Ah, ha!—Come, some music! Come, the recorders!—
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2
*
I used to work around the corner from that church, and I remembered the day the fire tore through the building. There was a lot of snow. It was in December, about ten days before Christmas. The fire trucks had a tough time getting through. It took years to rebuild the church, and by the time they were done I was long gone from that part of town.
So when my wife suggested going there for a concert, my reaction was "yeah, sure, why not?" Admission was cheap enough and it was easy to get to from work. Besides, I had almost retired and went to the office more for a change of scene than to do a lot of work.
Three years earlier I had rented space in a law office run by and for lesbians. The ladies were very pleasant, much nicer than a lot of guys and even straight women, and certainly nicer than the people I had worked with for 40 years. The ladies didn't bother me and I didn't bother them. I wasn't around enough to bother anybody.
The senior partner was a loud, brash, top-fuel testosteronically-enhanced bitch, a classic mad-dog dyke lawyer, but she had a heart of gold (if you could find it). Stereotyped to the max, she complimented me on my retro tie collection, and we compared Brooks Brothers suits. She charged me, however, way less than the market could have borne for my office, but enough so I didn't feel like a complete charity case. And she thought I was a master of our craft (another one I had fooled).
She had a collection of waifs and strays for support staff, mostly little mousy types of no particular gender, with an occasional built-for-comfort mama type. The lawyers who worked for her were obvious butch types who would have been the "affirmative action look how liberal we are" mannequins in any other firm. They were good, though, they knew their stuff, and stood up to the chauvinists and morons who form too large a part of our craft's population, to say nothing of our ever-to-be-esteemed judiciary.
Her junior law partner (not her lover, who was a rather tall, giraffe-like lady whose primary function seemed to be neglected spouse, with dog-walker and housemaid thrown in) was Maria. Maria was special.
Everyone knew Maria was the real wheelhorse of the firm. She put in the 19-hour days, skipped weekends and family, dealt with the obstreperous clients and even more obstreperous adversaries. She was so girly-girly that people didn't believe she was a true lesbian.
She was classic "bi now, gay later". She told me she had had boyfriends, even had sex with men and enjoyed it. She thought she was straight when she was an assistant DA in a neighboring county. Then she met Wanda.
Wanda stood 5'10" in her duty boots, the ones with the steel in the toecaps and the metatarsal arch. Wanda was a police officer after she left the Marine Corps (after ten years, they didn't ask, but she told them the day her last enlistment was up, and left).
Of course it's hearsay, but I am told that Wanda's ample breasts were tattooed. The left reads "Semper", and the right reads "Fi". Wanda wanted to be a Command Sergeant Major or equivalent, but of course that would have meant continuing to lie for years more. Someone else, not Maria (we never talked about our private interactions with our life partners), told me Wanda had her nipples pierced back to front and had a little stud custom-made, with the eagle, globe and anchor in 24 karat gold, to go on each one.
Wanda said there are no ex-Marines. Even when they're dead and shoveled under, they are Marines. If you met Wanda, you would thank God they're on our side.
Maria is like a daughter to me. She's the same age as my elder girl, Emma the tax practitioner. Emma and her husband Mike the civil engineer live 1500 miles away, one city block from my younger girl, Anne. Anne is straight and unattached but looking while she manages a national chain store in an upscale mall. I miss them terribly. There are no grandchildren yet, but I pray every day.
The day I went to this concert Maria told me that her breast cancer was back. She thought they'd gotten it all when they took out the lumps the last time. We'll all walk with her, I said, but I thought "the hard part of the walk is for her alone". Maria's news was not happymaking. I told her, not for the first time, how much I love her. Jokingly, I said it was like having another daughter with none of the work, or the expense. In my head I thought, "but with all the pain of loving and losing." I turned away and walked quickly back to my office, shut the door and lost it. I buried my head on my desk and sobbed. Stupid fucking old man, I thought, but I couldn't stop crying.
Somehow I made it through the afternoon, and my wife and I went to the concert.
The inside of the church had been done in fake Italian renaissance; modeled on the del Gesù in Rome, the little booklet in the front door rack said. Big murals featuring St. Christopher (even though he had been cut from the team), a few virgin martyrs, and St. Francis of Assisi with a few animals in the backfield. And enough aerial perspective to make Leonardo wince. Still, it beat being outside, where the snow was falling, or at home, where I'd taken over cooking dinner. I didn't feel like cooking that night.
So I paid the twenty bucks for two senior citizens (the one good thing about growing old is I'm a cheap date) and eyeballed the program. Italian seicento music for portative organ, theorbo (that's a supersized lute), Baroque violin and recorder. Nice and restful, not over-intellectual, just the thing for a Wednesday night in winter with no interesting hoops on the tube and someone you love fighting for her life.
Enter the musicians. We have the moonfaced Chinese violinist who organized this group (why is it that all male Chinese violinists are moonfaced, and all male Chinese pianists are lantern-jawed?), the large lutanist in the ruffled shirt (he'd be right at home in the office), the organist lean and slightly stooped, and the recorder lady.
The recorder lady stole the show. She was tall and thin, with tiny tight boobies like she was stealing apples, taut muscular butt that hardly jiggled when she walked in her high Taryn Rose slingbacks. Fresh-faced, wide-eyed, with a cute little cupid-bow mouth but not pouty. Young, I guessed, maybe two three years out of college; but her resume in the program told me she had been around a while, with some groups whose names I recognized. So she was nearer thirty than twenty.
She could play the recorder. Her thin agile fingers were all over that stick. Her mouth was all over it too. She moved the instrument elegantly up, down, back, forward, touching her lips, tantalizing it, blowing so softly and sweetly, then taking it firmly in her mouth and running her fingers over it. I wouldn't have minded trading places with the recorder. I may be shorter and thinner than the handmade Dutch model she was playing, but I could probably hit a few good notes if she felt like playing me.
Now you may ask why I was so fucking horny that I forgot Maria. Essentially because sex in my marriage was on its way out. Charlotte had been a wonderful lover. I had reveled in her body, in her intensely female form. I remember even now orgasms from 25 years before, intense, soul-cleansing proofs that God wants us to be happy. Even during her pregnancies and after the babies, the good times rolled on and on, like an endless summer.
