Heat

It’s 3 am and I have kicked off the sheet and flipped my pillow over to find the cooler side. I run a tired hand through the tangled, moist hair cleaving to my cheek, my temples. Finally, I sit up in the darkness, alone in my house on a hot and muggy night. I have been dreaming: my heart throbs against my nightgown; the back of my neck is damp. I stare into the murkiness of this bedroom and listen to the weary hum of the air-conditioner. The old iron bed frame squeaks as I pull my knees to my chest—and soon the tears come. I never wanted to be alone like this…

I like the heat of many things. The heat of a feverish night in summer—with friends on a rooftop deck, a breeze rippling off the river. The heat of a few good words on a page. The right color and stroke of the brush in a frame. The heat of people walking in their own deliberate and self-assured way. The heat of an audacious love... Which I have lost to something more tempered, more subdued. A flat, dry cracker of a love when I desire the grit and spice of a New Orleans love, a raucous kind of love.

I lift my legs to the side of the bed and pad down a hot, darkened hallway, the hardwood floor sticking to the bottom of my feet. In the bathroom, I splash water on my face, my neck—a softer image of me reflected in the quiet mirror. My edges and lines lost to the dusky shadows. I am me in a dream tonight, moving about an empty and unfamiliar house, moving around my unfamiliar life—bumping into things. I reach out sometimes to steady myself, but there is often nothing there. Yes, this must all be a dream…

The other night I am in the kitchen and he sits by himself in the living room. I hear staccato voices as he flips through the channels as so many men do. I chop vegetables, sauté onions, simmer a fragrant spicy stew. Yet he does not come to see, to test, to sample. He is not curious about the heat, a kitchen alive with the smell of gumbo filé, cayenne, andouille in the pan. I wipe my hands on a towel, sip a smooth red wine that slides like bliss along the back of my throat, my cheeks flushed from the open flame on the stove. And he sits in another room unaffected by the heat…

Sally tells me once, long ago, about a meal downtown with a man who dipped his fork without noticing the lace of sauce, the sprinkle of rosemary--the heat of it. She turned away, she said, and swallowed a soul-less meal that night all those years ago.

And so I make my way back to the bedroom, down a long quiet hallway, and wonder, as I settle back into bed, what to do with this night—with its shadows and silence. What to do with my own gnawing sadness. On a hot summer night in August: alone, alone, alone.
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