Odalisque
Seventeen
AFTER EVERYONE GOT BACK and we had dinner Friday night, we got online and got Melody a ticket to accompany her mother back to Boston. We managed to get bereavement fare, which wasn’t any cheaper, but gave her the option of setting a return later. Can’t believe the airline called the hospital to see if Harold was in the morgue. Sheesh!
Saturday, we relaxed, though I went over to the club to work out in the morning. Since it was a holiday weekend, there was no Pilates. That afternoon, Melody took me by the hand and we went into the bedroom where we made sweet gentle love while the family was just a couple of rooms over. It was a real release for Melody and she cried herself to sleep in my arms. I followed quickly after her.
We hadn’t been to Carmine’s yet, so when Melody and I got up we took everyone to our favorite restaurant for dinner. Wendy shuffled things with another waitperson so she could serve our table. It was after the meal that things got weird.
I had to get over to the campus to take my watch at ten. Everyone going home could have fit in the Mazda, but Melody jumped in my car.
“I’ll take this car home after I see where you work, darling,” Melody said. “Someone will come back to pick you up in the morning.”
We parked and I checked in with Andy and then with the guy on duty at the gate. When I got back to the tent, Melody was still there, sitting in the chair.
“It’s not as big as the one in our living room, is it?” she asked.
“No, but I guess it’s big enough to serve the purpose.”
“Hi,” Bree said as she came around the tent. “Oh! Melody! Did I mess up? I didn’t mean to interfere.”
“Relax, Bree,” Melody said. She held out her arms to her near-twin. Bree went right to her and they hugged.
“Are you okay?” Bree asked. “I’m so sorry.”
“It doesn’t get okay overnight,” Melody said. “But I’ve got family to help me. Tomorrow I’m going out to Boston with Mom for a while.”
“Melody, I… I don’t know what to say. I kept imagining that it was my father and I just fell apart.”
“That’s not what I remember,” Melody said. “What I remember is my strong friend picking me up and carrying me to my mommy. She was so gentle and so concerned for me.”
“Well, then I fell apart,” Bree insisted. “Oh, Melody.” The two girls hugged in the chair and I sat in the desk chair at the table. I hadn’t brought any homework with me.
“Tony, don’t you usually sit here?” Melody asked.
“Yes, but I didn’t want to interrupt. You needed some time.”
“We’re cold,” she complained.
I shook out the blanket, but before I could spread it over them, they were both standing beside the chair waiting for me to sit down. Getting the idea of what they had in mind, I moved the chair a little so that it would hit the wall before it tipped. We might get overbalanced.
I sat down and Melody sat on my left leg and Bree wiggled her way in on my right. They did some kind of in-place foot dance that left them with their legs tangled together and their bodies turned slightly toward each other. Finally, I pulled the blanket up.
“Mmm. This is cozy,” Melody sighed. We just reclined there like that for about fifteen minutes and I thought both girls went to sleep.
Melody lifted her hand and petted Bree’s cheek.
“Are you okay, Red?” she asked. I’d never heard Melody use a nickname for Bree other than when she refused to refer to her as anything but “bitch.” I wasn’t sure how Bree would take it.
“Yes, baby,” Bree answered. “But I’ve been so worried about you. And I had a lot of nightmares Thursday night.”
“So did I,” Mel said. “Is it better now?”
“I think so. I woke up screaming late at night. I was so panicked. Then, Dad came in and he held me until I went back to sleep.”
“You’re so lucky, Bree,” Melody said sadly. “You made up with your dad while he’s still healthy and will be around a while. Mine was dying when we buried the hatchet.”
Bree leaned forward across me and kissed Melody—first on the cheek and then on the lips. As they pulled apart, they froze for a few seconds with their lips barely touching, pulled together like magnets.
“It looks like you two have buried the hatchet, too,” I whispered.
“Sometimes in each other,” Bree said.
“But yes. We’re learning how to be sisters,” Melody said. She turned and kissed me. It was light and not passionate, but her tongue slipped out to lick my lips and touch the tip of my tongue as well. She pulled back with her eyes glued to mine.
“Now kiss Bree,” Melody whispered. Bree froze, looking at Melody. Whatever she saw apparently put her mind at ease because she turned her lips to mine and gave me a kiss as soft and sensuous as Melody’s.
“What are you up to, Melody?” I asked when Bree and I parted.
“I’m going to be gone for a while,” Melody said. “I don’t want the two of you to have to wait until I get back before you get to kiss each other.” She leaned in and kissed Bree again. “I don’t want you to feel guilty about kissing each other.”
“We’re still not going to be making out here,” I said firmly. “It just isn’t a good idea.”
“That’s fine,” Melody said. “There are lots of other places. Just… don’t go to third base yet, okay? I want to be here for that.”
“Third base?”
