Connie of the South Wood

It is night, just after 12. I am thinking of a smoking half cigar, a small aromatic full tobacco cigar. It is lying in my favorite ashtray, a porcelain rendering of a half nautilus. The cigar is on the other side of the room, my living room. I am alone and liking it in the middle of January, warm and cozy.

A lot I've thought about tonight, and none of my thoughts are on the woman I last saw two and a half weeks ago. She's crazy. Craziness is her best quality. Too jealous, too many moods, unpredictable, undependable. I have nothing against the way she lives, I just don't want that kind of life. Pretty soon she will ask me to move in with her, and her husband. Her legally separated husband.

The women behind me are all symbols or examples of my relentless, impatient pursuit of one thing. Sex. How I love sex. All of them people with no direction. All of them bigger than me. I have always been gravitated toward the big and sometimes eloquent women. Gravitated toward situations that led me to bed with them all. Women who are large are as beautiful as any. I am not a big guy, five foot eight. My quadriceps have survived, why haven't I? I have. I have never contacted a disease from any lover. The last one I am not sure. What I know of Mara is that her soul is diseased. She has deep, emotional problems. Rather sad, actually. Or would be if she wasn't so possessive.

....a woman is yawning, in my bedroom. Doesn't seem strange. I have no knowledge of her in my life, yet I may meet her before I pass away from the world. I see her in my mind as I hear her push the covers away. I hear her get up and turn on the small metal desk lamp on top of my chest of drawers. Closes the door behind her, going into the bathroom that adjoins my bedroom.

I need a smoke, another energy drink. The rock music playing on the compact stereo and I see her, this woman from literally in my mind's eye, like a psylocibin hallucination might be. Something I know nothing of. She is in the wood, it looks like dusk in May. She is far back in the woods but walking toward me. She is wearing earth tones, walking carefully around the trees, looking down at the ground and up to look in my direction, but not looking at me exactly. She is being coy....

The beauty of living alone is that everyone who comes is a guest. I didn't mind the company of Mara until she started crying about everything. The woman had lost her mother, and said she took care of her until she died. Then she took her little camera and made a video clip of her mother in bed at the hospital. Mara's mother died that night, I think it was expected. Mara kept the video, probably still has it. Classic morbid behavior. I never saw or heard the things I saw and heard until I met this Pentecostal Holiness with a lesbian history. I don't think her religion had anything to do with how Mara acted. Her mother had a lot to do with it and her mother's church had bake sales from August until Yuletide.

I found Mara on the internet, of course. Mara said she herself was sick the night I wrote her. She came over that night. A lot of things Mara said and did would have meant one thing to a lot of guys. A one night stand. I need very much to put an end to the declining relationship. Mara has one great quality, and that was she knows how to give head. She liked sex a lot, at first. She said it took time to get used to the shape of it. Then I howled in pleasure. Then I changed, and it was because of our conversations. All on cellular.

I saw a textbook example of the hot-to-trot female. I saw all her loving change to power play. Why? Who knows. I am tired of her and I think she is tired of me, too. This person is in her forties and acts like she is in high school. Coming back to the Neuse River basin, from yet another situation she did not want. Back to her home town, with all her high school friends here to get drunk or stoned with.

...The lady stops as she nears the end of the woods, the woods that end near my small apartment. She bends over to pick up something on the ground, and she stands back up, looking at a piece of bark or a cone. Then she looks off out at the crop field, one hand caressing the small blue locket on her white necklace....

I look back at my kitchenette. The clock says 1:15. I am at the desk, taking liberal drags from a cigar end. She is here somehow, and I do not hear or feel the strange lady's presence in the bathroom or the bedroom. Water is dripping. The bathtub faucet. Apparently I did not turn the faucet all the way off when I got out of the shower earlier. Time for some more music. Jethro Tull was quite good, his album containing the anthem to the work horses of Scotland. Yes, quite good.

On the PC I'm listening to drones, sound samples and my eyes are closed. The sounds are ethereal, beautiful...........the lady in the woods is sitting on a stump in the small clearing. She must be uncomfortable, sitting on that stump. Then I notice that the skirt she is wearing is something durable. There is something about the look of the woman. British, but I don't know why. She's dressed for anything, not royalty or high class. More like a sojourner. Could be staying in the madness of my home town west of here. Dressed as though she is in a play, as somebody I know cannot be part of my present day eventuality. She's coming closer to me, standing here in the door. Not a character in a movie, but the female form is a fantasy of a character in a movie. A provocative fantasy.

