3.14

There is something to be said for a woman who has class. Let me be paint a picture in a gilt frame that hangs in the parlor of your mother's house. The light is shining through the bay windows and she shakes her hair out in front of you. When she smiles, she outdoes the brilliance of the lake behind her. Her neck cranes to look around your cousin Susan to meet your eye, the gaze of which she drinks in a single draught. She's at the end of a seven year dry spell and she is ready to wash away her withdrawal with you. You can sense the muscles in her straining and taut. You can remember her arching into you when you kissed in the kitchen, sneaking ice in the summer heat when you were young enough to not care. But you went to university, remember, and you got married to Anne because it was a good idea, not because you wanted to.

There is much to be said for a woman who has fire. Let me tell you a story you'd hear in the night, one that would climb up with the smoke and join with the treetops. The crackle of the fire joins the sounds of the night, but you can't hear it for the sound of your ears in your head. You've been playing your guitar, but she got up to dance. In the half-lived light of the aging fire you can see the curves and the flow of her dance, the lines. I want to shout. It's welling up in me--the memory of the purity and the joy. Fire. Life. Her arms slip out and snap back. She spins and her hair whips out and around. You can't feel the joy of it. Can I stress this enough without reaching out and shaking you? I can wish for tremors in me to be the truth of it still, but I would lie. My shaking is only the fear that I'll die without ever again having her all to myself. All this is compounded by the knowledge that she came here with you alone because she's that sort of girl. You're out camping in the middle of the night trying to impress her by playing the guitar. You're the one chasing, but she caught you with her dance, tarantula-bitten in the night, fragile and febrile with desire. do you feel it? A woman destroyed by her men, torn apart by her memories, drunk on your admiration: you want her, can't you feel it? The ash and the heat and the light are hers and you quit feebly stroking the guitar and just watch her dancing to the music inside. You can't bring yourself to want her anymore, not after having seen her set apart and sacred. She isn't yours. She belongs to this night and all you have of her is the still fading flashing glimpse of the most woman you'll ever see.