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Editor's Selection for Summer
Michelle holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a James Michener Fellow, and teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at California College of the Arts. She recently served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University, and she is currently Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary’s College of Moraga, California. She is the recipient of the 2006 Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco. She is the founding editor of the literary journal Fiction Attic, and she serves on the advisory board of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She is represented by Valerie Borchardt of Georges Borchardt, Inc. Read an interview here, here or here. Read short stories online at the Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Other Voices, or in the February issue of Playboy. Read an excerpt from Dream of the Blue Room in USA Today, or a chapter from Michelle’s forthcoming novel in the San Francisco Chronicle. For more information go to www.michellerichmond.com National Literary Review is pleased to present this re-publication of The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress reprinted here by permission of the author & ©UMass Press. |
I am cruising down Market Street when I see her. I have been driving distractedly, glancing out the side window to the view of San Francisco laid out beneath me, to the white layers of fog parting over the Bay. The city is new to me, it is the place I have always dreamed of, and when I arrived here last week via Highway 1, thinking what that meant, that this was the first highway, the alpha of all highways, the beginning of a system of traversing and leaving and arriving thought up years ago, it was like coming for the first time upon some foreign place that I had seen in my memory for years, a place to which I have never been but which has always appeared more vividly in my mind than the town where I grew up. Now, looking out at the Bay Bridge stretched over the gray water, I am wondering how it is that I have lived my entire life without driving this winding street through this perfect stretch of city. At the top of Market a walkway gently arches over the street. This walkway, too, is a figment of my imagination; that is, the walkway was imagined by me long before I ever saw the real thing, so that when I did see it, four days ago, I averted my eyes from the traffic and stared in ecstatic awe at the thing I had thought up, that had been thought up likewise by someone else, or by a committee of someone elses whom I never knew, who nevertheless had my exact-same vision. My walkway, I have been thinking ever since. My city. I haven’t been up on the walkway yet, have only viewed it from my car, because I am afraid that if I go up there and observe the walkway from a different perspective it will become not the thing I thought of, but something else entirely. So I drive up and down Market Street fifteen or so times a day, but not once have I seen anyone walking across the suspended path. Thus, it has occurred to me that the path is not there at all, but continues to be the figment I always believed it to be, so that if I pulled into one of the so-called driveways crouched beneath the tall houses crowded onto the hill and took the spiraling path that leads up to the walkway and placed a foot upon the cement, the whole illusion would give way beneath me and I would fall to the street below, making an unfortunate and bloody ruckus. I drive back and forth hoping for some sign that I have not made this bridge up, waiting to see an actual body walking across it, or a bicyclist bicycling, or a runner running, or an escapee escaping. Someone. Today there are two. Two girls, one dressed in black, one in white, one thin and one not so thin, one blonde and one brunette, each holding a broom with both hands. The girls face one another, their feet wide apart, knees bent, shoulders thrust forward. Their dresses are long and flowing and seem to be made of silk; they have no sleeves or straps but are wrapped around the girls’ bodies sarong-style, so that they move the way wind might move, waltz-like and impromptu, defying prediction. The thin blonde in the black dress swings her broom at the plumpish brunette in the white dress, brings it up to her cheek in slow motion, and the girl in the white dress responds likewise, moving her face away from the broom, lifting one leg high and turning in a complete circle and bringing her own broom down against the legs of the girl in the black dress, who turns now and lifts her broom again, aiming at her adversary’s waist. I have slowed to watch the girls, living proof of the reality of my walkway. The other drivers seem not to have noticed this demonstration, or not to care, speeding past in complete indifference. Approaching the underlip of the bridge and fearful of losing sight of the girls, I ease the brake down with my foot so that the car is barely moving at all. Someone behind me begins honking just as the plump girl in the white dress raises her arms, hefting the