Steven Hunley
09-29-2012, 06:06 PM
A Bath
by
Steven Hunley
He looked at this watch. By midnight he'd be in Sacramento, but right now he was at the Lakewood Mall near Long Beach, on a balmy afternoon, questing for a sea-sponge. Who did he think he was anyway, Jacques Cousteau? A bath isn't so special, even when it's disguised as a midnight rendezvous...or is it?
Bed Bath and Beyond was the logical place to find an organic sea-sponge. He’d already secured tea candles, and the foaming bath soap was up to her and the champagne. They wouldn’t allow liquids over three ounces on the jet and he only had over-head luggage. Forget the obstacles. It was an appointment he wasn’t about to miss. To a literary fool in love, Sacramento is California’s Samarra minus the Maugham.
One sponge was the right size to hold in his hand. It seemed stiff but he knew it would soften in warm water and she liked her water steaming-hot. He always took pleasure witnessing tiny rivulets run off her shoulders down her back and stream over the twin curves of her magnificent pear-shaped bottom, and was convinced that particular exotic view was his-- and his exclusively.
“I’m going to spoil her. She has a lady’s sensitivity and sensibilities. It’s time to adore and indulge her at the same time while appealing to her sensuous nature.”
Jet Blue from Long Beach to Sacramento was a short trip. Munching Blue Chips and drinking Coca Cola, writing like mad in a dollar composition book with his Japanese Pilot pen, an hour and ten minutes later he was in her arms at the airport, kissing her an incredible-I-love-ya-like-crazy-kiss under the acrobatic-air-diving rabbit suspended on wires over their heads. They hadn’t lost a grain of passion during the intervening three weeks. On the contrary, they’d gained a bushel.
The kiss was circumspect since they were in public. They valued their privacy.
“I don’t know what to say.”
She was overcome with emotion. He was too, but knew what to say.
He picked her off her feet. She was as light as one of Degas’ pretty ballerinas.
He whispered, “You’re beautiful.”
In twenty minutes they were sliding the magnetized card, opening the treasured motel room. A coffee pot sat on the dresser, and across from that a mirror hung on the opposite wall. Clever naughty executives placed it strategically above the headboards all the way to the ceiling.
TV? Not needed.
Radio? Ignored.
View? They could always see that tomorrow.
The two were determined to provide their own entertainment. They’d reserved a double, one bed for touchy-feely no-holds-barred recreation, and the other for going night-night…if they slept at all. There was a phone, an arm chair, and holy cow, a Gideon bible.
While he tramps the hallways prospecting for ice, she searches for glasses stashed in the bag…along with the rest of the goodies, the space-ship vibrator with protuberances that light up and hum, a fragile pair of raspberry edible panties, Junior Mints for the popcorn, and for occasions when they feel less hungry and more restrictively formal---every silk necktie he owns.
They have two days until a house in the mountains becomes vacant and they make their escape to their Hole in the Wall hideout like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Being outlaws isn’t easy when love’s involved. They changed their minds about meeting two days from now when they realized they couldn’t keep their hands off each other a second longer. Considering they’ve known each other two years things should be going stale, but are heating up instead. Frequent partings and lack of contact made them long even more for each other, with a naked thirst only a Bedouin could understand.
Instead of Boredom leading to Brake Up, their relationship is turning into an extended honeymoon. Oh my goodness! What to do? What to do? Enjoy each other and strike while the flaming love-brand is still hot, that’s what.
Ever since the day they met she seemed so self-sufficient. What she needed was someone who cared for her for a change, give her some time to relax and be pampered, hence the sponge, which he wrapped up in a print of the Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir and bound it with scarlet ribbon. The self-serving bastard was an art student at one point, so he knew artsy paper.
“Here,” he said, tossing it to her as she sat crossed-legged like Princess Scheherazade on the Royal Serta pillow-topped mattress. “You can guess what it is. Wait here until I get back.”
He picked up something, hid it against the opposite side of his body and walked to the bathroom and began to run water. She could hear a lighter clicking and noticed mist glimmering like fine gold dust in the square of light emanating from the bathroom doorway. He came out and turned up the thermostat.
“You might like to put on your white robe.”
