Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [5]
She whispered her dream to her buddy Avoa. Who yawned, smiled at her, and said: Hmmm. Oil and water. Both. Sounds refreshing and rich. Before disappearing into the shower. Kate lay abed a few moments longer, musing.
Her lover, Yolo, had watched her leave. A compact, muscular woman with good skin and creamy white teeth, a woman no longer sure there was a path through life or how indeed to follow one if there was. He’d folded her in his arms, yawning as he stretched her slightly backward. It was already over between them. Both of them felt it. Her journey now was to be with women. Only women. Because of women. And partly because she had seemed to feel, and to wonder aloud, about the possibility that only women, these days, dreamed of rivers, and were alarmed that they were dry.
He had no such dreams, certainly. And if he had them, he did not recall them on rising. Nor could he fathom why this should be so. In fact, dreams, the world of dreams, did not exist for him as it existed for her. And unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?
And she left. He watched the green shuttle stop, the driver lift in her gear, her sleep-creased face appear in a window. Then with a wave, a rapping of her stick against the pane, she was gone. He would have driven her to the airport had she wanted it. But no, she had wanted to leave her house heading directly into her journey. No long cuddles near the ticket counter, no second thoughts about whether they would be all right. It was like her to want it this way. No fuss. She would meet up with Avoa on the way, perhaps in Phoenix, and then the two of them would be off, as they seemed to manage to do now just about every year.
And feeling somewhat abandoned, left, he indulged his critical mind: She was not much of a housekeeper. He thought this while picking up one of his socks he’d discarded near the door. And grimaced at the inner critic. See, he said aloud, what do you know? He went inside the house, and while making a cup of coffee noticed a cobweb already beginning to attach itself to his cup. It made him laugh. To him, this was the way of Life. Turn your back for only a moment while the water boils and you are lost in the scent of things to come, and Life puts out a tentacle to grab some part of you. Even the cup from which you prepare to drink is already being pulled if only so slightly back to the ground. A ground that moves, changes, endlessly, but is, paradoxically, always the same. Or it had been the same until, as the old ones used to say, here lately. These “old ones” were, generally speaking, her old ones, but she shared them with him; a quaintness of expression, a drollness of thought, that she seemed to garner directly from her dreams. She might awake laughing anytime whether day or night and expose him to frolicsome goings-on, pithy sayings, the oddest bon mot from perhaps a century or so ago. Sometimes he’d cry: “I don’t get it.” And she’d laugh harder and say: “Well, I guess you’d just have to have been there!”
He would miss her. He already did so. Nothing to do, immediately, but go back to bed. To burrow under a comforter still warm from her body, still fragrant with her always fresh, slightly spicy scent. In a room in which there were always flowers, and candles, and a feel of the music that she so often played. Haydn and Beethoven, of course, and also the Beatles, Robbie Robertson and Red Road, and always and for endless hours, Sade and Al Green. Because they know