A Bright House

Ray awoke beside a woman who had only just fallen asleep within the hour of her alarm sounding. A low volume jazz standard crept into the room. She stirred, eyes still closed, turned to her side and pressed the snooze button. Ray also moved to a shoulder, tucking his forearm beneath the pillow. Jenny returned to her position of back to mattress, profile to ceiling, eyes still closed. A light smile seemed to play across her mouth and this was where Ray’s attention travelled. There was a delicacy to the curve of her lips that he had not allowed himself to notice. Tiny lines framed them in a graceful sweep from above each nostril. He followed the flow of her chin, upward over the mouth and nose, across a smooth forehead arc into her unruly sensual hair.

It was easy for him to see, even without the benefit of sexual experience to draw upon, what she would be like in the throes. That hair vividly expressing her body, becoming integral to her abandon. Was she sleeping, or pretending to? He wondered this because the blankets had fallen lower upon her torso during the move for the clock. He wondered this because he found his gaze next fixed across the rise and fall of her breasts beneath a many years worn and washed white cotton t-shirt. The nipple nearest him pressed prominent through that thinned garment, causing his eyes to close to better see the visual that flashed there briefly.

How atypical, how Ray Townes, that this flash wasn’t one of his tongue and her breast. That it didn’t involve their eyes and bodies locked in heated carnal union. Or their at once elevated and regressed state of orgasmic upheaval. No, this was first a sound flash; Jenny singing along with something vaguely and distantly familiar, then appearing in a doorway of an unrecognized room to look at him in a way that said “I am in love with you”.

That look had never been made apparent to Ray. He had been the object of infatuation countless times. Had returned the interest emotionally but never chosen to act on it out of respect (he would never call it fear) for the clairvoyance. As Jenny stirred anew and murmured with opening eyelids, this thought created a lump in Ray’s throat. She turned her head to face him square on, her expression soft and vulnerable, probably as wide open as she had ever been during happier times. Their eyes engaged and they instantly perceived a need to remain silent together; to let the moment be its beauty. He wouldn’t give in to the urge to read her, and drifted through his own thought patterns... how was this wonderful easy silence and the direct gaze shared any less than if they had made love the night before?

How important was it, truly, for their bodies to exchange heat and motion in order for climax to usher in a deeper union? The unity was already present, so deeply felt, and they had just met mere days ago. Jenny smiled slightly, held his gaze directly, and seemed to nod to herself almost imperceptibly. It was his sense that he had actually reached her most vulnerable places. Had been allowed in, to help her. This gift alone would have been enough for him, as it had been his life’s work to use his abilities from a place of compassion, but in some inexplicable way their lives had intersected with impeccable timing and resonance. He didn’t linger on the unsettling details nibbling at the periphery of this good feeling floating all around them in the early morning of his departure for the prairies. They too were woven into what he felt would surely ultimately coalesce into a puzzle solved, and dare he think it?, a chance for his mortal life to know true partnership.

Goderich Ontario is a town of approximately seven thousand people. It features a lake Huron salt mine that employs many, and an octagonal downtown layout that pleases its town folk and tourists alike. A man wandered into this retail hub one morning in a state of dishevelment and mind fog. Three old timers who had never left the region, who were as much a part of Goderich as the Victorian building foundations, made it their ritual to meet at their favorite bench in front of the oldest tavern. They drank a morning coffee, mostly remained silent, and watched the streets come to life. It wouldn’t matter much to locals that the dazed stranger stumbled like a spectre through the golden slant of dawn rays like something out of a zombie film.

It wouldn’t matter in the telling later that the year was 1988, because one year pretty much resembled another in Goderich. It was what people liked about living there. Slow and steady. Very few sudden curves. Dependable patterns, flavors, details. This is a town, like so many others in the neighboring counties, where madness and chaos are better served in cities.

Shambling in tattered clothing, coatless on a bitter morning in late October, eyes wide in an unseeing stare, this unknown man has every indication of giving madness a piggyback ride. The old fellow named Roy but called Over Easy, nudges his friends in the ribs with an elbow each. The bench creaks as all three heads swivel to apprise what Roy is indicating with a tilt of his forehead. This is a place with a distinct demarcation between tourist season and the vastly preferred months when locals “get our town back”.

