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At their departure gate in SEA, waiting for their connecting flight homeward from a visit to the Portland area, Goines followed his wife to seats with enough surrounding space for her rollator and the two roll-on suitcases he was managing.
Goines casually looked towards the woman sitting across from them a bit farther down the aisle, and did an involuntary double-take at the sight of her looking intently into his eyes and smiling quietly, as though she knew something, and knew that he knew it too. Goines thought her demeanor strikingly personal for an airport.
The woman appeared to be a bit less than half Goines’ age. A girl of maybe six or seven years sat with her, but they didn’t appear to be that close, more like they were simply traveling together for whatever reason.
Goines decided to “mind his own business” by looking away. Exploring the situation didn’t seem to be an option. Anyway, he needed to pee. He informed Mrs. Goines that he was going to the restroom and got up and rearranged their stuff closer together before turning away from his wife and the woman and girl and heading off.
He wasn’t sure why he was doing it, but he found himself walking quickly, an old man marching. Presently he noticed another woman, seated about 30 feet diagonally to his left. She was maybe ten years younger than the first woman and was sitting with another woman about the same age as her. As Goines drew closer to them, the first woman of the pair lifted her eyes to him and flashed such a smile of recognition that he involuntarily gave her a sort of senior officer’s horizontal, chest-high salute with his left arm without altering his pace, because Goines didn’t recognize her as anyone he knew, and she wasn’t calling out his name. And this didn’t seem to be a situation to explore either.
But smiling at me like that? he queried himself – this stooped, white-haired, fairly wobbly 80-year-old man?
At a urinal in the restroom, Goines first checked to see whether his pants were zipped, for, in fact, he did half the time forget to zip them. But he hadn’t forgotten on this occasion. Besides, there had already been a couple of hours for Mrs. Goines to tell him he needed to zip his pants, and she hadn’t.
Goines drove to Costco alone the morning after they arrived home so Mrs. Goines could rest up. Going along their local road toward the freeway entrance, looking at the clouds dramatically gorgeous before him, he felt an upwelling tumescence, as though of clouds of erotic waves. Everything was sexual, aglow, vibrant, embracing.
The feeling continued as he entered the freeway and as he drove its 20 miles to Costco, re-experiencing his past life cinematically before him but not letting it interfere with his driving, which he managed with the greatest acuity and care, driving also feeling sexy.
His life seemed to him then to have been, or to now feel as though it had been, an orgy of loving everyone and everything that had come into it, and the feeling was enveloping everything around him now. It seemed as though the height of living – the supreme reason for living at all – was to experience everything as sexually aroused and arousing.
At Costco, as he approached the dairy alcove, a woman who looked to be in her early twenties seemed to be looking right at him, smiling as he approached. For a second he brightened, expecting her to greet him, but he quickly realized she must have just seen a friend (or her husband) approaching from behind Goines.
After filling his cart, he parked it in an aisle near checkout and went to the restroom and settled into a stall.
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Brilliant! This piece reminds me that I used to love everybody and everything, too, and that I need to get back to that feeling after a long, bleak phase, and right here at the approach of verdant erotic spring, when the world is mudluscious. Well done, Goines!
ReplyDeletePaddy, thank you much for the ardent support for my "Erotic clouds" vignette. Right after finishing it on Monday, I had that often delusional sense right after finishing the umpteenth draft of something that this vignette could be the best one I've written yet.
DeleteBut now it's Wednesday and, despite your imprimatur, I'm no longer sure about any "bestness," but I still do think it's pretty darn good, maybe even a breakthrough to something not previously expressed – or not expressed so sharply: Goines' subjectivity and introversion.
In "Erotic clouds," he thinks he sees women smiling at him in certain ways, and then he sees the clouds even seeming to do it, which we probably agree is ridiculous and just underscores Goines' subjectivity and projecting his inward states onto people and things outside himself. It seems to me still that this vignette captures Goines undergoing something like an "erotic emergency."