and deep and her robe felt to the floor. She ran her tongue down his chest and down his navel. She squatted in front of him and took the robe from the floor and rolled it into a sort of cushion she used to put her knees on while she unzipped his pants and gave him fellatio. His body tensed like a steel rod and he couldn’t get his eyes off the freezer that gave out rivulets of cold vapor alighted by the industrial light inside.
He couldn’t see the husband, but he knew who was responsible for him being there, and the lips of the responsible party moved up and down his shaft, creating such rapture that he couldn’t think straight and do what was right. He looked down and their eyes met, and he knew he would do anything for her, and she knew that too and she smiled and kept on rewarding him for his blind loyalty. He reached orgasm right where he stood and ejaculated on her face, convulsing on throes of sexual pleasure at the same time he kept an eye on the freezer, thinking what he was getting into, but the consequences of sharing her secret didn’t matter as long he could be with her.
They plotted in her room how to get rid of the frozen body, speaking in soft voices, holding on to each other, their naked bodies arousing. The idea of being a criminal aroused his libido, and the idea of making love to a criminally insane older woman reinforced that feeling of being rotten to the core. The idea of being in this together because both were rotten apples took hold in his mind, and he thrust his pelvis against her with force and determination. Her screams – of pain or pleasure, he didn’t know and didn’t care – made him feel like the incarnation of evil on earth, and he reached an orgasm like never before.
The morning light came through the cathedral-like windows and woke him up. He found himself alone on the huge bed. She was nowhere in sight. The thought of her coming behind him with a butcher knife crossed his mind and he jumped out of bed as if he had found a snake in it. As he was dressing hurriedly, she walked in, holding a silver breakfast tray, wearing a new, black robe with Chinese motifs and a radiant smile. Her high-heeled sleepers matched the robe, of course.
“Hi honey,” she said, and all his thoughts of butcher knives and another body in the freezer disappeared from his mind and he saw nothing but the beautiful woman he loved beyond measure and beyond common sense. He smiled too and both had breakfast and made love again.
After her returned home, the thought of the frozen body returned to him. He agonized about what to do. Plain common sense showed him a clear path that was blocked by his obsession for her, for her body, for her presence, for her smell. He could never leave her or betray her; neither could he ignore the frozen body in her basement.
Their plan had seemed simple when they had concocted it together, holding on to each other, but now the logistics seemed overwhelming. Using cash to eliminate traceable credit card receipts, he had bought the tools he thought would be necessary to get rid of the husband for good: thick rubber gloves, a pick, a shovel, an electric chain saw (less noisy than a gasoline-powered one), dark-colored heavy duty trash bags, a dust mask, and a mechanic’s overalls. After he’d bought these items, he decided that he also needed a hand held vacuum cleaner from an auto parts store, work gloves from the hardware store, and a new pair of cheap sneakers from Walt-Mart. He decided to rent a car, too. He’d watched enough CSI episodes to know that using their own cars to carry a chopped-up carcass was a bad idea.
As planned, he showed up at her place late in a moonless night. To his surprise she was wearing a rather short dress, with embroidered hose and high stiletto pumps, all in black, and some nice jewelry; not the outfit he expected her to be in to dump a corpse but on the other hand it was she, the incorrigible queen of fashion to the end. He brought down to the basement all the implements he had brought with him in the trunk of the rental car. She didn’t help with anything, but sat by the basement’s stairs, legs crossed and showing a nice slab of leg that kept him smiling regardless of the grizzly task at hand.
He put the overalls on, the dust mask, an old Bronco’s hat he had found in his closet, and the heavy rubber gloves, and then opened the freezer’s lid. The naked body seemed mummified, with a gray color not found on the living. He hesitated and looked at her. She smiled and that was all he needed to grab the corpse by the head and yank on it until he dislodged the body from the freezer. The frozen carcass landed on the concrete with a thud and rolled on its side like a piece of old wood. He took the electric chain saw and turned the switch on but a last moment thought made him hesitate.
“What’s the matter honey?” she asked from behind him.
“Somehow I need to hold the body down so I can cut through it,” he said. “I don’t want it to jump under the blade.”
“Hold on,” she said. She came around him, giving him a saucy smile, and put her foot on the carcass’ torso, hard, like if she were trying to dig her sharp heel into it. The running blade landed on the corpse’s neck and cut it off in a second. The head rolled onto the floor and ended up looking up her skirt with his crooked eyes. With a swift kick, she sent it rolling across the basement floor. The dismemberment operation continued and he noticed the relish that glowed on her face each time he sunk the blade into the old man’s corpse and bits of frozen flesh flew and pelted her. Each body part that came off she kicked away across the floor. He had never seen such meanness on her, and he didn’t know what to think of it but that he was enjoying the deed there was no doubt about. All he could think of is that he wouldn’t like to be on her bad side.
As she held the trash bags open while he placed body parts inside, he couldn’t help looking at her cleavage. He used the hand held vacuum to pick the frozen flesh dust and bits off the floor. He knew that his cleaning wouldn’t be enough to hide all the evidence if crime lab people came snooping around, but he knew that it would be good enough for the casual observer. The last things to go into the bags were his overalls, the dust mask, the gloves, and the chain saw in a bag by themselves.
They left the house before midnight and headed east toward the barren Colorado plains. She sat on the passenger side and gave directions to the place she had chosen as a dumping ground. They drove for a long time, the road going up and down rolling hills. The headlights revealed mostly open spaces quilted with faded grasslands or barbed wire fences and shrubs, with occasional trees that seemed foreign to the prairies, survivors of droughts and frozen winters, their barks as tough as buffalo hides.
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