broom high above her. There is a sense of unloosening, I feel it in my gut even before the dress that moves like wind has fallen away. It is as though I am standing inches from the girl and can see the knot slipping just above her soft breasts, the silk sliding over her chest, her thighs, the whiteness of her skin and the thick lovely folds of her bottom and the twin dimples above the place where her cheeks press outward from her back revealed as the dress moves up and outward, suspended above the girl and the broom for a long moment before it floats downward, falling away from her, over the edge of the walkway, descending to meet my windshield and passing over the glass in a quick caress before a corner of it catches on the side mirror. I take the white silk into my hands and pull the fallen dress into the car, soft and full into my lap. Having passed beneath the walkway I look in my rearview mirror and see her, the naked, dark-haired girl, shaven clean of pubic hair and all fresh and pink in the wind, her breasts upright and round, the broom standing at her side, bristles up, her fingers curled around the handle in an absurd mockery of An American Gothic. The girl looks stunned and accusatory, as if she might leap over the bridge and confront me, the driver with out-of-state plates descending the hill with her dress. She drops the broom and crosses one hand over her breasts, cups the other between her legs, then turns toward the girl in the black dress as I round the curve, one hand plunged into the soft mound of silk. HerThe wind has hands that take me up. Out there the Bay shimmers, the water pushes the cool hands toward me. Down there the cars move, the buses screech to top the hill, the workers come home, the drivers watch. Up here it is the two of us. She wears only black, even in summer, the city’s coldest season. I wear only white. We are a simple entity, two halves. Up here on the bridge, or down there in our tiny house which we inherited from our father, our house with its high narrow windows, here or there we are in opposition. She challenged me to this duel, a game having only two rules: we must move at a fraction of our normal speed, so as to bring on exhaustion more quickly. The one who stops first loses. The one who loses leaves. To the victor goes the house, the turquoise carpet from Turkey, the yellowing walls of the bedrooms, the old gas stove, the pointy roof. It is too late for us to live together. I have chosen a man she despises. She has chosen no one, or rather, she has chosen me. She believes she is my mother, my teacher, my cook, my one-who-knows-best. Five years since our father died, and she has named herself my guardian, though I am nineteen and do not need to be guarded. I am certain of my victory, for I am the strongest. She eats only vegetables and grainy things, stringy plants that grow in a window box above the kitchen sink. Her legs beneath the black sarong are thin. Her arms become tired while vacuuming. She has not made love to anyone in years and I believe, though she protests, that she is too weak for passion. Only days ago she came upon me in the living room, sitting on the couch, my hands propped on the shoulders of the man whom she despises. “No more,” she said, seeing his head plunged between my thighs, my fingers tracing the path of moles on his shoulders as I sat up, hips thrust over the edge of the cushions, loving the image of him bowed before me. “Not in this house.” “The house belongs to both of you,” he said, propping his chin on my thigh to take up my side. A practical man. A man not unlike my sister, possessed by an argumentative disposition. That night, after he had left and we had fought until our throats were sore from shouting, she proposed the duel. I wondered aloud whether it wasn’t overly dramatic. “Then come up with something better,” she said. The same words, I thought, that he would have chosen. At first I am ashamed to be standing here on the walkway, the silk clinging to my thighs, to my stomach that will not shrink, to my body that is too big. For years I tried to make myself smaller, until I met him, the man who said, “I love your size,” pressing his hands deep into the skin of my back, resting his cheek against my inner thigh. The straws of the broom brush my face, a cue that it is my turn to move, to lift my leg and turn and come back around to her. The dance proceeds. We have been up here for an hour at least. I am becoming tired, but I am determined to outlast her. Then there is the gust of wind, the lifting, the quick parting of silk from skin. I see the dress suspended above me, airborne, and understand that I am naked, on display. A woman’s hand reaches out of a window. I see a flash of red hair through the sun roof of a silver car just before my dress disappears with the hand. Covering myself, I move toward my sister, thinking that she will come to my aid, that she will be the mother she has always been, that she will sacrifice her own modesty for my own. I am waiting for her to unfold her dress, to wrap me up in it. “I win,” she says, then walks away, leaving me naked above the traffic. A chorus of honking starts up, and