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In a Wine Glass, a Doggy Bag, a Warm Tortilla, or a Nutshell
So the tempestuous affair ensued for a few glorious sweat and wine-soaked weeks. It ended only because he and his wife had to return to New York. But, he couldn't shake loose those full bodied lips that tasted of vine-ripened currents, pan-fried huckleberries and a hint of freshly dug truffles; and his wife, too, had seen a vision, much like the Shroud of Turin, in the movements of one impossibly lithe and limber dance instructor from Burkina Faso and now found it hard to concentrate while operating heavy machinery.
Soon after they split, and he made plans to move to the magical mountain village where in his romantic, artistic broad-stroked-brush-of-happily-ever-after-sunshine-yellow, he and the French woman from St. Remy and her three precious children would live happily ever after. He was, in fact, in love with her.
But before he could get there, and he could only move so fast, after all, he had a life in New York and things to tend to and paths to clear before moving south of the border, she found another. Someone who promised her the heavens and she married him, lock, stock and wine barrel on a night of full moon, La Loca Luna, where the hundreds of unwanted street dogs howled in unison and deposited their ample wedding gifts throughout the neighborhood.
The French Woman, Her New Husband, More Kids than a Barrel of Monkeys, and How the Wind Began to Change
The woman's new husband was divorced. He was a Canadian living in Mexico. His ex-wife and his four teenage sons lived in Toronto. Not wanting to be absent from his children in the hinterlands, they agreed to a rather unconventional living arrangement: He would live half the year in Mexico with his new French wife and her three young children, the other half in Toronto where he could be near his frigid, hormonal offspring.
If the New Yorker thought that his angst was fleeting and all was coming up roses now that his path was cleared and his lawn forever mown, he was sorely mistaken. He stepped off the plane into that intoxicating, high altitude Mexican heat and drove toward his new village home where he hoped to hold the hand of his claret-lipped lover so she would never again trip on those dangerous, crap-covered cobbles.
But when he heard she had wed, he fell into a deep depression: A darkness that changed his mood and paintings and once vibrant color scheme. His paintings now were not of colors that bloomed and propagated in such a warm paradise, but of tough luck and hard, rigid lines of black, somber shades of violet and cobalt. He swore he would never buy another tube of Crimson Yellow and if forced, perhaps only by water boarding, to use some tone of that hideous, hopeful color, would only agree to Burnt Ochre. But even that was too optimistic. And in that mindset, water boarding actually sounded preferable to facing the lying tints of hope.
Yet somehow they remained friends, but his heart could never fully separate from her, it was as if he was tethered to this woman, heart and soul, and he never gave up hope, even years later, that someday she would leave her husband and they would live the life he had always dreamed of. For his own peace of mind he called himself single, even thought he felt happy once again and ready to move on, accepting the platonic friendship as better than nothing. But everyone knows that being friends following being lovers is bullshit, and this is where even more of it hit the fan.
The Documentary Filmmaker from Chicago Bumps into Blue Artist on Cobbled Streets While Scraping Dog Dung from her Dansko Clogs
She was there to film a documentary for her local PBS station about the street dogs. She was maneuvering her way across the cobbles while fumbling with a heavy camera bag, a small boom, a water bottle, a bag of kibble, and a packet of warm tortillas that she bought from an old woman on the street even though she didn't want them and was already late for the shoot. He had just bought a bottle of Rosé from the Loire and was eager to sit on the terrace, alone. Looking down to scrape her clog, she ran head on and into him, and he barely held onto his sunset in a bottle, and her boom landed smack between his legs with a rather unexpected jolt, and he wasn't sure if he was permanently maimed or had been born again, because when he looked up from his boomed crotch, he saw the Virgin of Guadalupe tiled on the wall next to him, and in front, an angel with a bag of kibble. And again, more worlds collided causing yet another shift in the prevailing waft.
They connected and commiserated about the unfairness of life, thus becoming fast friends. She listened to his woes about his lost love. She told him secrets about her love starved marriage and years of her husband's infidelity while she gave birth to their five children. She shot her footage of Dogs Gone Wild and flew home to The Windy City. She divorced. Little did she know just how temperate these small blows would come to feel.
She flew back. They made love. She fell in love, he could not. But still, she dreamed of a future with the blue New Yorker. But his heart was still in France, right there in Mexico. Another year came and went, nothing much changed, and the smell was so familiar that everyone seemed to either not notice or had gotten used to the subtle stench.
The Windy City woman continued to come and go and they maintained some form of a relationship even though he couldn't fully open to her. And for half the year and nearly every afternoon, he still saw his true love for a late déjeuner. The five of them would sit around the kitchen table for an hour and enjoy a large family style meal usually of roast chicken and garlic, a wedge of Manchego and tortillas for the kids, Brie and baguette for her, slices of ripe avocado and mango. A bottle of wine. He would then walk home, half of his heart on his sleeve, the other half left on the kitchen table alongside the leftover chicken bones and bread crumbs. She would call her husband in Toronto.
The lover in Chicago finished her film about the street dogs of Mexico and dreamed of the day when he would finally be there for her his full corazón, untethered. She too, never gave up hope. And so everyone kept hoping for something different so out of sync it would make a dubbed Japanese horror film look and sound perfectly simpático. As if everyone's lips were moving in time with their words, but everyone spoke a different language and no one understood the other and they so wished they knew sign language because at this point, communication was left to the dogs.
The English Professor from Dartmouth who came to the Village of Magic with Cold Hands and Warm Heart, a Bullfighter, and the New Yorker from Blue to Red to Purple
