Inamorata

I was sitting in my bedroom reading Jane Austen when I had a sudden picture of a girl lying fast asleep on a bed, bathed in the warm silver moonlight that came through, like some unearthly liquid, the window opened to the calm summer night: my old girlfriend.

I don’t know why I thought of her, but it was probably, according to the Freudian logic my current girlfriend is immersing us all in, a song on the radio they played when we were together those years ago that prompted a suppressed memory. If I proposed the idea to her she would probably seize on it with a passion and begin a prompt psychoanalysis, not getting jealous that I’ve ever thought about other girls—some would, but not her; that’s why I love her.

But just thinking about what that song could be, man, takes me back. The thought of her gives me a lump in my throat I just can’t explain, even though it’s been a few years and several girlfriends since I’ve seen her—I mean, I’m over her. Maybe it was Sinead O’Conner—that girl was a big fan of her, and played her records late into the night when we were together, still a happy couple, dancing until midnight.

Anyway, for one reason or another, I thought of her. She was an inamorata of prodigious skill—or maybe it just seemed like that to me, blinded by my own side of the matter. She was never skinny, and not quite fat, but if that was always my favorite thing about her it was her least favorite things about herself. I never understood it, the way she tried to diet, halfheartedly, and I still don’t. I remember also that she never made it through the week without having to, for one perfectly legitimate reason or other, bake a pan of brownies, or a chocolate cake, or the ginger cookies everyone loved—laughing, all the time, at herself, and then eating a plate of whatever it was when it came, steaming, out of the oven, and urging me to follow her example. She was a writer, too, though she never took herself seriously. It was impossible for me not to, because she’s the one who taught me that you have to include the good with the bad in a story to make it great. Since she left I’ve never done that quite as well. The idyllic has always been my preference, and my failing: I create utopias with no foundations, and untested they fall far short of their embryonic fantasy beginnings. Of course, she went through my rough drafts lining them with the teachers’ red pens she used to correct them, to ground them and give them perspective, structure.

It was on such a classic night for us this memory takes place, the sweet scent of a chocolate cake in the oven flavoring the air as I, her helpful assistant, made frosting—such a vital skill for the boyfriend of a cook, it was the only thing she had been able to teach me to make. It was partnered by the subtle sound, quiet as snow falling, of my girlfriend correcting my latest short story, the longest yet. I had worked for weeks on the seven pages, building them up and paring them down day after day. I watched her shear away sentences, and even from across the kitchen I could almost see the way she brought out what I had meant to say as though it was a tangible web of steel beams and bolts growing up around my worn phrases, slowly and as inexorably as water washes sand away. She sat back, and I could see she was tired. “Dearest, why don’t you go to bed?” She sighed, leaning forward to rest her forehead on her palm.

“I think I might. It was a long day.” Slowly she got up to give me a goodnight hug and kiss, and left the kitchen for the bedroom we shared, almost filled by the double bed we kept there. In a whirl of chivalry, I remembered, I frosted the cake, using abundant globs of frosting to glue the two halves of the cake clumsily together and giving it a proud, wobbly chocolate crown. When the kitchen was finally still, the dishes and bowls she and I had used washed and the cake set under an upturned tin, I went into the bedroom to find her fast asleep, stretched out full length in the moonlight and peaceful as a monument to a buried princess—so serenely and inimitably beautiful I nearly cried then as I nearly cried when I remembered it those years later.