It's really time I should be getting to bed. I'm lighting up again and I hear the bathroom door to my bedroom close. A woman is singing a George Harrison song, My Sweet Lord. It's Connie, in my bathroom singing. I walk to the kitchen and take another drink of my latest deleterious drink, one filled with caffiene, and cold, not like coffee. I don't have any coffee made, and now I have company.

I walk into the bedroom. Connie the Lady of The Woods has put the woman's touch to my bed chamber. I have a single bed. What did she think, a nymph out in the Bible belt lowlands, when she saw I have a single bed? For that matter, what will happen, satisfaction? She's real alright, something or someone definitely different and it's high time, too. I don't know what to do except sit on the bed and take my shoes off I've had on since eight this morning.

Hello, Darryl. She speaks to me as she opens the bathroom door and turns the light off. But she doesn't speak. She is speaking to me without speaking, without using her warm red lips, or her tongue. How do I know your name? I almost say, but I know there's no need to speak either, not audibly. A chill goes up my legs when her thoughts reach mine. You have always known my name. Where are you from? I ask silently. Does it matter? I'm foreign. I am not from this area. I am given time to think, now. Oh, I see. I certainly believe you are not from around here.

She is wearing a light teal gown, almost white, under a royal blue bathrobe she had found in a drawer. I see a small overnight bag on my ottoman in the corner. My apartment is sparse. My own life is sparse. Yet here is a woman who I don't think can be real. She is just too perfect without an invitation. She could model plus size apparel for Shirley. She is gorgeous, so voluptuous and gorgeous. I am thinking that I am on my way to some next world, and this will be my fantastic send-off.

Connie thinks that I am wrong, I am not going to die. I am going to spend time with her, now, if I want. I don't think anymore. I get undressed. I have been fully dressed all day, and without haste or waste pull my shirt and my pants off.

Connie wants for me to lie down on the actually made bed. She turns off the lamp and pushes the door to the bedroom until it is almost closed. The little lamp on the card table in the living room is still on, and I watch Connie take off her robe. I can see her figure through the sheer babydoll. She is superb, curvaceous, an awe-inspiring figure of a woman, moving as if her feet really do not touch the carpet. I am with a vivid and real lover, but I don't know how she is here with me.

....................................................

There was a pink note on the chest of drawers the next morning and no Connie, the Lady in the Woods, the woman in my bed. The note said "I will always be with you Darryl, wherever you are."

I went out in the living room, still wearing nothing. I sat down in my favorite chair, the metal folding chair. I lit a cigar. I had the best sex of my whole life last night. Connie was soft, supple, and had a fragrance I could still smell, naturally. But I'd smell it for days to come. The night before I had a partner who was not a prostitute. She was more than a consenting partner. She gave me herself, without adolescent tweaking, without digressive pandering, without any kind of deal. It was lovemaking of the most magical kind, with me being treated as if I was hurt and alone and lost out in an unkind night. We were not embarking on a 21st century partnership arrangement. I did not get to know this inexplicable woman. We did not work anything out. I knew it was something temporary but I would take our passions far down the road.

Connie got in bed beside me that night and there was no economy of space. I could touch her and she was right there, like being in my reach was her reason for being in North America. Her mouth explored my pelvis, my thighs and I was by a warm sea, in the tropic sun. I was in the dark with a soft goddess of amplitude. I complemented Connie's endeavors and she called out, not loudly, but with a controlled and subtle passion. Her hands gripped my shoulders, my face down in her smooth vulva. Connie wanted me on my back and by the time we both had our quiet storms she was lying on top of me, kissing me with nothing but love. That's how it felt.

This was necessary, this experience or this fantasy. Constance was what I needed to feel like my existence is worth it, to keep wanting it, to move toward the next great moments of pleasure or discovery.

But if the Lady of The Woods was a wild sexual waking dream, why did I have this slick feeling down there on my scrotum? And the long golden strand of hair on my pillow? Not mine. The lady of the woods was here, had to be. Long ago before myself or anyone ever occupied this place.