Kathleen Valentine

by Kathleen Valentine

Published by Kathleen Valentine & Parlez-Moi Press

Copyright 2011 Kathleen Valentine, All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. No resemblance to any persons or situations is intended.

Author’s web site: www.KathleenValentine.com

Author's blog: www.parlezmoipress.blogspot.com

Author’s web sites designed and sponsored by Parlez-Moi Press

Front cover: detail from "The Union of Earth and Water" by Peter Paul Rubens,
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

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Dedicated to my friend Trudi Forti because, when I showed her the first story, she said, write more.

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SYNOPSIS
:
Eight stories with a common theme---the wonder of finding love---sweep the reader into sensuous worlds where ordinary people discover, or rediscover, love. Foolish love, forbidden love, married love---even murderous love, each story is a seductive jewel populated with characters that seem like someone we could know---or someone we could be. Each of the stories in this collection is an exquisitely rendered portrait of people from a broad range of ages each proving that passion and love are eternal, regardless of life's far-ranging challenges. 

MY LAST ROMANCE

8:53am....93 degrees.
The bank sign over the neon blue seagulls blinks. The day has scarcely started and already it’s past ninety. A thin, watery haze rises from the pavement making me feel like I am driving into a dream. Whose idea was it for us to live in this insufferable climate anyway? Why in God’s name did we think once we got old we would want to sweat? It boggles my mind.
I don’t even know what I am doing up at this hour. I rarely see daylight before noon. I don’t know what this strange restlessness is in me these days and it seems the only time I have to myself is while Silvio sleeps. We’ve been retired for years now but he can’t fall asleep before three in the morning. A lifetime of playing music half the night and partying the rest—in those years nobody went to bed before the sun came up. You can’t break the habits of a lifetime just because you get old.
The restlessness is tormenting me. Silvio hasn’t noticed so far. Of course Silvio not taking notice of me is nothing new. Oh, he liked my voice well enough when I started singing with the band. Almost as much as he liked my big boobs and dangerous curves. ‘I like my women like I like my cigars,’ he used to say, ‘well-packed, juicy and easy to ignite.’
That was me alright. He was the hottest dance band leader in the South when we met. The war was only a few years behind us and everyone wanted to party all night, dance till dawn and burn each other up with the kind of passion you can only find in the old records left from those days.
Do I sound prejudiced? I watch the kids today with their confused morality and their predictable sexuality and I feel sorry for them. Everything is accepted and nothing is fun. Look at them! Jogging along in the hot sun, sweat pouring off of them. Look at their faces! Do they look happy? Nobody in my day would dream of jogging. We danced. We mambo-ed and we cha-cha-ed and fox trotted all night long. We tangoed and tangled and drank and kissed and felt each other up and never wanted to stop. Look at these girls—thin as teenage boys! Like little pretend men.
Women in my time had chests—the bigger the better—straining against lace brassieres and bouncing under whisper thin silk blouses. We had hips a man could get ideas about and we knew how to use them, too. I could change the course of a man’s life just by turning around in my pink charmeuse evening dress—the one with the cute V dipping all the way down. And then there was that gold tissue faille that was so low in back and so artfully draped in front that men would stare at me and say, "Darlin’, what do you have on under that?"
I’d tilt my eyebrow the way I’d practiced in the mirror—maybe a thousand times—and say, all innocence, "Why, rose-scented talcum powder, sugar. What else?"
Oh, we were women alright. A man could have just about anything he wanted, he just had to figure out what it took to get it. He had to work a little bit. Talk sweet. Make you tingle. The other day I was listening to this relationship expert on the radio. Relationship expert? My lord. She said that she "advocates a mutually beneficial relationship with latitude for individual development." What the hell is that? No wonder these poor girls go running down the streets in this ridiculous heat! It’s a genuine wonder they aren’t screaming.
I say you are either going with a fellow or you aren’t. And God help him if he doesn’t treat you right. I remember this one girl—Lacy Dove Chaldefonte from Sweetwater, Georgia. Whew. She was five feet eight inches and one hundred and fifty pounds of creamy pink, orange-blossom scented female. She drove them crazy with her big doe eyes and mile long legs. There was this one fellow—a trumpet player from one of those Cuban rhumba bands everyone was so crazy about then. Let me tell you he got one look at Lacy Dove in a white sequined halter dress dancing the samba and thought he’d go blind or get seasick from all that glitter and motion. You could see the smoke rising from his bright pink satin trousers.
