Fiction Corner: Outing Montezuma - Part 4
 Jan Baumgartner - PVNN
| | A native Californian, Jan Baumgartner is a freelance writer dividing her time between surviving in Maine and living in Mexico. | |
For the next few days and unexpectedly, their paths would cross. They'd wave or yell "hola!" from opposite sides of the street until they could no longer bear it and agreed to meet on the same side of the cobbles. But the attraction was so powerful, so palpable, they could barely articulate. "I'm unavailable," he blurted before they managed hello. "I have the overwhelming urge to kiss you but I warn you now, you might very well want to keep your lips to yourself or on the edge of your wineglass or wherever else you may want to put them. My heart is not free - it's trapped with another and so I cannot fully be there for you."
To say the Dartmouth professor was puzzled would have been an understatement. This was the first time they had been in close proximity to one another since the art opening, and here they were on the cobbles having no history of previous conversation, and she wasn't holding a wineglass and they hadn't yet exchanged names and so this ominous, if not psychopathic, verbal outing made her shoes feel funny as if she were standing in a warm puddle of something unpleasantly familiar. Granted, his paintings were dark and foreboding, but this personality glitch and the fact that he was hermetically sealed in Mars Black beneath the searing Mexican sun, smacked of borderline whack job.
But she ignored his warnings and he only listened to half a heart, and they took turns locking their lips not only on their wineglasses but each other, although their guts told them they were making a grave mistake, much like the initial moments following eating fish tacos from a street vendor, but the chemical attraction was far too great for their combined intellects, and the fireworks of pheromones became the only language they understood and thus the cloud got thicker and thicker and God forbid anyone light a match.
Meanwhile, a bullfighter clad in full matador costume and swaggering in his usual bravado slipped into the corner tienda for a bag of pork rinds.
She was buying six bottles of water, one for herself and the others for her sunstroked children. Suddenly, her red faced five-pack began to jump up and down on the hard tiled floor shouting at the tops of their lungs, "Look mom, a real live bullfighter!" She collected her change and looked up and into the flat out dumbest, most exquisitely handsome face she had ever seen. He flashed a movie star smile of straight and gleaming pearly whites, simultaneously winking and as if in slow motion, parted his beautifully positioned, moist plump lips and said, "Olé!" as if it were covered in chocolate.
Normally such a despicable display would make her respond in a very straightforward manner such as "you've got to be kidding me," or "fuck off cocksucker," but she was fairly certain he wouldn't catch her drift and before her brain clicked on and her eyes could focus on the unbelievable display of embroidery and sequins, the small vessel-like shape resting atop his head and the unnaturally tight fitting pants, her mouth fully disengaged from her body, floated into the middle of the tienda and hanging in mid air whispered, "Olé right back atcha!"
Her children giggled and clapped and screamed "Olé!" and ten tiny hands began to touch his outfit, pulling at his vest, tapping his sequins all the while squealing, "do you really kill bulls, mister?! Do you really kill bulls?! Look at his funny hat, mom! It's shaped like a taco! Where's your sword, anyway? Ma?"
He didn't seem to mind the attention.
She had discovered the unnaturally tight fitting pants.
Orange Cones, El Dandy, and a New Shrink in Town
It was the most exciting, mind-numbing sex either of them had had in a very long time. And yet, the professor from Dartmouth still seemed to manage conversation. The now not-so-blue New Yorker had always been with women who used far too many words, and while he was all for stimulating conversation and soul searching exploration, the professor took verbosity to a new art form. And though he toiled with what colors he would use to paint this exotic lovemaking verbiage, he knew he had never seen anything quite so quirky in a tube.
Thank God, he thought, their week had an abundance of carnal stimulation, but she managed, still, to incessantly chat during lovemaking, sometimes carrying on full blown conversation, often without response, yet she didn't seem to notice. At the brink of orgasm, while others might moan or pant hoot, scream or yodel, she would often mumble, "flaxseeds are God's gift to the colon," or "how 'bout them Red Sox?" This, he never fully understood but he was fairly certain she had no idea she was mouthing such drivel and he let it go as some bizarre form of climactic disengagement, lack of oxygen to the brain when her body swooned and her mind turned into one of her blender recipes for a colon cleansing smoothie. How the Sox fit in was a tad more baffling. He was smitten.
Meanwhile, the documentary filmmaker, realizing her affair with the blue New Yorker was on the skids, couldn't seem to shake the vision of one glorious bullfighter and the way he sported his magnificent red muleta. This unsettled her, and for many reasons. Granted, they didn't understand a word each other said, but that was of no importance. The uncomfortable poking and prodding was what he did for a living - he was a slayer of bulls - and she, a lifelong, card carrying member of PETA. Yet the vision of his firmness in those ill-fitting pants and his cocoa covered "olé!" switched her brain off, and motorized her feet to glide down the cobbled street and stand in front of his casita, her hand clutching the brass knocker in the shape of a tiny bull's head.
His bedroom walls were painted oxblood red, the bed linens, red silk. A black leather beanbag chair squatted in a corner. The walls were blank except for the wall behind the thick wooden headboard. Above the bed was a huge framed poster of one famous matador, El Dandy, a legend in Mexico, and an obvious stimulus check or love worship for one randy bullfighter.
|
Vallarta Weddings
Vallarta Living | July 2009 
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us