L’esprit de escalier

-idiom

1. the feeling you get after leaving a conversation when you think of all the things you should have said.

*

But it was in the sky. It awoke simmering in emerald white-blue and subsided in twilight, smoldering puce and molten yellow. The trees, cars and houses, mere shadows against its sublimity. She knew these were the colors

It was in the panic clenching her insides, that lurch of a heartbeat that came after a close call or the slam of car breaks, the wail of tires. The heartbeat she felt emitting itself into the palms of her hands in little shocks and shudders. It slid through the fractures in her conscience, over the radio, his smile on the back of her eyelids every time she blinked, the smile that buried itself in her neck, in the laughter that swelled and broke like the tide when they knew they were thinking the exact same thing.

Because love, she realized, cannot be written, but lived.

In how they poked and nudged at each other like children until she snorted, thrashing and panting between laughter, the way they would go after each other’s belly buttons because it was the easiest target. Elation rolled off the tongue. Each loved the way the other’s mouth bloomed. She thought it tasted like the effervescence from champagne, a touch of whipped cream and sandalwood. For him it was the biting smokiness of whiskey and preserved peaches. Laughter they could claim as theirs.

She thinks most people liked to wake up to a face next to their own, breath in sighs through parted lips, the thin skin of their eyelids wavering in dreams. But she loved his back, his skin freckled with tan splotched as if her fingers left permanent prints there, a crossed the span of his back and over the slope of his shoulders. She ran her lips between his shoulder blades, read his skin like brail. She woke holding notched into him like a key, her arms looped over his torso. And he held her fingers even in the depth of sleep.

She wakes up to love, the smell of soap and toothpaste, the sounds he leaves in echoes around the apartment. The shifts he makes in bed while she drinks her coffee, his yawn audible and low like the moan of a dog when you scratch him in the right places. Their cadence follows them in hushed utterances and titters that disperse into exhales.

In absence, without the familiar swish of tired on pavement, without the sweep of headlights over darkness, illuminating the parking lot like a flashlight, no slam of a car door or shuffle of feet over gravel. She waited for those brief minutes around midnight and when they did not come she wrapped herself in her own, bare embrace.

In their anger. In the brush-off. They both wanted to be right but neither was. Because when the argument is of the precipice before the nudge off the edge, they forget what they were fighting about. Instead they are both angry with the other for being angry. So they sit, their fights culminating in the cabin of the car and she sits, chewing on her lower lip. He walks away. It the silence that eats at her like a bug bite, trying to ignore it until one of them break out of their hunched shoulders, relaxing like a body first laid on a mattress.

Undertow

She relished his mouth, savoring hints of truth and un-holiness, carnage and reparation. The way his back and shoulders undulated under the cadence of their bodies, nearly made her weep, the way a painting in a museum or gallery would catch her off guard, take the breathe right out from under her so she saw starts and pricks of light. When she came it, the rush of euphoria was otherworldly, her lithe fingers curling into the space between his shoulder blades, her head thrown back into a rumpled pillow that she had been gripping onto only seconds before as the swell of climax made each bone in her spine quiver.

*

He liked to run his tongue around the orbit of her breast, lightly catching her nipple, ripe, in between his front teeth, tasting the parts of her that light hardly touched. He would comment on the opalescence of her bare breast, several tones lighter than the rest of her summer flesh, how virginal and sanctified that sphere of skin was, susceptible to his touch, blotched red and pink, a relic left behind after he tugged his t-shirt over his head. What was left of him was only the slam of the car door and her left breast budding with stigmas she deemed sacred to her body.

*

He rolled joints with agility and purpose. Wetting his fingertips with the tip of his tongue, rolling the dried herbs into the supple paper as if he was creating a vital piece to a larger sculpture. The white sheet draped around the slope her waist made when she laid on her side, head resting on the bend of her elbow. She closed one eye, then the other, watching him meticulous in such a simple task. She liked viewing him from different angles. His, best features, prominent through a single lens. He lays the joint on the pillow next to him and swipes a lighter off the dresser, holds the joint under his nostrils and inhales. His eyes close, the way they do when he asks you to let your hands wander over his bare body.