He and Lacy Dove took up together. That’s what we said back then—"took up together". We knew the same words the kids know today—we just had naughty imaginations and didn’t need to spell everything out. We didn’t have to fuck because we could make the earth move.
That’s another thing today. People just love to be honest, have you noticed? They say something that would get their mouths soaped good and then say, "I’m just being honest." I say honesty is for the unimaginative.
For awhile Lacy Dove and her trumpet player did just fine. They’d come staggering into the club in the middle of the afternoon still sleepy-eyed and love-weary, hands all over each other. She loved to show off all the little silky unmentionables he bought her. He liked her to do strip-teases for him in his hotel room between sets and he spent tons on the kinds of things he liked to watch her peel off. Then the rumors started about him and this red-headed waitress from another club. Lacy just marched right into that club, grabbed that girl by the hair and slapped her silly till the poor thing admitted they’d been carrying-on. That was all it took.
Lacy had it all planned that night. She waited until they got back to his room and she wasted no time getting him undressed and on the bed. Then she started her strip.... First she undid her Midnight Fantasy stockings, one at a time and rolled them down the length of those never-ending legs of hers. She knew what he wanted. She leaned over within a kiss’s distance of his face and tied first one wrist and then the other to the bedposts with those stockings. That guy thought he was in for a grand evening—so excited he was shaking like a wet dog. And she took her time wriggling out of her candy pink silk slip. She teased him with it—drawing it nice and slow across his thighs and belly. She had him squirming something awful. She let it puddle down on the part of his anatomy that was fixing to burst. She did the same with her ribbon-trimmed 36DD brassiere and her rosebud embellished garter belt letting the dumb bastard shiver in anticipation. Finally she turned her back to him and ran her hands over her backside as plump and luscious as a sun-ripened peach as she wiggled out of her spider-web thin panties. Turning to face him—letting him have one last gander at that heavenly body—she licked her lips with her pretty pink tongue. Then she leaned over and took his cigarettes and lighter from the night stand. She gave him her best come-hither gaze as she touched the blue flame to the tip of her cigarette. Then with a sweet smile she dropped the lighter into the silky pile in his lap, picked up her coat, turned and sauntered out closing the room door on his shrieks.
Oh, now don’t get all upset. The trumpet player thrashed around enough to put out the flames and escaped with only minor burns to the former Pride of Havana. Lacy Dove moved to San Antonio and married a roughneck who made it big in the oil-boom of the Seventies. The last I saw of her she was on the cover of Southern Living in front of the gazebo she had just had built in her garden for one of her daughters’ Coming Out parties.
Well, not every girl that got cheated on was as crazy as Lacy Dove. But we were bad and sex was dirty and it was all a lot of fun.
I was seventeen when I met Silvio. He and his band, The Silver Saints, were playing a three week gig at The Balinese Room down on the boardwalk. My girlfriend Miranda called. "Have you seen those guys?" she cooed. "Every one of them is dark and slick and hot."
I’d seen them. They sure were dark and slick and hot. "Come on," Miranda said, "this could be your big break."
Miranda was my number one fan back then. I started singing in our high school glee club but what I wanted was to be a torch singer, like Juliette Greco or Rosemary Clooney. I collected all the records—Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee. I practiced in front of my bedroom mirror for hours. It wasn’t enough to get the music right. I had to get the look and the shrug and the pout—the smoke. My Grandma never intended all those sewing lessons to result in the dancing dresses I made. She’d have tanned my hide if she saw the lipstick red, strapless gown I made for my big night. It hugged me right down to my thighs and then exploded in cascades of ruffles. In four inch heels I practiced till I got the wiggle that could set those ruffles swaying. I borrowed some fake ruby earrings from Miranda and I looked like sin itself strutting into the Balinese Room that night.
It worked. Silvio took one look at me and the next song the band played was "Ruby". That’s what he’s called me ever since. And the rest—as the saying goes—was history. Silvio was everything I wanted—tall, dark, handsome and ripe to fall in love—first with my body, then with my voice. Then with me.
By the time the band pulled out of town my sewing machine, my record collection, and my wardrobe were packed along with them. That was forty-two years ago.