there are heads emerging from car windows, and children waving, and the chill of the fog on my skin. I crouch low to the sidewalk, my knees drawn up to my chest, my face buried in my knees. I try to make myself small, so small no one can see me. Soon my bones feel frozen. Belly-down, I crawl toward the far end of the bridge, the opposite direction from our house, her house now, the house I lost to her. My lover’s house is only a couple of hundred yards away, the purple house on the hill. I don’t care if the wife is baking, the children watching television, the whole sweet family gathered round. He will have to take me in. The fog has drawn in close like a zipper. I make my way through the small squares of yard, the short driveways packed with cars, crouching behind fenders and blue garbage cans that have been set out for morning. Coming upon his purple house I go down on hands and knees, crawl around back like a cat come home for supper. There are lights in every room. Music drifts from the windows. I raise my head just above the sill. On the rectangular rug with green fringe around the edges, he is dancing with his wife. The children sit at the corners, clapping and singing, getting all the words wrong. I tap the window screen. The whole family looks my way. The youngest boy, Jimmy, runs over and presses his nose against the screen. “She’s naked!” he announces. Tami, who is ten, asks, “Mother, is it wild?” The six year old, Simon, whom his father considers clever, says, “I spy me a nudist. The nudist is at the window. She ain’t wearing any clothes.” My lover’s wife runs over and grabs the children. I say his name but he pretends not to hear me. “Call the police!” his wife says, as if I have not just said her husband’s name, as if I am some stranger. “No,” I say to the wife, the children. “I’ve been here many times. There’s a blue rug in the orange bedroom. The toilet leaks when you flush it. The right rear burner is missing on the stove!” In this manner I attempt to validate myself, to assert my right to be here, but the wife is not listening. She is dragging the children upstairs, and they are screaming bloody murder. My lover stands in the hallway, holding the red rotary phone. “There’s a mad woman at my window,” my lover says into the receiver. “She’s not wearing any clothes.” DiamondA naked woman on a bridge won’t last long, not here or anywhere. I make a U-turn at Mars and head North on Market, planning to restore the dress to the girl. In the time it takes for me to reach the walkway, the girl has disappeared, and a yard sale has sprung up at the foot of the bridge. A cardboard sign says, “Everything must go.” A man slouches on the ground beside a small silver table with one broken leg. He is wearing an unusual sort of hat with a blue feather tucked into the band. The table is beautiful in an orphaned way; quite clearly it needs a home. The man is also selling a red feather boa, a snapping turtle in a yellow cage, an old sewing machine, a Speed Racer lunch box, a pair of army-issue binoculars, and a box of steno pads. I park the car illegally in someone’s driveway and leave it running. “How much is this table?” I ask the man, knocking my knuckles nonchalantly against the surface, as if the table barely interests me, as if I could take it or leave it. “Why don’t you take the steno pads instead?” he says. “I can let you have the whole box for fifty cents.” “No,” I say. “I stopped for the table.” “This snapping turtle is seventeen years old,” the man says, thrusting the cage in my direction. “Her name is Darren. She makes a fine pet. She eats very little and needs only to be walked twice a week. You can have her for seventy-five cents.” “I’ve never been good with turtles. How about the table?” “A feather boa has many uses. You may tie back your curtains with it, or create an interesting border for your doorway, or wear it out on a special evening. This feather boa costs ninety cents, and that’s my final offer.” I picture myself in the white dress that fell from the sky, the feather boa draped dramatically around my neck. “I’ll take it,” I say. “And the table?” The man lets out a long, disappointed sigh. “What do you plan to do with it?” The blue feather in his unusual hat distracts me. I am unable to articulate. “I just moved here,” I say. “I’m going to put it in my kitchen.” “The table is five hundred dollars.” I tell him that his table is not made of gold. I tell him that his hat is ludicrous. “Where do you come from?” he wants to know. “Alabama.” He doesn’t believe me. “What’s the capital?” he demands. “Montgomery.” “Okay,” he says to the turtle. “She’s an honest woman. Ten dollars.” I pay him and put the table in my trunk. He waves as I drive away, and I wave back, but then I realize that he is not looking at me. He is bidding farewell to his table. The kitchen of my new apartment on Diamond has three beveled windows, through which I can see the bluish beginnings of the Bay. Down below, boys in tight jeans and cowboy boots walk dogs with frightening leather collars. To the East is a hill bearing rows of houses, the most startling of which is a deep, lovely shade of purple. Sitting at the