It sounded to her as if he’d practiced those words for days. Actually, he’d previewed this moment weeks earlier, each scenario worked out by his fertile imagination in triplicate. In whispers he admitted he was obsessed with her body, her exquisite shape, her petite size, and the softness of her hair. When wet, it was just the right length to hang like a magnificent mop over her shoulders, cascade down her breasts, where virile steam rising serpentine from the tub, would eagerly coax her dark passive curls to reach forth and embrace the forbidden--- sweet candy nipples. Each curve she possessed was recorded by his hungry eyes, and there was always her silky voice to contend with, one he knew instinctively he could listen to forever.
Her intellect fascinated him, and made her all the sexier, if such a thing was possible. They both had a sense of spontaneity and invention. They kidded each other mercilessly but with kindness, growing affectionate in the process, and in time, tolerant and forgiving of each other’s weaknesses.
She was amazed at his interests and progress. When he admitted he was on a spiritual path, she caved in. She imagined that particular celestial trail was to be hers alone until now. Their paths were apart, then parallel, and inching closer day by day. Neither one of them doubted they were bound to intersect in the future. Long past coincidence, their affair was fast becoming Kismet, something huge, something epic, a classic love-song to be played for all times.
Between the two, synchronicity flowed like liquid fate.
She adored his sense of humor, but had to rein it in at times and constantly chided him to, “be more serious!” Even so, it allowed her in-born silliness to grow and blossom, bringing brightness to her dreary and responsibility-filled life. She trusted him, he was the first one she ever trusted, and it had been so long ago she couldn’t remember when the crippling strings of disbelief and deception started, only that every man she knew until now added a rotten thread.
Not him. He was honest and sincere in every fiber, in every thought and act.
From this mutual admiration sprang his idea of spoiling her, of making her his goddess, to anoint her with oil, so it was only natural that the bath be first. Something inviting and comfortable, something wickedly spoiling was needed to work his magic.
She had no memory of having ever been spoiled. Her life was constructed of hard knocks. Yet hard knocks taught her wisdom. After they got to know each other he realized that she was nothing less than a lady. Circumstance decreed she play the part of a lady’s maid, so the woman worked hard to earn a living. Life can be a cruel mistress. But she never allowed life's cruelty to tarnish her soul. Our Lady was well mannered, well educated, so feminine and soft in nature, so regal; she could easily be Lady Chatterley or Lady Diana, or Lady Whoever-You-Like. It was his duty as a gentleman to give her a night of relaxation and spoil her rotten, as rotten as humanly possible.
‘I don’t know what to expect,’ she thought, and took off her clothes and pulled on her cotton robe.
He appeared at her side and took her hand, leading her into the bath. Twenty two tea lights glimmered hello. They were lined up on the counter next to the mirror, double-bright with their own reflections, and all around the rim of the tub. Three clustered in each corner. The tub was a sea of white mountainous glops floating like clouds on soothing waves scented lavender. She held her breath and watched him direct her hands to her belt. Together they untied the robe, then she wiggled her shoulders and it slipped to the floor. She held her hands up like Anna Pavlova. He grasped them and guided her in toe-first. It was a scene from a thirties movie in dramatic black and white. Her dusky locks pinned up and piled like a pagoda, neck and shoulders nothing but curves and silver reflections, and the rest was suds… suds…suds. It was an opulent, decadent scene as ancient as sepia tone.
It could have been Paris bathing Helen of Troy or Anthony bathing Cleopatra, or Napoleon scrubbing Josephine’s pale statuesque back tattooed with the Fleur de Lis, straining his short stubby arms, up to his Emperor’s navel in suds. Now it was their twenty-first century turn. The warm soapy water, the candle-light, the sea sponge, timeless with their soothing spell, would be medicine enough for them both.
“Sit down and relax. I’ll be right back,” and like Harry Houdini, he disappeared.
He returned carrying two glasses of Chateau La Fit Rothschild. Like Atlas kneeling in submission, he reached over the mountains of suds and made an offering. The goddess accepted. Cool sparkling champagne splashed in her mouth and streamed down her throat, tickling her tummy, stoking her glow from the inside out. A flush appeared on her cheeks when she realized the mounds of suds she’d placed in strategic places were running down her smooth torso and legs, leaving her skin pristine, a surface perfect for candlelight reflections, and when he asked her,
“Stand up?”
