Cover Art Copyright 2014 Martha Landry
3 LOVE STORIES
O’Neil De Noux
Copyright 2014 O’Neil De Noux
Smashwords Edition
Language of the Heart
SHIELDING MY eyes from the bright, New Orleans summer sun, hand over brow, I climb the three steps to the front gallery of the house of the girl I should have married twenty-five years ago. The house looks the same – a narrow, wooden shotgun painted tan with green trim and a dark green door. The trim might have been brown back in 1977 when I’d walked away from the house for the last time.
I’d passed it, of course, maybe a hundred times, driving through the French Quarter, glancing at it as I cruised along narrow Dauphine Street. But I hadn’t looked closely at it in quite a while. It’s actually a Greek Revival shotgun with four rectangular Doric pillars supporting a parapet decorated with elaborate gingerbread trim. On either side of the ornate door, with its glass transom above, stand full-length windows behind louvered shutters.
I ring the doorbell and hear the “ding dong” echo inside. I ring the bell again and move to the side of the gallery to the banana trees next to the house. I close my eyes for a moment and see her face again – Marie Burns of dark brown hair and full, sensuous lips. She had her mother’s blue eyes and fair, Scottish complexion, although she was half Italian. Her grandfather had changed their name from Burano during World War II.
I move back and ring the bell again, let out a long sigh – relief or just nervous tension – and start back down the steps. The door opens behind me and I turn, ready to ask the occupant if they know where the Burnses live now and she’s there, right hand on the door frame, left hand on her hip. Her hair is the same, long and curled past her shoulders, those blue eyes stare into mine as a smile crosses her full lips.
I take in a deep breath. She hasn’t changed, not one iota. She’s the same as she was, a twenty-two year old wearing a red tee-shirt and faded jeans.
“Hi, Edward.” The corners of her lips turn down and her eyes widen. She tries to speak again, her lips quivering, but she can’t get it out.
I step back up on the gallery, still staring at her face. It’s as if she’d just stepped out of a time machine. She’s as lovely as ever, still a good four inches smaller than me, still petite. My heart races. I feel it thumping in my chest.
She smiles again, sadly and says, “You want to come in?”
The living room is as I remembered, I think. A sofa is on the left, a love-seat on the right, a round coffee table between them. Marie closes the door behind me and moves to the love seat. I sit on the sofa and catch a scent of sandalwood. A candle burns on a table behind her. The room is well lit, sunlight streaming through the transom and the side windows.
I look back at Marie and my heart races again as she runs her fingers through her hair and twists her head, hair falling around her shoulders. She looks the same. Those blues stare at me as she sits with her legs crossed. She wears white sneakers.
“I knew you’d knock on my door one day.” Her eyes are suddenly wet and she smiles and wipes them with her fingers. Her eyes are so light, almost sky blue.
“Do your parents still live here?”
She shakes her head and takes in a deep breath, letting it out with a sigh, trying to laugh at her awkwardness. “They both passed away.” Her voice stronger now. “And yours?”
“Both gone.” I lean forward. “I have a daughter. She lives with her mother in Florida.”
“You still teaching?” Her eyes seem to dart as if she’s examining my face. I’ve changed. My dark brown hair is streaked with silver, my fifty-one year old face has lines and I quit wearing a moustache ten years ago. It was almost solid silver. I’ve put on a few pounds too, but not many.
“I’m at St. Michael the Archangel. St. Charles Parish.”
She nods. “I knew you went to St. Stanislaus in Bay St. Louis.”
“For a while. But I moved back and taught at Archbishop Rummel, then Archbishop Hannan.”
“All over the place.” Her voice even now, smoothed out as if she’s recovered from the shock of my knock on her door. My heart still flutters.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Yes.” The word comes out sounding like a relief, as if I’ve been in the desert these last years.
