Her dual life Aug. 19, 1982
You couldn’t tell what she does for a living by just looking
at her face.
Over the years, she went from a look of innocence, even naïve
to motherly, although close up, she shows the wear and tear, especially around
her mouth and deep in her eyes where a darkness lay.
But her body betrays her, especially in a bathing suit, the
parade of tattoos she’s acquired like a road map to where she’s been and what
she’s done, breasts and arms marked with ink by an expert’s hand.
She has a rose tattoo on her wrist and another on her hip, seven
tattoos in total, each attained in a different place, signifying a career that
has stretched from coast to coast.
She’s always been this way, even with me during those early
years, though now, she paints herself as a middle class housewife, dedicated to
raising the child she sired with me.
I rarely see the other side of her, the one she reserves for
her clients, a regular cammelion, who changes her appearance at need.
She needs me to see her this way; when other men see
something else, as if she is capable of being two completely opposite people at
once, and I can only see that side of her reflected in the eyes of the men who admire
her, here and back in the city where she lives, the looks she gets at pool side,
her tattoos glowing in the slanted sunlight, she alluding to the truth only at
a distance, when we are on the phone and she hints at another, less savory
life, not asking me to forgive her – she doesn’t want that now and more than
she did back on the west coast when I struggled to keep her from diving into
that life.
This is what she wants, and I must accept it, and perhaps
being older now than I was back then, I might be able to – though it is a
struggle.
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