Chapter 9: Coming in from the cold
The long cold winter spilled over the Cascades with a vengeance the week before Christmas. The blonde and I rendezvoused at a waterfront hotel made famous when the touring Beatles stayed there. It advertised salmon fishing out room windows and a huge seafood buffet.
I never found if the room fishing was hyperbole, but I indulged in the buffet waiting for her to work her way 300 miles through the weather. She was dressed to kill when she entered the restaurant. As with the first time I was with her, she magnetized male gazes, sauntering toward me amid the wreckage of my prodigious meal.
Small amused smile. Head shake as I held her chair. “Every time I see you, you’re eating. No wonder you’re so big.” She accepted coffee. “It’s cold out there.” But not food. She cocked her head. “You think I drove all this way through that weather to eat? Do we have a room?” Maybe one of a kind, this one.
We did in fact have a room. Even a room right on the water where use of a salmon rod off the deck was theoretically possible. Being me, I wondered how you’d net a 40-pound Chinook from the surface nearly a story below. The odd things you think about. Across the water the orange-hued blaze of West Seattle ship-works and gantries was bright enough to leave room lights off.
Every time with her was memorable. That night above all. We were outside time, outside our everyday lives, literally in from the cold.
We knew each other’s rhythms and learned more. In the clock-less orange glow I was no longer in my early forties and she was no longer fifty. We were ageless in an erotic bubble. In the strange light my rigid cock seemed to have grown exponentially. Felt like it too. How could it find harbor in that slender body — how could it even fit?
Illusion surely, high on lust. It fit just fine. Repeatedly. Her eyelids were lowered, eyes flickering beneath as if dreaming. Her eyes were wide-open and rolling, cords in her neck tight as a strung bow. We made love slowly and sweetly. We fucked almost violently. We subsided gasping to touch and tease, humming like dynamos. Then we made love again until our personal storm gathered and I pounded her.
When I achieved that permanent lingering hard-on of which Henry Miller wrote so nostalgically, I knelt above her and clutched the headboard as she fellated me, on and on and on. Couldn’t quite inhale it all so maybe the illusion of size wasn’t all illusion. Didn’t matter…scores of nerve endings in the engulfed part poured signals to my dazed brain, flooding it with feel-good chemicals.
When her jaw ached so she could go no more, I nestled down between her legs for her turn. Had to lie on one hip to accommodate John Thomas, still at full salute. If sex is a drug, we overdosed that night. Eventually it was something like 3 a.m. and we were spent. She admitted now she was hungry. But was helpless to get up. Her legs would not support her. Rest, I said. I’ll go bring some take-out back. She kissed me. I’ll be right here…
The desk clerk said the temperature just hit 13. Thirteen in Seattle! The night was unnaturally still. Cars coated with ice, ice underfoot. All the usually moist air reduced to frozen crystals. I had to use my Zippo to thaw the door lock. The reliable Honda fired right up. My nose and hands were numb by the time the engine warmed and I scraped enough ice to see.
The Denny’s was warm. I ordered enough for four — I wasn’t coming back out till daylight. The odor of our rutting was powerful in the room when I returned. She laughed at all the food, but packed a lot of it away. I had what amounted to a nude picnic on a big bed with a sexy blonde in the orange harbor glow. Unforgettable. Our dessert was a slow, peaceful fuck. Then we slept. Not for long. Weak gray daylight woke her, and she woke me with her mouth. Amazing how those few hours recharged us.
But I couldn’t stay. I had promised weekend Christmas shopping to the kids. She respected that. After we took the edge off morning horniness, she dozed while I showered and dressed. Then came into my arms reeking of our night, arm around my neck, breasts swinging distractingly, kissing my neck: I really hate for this to end…
Hell, so did I. But she didn’t try to dissuade me. An all-round remarkable woman. She said she would sleep and luxuriate and remember, before getting ready to head for her family holiday. Be careful out there. Drive like you’re East o’ Mountains…
The east had come west while I wasn’t looking.
