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Steven Hunley
01-06-2013, 09:10 PM
Come Rain or Come Shine

by

Steven Hunley

‘More strange than true...
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.’ ---Theseus—Midsummer’s Night Dream

Fireplace in the foreground littered with throw-pillows, earrings scattered willy-nilly, champagne corks scattered here and there. Painting, oil on canvas, hanging on the wall, nude woman, life-size, with highlights and shadows in just the right places. Cabin just outside Aspen, Colorado. Nothing but ragged green tree lines in every direction, rugged white granite cleaved with blue foaming waterfalls, falling, ever falling, into calm expressionless pools.

Our couple likes it that way. Romantic is their singular flavor.

She got the risqué mouth. He got the slicked-back hair. She got the turquoise eyes, he got the coconut pair. He got handsome. She got style. They got everything…like a child.
He owns the moves that let her know what he wants. It’s her, only her, and that’s what counts.

Since each one is the other’s wonder, everything seems to fall into place.

Somerset Maugham wants to do a piece on their “relationship.” Man-Woman kind of thing. Figures he’ll do a novel, “Of Human Bonding” or something like that, kind of a sequel with a happy ending. Decides to make the setting someplace exotic, Tahiti or the Marquesas for certain. He needs to smoke a sophisticated cigarette and think about it while he reviews galleys from his publisher.

He, brash and hopeful, determined, out of his mind in love, meets her on line, never expecting an outcome like this. Then the dreamer awakens. Her reality tastes sweeter than his wildest sugary dreams.

She, apprehensive, at first, with no hope for their future, changes her outlook entirely. She’s a hopeless romantic at heart.

Synchronicity plays its part with dragonflies and coincidences, hinting that nature has a hand in their meeting. The importance of symbols does not escape our fearless duo, no more than they escaped Gauguin, who knew both his paint and his symbols and what it meant to be “savage”.

Maupassant insists they eat a croissant in his presence. Wants to see them place pieces of warm white dough in each other’s mouths with pale well-formed fingers. Wants to get all sentimental about it in a markedly French sort of way. Can’t wait to watch them play “in like lightning out like a comet,” like the course of his literary life.

Billie Holiday singing Come Rain or Come Shine in the background. Old recordings sound good, even with scratches, especially when they match the weather. Raindrops provide soft counterpoint to the music of her fire-engine red nails tapping on a crystal cosmic watch face. The harsh cold and wet outside are tempered by the fireplace and each of our lover’s attitudes. Feeling close was never a problem with these two. They own the patent on snuggling. Only they made snuggling Chic, and brought it back into fashion.

We cold mere mortals thank them profusely.

Nice and cozy like. An auspicious occasion for sure. The indicators are indicating like crazy. Size small black lacy negligee tossed with reckless abandon on the red Persian carpet. His belt wound like a cobra in the same place. Glimmering tins of tea candles dance around the rim of the bathtub. Her special oil with the cap that opens with SNAP results in hair pins lost in the couch cushions. No respect for undergarments, it’s a literary tradition.

Oberon is accused of ripping off Titania’s undergarments, and later, after his passion was satisfied, feeling oceans of remorse, he replaced them with silver lacy spider webs, woven by the goddess Arachnid, on the occasion of her deflowering.

The reason our couple gets on so well is that he lets her be herself, whispering one magic night, across a perfumed pillow, her shell-like ear just a breath away,

“Be as thou was wont to be. See as thou was wont to see.”--Oberon

She’d always wanted someone she could trust. He always hoped to find some understanding, so…
A cell phone accidently left on vibrate falls off the edge of the bed. Thank God for stainless steel.

Hemingway drops by to return fishing tackle. Says he caught a big one but sharks got to it first. He invites them to get drunk, take a train to Pamplona to run like crazy in front of angry bulls. Insists they wear red berets. Wants them to meet Mary and have a Marguerita while he types away at his wooden desk with his sleeves rolled up, continuing an endless safari to find the proper words for his magic scribbles. You know Papa. All good readers know Papa.

When our man regards his woman’s throat, sculpted white Carrera marble, it gives him the notion to cover every inch of her with baby kisses. He understands, that unlike the Venus de Milo, her pleasured hands will soon respond in kind.

When our woman regards her man, she takes his immediate measure to see how he will stand up under her pressure, only to sigh when she calculates the results on her exquisite physique.

Steinbeck has invited them over next week for a glass of California wine. They make good company and therefore good copy. Besides, they’re Californianos too. The winter cabin outside Aspen is only a love nest, not their permanent home. That’s tucked away in California. Gotta keep things in the family, that’s what John figures. New writers owe old writers plenty. It’s a reciprocal thing.

Only one thing on our couple’s minds, pleasuring each-other in every way possible. Time to get animal.

Uh-oh, watch out.

I feel like I’m drifting into dangerous waters here. Maybe I should drop anchor.

I’d write more, but then it would get all erotic-like and much too full of fun to be taken as “serious literature.” I can’t do that. If I do, in a hundred years this will never be in the high-school textbooks. That’s what I want, my place in the sun, Come Rain or Come Shine. I wanna end up in a ratty old textbook full of hastily scribbled phone-numbers and crude nasty drawings, dog-eared, ripped-out pages, remnants left over when students didn’t want to read aloud in class.

“Mr. Hunley, I can’t read aloud today, my page is missing.”

Musty, dusty, torn and frayed, smelling like an old text book, on the splintered back shelf of the school library, waiting my turn to be-recycled. That’s how I want it. So careful, that’s what I have to be.

I gotta stop here.

It seems such a shame. Seriously, it bothers me more than you. But you’ll get over it if you have any imagination. You can fix it up.

The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. –Theseus

After all- I didn’t want to offend, and neither did my friends.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear. -Puck

And me too.

Sorry, I got no manners. We both got no manners, me with my lousy writing and grammar, and him with history and his second best bed.


© 2011 Steven Hunley with the help of Bill Shakespeare.


http://youtu.be/FdhnCZvFTVU

Is this name dropping? Does it work?

WolfLarsen
01-07-2013, 11:11 PM
I very much like this! Because it's so very different! You've got a way with words in this piece!

But I'm not sure about some of the clichés. Something about:

"She was a romantic at heart"

Kill the clichés with a machine gun!

Other than that very good writing!

Steven Hunley
01-08-2013, 01:38 AM
You're perfectly right, Wolf-I'll do just that. Seriously, I didn't realize how cliché-ridden I was until after a few good critiques. Finally, after a while, I decided I could put them to good use. I evented a character that used them all the time! Not much of a solution, but a solution. In speech I use them everyday but in writing, they're poison!