She stands and points her chin toward the back of the house and I follow those round hips though her living room, through an office with a roll top desk on one side and a computer table with a large screen. Her computer’s gray, a tower, a Macintosh. I have a Mac too, easiest to use.
The next room is her bedroom. A neatly-made double bed with a ruffled yellow comforter and white furniture, a dresser, vanity, chifforobe. It smells like lemon here.
We move past the bathroom into the kitchen at the rear of the house. A shotgun is a narrow house with rooms lined back to back. Theoretically, if you opened all the doors, you could fire a shotgun through the front door all the way through the house to the backyard without hitting anything.
“Diet or straight?” Marie pulls out a can of Diet Coke from the fridge.
“Diet’s fine.” She pulls out another can and drops ice into two tall glasses. We sit at the small table in her bright kitchen, walls extra white, Formica table and counters a pale sea green, floor a checker-board black and white. This is all new, I think.
She catches me staring at her face beneath the white light of her kitchen and takes in another deep breath as she says, “I can’t stop staring at you, either.”
“You haven’t changed.”
She laughs a deep throaty laugh and takes a sip of Coke. “You always made me laugh.”
I’ve said it again and again, get a woman to laugh and you’re half-way home. My old saying comes back to haunt me for a moment. I’d made this woman laugh, before I walked out on her for another pretty face. When I was in my twenties, there always seemed to be another pretty face.
“You’re still an executive secretary?”
She smiles wider than before. “It’s called an administrative assistant now. I’m at One Shell Square. Off-shore drilling company. Thurston Colt Associates.
“Did you ever marry?”
“No.” She takes another sip of Coke then asks, “Tell me about your daughter.”
“She’s sixteen going on thirty.” God I hate when I use clichés like that. “She’s a handful.” Another cliché. What’s wrong with me? I’m a lot more nervous than Marie at this point.
I slow down and tell her about Judy, who stays with me most of the summer and on some holidays. We were together until her mother and I divorced four years ago, so I got to see my little girl grow up.
“Wish I could see her every day, but her mother’s in Florida.” I explain how we have joint custody of our only child, but I don’t insist she stay with me six months out of the year. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe she should live primarily with her mother.
“I remember you never wanted kids.”
Marie nods and finishes her Coke.
“Would you have dinner with me tonight?” I swear I can hear my heart thundering in my ears.
“Of course, Edward. That would be nice.”
I PICK her up at six and take her to a steakhouse in Metairie. No fancy, French Quarter Restaurant for our first date of the Twenty-first Century. Those Quarter restaurants are for tourists and the rich, not for school teachers and secretaries. administrative assistants, that is.
As we return to the Quarter, she sits next to me in my five-year old Saturn, her legs crossed again. Marie wears a red dress with a wide collar cut low enough to hint at her cleavage and short enough to show her slim legs.
“I was engaged for about a year a couple years back.” She
shrugs. A chief financial officer in love with finance and mergers and deals and not in love enough with me. Tell me about your ex.”
“Pretty. Blonde. Always a sharp dresser. Didn’t like movies, though.”
“What kind? Men’s Adventure? Shoot ‘em ups?”
“All movies. Hated Titanic, Saving Private Ryan. Even hated Casablanca, Terms of Endearment.” My turn to shrug. “I didn’t find out until our honeymoon that she’d never read a novel in her life. Read textbooks in college and Cliff Notes for her fiction assignments. She can, however, program a VCR.”
That draws a smile from Marie. Surprisingly, I find a parking spot not far from her house and we walk hand-in-hand along the uneven sidewalk along Dauphine Street, a warm breeze flowing through her long hair. Her red lips looks extra dark in the yellow glow of the streetlight, this pale skinned beauty. As we turn to go up the steps to her house, I gently pull her close, cupping her chin in my hand and brush her lips with mine. We kiss softly and she leads the way up the steps with my heart stammering in my chest.
