Flame Angels

by Robert Wintner

  Nah...

  That wasn’t it. That movie was dumb. That guy had no love in his heart for the snatch or the money. I just don’t have the money. What that guy needed was a rough cottage with some dense scrub on the beach and a ratty couch and a TV and some decent snacks in the fridge. Some brewskies and buds. That’s all. And a few friends instead of the money-grubbing parasites that guy had all around him.

  And don’t get started on the lust and love confusion, either — everyone in Ravid Rockulz’s water world was clear that it was all love and got lusty because of it. Your very best love was a function of lust, and vice versa. One set up the other, and the other confirmed the one. Sure, things got melodramatically comical on the coconut wireless, reporting by brunch on who was doing whom, with regrets or congrats at last. Sure the goings and comings and not-so-secret liaisons were often deemed script material. As the Anchor Drags was the neighborhood soap opera, and it was funny, but it was love too, mostly.

  Sure, the one and only true love anybody actually witnessed in the guy, Ravid, was for the orange cat, Skinny, which some women on the way out called misguided, misplaced, unfortunate or somehow wrong, which is what they used to say about all the cute, smart, sensitive guys being gay. But Ravid wasn’t gay, and the women criticizing his interspecies relationship didn’t know about the forms love can take, didn’t know Skinny the cat, not really, nor would they.

  Skinny came as a tiny pup — she so behaved like a dog — sitting on the threshold, an orange fuzz ball with eyes in the center and whiskers longer than her body, till she stood up, painfully thin. She meowed for yesterday’s sashimi, and a few minutes later, with her belly bulging, she found the warm spot for a nap on the feeder’s chest. He called her Itchy for a few days but then sensed the long-term effects a name can have on a personality — not to mention the social consequences. A flea bath followed by a brushing got the itch out, so she graduated to Skinny. She gained weight, but the name stuck in tribute to her simple needs.

  She followed him around the place, then chose her favorite vantage points from which to watch him, which felt like the first steps in their developing love. A few feedings offered her hope for more but provided no guarantee, so she watched him, as if to enhance her prospects. A cat so bereft of personal care by a loved one may reach, as many people do, for what’s been missing. She slept beside him with her head on the pillow, sometimes reaching over to rest one small paw on his shoulder. Naturally, she made an impression, though when he pressed her for more specifics on where they stood, she replied with indifference, her feline coyness making the pillow and paw seem simply convenient. As patterns became routine, she purred often, satisfied with life at last. If he opened his eyes, she would calmly say in her youthful, matter-of-fact voice, “Meow.”

  In his less chipper, not-so-youthful voice, Ravid would moan, realizing that any available peace of mind there on the pillow would be hers. She woke him up, indifferent to his needs, oblivious to the morning just three hours ahead. Maybe that was her gift, sharing what she felt, offering it for him with no reservation. Ravid felt no need to convince anyone of anything, except to assure himself, as necessary, that a little cat named Skinny could serve quite well as a guy’s best friend in the whole wide world. She spoke cat and more — she was a sounding board, offering guidance and comfort. So maybe a thing called love did begin with practicality, with needs met and time left over for leisurely communion and deepening familiarity. Maybe, even, it could be no purer than this.

  Some years later, once Skinny was grown, a woman came home with Ravid to engage in the physical romp most people fantasize about or seek out on the Internet. To say that Skinny liked to watch would have missed the cat’s true focus, which was Ravid no matter what he did. The woman represented a milestone in Ravid’s personal history of women. For starters came her striking good looks and amazing similarity to Annie Lennox, like, you know, on the Medusa CD but with the white hair.

  Call it synchronicity — the word and concept coined by Carl Jung and heavily adopted by the ethereal set — or sheer dumb luck, but Ravid had that day splurged on a disc by Annie Lennox. So similar was this new woman, with her ivory crew cut, her sleek body of astounding length and shape, that Ravid called her “Annie,” which seemed okay with the woman. Ravid had never met Annie Lennox but loved her — okay, he loved her for her music, but who could separate the woman’s music from the womanly vibration?