*

There is a heat that is internal, his abdomen and chest the warmest parts of his body under your palms, so prominent that you like to rest your hands there feeling him enter you. You know this worshiping of him, his body, the way he has roused you is dangerous, wet hands around an electrical outlet, bathed in water while lighting illuminates the sky, you’ve become a conduction for that lethal current.

*

He breathes into the spaces of your body, the plateaus of your abdomen when you lay on your back, his breath hot there after he has tasted you, made you come in loud bursts then small murmurs. He exhales into the plains where your neck meets your shoulders and you can smell the ambrosial, pungent scent of your own body on this breath, and you guide his mouth to yours, fingers grasping at his hair, then his neck, and his tongue is warm, like honeyed tea. You let yourself be vain and tell him you love the way you taste on the crevices of his mouth.

The intensity billows down; you climb onto each other, enmeshing limbs like dancers. There, a flush that you can see. Light sticks together then pulls apart like caramel. There is a hunger that pulses at your gut, clawing at your diaphragm. Your lips are engorged and his skin bleeds sweat and lust. This is an exertion that deprives you of the necessities to live. And when its over you both lay, chests heaving into a dark night. The moon is a muted gold. You open your mouth, your mind racing before your heart can catch up. But you don’t say it. And you are left with the sound of running water and a sigh into the night.

For Grandma.

“There’s something missing, or different, I think they painted the shutters.” My grandmother sits very still next to me in my father’s SUV, my mother on the other side of me shifts her weight to get a better look at the brick house, sagging slightly on itself, as if its succumbing, kneeling before to the thick mead of grass it rests on. No one speaks. We are there, my parents, grandparents and I at a pause in front of this hovel, a little compartment of a place my mother called home from decades.

“Well, there it is,” my mother reaches for my first three fingers and grasps them on her lap. I tired to imagine her in there with her brother and sister, Dan and Susie, all of them scooting around like little chickadees, bumping into each other, maybe spatting a bit then scurrying off to keep to their own. My grandmother, with her hair pinned up in a simple, auburn twist, a few stray strands clinging a bit to her long neck in the humidity of late July and the heat of the electric coils on the stove as she pressed the spatula into the buttered bread for grilled cheese. The house would be neat as it is now, because there would be no room nor patience for clutter or unnecessary objects, which is why, she never saved much of anything, only single braids of hair from her children’s first haircuts, tied with ribbon, placed in a cardboard jewelry box, settled in the same drawer she kept one box of the most necessary of heirlooms, my grandfathers dog tags and ID bracelet, a few yellowed news clippings and a paper-clipped stack of photos.

*

My grandmother, she whisks batter, for a bunt cake, or chocolate chip cookies, or brownies. She doesn’t believe in electric mixers, says elbow grease is the only way to perfecting batter. Her biceps protrude through her wiry but sturdy frame. She is so strong in her age of 89, still stands there with that bowl wedged between her breast and the crook of her arm. I whisk like she does, standing strong with the bowl, in the same place between my breast and the crook of my arm. I bake in my underwear and a white tank top stolen from a boy awhile back and I imagine my grandmother, young, my age, standing with slacks and a white short-sleeved blouse, her hair pulled away from her face. I imagine her kitchen growing warmer

*

My grandmother would have made breakfast while the sun stretched its rays a crossed the newborn sky, early enough that a solo robin chirped to itself while others were still rousing in the tree tops. She would feel the onset of heat before she climbed out of bed, the heaviness of the air premature for a morning early in June, waking her before the light did.

Her hair would be pinned up in a neat auburn twist, a few whips escaping from their hold with the breeze through the open windows and screen door. A quenching breeze that she knew would dwindle well before noon, replaced by a heat that bloomed like her hydrangeas on the front stoops, poufs of orange and marigold. She retrieves a red cardboard box of long stick matches and lights the burners, matches that will stay in that very spot, 3^rd drawer down in her kitchen, where, when she is a grandmother, she will retrieve them to show her granddaughter how to light candles.

