The Last Time

I dreamed I was in room and the room was in a house and I climbed through the window of the room but I wasn’t outside, I was in another house, because the first house was inside another house, and then I woke up and I was in a room but in another house, and on the wall of the room there was a painting, and the painting was of a horse, and the horse was in a field and on the horizon there was a house and I looked closer and closer and the house got bigger and bigger and then I climbed through the window of that house, the house that was in the painting, way out in the distance, and I was inside that house and then I woke up and I was inside a different house, but this one was upside down so I was standing on the ceiling and there was a skylight and I broke the skylight with a rock that was suddenly in my hand, then I jumped down through the skylight and I was in another house, but this house was moving, it was on the back of a truck and the truck was carrying it across a country road in Italy, I could see the farms on the hills through a window, then the truck stopped and I climbed out the window and I walked across a field and there was a house on the horizon like the one that was in the painting and I walked to that house and I knocked on the door and then I woke up and I was on a boat and the boat was sailing to Catalina, I could see Catalina in the distance, and there were dolphins swimming alongside the boat, arching their dorsals out of the water the way dolphins do when they swim, and then I woke up again and I was in another dream and the other dream was on a stage and I was playing piano – Debussy’s “First Arabesque” – and I woke up again and I was in another house in another dream and there was a beautiful woman with me in bed, she had long, wavy blond hair and she was looking up at me lovingly and I kissed her and she kissed me back and I undressed her and I climbed on top of her and I was about to penetrate her when I woke up and I was at work and I was typing this and I closed my eyes to go back to sleep so I could make love to that woman but when I fell back to sleep I was in a house, and I went from room to room looking for her but she wasn’t there so I climbed out of a window and I was in another house, a house that contained the one I had just left, a house that held another house like the other one I had dreamt, and I went from room to room again looking for her but she wasn’t there again and I would’ve called out her name but I didn’t know her name and then I woke up again and I was in my bathroom and I was on the scale and I was weighing myself and I saw that I had lost 10 pounds and I told myself that I lost that weight because I was eating less and that thought made me hungry so I went downstairs to see what was in the fridge and that’s when the earthquake hit and I saw my living room chandelier sway and I lost my balance and everything in my kitchen crashed down from all the cabinets and I thought “oh no this is going to take HOURS to clean up” but I didn’t have to because I woke up again and I was in another dream in another house and this one was empty and I went from room to room looking for that woman again but she wasn’t there and as I turned a corner I put my hand on a wall and small furry animal bit my hand and held on and it hurt and I tried to shake my hand so the animal would let go but it wouldn’t and it didn’t and I woke up again and I was in another house within a house and a dream within a dream and the telephone was ringing but I couldn’t find and the answering machine picked up but it wasn’t my answering machine and the greeting wasn’t in English or French or German or any other language that I recognized and then I walked out the door and onto a patio and I saw that the garden hose was leaking from its nozzle and I thought I should fix it and I tried to find where it screwed into the spigot so I followed the hose around the corner and then around another corner and then another corner and the hose kept leading me around corners, three, four, five, six, seven corners, then it led me into another house where it disappeared under a crowd of people and the people were dancing, it was a party, but then it wasn’t a house, it was a strip club, and there was a girl in black bra and panties and high heels and she had a nose ring and a tattoo on her back, she was dancing on the stage, the way strippers dance when they dance, she was twirling around a pole, and I tried to see what the tattoo was but I couldn’t get close enough and she was twirling faster and faster and then I woke up again but I wasn’t me, I was you and you were reading this and then I woke up and I walked away from my computer and I looked out my window and the sky was blue with white wispy clouds and I was awake and I thought I wasn’t dreaming but I was, because I woke up again and I was in a different house and there was a mirror on the wall and I could see myself and I looked older and my hair was thinner and I could see my blue, blue eyes staring back from the mirror and I woke up again, but I was asleep, and I knew I was asleep because I was floating above myself and I was watching myself asleep on my bed and it was raining outside and then I woke up again and I was in bed and I saw myself floating above me and then it was raining inside and each raindrop was a mirror and I could see my face reflected in each raindrop, older, with thinner hair, and the rain started falling harder and harder and each raindrop showed my face, hundreds, thousands, millions of raindrops were falling, each one reflecting my face, and the water was rising in my room and I saw that I was still floating overheard and the water kept rising so I got out of bed and slid open the glass door and the water gushed out and I rode down with it the way a kayaker rides down rapids, twirling the way a stripper twirls on a dance pole, arching my back as I jumped out of and back into the water the way a dolphin swims alongside a boat, and I rode the flood down a flood channel, and the waters of the flood channel were churning more and more fiercely, and I woke up and I was in a room and there was a painting in a room and the painting showed a clipper ship on the ocean against a dark sky and the ship was being tossed high up on a wave and the painting came to life, the way a movie does, and I woke up again and I was young and I was back in the house where I grew up and my dad was there and my mom was there and it was daytime but the sky was black and I went to ask my dad something but he was gone and then I went to ask my mom something and she gone, too, and I went downstairs and I heard a knock on the door and it was you, and you were looking for me just like you told me you knew you’d be looking for me one day, and that you knew that one day when you were looking for me I wouldn’t be there for you and I didn’t answer the door and you kept knocking and I didn’t answer and I thought I was going to wake up but I didn’t wake up, and you kept knocking and I didn’t answer, and you kept knocking and knocking and knocking and I kept thinking I was going to wake up but I didn’t wake up because it wasn’t a dream anymore and then finally you stopped knocking and walked away and I still didn’t wake up and I’m still awake and that was the last time.

