All
these things reappearing before her
seemed to widen out her life; it was like some
sentimental immensity to which she returned.
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
At this
point she knows she isn’t the same
she as the she’s
who inhabit those other
poems.
But possibly the nurses assume
she is.
It’s even conceivable they suspect her
name to
be Emma—“Emma” the homonym
in French
of “she loved.” Though she’s sure,
well,
she’s fairly sure she did love him.
Briefly.
Those evenings they spent together.
Tangled
in bed sheets, lights dimmed.
Or the
sunny days they floated, arm in arm,
through
the rippling, purple fields of Drôme,
heady
with the fragrance of lavender.
Once it’s
uncapped, memory’s perfume
will cloy
or repel. Now she’s in her eighties, either
can serve
to relieve the daily tedium.
Not that
she’s bored with habitual fare.
It’s
simply a truism that anything unaccustomed
will
spice the day with its flavour.
In
retrospect, she is the synergistic sum
of all
the she’s she ever was, and quite
aware
these she’s are distinct within her life’s
continuum.
But in
her forties she didn’t consider
she
might, in fact, no longer be the same
she as when she was a girl.
Occasionally,
the passage of time
will mock
middle age with perverse humour
by
allowing vanity to cloud wisdom.
...
He was
eighteen years her junior, the flirt!
She
protested eagerly and succumbed
eagerly
to this dashing, long-lashed flatterer!
They met
in Grignan, at the Clair de la plume,
twenty
minutes of wagon-rutted roads away by car.
(Her
husband, it happens, was conveniently in Rome.)
He kissed
the angle of her neck and shoulder,
led her
to the oak four-poster that filled his room.
Shy at
first (or was it coy?) she shivered.
But when
she unbuttoned her dress for him,
let it
fall, she was the blue lagoon of summer.
He
slipped in, swam in her warmth.
Because
he was her first amorous adventure,
she
couldn’t simply revel in eroticism
without
construing some affair of the heart.
But just
a few months later, alone at a museum,
it dawned
on her: she keened from medieval armour
that the
tarnished, empty shell he’d become,
he’d
always been. A mere flutter of sighs. He’d never
been
substantial. All along, it was her own dream—
damsel
and knight and forever after.
Forever
after. Hmpff! Forever be damned!
That
initial, long-ago tryst is just a blur
posted
along memory’s grey-scale album.
Like a
death notice in the morning paper.
From a
coronary, it says. And he was handsome,
still, in
his sixties, the photograph confirms.
Strange:
though he was her first, he’d seldom
crossed
her mind since that dalliance, years before.
The
fantasized re-imaginings, now, are welcome.
Yes,
quite heartening for a dowager,
these
visions and revisions of herself as a vamp—
visions
even cataracts can’t obscure!
...
She knows
she’s seen in this nursing home
as a
sweet old thing with fine white hair
dozing
and sleeping in a clutter of heirlooms.
She’s
lived with a benevolent calendar,
is satisfied
with her life’s outcome,
and
doesn’t mind that she isn’t young any more.
Because
she has a past. Because after the prim
sheltered
girl of inhibited desire, came a year
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