Read More: A brief Q&A with Jon Pearson
What if all the women who ever lived were this one woman named April? And what if she were lying naked right now on a hotel bed in Philadelphia looking up at the ceiling fan and thinking how flat and wide and still the blades were. And what if all the men who ever lived were this one guy named Ed, who right now was taking the hotel stairs three at a time to the fifth floor with a bouquet of roses wrapped in cellophane which he tore the price tag off of. And he’s feeling self-conscious in his striped pants, tuxedo shoes, and a brown leather belt he got off a guy he killed in one of the World Wars. And he’s running late, the guy who is all men rolled into one.
And April, waiting, squirms her butt into the fitted satin sheet and deluxe Beauty Rest mattress, the fineness of her womanly ass, and wonders where the hell good old Eddie is, goddamn it, and will it be like the last time. And she wishes to forgive Eddie, for she knows he shall need lots of forgiving. But first, she wishes to be fucked and fucked good. Sorry. “FUCK,” that four-letter word she first saw carved in a shade tree at the end of a playground in fifth grade. DUCK with an “F” maybe. It stared back at her with all its alien might. Cut with a knife, its jagged letters felt like wounds you could split open, letter by letter, and sink your arm into up to the elbow. And she wants it, now, the sinking into, the slipping into, the forgetting.
Eddie isn’t thinking about the Vietnam War, now, or the two World Wars or fly-fishing with the dad who never, ever once said he loved him. But he carries the hurt of it, the smooth, polished hurt, like the bony head of a pigeon against the wet of his heart. He wonders if April is as pretty as she was last time. And seeing the flash of his tuxedo shoe, black and glossy, against the paisley carpet, he tastes her mouth in his mind, the mouth of all women.
While April glides her fingers down his back, and he isn’t even in the room yet, but in her imagination she feels his back, and closing her eyes remembers when her grandmother once gave her a small metal thimble as a child, and sticking her pinky into it, she was filled with the delicious silvery emptiness of the thing. And she feels now as if she has fluttered down from the sky, all wings and toes, or pussy and titties, to be crude, again, because the crudeness of sex is rearing its diamond-shaped snake head as saxophone music rises from the alley below and mixes with the scent of pork chops and onions from another time and place. And sprawling there against the cool of the sheets, April feels all pine needles and squirrels, and loses herself once again in the paddles of the ceiling fan, drinking in the memory of Eddie’s hair, the fragrance of it, Alberto VO5, like her father wore. Deep down, Eddie is a little boy. And she knows this, knows it like a river knows, a deaf and dumb knowing, widening and narrowing in a wandering blind faith that is nature, that is woman.
Why all the goddamn wars, Eddie? she means to ask when he gets here. But first, she yearns to dissolve in the succinct beauty of her own two eyes, eyes that somehow feed into the silken petals of her one vagina, when it hits her that her butt is maybe a tad too big. I mean, she gained two pounds in a day for god’s sake, and the whole thing is ragingly unfair, seeing as how for the last 150 years all she’s had to eat is a salad and a handful of almonds.
But Eddie likes ass, she recalls. He likes chainsaws and books too, and travel brochures and, to be honest, the smell of gasoline and the screech of tires and the Ice Capades. He went to the Ice Capades once as a kid. He has worked the fields and killed elk and fought wars and bought liquor and stole a truck and worked all night to save a woman from drowning and delivered twins and fixed the broken water main and found a lost earring behind a 600-pound jukebox and paid his way through city college. And his sap is rising. And soon it is gonna be one man and one woman in a bed, in a room, the ibdiss and caribdiss, the whole she-bang, again and again and again—the origin of exactly everything.
And right now he’s breathing hard, Eddie is, outside room 527 with a red burst of supermarket roses and sweat rings, goddamn it. And he’s fifteen minutes late, again. Shit. And what the hell was it she wanted from the store? Damn it. And now he’s got to smooth things over. Like always, he’s got to smooth things over.
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Writer, speaker, artist, and educational guru, Jon Pearson has been a cartoonist for the Oakland Tribune, an extra for the New York Metropolitan Opera, a college professor, and a classroom teacher. His work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Baltimore Review, Barely South Review, Barnstorm, Carve, The Citron Review, Crack the Spine, Faultline, Forge, Lake Effect, Pretty Owl Poetry, Reed Magazine, Sou’wester, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. He believes now, as he did as a kid, that courage, caring, and creativity can save the world. He lives with his beautiful and poetic wife near Santa Barbara and you can find him online at www.jonpearsoncreative.com
Read More: A brief Q&A with Jon Pearson