She gladly complied.
Scrub was not the word to describe what he was doing. His soft swirling motions were more like caresses. He started by lifting the hair from the back of her neck, then washed her shoulders and worked his way down the small of her back to her buttocks. She lifted her arms above her head, palms together, forming a minaret. Soaping her underarms, then down the length of her arms to her wrists and fingers, he painted soft circular patterns with the sponge, leaving behind narrow columns of frothy perfume, marking her Egyptian pink-alabaster skin with pale trails of subtle scent. He turned her hand palm-up with a gesture only a true cavalier would use, kissed, and kissed again, while wrapping her fingertips over his cheek. Occasionally dipping the sponge in warm water and squeezing, he watched with slavish intensity, the suds run down her slippery physique and disappear into hidden nooks and crannies like sweet creamery butter on hot English muffins.
The candles developed halos from the steam, and flickering flames with their continual movement gave the bathroom a painterly quality, with glistening shapes symbolizing the liveliness of nature, like in Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.
He sometimes wondered how the affair started and quickly remembered when he put his mind to it. It was a harmless remark she made once online.
“What ‘cha doin’?”
He took it differently, not so innocent, and not so harmless. Three words can speak volumes.
Before this, all her e-remarks had been about his photos or hers. Praise and critiques, feeling one another out with tender artistic tentacles, in such an off-hand manner they might have well been talking about the weather. Nothing too personal, oh no, they were too cautious for that! But these three words were a different color; even his weak eyes could perceive their shades of difference.
“Oh my god,” he thought, “she actually wants to know what I’m doing! Oh my god. Oh my god!”
He danced around the computer screen three times and why not? His life was suddenly triumphant. He felt like nine-year-old Californian Johnny Steinbeck considering a trip to his sepulchral city San Francisco to eat spaghetti, or eight-year-old Larry Ferlingetti sitting at his student desk in Yonkers dreaming of eating hotdogs on his Coney Island of the Mind. The possibilities were outrageously delicious.
“What ‘cha doin’?”
Was it an innocent remark? The reaction wasn’t so innocent. He started to sweat, muscles turned hard, only men know which ones.
‘Let’s get manly about this,’ he considered. ‘Let’s get real. Let’s get all Hemingway about it.”
His mind did handsprings. Her words led to a work-out in mental gymnastics. If he had been Arnold he would have pumped iron. He pumped; well… you know…in whatever direction his blood was flowing. But in the end the transformation was fantastic.
The man was all hard sinews and gonads and libido until they first met. Now he was all soft love-songs, poems, pet-names, and tender Valentines.
After they met in person they found out that they were both of one mind and shared the same level-headed thinking, leading to the conclusion that time was short. They didn’t have time to grow old and die and wait for heaven. Why not bring heaven to earth? Isn’t that where it should be? Among flowers and mountain tops with endless vistas and sunsets? On hot desert sands tempered by cool winding rivers? Or blinding white coral beaches skirted with tall swaying coconut palms?
Why not sequester heaven in a hotel room nestled next to interstate eighty?
Heaven had already reserved a space in their heads and their hearts. Time to nurture each other like no one else could with an intimate hour of devotion. Because their good intentions are shared equally, they offer each other a chance to breathe, an opportunity to serve their loved-one, an exercise in giving them something they haven’t experienced since they were tiny-tots of two or three. That was when their mommas would lay out the softest towel, run the water, and check with her wrist to see if it was too hot for her baby girl or boy. This singular evening, slated as an intimate excursion into nostalgic lollipop childhood, contained all the trimmings of a deliciously grown-up X-rated feast.
And isn’t it romantic when two mature adults, age-ripened and full of life, have a never-imagined second chance at love? Isn’t romance a cornucopia of second chances? Second chances demonstrate the tender and forgiving nature of romance. And broken hearts, once repaired with care, often pull through.
To boldly paraphrase Saladin’s last line in The Kingdom of Heaven:
“It is nothing to the world, everything to them, something simple…ordinary…a bath.”
Right. And Jerusalem is just a city.
