Heaven Is to Your Left

by Vanda Writer

  “Heaven’s no! I knew too many of them from my father’s side of the family. Crashing bores. You?”

  “No. I never dreamed about marrying anyone. Is this chaise lounge I’m sitting on Richard’s?”

  “Where did that come from out of the blue?

  “It is, isn’t it?

  “No, not Richard’s. Mine.”

  “Then the one you’re lying on is?”

  “Remember, we weren’t going to do that while we’re here. We have such a short time.”

  “Sorry. It’s kind of a reflex. I have a confession to make.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Over the years, I’ve grown to like Richard.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’ve tried not to, but he’s kind of an oddly likable fella. He’s terrible with anything having to do with your career. He has no sense of theater or cabaret at all. But he’s a good person. Easy to talk to, sometimes funny, caring, and he loves you to pieces. How could I not like a guy who feels like that?”

  “I never expected that to come out of you.”

  “Me either. You know what’s also weird? Despite liking him, I don’t feel guilty about my relationship with you. I know I’m supposed to, but I can’t manage it. It feels like they’re just two different things, both important, but different. Is that how you fit him and me into your life?”

  “I don’t think I think things through as deeply as you do.”

  “Too bad we have to be secret about us with him. Sometimes I wish I could tell him how happy you make me and sometimes, I pretend that if he knew about us, it’d make him happy too.”

  “Well, pretending and reality are two very different things. I’m going to take a nap.” She lowered the back of her chaise lounge.

  “I’m going to join you in that nap.” I stretched and lowered the back of my chaise lounge too.

  I sort of stayed awake, but I sort of fell asleep too. I was in some in-between place with breezes lightly drifting over my body. The air grew cooler and I felt her hand on my arm. She whispered, “Let’s have dinner.”

  While I slept, she’d made supper in the yellow kitchen behind a colorful curtain just a few steps beyond the main room. Instead of eating at the big dining table, we ate hotdogs and hamburgers at the little round table in the yellow kitchen.

  “Oh, gosh, Jule, you can even make hamburgers taste out of this world.”

  “I didn’t do anything special. Try a hotdog.”

  “I know you did do something special, because that’s how you cook, but this . . .” I grabbed a hotdog from the plate in the center of the table where she’d put all the hotdogs in their buns. “I’d be five hundred pounds if you always cooked for me.” I bit into the dog and fell back in my chair—ecstasy. “Oh, gosh, this is terrific too.”

  She laughed, flicking her napkin at me. “It’s a hotdog.”

  “Not just any hotdog.”

  “You’re a little bit out of your mind, you know.”

  “Yeah, I do. Did you ever have a hope chest?” I asked as I devoured the rest of my dog.

  Juliana put her hotdog down on her plate. “Yes. Yes, I did. I haven’t thought about that in years. What made you think of that now?”

  “Schuyler’s coffin.”

  “What?”

  “His coffin looked like my hope chest. Well, sorta. Mine was made of cedar chips, and I don’t know why my hope chest popped into my mind in the church. Did you make a fuss about yours?”

  “A little. When I was fourteen, I bought some pretty curtains that I imagined hanging in the kitchen I’d one day have.” She got a faraway look. “I wonder what happened to them? Or the chest for that matter. Did you put special things in yours for the future?”

  “Nah. My mother dreamed about the husband I’d marry, but I didn’t. She put sheets and towels and pillowcases from when she was first married in there. She even put in her wedding dress, hoping one day I’d wear it. When it came time for me to wear one of those things, I was a lot skinnier than she had been, and the war was on and no one was wearing fancy wedding dresses anyway.”

  “But you still looked awfully pretty in yours.”

  “Yeah? You remember?”

  “Of course. Do girls still keep hope chests?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know any young girls, but if I had a daughter, I wouldn’t get her a hope chest.”

  “No?”

  “No. I think she should decide for herself what she wants to do. I suppose most girls do get married, but not all of them.”

