Love Deluxe (9 page)

“Come on, buddy, it’s been a long day and your pretty drunk. We’ll order some room service and then you’ll feel better.”

I buried my head in his neck and sobbed, “He couldn’t lose the empty feeling.”

I was crying hard as he led me out of the bar, he turned to the bartender, who, thankfully, spoke English. He asked him to have dinner sent to our room, anything filling and plenty of it.

The bed had been turned down and looked like a miracle in the middle of the room. I wanted to climb right in and get lost in the duvet and pillows. John lowered me to the cold floor in the bathroom and I lay on my side, the coolness of the marble wonderful against my burning face. My tears had stopped and my head was beginning to clear, I watched as my husband fill the bathtub, carefully pouring in several fragrant potions from crystal decanters that sat on an antique credenza. He hummed as he prepared my bath, unaware that I watched as he gather soap and sponges and towels. I was witnessing a moment in time, and I knew I would remember it as long as I lived.

He undressed me quickly, not letting his hands linger on my fevered body and then he helped me into the tub. He placed a bath pillow behind my head and went to answer the door when our food arrived. He fed me lamb and roasted potatoes and pieces of a warm baguette while I soaked, up to my chin in bubbles. He sat cross legged on the floor and we ate from the same plate.

“I don’t want you to ever be sad, buddy, not ever,” he said.

I couldn’t think of the right way to tell him that I’d always be sad, even when I was happy. It was part of who I was now. Henry had wanted to fix me after our son died, but he couldn’t and it killed him.

“Let’s get in that big bed,” I said, shutting that door in my mind. John shed his clothes and climbed under the covers, leaving them folded back for me to join him. I slipped in naked and he reached out an arm and scooped me up next to him. I twined myself around him and his body was incredibly long and deeply warm. I was ravenous for him after my strange foray into sadness.

“You should sleep, buddy,” he said, but his erection was huge against me.

I moved on top of him and eased myself down, slowly taking him in. My hair fell across his chest as I leaned forward and we kissed as our bodies rose and fell, together. My knees shook from holding myself up, he was so exquisitely long and hard.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered, but he couldn’t stop and he thrust upward and as he did my body exploded around him and I shouted his name. I fell against him and he moaned and shuddered his release violently. Afterward I lay beside him and he held me tenderly while the fluids of our lovemaking stained the lovely sheets.

“My sweetie,” he breathed, his eyes already closed.

How lucky I was to have been given a second chance at love. I loved him so and I craved him in some primal part of myself, those were my last thoughts as I fell into sleep on our first night in the city of light.

Chapter Six

The next days were so filled with marvels that they danced in my head. We visited Notre Dame, then Saint Chappelle and Saint Eustache, lighting candles in each, prayers floating to God’s ears. We went all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower then back down to the second level to dine at the Jules Verne restaurant looking out on the city. We climbed the endless steps to Sacre Coeur, lit more candles then caught a taxi down to the Moulin Rouge. We went to the Pompidou Center, the tiny Picasso Museum and finally the Musee d’Orsay to see the glorious works of the Impressionists.

I was so enamored of the Shakespeare and Company book store that John left me there and wandered the left bank while I bought copies of my favorite books to ship home, including a copy of
To Kill A Mockingbird
for Emily. All with the famous “Kilometer Zero” stamp on the first page. We ate food that was only dreamt of in America and consumed wine so smooth it evaporated on the tongue. We explored the gardens of Giverny, crossed the bridge over descendants of water lilies Monet had immortalized. We spent a day at Versailles and enjoyed a picnic, taking in the grandiose fountains and struggling to comprehend a world where seven hundred rooms, two thousand windows and sixty seven staircases were the norm for a palace in the countryside.

Paris truly was a feast for the senses, the buildings were charming and every street corner had a garden or a statue. The language was lyrical, the people were elegant, every morsel of food was scrumptious, and each drop of wine was like honey. And feast we did on all that the city had to offer. We were in a state of complete intoxication with Paris and with each other, a splendid mix.

Our last day in Paris was a whirlwind shopping spree gathering goodies for ourselves and everyone at home. That night we dressed up and had a five course dinner at Le Grand Vefour. We stopped at the bar at the Plaza Athenee, got ridiculously drunk and took a taxi to the Arc d’Triomphe for a last view of the city. It was a perfect night, the sky was an inky black pierced through with stars. From the top we enjoyed a spectacular scene of the Champ Elysees with the traffic creating a streaming spectacle of light. A freak cold-front had swept through the city and John and I held hands and stood close against the cold, the frosty air sobering us. I glanced up at him and there were tears in his eyes, he tried to laugh it off but I was sure of the hurt I saw on his face. It began to snow and I was caught between the luminous beauty of the night and the sadness in John’s dazzling blue eyes.

