Singing in the Rain
Having a cocktail while Jenny gets ready for the Opera
The streets of Gran Via shine wet. I left the Hotel Operatic a little after 6:00 pm., promising to be back by 7:30. I had walked only two minutes when a dark-haired woman wearing a short skirt, her eyes painted like a caricature artist might see her, working the street openly, whispered come this way with me.
In Madrid, as in Barcelona, prostitutes are an everyday aspect of city life. I stood panting in the rain as if panicked. These days I’m nothing more than a silly old bugger. I contemplated for a moment whether I could find the blood flow to produce an erection on such a wintry night. She flicked her head and waved her hand.
I giggled at myself.
I was desperate for a beer, not a hopeless shag.
I have not written for several days, not since Saturday. I wanted to wait until I could write more cheerfully.
Jenny is in the hotel room preparing to attend the opera tonight. I’m not highbrow, and to be quite honest, I don’t understand it. I couldn’t care about opera. A couple of beers, and truthfully, I won’t care about it. I’ll sit beside my wife, holding her hand, and listen for her sniffles when she moves.
This most beautiful of women, soon to be a grandma dressed to be adored, turns a man’s head for what is not shown but what he imagines.
I once told Jenny if I go to hell, she will be there to get me out. That’s funny, she said, that’s quite funny, but you shouldn’t joke about things like that.
I don’t care; I don’t care anymore. I’m happy; I feel whole again. Even Steve, who brought me to this shining place, no longer appears as a bully.
Well, it’s not so much that he’s a bully. It’s just that he doesn’t suffer fools easily. He’s always reading. An intellectual. I’m not an intellectual. Most women, in my opinion, are cleverer than their husbands. Steve has been careful to remain unmarried. Back in the day when he did meet women, you know, back in those days when intellectual women were mostly admired the same way the rear of a bus might be, he never found love.
Jenny’s going to flip out when she reads that sentence. We lived our youth in different times. But Jenny is slowly changing my outlook.
Having been refused business, the woman on the wet streets is walking ahead of me, not your office typist. She’s taking short steps because her skirt is so tight, and with each step, her buttocks jerking from side to side against the material, the skirt curved inwards over the mound of buttocks, clinging down the back of her legs so I can make out the line of her panties. Forty years old, I’ll wager.
My longings have long ago subsided.
The Del Diego cocktail bar is a lively joint. The concierge explained it was a hangout for local artists. It felt more like a place for revolt. People abound posing revolt, having the pretensions of rebels. Something, some weird mindset, has me feeling at home.
It is in such places my mind can take mystical flight. Men here, those not getting along with their wives, men who can do nothing right, prize fighters among comrades, write poetry about ugliness, violence, and realism, but never something new, fresh, clear, and astonishing.
They write, argue, and drink together on the failures of love. I’ve never preoccupied myself with becoming a poet; I’m not a craftsman in the strictest technical sense of the word. I’m more rigorously preoccupied with becoming a writer.
It is time to leave, for if I know anything, I know another drink in this bar will lead to something ugly. I have a wife waiting, a woman to be adored, a woman with whom to be happy, to know companionship, not remain here and be swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log.
I raise my umbrella and walk back to the hotel, singing in the rain.
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