  “Obviously not. You didn’t.”

  “But I’m an old maid. No girl wants to grow up to be that.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “I think that’s it.”

  “What?”

  “Why I thought of my hope chest when I saw the coffin.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for me they’re both about death.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that. Except . . . you do the dishes.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and laid the napkin on the table.

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I cooked.”

  “True. Except I chopped the celery and carrots. Don’t you have a dishwasher?”

  “My goodness, no. Do you? Haven’t you seen the prices they’re getting on those?”

  “Yeah, but you always have the latest thing and you never seem to worry much about

  cost, so I thought maybe . . .”

  “But I don’t want to be robbed. I would never spend that kind of money on a machine

  that does something I can easily do myself for free. We hardly ever come up here; it would be a waste. Are you really so opposed to dishwashing?”

  “No. I just wanted to see how one works. I haven’t seen one in person yet. Just in magazines.”

  “Do the dishes slowly,” she said, rising from her seat. “I have things to do in the other room. Don’t come out till I tell you.”

  As I put my hands into the soapy water, I knew I’d never been so happy in my whole entire life. I didn’t hurt Schuyler to have this. I didn’t cause anything. I didn’t tell Mr. Wilferini to do that. That was true. Wasn’t it? And now I was with her and she was out there doing “things” in the other room. Things to surprise me. Oh, time stop here on this day. Never move another notch forward. Let me live here always. There’s no tomorrow. I’m in love. In love! I threw soap bubbles into the air.

  Jule ran in.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Put this on.” She laid some clothes on a chair and ran back out.

  It was the suit she’d made for me during the war. She’d saved it! I scrambled into it and stood on my side of the curtain. “Can I come out now? I need help with the tie.”

  “Yes! No! Wait. Just a minute.”

  She played the piano on the other side. I recognized the tune as one she’d sung in her first Copa act, “The Trouble with Me Is You.” A fun song. It was on her first album.

  “Okay,” she called. “You can come out now.”

  I stepped into what she had transformed into a small nightclub. The lights were low and there was a round table with a white tablecloth in the center. A flickering candle and two wine glasses, not yet filled, sat on the table. A few feet away was a microphone and to the side, a hi-fi. Juliana wore a white satin dress that bounced around her silken calves; it had a low-cut bodice. She knew how much I liked peeking at her when she was fully clothed.

  I walked toward her; she greeted me before I had reached the table. “First, let me fix that tie.” Her fingers against my neck sent chills through my body.

  “Okay, now you look gallant. Madame, welcome to the Chez Juliana,” she said in a French accent. “Come.” I followed her. “Mais bien sur, zee best seat in la maison.”

  I sat down, eager to be entertained by the sexiest, most glamorous, most talented nightclub singer in the world, who was now even a Broadway star and would soon be a great opera diva.

  She played records on the hi
-fi while she danced and sang into the microphone, looking right at me. Neither of us concerned, at last, about who might be watching us. I even joined her in a few verses of the songs. Insisting we save the wine for later, she made us sidecars. I hadn’t had a sidecar in almost a year. But here at Chez Juliana I could have them without worry. At the end of one of the songs, she stepped over to me at the table, poured white wine into each glass, picked up one of the glasses, and said, “To the most beautiful woman in the room.”

  “Me?” I said, standing, holding my own glass of wine.

  “Mais bien sur, of course.”

  She clinked my glass and we took a sip. Then she took our glasses and put them on the table. She put her hand out. “May I have this dance?”

  My heart beat in my throat like it did that first night. “Oh, yes, Jule, yes.”

  She lifted a delicate forefinger— “A minute”—and glided over to the hi-fi to remove the 33 rpm record. She replaced it with a 78. As the record began, she took me in her arms and sang “My Romance.” The very first song she ever sang to me. The very first time she ever kissed me. We danced, swirling in an aura of our love like we were dancing in a timeless dream around and around.