She drops her purse on the sofa, kicks off her high heels and turns back to me. I step to her, place my hands on her waist and we stare into each other’s eyes. Her pupils dart again and she’s searching. I hope she sees what I see in her eyes, what has probably always been there.
I want to touch her so badly, but this is her call.
Marie rises on her toes and we kiss and I wrap my arms around her. She takes me to her bed and my hands roam the familiar curves of her body and she is flat-out gorgeous and for the life of me I don’t know how I ever walked away from her.
Later, lying in each other’s arm, the ceiling fan spinning slowly overhead, my mind drifts back to our days together all those years ago. Dinner and movies and dancing and making love beneath ceiling fans. Why is the feeling more intense now? Because I’m older? Because we lost so much time?
“I don’t want to talk about how it ended,” she says and my mind snaps back to the present. “I want to talk about everything except that.” She leans over me, her eyes searching mine. “I want to talk to you so badly like we used to back when we thought we had it all in front of us.”
I feel a catch in my throat.
“You might not believe it, but it still hurts. It always will.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’ve been sorry for so long. For both of us.”
“Me too.” She lies her face against my chest and hugs me tightly. I feel a tear fall on my chest.
“This is hard,” she says and she’s right. Damn hard.
WE’RE TOGETHER every night through the week. Dinners and movies and even dancing. She cooks lasagna for me and I broil steaks. She likes my house, although it’s nearly as tiny as hers.
We talk so much, my jaw aches some nights as I drive home. We laugh too and it’s all so nice, all falling together again, so much so, it’s frightening. There are times of quiet too. Marie and I sit comfortably without talking, not needing to invent conversation.
“My daughter’s coming tomorrow,” I tell her Friday evening over iced-tea. “She’ll be here for two months.”
“Oh?” There’s a hint of panic in her face.
I squeeze her hand. “We’ll still see each other every day.”
“I just thought – you might want to spend time with her.”
“We will. Together and then you and I will spend our time alone.”
Here eyes still look sad. I know. There’s suddenly a road bump. I feel it too, both of us worried this may all blow away, like a spider web in the wind.
The bump comes with me the next morning, a bright Saturday. Marie and I plan to walk through the flea market at the bottom of the Quarter, next to the French Market.
I’m tense, but not as tense as Marie who squeezes my hand as we walk down Barracks Street toward the river. Judy wears cut-off jeans, too short but I avoid telling her that, and a black tee-shirt with the word “Hussy” in white, emblazoned across her chest. She walks a step in front of us, not looking back.
Marie and I both wear full-length jeans and button shirts, hers a fitted white blouse, showing off her shape nicely. She has silver barrettes holding her hair back at her temples. Looks great. A couple men check Judy out as we step into the flea market area and move through stalls of tee-shirts, sunglasses, belts, purses, used clothing.
“I’ll meet y’all back here in an hour,” Judy calls out, not waiting for a reply.
“She’s a handful, all right.” Marie pulls me close for a peck on the cheek. She freezes as Judy turns around, walks up and takes her hand.
“The girls will shop together,” Judy tells me and leads Marie through the stalls. “One hour,” Judy adds without looking back.
I hear them before I see them an hour later, as I’m thumbing through a box of old paperbacks, two Elmore Leonard westerns tucked under my arm. Their laughter is almost contagious and I chuckle along. Judy shows me her newest tee-shirt, fire-red with white letters proclaiming “Don’t Start With Me. You Won’t Win!”
Marie presents me with a dark blue tee-shirt with “New Awlins” across the chest.
“Show him yours,” Judy says.
Marie’s bought herself a pink tee-shirt with black letters that reads, “I Need Someone Real Bad. Are You Real Bad?”
Judy’s influencing her already.
We have lunch at a small Greek place, gyros all around. Sitting at the small table with our soft drinks, Judy asks, “Y’all went how long ago? Twenty-what years ago?”
“Twenty-five.” I take a sip of iced tea. The smell of sizzling meat in the place makes my stomach rumble. “We went out for three years.”
