Flame Angels

by Robert Wintner

  Ravid’s pattern of quickly falling and then regretting his love’s departure had earned him the nickname “Avid Ravid,” which made no sense if you pronounced his name correctly, which the clever fellows never would, but who cared anyway? Still, he could not disguise the mourning after. Avid Ravid stuck like a nickname can, because it was polite and harmless and accurately profiled his vulnerability. For better or worse, it underscored the pattern, and newly arrived women took heed of the name, inferring that Ravid was avidly loving, which he was. Are you kidding? With a body like that? And those Speedos? So the seven-day cycle would often begin anew.

  Ravid Rockulz nevertheless had lived outside the realm of most dive crews, as neither a womaner nor a womanizer. He’d spent most evenings alone, reading a photography book or learning a new piece of equipment or software, or working his images. Occasionally he watched a movie or went to a bar for the single reason a bar should be visited, which was beer, retail in a social setting. His singular approach appealed immensely to the women who took note, as it had to Minna Somayan. Ravid regarded these women as deep water people cruising in schools to better maintain the game spirit, out for some fun. Everyone was free to engage as necessary in the spawning ritual — just as Minna had done. So what was to ponder or wonder or scrutinize?

  He’d found life amusing, even if some days required a dash more imagination. What life didn’t? He hadn’t pined away for a woman to steal his heart but stayed busy, filling his time productively, keeping the learning curve steep in the bold new dimension, digital. With a beginner’s mind, he went along with new technology just as he would go along with any prevailing current. He waited for something to change, to make his passion more accessible — and look what came along. No more film expense, no more hesitation on hundreds of shots.

  In enviable context the hot and cold social flow changed from tedious repetition to glittering romance. Gone was the morning wake up, looking over to see a very nice woman sleeping sweetly and thinking yes, pussy is a convenient thing to have nearby. Should I make breakfast?

  Now I shoot digital, he thought, waking up alone, looking over at the empty pillow beside him and wondering what she could be doing, eating, thinking, smelling, hearing, doubting or loving right now this moment. What the hell was going on here?

  Only a fool does good works for commensurate return; good works are their own return, fulfilling the practitioner with unique warmth and well being, if he’s good. Any other return is gravy, which was not to call Minna Somayan a lucky bonus on a life well lived but rather a precisely fitting puzzle part in the many-layered scheme of things. Ravid loved the Hawaiian culture, its reverence for and unity with the elements, stemming from the ahupua‘a system, whereby the king granted land according to skill and need. So fishermen got coastal land, farmers the rich hillsides upcountry.

  Sure, modern times and big development with heavy traffic and population had put people on edge. Gridlock, overcrowding and high prices caused many local boys to bandy epithets like “fucking haole,” meaning “white” in modern terms but technically meaning anyone from somewhere else, making the Hawaiians themselves the original haoles and making the Japanese sugar workers more-recent haoles, though they never called themselves fucking haoles, even back in sugarcane days when they had no birthright.

  Well, everyone here came from somewhere else, though some cultural groups don’t want to talk about that. They do want recognition as the best navigators and fisherman the world has seen, guided by the constellations, even as the stars slid across the sky. The first kanaka o’ kekai navigated by water temperature he could feel by hand. He navigated by current, by wave action and by watching the dog in the bow, who could smell land. Hey, you can’t be known for open ocean navigation by sheer wits to get here and call yourself native too, but Ravid begrudged them nothing.

  As for mean-spirited boys, they could be found anywhere in the world, of any descent.

  Beyond history and its current interpretation, the Huna way remained stable, predating the golden rule. Firstness might have counted for very little, but Huna reflected a wisdom of the ages with its golden precept of aloha, the practice of taking care of each other, of the ‘aina, or land, of the ebb and flow of resources in their seasons. And regardless of what spirit was lost in the angry boys, the Buddha spirit survived them.