©Steven Hunley 2012
by
Steven Hunley
He looked at this watch. By midnight he'd be in Sacramento, but right now he was at the Lakewood Mall near Long Beach, on a balmy afternoon, questing for a sea-sponge. Who did he think he was anyway, Jacques Cousteau? A bath isn't so special, even when it's disguised as a midnight rendezvous...or is it?
Bed Bath and Beyond was the logical place to find an organic sea-sponge. He’d already secured tea candles, and the foaming bath soap was up to her and the champagne. They wouldn’t allow liquids over three ounces on the jet and he only had over-head luggage. Forget the obstacles. It was an appointment he wasn’t about to miss. To a literary fool in love, Sacramento is California’s Samarra minus the Maugham.
One sponge was the right size to hold in his hand. It seemed stiff but he knew it would soften in warm water and she liked her water steaming-hot. He always took pleasure witnessing tiny rivulets run off her shoulders down her back and stream over the twin curves of her magnificent pear-shaped bottom, and was convinced that particular exotic view was his-- and his exclusively.
“I’m going to spoil her. She has a lady’s sensitivity and sensibilities. It’s time to adore and indulge her at the same time while appealing to her sensuous nature.”
Jet Blue from Long Beach to Sacramento was a short trip. Munching Blue Chips and drinking Coca Cola, writing like mad in a dollar composition book with his Japanese Pilot pen, an hour and ten minutes later he was in her arms at the airport, kissing her an incredible-I-love-ya-like-crazy-kiss under the acrobatic-air-diving rabbit suspended on wires over their heads. They hadn’t lost a grain of passion during the intervening three weeks. On the contrary, they’d gained a bushel.
The kiss was circumspect since they were in public. They valued their privacy.
“I don’t know what to say.”
She was overcome with emotion. He was too, but knew what to say.
He picked her off her feet. She was as light as one of Degas’ pretty ballerinas.
He whispered, “You’re beautiful.”
In twenty minutes they were sliding the magnetized card, opening the treasured motel room. A coffee pot sat on the dresser, and across from that a mirror hung on the opposite wall. Clever naughty executives placed it strategically above the headboards all the way to the ceiling.
TV? Not needed.
Radio? Ignored.
View? They could always see that tomorrow.
The two were determined to provide their own entertainment. They’d reserved a double, one bed for touchy-feely no-holds-barred recreation, and the other for going night-night…if they slept at all. There was a phone, an arm chair, and holy cow, a Gideon bible.
While he tramps the hallways prospecting for ice, she searches for glasses stashed in the bag…along with the rest of the goodies, the space-ship vibrator with protuberances that light up and hum, a fragile pair of raspberry edible panties, Junior Mints for the popcorn, and for occasions when they feel less hungry and more restrictively formal---every silk necktie he owns.
They have two days until a house in the mountains becomes vacant and they make their escape to their Hole in the Wall hideout like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Being outlaws isn’t easy when love’s involved. They changed their minds about meeting two days from now when they realized they couldn’t keep their hands off each other a second longer. Considering they’ve known each other two years things should be going stale, but are heating up instead. Frequent partings and lack of contact made them long even more for each other, with a naked thirst only a Bedouin could understand.
Instead of Boredom leading to Brake Up, their relationship is turning into an extended honeymoon. Oh my goodness! What to do? What to do? Enjoy each other and strike while the flaming love-brand is still hot, that’s what.
Ever since the day they met she seemed so self-sufficient. What she needed was someone who cared for her for a change, give her some time to relax and be pampered, hence the sponge, which he wrapped up in a print of the Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir and bound it with scarlet ribbon. The self-serving bastard was an art student at one point, so he knew artsy paper.
“Here,” he said, tossing it to her as she sat crossed-legged like Princess Scheherazade on the Royal Serta pillow-topped mattress. “You can guess what it is. Wait here until I get back.”
He picked up something, hid it against the opposite side of his body and walked to the bathroom and began to run water. She could hear a lighter clicking and noticed mist glimmering like fine gold dust in the square of light emanating from the bathroom doorway. He came out and turned up the thermostat.
“You might like to put on your white robe.”
