Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Soulmate Aug 2003


On a walk through Central Park, on a rainy afternoon, I had asked my closest friend whether he felt that the woman that he had been married to for the past twenty years was his soul mate.

At six-thirty the next morning I received a phone call. I picked up the receiver and listened to the plaintive voice of his wife. She was sixty and had gone off the hormones that had kept her flush free for the past seven years. …


……………..

I looked at her, soundly sleeping, hair plastered against her sweated forehead; even in sleep drops of perspiration could be seen on her cheek. She was sixty and had gone off the hormones that had kept her flush free for the past seven years.



He was his own weather system, now in storm cycle, and no, it wasn’t that romantic distant thunder that brings lovers together, but rather it was the startling, fearsome crack right overhead, the flash of it simultaneous with its sound, evidence of its dangerous closeness, and blinding, a cleansing smell of ozone wafting through the brilliantly lit trees, eidetic, drenched and gleaming, then disappearing back to black in the threatening darkness.



He beat her mercilessly, with the alcohol fueled fury of a man too short and too fat, and too slow for his lean and hungry ambition. She loved him anyway, craved him for it, as most women love the men who beat them.


“Uncertainty,” Robert Musil said, “is sometimes nothing more than mistrust of the usual certainties.”
Here's what I want to say about him:

He beat her mercilessly, with the alcohol fueled fury of a man too short for his ambition. She loved him anyway, craved him for it, as most women love the men who beat them.