'That Look'
R. P. Singletary
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The woman I used to be. No man should know, could? ...I knew the look well, and I saw
it in her lazy eye. In both of them, actually. Light lids, soft screen to that seminal shade somewhere between lavender and violet. Lashes whipped into individual, free-standing attention. Crow's feet carefully caressed and smoothed near to the point of forgottenness, except to her memory. I saw the look also in the way she crossed and uncrossed her legs, calves still so taut and tanned, far different from the drying leather masquerading as skin sagging off so many of her peers (and mine). I saw the look in her creamed hands when she gently patted her pleasant lips with the rough cloth napkin after sipping sparkling water for her insides; she kept her lips moist, too. I could tell. Not only from her silky, unlined hands, but I could sense from other fragranced body parts that she'd never, ever touched tobacco. Telltale, harsh crevices didn't jut up her upper lip or slide off the sides of her mouth, again unlike others of our generation who for long regrets had too tightly gripped those rolled, white fancies, without realizing they indented faces that would hide from mirrors 'til the death. In all these forms, I felt the look, and yet also so simply just from the way she sat there, today – finally – looking unsure of left or right. In the way she now hesitated, everything so tentative. She did all the right things, but it still crept up out of her and upon her. She no longer felt certain. Of her own beauty and therefore purpose. This saddened me more than it did her, I convinced myself in generalizations. Truth be told, women-watching likely tops the list of all- time-favorite asexual or sexual pastimes for both men and women, eagerly in first place ahead of football-watching, fancy-shopping, liquor-swilling, money-amassing, or even travel or ice cream. Please don't presume any misstatement of anthropology, this neither pornographic or misogynistic. I'd argue seldom be it either at heart. Freud may have been on to something with his maternal meanderings, perhaps the same with Eliot's circuitous explorations of our own origins for all genders. |
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The older I get, the more I admit to my own ill-understood, arm's-length enjoyment of the feminine. I admire women so greatly, yes of course the form of their shape, but also the sentiment of their thought, downright equally the two. Utter and genuine respect I should call it, not mere amiable passing admiration, which may come across to some as weak, to others as pedantic (or yet again, to still others of you as sexual?). Mine something closer akin to what an aged mainline Protestant minister once years ago told me remained the ultimate of beauties for him: a pregnant woman, near term. A pregnant woman, near term, ultimate beauty. Think about that. Not some beauty, but the ultimate. If you see anything disrespectfully gross or unnecessarily sexual in these ways, I daresay you, kind sir, dear ma'am, best schedule a shrink, hold out wrists for arrest, or confine yourself to confessional for an afternoon or the like, like our Mom did. This woman today, this lady, sat a couple tables over from me with all the thoughts at the Viennese-style coffeehouse on the main thoroughfare that cuts crooked through our young city's heart. Finally stripped of humidity toward the tail end of hurricane season, the autumn air perfected our al fresco espresso-sipping, surrounded by a peach of a city and guarded by pristine, glass pokers of skyscrapers and older, brick-building sentinels of only two prior centuries, no ancient town ours, unlike the Italian or Austrian. Against such an outdoor backdrop, the woman raised the tiniest of coffee cups to her pillowy cheek. Dessert or pastry nowhere to be seen on her small, marbled table top. It was mid-morning, a light jolt of caffeine all she needed. Yet again, she uncrossed, recrossed her legs. The cooler, not chilly, weather this morning allowed her excuse for a thicker, fashionable fabric that still let her show leg. She wasn't waiting for anyone – not anyone she knew, not anything she wanted. The coffee a self-imposed timeout, and she very much had the look, sip after sip. Cardio now hurt her joints. Wine lingered on her waist. Meaty dishes tumbled her tummy. She wore size eight, unsure for how much longer. I read all this across her face, writ large and too universal the same theme for us all, boring with worse fate for most. Maybe because of the transparency, her beauty completed for me. I respect a philosopher-queen, she who contemplates in and with her face the what-ifs of her life, and by extension, any reason behind all our lives:
beautiful never as precious or precocious as this morning, this barren coffeehouse, no one looking. Ha. I wanted to shake the beauty of the woman back into place for eternity. I wanted to beg. What was she thinking, confirm, pretty please? Instead, I ordered another espresso from the quick waiter. I sipped. Like her. My eye tried to halt the talk in my head about the singular look on her face, the mind's eye after the assumptive-beauty dialogue that was birthing registries at the hospital up the street. You spot it, too. In young girls the world has not yet trained: act beautiful! I see it in women come-of-age in a time always knowing female Supreme Court justice, Presidential candidate, CEO. I respect all, mind you, these looks and those in ever-older women, deemed over-the-hill by Society that walked away and left them wondering the look of their former, younger, prettier selves: Was? I? Or? Wasn't? I? I recall a legendary female actor saying, plainly, just as she had decided when she first had the same self-dialogue, she was never beautiful (so she said), how it made the aging process, her career so liberating, glad she weren't in America.... Not from the caffeine, my heart now ached for the still-beauty sitting so elegantly there tables away on the sidewalk terrace, holding her own court of ill-mannered matters today, her powerful court of 1 and one only, the only court that ever really mattered, especially after death. I wanted to buy her a drink, a hot cocoa, or something non-alcoholic, a fizzy-fuzzy water, drink to her, our health! Yes, I wanted to hold her hand, read her “Little Red Riding Hood,” and tell her that ogre-wolf in her head was bad, bad, so badly wrong, but she didn't need me to encourage or any old wolf to scare. I was needing her, her to be Beauty, something saved, something to be saved, by me. HerHero. Not needed. Not over there at her table. I kept my distance. She sat there lost in my own declining thought, and I continued projecting, waiting for my own confirmation, that doctor's overdue call and a text, finally sent, by a lover lost in traffic. Who am I to judge?, a pontiff posed the other year. More of a lower-case-catholic Christian myself, I know we are to love first and foremost and throughout every life-action, breath-thought, as we fulfill our roles in cycles, giving and taking, taking and giving, thanking more we hope, but I know that I don't. I judge. I look at people, at men and at women and all. I see hour-glass, pear-bottom, cherry-heavy-top; spindly-haired, wet-n-wiry, bobbed, Texan bouffant, punk-shaven; Walmart or Macy's or Saks?; roughened, dirt-laced nails or smooth-as- shellac – did you know shellac, at heart, is a resin secreted by the female lac bug? Mighty powerful, sensual, real metaphor there for feminine strength, resilient beauty, utter commercialism. Surprised some Paris or New York male purveyor of cosmetics hasn't already....Don't get me started on the aging men, their sad looks and less-than-handsome ways, the broken fixes they gave up on long ago because they could and no one cared, or so they thought. I kept trying to decide if I wanted her to leave first, or should I let her go first? I gave up on my lover and the doctor. Once more, my pathetic control issues. Should I let her, all the wrong words, had I learned nothing on the three pricey espressos? I wasn't going to speak. The morning crept by. I wasn't ordering another fancy coffee drink. Three singles, always my limit. I couldn't keep watching her this way either, pretending something else kept me here, so close to her. I didn't have a notebook. I wasn't feverishly typing work into a computer tablet or jotting notes sideways on a week-old Journal-Herald. At some point, she would catch on, painting me odd a nice contrast to her face, so I was happy when she made the first move, and how she did. She didn't leave when a distinguished man sporting sterling cuff links arrived and pecked her ever-so-lightly rouged cheek (barely rouged, less makeup as she ages, you see). She didn't leave when a cougarpaw-er the age of her son showed up to rub her shoulder or more. No, those all silent what-ifs of my own perennial preoccupation with invention and avoidance. Calmly, casually, and simply. She uncrossed her lovely legs and rose from her tiny, cane-seat chair, leaving the polite fairy tale's mirrored wall staring me in my face. Shoulders back as they'd been all morning unlike mine, she walked out. No fanfare or limou. No toot-toot. No audience but me, now alone in the mirror-mirror, me another person genderless and waiting in the long line come, wondering at self as always me, “Will I be beautiful, too?” the man of my creation said. |
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THE END
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