new table that totters on its broken leg, I have visions of my own heroism, the lengths to which I will go to restore the naked girl’s clothes. In this vision I go out into my city. I take the dress that was given to me, the dress that fell from the sky. I place a foot upon the walkway, the walkway which exists, truly, and which will not collapse beneath me. I stand above the traffic, clutching the white silk that is prone to falling. At last she arrives. She is naked, as when I left her. She holds one hand over each breast as she steps onto the walkway and moves toward me, her sweet thighs slapping together, her belly beaten pink by the wind. “Please,” she says, stretching out her hands to receive the dress, revealing the dark of her nipples, the shadows gathering beneath her breasts. In this city that is mine, this city that I dreamed long before I saw it, on this walkway that I built years ago in my mind, I persuade her. “Come with me,” I say. She takes my hand, and I lead her home. On the high bed I lay her down, touch my mouth to the white instep of her foot, press my fingers into the cushion of her calves, and lay my head upon her stomach, hearing the deep pulse of her womb. Many nights gather beneath her eyelids. Her legs are heavy from dreaming. She is a replica of myself from many years ago, before I dreamt of cities and bridges. On the dress that fell away, the dress she sent down to me, I detect my own smell, the print of my own fingers. I sit at my table in the apartment that is mine alone and gaze out at my city, dreaming of the rescue. I spread the dress on the table and admire the soft grain of the silk, a blue stain the size of a quarter just above the lower hem. I stand and wrap the dress around me, tie a good knot that will hold, and position myself in front of the long mirror in the hallway. The 37-Corbett clatters by, spewing soot within inches of my window. The passengers stand, clinging to straps that hang from the ceiling, gazing into my hallway. I pull my hair away from my face, push my belly out to make it round. I think of my mother at the fruit stand in this very city, some thirty years ago, her hands traveling over ripe mounds of tangerines. She sees my father’s eager face beneath a sailor’s cap; he is running toward her. As he lifts the cap from his head and begins to call her name, she drops three tangerines into a paper sack, presses a quarter into the vendor’s open palm, and turns away. In the end, following the advice of her own mother, she will come back to him; but in that moment at the fruit stand my mother is alone and fearless. Walking away, she breaks the skin of a tangerine with her fingernail, tears the skin from the flesh of the fruit, lets the juice spill down her hands. She turns a corner, and my father’s voice fades beneath the low howl of a foghorn. In that instant she forgets him. She is not my mother. She is no one’s wife. She is a woman set free in her new city, thousands of miles from home. |
Ingrid
I heard her voice before I saw her, her sing song dancing the air of Casa de Paella in Barcelona. Something Scandinavian?
"Perhaps we could take a boat to Majorca tonight, Bertie. I've heard it's wonderful...the biggest of the Balearic Islands."
"Fine idea, Ingrid," a male voice answered.
I braced myself. Ingrid might be as old as forty talking to her even older husband, Bertie.
A second male, "If we go down to the harbor right now, we could get our tickets, have dinner, get drunk."
"I thought you were dee-runk already, Sammy," Bertie's voice said.
A night cruise to Majorca, I thought, the next chapter in my Homeric odyssey after four days on the French Riviera my unburdened by an itinerary.
"It's my last little summer of independence," I told my fiancee grandly. "After this, I'll be buckled into my seatbelt for the duration."
Diane and Mom wanted to track me, buckle me in from a distance. But I saw sympathy in Dad's eyes. Chained to his insurance agency for twenty-three years, he bore the hopeless look of a zoo lion.
The threesome behind me was about to leave. I summoned my courage and turned around. Ingrid smiled into my soul. Back then, I believed in the perfect woman theory. That there was, out there, some goddess who was ideal in every way, designed by God for me alone. Diane was okay. Lovely enough to win a part of my heart. But the woman before me was Aprodite.
I had fallen for five women in five days, women I saw on the train or in restaurants or along the beach in Cannes. Now, I fell in love with Ingrid believing, in my arrow-pierced heart, that I would love her forever. She was one of the Sirens in my eighth grade copy of The Odyssey. I loosed my bonds and sailed toward the song of her voice.
"Excuse me. I happened to overhear you might go to Majorca tonight. I was planning to go there too," I lied. "May I join up with you?"
We were all about the same age. Europe in the '60s was jammed with young people wandering train stations, museums, beaches; crowding into the Caves in Paris to sway to the voices of Edith Piaf imitators. You picked up with someone who was headed the same way and broke off with them when they were going some place else.
