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A widow, she had survived her husband's painful and drawn out death from colon cancer, and a subsequent relationship with a certified sociopath, and now a few years later, did a solo journey to this mountainous village to bask in its healing powers, escape the wrath of winter, and to finish her book , Your Intestines and You: The Power of Colonics and How There Can be a Silver Lining for Any and All Intestinal Wall.
They met at the reception for his latest art show. The space was cramped, far too small for the tightly clustered knots of overly dressed people clad in magnificently bulbous stone baubles, the sea of wineglasses, and the massive canvases that seemed to suck the very life out of the ancient interior, tossing out and onto the cobbles the resident, and now, pissed off spirits.
She snaked her way through and collected her glass of inferior red wine and wondered how anyone could create such haunting paintings while surrounded by perennial sunshine and vibrant explosions of color. She felt it hard to catch her breath, suffocated by the looming daggers of gray and violet, shards and slashes of cobalt, and one particularly bleak canvas that took up an entire wall that was nothing more than solid black and nearly indiscernible to the naked eye, a tiny red tear stain, or was it a drop of blood, in the bottom right hand corner. Just then, a diminutive woman wearing a turquoise pinky ring the size of a golf ball, bumped into her and jammed the weapon into her ribcage, and it smarted, and that coupled with the gut wrenching death blow of paintings by such a disturbed mind, made her want to suck down a rather enormous pitcher of mango margaritas.
Fumbling her way toward the door she bumped into what had to be the devil himself clad head to toe in black, spilling her wine across his sleeve. Before words formed, their eyes locked and the blue New Yorker whose canvases depicted a life without meaning, and the English professor from Dartmouth who knew colons inside and out, felt that destiny had intervened, but to what length and end, only the irritated spirits knew for sure.
She fled onto the uneven streets and tripped her way through a group of inebriated tourists singing La Negra Noche alongside less than impressed Mariachis, disappearing into a swirl of darkness, a handful of leg humping street dogs hunkering close behind. He stood in the gallery, his half heart pumping so wildly for the first time in years that he deliberately splashed his glass of wine across the remaining dry sleeve, dousing the throbbing organ in attempts to calm down the very madness of its beating.
For the next few days and unexpectedly, their paths would cross. They'd wave or yell "hola!" from opposite sides of the street until they could no longer bear it and agreed to meet on the same side of the cobbles. But the attraction was so powerful, so palpable, they could barely articulate. "I'm unavailable," he blurted before they managed hello. "I have the overwhelming urge to kiss you but I warn you now, you might very well want to keep your lips to yourself or on the edge of your wineglass or wherever else you may want to put them. My heart is not free it's trapped with another and so I cannot fully be there for you."
To say the Dartmouth professor was puzzled would have been an understatement. This was the first time they had been in close proximity to one another since the art opening, and here they were on the cobbles having no history of previous conversation, and she wasn't holding a wineglass and they hadn't yet exchanged names and so this ominous, if not psychopathic, verbal outing made her shoes feel funny as if she were standing in a warm puddle of something unpleasantly familiar. Granted, his paintings were dark and foreboding, but this personality glitch and the fact that he was hermetically sealed in Mars Black beneath the searing Mexican sun, smacked of borderline whack job.
But she ignored his warnings and he only listened to half a heart, and they took turns locking their lips not only on their wineglasses but each other, although their guts told them they were making a grave mistake, much like the initial moments following eating fish tacos from a street vendor, but the chemical attraction was far too great for their combined intellects, and the fireworks of pheromones became the only language they understood and thus the cloud got thicker and thicker and God forbid anyone light a match.
Meanwhile, a bullfighter clad in full matador costume and swaggering in his usual bravado slipped into the corner tienda for a bag of pork rinds.
She was buying six bottles of water, one for herself and the others for her sunstroked children. Suddenly, her red faced five-pack began to jump up and down on the hard tiled floor shouting at the tops of their lungs, "Look mom, a real live bullfighter!" She collected her change and looked up and into the flat out dumbest, most exquisitely handsome face she had ever seen. He flashed a movie star smile of straight and gleaming pearly whites, simultaneously winking and as if in slow motion, parted his beautifully positioned, moist plump lips and said, "Olé!" as if it were covered in chocolate.
Normally such a despicable display would make her respond in a very straightforward manner such as "you've got to be kidding me," or "fuck off cocksucker," but she was fairly certain he wouldn't catch her drift and before her brain clicked on and her eyes could focus on the unbelievable display of embroidery and sequins, the small vessel-like shape resting atop his head and the unnaturally tight fitting pants, her mouth fully disengaged from her body, floated into the middle of the tienda and hanging in mid air whispered, "Olé right back atcha!"
Her children giggled and clapped and screamed "Olé!" and ten tiny hands began to touch his outfit, pulling at his vest, tapping his sequins all the while squealing, "do you really kill bulls, mister?! Do you really kill bulls?! Look at his funny hat, mom! It's shaped like a taco! Where's your sword, anyway? Ma?"
He didn't seem to mind the attention.
She had discovered the unnaturally tight fitting pants.
Orange Cones, El Dandy, and a New Shrink in Town
It was the most exciting, mind-numbing sex either of them had had in a very long time. And yet, the professor from Dartmouth still seemed to manage conversation. The now not-so-blue New Yorker had always been with women who used far too many words, and while he was all for stimulating conversation and soul searching exploration, the professor took verbosity to a new art form. And though he toiled with what colors he would use to paint this exotic lovemaking verbiage, he knew he had never seen anything quite so quirky in a tube.