I drive out the jetty past the bait shops and the boat rental shacks to the end of the fishing pier. Most of the shrimp boats are gone for the day. I hear them chugging out into the Gulf long before the sun comes up. I roll down the windows and the thick, sticky salt air washes in dampening my hair and cotton blouse. The gulls swoop overhead squawking loud enough to drown out the sound of the waves lapping at the pilings. Across the bay where the water flows toward the channel dolphins leap through the waves with little flashes of silver. In three weeks I’ll be sixty. Too old for the fire burning inside of me. This all started a week ago. Memories are crazy things, sort of like a piñata. You never know what’s inside and ready to come pouring out until it is too late to stop them. What cracked mine open was a copy of the band’s 1957 hit
My Last Romance
. I found it in a stuffy, drab little record shop off of Avenue L. I keep reminding myself that’s what I get for doing a good deed.
Silvio was furious when our last copy of it got broken during the winding down stage of his seventy-third birthday party last fall. Benny, the drummer from a late incarnation of The Silver Saints, confined to a wheelchair since his stroke and way too far under the influence, was drumming along to the music when, carried away by a frenzy of musical passion, he drummed into and shattered the brittle old 78. I’ve been scouring second hand shops ever since.
If it hadn’t been for an accident on Pompano Street I never would have found it. One of those T-top sports cars came flying around the corner smack into the side of a pickup loaded down with barrels of crabs and seaweed. It didn’t hurt the truck much but the barrels tipped over into the sports car and the kids inside were screaming something fierce in that slimy, crawling mess. I turned down Avenue L, a side street I rarely take, and that’s where I saw the sign, "Cap’n Jack’s New and Used Books, Records, Tapes, CDs".
Captain Jack himself, in cut-offs, sandals and a lime green Hawaiian shirt with pink flamingos open to display an amazing belly, lounged in a recliner in front of an electric fan, smoking a pipe and reading the Morning Chronicle.
"Well, well," he looked up and flashed a broad white smile, "been a while since I seen a vintage beauty round here." The Captain was a vintage work himself, leathery skin lined and baked as dark as his thick mane of hair was bleached white by the mercilessness of harsh sun and strong sea-spray. A Douglas Fairbanks kind of beard. There was something about him that excess weight and wrinkles couldn’t tarnish, a wicked wildness that teased a lady’s imagination, at least if the lady had a naughty imagination to start with.
"Now, I’m just hopin’ I’ve got what you’re looking for, little lady," he grinned.
I tossed my head and looked at him through the mystery of my sun glasses. "Old 78s," I said. "Big band stuff from the Forties and Fifties."
He rose from his lounger—more gracefully than I would have thought possible—and took my hand in both of his huge, rough ones. "Darlin," he grinned, "you are gonna fall in love with me when you see what I have for you."
He winked. He had been a bad one and I appreciated it.
Putting a hand on my back, just a little lower than necessary, he guided me into the garage. Wooden citrus crates resting on plank and sawhorse tables filled the two-stall garage. The old paper slip jackets were tattered and faded around the edges but most of the records were in prime condition.
"Now, this is music, darlin," he began, launching into a detailed opinion of every band he had danced to over the years. But I was enthralled—records of music that brought back waves of memories. I started a stack—Silvio would be thrilled.
And there it was—still in its paper jacket—
My Last Romance
by Silvio Santini and the Silver Saints featuring the Voice of Ruby Velvet. The red letters swirled across a background of silver hearts in the center of which a silhouetted couple touched lips. Delicately I slipped the record from its cover. It was perfect. I could have kissed the lecherous old Captain.
"Now, I want to see you around here again real soon," he said wrapping the package. He fixed me with a deep, twinkling look. "I’ve got lots of good stuff you haven’t even seen yet," he purred running his forefinger up the inside of my bare arm. I smiled and turned back to my car. I don’t care if I am an old woman—being appreciated is bound to put a sway in your hips.
Silvio was sipping coffee in the cool darkness of the bedroom. He’s never adjusted well to waking up and since his by-pass surgery last year he keeps the air-conditioning a tad cooler than I like. He’s not a bad looking man, I thought, watching him from the doorway—leaner than ever before, his thick gray hair gleamed like polished pewter in the dim light. He has those strong, Mediterranean features that just get better every year and his moustache—his favorite affectation—is as perfectly groomed as always. Maybe the Captain had stirred something up. I slid across the bed and snuggled against him.
"What have you been up to?" he asked not looking up from his paper.
"Brought you a present." I plopped the package onto his lap.