"Sure, I'm Bertie from England. This is Ingrid Deceto. She's named after Ingrid Bergman," he laughed. "And the one with the pirate patch over his eye here is Sammy from Australia. The patch is genuine, the man is a fake."
I shook hands with my Cyclops.
"Hi, I'm Lance Bloom from New York - Manhattan." My name was Larry and I was from Rochester. "So you're from England," I said to Bertie, "and you're from Australia. Where are you. from, Ingrid?" I stammered into her beauty.
She wore her dark blond hair long. It was pulled together behind her neck by a sapphire ribbon that matched her eyes. She was prettier than the black and white Ingrid of Casablanca. Her face was all fine lines, full lips, high cheek bones. The Spanish sun had awakened freckles across the crests of her cheeks and along her bronzed arms.
"I'm from everywhere. Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, London. When I was nine, I was from Istanbul; when I was thirteen, Athens; when I was seventeen, London. That's where I'm from now, London. We live along the Thames. We always live near the water. My father is with the Danish Foreign Service. I'm from everywhere and nowhere."
We paid our check, headed for the harbor along rain-wetted streets, past little shops exhaling leather-coffee-roses and restaurants where paella bathed in large tubs, midnight blue wine rose from the center of each table in label-free bottles. The afternoon sun rode our shoulders as we reached the harbor. Along the pier, diesel fumes and fish smells mixed with the light stench of oil tankers. We booked deck passage on a ship called La Zanzibar bound for Palma, Majorca. It was part passenger-part cargo ship and carried boxes of bananas.
I was glad I wasn't engaged to Diane; glad I hadn't strapped on the seat belt yet. My freedom tasted like the 1959 Bordeaux I drank down to the dregs two nights before at a Cannes restaurant and sounded like the guitar I purhcased in Barcelona.
During our walk to the ship, I collected delicious facts about Ingrid. Since I now loved her, everything was delicious. She wore a sleeveless white blouse with a pocket over the left breast, cotton shorts the color of the sea, leather sandals with a single thong that separated her first two toes. Her nails were polish-free. Her face was its own cosmetic.
The scent of bananas straddled the mid-section of the ship as we boarded. We made our way to the bow, carved out a spot against a tarp covered load of lumber. I was careful to secure the spot on Ingrid's right so I would be free to drape my left arm around her shoulders leaving my right hand free.
Instinct informed me that my competitors would not challenge my Ulyssian power. Sammy was anti-power anyway. "I'm an anarchist. All rules are evil," he announced on the walk to the harbor as we passed a couple of Franco's policemen decked out in shiny black tri-corner hats and toting submachine guns. "Men who enforce rules are bloody devils."
Pale, sunken-chested Bertie was T.S.Eliot. In between tubercular-sounding coughs, he smoked oval Galois Disc Blue cigarettes stored in a brown leather cigarette case with gold trim.
"You seem chronically depressed, Bertie old man," Sammy teased.
"You don't understand me," Bertie grumbled, his arms crossed, a Galois stuck to his lower lip. "I own a dry sense of humor - too sophisticated for a goddamned Aussie."
Sammy laughed and gave Bertie a hug. Ingrid laughed too, the sound smiling up from deep in her throat.
Sammy withdrew a bottle of Chianti from the blue canvas bag looped over his shoulder. Bertie produced a wedge of Stilton from his bag. I shaved four slices with my pocket knife and handed them out. Someone broke into a case of the bananas and passed bunches to everyone. The four of us sat down on the wooden deck, leaned our backs against the canvas tarp, devoured the wine, cheese, bananas as the ship steamed away from the collapsing sun.
An hour later, I took out my guitar and sang, "Unchained Melody." Ingrid joined in. I took her singing of "I hunger for your touch," as a personal invitation.
By midnight, Sammy and Bertie were asleep and Ingrid and I were a couple. Beneath the stars, she slipped on a blue sweater adorned with snowflakes and mountains and trees. I was glad the sweater buttoned down the front as I wrapped her with my left arm.
I confessed as much of my life story to Ingrid as I could: my degree from Dartmouth with a major in English literature, my acceptance to Columbia Law School; how I was embarrassed by my rich family, how I admired JFK and thought it was time for me to start marching with Martin Luther King; my two nights in jail for drunk driving. I didn't tell her about Diane and how this was my last summer before I buckled up.
