Ten
The
Eye of the Goddess
The next morning, we were consuming a late
breakfast at Gilda’s. Carlotta, alas,
was nowhere in sight. A passel of
bourgeois ladies at the next table were conducting a debate about who among the
latest crop of pop singers merited the label “diva.”
“Well, what about Melissa
Etheridge then?”
“No, no. Melissa’s more of a rocker. For ‘diva-ness,’ you have to have a certain
level of showbiz refinement, like...”
“Shania Twain.”
“Yes! Or Celine Dion. Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, that type.”
“What about Barbra?”
“Dahling! Barbra invented
‘diva.’”
Hessie could take no more. She made a beeline to their table and, with
the approximate tone of an airline stewardess, delivered the following:
“Hi. I couldn’t help overhearing your
conversation, and I just wanted to throw in my two cents. ‘Diva’ is a term originally created to
describe, literally, goddess-like operatic sopranos. I might add that opera is unimaginably
difficult to perform. To compare opera
singers to the list of guitar-strummin’, shower-singin’ butt-shakers you have
just described is like comparing my eggs Benedict over yonder to an Egg
McMuffin. Thank you for your time, and
please... have a delightful breakfast.”
Hessie departed as quickly as she
had come, leaving a cloud of stunned silence in her wake. Finally, one of the divettes was heard to
say, “Well, that was interesting.” They then discussed the latest offering from
the Oprah Book Club, “The Tree, the River, the Shrub.”
Sadly, Hessie had to leave right
afterward, to Portland and the Rimsky-Korsakoffeehouse – the usual problems
with barista turnover. Carlotta arrived
a few minutes later, delayed by some ill fortune at the auto shop – but of
course she had actual work to do, so I figured I’d best forfeit my table to the
lunch crowd. (Besides, my paranoia had
grown in the night, and even Carlotta, with her mile-high legs, seemed like a
potential rival.)
I
spent the rest of the day simmering on full brood, using my vast visualization
skills to picture Frosty in various positions with luscious women. This was exactly the kind of thing I never
had to worry about with George, and Lord, did I hate it.
I gambled on the beach. I knew full well I might run into them there,
but I craved the auditory massage of water hurling itself forward. Under a fog of jealousy, I found myself
looking down at the ground with each step, noticing small things in my
path. The sand, for one, was light
enough that it would gather at the tip of each invading roller, leaving tiny
ridges, a linear diary of the tide.
Later, I passed a man with a silver beard and jogger’s build, standing
over a dead seagull atop a small rise.
The man’s expression was strangely vague. I couldn’t tell if he was sad about the
seagull, scientifically curious about its demise, waxing philosophical about
the life-and-death cycle of nature – what? Typical of a man to be so fucking
hard to read.
After an evening of weepy Puccini
in the listening room, and a decent night’s sleep, the fog of jealousy had
thinned, and I could even carve out peepholes for myself. But I was still feeling guarded. When I met Frosty at noontime, he seemed as
distracted as I was. We greeted each
other and headed off down the beach with very few words.
The days of royal crescents were
gone, our treasure points whittled down to nubs, the rocks reclaimed by the
ocean. We passed the afternoon with few
discoveries – until we reached that same spot on Hotel Row, where the point
remained remarkably intact and populated.
Climbing the peak, I found a lovely green bottle-bottom with stitchings
along its edge.
“We won’t be giving that to
Frosted Glass Woman,” said Frosty.
I answered in a perfectly vague
tone. “I am not yet a convert to your
religion, Frosty.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “Mine is not an evangelical cult.”
Fuck
him and his humor, I thought. Here I
was seeking open flesh for the incision, and he wouldn’t cooperate.
All the way back, I followed
twenty feet behind, frustrated that he wasn’t responding to my distance. But it did give me time to think – mostly
about the previous afternoon’s phone calls.
Calling on the boss, I was greeted with the usual blissful assurances.
