by Claudia Coleman
The Adventure Inn boasts lots of activities for its residents, even the ones who shuffle with walkers or scoot around in their wheelchairs. In fact, the brochure given to families looking to place their infirm parents lists Shuffle and Scoot along with Knit and Purl as the most popular of its daily activities for a certain set in the A wing, “A” standing for Active. Every Body Active is the motto around here.
Talk about active … men over eighty still get plenty horny. I hardly know what to do at times. Over the years a couple women have lain on the bed with me, but they aren’t really interested in sex. And very few ever agree to get under the covers naked. Mainly the ladies here just want to cuddle on the little couch in my room. Snuggle and Cuddle – that’s about all the action I get.
But, and I have to smile, the Adventure Inn has a few hot tamales. It’s best when a hottie invites me to her room. Actually, so far, only one has done that … Julia. The candlelight, the coziness, the perfume never failed to cheer me into a throbbing erection. Julia worshiped it. She admired it and rubbed her chest, neck, and face all around it. “Like a warm, sweet nest,” she said. “I could settle in here forever. And these two”— the silky caress in her voice thrills me still —“so soft, but firm, like plump marshmallows!”
But she died. We had hardly just begun our evening trysts, when one morning she didn’t appear in the dining room, and I sure wasn’t going to eat that half cantaloupe. I’d snagged it for her since that was always the first fruit to disappear. My oatmeal went cold. I did a fast shuffle down to her room. But it had already been cleared out.
My knees buckled. Sajid, the Samoan orderly, saved me from sprawling on the floor. They wanted to stick a needle in my arm. “It’ll help,” they said, “and you can sleep.”
Sleep! Who needs sleep! I need love and warmth and a full body hug, skin on skin, in the fresh air. In a meadow with a waterfall and birds. With Marlene, my wife, my heart!
When all the voices finally left the room, I opened my eyes and there was Sajid, sitting by my bed gazing at me. So faithful. “Where’s Marlene?”
Sajid smiled his gentle smile. “She’s been gone … what… about ten years now, isn’t it?
Over by the window, Marlene hovers in the light, shimmers in the tears welling up in my eyes. “I’ve got an idea—a new activity.”
Sajid’s eyebrows go up and so do the corners of his mouth. “What? Snuggle and Cuddle isn’t enough for you?”
Good old Sajid. He feels for us, the A Wing’s lonely men.
“Snuggle and Cuddle Naked!”
Sajid’s quiet laugh, his white teeth against brown skin, shining, like a beacon—I feel instantly better.
“That’s the spirit!” he said.
Even so, most nights – they’re the hardest – I cry myself to sleep. Toward dawn a naked angel lands on my stomach and slips off my pajama top. She lays her face on my chest and we roll in the sand. The current carries us out to the deep water. The salty air, the sunlit water, silky fishes glinting in the sun shafts. The angel is Marlene, naked and twenty-five. Her arms and legs wind around me. Weightless, we spin and laugh. She kisses my neck, my eyelids. My body shudders into a sweet joy.
Morning comes early when you’re lonely and old. Always the same foggy routine with the same shaggy haired, gray faces drifting in the fog of their own foggy brains and the Adventure Inn’s interminable foggy days. The half-green cantaloupe, the too-sweet fake orange juice, the artificial maple-flavored oatmeal, the weak and bitter coffee, the long day filled with armchair aerobics and longing, longing, longing.
Some days intense longing doubles me over and I fall, but not on the floor. A vision heaves me high … soaring … somewhere up there to the Better-Than-Ever, the sweet Don’t-Ever-Stop, the Flaming Endless-Endless-Moment.
She’s got to be out there, still. But here in this prison with no walls, this vast and gray empty space, alone, how would I ever find her?
There’s always death … probably my only way out. Maybe death is a friend? I don’t dare hope it. But maybe, just maybe, if my longing is true, it could happen. I could dream myself into a joyful place.
