Cliff House

Cliff House He fantasized about growing a beard, wearing turtlenecks, living in a house above a cliff, a diminutive cottage where he would listen to the growling of the waves on the rocks below and the storm gusts rattling the windows in their casements. Either a gnarled-pine, Pacific Northwest landscape, or the chalky coastline of Cornwall. Isolated. A craggy haven where, when he was not making love to lonely, soulful women, he would read contemporary French novels beside the stone fireplace, glancing up from the page to stare out the window at the indistinguishable line where the overcast sky caressed the ocean. He would entertain poets, dark-minded young women who capitulated to sex as penance, yet made love with teary-eyed fervor, exorcising imagined demons, seeking psyche-cleansing atonement. Severe bangs and chin-length, black hair, with close-trimmed, unpainted nails on long, bony fingers. Hands that clenched his back when he entered them, then shoving against his shoulders, arching his upper body away from them so they could stare almost hatefully into his eyes when they came, and then finally gripping his neck and tugging him into a consoling embrace.

A succession of bleak women. Sequential, rhyming stanzas, gliding in and out of his life. No one permanent, older, or wiser. No one who had outgrown their fascination with desperation and hopelessness as an existential perspective. No one maternal or compassionate. No one anxious to bypass the suffering for which he offered a palliative balm.

Cliff-dwelling as an unrecognized pipedream. Flatland living his reality. Married and then not. Suspecting that the length of the marriage reflected his wife’s threshold for boredom. The divorce decree reading like a eulogy for a creature he loathed. His post-divorce apartment on the second floor of a two-story, brick building, accessed by a catwalk overlooking a paved courtyard encumbered with children’s toys. No waves crashing on rocks or storm winds rattling casements. Only cries and complaints of toddlers and frazzled mothers wafting skyward. Women fated to tolerate desperation, who surrendered to his overtures as diversion from their dismal subsistence, clutching him with thin, chapped fingers, their coupling a transitory distraction glazed with a flagging optimism that a taproot might anchor something enduring. An aspiration he at times shared, alarmed to find himself on the same wavelength with their optimism. Waking each morning with expectations that mocked, that sputtered, after dreaming of a broad life atop a precipice, an aerie where he could practice ostentation, not the insignificant existence his life had become in this apartment complex.