“Sandy, really. I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but
what you’re doing up there on that beach is far more important than any petty
inconvenience on this end. Believe me, I
know – if you don’t stay up there till you’re just dying to come back, these
conflicts will eat you for lunch on a daily basis.”
What a wonderful man I worked
for. And what marvelous lies he
told. I got the truth from Shanili,
packaged in that wonderful sideways phrasing of hers.
“Mister Conowith is having much
trouble, Sandra. The company is very
much wanting that he should do something about your... situation, and he is, how would you say? He is
like a man on a busy freeway, trying to stop large trucks by throwing pebbles
at their tires.”
“Not only that,” she added, a
touch of embarrassment in her voice. “I
myself... I am missing you very much.”
That last part got me. The thought that someone placed beneath you
by the crapshoot of corporate hirings would actually miss you. That Shanili was a prize.
Even so, that was much easier
than talking to sister Meg, who listed the many ways my nieces were being
tortured by my absence, and made me promise to come home for Thanksgiving. She tormented me further by describing the
costumes Maisey and Tanner were wearing for Halloween. They had developed this odd fixation with
psychedelic rock, and were going as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
For dinner, Frosty warmed up some
leftover Chinese beef and broccoli. I
tried not to consider the other female lips that may have touched it. I held off until the persimmon pudding, when
questions began to leap from my mouth with the subtlety of bullfrogs.
“Is this glass-collecting stuff
going to go on forever, Frosty? You have to do something... real after this, don’t you? And what are you
going to do with all that glass, anyway? Don’t you eventually have to put it to
some kind of use? And another thing I’ve been wondering – how the heck do you
dress the way you do? Is there a dry cleaner around here, or do you iron your
shirts with… stones warmed up by the campfire?”
My onslaught was met by a long
silence, after which Frosty turned back from the stove, ladle in hand, and
asked me a single, brief question.
“Are you done?”
We exchanged an uncomfortable
stare, after which I gave him an even briefer answer.
“Yes.”
Frosty, finished, er... frosting my pudding (with praline sauce, damn
him), and set it before me.
“A common female technique,” he
said. “Never ask the central
question. Much better to unleash a
cluster-bomb of wholly unrelated questions, in the hopes that the pivotal
answer will be flushed from the shrubbery with the rest of the pigeons.”
He placed his hands on the table,
attorney-like.
“Now. Would you like me to actually answer all
these picky-ass interrogations, or would you prefer to get to the friggin’
point?”
“Okay, Frosty.” I took in an
Eskimo breath and set my jaw. “Have you
been fucking around?”
“Well, there!” He slapped the
table and smiled. “Was that so hard?”
He stood and went to the stove,
taking his good time dishing out a saucer of pudding for himself, then returned
to the table and began eating.
“You’ll excuse me,” he said. “But I get the feeling I’ll need the
strength. Now, tell me this. Without naming names, may I assume that you’ve
been warned of my evil ways from someone in town?”
“Yes.”
“May I further assume that I’ve
been painted as something of a Don Giovanni? Dipping my pen in many inkwells?
Leaving young milkmaids sobbing at the altar?”
“In so many words – yes.”
“Okay. In that case, let me begin by describing my
actual sexual practices, and I will let you decide what’s what. If it doesn’t meet with your expectations,
that’s fine. They are – like most things
about me – rather eccentric.
“Now. Living the odd life that I do, I am sorely
lacking for what you might call...
sustained contact. People come to
the beach, they stay a few weeks, they’re gone.
I’ve learned to enjoy them while they’re here.
“I also, understandably, am taken
to be something of a mystic – although I am uncomfortable with that term. Really, I just do what I need to do to get
by. Nonetheless, this ‘mystic’ quality seems
to attract a certain type of woman: between forty and fifty years of age,
completing or just past her child-bearing years, feeling dispossessed by life
and searching for new ways of looking at things. This is what I provide.
“I will not soften this up for
you – sex is often part of the bargain.