“How long did you and mom go out before y’all got married.”
I feel my neck redden as I answer, “Six months.”
Judy smiles mischievously. “Three years, huh?”
She’s up to something. But I can’t help but smile at the gleam my little girl’s green eyes. Of all the females I’ve ever known, Judy’s the one who has me wrapped.
“So.” Judy turns to Marie. “Was my Dad a hottie back then?”
She catches Marie with a mouthful of Diet Coke. It comes out her nose and I pass her my napkin. Judy gets up and gently rubs her back until Marie’s recovered, looking at me with wet eyes, grinning as she says yes, I was a hottie.
IN TWENTY-FIVE years people change, everyone changes, except Marie. It’s spooky, a little scary but I don’t want it to stop.
Driving my daughter home, I ask what she thinks of Marie, what she really thinks.
“She’s nice, Dad,” she answers in a condescending voice. “And very pretty. For an older woman.”
“What do you mean older? She looks the same as she did twenty-five years ago.”
Judy closes her eyes and leans back in the passenger seat. “Dad, she didn’t have dark circles under her eyes when she was twenty or twenty-two, whatever. And she didn’t have gray in her hair and those little jowls.”
“What little jowls!?”
Judy’s eyes snap open and she laughs. “I don’t mean it in a bad way, but her cheeks. They’re puffy like little jowls.”
I feel my heart racing again. Thankfully Judy closes her eyes once more as I struggle to recover from what she said and I wonder, is it true?
I DROP Judy and two girlfriends off at the Palace Theatre Complex Sunday afternoon and head for Marie’s. I have to park up on Rampart and walk six blocks back to her house. I see her peek out at me as I climb the steps and she opens the door.
Marie stands in her dark living room with her hands behind her back. She hasn’t bothered turning on the lights. She wears a white dress today, her hair fluffed out, draped past her shoulders. I recognize the song just as I’m about to kiss her, Jerry Rafferty’s Right Down the Line. I catch my breath. If there was as song that was ours that was the one, about a man telling his woman it’s her, right down the line. He tells her he’ll never leave her.
Marie hugs me and says, “For the last twenty-five year
s, every time I hear that song it reminds me of us. Every time I hear Stevie Wonder’s Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday I start crying. Can’t help myself, wondering what happened to the world we knew.
She leans back and looks up at me, those sky-blue eyes shimmering in the warm afternoon light streaming through the transom.
“We’re still going to Port-O-Call?”
“Sure.” I kiss her softly and the kiss intensifies for a moment before she pulls away, goes to freshen her lipstick, pick up her purse and turn off the stereo. I take her hand and we walk down Dauphine toward Esplanade Avenue.
The sun moves from behind a cloud and we walk beneath its glow. I turn to Marie and see it all – strands of gray hair in her hair, faded circles beneath those lovely eyes and her cheeks are puffy and seem to sag a little, like jowls. There are lines too, around her mouth and it hits me, like running into a brick wall.
My heart thunders and I have to catch my breath.
“You all right, Honey?” Marie grabs me and I nod slowly as I catch my breath and feel my heartbeat slowly returning to normal.
“I’m OK. Really.” I look hard at her face and know I love her like I’ve never loved before, even when we were young and we had everything before us. I feel rain on my face and realize, it’s a tear.
“You sure you’re all right?” Marie kisses the tear away and wipes the wetness from my face. God, I can’t remember the last time I cried like this.
“Why was I so stupid?” I ask. “Let all those years slip away.”
She lets out a relieved sigh and tells me there’s nothing we can do about it now. “Except stay together.” Her voice is strong, determined. “And don’t waste what we have left.”
We step off the curb right into the path of a mini-van moving too quickly down the narrow street. I yank Marie back and we stumble up on the curb as the van’s horn blares as it passes.
“My God!” Marie gasps.
3 Love Stories Page 1