  So he closed his eyes during the sweet exchange, with Annie Lennox pouring warm honey in his ears in perfect cadence with the woman conjoined, whose name was Carol or Stacy or Janet or something but who got the connection and didn’t mind being called Annie. Didn’t mind? She loved it, wrapping herself around this sweet anonymity and Ravid in admiration. This must be, Ravid thought, what they mean by a win/win situation, so well could one Annie follow a lead and writhe in grace, while the other Annie crooned as only she could.

  All a fellow had to do was bring down the eyelid movie screens, and who do you think showed up, svelte, lithe and dykey blonde? Yeah, well, with such a lyric and score in the background, this engagement of new Annie maintained the same high standards in the foreground. Just for fun, he could open his eyes on the refrain for a virtual reality as juicy and sweet as a fantasy ever was. New Annie’s hair seemed spikier and a tad more severe than Annie Lennox’s but failed to dilute her femininity. If anything, the marine buzz cut only highlighted her gifts, a feat few women could achieve like new Annie, with her amazing posture and Cadillac-bumper tits — naturals! I think.

  Wait a minute. Was Annie Lennox lesbian? Well, whatever. She’s so lovable; I can swing that way too.

  Meanwhile, new Annie’s striking good looks were only par for the course; which wasn’t to say Ravid was lookist, fatist or sexist in any way. It was simply that new Annie was beautiful, which wasn’t to say merely beautiful but rather that she lacked that certain elusive kink captured so perfectly by Annie Lennox. Who ever looked at Annie Lennox and didn’t want more?

  Hey, not to worry: Things worked out with a dollop of imagination, and don’t forget the fun. With new Annie coming in merely average on her standout beauty and then surpassing the teeming refuse yearning to be free with her smarts, the volley was crisp and accurate. Quick as a whip with the sassy quip on anyone or any subject, she shrewdly avoided cracking her wit at Ravid, who tingled at this amazing skill in a woman of such dexterity and grace.

  So she wasn’t Annie Lennox. We’ll make do.

  They could still engage in a free exchange of hormones and intellect so thorough that a waterman could feel, in a word, inexperienced. It was new Annie coming home with Ravid, and she put him in the catbird seat, making good fun of everything and everyone else with incisive irony between bouts of sweet succor, each cycle rejuvenating its alternate in an intellectual and physical whirlwind.

  The vigor new Annie brought to the table and the bed felt like an awakening. Like a cool breeze in July, she alerted the senses with her chilling repartee and willingness to please. Who was this woman? Did the gods send her to taunt and tease, to show perfection that no man could ever possess? Better yet, she reigned in her indomitable wit in deference to her date. Nobody wants a love based on competitive wit, just as nobody wants to be ridiculed — as Ravid once was by a woman who called him a macho pervert, a sex machine who wore his spray-on swim skivvies like a billboard.

  He did no such thing. He preferred a basic nylon swimsuit, so that’s what he wore. The rude woman who’d made that accusation, like her rude predecessors, was on the way out. So it didn’t matter, though it always felt better to send them off satisfied, like in customer service, kind of.

  But new Annie was different. New Annie lived above that petty stuff, scoring at will in every category, till the toughest macho nut could feel his shell cracking. She caught him staring within minutes of her arrival and asked for his thoughts. With a wink and a nod at her extraordinary hair, so short, so dazzling, so erotic, he asked if the carpet matched the drapes. S
ardonically dominant in her most vivacious urban leer, she gave him the news: “This is the nineties, baby. There ain’t no carpet.”

  Ravid laughed short — or was that a gasp? — processing the nuance; the nineties ended years ago. Did no carpet suggest that they were down to hardwood? But he didn’t sort her odd humor for long before she discarded her only two pieces of clothing and encouraged him to follow suit. The farmer’s market never had produce so fresh and abundant.

  Love germinated only a few days in, sprouting and bursting forth. And it could have been love forever and ever, even with hormonal depletion finally settling in, which took longer than usual, which indicated something else, something more, something beyond. The music was so good and the likeness so striking, he just wanted more. And so did she.

