Beatitude 14
The Whole of the Moon
CHAPTER 14
Northmont University. June 23, 1984.
Charlene’s dorm room smells like pizza and weed. We’re alone, together, wasted and totally naked. Lost in our own private pocket universe.
Charlene tapes puzzle posts over Alain Delon’s huge cranky face.
“Better?” she asks.
What could be better? I’m sitting in the middle of her bed enjoying a voluptuous view. After a pull from a bottle of Merlot, I give her the only answer possible. “Perfect.”
Charlene slips back into bed. She snatches the bottle from me and finishes it off. Then she hangs over the side to set the empty on the floor; her perfect round buttocks laid out before me. Yes, I’m high. Really high. In fact, so high I’m almost brought to tears by the beauty of it all.
With feline grace, she slinks back around to straddle me.
Cradled together, staring into each other’s eyes, a rush of feelings swell up inside. Not just amorous, also spiritual. And I’m compelled to say something that’s probably gonna come off . . . doofy. Definitely pretentious. The kind of dumb, flowery thing that would turn off most girls. But right now, in this moment, I can’t help myself. In a slurred whisper, I unload a favorite quote about accidentally falling in love from the Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“Could that be any better in Spanish?” Charlene asks, touching my lips with her fingertips.
“I love that book.”
“Me, too.”
We gently kiss.
Charlene grinds into my lap and says, “I’ve got one,” and she proceeds to offer an erotic quote I’ve never heard before.
“What’s that from?” I ask.
“Wharton,” she says. “It’s in the Yale archives, unpublished.”
We’re both worms, word nerds, the same kind of crazy, but I think I’ve met my match with Charlene. I gently kiss her neck, submitting to her superiority.
Then I drop another quote. A sexy one praising a lover, labeling her a miracle, from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
“Miller,” she says. “Such a guy.”
She pulls my hair and drops an unexpected bomb from Herman Hesse — a passage from Siddhartha about the power of giving and receiving pleasure.
Boom! That quote destroys me. If she’s recited that passage to anyone else, I don’t ever want to know. She passed it to me while we were attached, connected. That’s all that matters.
I flip Charlene over on her back and briefly consider a spicy line from Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus. Instead, I fully digest her last words and silently follow their instruction.
BEATITUDE © Mark Scott Ricketts
SOURCES FOR QUOTES (try to find them):
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Edith Wharton, Beatrice Palmato (unpublished)
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus
“So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. She taught him that after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Another great chapter and more great music and books! Wow, thank you.
I just finished "The Man with the Golden Arm." It took a while to get it through interlibrary loan (it wasn't available in my little town) and it took me a month to finish reading it (I am normally a pretty quick reader). Beautiful, densely packed language, gorgeous imagery, amazingly complex, likeable, characters, but a difficult read. It was a depressing trainwreck of a story, watching these people destroy their lives. I kept wishing there was some way to intervene, but it plows on like fate. It was definitely not a read-it-all-in-one-sitting kind of tale: I had to keep taking short breaks, but I kept coming back to it. A good story, but infinitely sad - it will stay with me. Thank you for the recommendation!
Now on to something lighter - Christopher Moore's "The Stupidest Angel." My favorite holiday read. Ho ho ho. 😁