We returned to the hotel to find a thoughtful concierge laying a fire in the fireplace in our room. When it was blazing it cast an amber glow as it warmed the air. We wrapped ourselves in the impossibly soft hotel robes and ordered a bottle of cognac, then sprawled on the rug in front of the fire to enjoy our drinks and exchange thoughts on the day.

“What happened, buddy?” I asked. “You frightened me earlier, the look in your eyes.”

“It was so beautiful up there,” he started, “it reminded me of how the water looked at night off the back of the ship when I was in the Navy. Those memories are good and bad, I didn’t mind being in the service but I was a kid, just seventeen and I missed my family like crazy.”

He poured himself another glass of cognac, lay back and told me the story of his childhood.

He was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania; just six months after his parents were married. His mother was from a well-off Bucks County family and his father was from generations of dirt-poor Kentucky coalminers. His parents met when his father, an aspiring actor, was touring with the road company of
Barefoot in the Park
. His dad was the understudy for the Robert Redford part and his mother had a thing for Redford, or anyone associated with him. They first met in the alley by the stage door entrance. The arrogant Kentuckian and the ingénue from Pennsylvania fell in love in short order. Marriage and a baby followed, along with a move to Los Angeles. His father took whatever bit parts he was offered and his mother did clerical work at a movie studio. His father’s career went nowhere and this he blamed on the fact that he was strapped with a wife and child. His reasoning was that he was forced to take any part, good or bad, to support his new family. If he’d been out on his own he could’ve been more selective, he could’ve chosen better roles. The truth was he was never offered any. He wasn’t, in fact, a very good actor. He still loved his wife, was still attracted to her fresh-faced beauty, it was the kid who became the scapegoat. John was the reason for his failure, the source of his resentment.

When John was ten years old his father gave up on acting and life in L.A. He took a menial but steady job at a factory outside Milwaukee.

“Dumb jackass!” John cursed his father’s choice, “He could’ve taken a boring job anywhere, he’d been in the Navy for Christ sake, he’d been all over the world. But where did he settle down,
choose
to settle down? Wisconsin! I can’t even describe winter in Wisconsin, I mean C-O-L-D. Colder than a well digger’s ass and that dumb son of a bitch was a well digger’s kid straight out of, “Oh by the way, your grandparents are first cousins” Kentucky. The motherfucker was the grandson and great grandson of coal miners. Who knows how many proud generations of Foster men crawled into those dark ass mines and then died of black lung disease? But Ben Foster was going to make a difference. He got out of Kentucky and made it all the way to California. He got a tan and some bit parts and extra work in films and TV. But after ten years my mom was getting more attention from the studio boss where she worked and he wasn’t even close to hitting the big time. So he not only gave up on acting, he decide we would leave California. And not for sunny Arizona or Florida but straight to middle of the road, middle fucking America, cold-nine-tenths-of-the-year upper Midwest.”

He was breathing hard, fists clenched, blue eyes as icy as the state he was describing. He looked at me imploringly, “Why did my mom go with him? We loved L.A. and she was secretary to the head of the TV studio shooting the Dukes of Hazzard. I hate my father, hate him now and hated him then. He decided his life was useless so he would ruin it for me and my mom, too. Well, he failed as an actor but he should have won an Oscar for becoming the meanest, hardest hearted asshole in history. When we moved to Wisconsin my mom and I were best friends and he couldn’t stand it, he didn’t want anyone to love me, ever. For ten years I’d been an only child so he decided to ruin that, too. Thanks to him my mom had three babies in the next five years.”

“I ran away from home when the youngest was born, I was fifteen. We had just finished potty training the three year old and the two year old was still in diapers when the baby came along. I’d had enough of it all, my father’s cruelty to me and my mother, his hatred of me and over the top love for the new babies. The diapers and throw up and me stuck babysitting all the time. I really loved those kids but I had to get out of there. I had an old motorcycle, a Yamaha 125. I got on it one day and just took off. It was the middle of winter, as icy as my father’s heart. I bundled up pretty good and headed due south. My mother’s sister lived in Dallas so that’s where I was going. Somewhere near Iowa my bike was so caked with ice I could hardly hold it up and my gloves were frozen to the hand grips.

I pulled over at a rest stop and a trucker took one look at me and said, “Boy, you look like walking death, where you headed?”

“Dallas,” I told him. “He was huge, probably six foot seven and black as night. He threw his head back and howled with laughter.”

“On that toy motor-cicle?” he asked and laughed some more. “Come on kid, I’ll help you get your bike in the back of my truck, it ain’t half full. I’m only goin’ as far as Tulsa but you ought to have thawed out by then.”

“He was a nice guy, he fed me a hot meal and got some coffee in me, but every once in a while he’d look over at me, and start laughing all over again.”

“Crazy Yankee boy gonna ride a little bitty motor-cicle from the North Pole to Texas!”