  Yes, he had concerns that grew more numerous as his heart opened to her. Suffice it to say that his growing list of questions mostly involved practicality. He assumed she would move to Maui, because it was so much warmer, sunnier, drier and more fun than Portland. He then assumed she would move in to his place, or maybe they would get a new place, and she would find a job, so their new place could be a regular place, one of the rental condos with a communal barbecue pit and a swimming pool. Then again, she did love Ravid’s place and said as much many times, so maybe they could fix it up and make it work. Wait — maybe she could just send for her things. Why not?

  Well, she laughed again with the old sardonic dominance, though this laugh quivered on a note of trepidation. “The main reason why not, buddy boy, is that I don’t think the old hubby boy would send them. You know, my things. Hey, grow up. Be a man...” And so on, to the extent summarily that you can’t have it any better than with a married woman. Talk about no baggage: slam, bam, this was terrific. You were terrific. Love your place. Your cat! Ah! Hey, see you on the corner next year, maybe, baby.

  Ravid wasn’t finished, but she was. Her sudden revelation and departure felt like a delivery of true meaning — via Mack truck through the front wall and into the living room and onto his chest with an offload of monumental heartbreak, proving that it had been love. He’d been used, as he’d been used many times and as he’d used women many times. Many times the sexual utility had been shared, in the mutual back scratch meant to achieve relief. But this was different. Yes, some of the women said they loved him, but they were lonely women infatuated with the tropical scene — with the palm trees and heavily scented flowers, the garish colors, the cat, the beach shack and, yes, the Speedos. But the thing with Annie was no scene. It was real. Wasn’t it?

  Inconsolable, Ravid’s heartbreak rendered him sexually numb for weeks. The usual cavalcade was even more intrigued by the zero-body-fat guy with the incredible frontage and indifference to the luscious buffet before him. They made themselves available but could not compare to Annie. They seemed predictable, demanding and tiresome.

  But time and nature heal. They work together toward the recovery of needs, so life can endure. Ravid’s needs returned in easy repartee with Marcia from San Francisco. Marcia was smart, not streetwise and ironic like Annie, but comforting; Marcia knew everything and was there to help. Helping others was her profession: clinical psychologist. Besides success in life with skills and professional know-how, Marcia had a unique worldview. She understood events and the competing potentials of goodness and evil. She sensed nuance in conservation politics and the insidious overlay of evangelical greed therein. She sensed “disturbing” contradiction in the gay agenda, yet she defended anyone’s right to do anything that didn’t harm anything else. What she didn’t like was “disturbing.” What she approved was “appropriate.” The San Francisco Forty-Niners could be disturbing but were mostly appropriate. But she looked good and seemed game for adventure, with warmth and humor that made the smallest task or outing a grand opportunity for fun. Marcia’s sartorial flourish seemed a tad extravagant for Ravid’s social circle, but he didn’t mind. In fact, she seemed to be what the doctor ordered. She cured his malaise with her elegant designer sundresses, her lapis and pearls, her frilly lingerie, so exotic that it didn’t exist in key dramatic areas. He loved looking at it, especially where it wasn’t; it so perfectly matted and framed her most exotic samplers. He loved removing it. Besides that, her seasoned slowness facilitated each favor with the meticulous deliberation of an older woman. Marcia was forty-five — and counting.

  Marcia also broke the ice with a flourish. Her vigor and enthusiasm in sexual exchange suggested years of practice in the field. Ravid used condoms religiously at the beginning of their romance but still suffered the angst of anyone with a game date from San Francisco. She assured that he needn’t worry; she hadn’t been with a man for at least seven years, longer than the gestation period of the dreaded disease. And no, she’d never been with a man who’d been with a man. He asked how she could be so certain. She said that a woman knows a few things and should be given credit. He asked how she knew who he’d been with, and if he’d always been safe. She said she did know because she could tell, and because she trusted him to tell her the truth. He thought she sounded screwy.