  The scent of flowers had preceded the woman Minna. She had come his way with smiling eyes to care for him as he would care for her, which felt karmic and eternal. If this was love, he hated and loved it. How could anyone feel so bound to another person and enjoy it?

  The important point was that a man aware of his effect on women had the confidence to answer the tough question when one such as Minna Somayan came along: Why me?

  The answer seemed just as concise: Why not? She was obviously, amazingly beautiful. He wasn’t bad looking and had better manners than most, so that was the answer to the question. They’d met by chance. Yes, she’d taken the initiative, but that seemed natural too, since anything he could have said would have sounded like a line, one of the thousands she must have heard before. And besides, she was good at taking initiative, at applying what she called her “regal presence.” It made things okay. It made things good.

  So why am I thinking about this?

  Because she didn’t say where her family lives or how long she would be gone or what earthly reason she could have for not taking me along — me, the husband in this story of marriage.

  This isn’t jealousy, because I don’t suffer from that.

  Or at least he never had in his liaisons over the years, on many occasions of heartfelt contact and sexual service with the loveliest women he’d known.

  Oh, yeah, and I was trying to think of what hole to try next, which is stupid, because you can’t come up with a new hole just by thinking.

  Some of those women had boyfriends at home; some had husbands, and some children. A few had grown children, and some had grandchildren, though that hardly excluded them from the lovely column. All went home by the weekend, back to their real lives, leaving the dive guy behind — or rather taking him home too, vicariously, a beautiful man starring in a tropical fantasy.

  He hadn’t wanted the part, and so took it sparingly, relative to the offering at any rate. He took it with sanguine forethought for the consequences of the aftermath. He regretted the paucity of women in the tropics who served beyond the service trades. Not that he didn’t count several maids and waitresses among his close friends. He did. More important here, however, were his choices and habits that fairly proved him free of jealousy.

  This wasn’t that. This was love. He wanted to know everything about her right now. For example, he wanted to know about her past with men and boys, intimately speaking, though not down to macro, with the sordid details, deep penetration and possible perversion, and certainly not about alfalfa sprouts. He just wanted to know her more generally, which wasn’t jealousy but curiosity. Surely she’d had boyfriends, and surely all the pleasures she’d shown him had been shown to others before him. You don’t get those skills out of nowhere.

  Yes, the imagery of her with another brought its moments of doubt and pain, but that too was free of jealousy. He was further spared that most rancorous of emotions by her apparent evolution, spiritually and culturally. So she’d engaged physically with another human. So what? Given her status and ranking among women, would not this other man, or men, reflect equal development of character? Ravid thought he would. Or they would. Or did. His base curiosity was based on concern for her welfare. Did some other hard-driving dick fail to sustain the gentle, loving touch? That didn’t seem likely, given the elevated plane of her former boyfriends. But he wanted to know. That was all it was — not a preoccupation on another dick going in and out.

  Hey, let it go.

  Yeah, fine, but this still didn’t add up. This was supposed to be more than a fling, more than a romp on the other side of the world, anonymous and noncommittal. They all went home by the weekend
. Knowing nothing of in-laws and family diplomacy, Ravid sensed something he hadn’t yet considered.

  Family complexity and images of former boyfriends were tough. But everyone who ever got married deals with a transitional period. Sure, it usually takes longer than a few days, but should she not view his place as home? Sure, it was a ramshackle rental. But shouldn’t a place be incidental to the players, just as marriage is a formality following love? Well, in time these things would sort themselves...

  Or not. And just as a sailor should avoid whistling or hoping for wind, so should a lovelorn man avoid the yen to know everything.

  Why?

  Because he might find out.

  No

  Minna Somayan returned on the fourth day following her departure. She knocked on the door soon after he’d returned from the day’s work, perfectly timed to allow him a shower and a beer and few minutes of relaxation. The knock was strange, as if to allow him time to shoo the strange woman under the bed or out the window. Who would knock at her own front door?