She listened with her eyes, her lips and the space between the buttons on her sweater. The breeze kept slapping a yellow forelock back and forth. Each time it flopped in front of her eyes, she would flick it back with her right hand. All the while, I studied her lips and tried to figure out how to kiss them.
"Just think," I said. "We'll both be parents some day."
"I don't know about me," she replied. "Children are a lot of responsibility."
"Well, I hear the process of conceiving them is lots of fun."
"You hear?" she laughed. "So are you telling me you have no first hand experience with the 'process'?"
"Certainly not!" I said, as if shocked. "How about you?"
She cast her head down. "My, what a question."
"Give me your answer."
"I've heard that it's quite dangerous for a young woman." She paused, pushed back from me. Her eyes turned dark. "Look, Lance. The most important things about me you can never know. I am completely different from you. I live a very strange life. A life you could never, possibly understand."
Bertie coughed. Sammy stirred and called out, "Nuclear nightmares ... bloody Reds'll kill us all unless we learn to fly through the air with the greatest of ease."
We laughed. "Leave me alone," Sammy grumbled from the mystery of his sleep talking, his shoulders twitching, his eyes sealed shut.
"Okay," I said. Sammy relaxed and resumed snoring.
It was only then that I noticed, as Ingrid's left hand slipped over the top of her thigh, that she was missing the little finger on that hand. In its place a tiny nub twitched.
She looked down at the hand. "It happened when we were living in Istanbul, a dog attacked me on the street. I was fourteen. Two men pulled the dog off of me but he took my little finger with him. I thought no boy would ever like me. My dad wanted to find the dog and kill him. I told him that wouldn't bring my little finger back." She tilted her head and smiled up at me. "Do you feel strange to have your arm around a cripple?"
"You aren't a cripple. You're the prettiest woman I ever saw."
"Thank you, Lance. I think you are very nice looking yourself."
"Ingrid. I know we just met, but I feel I know you so well, that we were meant to take this trip together - to be together."
She didn't answer. But amid the perfume of bananas and the double sheen of the moon smiling from sky and sea, she snuggled closer, didn't stop my hand as it slipped under her sweater.
I planned to stay awake all night sketching Ingrid with my fingers. Some girls know how to kiss and others don't. The bad kissers keep their lips thin and hard or relax them so completely they go all wobbly like the gunnels of an unlashed boat you're trying to board. Ingrid's lips were twin pillows, soft as spring rain and firm as her breasts. She murmured something in another tongue.
"What did you say?"
"The Danish is hard to translate, exactly."
"Then what did you say, approximately," I murmured.
"I said you have the gift of kissing."
I returned my hand to her left breast. "You have the gifts of a goddess, a Siren."
Soon after midnight, we both drifted into sleep.
I dreamt I was back in Rochester. Ingrid and I were sitting on the couch in my living room necking when Diane and my mom walked into the room. Diane was carrying a giant scimitar. She lifted the long curved blade above me. I tried to raise my arm to block the blow but I couldn't move. The sword came down between Ingrid and me, cutting off Ingrid's right arm and slicing into my left. Ingrid cried out at Diane, "You have crippled me." Then her detached arm floated across the room and slapped Diane so hard that Diane's head fell off.
For me, this is a typical nightmare. I awoke with numbness along my left side, shook my arm to life, gazed at a dawn soft as bath water. A few panels of sun trimmed the top of the single mast soaring above us.
"How did you sleep, old man?" Sammy asked a grouchy looking Bertie.
Bertie switched off his horn rimmed glasses and drew on a pair of sunglasses. The emerald disks made him a bored T.S. staring out at the wasteland of the world.
"Weird dreams," Bertie answered. "How 'bout you?"
"Sammy spent the night preaching about the evils of nuclear war," I interjected.
"Oh God, was I talking in my sleep again?"
"You were very entertaining," Ingrid said.
Sammy looked toward us, "Well, you two seem to be getting on well. A regular couple I'd say."
We gathered our few possessions, headed for the gangplank. The city of Palma snaked a vast sidewalk along its shoreline. Low, sand-colored buildings with rosy tile roofs and a few taller buildings slept amid the fronds of hundred of palms. Above it all, a 14th century cathedral reigned .
