He watches her as she bounces ever so slightly, her
shoulders dipping in rhythm as she picks up dog toys from the floor. On the
stereo, the Gramercy Five bounces gently along, with his wife responding
unconsciously to the music. She was only ten years old when Artie Shaw put
together his quintet, but her body knows what he was saying all those years
ago.
Wherever did he find her? The three ounces of vodka in his gimlet
take away almost every inhibition he had. But he doesn't need to do anything—all
he has to do is watch her. With this woman whom he's treasured for a quarter
century, even with all the limitations of age, here is a familiar feeling, one
that makes life worth all of its pain and uncertainty.
She wasn’t his first love. That one had come in the
loneliness of youth, a grasping for comfort, a mutual need for certainty. That
one had ended, inevitably, in disillusion. The comfort was temporary, the
certainty elusive.
Others followed, each one promising fulfillment, only to
float away in currents of change. Each one gave him that which only a woman’s love
could give, a buoyance in the maelstrom. He’d given back as long as they
lasted; the flesh and the souls eventually tearing apart in mutual loss.
The playlist in his computer cued up Johnny Mathis and then Tony
Bennett—long ago and fondly but faintly remembered, the regrets and the sighs of
those years now barely noticed.
Earlier, as they prepared dinner, he'd played an old album
by Herb Alpert and had remembered floating down a highway with another woman in
her Mustang, the eight-track stereo blaring Tijuana Brass, feeling free for the
first time in his life. He’d savored the memory. It didn’t matter that it was fifty
years before; the feeling was still there.
“Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” and other tender
songs of Paul Simon the other evening had brought wistfulness in the midst of a
world gone mad, a clutching for that old solace of youth, when the touch of a
hand felt warm on the heart. The maelstrom was too violent, the love too
fragile. The haunting drum solo in “Inna Gadda da Vida”—In the Garden of Eden—had
marked the end of something precious, the fluttering of an Iron Butterfly, a
nostalgic wail in sweet smoke.
A time of aimless wandering, accompanied by an equally lost
companion, moved by Roberta Flack’s “Killing me Softly,” longing for something only
glimpsed in the mist, something now forgotten. And then a rainbow, a swirl of
hair, a voice from the past, the child of that first love. Eva Cassidy singing
“Fields of Gold” and remembering, restoring. A hole of darkness, healed.
Now he puts on the track “What a Feeling” from Flashdance,
and he watches her. “I can’t not
move,” she always says, smiling at him.
Old music vividly remembered and responded to evokes
feelings collected in a lifetime. Like faded snapshots (those were discarded
years ago), the songs he’d shared with others become the themes of unwritten
narratives and longings stuffed beneath the cushions of memory.
Now, a fitting coda to a life. In the waning time—months?
weeks? days? that they can spend together, he basks in the glow of her, the
comfort of a woman.
The only one.
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