It sounded to her as if he’d practiced those words for days. Actually, he’d previewed this moment weeks earlier, each scenario worked out by his fertile imagination in triplicate. In whispers he admitted he was obsessed with her body, her exquisite shape, her petite size, and the softness of her hair. When wet, it was just the right length to hang like a magnificent mop over her shoulders, cascade down her breasts, where virile steam rising serpentine from the tub, would eagerly coax her dark passive curls to reach forth and embrace the forbidden--- sweet candy nipples. Each curve she possessed was recorded by his hungry eyes, and there was always her silky voice to contend with, one he knew instinctively he could listen to forever.
Her intellect fascinated him, and made her all the sexier, if such a thing was possible. They both had a sense of spontaneity and invention. They kidded each other mercilessly but with kindness, growing affectionate in the process, and in time, tolerant and forgiving of each other’s weaknesses.
She was amazed at his interests and progress. When he admitted he was on a spiritual path, she caved in. She imagined that particular celestial trail was to be hers alone until now. Their paths were apart, then parallel, and inching closer day by day. Neither one of them doubted they were bound to intersect in the future. Long past coincidence, their affair was fast becoming Kismet, something huge, something epic, a classic love-song to be played for all times.
Between the two, synchronicity flowed like liquid fate.
She adored his sense of humor, but had to rein it in at times and constantly chided him to, “be more serious!” Even so, it allowed her in-born silliness to grow and blossom, bringing brightness to her dreary and responsibility-filled life. She trusted him, he was the first one she ever trusted, and it had been so long ago she couldn’t remember when the crippling strings of disbelief and deception started, only that every man she knew until now added a rotten thread.
Not him. He was honest and sincere in every fiber, in every thought and act.
From this mutual admiration sprang his idea of spoiling her, of making her his goddess, to anoint her with oil, so it was only natural that the bath be first. Something inviting and comfortable, something wickedly spoiling was needed to work his magic.
She had no memory of having ever been spoiled. Her life was constructed of hard knocks. Yet hard knocks taught her wisdom. After they got to know each other he realized that she was nothing less than a lady. Circumstance decreed she play the part of a lady’s maid, so the woman worked hard to earn a living. Life can be a cruel mistress. But she never allowed life's cruelty to tarnish her soul. Our Lady was well mannered, well educated, so feminine and soft in nature, so regal; she could easily be Lady Chatterley or Lady Diana, or Lady Whoever-You-Like. It was his duty as a gentleman to give her a night of relaxation and spoil her rotten, as rotten as humanly possible.
‘I don’t know what to expect,’ she thought, and took off her clothes and pulled on her cotton robe.
He appeared at her side and took her hand, leading her into the bath. Twenty two tea lights glimmered hello. They were lined up on the counter next to the mirror, double-bright with their own reflections, and all around the rim of the tub. Three clustered in each corner. The tub was a sea of white mountainous glops floating like clouds on soothing waves scented lavender. She held her breath and watched him direct her hands to her belt. Together they untied the robe, then she wiggled her shoulders and it slipped to the floor. She held her hands up like Anna Pavlova. He grasped them and guided her in toe-first. It was a scene from a thirties movie in dramatic black and white. Her dusky locks pinned up and piled like a pagoda, neck and shoulders nothing but curves and silver reflections, and the rest was suds… suds…suds. It was an opulent, decadent scene as ancient as sepia tone.
It could have been Paris bathing Helen of Troy or Anthony bathing Cleopatra, or Napoleon scrubbing Josephine’s pale statuesque back tattooed with the Fleur de Lis, straining his short stubby arms, up to his Emperor’s navel in suds. Now it was their twenty-first century turn. The warm soapy water, the candle-light, the sea sponge, timeless with their soothing spell, would be medicine enough for them both.
“Sit down and relax. I’ll be right back,” and like Harry Houdini, he disappeared.
He returned carrying two glasses of Chateau La Fit Rothschild. Like Atlas kneeling in submission, he reached over the mountains of suds and made an offering. The goddess accepted. Cool sparkling champagne splashed in her mouth and streamed down her throat, tickling her tummy, stoking her glow from the inside out. A flush appeared on her cheeks when she realized the mounds of suds she’d placed in strategic places were running down her smooth torso and legs, leaving her skin pristine, a surface perfect for candlelight reflections, and when he asked her,
“Stand up?”