My plateau home was 800 feet above sea level. Above the rain, below the snow was a Chamber of Commerce motto. Not this winter. As I climbed onto the plateau through the snow-blurred landscape I saw big trees down, heavy branches protruding into the road marked by flashers. Roofs peeled back. Power lines down, linemen on the poles. Florida memory kicked in. It was like driving into the aftermath of a hurricane. In this case, a snow hurricane.
When I hit the plateau proper, I was abruptly into the hurricane itself. Heavy winds buffeted the car. Garbage cans and lawn furniture skidding across the road. Doug firs bending and swaying. Houses dark, flicker of candles here and there. It was like entering a frozen, violent universe. The radio said plateau winds had peaked at one hundred mph. The peculiar frozen stillness when I went for food made sense now. The storm sucked away all wind, and somehow skipped Seattle.
My home was intact but powerless and vacant. A note on the fridge said they were at her sister’s house. The one who wouldn’t let her boyfriend keep my guns in his safe when we were stuck in Chloe’s brother’s trailer waiting for our tenants to vacate. (Yes, I held a grudge.) Her boyfriend had their house equipped for survival — generator and wood-stove — so Chloe and the kids were safe. No thanks to me. The note didn’t say that. Didn’t have to. It did include a list of supplies for me to pick up.
I changed into hunting wool and traded the Honda for my big pickup. The wind still was strong. Maybe sixty, seventy based on Florida memory. Sub-zero wind chill, no resemblance to Florida. At the only grocery store with electricity, I had to turn driver-side downwind to open the door.
Power stayed out through the holiday. Last-minute shopping was done at sea-level malls. Christmas Eve was at the sister’s house, crowded with family refugees and drop-ins. Holiday music against the steady thump of the boyfriend’s generator, powering the record player and electric stove. Gifts exchanged by lamplight. Sleeping bags littering the floor near the wood stove, and in the boyfriend’s travel trailer with its independent propane heat. Everyone in full emergency mindset.
I stowed my erotic vacation from real life deep in memory, safe from belated guilt about not being home when the storm hit. No forecast had predicted the severity. The plateau always had strong winds. Winters happen. The catalyst that changed things was clear-cutting of protecting fir-clad foothills that once formed a natural windbreak thousands of trees thick. Plunging temperatures riding hurricane winds had nothing to prevent them scouring exposed plateau settlements. It wouldn’t be the last time.
Given life-long paranoia, it was all too easy to infer Fate was sending me a warning to mend my ways. But I refused delivery. A miss was good as a mile. The plateau, among her extended family, was where my wife insisted on staying. Intended or not, the closeness of our early marriage, before kids and before she planted herself immovably in her dead mother’s house, was gone. Something I never envisioned ten years ago when I honored her request to stay married and not go to the other woman I loved. Our marriage had become an institution, and she was comfortable with that. So as the saying goes I had made my separate peace.
Surrounded by her family, she managed fine in the unexpected storm without me. No surprise; we effectively lived separate lives. The storm was just a variation on a theme. Evidence, perhaps, I was the unnecessary fifth wheel her family always considered me.
That sure was a long cold winter.
Postscript: The work that took me to Spokane that year concluded successfully the following spring. The last meeting over there offered a chance for a final bittersweet tryst, as my blonde luck ran out simultaneously. I settled back into the dull routine of a desk-bound Western Washington bureaucrat. Her hairdresser salon kept her close to home. She seldom traveled west. We were not exactly jet setters.
We parted with regret but no sadness: we had been good to and for each other. We made no effort to prolong contact. Life moved on. A new governor was elected and promoted a middle manager of an agency I had worked closely with to director. We knew each other, and I accepted transfer to his staff with attendant pay raise.
In the next few years I did have occasion to visit her city, but always as a passenger on the governor’s KingAir for quick in and out meetings, no overnights. So I didn’t call. Four years later, I stopped by headquarters for messages on my way to SeaTac for a commercial flight to a government conference in Quebec.
The young Patrol cadet manning reception said I’d had a visitor, “a hot older woman, a blonde…” And read her name off his notepad. No message, she said she’d just stopped by to see if I was in. He added she looked very disappointed when I told her you were on your way to Canada, and eyed me speculatively, as if he’d never seen me before. I never heard from her again…
