The Most Beautiful Woman I’ve Ever Met
It wasn’t her looks.
It was the things she said, like “I live in America but I don’t consider myself American. The government will send you off to die in war but if you’re dying of cancer and don’t have health insurance they won’t fight to save you.” And, “How are we showing we are thankful by gorging ourselves on Thanksgiving? Shouldn’t we just eat what we need and give to others in need?” And, “Animals experience fear and love, yet we kill them like it’s nothing because we are ‘smarter.’ If aliens came down from Zimbolo and did that to us what would we think morally?”
She worked at the post office and told me these things when I went there to send my manuscripts out. I wrote about societies follies sometimes and she had read my work and took it as an open invitation to spill her guts to me. I didn’t mind. I completely identified and agreed with what she said. I stood there with my mouth open, nodding my head, awe struck by her outlook on life while she weighed and stamped my manila envelopes.
“What’s up with people going to war over religion?” she said. “If we took away all the fantasies we’d go back to the basics by worshipping the moon and sun. Hell, you could write a religion.”
I smiled, “My thoughts exactly.”
Her spirit was so damn beautiful. The capsule containing her spirit, however, was not beautiful in the classic sense. Her face reminded me of an egg with long strands of curly black hair hanging over her large forehead like cracks in a shell. Her cheeks blushed as red as a rooster’s comb as if she had been out in the cold for days. Her pure white skin made her teeth look gold and her gums look blood. Short, stout, with the tits of an impregnated dog and a body shaped like a turtles shell, her little hands clenched my submissions like the claws of a crab as she said, “We’re all monkeys trapped on an island, too afraid to swim through the murky waters of society to the other side.”
MmmHmm,” I said, gawking at her and imagining her beautiful words doing evocative belly dances through the air.
And the next week I went to the post office with four new manuscripts and ambled up to the service desk, sure enough, there she was, sizzling with words.
Like a cooked maggot: it wasn’t the taste that counted, but the hunger it took away.
Before she could say anything and put me in another trance, I said, “Listen, what are you doing tomorrow night?”
She looked up and her eyes grew so big that the sleep lines disappeared and for once she was speechless.
“I,” she said, “I,” and, “I don’t have any plans . . .”
“What do you say we get together and talk?”
She grinned with her crimson gums, “It’d be like a dream come true!”
Once again, “I agree.”
- — -
The night was lukewarm so I mixed a couple sixteen ounce bottles of Seven-Up with vodka and drove her up the bluff. I had found out her name, Rochelle; and I thought, now that’s a name with spirit! I pulled in the parking lot near the bluff top. We had already finished our vodka sevens so I mixed a couple more and we walked up the trail. The sky was clear and the moon looked like a mauled silver dollar glinting with star rays. Rochelle smiled constantly. She was a bit drunk and held my hand, bumping into my side as we made our way up. Couples coming down gave us queer glances. I could hear the guys laughing after they passed us and their girls giggling and saying “Oh stop!” But I didn’t care. Rochelle didn’t care. The world was one big Follyville and we both understood that and thought the same sardonic thoughts about them except we omitted the “Oh stop.” We came to the end of the trail, a fenced in edge of the bluff with an American flag jutting off the side lit by spotlights. It waved and wisped over our heads as we looked down at the sepia tinted city lights.
“America, ha!” Rochelle said. “I was born here but I could have been born in Hiroshima, a mutated freak after they dropped the first atomic bomb.”
I raised my drink, “Cheers to that,” and gulped it down.
“Humans really are the violent type of animals. I mean look at the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. They reacted like rattle snakes, thoughtlessly lunging at anything they opposed without the slightest recognition of innocence. Why don’t we cook and eat these malicious humans instead of things that live day to day without harming anyone?”
“Right on!” I said.
She went on and her voice began to slur, “How can we possibly think we know how the universe was created when we don’t even know how to cure AIDS or Cancer or Alzheimers?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“It’s like everyone has cataracts and they can’t see outside the box. They say ‘Oh, we better get married, everyone else is, and it’ll be best for our kids.’ Well not always, buster, I say. Sometimes children are better off when the parents split so they don’t have to deal with the constant bickering and often times physical fights.”
“So true,” I said.
“Empathy is the greatest education anyone can learn. People would be so much better to each other if they would detach themselves from their own minds and fill the shoes of others who are starving or in pain or dying.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes indeed.” I lit a cigarette and let its soul slowly drift away.
There was silence. Rochelle stopped talking. I tried to think of something smart to say, but she had already said everything that had been on my mind that week. I started to chain smoke. She took longer chugs off her bottle.
“You haven’t really said anything since I’ve met you,” she said and turned to me. “Haven’t you anything to contribute? I thought you writers were supposed to be special, truly deep, rippling with the brilliance of a crystal stone tossed in a wide never ending lake. Just what the hell is this?” she scowled. “I feel like I’m talking to a vegetable.”
“I’m just stunned that we think so much alike,” I said. “Don’t take it the wrong way. I think it is wonderful.”
“Are you freakin’ serious?” she said. “Are you bullshitting me? I bet you’re just going to write a story using my thoughts. Aren’t you? That’s what it is, isn’t it? Seek out your little ideas and jot them down? You’re using me!”
“Well, yes and no. You’re taking this the wrong way. Honestly I . . .”
“Screw you, Nelson! You’re just an idea thief.”
“Not really, I . . .”
Rochelle tramped down the trail and the dirt kicked up around her pudgy ankles while her thin black hair blew like hundreds of spider legs and she disappeared into nonexistence.
I muttered the end of my sentence, “thought of it all by myself,” and looked down at the city lights, then up at the flag, and over the moon. The vodka seven was hitting the spot. I flexed my muscles. Years of lifting weights rippled beneath my t-shirt. I glanced down at my chest; it looked sort of like a pair of breasts. I stood at the bluff top, thinking by myself for a few more hours, drinking my content.