  “My romance doesn’t have to have a moon in the sky,” she sang. “My romance doesn’t need a blue lagoon standing by, no month of May . . .”

  I wanted to shout, “I love you!” but I knew that would spoil it. She didn’t want to hear that, and I was growing weary of saying it without it being returned. These moments, these wordless moments right now, these were the ones that had to be our moments. Nothing else could exist for us beyond now. But the song was coming to an end and I didn’t want it to end. Cling to it. Stop it from ending. She sang:

  “Wide awake I can make my most fantastic dreams come true.”

  And we stood still, looking deep into each other’s eyes while she sang the last line, “My romance doesn’t need a thing, but you.”

  She bent and kissed me. She kissed me long and deep and I wanted it to go on forever, but kisses always must end, and our lips parted.

  Arms around each other, sleepy, we took our glasses of wine and walked to the top floor, to the bedroom she’d prepared. “Now, this room is not all that special,” she said when we stood outside the door. “We use it for storage. That’s where a lot of that hi-fi equipment came from. But it’s a room that no one has ever slept in. It has a nice view. I just don’t want you to be disappointed thinking it’s some palatial suite. It’s not; it’s small and—”

  I’d never known her to get anxious about pleasing me. “Can we go in?” I asked.

  “Certainly, I just want you to know that it isn’t—”

  I pushed open the door. Inside was a canopy bed. The bedspread had a daisy pattern. It was a small room like she said, but warm. She’d spent all day making it warm. It smelled like wood. I walked over to the open window, where I could feel a light breeze. From there I could see the mountains and the trees, and the lake and a sky bursting with stars. “Oh, Jule.” I held back my tears. She didn’t like tears. “It’s so beautiful.”

  “You like it?” She was practically hugging the doorjamb on the other side of the room as if afraid to enter. Afraid I wouldn’t approve. “Yes, I like it. I like it very much.”

  She came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. She turned me to face her and we kissed right in front of that window, as if our love was as good as anyone else’s.

  “I want to make love to you, Jule. However, you want it.”

  “Really?” she said with one of those glints in her eye that always warned me to be careful of what I promised. “It occurs to me that you owe me a strip tease.”

  “What?”

  “I did it for you way back when. Now, it’s your turn. I have a record player over there. I picked out some music.”

  “You sure thought of everything.”

  She put the record on the player and fixed it so it would keep playing over again. An instrumental song came on. “Bumps and Grinds” was the title.

  “Where did you find something like this?”

  “Oh, I get around.” She picked up the fedora that sat on the dresser and put it on my head. “Wear this, doll face.”

  As the song continued to play with lots of booms and whistles, she sashayed to the bed and draped her lovely self across it, with her head and shoulders propped up with pillows. “Well?” She smiled and winked. “Take it off.”

  At first, I felt silly and awkward, but then I thought what the heck, and I just let the music take me over. I shimmied and shook and teased her to the music. I undid my tie and slid it off my neck real slow. I tossed it to her, and she caught it and kissed it. I twirled around and threw the fedora at her, then slowly opened each blouse button. Sometimes I pretended I was going to take something off, but didn’t. She oohed and aahed from the bed. A very appreciative audience. I slowly showed her one shoulder, then the other, but I couldn’t help laughing. Neither could she. Finally, I took my shirt off and twirled it in the air, and she cheered. I let it go flying, and it landed somewhere. I teased her with unsnapping my bra. I threw the bra at her, and she caught it giggling like a teenager. Once my pants were down around my ankles, I climbed into the bed and into her arms. She finished taking off my pants. “I’d better turn off that grinding music or we’re both going to end up certifiable,” I said.

  I got up to turn off the music and when I turned around, she was stepping out of her dress. I watched as she took everything off and covered herself in a semi-sheer nightgown. We lay in each other’s arms, staring out at the night sky. “I hardly believe this is real,” I said. “You and me lying here. The only outside world is that sky.”

