The Love of My (Other) Life

by Traci L. Slatton

  “I don’t know, I don’t have a vision for my life, I make it up as I go along,” I murmured, following him back out to the waiting choir. “Then I shock myself and go too far. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m already mid-thirties, and I’m still just bumbling along.”

  “It’s not about age,” the rev said in his kindly tone. “The Divine is always with you. As A Course in Miracles says, ‘I no longer need to be the director of the universe, and can simply rest in the assuredness that ‘I need do nothing’ but be still and let His forgiveness touch my mind.’”

  The choir, as a body, gathered around the rev and me—and broke into song. The Alleluia chorus.

  The rev and I exchanged a smile.

  “I could really use forgiveness,” I said more somberly than I intended.

  The rev, despite his unflagging bonhomie, is really very sensitive. For a moment, he looked stricken, his face melting in on itself like a wax mask. Then his usual placid expression returned.

  “Not you, Tessa, you’re one of our angels. And it’s not about sin. That’s too literal an understanding.

  Forgiveness is a much broader concept than that. It has to do with wholeness.”

  His secretary, Joan, yodeled out from his office.

  “Reverend, Rabbi Schwartzbaum is on the phone about the peace march!”

  “Okay,” he called back. He turned back to me.

  “Tessa, do you need me?”

  “Mrs. Leibowitz is failing. Her doctor says she’s wearing out with old age. He wants to move her to a hospice. She refuses to go.”

  “Oh dear, let’s call her kids,” he said, his brows beetling together on his forehead.

  “She doesn’t want to worry them. She’s adamant about that.”

  “Hmm. You’ll think of something, Tessa, you always do. You’ve been a blessing and an asset to our eldercare program since the day you started here.

  What would we do without you? What’s it been, five or six years now? You were fresh out of graduate school when you started here. We do appreciate your good work. Hope we can keep you on. Our funds are so depleted.” He was already hurrying away to take the cordless phone that Joan was waving at him.

  Just like that, I was determined anew that some financial blessing would show up for the rev and all his worthy programs. But I couldn’t wait for a radiant, hymn-singing being to wave a magic wand over the situation. Until the angel appeared, there was me.

  Screwed up, anything-but-an-angel me, who still had a few resources up her sleeve.

  I pulled out my cell phone and found the old contact information.

  * * *

  * * *

  11

  The laboratory at night, or through the rabbit hole

  B rian was alone in the lab, as he always was these days. He was thirty-something now, still dressing like a grad student. His shirt was stained with sweat and unevenly buttoned, his hair ragged. His face wore a raw expression as he stared at a strange machine. It resembled an arbor with a tangled flowering of wires, like a spider plant with a hundred babies, all of it connecting to several computers.

  It was strange but immeasurably beautiful. It was his last hope.

  Brian fingered one of the nodal bursts of cables and ran his hands down along it to a laptop that was bigger than the others. “I wish you were a time machine,” he told it. He held his breath, wondering if it would answer.

  “Affirmative, Brian. I read you,” was what he half-expected to hear. But only silence responded. He smiled bitterly. “If you were a time machine, I could go back and change things. That’s what I really want to do. Why didn’t I invent that?”

  A bustle and the rubbery treading of sneakers sounded. Rajiv entered the lab and leaned against the wall. He was older, too—the same age as Brian.

  He gave Brian a compassionate look, the look of unvarnished acceptance that passes between old friends who’ve shared too many beers, career victories and mishaps, conquests, weddings and funerals. “The device jumps laterally into parallel worlds.

  There’s no changing the timeline.”

  “Yet,” Brian said.

  Rajiv shook his head. “Bri, man, you must accept the limitations of the physical universe. It’s amazing you’ve come this far. Amazing and terrifying. What you’ve created goes against the order of the worlds somehow. The entire universe rests on dharma, and what are you doing to dharma with this device? I wonder if it will really work?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Brian said. His fingers pounded out something on the computer keyboard, then he leapt at the machine and threw some switches. The whole contraption lit up. Brian yelped with excitement, and the hair on his cervical vertebrae tingled. He fiddled with a dial and tapped again on the keyboard.

  A soft hum like monks chanting ‘om’ rose and filled the lab. The arbor glowed with blue light in concentric rings like the expanding wavelets in a pool.

  “My God, Brian,” Rajiv yelped.

  “Maybe I can change something, somehow,” Brian said. He closed his eyes prayerfully, and then stepped into the brilliant blue center of the arbor.

  “You’re not going to test it on yourself!” Rajiv said. “Brian!”

  * * *

  * * *

  12

  Lamb chops, plasma, and bliss

  It was late afternoon by the time I found myself at my front door. After talking to the rev, I’d made a call I never thought I’d make again. So there you have it, Dante was right after all: hell really does ice over.

  To comfort myself, I went downtown to Pearl Paints on Canal Street and stocked up on tubes of oil paints. Utrecht makes fine oils, a pleasure to use, with their buttery texture and brilliant color and complex chemically smell. I put down the shopping bag on the floor to rummage around in my messenger bag for my key.

  Smoke was pouring out from the bottom of my door.

