The Old Flame

1

As I lay in Tom Levin’s bed, enjoying the sweet fragrance of his sheets and their coffee coloured silky, crispness I suddenly realised that there was a dreadful obstacle between us.   

I had felt so comfortable in the bed that I’d forgotten there was a problem, for I had been tingling with an ecstasy of expectation.  Except for a pair of baby blue pants, I was bare and I waited for him to climb into bed beside me, dwelling on the idea of lying close to his soft skin, each nerve ending warmed by his warmth, but as I waited for him, it slowly dawned on me, the awful realisation. 

Because of the excitement of our date, I’d not thought about the problem.  It was a Saturday night and it had all been unexpected, the sudden invitation to his house.

“Shall we take a taxi to my house?” he had asked, softly.  It was last orders, eleven o’clock. The bar had emptied. “Do you want to come back?” he asked me, rather subdued sounding. I wondered why he seemed so moody about it.

“Back to yours?” I asked, in surprise. He was waiting for me to answer his question about the cab to his house.  “Alright” I nodded.

We found a black cab on Shaftesbury Avenue, which seemed to laugh all the way to his house and in his building I climbed the stairs I’d not climbed for over nearly two years. There was still the same old carpet of a shared stairwell. The flat was cluttered with old machines and pieces of unfinished sculptures. He appeared from the kitchen with a half bottle of white wine. I sipped at mine, thirstily and sat down on his red shiny sofa.

Then he came to sit with me at the other side of the sofa.  We sipped the wine, and after a while he laid his leg on the sofa, so that his socked foot was near me. I could see this hole in his sock, just at the toe. It was such soft skin in the hole, so baby soft. My toe had hard skin and had gone like pumice stone and so out of affection and wonder for its softness, I put my finger in the hole and stroked the top of the toe. I stroked it with all this courage, afraid of how I might feel if he should  ‘rebuff’ me away. It felt smooth and pink and I smiled at him.

All at once he said with a lower voice:

“Do you want to go to bed?”  I simply nodded and got up to go to his bedroom, like a willing servant. I dropped all my clothes on the floor except for the baby blue pants and got under the cool icing sugar duvet, smelling him again. His duvet was crisp and cream. Under it I could see the yellow gloom below. I liked the smell of his bed again. I hid under it in the dark, prodded by the springs of his bed and I heard the murmurs of the radio and I pulled his duvet over me - blancmange and creamy, noticing a little hole a cigarette hole and wondering if he fell asleep in bed smoking and hoped he took care and didn’t let a fire start. I hoped he’d give up smoking but he said he couldn’t and said he preferred cigarettes to people.

He undressed somewhere in the darkness of the room and as I waited, lying in his bed, still and quiet, hearing the rustle of his clothes falling to the floor, I felt my nerves jingle.  But then I realised that I was totally trapped and that I could go no further than this. 

I had discovered the problem only recently while having a bath.  One evening, because I had no lover’s hands to caress me, I decided to have a bath and be caressed by the warm hands of water instead.  I undressed. One’s body should be treated like a shrine: well clothed, washed and fed. My shrine, the only shrine I had was my body and was loved by the earth.  I told myself it was loved, even though no man loved it, I told myself not to be scared about being alone, about being forgotten, about having no one.  I decided to have a party in the bathroom, and glorify my body with streams of water and balloons of foam, smoothing the best soap over my skin.

When the taps had rattled the basin to the full and a gentle steam heated the bathroom air, I tingled with delight and I lowered myself into the hot water.  I lay back and closed my eyes. My hands swept over the smooth contours of my ribs and breasts, gently creeping to the secret creeks and crevices of my armpits, my knees and between the wet ravines of my vagina. Yet it was while the fingers explored the region of my vagina that an unfamiliar foreign object protruded stiffly from me. It was like a bullet-sized mound, never there before under the water. 

In alarm I felt a surge of cold fear shoot through me. Domed and powerful the stiff roofed mound protruded like a new power, keen to populate. For a moment I tried to encourage my fingers to go to other places, distracting them but they kept going back to it with a garish fascination. They kept running their tips over its dome obsessively. Suddenly the bath lost all its powers of seduction and I stood upright letting the waterfall off me in shards and shatter like glass around my shins. I no longer felt free and wrapping my towel around me I began to feel anxiety. Cold and trembling I nestled into the heat of my duvet, wishing to be hugged and soothed.

