By Lenna Suminski
He stands there, clad in an armoury of French-pressed linen suits approved by Vogue just last month trying desperately to prove to himself he has now risen to be a man. His contradictions of mind and matter have always entertained me to a giggling slump and while he imitates this New York summer weather with his trickling yellow hair and drizzling dress, his tragic posture evokes a precise maternal instinct from me – peculiar strands of love not even summoned by my own daughter.
He forces me to speak: “I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”
…
At this dusty time of the year the flowers and trees drifted from other summers. The peculiar scene of pine needles evoked memories of roads that cradled the happier suns of a long time ago. The road not taken taunts me with the precise incisions of surgeons or the delicate tuning-fork of a Swiss watchmaker.
As he stares across the water in a rare moment of stillness, I bade Jay to recall our wistful nights of a misty time in 1917, our demonstrations of romance disasterly vivid, now creeping around the edges of my mind and escaping the extensions of my fingertips. All of that seems more instant than this artificial carnival of love in this garden’s pungent perfumery and his purposeful delineation of the Fay family clock.
Do you remember…the night you gave me a birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom painted white? I ask him in a silly whisper in my imagination…it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best…I confessed and I confess now, that that was the first time I ever said that in my life.
We were walking down Pleasant 6th Street when the leaves were falling…the sidewalk that led up to my ivy-plagued back door was bleached with moonlight, below it lay my carefully placed ladder that stretched and slithered around the illumination of my father’s study and towards the dark window of my room. You eyed it with suspicion or with interest, I could not tell.
As you approached with alarming ease and confidence I shut my eyes to reduce my static heart and mind to just the sense of you…You smelled like new goods, being close to you, my face in the space between your ear and stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserve of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambricks and linen and luxury bound in bales. You and your pale aloofness of yellow hair and lavender eyes, you were without a doubt the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I interrogated myself for days afterwards – I wonder if you ever realized my anxiety – your foolish bravery and selfish justice selected by you for just the two of us…You were a boy, an educational feature; an overture to romance which no young lady should be without.
Now I see that you are what you wanted us to become, and still I cannot untangle James from Jay. It would be unfair to blame you for fulfilling your own manifested destiny, the same as I did with Fay and Buchanan. But what are you trying to do now? Seeing me here, when we are already what we dreamed for each other?
The world offers men the possibility of carelessness and caricatured romance so they can zealously proclaim it to be ambition, one that is gracefully extended from the rusted palms of God himself – the majestic emergence of his creation designed to bless its creators with the emblem of immortality. It was exciting enough for me, in the summer of 1917, to be close to the ones that could devour all of our youth’s potential. I will admit, school was not the belle of my attention that year. There were too many soldiers in town and I passed my time going to dances – always in love with somebody, fast-pacing and slow-swaying all night, and carrying on my school work just with the idea of finishing it.
After that kiss, you were to me a nail in my palm, and that same bloodied flesh on a big blue book bound by braille. In that kiss the incarnation was complete. Though I will admit perhaps it is unfair to equate my sacrifices of femininity and chastity that summer all onto you, I still cling onto the life – of you and me far away on a rowboat in the middle of a stormy sea, bobbing with the pressure of nature instead of civilization and kept steady by your hands and my hair and our…dream? That vision of us and more importantly of Daisy Fay, whipping hair tucked behind my ear with hard-earned calloused palms, I will preserve with delusion in a third dimension.
…
At 23, I have done an excellent job at imitating my mother’s lifelessness, and glazed, impressionable eyes. I offer Tom as she had with my father, life, life, life, and ensuring Fay immortality in flesh and blood. Buchanan will live on forever while your Daisy Fay drifts away across the waters. Should I feel sorry that I wasted my tenderness for another name, for another man’s athanasia?
All of me, an Athenian temple, flying into the wind as pulverized specks from my wasted decaying acropolis, existing only to symbolize a light ahead for your Odyssey. Mothers and daughters alike, paralyzed by the abysmal pillar dug in the pit of our stomachs, striking through in between our ribs and reaching for the narrow keyhole up our throats and to our cherry pink always-agape mouths.
I spit out words but all that comes are tears. I tell you, I wanted to give you life, I promised you, I wanted…to give you an alms for your dreaming dazing self. What more of me is there to give now?
Don’t you think I was made for you? I used to feel like you had me carved out or sewn up—and I was plucked from the third dimension of your mind—to be worn, I still want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a stitch on the inside of your fraying cufflinks. Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed? Of cigarettes, wedged way down between your fingers? Thumbs still fiddling and bloody from your unfulfilled knocking and picking…
I try and fight the dull pang of resentment that someone else closer to you knows all of your details, to think your rough sea-borne hands were now leading others than me into those cooler regions which you inhabited alone. I should feel happy for you, but you’re still sitting next to me, and I am only a girl equipped with only my meagre education of waltz and folding handkerchiefs. A handkerchief now being unfolded from your heart and directed by your thumbs to swipe away the rain and all its drizzling.
Nick peeks his head out in embarrassment and probably more out of boredom and breaks the moment all up apart: “It stopped raining.”
“Has it? What do you think of that? It stopped raining.” He repeats it back towards me.
“I’m glad, Jay.” I say to convince nobody.
While I mourn the loss of privacy and memory in the foams of the rain, I cover my tone in an upbeat song and promise him if he comes back, if we go back, I will make the jasmines bloom and all the trees come out in a dazzling flower. I will pinch every pine needle and rip and dye the willow leaves orange or red and in the rain’s shadowy shelter there will be clouds to eat and I will let you play with my hair while I trace back the roads along your palm.
Image credit: mymodernmet.ru