  I found my key finally and jammed it in, but I couldn’t get the door to open. In a panic of fear and frustration, I banged my head against the door.

  It was a reflexive gesture. I wasn’t expecting it to open.

  But it did, and there stood Brian, wearing an apron. My apron. He sang, “Hi, honey, welcome home.”

  I had a moment of utter, speechless shock.

  “Would you like a drink, Tessa?” he asked. “You look like you could use a drink.”

  I recovered myself enough to manage a few words. “What, what are you doing here? How’d you get in?”

  “The door was unlocked,” Brian said.

  “No, it wasn’t.” I tried to push through him to see what was on fire in my home. My brain had short-circuited, but I figured I could put out the fire and then deal with the fact that a crazy homeless man had broken into my apartment.

  Brian threw an arm around my waist and halted me. He gestured with his chin at the door on which hung a sign that said NOTICE OF HOUSING COURT.

  A luminous landscape was painted over it, but the letters still showed through. “Great painting,” Brian said. “Almost as good as your figure drawings.”

  “You broke into my apartment, and you’re talking about my paintings?” I asked incredulously.

  “You, a total stranger?”

  “We’re not strangers anymore, you met me today,” he said in a reasonable tone. “Did you do that recently? Is that why you said you were painting again? It’s really beautiful. Exquisite.”

  I softened because I couldn’t help it. My art was the way into my heart. “Thank you. I was rather pleased with my use of color and the composition of trees framing the stone wall.” I stole a look at Brian; I really didn’t think he was an axe murderer. Would an axe murderer be able to appreciate my painting?

  No, axe murderers would like the ugly crap sold by Frances Gates.

  Brian held aloft that professorial index finger.

  “Notice that this isn’t a canvas. It’s an eviction notice.”

  He had no right to be standing in my kitchen. I tore myself out of his grasp. “What’s al
l the smoke?”

  “Lamb chops caught on fire. Greasy suckers.”

  I ran to the oven and threw open the oven door.

  Inside, smoldering on my cast iron skillet, were blackened, coal-like lumps of meat.

  “I can scrape off the charred part,” Brian said.

  Those were my last frozen chops, and I was saving them for when I was really, really hungry and couldn’t stand another bite of free bagels and cream cheese. “No! Get out of my apartment right now. You have no right to be here!” I was yelling and stabbing the air with my finger. A tiny, querulous voice in the back of my being wondered, had I somehow encouraged him today by not being forceful enough with him? Had I been bizarrely tolerant, so that he thought I was inviting him in? “Brian, I mean it. Get out, and don’t bother me any more!”

  “But I came all the way from a parallel world to see you, and I only had five days, four hours, twenty two minutes, not a second more, and the clock is counting down.” He made a placating gesture with his hands, palms facing me, trying to appease me.

  “I don’t care what crazy farm you escaped from. I don’t know you. I don’t want you in my home. Now.

  Get out!”

  “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  “I’m calling the police,” I decided. I grabbed the phone and punched in 9-1-1.

  “If you call them, I’ll tell them you stole a Cliff Bucknell from the Frances Gates gallery.”

  I hung up the phone. I squared off to Brian. Both of us were determined. I could feel the tension like a block of marble between us. “You really think I’m going to let you stay here? A criminally insane derelict? I should whack you in the head with that cast iron skillet and drag you outside to the park where you belong.”

  “You’d never do something like that.” He grinned and shook his head. His stance didn’t relent. “You’re a bleeding-heart caretaker without a spine here. In my world—”

  “‘My world?’ There’s only one world, you lunatic.

  One!”

  “Nope. You’re wrong. There are lots of universes.

  Parallel worlds, a near infinite number of them, a different world for every decision. We live in an unfathomably enormous multiverse.”

  “You’re from a different universe?”

  “That’s what I keep telling you. You listen better in my world.”

  “I’m not a caretaker, I’m a blocked artist with noble ideals for helping humanity—”

  Brian made a strangled sound. He gave me a look of total disbelief, as if words had failed him.

  Then he grabbed me and kissed me.

  At first, I fought him, of course. But then something else crept in. Something soft and luscious, something that made me tingle south of my naval and north of my kneecaps. It had just been so damn long since anyone kissed me—and for being a crazy homeless guy with delusions of physics grandeur, Brian could kiss.

  And kiss and kiss and kiss.

  And kiss some more.

  And then I was sort of limp like a pool of uncongealed Jell-O.

  Brian lifted his head. “Blocked, noble, et cetera, et cetera? Is that what you say to yourself when you sleep alone, night after night? When’s the last time you went on a date? When’s the last time a man held you and kissed you until your panties crept up under your armpits and your insides turned to plasma? When’s the last time your lover held you all naked and sweaty until you were done moaning and screaming and were limp with bliss?”

  “My sex life is none of your business,” I said. It came out as kind of a mewl and I would have hated myself, but I was sort of in shock at the masterful way Brian had kissed me. I had never in my life been kissed with such authority. It gave me a whole new regard for him. Not that I’d ever admit to that.

  “You don’t have a sex life.”

  “At least I’m not crazy.” To sound serious and self-possessed, I said, not meaning it, “Let me go.”