A couple of days later I was lying on my back and the doctor had place both my legs in the air on some stirrups and she was burrowing into my vagina like a beaver.
“Yes,” she murmured, “Yes, yes. It’s a menlanglolia malutria”
“Eh?” I answered, my heart beating in quick panic like a drum beat. She was squeezing it and pulling it.

“Oh, it’s nothing to be afraid of, very common,” she said, touching her hand and making a gesture of a hand movement, “but it will have to be removed,” she added forebodingly, “as it is very contagious. You have to go to a dermatologist” and she made me an appointment for ten days time.

Returning home, the flat was dim, the furniture dull and inhospitable. It felt drab to be alone and I went to the computer to check the emails and found there was an email from Tom Levin.
“It would be nice to meet up this weekend,” he had written. My heart leapt with excitement and I replied at once completely ignoring the presence of the knobble.  I had not expected that we would end up in his bed.  I wanted to tell him about the knobble, but I was frightened that he might just tell me to get out and leave.  I believed that he only wanted me to have sex with and couldn’t believe he loved me. I believed that if he knew about the knobble, he would feel I had wasted his time, and realise I was with him because I loved him, with no intention of sex.

Suddenly Tom Levin joined me under the duvet.  At first our bodies didn’t touch.  I kept a tight hold of my pants, baggy, old pants that I wished I’d not worn, but I had not imagined he would invite me here, and he would see my underwear. If I had known he was going to invite me to his bed, I’d have worn some lacy ones, but instead I had these plain nylon ones.

I’d seen a bit of his penis, spying him while he had taken off everything, except for a black t- shirt and his penis was larger, red and toughened looking, making me feel wet between my legs and really nice, but some real dilemma was happening: though I desired his penis, I knew the knobble might infect him. I had started imagining him speckled with warts and I just couldn’t do that to him. Nor could I reveal something so ugly about myself:

“Do you really love me, warts and all?” (perhaps the saying had come from another woman in my situation long ago)

The wart, with its pink dome, like a Mecca or a church, hoping for a spread of new converted, was lying in the bed with Tom Levin. I realised then that there was in fact three of us: myself, Tom and the wart, and that there was only my blue knickers protecting him from the infectious creature, although it was not a venereal disease, but a normal wart: a lot of people had them, but it was infectious never the less.

He began to try to get the knickers off but every time he tried, I held them on to me. He was trying to unclasp my fingers from the tight hold of my knickers, but I gripped onto them even tighter.  And though I wanted to explain, I felt afraid it would disgust him.  Besides, part of me felt like it was an army medal. In fact the wart was the result of my efforts at loving him, of all that I had gone through so that I could be there with him in that bed.  I felt, right then, that I was a kind of warrior, on the side of love.  Having faced what I feared most: love and sex and all the little sparks of love that light our way on a great way, I had been inflicted with this wart on my brave journey.

2

It had all happened in Paris, my brave journey.  When Tom Levin had not requited my love, nor even telephoned, I had packed up my rucksack and moved to Paris, all alone, with no money and no-one else and though I had not contacted him for over a year, one day something made me write to him. 

Up to that point, nothing had persuaded me to write to him before.  People had urged me to:

“Just send the letter to Tom why don’t you?  What’s stopping you from telling someone you love that you’d like to hear from them?” I looked aback at him in horror at the idea.

“What’s stopping me?” I murmured in disbelief. I could think of lots of reasons for not sending it.  “If he doesn’t return my love I might crumple up and die!” I said.  Every time I considered writing to him, my thoughts began racing: ‘if he didn’t respond it would feel as though the bottom of my world had fallen out’

I would be scared of the loneliness out there, the void of learning that my warm feeling was all sham. I did not think I could survive a rejection and what scared me was that if he did not reply, I might not survive it, for the feeling I’d had for him had given me so much strength and courage that I didn’t want to find out if it was fake.  My paintings would all have to be about sorrow and hate, about despair, about this mean cruel life and its hellish lessons, about being made to love someone and then suffering for loving them. Unrequited love was the hardest thing, especially when the instincts told you it was marriage and they had lied (or perhaps they had told ME it was marriage and not him)

Mary had dipping black brows and hot brown eyes. She told me she was not someone to be fooled by love. I never understood her moods.  I knew that she was sensitive, but I wondered if I’d offended her?