She gladly complied.
Scrub was not the word to describe what he was doing. His soft swirling motions were more like caresses. He started by lifting the hair from the back of her neck, then washed her shoulders and worked his way down the small of her back to her buttocks. She lifted her arms above her head, palms together, forming a minaret. Soaping her underarms, then down the length of her arms to her wrists and fingers, he painted soft circular patterns with the sponge, leaving behind narrow columns of frothy perfume, marking her Egyptian pink-alabaster skin with pale trails of subtle scent. He turned her hand palm-up with a gesture only a true cavalier would use, kissed, and kissed again, while wrapping her fingertips over his cheek. Occasionally dipping the sponge in warm water and squeezing, he watched with slavish intensity, the suds run down her slippery physique and disappear into hidden nooks and crannies like sweet creamery butter on hot English muffins.
The candles developed halos from the steam, and flickering flames with their continual movement gave the bathroom a painterly quality, with glistening shapes symbolizing the liveliness of nature, like in Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.
He sometimes wondered how the affair started and quickly remembered when he put his mind to it. It was a harmless remark she made once online.
“What ‘cha doin’?”
He took it differently, not so innocent, and not so harmless. Three words can speak volumes.
Before this, all her e-remarks had been about his photos or hers. Praise and critiques, feeling one another out with tender artistic tentacles, in such an off-hand manner they might have well been talking about the weather. Nothing too personal, oh no, they were too cautious for that! But these three words were a different color; even his weak eyes could perceive their shades of difference.
“Oh my god,” he thought, “she actually wants to know what I’m doing! Oh my god. Oh my god!”
He danced around the computer screen three times and why not? His life was suddenly triumphant. He felt like nine-year-old Californian Johnny Steinbeck considering a trip to his sepulchral city San Francisco to eat spaghetti, or eight-year-old Larry Ferlingetti sitting at his student desk in Yonkers dreaming of eating hotdogs on his Coney Island of the Mind. The possibilities were outrageously delicious.
“What ‘cha doin’?”
Was it an innocent remark? The reaction wasn’t so innocent. He started to sweat, muscles turned hard, only men know which ones.
‘Let’s get manly about this,’ he considered. ‘Let’s get real. Let’s get all Hemingway about it.”
His mind did handsprings. Her words led to a work-out in mental gymnastics. If he had been Arnold he would have pumped iron. He pumped; well… you know…in whatever direction his blood was flowing. But in the end the transformation was fantastic.
The man was all hard sinews and gonads and libido until they first met. Now he was all soft love-songs, poems, pet-names, and tender Valentines.
After they met in person they found out that they were both of one mind and shared the same level-headed thinking, leading to the conclusion that time was short. They didn’t have time to grow old and die and wait for heaven. Why not bring heaven to earth? Isn’t that where it should be? Among flowers and mountain tops with endless vistas and sunsets? On hot desert sands tempered by cool winding rivers? Or blinding white coral beaches skirted with tall swaying coconut palms?
Why not sequester heaven in a hotel room nestled next to interstate eighty?
Heaven had already reserved a space in their heads and their hearts. Time to nurture each other like no one else could with an intimate hour of devotion. Because their good intentions are shared equally, they offer each other a chance to breathe, an opportunity to serve their loved-one, an exercise in giving them something they haven’t experienced since they were tiny-tots of two or three. That was when their mommas would lay out the softest towel, run the water, and check with her wrist to see if it was too hot for her baby girl or boy. This singular evening, slated as an intimate excursion into nostalgic lollipop childhood, contained all the trimmings of a deliciously grown-up X-rated feast.
And isn’t it romantic when two mature adults, age-ripened and full of life, have a never-imagined second chance at love? Isn’t romance a cornucopia of second chances? Second chances demonstrate the tender and forgiving nature of romance. And broken hearts, once repaired with care, often pull through.
To boldly paraphrase Saladin’s last line in The Kingdom of Heaven:
“It is nothing to the world, everything to them, something simple…ordinary…a bath.”
Right. And Jerusalem is just a city.
©Steven Hunley 2012