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Aftertaste

Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

[It’s all in the aftertaste] she thought, with a bitter glance into the near past. It troubled her that there were more nuances to the aftertaste of things made inedible by more than just their size or inability to be cooked. It hurt her sense of logic that more events, interactions and shared experiences had aftertastes than food she had eaten. For as long as she could remember, the people she lived her life with, the friends, neighbours, relatives and family members who were her companions down the path of her life had told her that she was the sum of her experiences.

[Wrong!]

It’s not what a girl felt while she was doing something that mattered, it’s how she felt when it was all done and the chairs had been turned over and hung off the sides of the tables; when the lights were switched off and the furniture had inaudible conversations with each other about whose ass had sat on what chair and whose elbows had been unable to stay off which table, that the true effect of a moment was tallied and placed in the positive or negative columns of life’s ledger.

She dreaded the aftertaste of a thing so much, or rather the idea of it, that she came to live entirely for it. She was no longer able to find it within herself to live through the experiences because she was so aware of how hard she would work to analyze the aftertaste. Even though she knew like everybody else in the world that too much sweetness would kill a person, she longed for most of her aftertastes to be sweet. Great movie, great date, best sex ever, longest period without a depressing thought, painless period, no embarrassment, no anguish, lighter cell phone bill than expected, impossibly painless credit card dues…she longed for each and all of them.

She raced through sex with beautiful men because she wanted to leave before the glow wore off and she realised that under his nails were dirty or that he didn’t seem to recall that his toes were attached to him and as such required washing just as often as his balls.

She longed for the end of another month so that she could celebrate the passing of another thirty days where her earnings exceeded her expenditure by enough to enable her to salt a little away for retirement. If the thought occurred to her that the feeble sum of money she saved each month would be largely worthless by the time she actually got around to retiring it might have taken the shine off her achievement of spending less than she made in a given month. So she trained her mind to keep such thoughts at bay.

She skipped out of three relationships with a future before she was thirty because way too many statistics reminded her, and anyone else who dared contemplate a longer union than it took for two bodies to come together in a fog of pheromones and liquor-flavoured sweat, that divorce rates were up. Every year. So she tried to get what pleasure she could, where she could, when she could, and tried to not to think of the fact that most other girls her age were women now, because they were married and some of them had already begun expecting their first children.

She wasn’t a high-flying executive or movie star who needed to maintain her figure and remain answerable to a board or adoring public that needed her to retain her shape and face. She was one of the horde, always seen as a tiny little spec hurrying along in the distance and forming another dot in a sea of dots crossing streets and boarding trains and needing to be convinced that this candidate was a more viable one than the crook across the street who would simply bring a heavier crush of taxes to bear upon the common man just so that more soldiers could be torn from their mother’s bosoms and sent into war, under-trained and over-armed.

And then one day, when she least expected it, he arrived.

Right on the face of it, he was not the type of man a girl who wore plaid and sensible blouses would be attracted to. Sure she probably starred in the school boy fantasies of a few boys who rode the train alongside her as the school teacher they would like to spank and finger but she didn’t give people the impression of being ‘a lady in the street and a freak in the bed’. Still he zeroed in on her with his Brad Pitt chin beard and his Jason Bourne frankness and she felt weak at the knees in a way she hadn’t felt since she stopped dating Montell Smith. That boy had had a way with his tongue that could still run a shiver up her spine [Fantastic after taste!]. But she was a practical woman and having lived a waking life of thirty years she wasn’t in the habit of being turned into Ol’ Jelly Knees by some guy with a lop-sided smile and lazier lids than Sleeping Beauty.

Without preamble or small talk he had stuck a cigarette between his slim lips and mumbled, “What’s your name sweetheart?”

“Why?”

“So I can scream it out loud as I’m fucking some truck stop whore.”

Her cheeks went red so fast, a friend would have wondered if she was in danger of breaking the sound barrier. “That is a totally inappropriate way to speak to a girl.”

“I agree,” He leaned in and she waited for the annoying yet not entirely unwelcome waft of cigarette smoke to sting her nostrils. It didn’t come but these words did, “But a woman, should be able to handle it.”

She looked at him, really looked at him, and simultaneously willed herself not to be swayed by the blue in his eyes, “So you think it’s okay to make inappropriate comments to a woman just because she’s supposed to be old enough to handle it?”

He raise two fingers to correct her, two because they were the ones holding up the cigarette and waved them before her eyes, “I would never have used the word old. I prefer mature, or experienced.”

Her nipples were having the most inappropriate reaction to this man and his attempts at conversation with her. They seemed to want to reach out and touch him, as if he was in need of chesty consolation. “Shannon.”

“Wilfred.”

“Really?”

“What’s wrong with Wilfred?”

“Nothing. I guess.”

“What did you figure me for?”

“I didn’t. I was minding my own business and drinking my coffee.”

“That’s not really coffee.” He said it loud enough for the barista to purse his lips in a thin line and look away. “Someday, maybe I’ll take you to South America and show you what real coffee looks like. Before it’s harvested and before you drink it. Then maybe I’ll watch your face after you’ve taken that first ever sip of black gold.”

“You want to take me to South America?”

“No. I just want to show you what you’ve been missing.”

“Why do you think I’ve been missing anything?”

He sighed and smiled and she made a note to have a stern private conversation with her nipples and any other body parts that felt the need to reach for him, “Come on, you think that is coffee.”

She looked away. Not to be rude but because it seemed to be the only way for her to actually continue breathing. She sensed his warmth and knew he had inched closer, “So what do you say?”

“About?” She was still breathing.

“Going out with me.”

“Why me?”

“Because I suspect you’ll make me happier than any supermodel I’ve ever dated.”

She was immediately jealous of every supermodel with unending legs that might have wrapped them around his waist. “Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

“If I wanted to reassure you I’d pat your wrist and say, ‘there, there.’ Come on, go out with me. What can you lose?”

[My sanity]

The last aftertaste she ever remembered was the roasted flavour-rich aroma of coffee that she associated with the morning Wilfred asked her out for the first time. It had nothing to do with the actual coffee she was drinking that day. Two years later he took her breath away with the same efficiency he had exhibited on that sunny morning in an anonymous coffee shop.

He never told her that he had been the fat kid in school that everyone picked on. He never told her that she reminded him of the only teacher who was nice to him. He never let on that he would always be grateful to that lady for helping him live through the fat and grow into the fit. He just promised himself that he would treat this reincarnation of Mrs. Brown right, for the rest of her life.

What the hell, right? No relationship is perfect.

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