  The answer did not fit the question but transcended all questions. Like sunrise at quitting time, she filled the room and his heart on entering, effusing joy and love with a kiss, a gentle touching of lips. “Hi, you,” she said.

  He’d rehearsed his response so she could fill in the nagging blanks — but rehearsal and Ravid verily melted, his happiness palpable between them, his eyes feasting yet again on his great good luck. With two sets of hands floating like butterflies in a garden, in which buttons are flowers, they cross-pollinated, opening, discarding, breathing steadily as a healthy young woman and a dive instructor can do, faced with daunting aerobic stimulation. Naked and standing, he lay her onto the bed, where they merely touched in exquisite anticipation, like travelers at the gates of Kingdom Come.

  Moving slower than any old boyfriend ever could, he feasted his eyes and senses. She returned the electricity with equal fervor. He resisted, sensing that life would never be so promising as at that moment. He twitched against the voltage, prolonging the sweet agony till the stellar bodies and ocean tides could wait no more. Then, in the moment of his choosing, the world would be his. Why would a man so wealthy need to rush?

  So he gazed upon her and the moment waiting to be claimed, in the spirit of love and triumph.

  He didn’t mean to ask where she’d been. He meant to bemoan his days and nights without her, his distracted thoughts and, oh, his tarnished image on board due to errors caused by this...this love that knew no bounds, and so on and so forth — but it came out wrong. “Where were you?” It sounded like jealousy, like an accusation that she’d been in the wrong place.

  “Oh, God! You’re not jealous?”

  “No. I don’t get jealous.”

  “What? You don’t get jealous?”

  He shrugged to indicate simple curiosity in the emotional gamut of a man and wife reunited in questions of vague urgency. She’d slipped the most heinous human emotion in there to make his denial of jealousy stand out, as they spoke of love and his mundane schedule. The delay in physical contact went from exquisite to strained, but it felt necessary, so they could resolve the uncertainty, so the games could properly begin. He rolled onto his back and stared up. She lay beside him. “No. I’ve never been jealous,” he said. “That is a good thing, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. It’s the greatest...” She moved apart and away from him to sit up into a slumped posture on the edge of the bed. Then in a monotone meant to be free of emotion, or spent of emotion, she gave him the news:

  She’d been home.

  That was it.

  She’d stayed at her parents’ place. She’d explained things to them. They wished the newlyweds well and hoped for a long and prosperous life.

  The End.

  Except that a man so seasoned at depth doesn’t need to see a thing to feel its presence in the periphery. He sat up too. She said that she also used the time to recover from an episode of...well, female things, if he must know, things of a personal nature.

  If he must know? Oh, how little he knew. Since when did a woman go to her parents’ house to explain that she’d married a guy who hadn’t come along to meet them? Why would she need to leave for her parents’ house to wait out her period, if that’s what it was? He stood up. He took one step to the window. He looked back, squinting at her snatch to check for lingering clues. He laughed — at himself, though this too was not funny. He looked down at the old ramrod, rarely so rudely left all alone for so many days, so left out in the cold, as it were. But who said her female problem was a period, anyway? Maybe she has...

  And, he might as well know, she made productive use of her time by getting rid of the asshole responsible for, well, let’s just say a major part of her problems. Or trying to get rid of him at any rate, though the incredible jerk had this sick notion that she was his property and would remain so till he was good and goddamn ready to send her on her way, and anybody who thought they could take what was his would be in for a bumpy ride on a very rough road.

  Getting rid of the asshole?

  She laughed, “What a jerk. You would not believe this guy. He can’t even talk. He says, ‘You like die?’ Unbelievable. Like I’m going to hang with that lowlife forever. Like it doesn’t even matter that I’m married now. Hell-oh-oh...” She turned to him, attempting the cute, pixie-like persona of their laughing, happier times. She failed on a quiver.