  Juliana sighed. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

  I wanted to say “I love you,” but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I let my heart say it to her heart.

  She ran her hand over my breasts down to the waistband of my underpants. She slowly pushed them down while she kissed me. My hand found its way past her nightgown to the curve of her hip and down her thigh. She sighed and slid down onto her back. She reached into the top drawer of the end table. “Do you mind?”

  A dildo and harness lay there. “I’d love to.”

  I kissed her breasts, her belly, her clit. Then, at the right time, I cinched myself into the dildo.

  By the time we’d gotten into bed, there wasn’t much left of the night. We were sleepy, but still not satiated, when the stars began to fade. I pulled her close to me. I didn’t want those stars to go. I didn’t want to move on into this day of separation, of back to business, of back to pretending. We were something different here.

  Suddenly, I was seized with the heat of her. I had to possess her. Possess her more than I ever had. Never let her go. Time was ticking away. Our time was going. I got on top of her and pushed the dildo deep inside her. She gasped. I touched her clit and kissed her breasts and moved up and down on her, anything I could do to have her in me and me in her. We were one. Forget the world.

  She threw her arms around my neck and we moved together. Merging, merging into one being. I had to have her in me. She was yelling, “Yes! Yes! More! Please, more, Al, I need, I need . . .” At the highest point, when I knew she was climaxing, she yelled out, “I love you, Al!”

  I stared into her face for just a moment until she melted into the bed sheets and turned her head away. We were still connected, and I was afraid to move. Afraid to go into those next few seconds. We must stay here with more than a piece of rubber connecting us. We must stay here, not talking. I was content to listen to her breath and replay that moment, that moment I thought I didn’t imagine, that moment I thought was real, that moment she said, “I love you, Al.”

  “Uh, so, Al,” she said, giving me a light push off of her. The next moment had come and we were separating. I watched from the bed as she got up and put on her robe. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  She never turned to look back at me.

  I
reached out and touched her hand. “Jule.”

  “Breakfast,” she repeated, still not turning, and padded out of the room without her slippers.

  I saw that she had brought my suitcase into this room. It lay against the wall near the high fi. I put on a pair of trousers, a shirt, and sneakers and went down the stairs to the kitchen. She had a pot of coffee going and was standing over the burner, swishing around the scrambled eggs. “I hope scrambled is okay.” She didn’t turn to see me.

  “Sure. Terrific.”

  “I made coffee instead of tea, because I love the smell of coffee in the morning. I can make tea if you prefer.”

  “No. I like coffee in the morning.”

  “I know so little about you,” she said softly, pushing the eggs onto two plates with the spatula. She brought them to the table. “I should’ve made bacon. I forgot. How did I ever forget? I have it, but I didn’t— I can make it now.”

  “No. This is fine. I’m not that hungry anyway.”

  “Yes. So what else do I need to, to, uh . . .” She looked around the kitchen, everywhere but at me.

  “I’ll get the coffee,” I said.

  “No, I’ll get it.” She poured coffee into two cups and brought them to the table. “I forgot the saucers. What’s wrong with me?” She went to the cupboard to get the saucers and her hands shook. She dropped one and it smashed to the floor. “Now look what I’ve done.”

  I jumped up. “Careful. You’re not wearing anything on your feet.” I took the other saucer from her hand. “I’ve got it. Sit down. I’ll get the dustpan and broom.”

  “They’re here.” She lifted them from behind the refrigerator. “I can do it.”

  “You don’t have slippers on. Let me. You sit.”

  She let me take the broom and dustpan from her limp grip, but she didn’t sit. She stood there, as if not sure what she should be doing. I put the intact saucer under her cup and got a second one for me. “Jule, sit. Your bare feet are making me a wreck. Sit. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  As I dumped the pieces into the garbage, she unfolded her linen napkin and laid it across her lap. I joined her, ready to eat. “It’s cold,” she announced. “You can’t eat that. I’ll make new.”