Labor Day weekend tends to shut the door on all those Toronto folk and Michigan license plates. It is when faces are readily identifiable and comfortable patterns reestablish overnight. The air of perfunctory politeness in downtown retail shops, the outgoing veneer of welcome and polished helpfulness in restaurants; this is dropped like a heavy boulder and the necessary evil of tourist dollar life support fades back through another pretty Autumn followed by an annual snow dump marathon.This stumbling brain fogged man who weaves along the sidewalk is about as out of place and time as it gets in a town like Goderich.

The old fellow named Roy but called Over Easy pushes forward on the bench, peering intently at the slowly approaching stranger. His curiosity is overridden by concern that comes easily to those who have been raised to help others; Roy’s is a generation of morality in depths superior to the selfishness exhibited by the baby boomers. His world has changed rapidly, his alienation from the current generation’s children very nearly unbearable, but seeing someone in need, even a non local, causes Roy to act. He rises from the bench and unthinkingly approaches the tottering man.

Those who remain seated behind him do not follow until the stranger at last collapses face down, not even breaking the fall. He lands with a sickening impact, out cold immediately in his own broken nose blood. When Roy reaches him, his teeth are chattering in the spreading pool. He puts his big hands on the man’s shirt collar, seeing something below the fabric that rips a jagged line across what skin is visible. The other two elderly men arrive, out of breath, both not speaking, keenly involved in this intriguing break from routine. Roy lets out an abrupt exhale as he tugs the back of the shirt collar down further; deep and seemingly infected wounds run in horrible parallel grooves from the fallen man’s shoulders and down into the shirt.

Ray Townes had always been a man of words. A voracious reader whose brain craved constant feeding. The facility and respect for language conveyance had been of utmost use to his unusual ability to perceive what is normally not available to the average mind. Those who came to Ray for his sight and counsel, depended on his deft communication skills every bit as much as he did.

It was challenging enough for him to get across the gist of what was shown to him, or quite often arrived as a knowing that existed free of visual or auditory framing... if asked to express his emotions, his take on it, Ray would not have been able to wrap words around all that flooded him during those exquisite minutes of peace in Jenny’s morning bedroom. It was all there in window light. In their openly vulnerable eye exchange. He was aware of being a man as never before, though it didn’t manifest physically. That most primal need was voiced within, perhaps unknowingly sown in her lovely aura then, to taste her through his touch.

His face must have been a mirroring of hers, and of the cocoon that held them in thrall. To know her within and then learn every nuance of her body’s want all felt imminently possible, probable, inevitable, decreed, ordained, meant. The impossibility of describing that morning’s moment was superseded by a higher challenge; to comprehend just why it was her. There are times in every human life story when things are simply known.

Ray would never articulate why his years of soul journey in the Townes vessel had brought him to a sudden calm knowledge concerning a woman in a place so many miles removed from his geographical and even emotional definition of home. Toronto? In his early fifties? A woman whose heart had been broken and subsequently incarcerated under the auspices of pseudo survival? Somehow without delving into an answer from within his knack for “sight”, Ray sensed a sweet nameless peace for them, if they would reach for the correct strands from the raw materials of weave, together.

A kiss was invited then, there, always. Both pairs of eyes saw it, but they didn’t move to create the kiss. Uncertainty played no role in their not adding that next step to the sweet escalation. One frequency unseen but keenly felt in two minds ever one mind, two children of all children, vibrated them in place atop the bed in the house on Bright street. In other minutes the clock radio would resume its notification, they would end their magical time rebellion chemistry and rise into movement that within a span of hours would fail to convince either of them that they were separated. It is perhaps natural and inevitable to ascribe a pivotal moment to love, or to the falling in of love, though love itself can never be a single moment identified.

To call it a process also seems to miss the crux. To affix any tidy summary, or worse, an all encompassing descriptive lexis adhesive for the whole of humanity as it is or isn’t so blessed by the omnipresent truth-entirety of overarching why-neosis, seemed woefully limiting. Jenny and Ray went into a portal that was always present. Always designed only for them if an advantageous magic dance of timing and willingness found its commensurate music. Of course, once there in it, once cognizant of how it could never have been any other unfolding, it is natural to attach a pivotal moment or event to the blossoming of that which every human is hard wired to seek.

Hours elapsed across that day, measured counted fractions of life as though it could all be linear, found Ray Townes driving up the long dirt artery toward his childhood home. He was no longer the man who had left the prairies to bury his father. Hours measured in Toronto, all the way into early evening, and Jenny found herself unrecognizable by the standards of measurement previously used to identify the previous version of that woman. She stood in her dining room with an unreadable expression owning her face, looking at the marble as it sat in a corner of baseboard, so much more than a marble.