You will have to admit that, when handled with a certain degree of
affection and tenderness, sexual intimacy provides a wonderful healing power.”
“Yes,” I said, through gritted
teeth.
“Hang with me here, Sandy. I’m almost to the good part. These relationships don’t tend to last,
because these women all have lives they need to get back to. Occasionally, however, I do manage to
maintain long-distance friendships, and occasionally those friends do return
for visits. But each time they leave, I
offer the same caution. I am what you
might call a serial monogamist. This is
not inspired by some profound moral code, but rather from the basic impression
that to divide one’s sexual focus is to strip it of all its magic and mutual
respect. Besides, you women are hard
enough to figure out one at a time.
“So now – to the endgame. These last two visitors were, indeed, women
with whom I have slept in the past. But
not this time. Because you, dear Sandra,
are my current one and only.”
He was getting there, but “My
Current One and Only” wasn’t the Broadway musical I had in mind.
“But wasn’t there...” I started,
stopped, and then started again.
“Besides just being available, and present, at that moment... was there, is there, something special about
me?”
Frosty fished a piece of brown
glass from his pocket and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. He aimed it in my direction and answered.
“I generally accept the
visitations of women the way I accept the pieces of glass swept into my path by
the ocean. It’s a passive
existence. Women come to me, needing
something; I provide them with bright images and solace. In return, I receive the comfort of female
companionship, the pleasures of sex, and a welcome respite from a lonely
life. But I never took the trouble to
actively pursue them. Until you.”
“Until me?” I said. “I find that hard to believe.”
“The blue piece is one in a
million, you know. There’s something
about the structure of cobalt glass that causes it to break into very small
pieces. You just don’t find them that
large and that perfect. I found that
piece at the bottom of a cliff one day.
I called it the eye of the goddess, carried it with me every day for six
months. The moment I saw you, it was no
longer mine.”
Shit. He had thrown me to the mat one more
time. I am putty, I thought.
Modeling clay, molten glass, waiting to be blown into small, cute
animals and sold at Disneyland. I fought
back the lump in my throat and eked out a question.
“Why?”
“Lights. Inside your head. To the practiced eye, Sandy, your radiant
power is as visible as a beacon ten miles out on a clear, dark sea. I had no choice.”
The nerves at the back of my neck were shooting off like fireworks,
and the muscles in my limbs went limp.
The passion boiled through my body like steam, but it came out
unexpectedly. I placed my hands on
Frosty’s chest in preparation for the goddess kiss – then thrust my arms forward
as hard as they would go. Frosty fell
flat on his butt, inches away from the fire.
He looked up at me, simultaneously stunned and amused.
“You fucker!” I growled. “You’re not off the hook yet. You told that goddamn gorgeous story to every
woman who touched your dick!”
I paced like a caged tiger,
trying to understand what it was I was asking, why I was being such a glorious
bitch (and enjoying it so much). I aimed
a kindergarten teacher’s finger straight at his nose.
“Show me something you haven’t
shown a single damned one of them.”
Frosty scrambled to his feet, a
look of thrill flashing through his eyes.
“Follow me.”
He pulled me along the dark road,
up to the ranger’s cabin, where we ducked through an ivy-covered gate to a
metal shed. Frosty pulled a key from his
pocket and undid the padlock, swung the door open and yanked a
light-string. My gaze was met by what I
would guess to be one hundred white, five-gallon buckets, each of them marked
with a large G, B or W.
“My God, Frosty.”
He shuffled to the rear wall and
dragged out a single black bucket, placing it at my feet and popping off the
lid, one small section at a time. He
lifted it with a flourish, exposing five gallons of midnight sky.
I woke up halfway through the
night, Frosty’s breath at my shoulder, a full moon poking stars through our
macrame ceiling. I rubbed my eyes and
tried to recall the dream I had just interrupted, a pair of great horned owls,
silver-feathered, on a beach composed entirely of cobalt blue sand.
Photo by MJV
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