“We rode along quiet for a long time, snow was blowing like crazy around the truck. It was all white outside, like we were in the clouds. When he smoked he’d hand me a cigarette, too. Finally he looked over at me and said, “I just got one question for ya, it ain’t about where you goin’ or where you been ‘cuz a look in your eye tells me you runnin’ from the devil hisself. But I been wonderin’, you ‘bout the whitest white boy I ever seen, is you a albino?”

John Foster smiled remembering that, “No sir I’m not, but I did go to a concert one time and it was the best time I ever had in my life, the singer was a man named Edgar Winter and he is an albino. And I’ll tell you, the way that music made me feel and the way he and his brother could play and sing made me wish I was an albino.”

The trucker let John off in Tulsa where it wasn’t yet warm but it wasn’t freezing. He figured if he could just make it to Texas he’d be home free. He made it to Dallas, presented himself at his aunt’s doorstep and faced a welcome as cold as the winter he’d left behind. An invitation was one thing, an arrival, another. She phoned his parents— he fled. Two years of couch crashing and dumpster diving and a new found affair with marijuana left him lost and lonely. He missed his mother and the womblike quality of his bedroom, his stereo blaring the Rolling Stones and Metallica. One day his father grudgingly showed up to take him back to Wisconsin. He went home to his mother’s smile and the carrot cake she made just for him and to his father’s silence and refusal to look him in the eye. Two weeks later his father shoved him onto a Greyhound bus heading to boot camp in Jacksonville, Florida. He was seventeen years old and would be aboard the aircraft carrier JFK for the better part of four years.

“It gets lonely out there,” he said. “The ocean’s so huge and dark, like a planet all its own. Something in you, something small and scared wants its family, wants something it knows, but you gotta be a man ‘cause that’s the only choice you have.”

The thought of that, the grey of the ship, the rolling of the ocean, that bottomless liquid world the only solid thing he knew for months on end. I imagined him, already too tall for his bunk at seventeen, floating, sailing away from a family that didn’t want him, yet he longed for them still.

***

We left the next day; the snowfall had turned to rain, grey and melancholy, weather that made it easier to leave Paris behind. We returned to America, buoyant and hopeful, not unlike generations before us hoping to build new lives from the ashes of the old. We were on a layover at La Guardia and I couldn’t stop thinking about the things John had told me. It seemed he’d had so little joy in his childhood.

I asked him, “Did you ever go to Disneyland when you were a little boy, when you and your parents lived in Los Angeles?”

“Nope, my parents never had any interest, then when I moved back after the Navy I worked at Universal Studios for a while, but I never rode any rides.”

“You worked at Universal Studios?” I was surprised that I didn’t know that about him.

“Yeah, I was War Don, Ruler of All Evil, you know, from the Warriors Across Time series.”

“Really now?” I asked, remembering how my son had adored that cartoon series and collected all the action figures when he was little.

“Yep, he was really tall I guess, so I fit the costume. There was an English girl who played Bella Donna, Queen of Destruction, she was always saying, “Come on mate, let’s go over to the Psycho House for a shag.”

I shook my head, taking that in. I could actually see him, the world’s biggest kid, dressed in his costume and following some strange girl to the ramshackle set of the movie Psycho for a quickie.

“You never cease to surprise and entertain me,” I laughed. “What other secrets are you keeping?”

At the gate John told me to wait and he’d get our boarding passes. I watched him talk to the young woman at check in, he was smiling and gesturing, leaning over the counter. The attendant laughed, batted her eyes and blushed, caught in his blue-eyed spell. She tapped furiously on her computer, handed him two slips of paper and watched dreamily as he walked away. When she spotted me she jerked her gaze away. I just smiled and felt kind of sorry for her, familiar as I’d become with the lure of his unabashed sexuality. He plopped down in the chair beside me, boyish once again, and handed me the passes with a gleam in his eye.

“What did you do?” I asked, accusingly.

“Look,” he said, tapping the papers.

I looked down, then back at him, “First class, you upgraded us?”

“No, she did.” He lifted my hand and kissed it, “She gave us a wedding present!”

“You charmed these out of that poor, smitten girl?”

“They’re a bonus buy, buddy. They didn’t cost her anything and first class wasn’t full. I told her we were on our honeymoon, she was a good sport. The airline probably works her too many hours and doesn’t pay her Jack-shit, so she was happy to do it”

“Bonus buy?”

“Sure, you can get a better deal on anything, you just have to ask. Like when we checked out of the hotel in Paris, I told them the service wasn’t that great and they lowered the final bill. They expect you do it and if you don’t you look like a sucker.”

The flight was a dream, we drank way too much Champagne, (Veuve Cliquot, first class after all) and cuddled under blankets touching and laughing. He moved my hand to his inner thigh and he was hugely erect. He kept his hand over mine and moved it slowly up and down the entire length, whispering things that are only appropriate for lovers to hear.