  “You stole a million dollar piece of art because you think it’s ugly, and I’m the crazy one?” He chuckled shortly and then kissed me again. He brought my palm to his lips and kissed my hand gently, intensely. Slowly, expertly, he ran his lips and tongue along my wrist.

  All the nerve endings in my body unfurled and sang opera.

  “I have to help Reverend Pincek,” I murmured.

  What else could I say? It was as if this stranger knew my body’s innermost secrets.

  “Sweet, but you have to give it back.” He unbuttoned my top button and kissed my clavicle and the hollow of my throat.

  I moaned.

  “I just want to please you,” he said softly.

  “It’s been so long. Don’t stop!” The words poured out of me—I couldn’t control them.

  Brian stopped kissing me and looked me full in the eyes. “Tessa, sweetheart, are you sure?”

  That’s when I owned what I wanted, and I didn’t need words for that. I kissed him back.

  * * *

  * * *

  13

  Barolo and missing moles

  We cuddled under the duvet. Brian’s body was as lithe and muscular as his speed and reflexes had promised. And I might be the artist, but the man was a genius with his hands.

  And his mouth.

  It was as if he’d made love to me a thousand times already, and he knew precisely where, how, and when to stroke, press, and accelerate.

  That’s right, this is what it was like to get mine.

  That’s right, I have an erotic core. Mrs. Leibowitz was right, it was all about getting laid.

  My ex-husband had never managed to stir me to such lush intensity.

  I felt like a kitten that had lapped all the cream and I stretched luxuriously. Brian watched me with an inscrutable, though slightly bemused, expression on his face.

  “You’re good at this!” I said.

  “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be good at it again. Maybe ten.” He nuzzled me.

  We could spend all afternoon in bed … . Oh, wait, no we couldn’t. “Oh. I have a meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “With a guy.”

  “What kind of guy?” He pushed himself up on one elbow and touched my breast. “Here, you have a red mark on your breast. Where my Tessa had a mole.”

  “My ex made a comment. I was self-conscious and had it removed. I always had to be perfect for David.”

  “Good ole Saint David the savior,” Brian said bitterly, biting off the words with more savagery than the situation called for. He rose from the bed and slipped on his jeans.

  I sat up, wondering at his bitterness and admiring his finely knit body. He was well made, indeed, with beautiful symmetry, perfect proportions, and rounded limbs that fit into his torso and pelvis, as if he’d been designed by Polykleitos, the ancient Greek sculptor. Brian’s skin was warm toned like linen cloth with a blush to it. I thought about painting him. Could I get him to model for me during his five days and four hours here? I wondered again what had provoked him. Saint David? As if.

  But when Brian turned to face me, zipping his pants, he was composed. “Want some wine? I opened a bottle from the cupboard.”

  “There’s no bottle,” I started. Then I remembered. “You opened the last bottle of Barolo from my wedding?”

  “Why not?”

  “I was saving it for some wonderful occasion, like when I sell my first painting.”

  Brian scanned me. “You have all those beautiful landscapes stacked in the living room, and you’ve never sold a painting?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe because I’ve never shown them.” I flopped back down onto the bed.

  “Never ever?” he queried.

  I shook my head again.

  “Why the hell not?”

  I groaned and pulled the cover over my head.

  “Okay, we’ll celebrate being alive today.” He shrugged. “What’s more wonderful than that?”

  “You know what I mean,” I gru
mbled, throwing back the blanket. “Fine. I’ll have a glass. But quit going through my stuff.”

  He grinned and left the bedroom. I hoped he didn’t notice my messenger bag in the kitchen.

  I looked around my bedroom as if seeing it for the first time: plain white walls with cloudy outlines where paintings used to hang, bookcases with vacant spaces where David’s books had sat, picture frames facing down. It was a symphony of deliberate denial.

  Maybe I was seeing with new eyes. When my budding art career fell apart and David left, I packed away my landscapes and displaced all the photos, so I didn’t have to keep looking at my failures. I kept the room clean, but other than that, I had wasted not a second on it.

  Maybe it was time to put back up some paintings.

  Maybe it was even time to put away some of the photos.

  Brian came back in, whistling, and handed me a glass of wine.

  “You have a sneaky look on your face,” I observed.

  “L’chaim!” he said, raising his glass.

  “Here’s to saving eldercare.”

  “You’ve got to—”

  “Don’t tell me to give the skull back,” I said, quaffing the wine.

  “You stole it.”

  “It’s not theft.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Because it’s ugly?”

  I grunted. “It’s insured. There’ll be a huge settlement.”

  “Tessa, please. Frances will call the police, and you will go to jail. He knows you took it.”

  “He can’t prove it. The security cameras didn’t work. You said so,” I said smugly.

  “Not going to fly.”

  “What if it was really actually mine, all along?” I challenged him. “What if I could prove it?”

  “You took it from the gallery. You have to give it back.”

  “That gallery represents everything that is wrong with the contemporary art world that prevents real artists, good artists, from being successful!” I said, passionately. “That gallery should be burned to the ground as a service to humanity!”