Saturday, 17 January 2015

Thirteen Crucifixions, 76


“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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