She’d fold a paper towel into a prim square and daub Crisco in orbits and halos around her pans, grease them the same way she’d bathe her children when they were infants, quickly, efficiently, leaving no crevice untouched.

Bacon was expensive so she stuck to sunny-side up eggs, fried eggplant and perhaps a nest of fried noodles.

*

I spent my childhood memorizing every part of her hands, the surface of her palms and the lines that undulate and swerve across her joints.

Hers are muted and pearly in the light, holding tranquility in her palms, weathered and worn.

Mine showing the beginnings of calluses from erosion on flesh from helping my father in the kitchen, kneading, scrubbing, dicing, the rub of kitchen tools on thin skin.

Her flesh with its balmy folds and puckers seems as if it has just been laid across her bones like paper mache.

Mine are like blown glass, Christmas ornaments, appear delicate and weak but are derived from heat, withstood oven burns, paper cuts and chapped winter air.

My grandmother’s palms trap scents of basil and mint from cooking supper or pulling weeds from her herb garden.

The tips of my fingers and the spaces between them absorb the scent of perfume from hurried spritzes out of the bottle and coffee when I sop up the foam from the bottom of a daily cappuccino. The dull hint of flowers and espresso beans lingers there all day. Sometimes I rest my hand across my mouth, just below my lower lip so I can inhale it.

Her knuckles are like uncultured pearls extracted from fresh oysters, silken with a dull sheen. The skin that stretches over them fades in hue when she makes a fist or curls her fingers around crochet hooks, iridescent in the wash of dull lamp light.

I like how easily my knuckles crack. Using my thumb as leverage, I push each finger into my palm until the joint readjusts with a satisfying pop. This habit makes some cringe and shiver, cover their ears.

“Your gorgeous hands are going to end up ruined and deformed like mine!” my mother shoves her hands under my nose. Her knuckles bulge from the center of her fingers that bend in odd angles. The ovals of her fingernails are misshapen and uneven. My mother’s hands remind me of pieces of shrapnel or knotted roots on an ancient tree. But I think they are beautiful in a way I think driftwood and beach glass is beautiful. Natural and weathered from earth. Imperfect, just like her mothers.

My grandmother’s hands have rivulets of indigo veins that I would squeeze between my small fingertips. I loved how they felt as I pressed them down, cutting off blood flow until I released them, blood filling them plump.

My blood vessels are only visible when I’m cold or vertical. Azure against olive flesh, thin and flowing like raindrop trails on a car window.

My grandmother would encase my hand in hers, enveloping it in a swaddle. I remember her hands always giving off an internal heat that never dulled.

My hands are made like hers, to rub and massage, kneed tense muscles on his torso, roll ovals into the fleshy part of his back with the heels of my palms, scrunch his shoulders with my fingers. I like how his muscles turn into something malleable like dough from the warmth of my hands, like silly putty or clay, allaying under the power of my exertion.

But I hate how they swell in the heat: how the rings that I feel naked without become just snug enough that I have to soap up my hand to slide them off. Typing, writing and cooking are a struggle when my fingers are engorged from summer humidity, refuse to bend, the skin across my knuckles will split open and ooze like blisters, become clumsy, fumble and falter even the most simple tasks like holding a pencil, brushing my teeth, painting my nails. The tool becomes entangled between the spaces of my fingers, falling to the floor or counter where I pick it up only to fumble again. And if I try to make a fist, or spay my fingers across the steering wheel of my car, my flesh stretches across my bones aches more than the joints themselves, like leather or sheep’s skin desiccated on a frame. I hate the hangnails and cracked edges of cuticles that fray near the bed of my nail so that I bite or tear at them until they bleed and well up with blood, until they are sore for days after and I have to rub Vaseline to alleviate and coax them.