  But she looked fresh as a catalogue offering, so perfectly preened and buffed, with nary a dimple or hair out of place, no creases or folds interfering with the generous offering. Forty-five? Seven years without?

  She made no sense, really, but with concise enunciation and eloquent syntax she could speak around an issue, any issue, like it was jam on toast instead of a deadly virus. So he’d diddled her most personal self for a minute or two and then reached with his tongue for something or other through her crotch for eight or nine more minutes then went ahead bareback. Hey, San Francisco. A clinical psychologist. Who better to know the odds and safe bets?

  She later told him that her vision quest included experiential data — her phrase. Marcia needed to test something for herself.

  To wit: Her latest dilemma was in the parental/friendship interface with her daughter. She wouldn’t say her daughter’s age, assuming that her date didn’t care because age should not be important. Her daughter was post-pubescent at any rate, as the tale would tell. Marcia’s challenge was a study in patience, in which daughter came to Mummy, asking innocently as only a little lass can — “Mummy, I really liked my last three boyfriends, Darius, Martin and Francis. They weren’t really my boyfriends, because I didn’t want them to think I was loose, so I wouldn’t let any of them...you know. They stopped calling. That’s what they do. So I let Pierre do anything he wants. I do whatever he asks me to do. I thought it was disgusting at first. Now I’m used to it, but I still think it’s weird. Eww. He says he’s in love, but I don’t want to go out with him anymore. Am I doing this wrong?”

  Well, the mixed emotion and constrained reaction began with, No, dear, you aren’t doing anything wrong, but that doesn’t mean you should... What I mean is, you can’t... You can’t...

  Ravid waited for the moral of the story, which wasn’t as obvious as met the eye. The moral was that the daughter had let go and experimented in a way the mother called very unwise, even as she, the mother, measured her daughter’s experience relative to love as greater than her own. “Frankly, I had sexual intercourse with a fellow I hardly knew and got preggers with Samantha. It was rather clinical and went nowhere, really, except of course for making her, meaning Samantha. But frankly, I’ve held back.”

  The bigger question seemed evident: Had Mummy been going about things wrong? Frustrated and lonely as a heterosexual woman in San Francisco can be, Marcia had resisted the temptation to gobble up any straight, clean, well-educated and socially adjusted man she met. She’d met a few, but they were so predictably pithy and urbane — and soft, like city men. She didn’t so much doubt her judgment but decided to wait for the right man to come along. And wait and wait — not to say that her standards were too high, but they were different. She realized on seeing Ravid at work and play that he had a love affair with life going on, that he would be the perfect replacement for Dirk. She’d named her dildo D
irk and praised him, Dirk, for selfless giving, sparing them both from many evenings of solitude.

  Ravid seemed perfect for the grand experiment, in which a real man would be granted the same free license only Dirk had enjoyed, to see if such openness could bond them as one. Scratching the big itch would be easy, if she could establish intimacy with another person. Is that unreasonable? No, but she was bound for glory, based on the highest levels of intimacy, including spiritual and emotional levels beside the physical. She shuddered on confiding that she thought this could be “it.” She assured him that with guidance he could be so much more than the rippled dive guy in the spray-painted-on Speedos. She said the cavalry was on the way, meaning herself in the rescue role, because nobody should have to go through life as a sex object. Not to worry; they had their best years remaining.

  Willing to bet her credentials as a clinical psychologist with twenty-three years’ experience, she pegged Ravid for sensitivity. She was only woman, so Speedo-tinted glasses may have influenced her vision of his inner glow. Not to worry once more — he could unleash the love her life had been without.

  Ravid did the math — he was sixteen when she started her professional career. But her psychosexual approach felt skewed. For being so naturally gifted at sperm extraction, she seemed woefully wrong on the derivation of meaning as it related to her life. Referencing her life as an entity separate from herself, she enumerated what her life had going for it and against it. She longed to find what her life was lacking. He felt her life engulf him as it had her, like a net.