  Frankly embarrassed that the woman of his dreams actually reached for his thumper within the same minute of disclosing what must have been a former thumper, Ravid shivered in awkward synchronicity. His skin contracted in the sudden cold wash of ugly realization. Goose bumps rose like a samurai army from cover in the underbrush, or as Minna Somayan playfully cried out, “Hey, look at you, with the chicken skin!” She laughed again, a small, forced laugh meant to salvage the difficult moment, playfully stroking the other little samurai.

  “He’s...what? Your boyfriend?”

  “Was. Fourteen years. But it’s over. It was a mistake. Hey. I’m twenty-six years old. Okay? This guy, he takes advantage when I’m only twelve. Yeah, I went along. I was mature for my age. But fourteen years? Enough already. One time, I fuck him. One. It wasn’t so terrible. The other times were nothing. It doesn’t work with him. He thinks he owns me. One abortion I get for him. Enough! I went give up my baby for adoption. My baby. Not his. Never his. But the baby never get born, because I miscarry. His fault. Because he too rough is why. I get out because I want something else, something new. That’s why. I want you.”

  “You mean he didn’t know about me, so you had to go home to tell him we’re married?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean. I tell him every time. I mean, not married every time. You the only one so far, married and all. Still every time he get all huff and puff, want to blow away whodaguy.”

  “Whodaguy?”

  “Yeah. This time, you da guy. Hey. No worries. He been saying that for years.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t. I told you. I used to. You never have one girlfriend?”

  “Why are you talking differently?”

  “Psh. Because. I been around that guy. That’s why — hey. He been taking steroids?” She meant the thick-necked, muscle-bound bully in her hand, which she coddled and coaxed to give testimony one more time in the face of rigorous cross-examination.

  “So what? He wants to...make trouble?”

  “He won’t do nothing. He’s my cousin, Darryl. My uncle would kill him. My mother too. You know I always looked up to him, in school and whatnot, but I got so sick of him. He’s crazy. I been done with him since high school. Eight years already. Besides, we married already!”

  “He wants to shoot me?”

  “All talk. Listen. You the one. You different, Ravid. I love you. I want you. I want you to be strong. Look at you.” Taking the rigid tube in her mouth, she encouraged him briefly but expertly, removing him to underscore her case. “Look at you
. You are strong. Look how strong you are.”

  She’d proven her ability to speak Standard English with a subject and verb for each sentence. She’d displayed grammar, syntax, diction and enunciation, language skills that could be taken for granted. Yet here she dipped deeper — or rather, receded further — into pidgin security. It seemed like shelter from the real world, the world of outsiders relentlessly reaching to take something away. Pidgin security was meant to defend against those who could not penetrate the mystery and meaning of this jumbled slang, though anyone around it for any time at all could see that there was no mystery and hardly any meaning. Pidgin communicated common experience and agreement on da kine. He wanted her back in the world of communication, so he asked, “Can you please stop talking like that?”

  She laughed, and in a caricature voice of the pridefully ignorant said, “Ah dunno.”

  He had no response — wanted one, but didn’t know what to say to this other woman recently arrived with a reminder that marriage is forever. She saw his dilemma and knew exactly how to take them both back to former, lovely times.

  So she sat up straight and grasped his thighs, as if the dialogue would now bear reasonable meaning between her and the only thumper that counted. Reaching behind him to grasp his backside she pulled him near for a most personal hug, taking the key witness of their love through the oath, that the testimony he was about to give would be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, she glanced up — alas — to see a judge in doubt, his forehead as wrinkled as any old man’s.

  Staring down on an object of scorn and wonder, Ravid squinted and finally spoke. “You tell him every time?”

  Alas and alas, counsel for the defense could not fool the jury. Yet her guilty plea was more touching with a soft, sweet embrace that appealed for mercy and more, her regal head movement leaving no doubt in a lonely man’s mind that this was a terrific blowjob, and that the taste of alfalfa sprouts was surely as familiar as coffee and toast.