Strategy

The chess pieces are placed in rows, occupying the checkered squares like soldiers, one missing here or there as if a rook and a queen went off to bed together. A king, overturned, a cleft of stone missing from the base, a denotation of shame. The white pawns have a jaundice tone to them where the afternoon light is muted behind sheaths of clouds. The men are slouched in the metal furniture, bulky and overcrowded in their Levi’s, flannel and work boots. The man closest to me taps his index finger against his temple, a single vein protruding there like a river on a roadmap. A cigarette collects ash in the overturned coffee cup. The man swipes at the corners of his mouth with his thumb as if he is about to turn a stubborn page in an old book, then retrieves his cigarette. His eyes remain fixed on the pieces. His opponent drags a hand through brassy strands of hair that shine in ripples like light on water, the tips skimming the seams on the shoulders of his shirt. His eyes scan the board as if he’s skimming prose. He retrieves a rubber band from around his wrist and pulls his hair into a low-slung ponytail, a few strands freed from wafts of air, lifting away from his face, flitting around his square, set jaw and nudges a pawn forward with his knuckle.

My pen is paused over notebook paper. Through the glass I watch a muted aplomb, these men whose large, stained hands, poised over a chessboard, move pieces with such care and precision, in a game of attack and capture, a strategy of calculation, trust and betrayal. I scoff to myself, “most men would prefer football.” The man with the ponytail wraps his palm around the porcelain mug to his left, sips, his lips left wet, rubs the back of his neck, pulls the loosened hair in the rubber band a bit tighter.

That flaxen hair, escaped from the grips of the rubber band, on my neck, grazing my collar bone, draws paintbrush-thin lines of perspiration across the tableau of my chest as he dips his head to taste the salt on me. He would move invisible chess pieces over my flat stomach with his fingertips, talk to tactics versus strategy. He’d retrieve chess pieces off his dresser and place them across my torso, the cold marble or stone resurrecting goose bumps. He would trace pathways of the bishop at queen with his thick and apt tongue. He would smell of ginseng and aftershave, a little pine, and taste like maple syrup.

Through the glass, pawns lay in a small cardboard box, a holding cell for traitors, the board absent of its kingdom except for a few survivors. The sky fills with billows of pewter clouds and raindrops leave track marks ageist the window. The men show no sign of leaving. The stray strands from his ponytail cling to his forehead, matted, as the rain comes harder. He plucks a black knight from its occupation near the center of the board and moves it a space closer to the peripheries of the board. His opponents king stands vulnerable, the pawns captures and unable to protect him. Beads of water collect on his mustache and beard, dripping every so often onto the nearly empty board. And the sky opens up with hot light and sound. The rain comes. And I do not know their names.

Invisible Love

Sometimes I wonder what kind of lover he would be to me. He is versed, knows how to love a woman without complication. He appreciates the beauty in body parts like knees and ankles. He likes bruises, sees them as inkblots, a way to define a woman by her marks and scars. He will find a bruise and swipe at it with his fingertips as if he is reading brail. He reads a woman's body with his hands, his nose, his mouth. He get to know her, to love her by her smell of coffee and tea tree oil, the taste of salt and chamomile on her shoulder blade, the way her hair feels like corn silk through his fingers.

He would disagree, affably, to gifts on holidays and, instead, on some lukewarm summer morning I would find a note written on a napkin or old envelope from an electric bill that's already been paid. It would be written in methodical, masculine scribble:

Hey you,

Didn't want to wake you up. Made some tea and muffins for you. Booberry, your favorite (see what I did there?) I almost woke you to tell you how beautiful you look in the morning with the sun on your face and you breathing through that little space between your lips? I even think it’s sexy when you snore. I don't have to tell you good luck with your writing today because you don't need it.

You Know I Love You.

