(vignette 8) The Eye of the Beholder

   

That night, after luxuriating in her bath, Marie-Anne penned fresh words, following the date and day of the week, into her diary.

Oh, beautiful.  The bright blue

skies.  My ocean's waters.

You hold me, embrace me

who dares to breathe you

in and out. Oh, beautiful.

Oh, beautiful.  Lolling fields

to bed me, lay me down

beside nettled fences, yielding

to lamp-light, at last

returning.  Eternal.  Beautiful.

Oh, beautiful.  The late trains

call with their clip and clatter

of coming and going.  The rain

of sound falling at  the speed

of light.  So lovely.  So beautiful.

Oh, so beautiful.  The waves’

crescent gestures ordain

rounds of loss and urge return

of those they wish well.

Goodnight.  Dearest.  Beautiful.

   

It was a wonder that Marie-Anne hadn’t accidentally drowned, such was her preoccupation with the President’s body as she lay, eyes closed, in her bath.  Gently rocking.  Pelvis thrusting.  Attendant waves lapping at her breasts.  Envisioning acts unseemly had they not evoked shared intimacy.

Now, she lay in bed wondering how she would ever find sleep.  Until this moment she’d never thought how archaic was her language.  Sleep, after all, wasn’t the sort of thing one found, like a lost button or a coin in the cushions of the couch after a party.  It was her nagging thought that just as she might never truly find sleep, she might never truly know the President’s body.  Oh, he was gorgeous, indeed!

Marie-Anne had reached early middle age unmarried.  It was of no fault of her own, and, certainly not because she was comely.  Indeed, while Marie-Anne had been rotund as a child, she’d grown into a glamorous young woman.  She carried this beauty with her into middle age, touched by the humility of one who could count her blessings in lost pounds.  No, the cause was, in a sense, thoroughly common, ... if a bit old-world.  Marie-Anne’s mother fell ill and infirmed when Marie-Anne was still young.  Attending to her widower mother’s needs as an only-child effectively took her off the market. 

Oh, there was an older brother; but, he was a bit of a miscreant, a reprobate who’d gone to jail for a series of felony thefts.  Under new “Three Strikes” law, he’d eventually gone away for good.  He was put down like a rabid dawg, their mother used to say of him, never failing not to speak his name.  He was little more than a footnote on Marie-Anne’s life now.  She thought of him as “miscarried”, the brother she never had.

She might have said the same of her father.  He’d gone to war and come back a shell-shocked wreck of the man her mother had known.  At first, after he’d come back, he’d drink himself into altered states.  These often left the impression that she was living in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  To secure her own peace of mind, Marie-Anne would ultimately spend most of her early childhood evenings locked away in her room.  She reasoned this was why she had been fat as a child.  Cooped up with enough food to last her into an eternity, she’d finish her homework then spend the night inactively watching TV.  It struck her that she had the life of one of the hens on the farm where her family lived, in a form of captive husbandry.  In the end, her father became prophetic.  If I don’t wake, just bury me here, were his final words.  He was speaking of the floor, where he’d often pass his evenings, prone, beside an empty bottle.  When he died, they buried him behind the out-house, said some words, and sold the farm.  That’s what brought Marie-Anne from up-north, on the rolling countryside of Clyde, to this sleepy little university town.

It was of no matter to Marie-Anne that she remained unmarried now, even after her mother’s late demise.  It wasn’t the dead-end that her friends suggested it should be.  Rather, it marked opportunity.  — Now, don't you let opportunity fly out the window, she remembered her grandpa advising her.  Marie-Anne wasn't going to spend it on the first man that walked by, no matter what her friends thought. —  She was single, not alone.  She could turn heads.  Walk down the street, and, the eyes of every man would be upon her.  Some, so single-minded in their attentions, she thought of them as the walking dead.  One once even drove his car into the back of another that had slowed to give her what her mother called “googly-eyes”.


Strange, she stopped to amuse herself, how in the age of the search-engine that term had been given new life.  She was thinking of the hot married man who told her, Child. I’m gonna look you up!  If he weren’t married, she would have encouraged him with a smile.     ... and, the young fellow she’d passed inside the Country-and-Western bar she that visited for line-dancing lessons with her friends.  He had the annoying habit of saying Bing!, as if she was ringing his bell, whenever she came within “shout’n distance”.  Her friend, Joscelyne Clement, called this his Yahoo! moments.  Joscelyne said this to imply that he was a country bumpkin.  As she looked back on it now in the context of ‘the new age’, Marie-Anne allowed herself to think of the brutes of Gulliver’s Travels rather than the wits of an intelligent search engine.

No, Marie-Anne was not single because she was comely or especially smart, but, because she was saving herself.  Not particularly for the right man, for Mr. Right as Joscelyne named this unknown soldier.  No.  Just, saving herself.  It was what she’d always done and, likely, always would do.  The President was safe.  She could dream of him, or, lay awake thinking about him.    ... Imagine making love to him in the surf on far-flung Caribbean beaches.    ... Write love poems, that were heartfelt if not terribly good, about him.  She could venerate him.     ... but, she could never have him, and never would.  He was safe.  Even Botticelli, had to paint Mars to see Venus.  She understood, it was the pursuit that made her happy.