My Red Loves

I went to Elena’s apartment when I got to Barcelona. She had lived next door to a friend in Santa Monica, but moved to Spain to teach English and sent me her address because she knew I’d be coming to Europe that spring. It was a big apartment; she was sharing it with a group of other teachers. Some of their friends were visiting too, so we all went out to dinner, got drunk on red wine, told jokes and ate rabbit. When we went back to the apartment, I rolled out my sleeping bag on the floor of her bedroom, we said goodnight and shut the lights.

I woke up the next morning when the sun shone through her red lace curtains.

“Sleep well?” she asked me.

“Yeah, you?” I was still drowsy, but I saw she had been awake for a while; her eyes were wide open.

“OK. The floor must not be comfortable, though. Too bad my bed is so small.”

I thought for a moment.

“I’m not all that big. Neither are you. I could fit.”

I took off my T-shirt and my jockey shorts, went to her bed and pulled her red blanket down. I climbed in and wrapped my arms around her. She wriggled out of her red sweatshirt, we kissed and then made love all morning.

Two years before:

Hannah walked up to me on the quad. I was about to go home after my 11 o’clock class; it was my last one of the day.

“Hey, could you give me a ride? I don’t have my car today and it’s a long, long bus trip.”

We walked to the parking lot and hopped into my red Fiat sedan.

“Got any pot?” she asked. “I’d sure love get stoned.”

“At home. But I live in the opposite direction. Do you have time?”

“Sure, I don’t have to be at work until five.”

At my place, we sat on my bed, fired up my red bong and got stoned while we listened to a Ralph Towner record, airy improvised classical-style guitar over a jazzy bass and drums. She took off her red platforms and lay down. On the wall above my bed there was an art nouveau advertisement showing Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Medea. She had just slain her son, who was sprawled at her feet, and her eyes were wide open in horror. The tip of her dagger was red with blood.

“Wow,” Hannah said. “Check that out.”

“I know.”

“But come here and look at it from this angle.”

I lay down next to her. She rolled over a little, closer to me. She was wearing a red paisley halter dress. I pushed aside her long dark hair, caressed her shoulder and told her she was so beautiful. Her bare back was inches from my lips.
I thought for a moment.

I touched my lips to her shoulder and untied the knot at the nape of her neck. The top of her dress slipped off when I pulled it down, then I ran my fingertips across her breasts. She spun around and slipped her mouth onto mine. In a minute we were naked and I was licking her. When we were done with that, I pulled myself up, propped her ankles on my shoulders and we reached another round of ecstasy. Then she used those gorgeous red lips to finish me off.

The month before:

Kiana was walking across the lawn on the north side of the campus, the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We waved to each other and she came to sit down next to me on the freshly cut grass.

“Have a look at this,” I said, handing her an article I had just finished for the college newspaper. She started reading. I didn’t want to be staring at her, I didn’t want to be gauging her reaction to each line, I wanted her to tell me what she thought when she had finished. So I looked away from her, toward a redwood sculpture by the promenade. It was a warm day, not too hot, and a perfect light breeze blew over us. And then a strange thing happened.

I felt something I’d never felt before. Electricity in the air, an invisible red current enveloping us both. It was almost frightening. I looked up at her and she was staring at me with a fierce intensity. And I knew it wasn’t because of anything I’d written.

I thought for a moment.

Then I reached over, pulled her neck toward me, and kissed her like I’d never kissed anyone before. We were deep in some other place, some red world, for what could’ve been hours but was probably not even a minute.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked back to the red Fiat and I sped to her house. We slid each others’ clothes off and jumped into bed.

I kissed her from the top of her head down to the red polish on her toenails. And for the rest of the afternoon I pleasured her in all the ways a man can pleasure a woman and she pleasured me in all the ways a woman can pleasure a man.

The year before:

It was our last year of high school. Mike’s parents were out of town, so he was having a party, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go. I was driving home from my job at the record store, and at the last second, I turned my red Karmann Ghia onto Red Rock Avenue, parked and went in to Mike’s red-tile roof house. The party had been going on for some time. Couples had already formed and had taken some of the bedrooms. Cary grabbed my hand and said she wanted to talk to me.
She lived around the corner from me. She was petite, with long dark hair, and she was very, very pretty.

“OK,” I said.

“Alone,” she answered, in a red hot tone.