We found a café, ordered coffee, bread and cheese. I was more than Ulysses. I was Zeus, my goddess under my sway. The Mediterranean, all of Europe, was mine. I picked up the check and we wandered out to survey the town.
Sammy got a map. "Santanyi, that's the place!"
"Where is that?" Ingrid asked.
"Southwest of here. There's a nice new German resort down there. Very reasonable."
We took a bus along a road who's paving got more and more sparse until it gave way to plain dirt just beyond a town called Campos del Puerto. We jolted and jarred along, dust clouding through the open windows, until the driver dropped us off in the middle of nowhere.
We walked about a mile across desert like land. Bert and Sammy walked ahead while Ingrid and I straggled several yards back.
"I hope I haven't made Bert and Sammy jealous," I said.
"That's unlikely," Ingrid said.
"Now why is that? I would think any man would want to be with you and would be upset if any other man tried to get in his way."
"I guess you don't get it about Bert and Sammy.
I didn't.
"Lance, don't you understand? Bert and Sammy are boyfriends."
"You mean. they are homosexuals?"
"I mean they love each other. It's not such an unusual thing in Europe as it may be in the U.S. Europeans are more tolerant of what's different."
All of us were sweating by the time we found the hotel, rising white and new, miraging shifting shoulders of the sea. Sammy's arm wrapped Bertie's waist. He withdrew it as we arrived at the entrance to the hotel.
"Now why is it we want to stay in a German hotel on a Spanish island?" I asked.
"Because the damn Germans are always so clean and neat and orderly and I'm already sick of cheap Spanish hotels," Bertie grumbled.
Bertie was right. The place was clean and neat and orderly and stunning and rose like an ice castle above the little cove. Herr Gottfried said, "We have just opened and I am pleased to give you our best rate - six dollars per room."
We booked two rooms one would be for Ingrid and the other for the three men. For all I cared, Bertie and Sammy could sleep in the same bed while I slipped off to visit Ingrid.
The manager put some cheese, sliced apples and bread on a plate. We ate at an umbrella table set up on the edge of the sand. We drank two bottles of Chianti and by the end of the second one I was feeling very happy and very powerful.
"How about a swim?" I proposed.
"Yes. I'm still very hot," Ingrid said.
Bertie and Sammy exchanged glances. "Not us," Sammy said.
The hotel was mostly deserted and only one other couple, an older pair, perched on the sand in the bright sun. As Ingrid and I passed by I heard them conversing in German, wondered if the man was someone my dad had tried to kill just a couple decades earlier.
Ingrid wore a pink and white beach towel around her and let it fall to the sand when she got to me. Her bathing suit was a two piece. White. The sight of her in so little clothing took my breath away, her narrow waist, the handfuls of her breasts.
"You look.so.lovely," I stammered.
"Well, thank you."
She turned, dashed toward the water, her thighs jostling lightly, her shoulders swingingback and forth. She reached the water, paused a moment, then slid into the low surf. I followed. The water was warm, the air tender, the six o'clock sun angled orange.
Ingrid stroked toward a rock several hundred feet from shore. She was an astonishing swimmer and though I had been on the swim team in high school, it was all I could do to stay close. She reached the rock way ahead of me and shouted, I won, when she touched it.
"You had a head start," I complained.
"Okay. We'll have a second match." She pulled herself halfway up on the rock, took a breath, didn't seem tired. The blue hair ribbon was long gone and her locks hung to the tips of her shoulders in clumps, water dripping from each, tracing its way down her neck, across her shoulders, between her breasts.
"Let's swim for that rock," she shouted. "Ready. Set. Go."
The second rock was further out, sat at a sharp left diagonal from the shore. I swam next to her, smiling as I turned my face toward her, grabbing at her to hold her back a little. I reached the second rock just barely ahead. But I sensed she let me win.
"Well. I guess we're even now," I said.
"You cheated, of course, grabbing onto me. And here I am swimming with a disability," she said, holding up the hand with the nub. "
"You're very competitive for a girl."
"What makes you think I'm a girl?"
"Everything about you, especially now that I've gotten such a good look."
"Looks can be deceiving."
"There's nothing deceiving about that figure of yours. It's perfection."