“I can’t imagine either of you kissing for very long without getting to second,” Melody giggled. I hushed her. Bree’s eyes were glistening as Melody looked at her. “I want to be first to lick you before Tony does,” she whispered. I felt Bree shudder on my lap.
“You don’t have to do this, baby,” Bree said. “I can wait for you… as long as it takes.”
“That’s what you’ve shown me. But it’s more fun this way.”
Both girls cuddled against me, kissing me on either cheek and then moving their mouths enough so we were all three connected lip-to-lip-to-lip.
“Mmm. About no making out at the tent,” I reminded them.
They settled against me with their hands held against my chest and went to sleep.
Bree’s phone vibrated at a quarter till midnight. She stretched and started to move but Melody caught her hand and held her close to us.
“Take good care of my baby,” Melody whispered to Bree. “Tony, please don’t ever stop loving me.”
She pulled herself together and stood up. Bree started to follow but Melody held up her hand.
“I need to get going before the next shift arrives,” Bree said.
“There are no other shifts tonight. I, on the other hand, have two other lovers waiting for me at home. Can you bring Tony home in the morning?” Melody asked. Bree nodded. Melody leaned down and kissed each of us, and headed for the car.
I had to paint it. There was no way around it now. With Harold’s death, the image of the autopsy was constantly swimming in my head. But time was a precious commodity. I had no time to paint.
I took Melody, Lexi, Mom, and Dad to the airport Sunday morning at ten. They were headed to different gates, but it didn’t really matter since I couldn’t pass through security anyway. I wondered what it was like in the ‘old days’ when you could kiss your lover goodbye at the gate. Or like in Casablanca where you stood at the foot of the stairs as she climbed up to the door of the plane. Shit! I’m so fucking sentimental. Lexi stood patiently until the last minute as Melody and I clung to each other, kissing like I’d never see her again.
I didn’t have a chance to nap before we left and driving home from the airport, I found my eyes bleary and hard to focus. I realized I was crying again. I pulled off at an exit on the south side of town and wound around until I found a little mall. I went in for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. It was an odd kind of place—not your usual shopping center. There was a huge second-hand store on one corner, every cell phone carrier in the world, a food court, bank, European deli, Radio Shack, and a place for buying trailer hitches and car racks. Walmart was on the other side of the parking lot next to a fitness center.
I called Lissa and told her I had some errands to take care of on the way home and I’d be a couple of hours.
I just needed to be alone for a while.
I wandered into the second hand store and it was pretty intense. Yeah. What can possibly be intense about a second hand store? It has all kinds of stuff from crystal vases to trays full of unmatched silverware to clothes for men and women. There were shoes, suitcases, kids’ games and toys. A small collection of furniture occupied one corner of the store while nearby there were sheets, curtains, and towels. Who buys someone’s used towels?
What got to me as I wandered down the aisles was that everything there used to belong to someone else. It was all the same stuff you could find at Sears, but what you buy new has no story. I picked up a tricycle—the plastic kind with a huge wheel in front and a seat so low that the kid’s butt would almost drag on the ground. Some little kid had ridden this thing, maybe on a street lined with trees, on a sidewalk with cracks in it that would bump the front wheel up into the air. I could hear squeals of laughter that reminded me of Drew when I was chasing him around the back yard.
What happened to the kid who owned that trike? Did he or she just grow up and the parents gave away the old stuff as the kid acquired new? Or had they kept it as a loving treasure, stored in the rafters of the attic until they finally died and their stuff was donated to charity?
There was a whole section of white shirts. I hardly knew anyone who wore white shirts. Dad had a couple that he kept for wearing with a suit if he went to a wedding or for special events at his school. But here were maybe fifty of them, hanging in a row. I thought about how I was always getting paint on myself when I worked. The shirts were three to five dollars each and I picked up eight of them that were big enough to put on over all my clothes.
Who wore clothes this size? I had an image of a 300-pound used car salesman, sweating in the summer heat with a white shirt he could barely keep tucked in and a tie that was only long enough to reach the middle of his enormous belly. I could paint that.
I don’t know why I wandered through the furniture section, but there was an old recliner there for fifty bucks. I tried it out and thought about my nights at Tent City and my big chair in the living room at home. The studio could use a chair like that for times when I got too sleepy while working late at night.
My coffee was long gone when I finally loaded the chair and shirts into my car and headed back to town. I stopped at the studio and deposited the chair. I figured I’d better wash the shirts before I used them.
My time wandering and imagining other people’s stories settled my mind and my emotions. I was still exhausted and when I got home Kate and Lissa let me go take a nap. I was out like a light.
We puttered around the kitchen eating Thanksgiving leftovers—just the three of us. We gathered up dirty sheets and towels from the guest rooms, did laundry, vacuumed the carpets, and generally tidied up the house. It was only eight o’clock when the phone rang. We had it on speaker immediately.