And I would save all of his little notes in a paperclip and keep them hidden in my underwear drawer. His love would be purposeful and informal. He would love me best in one of his white shirts, dewy from a fresh shower, a mop of cropped hair pushed away from my face, ruddy and spry. He would be tactful, keep me wondering and perplexed about his love for me from time to time. Loving him would be like a puzzle with pieces missing, so I’d have to go searching for his secrets. Secrets he’d tell me in bed, a little winded after making love and coming with my name on his tongue. He would pass storefronts and be reminded of trinkets I’d like or books I’d read but would only buy them if the wind was blowing the right way, wind that felt like my breath in his hair. And we would cook meals together, assigning each other tasks. He’d wipe tears from chopping onions, and I’d lick the sauce off his index finger. Our arguments would be heated; we would yell, push each other around and go to bed with our backs to each other. And in the morning his chin would be in its usual place between my neck and shoulder and we’d converse in sleepy murmurs until the sun beckons us from the landscape of twisted covers. This is how I would love him.

How to be the Other Woman

-Photo by me

Fragment Chpt. 1 (Maybe?)

Ravish.

…In his car where both of your breaths come in thick, laborious exhales and mist forms on the windows. Trace shapes and letters in the condensation, bite your lip and look straight ahead, and when you look at him, make sure it’s only out of the corner of your eye. Appear coy, but don’t allot him your full attention. Make him believe your indifferent. It’s in the deception

Read his thoughts through the dirty wordplay that you tease each other with. Be aware he is taken but ambivalent…at first. Fidget, play with your stockings, stretch out one leg at a time, re-adjust your skirt, massage your own neck with your fingers a bit to let him imagine his teeth there.

Maybe you’ve only seen her once and you can feel your brow pinch and your mouth dwindle into a tight line when her eyes flit over you from a crossed the room.

Or, just the opposite, you treat her like a new friend, compliment her shirt, her bag, maybe her shoes, tell her you should have a girls night, grab a drink, laugh at her one-liners and make sure he sees you laughing with her. Be recklessly detached and risk the scars left behind, disfiguring and permanent.

*

At home, paint your toenails red and listen to jazz while you shower, hum through the steam and stream of water. Let the vapor settle around the peripheries of the bathroom, touch the crevices of your body where condensation has formed, touch yourself in the way you know he would, with two fingertips. Let the water soak each part of you and be proud of the dips and ellipses of your silhouette.

Your hips jut and gyrate when you squirm. You dig your heels into the floor, or the couch or bed, or backseat where you are laying with your jeans around your ankles or skirt pulled up past your knees. You have bruises, beauty marks for your legs, faded, the color of thistle and a halo of yellow. You can let him take your shirt off but leave your bra on, and don’t loose your underwear in the heat of tugging at his hair or latching onto his shoulders. Don’t be that kind of girl to misplace your underpinnings. Know that he is good with his tongue. The climax reminds you of a warming stove, steadily building heat until your red with the impatient longing to come and he stops and runs his bottom lip up the inside of your legs until you grab his hair and tell him not to stop between gasps. Make him the best; tell him he knows your clit like no one else. Make him believe it when, after the warmth of his mouth, you finally come in purrs and moans. Let your muscles give in, let your legs shake, smile at him when he looks up and you from where he lays his head on your stomach. Be silent and listen to his breathe.

Don’t let yourself be existent because of what men think of you, or think of when they look at you.

Try not to wonder what he would think if he were to see you in the early hours of the morning. Believe that he would still find you sexy even with morning bed-head and stale breath.

Lie. But not too much. Or rather, see it as leaving out details.

*

If she sits and closes her eyes these men become mere flashes of skin, and shades of blue and brown irises between blinks, and bits of conversation and dark spaces and the flushed skin and swollen lips after.