I often sit in the lobby. People coming, people leaving. I dream about new things that might happen. Then one day something new does happen. The front door opens and she emerges as if out of the light, clutching a spray of peonies. A vision in rose, in a wheelchair like they all are. Strangely, she glides toward the check-in office, but no one seems to be pushing her. Her skin is brown and beautiful, just like Sajid’s. Sajid, who comes from an island paradise in the distant realm of sweetness. I wish she could be my naked angel, but she never even casts me a glance.
After three days of dreams and fantasies, there she is. Rose, alone at breakfast. I pick up my pace to grab the chair across from her. Fortunately, I shaved that morning.
I let my heart calm, then raise my eyes to find hers, and I’m instantly buoyed aloft by the radiance of her smile. She looks at my tray. We’ve each chosen the same things, a fluffy mound of yoghurt in a pool of brown juice with three stewed prunes nestled on top.
“I make a volcano with my yoghurt, with the prunes floating in the crater,” I say, smiling into her eyes. I spoon a prune into my mouth. “The prunes are my favorite. They look wrinkled and old but …”
“But they’re sweet and juicy!” Rose drawls in a husky voice that bores into my chest, runs through my body and limbs, and electrifies the air, enclosing us and our volcanoes of yoghurt and prunes in a timeless swirling place that is nowhere and everywhere all at once. Rose is Marlene and Marlene is Rose. And every love is all love for all time, a single breath of life itself.
A thrill of joy hits me so suddenly that a bit of juice squeezes out my lips and trickles down my chin. My own napkin still in mid-air, Rose reaches across the table and wipes the juice herself. Right then and there, I know my prayers have been answered. Thank God I shaved.
We’re eating our prunes and yoghurt in silence. All of a sudden, the dining hall is gone, vanished! It’s just the two of us, spinning in our own orbit, the sound of waves crashing on a distant shore. Finally Rose pushes back her chair and stands. “Coming to the program this evening? I hear there’ll be dancing.” Her voice echoes around the room as she glides toward the door on slippered feet.
Just one more night of love is all I ask. Then let me die in ecstasy.
It’s Friday evening, and since there’s always some kind of gathering in the lounge, very few family members stay much after dinner. I spot Rose instantly. Light suddenly fills the room, so much does her essence reflect the rays of the sun. She is a flower whose fragrance so buzzes with energy that I almost can’t approach.
Someone hits “play,” and the sounds of “Yesterday” drift in the air. Bodies sway, two by two.
There’s Rose standing next to me, though neither of us took any steps. In one fluid motion my body melts into hers, her form perfectly mirroring my own. As we turn around the room in some distant memory of a waltz. Faces float in and out of view, Sajid’s and others. They look worried, but nothing touches my joy at the words Rose whispers, “I’ve been waiting for you.” The delicate touches of her lips on my ear, like a wet butterfly settling in its folds and turns, vibrate me off the floor.
I suavely waltz Rose out into the hall. And though several people dash up and down—why are they worried?—no one stops our slow dance toward my room. Together we float onto my bed and roll and embrace and laugh the way lovers have always done. I fear we’ll roll off the narrow bed and the hard floor will jolt us out of the moment, but the bed is much larger than it was this morning.
Her hands cup my cheeks. Her lips kiss my smile. “I am ready. Are you?”
“Oh yes, yes,” I whisper and give myself completely over to her. She kisses me again, this time fully as if to take my very being into her own. We meet on a distant plain, where Rose leads me into a bower. The fresh and fragrant air nourishes my every pore. “No fog here,” echoes in the trees. “No, it’s fresh,” I say.
We lie on the cool sand. I roll onto my back. The ground falls away. Rose hovers above me, like a lover awaiting the electric touch to come. Soft clouds billow high above. Nothing is the same. I have no flesh for the rain to soothe. My body shimmers into hers as our edges melt away and we sublime into the light.
I am a translator and writer of fiction and poetry. I have published several articles in both English and French as well as two book translations from the French. I am a practicing Buddhist and live with my husband and two cats in San Luis Obispo CA, where I taught literature and composition at California Polytechnic State University.
Photo by Felicia Montenegro on Unsplash
