Women - Charles Bukowski [111]
“Right.”
Valencia walked me to the screen door. We kissed there. Then I walked out to the Volks. I got in and drove off. I circled around the corner, double-parked, opened the door and puked up the other drink.
98
I saw Sara every three or four days, at her place or at mine. We slept together but there was no sex. We came close but we never quite got to it. Drayer Baba’s precepts held strong.
We decided to spend the holidays together at my place, Christmas and New Year’s.
Sara arrived about noon on the 24th in her Volks van. I watched her park, then went out to meet her. She had lumber tied to the roof of the van. It was to be my Christmas present: she was going to build me a bed. My bed was a mockery: a simple box spring with the innards sticking out of the mattress. Sara had also brought an organic turkey plus the trimmings. I was to pay for that and the white wine. And there were some small gifts for each of us.
We carried in the lumber and the turkey and the sundry bits and pieces. I placed the box spring, mattress and headboard outside and put a sign on them: “Free.” The head-board went first, the box spring second, and finally somebody took the mattress. It was a poor neighborhood.
I had seen Sara’s bed at her place, slept in it, and had liked it. I had always disliked the average mattress, at least the ones I was able to buy. I had spent over half my life in beds which were better suited for somebody shaped like an angleworm.
Sara had built her own bed, and she was to build me another like it. A solid wood platform supported by 7 four-by-four legs (the seventh directly in the middle) topped by a layer of firm 4-inch foam. Sara had some good ideas. I held the boards and Sara drove home the nails. She was good with a hammer. She only weighed 105 pounds but she could drive a nail. It was going to be a fine bed.
It didn’t take Sara long.
Then we tested it—non-sexually—as Drayer Baba smiled over us.
We drove around looking for a Christmas tree. I wasn’t too anxious to get a tree (Christmas had always been an unhappy time in my childhood) and when we found all the lots empty, the lack of a tree didn’t bother me. Sara was unhappy as we drove back. But after we got in and had a few glasses of white wine she regained her spirits and went about hanging Christmas ornaments, lights, and tinsel everywhere, some of the tinsel in my hair.
I had read that more people committed suicide on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day than at any other time. The holiday had little or nothing to do with the Birth of Christ, apparently.
All the radio music was sickening and the t.v. was worse, so we turned it off and she phoned her mother in Maine. I spoke to Mama too and Mama was not all that bad.
“At first,” said Sara, “I was thinking about fixing you up with Mama but she’s older than you are.”
“Forget it.”
“She had nice legs.”
“Forget it.”
“Are you prejudiced against old age?”
“Yes, everybody’s old age but mine.”
“You act like a movie star. Have you always had women 20 or 30 years younger than you?”
“Not when I was in my twenties.”
“All right then. Have you ever had a woman older than you, I mean lived with her?”
“Yeah, when I was 25 I lived with a woman 35.”
“How’d it go?”
“It was terrible. I fell in love.”
“What was terrible?”
“She made me go to college.”
“And that’s terrible?”
“It wasn’t the kind of college you’re thinking of. She was the faculty, and I was the student body.”
“What happened to her?”
“I buried her.”
“With honors? Did you kill her?”
“Booze killed her.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Sure. Tell me about yours.”
“I pass.”
“Too many?”
“Too many, yet too few.”
Thirty or 40 minutes later there was a knock on the door. Sara got up and opened it. A sex symbol walked in. On Christmas Eve. I didn’t know who she was. She was in a tight black outfit and her huge breasts looked as if they would burst out of the top of her dress. It was magnificent. I had never seen breasts like that, showcased in just that way, except in the movies.
“Hi, Hank!”
She knew me.
“I’m Edie. You met me at Bobby