Her top was tied in the back rather than hooked. She reached around and untied it. I thought she was going to take it off. Instead, she just tied it tighter. The two of us laid down on the rock like a pair of seals. It was barely large enough for two people and the Mediterranean licked our feet. I thought about sharks, couldn't for the life of me remember if any inhabited the Mediterranean. The second rock was isolated around a bend from the hotel cove. Ingrid and me, the wide cloudless sky, the delicate lips of the sea kissing our feet, surging around our thighs.
I was Zeus at rest, gentle, tender, at ease. I looked over at my companion. Nothing with Diane ever felt like this. Not even on New Year's Eve the year before when we almost went all the way in the back of her Dad's Cadillac. With Ingrid, I was at the top of a peak. Diane down in some valley out of sight, small, insignificant.
"Ingrid. I think we were meant for each other."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. It is."
"Maybe or maybe not."
"There's no maybe about it, Ingrid. I know I love you."
She lifted her face from the smooth surface of the rock and studied me. "Yes. I do think you are in love with me."
"You say that like you are a doctor who has just diagnosed a condition."
"Perhaps that's true. Perhaps you have just a condition and it will pass. But remember what I told you. I have a condition of my own that will not pass. If your love is true, it will change me. If it's not, well."
"Look, Ingrid. My love is permanent. I am sure of it as I am that this." I looked around for the right analogy to prove my love. "As sure as this rock is solid."
At that moment, a larger wave washed over the rock and over both of us. We stood up, shaking like drenched dogs.
"Don't you think that's a bad sign?" Ingrid laughed.
"It's a good sign. The rock is still here in spite of the wave. We are standing on it. I think this must be our own island. I can't think of a better place for what I want to say. Ingrid, will you marry me?"
"Oh Lance, my strong sailor. You do love me. You're so sweet."
"Sweet, maybe. Serious, absolutely. Ingrid, I have lots of money or at least I will have. My father is very successful and my mother comes from big wealth and I'm the only child. You need to marry me and we need to have lots of children."
She smiled at me from Mt. Olympusl. I didn't feel like Zeus any more. I was a human in the hands of her celestial power. She leaned up, kissed me. I ran my hand up and down her naked back. I thought she would say yes as soon as our lips came apart. I thought how the two of us, embracing there on that pedestal of the sea, must look like some grand romantic statue, twin ornaments atop the crown of the vast silver Mediterranean.
Ingrid didn't answer. Instead, she wrapped a long sad gaze around me. A single tear escaped each eye. Then she turned and dove into the sea.
When she surfaced, she was laughing. She had removed her white top and flung it at me. She rose up in the water just far enough for me to gain my one and only look at her breasts. She flashed me her smile warm as noon, then plunged back down into the Mediterranean, a mermaid returning to the deep. I called to her. Then I saw the flick of her fishy tail, iridescent in the bright sun as she vanished beneath the waves.
I return every summer to Majorca with Diane and our three kids. Bertie and Sammy are still together and we all remain close. I give the pair free lodging at my hotel whenever they wish.
Bertie never believed my story about Ingrid. But Sammy did. Bertie thinks I killed her. Sammy knows I loved her.
"Why can't there be mermaids?" Sammy would say to Bertie. "Sailors have been seeing them for centuries. Maybe she's the Lorelei and she swam off her perch in Copenhagen down past the rock of Gibraltar to Spain and to us. Why not?"
Bertie would scoff and shake his head. One of them thinks I'm a murderer but he's never tried to turn me in. The other believes my love and my story.
I bought the hotel in Santanyi, renamed it The Lorelei. The statue of Ingrid I commissioned rises up from our little rock beyond the view of the cove. The likeness is good, right down to her high cheek bones and full lips. When I die, a statue of me will be mounted on the other half of the rock embracing my Ingrid. People can come to the hotel and hear the story of me and my mermaid and shake their heads like Bertie or believe like Sammy.
Some summer days, I swim out to our rock. When I arrive, I perform a little ritual. First, I pull myself up next to the statue and wrap my left arm around her bronze shoulder. Next, I cast my eyes out to sea watching for signs of my mermaid's return. After she fails to appear, I turn and kiss my statue full on the lips.
Then I swim back to my hotel. I still have the Germans manage it. Like Bertie says, they're so neat and clean and orderly.
Story and Photographs ©Dane Dakota , 2006
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