“You have to know,” she said, “if he returns your feelings” she had insisted.  She was such a loyal work colleague, enduring my pining with patience. Mary looked perfectly calm, groomed, with her shaved legs and her painted toenails.  She had black hair, a pretty face with a beauty mark and knew all the French idioms like “casser les pieds” and “bruit dans le couloir” and “poser un lapin” and had bright shining eyes, dark as black coffee, which watched me attentively.

I had told her how my feelings were glowing and warm and I very much wanted my inner world to be ready for them.  It was like a burning asteroid inside me, burning me so hard, it was an impossibility to transmute what had already been transmuted, for he’d smelted me into something else and I would probably have to be smelted into something else by someone else.  It was like Astrophil and Stella, by Philip Sydney.  It was about love and being burnt.  I felt as if life had tricked me, had fed my heart a lethal heroin of love and now I growled for it - spun in it - was locked in it. “It would be a miracle if I got a reply” I told her dreamily.  “It would be the most beautiful thing, as precious as a church, as precious as life - I could love life completely if love answered me now what I wanted to know”

 

After an hour or two of listening to me she had begun to look rather fatigued.

“You don’t want to get obsessive forever, I mean you ought to know whether or not he returns your feelings,” she said with a strained voice. “Your obsession has to stop:  you are going to write a letter and find out if he feels the same way as you” and then she sighed.  I looked at her in horror.  Mary looked back at me without much sympathy.

“It’s too late... I’m too old… oh how could anyone love me now, let alone marry me now?” I said. I did not feel good enough for love. The truth was that I was a maggot-sized caterpillar, compared to the beautiful butterfly of love and I did not think myself good enough for love!  My own hair was mousy and thin.  I was, spotty, over-anxious, had panic attacks, shoes with holes and felt I had nothing of interest to say.  Yet all I wanted was a boyfriend.  There was a despairing gulf inside me and my eyeballs were searching like globes.  A fire burned, desiring some one.

“It is not enough just to like someone, you have to relate to them” said Mary, speaking to me as if I had to lip read.  “At the moment you are treating him like a film star, like a prince.  You are just having a relationship with yourself, your fantasies.  Get real!!!  He’s human, like you or I.  He goes to the toilet!  Get in touch with him.  Tell him how you feel.”

I nodded that I would, but sometimes I told myself I’d be led to him tenderly by fate and didn’t need to do anything, not send any letter!  Sometimes I felt my person floating like a gas, I didn’t know why but sometimes alone I felt closer to the answers.  I seemed to be quite happy getting lost in thoughts.  I didn’t want to find out how he felt in case it brought to an end something I didn’t want to end: a sweet sense of perfect expectation.

When Mary saw me again I explained to her that the letter was now in my desk drawer.  She frowned.

“Why write a letter and not send it?” She was annoyed again.  “You have to post it.  Come on,” she said, with a matronly tone, “get it over and done with,” she said and clapped her hands.

“Did you post the letter?” Mary asked me a few days later.

“Yes,” I said with a well-acted nod.

“Good” she smiled, quietly pleased. “Now you can concentrate on getting a real boyfriend,” I nodded and smiled and from then on I did not dare speak of Tom Levin to Mary.  I did not speak of him again, in case Mary was angry.  Perhaps she noticed my divisive evasiveness and efforts at nonchalance, but she did not say anything. Over the next few days we went to cinemas, we ate moules marinieres, we sat in parks and talked about life, and yet I avoided the subject of love.  I felt like an addict, pretending that they had kicked a habit, and yet knowing, in secret, that they had not.  Tom was like a bulging question mark, ‘Did he like me?’ ‘Did he love me?’ The question still pulsed within

3

I had shown Sofia and Julie my new apartment one Friday evening.  It was on the sixth floor and I proudly led them over to the window to see my new view of Paris. You only had to open the kitchen’s French doors to find a surface of silvery grey roofs and orange chimneys growing for miles from a soil of pale Sandstone. At night the buildings were dark as rusty metal and the sky was thick as cartridge ink.  And the moon had laid sheets of white silk everywhere, over the cobble mosaics where the bleat of mopeds rose from the city.  I would cook omelette on the little cooker plaque, and sit on a stool at the open window watching the moon, its big white face, my only companion.

Julie described my flat as “mignon” which means sweet, politely small, but very sweet, for a single person, when Sofia suddenly said:

“Tell Julie,” Sofia said, “Tell her why you’re in Paris!” I felt shy suddenly.  Julie was looking at me waiting. “Tell Julie your secret,” Sofia coaxed. She made a begging gesture.  She was smirking and so I smiled back deciding whether it was worth being the butt of their mockery.  “Tell her, go on!”

