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He liked to let her get there before he did. He knew she dwelled on the anticipation, and the down time after feeding her family. She liked as well the pseudo-Honky-Tonk ambience and she loved the chance to work in her journal in a hand so tiny and tight if she could not have got the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, she could have got, at least, the most important parts.
He liked how his eyes would find her fast through the clots of local softball teams and bowling leagues in their post-game reveries or regrets. Clusters of young families at a latish burger and fries before going home to watch the videos they rented, after some discussion, together
By now in every bar on the street, everyone knew what they drank, knew exactly which day of the week it was by where they sat, in which dark booth indiscrete laughing loud, heads thrown back under the neon halos' stridulated afterglows.
Neither could remember whose idea it was to do "Favorite Parts," but both agreed as soon as they started that it was brilliant. Not ever the very first moments but soon after they had settled in to whatever local bar was theirs at the time -- her beer and his bourbon, his Camels and her Old Golds, their ashtray all laid out in the necessary geometry, his seat scooted up so she could see his eyes, hers angled so her hair caught the light off the mirror and gave it back. Then they would begin to say what they particularly liked the best the last time they made love.
Understatement is where they usually began: this or that was 'pretty good,' or 'OK,' or 'better than a sharp stick in your eye'. But eventually their belief in little else but a good story and concrete details won out.
She had yelped or tried not to. He had crooned her name in her ear, or meant to. She had shivered in the way he always wanted a woman to; he made noises she never would have imagined he would, nearly girlish. Once Cream was on the radio and she mentioned she had never had an orgasm to Cream before, then did, and did again. He waited until she was done and said he thought that was probably the real reason the band had broken up.
Maybe his wife drove by the bar just after they got inside or her husband bought the cover she had for being where she was, when, and with whom, again. "What are the odds," they'd laugh knowing they had beaten them, again.
Story was once when they were out of town together at some Friday afternoon Fish Fry in a place -- no kidding -- called 'Joe's,' they nearly got busted by her boss. Story is she donned a paper napkin babushka, he a pocket comb mustache, duked the waitress a twenty and said to her what he later claimed he had been living his whole life to say, "Hey baby, is there a back way out of here?"
Story got to be they fled through the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant next door, out through the crackle of duck fat frying, raised cleavers and Mandarin curses, to the parking lot on the other side of the strip mall and back to the motel they did not leave for the whole next day, nor needed to.
They thought of themselves as lovers in that stark Continental sense, not your standard American variety -- balling behind the bowling alley, diddling in the doughnut shop parking lot. After all she had modeled underwear for a Farm & Fleet catalogue. He had held for field goals on a high school team that nearly made it to State. She was the free-throw champ for Holy Ghost High.
They had their own digs -- an odd sort of time-share apartment with a Lisa Minelli impersonator whose day job was at Starbucks. They had a huge purple scented candle, a cheap boom-box and too many unlabeled tapes to know what they were putting on when they were in a hurry or even when they were not. They made tapes for each other the way that lovers do, a sound track of their longing, absolutely unique in its own generic way.
Ivory Joe Hunter said his baby "could mambo in a telephone booth." Ray Charles had a women "way across town." There was Stella by Starlight, Nancy with the Laughing Face, there were too many Marias and O Carols and Gloria's to count. That's what he thought.
When Joe Cocker sang, "You can leave your hat on," or "She climbed in through the bathroom window," or LaVerne Baker did Jim Dandy to the Rescue, or Tiwedlidum Tiwedlidee, that seemed about right to her.
Many of the tapes were labeled 'FAV" with a number after it, say 1 or 23. One said "Songs About Dancing," his tape for her, during that stage when he wanted her to dance with him but she wouldn't. "Marry me," she'd toss out of the side of her mouth and exhale an Old Gold at the same time. He never knew how cynically and never would until he did.
Other tapes were called something like "Old Timers" or "My Make Out Songs," both hers. So he seduced her to Sinatra; so she said, "You so have to listen to some Bonnie Raitt." He countered with Tom Waits - the middle period, say Nighthawks at the Diner to The Ghosts of Saturday Nights. She nearly finished him off with Etta James, Lucinda Williams and Blossom Dearie.
In their apartment they also had a miniature Superman action-figure with - neither of them could remember why - an unused - they both assumed - Breathe-Right strip strapped around its middle like some bloated cummerbund. Our hero impaled crotch-wise upon a random previously existing nail. And there was an even more Penguinish than one would imagine little wind-up Nun that sparked - Sister Sparky in fact - as it lurched across the cardboard box bedside table covered with some bright cloth.
They had three dozen wash-cloths and two towels, a pen leashed to the cord of a dingy mini-blind. There was a clock that was not theirs with numbers so big they could both see it from across the room even without their glasses on. And the occasional strange condom too, or half bottle of wine they would never drink, a magazine they might perhaps read together but rarely had the time to.
"Parts is parts," they'd say, mimicking an old T.V. commercial but knowing that if this was not an epiphany it was the waiting room to one. "The fish in the sea is not thirsty," he said, quoting Kabir. "Have you ever noticed," she replied, "on 'Gilligan's Island,' some people escape but never send help."
Her grade school science project was on lightning -- Dangerous and Exciting!!! -- his was on hair. Lately they lie in bed and discuss whose stomach was growling. He's had as many wives as she's had lovers.
Neither of them thinks this can go on but knows that it will. Both of them knew but did not talk about how each knew the other was both the worst and the best they needed in their lives right now, the steady hunger for the other, the thirst they shared.
Story was they often had to wait for what felt like forever, sometimes they didn't wait to take off their shoes. To them a phone booth was a grotto, a dark park bench the anteroom to the Cave of Lights or Juliet's tomb. They'd smoke endless cigarettes together or apart. They'd stand side by side with fists in their pockets at the edge of a thin Islamic moon.
Both, they swear to each other repeatedly, would have left respectively their spouses by now if they hadn't found each other.
The next stage, after they were well into it, seemed a natural, "Future Favorite Parts," what they would do and in what order the next time they were together -- a script, a menu, it wasn't a promise exactly -- they were way beyond that -- more just like the way you think you'll wake up every morning, how you expect a day will be because if you're small and very lucky it usually is.
Bruce Taylor's poetry, fiction and translations have appeared in such places as Carve ,The Chicago Review, The Exquisite Corpse, Light, The Nation, Nerve, The New York Quarterly, Poetry, the Vestal Review and E2ink-1: the Best of the Online Journals 2002. His current project is a short fiction series called
"Story Is" of which this selection is a part.