"Yeah?" He turned and smiled at me with those same black eyes that swept me off my feet a hundred years ago. "What is it?"
Silvio loves presents. He’s like a kid. He starts rummaging through the house weeks before Christmas. The only way I can keep a surprise is to lock it in the trunk of my car.
I rested my chin on his shoulder and watched his long, fine hands fold back the paper.
"Holy smokes," he said, "where did you find these?" He turned and kissed me on the end of my nose. In forty-two years together he has never ceased to treat me like a pet instead of a mature—and now, old—woman.
"God, this brings back memories." He flipped through them slowly. Coming to the one I deliberately placed on the bottom, he turned to me and gave me a huge hug.
"You’re a good girl, Ruby, you keep this up and one of these days I may have to marry you."
I laughed—the truth is Silvio and I never have gotten married. He got out of bed and headed for the stereo. I stretched out and let the heavenly music fill me up. Seegar Ellis’s That’ll Be the Day drifted over me bringing memories of the first night we went to see him at the Palladium. It was a steamy hot tropical night and we sat on the veranda sipping champagne cocktails hardly able to hear the music over the shrieking of the cicadas.
"Who’s Johnny Angel," Silvio asked.
I opened my eyes and blinked back to the present. He was standing in the doorway holding the record jacket with the red letters and silver hearts facing me.
"What?"
"Didn’t you see this?" He laughed, turning the jacket over. Across the back was a message in my familiar looping scrawl.
"Give me that," I reached for it. It is not unusual to find autographed copies of our old records. We signed records sometimes until I thought my hand would fall off—"To Betty Sue, with the green eyes, Love, Silvio Santini", "To Bobby, Hugs & Kisses, Ruby Velvet", "To Angie, our most devoted fan, Love, Ruby & Silvio." There were probably thousands of them out there. It sold records.
Silvio jerked the jacket back and shook a finger at me. "This is hot stuff, kid, ‘To Johnny Angel who will always be the soul of this song, Love & Kisses, Ruby’. Yeowch!" He shook his hand as though his fingers were scorched.
"You must have had it bad for this one, baby." He grinned and tossed the jacket on the bed.
"Who can remember?" I said, gingerly picking it up. "How many of these do you think we signed?"
Silvio laughed turning back to the kitchen with his coffee cup. "Billions and billions," he sputtered.
But the truth is I did remember. I folded my arms around the jacket holding it to my heart and the piñata cracked open....
It was a hot August night in 1957—the Crystal Rainbow Ballroom, smack in the middle of Seabrae Amusement Park. Seabrae was one of those old-fashioned seaside amusement parks—no plastic, no computer animation—just the dreamy imaginations of now over-fifty Americans fading into hazy memories. Hundreds of multi-colored lights set leafy branches glowing and glittered off the water in a two mile long channel filled with swan boats twisting and turning through night air thick with the fragrance of mimosa, jasmine, hot dogs, kerosene lanterns, and popcorn. The centerpiece of the park was a shimmering carousel on an island formed by the channel. Magnificent wooden beasts, gilded and ornamented griffins, unicorns, pachyderms, and tigers, slid up and down on gleaming brass poles as children and adults alike laughed and reached for the brass ring just inches past their fingertips. And wrapped around the entire park—like a creaky, musty-smelling dragon—curved an enormous wooden roller coaster. Everything was laughter, carousel music, the frantic clatter of the roller coaster and the excited screams of its riders. The Silver Saints were playing a four week gig and Silvio and I were fighting again.
In my early years with the band Silvio and I had been the most passionate of lovers, sneaking time between sets for quick trysts in dressing rooms or the back of equipment trucks—making music and drinking half the night then tumbling into bed to drive each other mad until noon—looking forward to the rare hiatus between engagements when we could spend days inventing new and more decadent ways to wear each other out.
Silvio was a dazzling lover. All he had to do was look at me with his dark eyes over the glitter of a dancing crowd to set my skin afire and my thighs shivering. When he slid his hand along my stomach or brushed his fingers across my trembling backside he turned me into a greedy, purring cat who never knew the meaning of "enough". He made me magical, it was part of what thrilled the crowd. The heat he stoked in me seemed to seep from my every pore and waft like smoke through my voice when I sang. I knew what I did to men. I saw how they adjusted their discomfort or rubbed closer to their dance partners. I saw how much the women loved it, too. But Silvio was the only one I wanted. And wanted and wanted and wanted.