“I love you,” Melody said. “We’re at Mom’s and all safe. It’s really late here and I’m exhausted.”
“We wanted to know you were safe, Little One,” Lissa said. “We miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Call us or text us any time, okay? You know we’ll be waiting.”
“I know, lover. I have no idea what all we have to do. Mom and I talked all the way here. We’ll probably carry out Dad’s wishes,” she said.
“You’ll do what’s right,” Kate said. “Just let your heart be your guide. I love you.”
“Love you, too, Kitten. Love you, Lissa. Love you, Tony.”
“I think we might as well go to bed, too,” Lissa said.
“Do you… um… want to be… alone tonight?” Kate asked. “I mean the two of you? I can go back to the dorm.” We looked at her in shock.
“We want you with us, Kitten,” I said.
“We always want you with us,” Lissa added.
“I didn’t want you to feel like I was trying to move into Melody’s place,” Kate said. I could see tears starting to form in her eyes.
“Who would fill your place if you moved into Melody’s?” I asked. “You have your own place in our hearts and in our bed.”
We kissed a lot but didn’t fool around. We settled in and I got center-of-the-bed honors with Kate and Lissa, my beautiful lovers, curled naked against me.
Lissa and I started our racquetball practice Monday afternoon a little half-heartedly. I’d been tempted to cancel it and get an early start on our anatomy team project review. They were a little pissed that I wouldn’t start until our usual time at four-thirty. After Lissa and I got warmed up, though, we found a lot of release in working hard on the court. We didn’t try to beat each other down, but played more for the connection between the two of us. We were physically tired by the time we finished, but mentally more refreshed than we’d been all weekend.
Unfortunately, Lissa had to go home to our empty house while I met with my anatomy team.
The team reviewed our project and we argued constantly over little things like sentence construction. In addition to the pieces that we’d all contributed to the project, we each had written our own conclusion.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Amanda accused me. “Of course it’s all connected. ‘The leg bone’s connected to hip bone’ and all that,” she sang. “You’re just pointing out the obvious.”
“You don’t get it,” Bree defended me. “Tony isn’t talking about joints and ligaments. He’s talking about how all the systems are connected—how the body doesn’t work unless all the systems are functioning together.”
“Let Tony defend his own conclusions,” Justin argued. “It just looks weak to me. It’s metaphysical and we’re in a physical science class.”
“That’s better than sounding like a regurgitation of the text book,” Amanda surprised me by attacking Justin’s precise technical conclusions. It was obvious, though, that she wasn’t defending me; she was just set on tearing down everyone.
“All right,” Bree said. “Go ahead and rip me a new one, too. Jesus, bitch! Do you think you’ve spelled out anything new by tracing the path of a contusion from point of contact to paralysis?” Before it could go any further, I jumped in.
“Guys! Take it easy. We’re attacking each other. This is a joint project, but the conclusions are the part that is personal. They are the only thing that will differentiate between us in our grades. We each have to take responsibility for our own. What is it that’s really bugging you, Amanda?” I asked.
She was quiet for a minute and took a deep breath. Even Justin just folded his arms and leaned back as if he was already defeated by what she would say.
“I can’t afford anything less than a four-oh if I want to get into Johns Hopkins,” she said quietly. “SCU isn’t a top tier school and my grades will be discounted as it is. Group projects always make me nervous.”
“Do you honestly think the work we did together on this project is less than the best that anyone in class will produce?” Bree asked. Amanda shook her head.
“Tony’s conclusion… it will make the rest of us look bad.”
“Is it really that bad?” I asked.
“No. That good,” she said. “Not even that. It’s different. It shows what bringing a different discipline to bear on a project will do. By comparison, mine looks text book. Sorry I accused you of that, Justin.”
“You want me to rewrite it so yours looks better?” I asked. I was serious. I didn’t need a perfect score in this class. For me, it’s an art project.
“No. I want to rewrite mine,” she said.
The session went better after that, but we worked until close to nine before we were all satisfied with what we had. Amanda’s new conclusion was risky. Instead of talking about the anatomy, she talked about the discoveries of working with a team with different perspectives. It just might work.
“Darling?” I whispered as I entered the bedroom.
Lissa was already in bed when I got home. She rolled toward me and I could see she’d been crying.
“Oh, dearest, what is it?”
“So lonely in bed without you,” Lissa said. “Just got overwhelmed.”
I stripped and crawled in beside her leaving my clothes in a pile on the floor. I pulled her close and gave her a long but gentle kiss. She pushed me away.
“You ate Thai food tonight, didn’t you?” she asked. “Go brush your teeth and come back to bed.”
I started to get up, but she pulled me back for another quick kiss.
“I had leftover turkey,” she sighed. “Pad Thai would have been nice. But not second hand.”
I went to brush my teeth extra carefully and used mouthwash, too.
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