“Well,” I began, considering it, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the butt of their mockery. Chloe was a journalist, with large, sharp brown eyes and Sofia managed a theatre, with twinkles in hers.

I had really preferred to keep my secret from anyone, my feelings for Tom.  At night I went to sleep just dreaming of him and love. Underneath the duvet it was crimson as the lining of the womb I was first formed in and maybe my blood ran down the springs and coils under the bed, where I had the most heavenly feelings, the most heavenly where the daily feelings could never live up to again. In my mind, I put my lips on his and by kissing him I quietened a groaning woman inside who had longed for him since meeting him. Yet I just had jigsaw pieces of memory of him.  Sometimes I saw his lips (with the tiny birthmark) the wave of his hair, behind his impish ears and the slant of his neck, unique to him.

“Please, please tell her why you’re in Paris,” Sofia repeated.  I frowned, and led them to the bedroom, showing them the French doors in there, which, when they were wide open you got the odd mosquito bite in the morning because you had to lie naked on top of the duvet because otherwise it’s too wet and hot.  The breeze would come in curiously and look around my rooms, which were full of light because I didn’t mind sleeping without curtains closed.  Some people can’t bear to sleep with even a crack of light coming in and pace fanatically over to it to cover it up, but light is not a problem with me.  I like to wake up slowly and half meditate and half ponder getting up. I put the coffee in the machine and take a shower, dash across the flat dripping to get a towel, wondering if anyone had seen me naked across the courtyard. The floor had little hexagonal terracotta tiles painted white and cream walls.

I made little cups of expresso and thought:

‘He was a quick fling and now he thinks nothing of me,’ but when I got to the milk I thought ‘But why did he telephone again? Why?’  My mind was really just a child and silence was the parent.  When it rained in that little Paris flat, it tapped like nails upon the covering if the roof, and, so to feel at home in the kitchen, I lit a little candle because a flame was like a little pet – a  little fish or bird - fluttering.  When you’re alone, it’s good to have something flutter, but it also made me remember my old flame.

“Come on, tell her!” said Sofia.  I looked at them both, paused, blushed before saying,

 “Well, I fell in love,” I confessed and pulled a sort of shameful clown face and went to pour water on my balcony plants, which were speckled with sunlight and I could feel the kind strips of sunset rays lashing warmly against my cheek.

“You fell in love with who?” Julie asked.

“With this man…” and I went quiet.  They were watching me intently and waiting.  They looked at me as if was “from another planet” They looked at me as if I was a kind of experiment.

“Well what was he like?”

 “His chest is small, just a light coating of hair and he has thin arms”

“And… so where is he?” she said,

“Well nothing happened,” I repeated, sadly. I looked down. “The object of my love has not transpired,” I said, sadly.  “I believe he loves me back, it’s just that every meeting we have had is full of misunderstanding”

“Well what proof have you that he loves you back?”

“Well,” I began, “he said I was the sweetest woman,”  They laughed again, throwing back their heads.

“Was that before sex or after?” Julie asked.

 “Actions speak louder than words when it comes to men,” said Sofia. 

“So you don’t think he meant it?”

“He probably did at the time”

“They’ll eat her alive!” Julie replied quickly.

“Who will eat me alive?” I intervened, but Julie just looked at Sofia, and they said nothing, like wise jaded look parents have for naïve and over-optimistic children with dreams. 

“And?” they said, waiting.

 “So who is going to eat me alive?” I asked again.  Julie and Sofia looked at one another and smirked again.

“The Paris men…” Julie answered.  “They are very romantic but they will eat you alive”

“You sound as if the male species here is a group of con merchants” I said, appalled. 

“But don’t be taken in by any Paris men, don’t be taken in by any of them” Then Sofia added. “Love is not enough,” Sofia said, “somehow you have to relate with them”

“You speak of men as if the men here are alligators”

“She’s not far wrong,” said Julie, looking at me.  But I shook my head.  I believed if it was pure love, the pure eternal light of love, then nothing could go wrong.  I was in Paris, in my late twenties, believing in love and looking for men to love.…. 

https://www.amazon.com/Old-Flame-Keziah-Shepherd-ebook/dp/B00EMZM5A2/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1500551309&sr=8-6&keywords=Keziah+Shepherd