Don't mind the naked man on the couch

Don’t mind the naked man on the couch





She woke up with cottonmouth and what felt like her mind stretched as a blanket over all her memories.  Tried to get out of bed but the cover seemed heavy .She did not want to wake up anyway, so “what’s the rush” she asked herself.  There is no answer to a rhetorical question silly, she smiled by raising her eyebrows only and sank deeper between sheets.

In her dream, risqué dream if you want, all the men she ever knew were naked, and one by one sat at the end of her sofa.

There he was, Saul, dark and muscular oblivious to his nakedness, reading the magazine she had left on the coffee table.  Some girlie magazine she picked up at the grocery store.

“I thought you don’t like these kind of magazines “Saul’s voice came through the silence of the room and landed on her ear drum.  She raised her head and looked in his direction.  Maybe if she said nothing about him being naked it won’t be awkward

“The fashion tips are good “She heard her voice responding but it didn’t seem like it belonged to her.  It sounded like coming from distance and muffled by something acting as a filter.

“You never followed main stream fashion,” Saul answered blunt.

“Sometimes there are articles I am interested” Her voice again crossed the room and returned to where she was laying, like a boomerang of some acoustic marvel.

Saul was laughing now:

“You know how to give a blow job without reading some clumsy written article. “

She should blush now.  That was a must.  God, she hoped she was blushing .Maybe she was too old to blush.  Instead, she continued talking to the naked man sitting legs crossed one on top of the other on the sofa.  She made a mental note: A naked man should not sit crossed legged under no circumstance.

“What are you doing here anyway?  Did we….”  She didn’t continue her sentence because Saul’s laugh filled the space between her puzzlement and the couch at the end of the room.

“We are all here Matilda; Larry, and Matt and that weird Dutch man whose name nobody can get right and of course, young Juan you married for a day in Vegas. I am not sure who else is in the kitchen but they’ll show up here on the couch sooner or later.”

What was this?  Some erotic redemption?  Some post coital purgatory?  Maybe the spicy Vindaloo from last night was the culprit here.  Everybody knew spicy food triggered hallucinations or some kind of wacky out of the body experiences .She was convinced she was still dreaming yet the naked man talking to her seemed so real.

Saul picked a cigar from the box on the coffee table.  Ah, yes, the smell of cigars, she remembered that as she sank in an olfactory reverie.

She was thirsty.

“Could I have a glass of water? “  Right after her question left her lips, she regretted it.  If Saul would want to get her a glass of water, he would have to get up.

“Never mind, “I am not thirsty anymore she added quickly before the man became erect.

“What do you guys want?  Why are you here?  Am I dying?  “She wanted to add why are you naked but was afraid of some vulgar answer.  As she remembered, Saul was rather visceral and blunt in his speech.

“We are here because it’s your birthday.  You are not dying, but we all are going away from your memory.  We had our part but now we are moving on.  Larry, for example found a nice Italian girl on the Internet and he’s moving in with her.”

Oh, God, Larry, I remember him and his Camero with painted flames on the side, thought Matilda.  She felt a little vomit in her mouth when thinking of Larry but she managed to hide her repulsion.

“Matt is here also.  He never married but he’s gotten older now.”Saul continued.

Matt, she recalled him, 10 years her junior, always made her laugh, exquisite lover.  She woke up every morning with a smile on her face as if she slept holding a brick in her mouth.

Then it was Vrjen, why can not anybody remember his name?  She met him in Amsterdam and spent a night in the same hotel bed with him .Her luggage, her cello and her wallet were stolen, and she had no money, no identification, and a lot of angst.  Too much scotch and a big hangover in the morning.

“What about you, Saul?  What have you been up to?  “

“Me?  What would you want to hear? That I never forgot you?  I did, though I can still see myself somewhere back in time, coming with my arms full, moving my life from one prison to another. That should have given me a clue of what was to come.”

“.What was to come it really came.  I think we both started to become poisoned by our own internal anguish.”  Matilda whispered.

It would be too much to point out what happened back then.  Or what happened after that, which one of the years passed as a clandestine pedestrian in a demanding traffic.

She heard Saul’s raspy voice again:

“The dust somehow settled now on the past and not because I ever had a vindictive feeling for you.  I think of it as fine dust that it amounted all around us.”

