AN ITALIAN STEED - 31 May 2011
31st May 2011
Got a call from the realtor this morning asking to show the house at 11:30. We’re in the pocket with it now, plumping up the cushions, Ajax-ing the sink, fresh flowers all around. Today is blue and breezy with a hot sun, the garden voluptuous. We leave the door to the deck open so they can hear the sea when they enter the house and, before we leave, take a look around and imagine what it would be like to come here for the first time. We always half expect a check to be waiting for us on the table when we return or maybe they will have moved in!
Today, to fill the 45 minutes we vacate, we go to the supermarket to advertise our bikes on the bulletin board. Joel’s Celeste Bianchi and my black Pashley.
I think of Joel’s as his steed as it was upon it that he first rode into my life: a long-legged 52 year-old prince with silver curls flying out from his helmet, the rest of him sheathed in black lycra. It was September 24th 1990. I was recently divorced and Joel had been separated for 10 months from his wife of 28 years. I was 44, twenty months sober, owned my own hair salon and painted as a second career. My daughter, then 17, and I lived in a small town upstate New York.
In those days Provincetown was a ghost town after Labor Day yet the weather was still warm enough to swim. After years of coming here with various husbands and boyfriends I had returned off-season to enjoy the serenity and claim it as my own. Maybe it’s because the Pilgrims landed here first before continuing on to Plymouth that I felt at home here – even the first time that I came here in July 1971, two weeks after my first child was stillborn. In spite of the staggering grief, the place spoke to me.
The evening that Joel and I met we were both going out, independently, to Herring Cove to watch the sunset. I was on foot and feeling like I was finally inhabiting myself. There was no-one, no traffic, just me and the sandy road and the past slipping off my shoulders. And then woosh, there he was. We turned to each other and saw everything and turned away. And as he biked on, literally riding off into the sunset, I thought,“there went a kindred spirit,” and that was that. I watched my sunset and Joel, evidently, watched his. Then I turned and made the mile and a half walk back to the little studio I’d rented on the water.
About 100 yards before I reached the gate I heard that woosh again and turned to him as he dismounted and together we walked the 100 yards carrying on a conversation that had perhaps been interrupted centuries before. At the gate I invited him in for tea. He rested the Bianchi outside my door and the two of us sipped tea in the candlelight, his beautiful face suspended in the falling light. We arranged to meet at his house early the next morning for a walk and so it was that I came through this garden gate, the gate over which he would propose to me 10 years later.
We pin the flyers on the bulletin board and return home. There is no check on the table. And soon the trusty steed will be gone. But my prince is a keeper.