The desire to touch

And she thinks about the way he articulates certain words

Words that would normally be banal with any other person but he draws them out on his tongue like he just exhaled smoke from a cigarette

“They've got so much detail. They're soft, expressive.” This is why he loves women, and why she touches herself in exploration. She tries to see what he sees. She wants to turn her cluttered conversation and awkward stutters into confidence, build up her quirks into something she loves. She wants to turn a bare shoulder to people who look through her or who laugh at her. She wants to take her insecurities and turn them into effervescence, blow bubbles in the air, turn people on with her laugh, stand with her spine elongated, collar bone worn like a modern piece of jewelry. She loves to be touched, an arm slung around her waist, a palm resting on the back of her neck, a hand finding hers. She loves the warmth that two bodies make on contact. The of her body define her tone. Her curves are punctuation marks.

The way he touched her, he was discovering skin for the first time.

Bar Fly and Bare Nights..To Be Continued..

..a start to my short stories?...

*

You use the thick sheet menu as a coaster for your beer, condensation forming a ring on the lamination. You nudge the half full bottle with you’re knuckle, but you’re tired of easy sipping and Bells Two Hearted, just to feel uncomplicated, a girl boys like because she slugs a hoppy, kitschy, somewhat hipster beer, without a glass, mind you.

You listen to the table behind you talking about biker gangs, which you remember from the summer living on the lake, their tailpipes leaving ashy trails in their wake and a gargle-putter you could always feel in your ribs as they sped by you, when you were a waitress on the patio at Zinc downtown.

The bartender tosses his head back and forth, his hips swaying in fitted jeans, a wine key and bottle opener slung in his back pocket. You watch as he mouths the words to Billy Jean as he grabs vodka, then cranberry, then triple sec, shaking the shaker above his head, a fine tuned body in a tight burnout t-shirt that has a print of Debbie Harry with gold letters reading BLONDIE. You want to be his friend immediately and have a quick day dream about the two of you hitting the gay night clubs, dancing on speakers, glitter flying.

God I wish you were here you think. I wish you were here “..two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year…”

You catch the waitresses eye over two skull capped heads and trace the water droplets with your pinky a crossed the “entree” section of the menu. The waitress takes her time to get to your table and says nothing as she pauses in front of you, hip popped to one side.

“Can I try the…French 75?” She eyes the beer bottle she brought you only minutes ago.

“Not doing it for you? She points to the bottle with her pen. You grab the bottle and gulp the beer like a man and taste nothing until you take a breath in, feeling momentarily nauseated. The waitress looks bored.

“Nope, just need something else.

*

You sip the French 75 and can taste the gin on the back of your tongue, a bite of juniper and effervescence spiking your taste buds, tickling your nose and the space between your eyes. The aftertaste of sugar and lemon reminds her of the chapstick he wore the first time you kissed him in the dry heat of early summer.

And you wonder with the last trickle of liquor down your throat what kind of lover he would have been. The taste of gin brings you back to that porch, looking at the silhouettes of the trees, black against a night sky the color of soaked figs, and the edges of the leaves glow against dull light from neighbors’ windows. He lassos his bare feet onto the back of the chair, dragging you towards him, pulling you onto his lap and you wrapped your legs around his waist like a serpent.

*

The air coming through the open door reminds you of his fingers cupping the back of your neck, words splayed out between tasting the liquor on the insides of each others lips, tracing lyrics over the outlines of your mouths.

Now you spin the empty glass counter-clockwise on its base with your index and middle finger and you look for something to focus on before you decide to order straight whiskey on half melted ice, and you find a couple sitting just off the crest of your left shoulder. You try to observe out of the corner of your eyes but it gives you a headache so you maneuver just enough in your chair where it looks as if you only re-crossed your legs. The girl reaches out to finger the cuff of the boy’s sweater and he catches her pinky, hooked into his and he quickly places her finger between his teeth as she giggles.

You order another water from the waitress, too miffed now to pretend like she actually cares if you are going to tip or not, and you hold an iced cube on your tongue and remember how he always seemed to wear white t-shirts and jeans in the summer, went barefoot and there was something so masculine and fervent about seeing a man that plain and beautiful, smelling like bar soap and warm rain. And the night that never leaves you, you remember him sitting like the boy a crossed from you, one knee bent, the other straightened, his toes fondling the cuff of your jeans.