Saul continued while Matilda hid her head under the covers;

“We lived in some form of quiet desperation back then, trying hard to find a place of comfort and happiness.”

She nodded under the sheets.

“The problem in your case was that you looked for a notion of love, something you read about or thought it should be delivered to you by destiny.  In love, as in war, those who do not demand peace win.”  She heard Saul’s voice for the last time.

When she closed her eyes hoping for the dream to change direction she felt awake. The pack of cigars was still on the coffee table next to the girlie magazine.  She knew her dream and all these thoughts were like the song of a dying black swan. 

Her memories were finally organized.

“Nobody ended a big love in a benign way “she reassured herself. “  You can’t perform a meticulous surgical detachment of two hearts beating as one.”As these thoughts settled in her consciousness  she started walking towards the kitchen, with a mind clearer than ever and a content smile on her face.





















 



Matilda never felt compelled to follow trends.  Saul was right.  For three years, back in her very moist days, when everything seemed covered in cotton candy and away from the scorn of the world, she lived as his clay, learning new shapes every morning, morphing perpetually in what could only be seen now, in retrospect, as a blind race to completion.

With memories suddenly awakened, she sat down at the kitchen table and tried to make sense of her dream.

“It’s funny how life ties and unties one’s lose ends. “  She thought to herself.

“You’ll always go for the dysfunctional man.  This will bring shame and unhappiness for all of us “That’s what her father told her once.  His words back then landed harshly in the quiet space left between his wounded honor and Matilda’s new found climactic bliss.  Because of Saul, Matilda grew up quick.  Her views on life, men, love, and sex were forever sealed and never near the average missionary border.

The spin of the world was learned from the master.  Saul had none of the pedestrian boyish charm Matilda knew from school.  Instead, he had complete control in sculpting her in any way he desired.  She never resisted.  Her first lover, powerful and confident, too old and savage, macabre in the way the world saw him; she followed him like sailors follow the North Star.

Now, she could not help smiling while pore  coffee in her mug, because even in her dreams Saul was the dominant one.  A whole history of men was completely at his will.  He conducted the symphony of her memories, the cast of characters, and their exposure within her subconscious.

“Bastard” she mumbled but still smiling.

Eventually, she had managed to write herself in and out of love many times over, fulfilling the crude prophecy her father placed on her head when she first disobeyed the abstract rules linked to her virginity.  To her parents’ horror, she married twice and walked out of life’s typical cul de sacs through ill-conceived divorces.

All this time Saul was a constant part of her thoughts .Like some absurd surreal bouncer he kept her desires and fancies straight showing up in her dreams every time a new lover threatened her emotional well being and ultimately every man after Saul seemed as nothing but a prepubescent, sexually deprived victim to the ogre masterfully carved in her soul.

She looked out the window as searching for a safe place to land her memories.  Back when she met him, her age was an issue.  His age made him the target of an angry world.  Nobody understood how such a young girl was content in the shadow of such a powerful and seasoned man.

“Why are you destroying your youth?” her father asked her.

“Why can’t you go out with a nice Jewish boy?’ asked her mother.

Matilda was the only child to her parents, the youngest in her art class and had no knowledge or experience when it came to men, sex, and love.  As a blank canvas for Saul, she showed the greed needed to absorb the pleasures of the world but none of the sharp awareness of her exact place in it.  That made it irresistible for the master.

“You need to go back and learn how to be a child “Saul told her before leaning over her shivering pale body.

Every second was back in her mind now: the edge of his bed, her wrinkled shirt on the floor, her white body radiating in the dark, his eyes like beacons, green and clear, glued to the pink buttons at the top of her breasts.

She twisted and gasped under his touch.

“I am not a child! “  Even after so many years, her answer back to him still echoed, as some form of acoustic memory she kept hidden within the secret chambers of her quirky mind.

His passing through her made it hard to ever feel like a child again .Lots of bargaining between herself, society, her senses, and her awareness had to take place.  In time and as the years past by, Saul’s reminiscence slowly started tyrannizing her every sober and awake moment.

“Who’s the shrew that screwed you up?”  Matt asked her years later when he sensed the chill in her heart.

Between Matt’s question and the next sip of coffee, Matilda nostalgically started reviewing random moments from her past.  It seemed a forceful past even under clouds of dust .She carefully began exfoliating each memory, dropping off the putrid layers like a stale onion.