~ Blue Wing ~

by

John M. Solensten

“Number seventeen,” he says. My God! He’s trembling again and she sees it. She gathers up some sacks and her car keys as they are getting out. He hurries ahead of her and unlocks the door. She steps past him into the surge of heat from inside the room.

“Oh, my!” she exclaims, standing there, letting the place focus for her. The room smells of deodorants and something else. The wallpaper, a muted red snowflake pattern, looms over the dark Mediterranean bed and other furniture. He has already put the light on in the white bathroom.

“Oh, my--bordello eclectic!” she exclaims.

“Oh, Carrie!” he cries, moving toward her.

She drops the sacks and heads toward the bathroom. He peels his clothes off and listens to water running in there...

She emerges from the bathroom in a dark green robe, sees him, smiles.

He pulls the robe away, letting it fall softly, pulls her toward him.

“Oh, dear God!” she cries as they fall bedward.

Oh, Summer! Summer! Summer!

Oh, throb of the wild, pulsing tropic!

Oh, such prodigious rowing we do make..

And then--the amazing damp breath of the madness cooling, cooling--he kisses her, kisses her...

While she weeps, then pulls him up, clings to him, pulls his face up to hers.

“What’s the matter?” he whispers, kissing at the tears.

“Oh, nothing’s the matter--nothing at all, can’t you tell? Everything held back for a long time just rushed out, that’s all!”

He comforts her, wonders at this strange ceremony of grief.

“Even on the honeymoon he wasn’t quite with me. Not really.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine...”

“I’m sorry I...”

“It’s all right,” he whispers, kissing the rich tanned golden curve and dwell of her body--kissing to know her.

“You’re so lovely, so fine in everything,” he whispers.

“Oh, but not so perfect. And I have missed things in my life.”

“No children?” he asks, rising up on one elbow to keep his face close to hers.

“With someone who could never be ready at the right time? But you haven’t either--you who was going to be a teacher or something.”

“No,” he says.

“You know that if we get caught they’ll think badly of us--all the good people.”

“I like my body when it’s with your body,” he replies, “it’s more and better.”

“You’re changing the subject,” she says, laughing hoarsely. Then she is sitting up and asking what food he has brought along. He reaches for the long tanned curve of her back, strokes it, lifts up to kiss it. She leans back on a pillow, pulls the sheet up over her breasts.

He wishes she wouldn’t.

He gets up to find the food he has put on the luggage table: sandwiches, pop, the iced wine in an insulated little box. He pours wine into a plastic glass.

She frowns, sits up a little. “Oh, wine in more plastic. I’m afraid I’ll have to get us some good wine glasses. Don’t they have any in that town?”

“I guess I just wasn’t thinking about tableware,” he says as he sits next to her in bed, fighting the lean little pillow at his back.

“Luncheon on the grass,” she says, her face rounding with a smile.

Chewing and laughing.

“Do you remember our last summer--I mean together?”

“Oh, Seb, are you back there again? So many summers have come and gone since then.”

“That one May afternoon--just after classes let out--we walked all the way across town and talked about life. We both talked about faraway places and how we might go to them someday! It was a grand day and then a grand night with the pavement dance in town and everything.”

“A musical--you seem to be speaking lines from a musical again.”

“I suppose. I’ve been told that before, I guess.”

She gets up to go to the bathroom, a hand flickering behind her to cover her. At the door she turns to throw him a kiss.

When she comes back she stops, pours herself some wine and grabs some papers and things out of a shopping bag.

“What’s this?” he asks.

“Show and tell--again!” She eases down next to him and turns on the bed lamp.

Photo albums. She has two to show him. He wonders how she got them out of the house. He wonders how she can show so many photos of her husband. Is it some kind of a show of honesty between them or merely a toughness she has learned and he is learning?

He can see the money there in those photos--in those moments staged for Better Homes and Gardens--in that house of theirs on an avenue of grand houses in Des Moines. Yes, and moments in distant places he has never seen--the entrance to the Louvre, the blue sea flashing on a beach on the Turkish Riviera, the sculpture garden at the Walker...

As he sees them he feels her moving away--away again...

“Much have I not traveled in realms of gold,” he says.

“I did some post-grad study at the Sorbonne,” she says, turning a page and showing him a photo of her younger self with other students all smiling, all full of enthusiasm...

“Lucky,” he says.

“You never went back to school?”

“Not quite. I went to college for two weeks and that was it.”

“You, the class valedictorian?”

“I thought being King of the Ballroom was enough. Then I had to come home and help support my mother.”

“Your wife--she died very young?”

“Yes. She died in a car accident on the highway to Mason City.”

“Was it good with her?”

“I hardly knew her. We were both crazy busy trying to save money to buy a house. Then she was gone.”

She doesn’t seem to be interested. She is not just looking at the photos; she is far away IN them.

The afternoon light falls.

He’s ready to move with her, into her when she cries out, “Oh, God! It’s nearly five!” and pushes him away. She turns away, pulls clothes on as he jumps and stumbles into his own.

“Same place in a week?” she asks, pulling at her hair with a brush.

“Oh, yes!”

“But some day soon we should be in Blue Wing.”

“Tricky.”

“Try. It’s our house, you know!”

She’s at the door as he gives the place a final check.

He kisses at her, misses.

“I’ll walk down to my pickup,” he whispers hoarsely as she slips into the winter twilight.

She drives away from the unit on squealing tires because she is late. She doesn’t wave good-bye.

The goddam pickup. The goddam heater. His loins feel lizard damp, his body suddenly tired. Better get to bed early. Putting up drywall in the morning.

Driving by the lake he sees the dim figure of some old guy standing out there ice fishing on the last, the dangerously thin ice, dangling a line into the depths below his lantern. The old guy is bundled up thickly and dances on one foot and then another to keep warm. Doesn’t seem to care that he dancing on dangerous ice.

Beck laughs at himself. It is a bitter laugh. Because it is his heart.