That meant finding a bedroom, going in with her and doing more than just talking.

I thought for a moment.

I took her by the hand, went upstairs and checked the maid’s room; it was available so we went in. Before I could even make an attempt at the pretense of “talking,” she had me on the bed and unbuttoned my pants. I unzipped the back of her red dress and pulled it up over her shoulders, then unhooked the clasp of her red bra and pulled her red panties down to her ankles. We rolled around the red bed, kissing and caressing, then kissing and caressing some more. It was a cool December night, so I pulled off the red bed cover, we got between the red sheets and had at each other until we couldn’t anymore. By the time we were done, everyone else had gone home. When we came out of the bedroom, we were able to find our way out was because Mike had left a red night-light glowing in the hallway.

Thirty years later:

Those are four of my red loves. I have more, but those were the ones I picked for this story. I call them my red loves because they never happened. Each time that I thought for a moment, I didn’t act. So those experiences that I could have had were stricken from my life, the way an editor deletes sentences with a red pencil. Why?

That night I got to Barcelona was Elena’s birthday, she was a beautiful, kind and smart woman and I would’ve easily fallen in love with her, but she was 40 and I was 20, so where would that have led? Of course I still wonder how great it would’ve been to climb under that red blanket with her.

Hannah was fun and sexy. But she’d been dating Lee, a classmate. “We broke up,” she assured me that afternoon on my bed. “It’s over.” But Becky had told me the same thing a year before: that she had broken up with her boyfriend, my friend Will, so it was OK for us to make love. And we did. But I saw Becky and Will together a few days later. “Oh shit,” I’d said to myself. “I had sex with somebody else’s girlfriend.” So how could I be sure Hannah had really finished with Lee? He told me later that it was true – they had broken up. Of course I still wonder how great it would’ve been to take off that red paisley halter dress and feel her body spasm with ecstasy in climax after climax as I held her in my arms.

Kiana and I had known each other for years. She was pretty and had an exquisite body, which she normally didn’t show off. But one day I had gone to her house to pick her up to take her to a play that I had to review for the college paper, and she’d just gotten out of the pool and was wearing a red macramé bikini. So I could see she was slender but perfectly curved. If I’d have kissed her on the lawn that afternoon and made love to her, would we have gone from being friends to something more? I wasn’t sure I was ready for a girlfriend. Later, I asked her about that electricity I felt. “I looked up and your hair was glowing in the sun and you were just so beautiful, sitting there cross-legged in your red pants, I was just, I was just – you looked so good.” Ah, how great it would’ve been if I’d reached over and kissed her and taken her home and made love to her.

Cary had been dating a friend of mine, Russell. She suspected he’d been cheating on her with his old girlfriend so she asked Rick, an old friend, to take her to my house and see if I would tell her the truth. Which I did, thinking that it was in confidence, that she’d just break up with him and leave me out of it. But she told Russ what I’d said, he called me, and I had to go over to his house and apologize. I saw Russ and Cary together in front of her house the next week. I wasn’t happy that they’d dragged me into their false drama. There was no way I was going to go to bed with Cary. Still, she was very, very pretty and I just loved it that she let me know she wanted me – or more precisely, that I could have her if I wanted her. Of course I still wonder how great it would’ve been to take her up to a room at Mike’s house, get her naked, pull her on top of me and watch her riding me.
But each time I thought for a moment, I asked myself: What happens after? And I thought that it wouldn’t work out well. So I didn’t do what would’ve been so exquisite. Once, twice, these three times, four times, more times; more times than I can count.

But not all the time. Because I had other loves, too, that were not red loves. Those were the ones I thought would work out. And they didn’t work out, either. So maybe I was wrong, and maybe any one of the red loves, the ones I wrote about here or the ones I didn’t, would’ve worked out better than the other ones, the ones that happened.

I didn’t start out writing this story. It was just going to be about Elena, about what would’ve happened if I’d climbed into bed with her that morning in Barcelona. But then I decided I’d add Hannah and Kiana and I’d write about what it would’ve been like to make love to them. I had grabbed a redeye on my way home from work and was staying up all night to try to get my red story started. I was wearing my red sweats and I was looking at the toy cat on top of my computer. He’s holding a red ball in his mouth, with a red bow tie and two red hearts on his paws.

Then Cary found me on Facebook. “Do you remember me?” she asked. “I think I remember you.” She’s living in another country, on the other side of the world. She opened a chat window on my page and told me what was going on in her life.
“I’m married, but unhappy. I think I’m getting divorced. I’d really like to come back to the states. Do you think I could find a job there?” Hmm, bad timing, I told her. Layoffs everywhere. She might as well have been saying “Save me.” But I couldn’t: I have long hours at work and an hour commute each way. I don’t have time to save anyone. And I wouldn’t: She didn’t really remember me, she was just looking for some man to help her get out of a bad marriage. But I do love you, Cary, in my red love way, love that could have been but never was. And so now you’re in my red story, too.