“Do you like persimmons—the fruit, I mean?’
“I honestly can’t
say that I’ve ever tried one.”
“I find that hard
to believe.”
“Believe it.”
“I will if you say
so. How’s your calamari?”
“Good. How’s your squab?”
“A bit
overcooked. But tender. Like you, my little pigeon.”
“I’m not food.”
“Yes you are. With a name like Persimmon?”
“Oh stop. Drink some wine.” Persimmon refilled Bill’s glass. He held it up in a toast.
“To our love. May it always nourish us.”
“I’ll drink to
that.” Not that Persimmon was terribly
aware of just what it was she was drinking to.
Often she had to hold her tongue, since Bill’s corny, at times smarmy,
declarations of his love for her often made her want to gag. Which left her feeling wicked, ungrateful and
guilty. Finally a man who loved her,
whose love she could openly receive, bask in and enjoy. So what if he expressed himself in adolescent
poetic muckiness. One of her colleagues
described him lately as an inhumanly human personification of purple
prose. Which she supposed that he was. But Persimmon was in love. Or she was in love with love. Perhaps with the idea of being loved. He pleased her wonderfully in bed, he was
nice to look at, clean, considerate, sensitive, reasonably intelligent. Nice to talk to. Completely and totally interested in her. And all she could do was sit there like a
passive blob and soak it all in. Parasitical. La belle dame sans merci. She honestly couldn’t say she loved him. Persimmon, to her horror was just discovering
that she had never really loved anyone in her life. Except her daughter. But Juniper she loved as a prized
possession. A trophy. Booty.
And the fact that she could take good care of mother? Towards her daughter she had a fierce devoted
love that seemed at times to border perilously on incest. Lesbian incest? Persimmon?
But she couldn’t call it that, though at times she had wanted to lick
her clean all over like she was a cub, or a kitten or a whelp and Persimmon was
her—she dared not take this train of thought any further.
Over the lit candle
Bill gazed at her with moist affectionate and devoted eyes. “Thinking?” he said.
“About my
daughter.” She couldn’t name her. Persimmon was acting the role, the mother
archetype. Making Juniper “daughter.”
“You shouldn’t
worry about her.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course you
do. What kind of mother would you be if
you didn’t?”
“But I’m not
worried about her.”
“It’s all over your
face. She’s practically a young woman
now. She is a young woman. Time to cut her loose.”
“Bill, I ‘cut her
loose’ quite a long time ago.” Juniper,
as she’d expected, was becoming a source of discord between them. Her daughter didn’t seem to entirely approve
of her mother’s new find. She’d said
nothing to express hostility, but there was unease there. Bill was certain that she disliked him, and
had mentioned that he felt judged by her.
Juniper, pressed recently by her mother simply replied with polite
evasiveness that while she was sure Persimmon could do better, she had also
seen her do a lot worse for having a man.
She otherwise left them alone.
“She’s going away
for the weekend.”
“With her father?”
“She’s stopped
seeing him. I think they’ve reached some
sort of impasse in their relationship."
She could tell by the dull look in his eyes that none of this was of
interest to Bill, whose attention span seemed usually limited to only those
matters that were to his immediate interest.
Persimmon seemed certainly to interest him. But nothing that she did, nor anyone she was
connected to. Bill was maybe in love
with his own idea of Persimmon? She
couldn’t even discuss her profession with him.
It didn’t matter that she was a journalist, simply that she was brave
and courageous eking out an existence as a free-lancer.
“It’s a pity
they’re not in season right now.”
“What?”
“Persimmons.”
“My name again.”
“But you’re always
in season.”
She flicked water at
him. He laughed.
“I guess I deserved
that.”
“You did”,
Persimmon said smiling not too ingenuously.
He lifted his
wine-glass. “To the persimmon. That wonderful fruit. In its youth it is hard and bitter.” He took an overly gestured sip of his wine. “But in its maturity—“ he paused with
melodramatic flourish—“Tender and sweet.”
“So that’s how it’s
been”, she said suddenly. “Why, I’m just
like my name. When I was young I was
just that. Hard. Bitter.”
“I don’t need to
know that, my queen. Your past is of no
consequence to me. No consequence at
all. It’s the present alone that
matters, it’s the beautiful Persimmon in her tender and sweet maturity—that’s
all that matters. That’s all I want to know. Whatever, whoever you were in the
past has never existed for me.”
Bill had been
eating steadily throughout the meal.
Now, except for the raddicchio garnish and a few tiny bones, his plate
was empty, while more than half her meal remained on her plate.
“You’ve hardly
touched your food.”
“Bill”, she said,
looking at him with a penetrating seriousness.
He appeared startled, as though he’d been sleeping and she had just
dumped a bucket of ice water on him.
“What?”
“My name,
Persimmon—“
“Yeah, what about
it?” A waiter came by to refill their
water glasses, a handsome lithe, dark-haired young faun.
“It’s not my real
name.”
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