But time is cruel to that level of passion. People in professions like ours, where the opportunities for diversion seem endless, are notoriously wanton. It is a simple fact, not good or bad, just a fact. We had settled into a tolerable, if not desirable, understanding. At home between engagements we lived together and, in most ways, loved each other. On the road was another matter. We kept our own hotel rooms and didn’t ask each other what went on in them.
Silvio needed me—of that I had no doubt. As the Fifties wore on and rock and roll swept madly across the country jobs were not as plentiful as they once had been. The older crowds still loved us but the breaks between performances grew longer each year. We bought a beach house—the one we live in now—in a small Gulf fishing town which we could call home. It was good, we spent weeks there writing new music. Silvio would sit at his piano for hours to work out tunes and refine lyrics. That’s when he would reach out to me.
"Hey, baby," he’d say, "how about coming over here and giving me some inspiration?"
And I would. Teasing, enticing—making him shudder and gasp but always aware that behind his laughter and sighs the frustration he felt was bitter and I was the only one who could distract him from it.
Then it would be time to be off to another Crystal Ballroom, another Palisades, another Wonderland or Starlight Lounge. We would put on the personalities we kept in the trunks of costumes and not watch each other out of the corners of our eyes.
That’s when I met him, John Angelini, Jr., Johnny Angel.
He looked like an angel. Not too tall, solidly built with a face of heavenly innocence, wide Seabrae blue eyes, a halo of pale curls and a mouth badly in want of kisses. I can close my eyes now and see him as I first did in his white summer suit and pale blue shirt lounging on a park bench under the sweep of a pin oak tree, picking at an enormous puffy pink cloud of cotton candy. We were between sets. Silvio was drooling in the cleavage of a diamond-encrusted divorcee from Chicago and I was looking for trouble.
In his soft Carolina drawl he told me that his family was in Europe for the summer—the Riviera or Switzerland. They always summered there—but he was sick of Europe. He said that since childhood he’d begged for a vacation at an amusement park but his mother thought that declassé so he was alone—indulging a childhood fantasy.
I fell for the sweetness about him—a winsome innocence that was tantalizing. He was young and delicious and ripe for seduction.
I never meant for it to happen—I don’t suppose you ever do. At first it was just fun. We danced close under the paper lanterns to the calliope music and I felt him tremble as he let his hand drift lower and lower on my back. Now that I’m old I can be honest enough to say that knowing you have that kind of an effect, that kind of power, with a man is an intoxication all its own. The pity is the power was its greatest when I was least able to handle it. We fell into each others’ desire like china dolls headed for a stone floor—but the free-fall was so sweet.
I don’t think my voice ever sounded as voluptuous as it did that week—sung with a mouth swollen by kisses. I’d find the blue beacons of his eyes across the crowd and tumble into them with my voice. People packed the ballroom pressing together as they danced with a desire they never knew before. Middle aged couples from the mid-west, thinking they had taken yet another tedious amusement park vacation, suddenly found themselves pressing their bellies closer together as they danced and sneaking back to their hotel rooms before midnight to rekindle excitement that had been lost for years. More babies were conceived in The Seabrae Inn that week than at any time in its history. Even the bougainvillaea grew more lush, the mimosa sent off more fragrance enticing fat, fuzzy bees drunk with the sweetest nectar ever. Nobody knew what was going on—least of all Johnny and I. We were tolerating the hours of rehearsal and performance until we could be together again, arms and legs wrapped around hips and backs. Lips and tongues and fingers and skin swelling with anticipation of the next contact, the next joining, the next connection. We lay together in lakes of morning sunshine feasting on each others endless desire, unable to be close enough, unable to feel enough, all the succulent portals of longing fully engaged, besotted with each others’ faintest breath or sigh. He told me I was his first love. In that week I grew to believe that he was my last. So deeply enraptured was I that he seemed like the half of me I never knew I had been missing. The only time we were apart was during the few hours of rehearsal I forced myself to participate in each day. I was so lost in love I never noticed the knowing glances of the band members. I had no awareness of Silvio at all. He was just a shadow on the periphery of my world of sensual intoxication. I was oblivious to the annoyance and then the worry and then the fear growing in him. If he tried to quarrel with me at that time—or provoke me or seduce me—I have no memory of it. I was bewitched by blond curls and smooth skin, strong hands and the insatiable appetite of my angel lover.
I don’t remember which day of that week Johnny showed me the record he had purchased while I was rehearsing. Silvio wrote