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Come, The Recorders

Ah, ha!—Come, some music! Come, the recorders!—
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2

*

I used to work around the corner from that church, and I remembered the day the fire tore through the building. There was a lot of snow. It was in December, about ten days before Christmas. The fire trucks had a tough time getting through. It took years to rebuild the church, and by the time they were done I was long gone from that part of town.

So when my wife suggested going there for a concert, my reaction was "yeah, sure, why not?" Admission was cheap enough and it was easy to get to from work. Besides, I had almost retired and went to the office more for a change of scene than to do a lot of work.

Three years earlier I had rented space in a law office run by and for lesbians. The ladies were very pleasant, much nicer than a lot of guys and even straight women, and certainly nicer than the people I had worked with for 40 years. The ladies didn't bother me and I didn't bother them. I wasn't around enough to bother anybody.

The senior partner was a loud, brash, top-fuel testosteronically-enhanced bitch, a classic mad-dog dyke lawyer, but she had a heart of gold (if you could find it). Stereotyped to the max, she complimented me on my retro tie collection, and we compared Brooks Brothers suits. She charged me, however, way less than the market could have borne for my office, but enough so I didn't feel like a complete charity case. And she thought I was a master of our craft (another one I had fooled).

She had a collection of waifs and strays for support staff, mostly little mousy types of no particular gender, with an occasional built-for-comfort mama type. The lawyers who worked for her were obvious butch types who would have been the "affirmative action look how liberal we are" mannequins in any other firm. They were good, though, they knew their stuff, and stood up to the chauvinists and morons who form too large a part of our craft's population, to say nothing of our ever-to-be-esteemed judiciary.

Her junior law partner (not her lover, who was a rather tall, giraffe-like lady whose primary function seemed to be neglected spouse, with dog-walker and housemaid thrown in) was Maria. Maria was special.

Everyone knew Maria was the real wheelhorse of the firm. She put in the 19-hour days, skipped weekends and family, dealt with the obstreperous clients and even more obstreperous adversaries. She was so girly-girly that people didn't believe she was a true lesbian.

She was classic "bi now, gay later". She told me she had had boyfriends, even had sex with men and enjoyed it. She thought she was straight when she was an assistant DA in a neighboring county. Then she met Wanda.

Wanda stood 5'10" in her duty boots, the ones with the steel in the toecaps and the metatarsal arch. Wanda was a police officer after she left the Marine Corps (after ten years, they didn't ask, but she told them the day her last enlistment was up, and left).

Of course it's hearsay, but I am told that Wanda's ample breasts were tattooed. The left reads "Semper", and the right reads "Fi". Wanda wanted to be a Command Sergeant Major or equivalent, but of course that would have meant continuing to lie for years more. Someone else, not Maria (we never talked about our private interactions with our life partners), told me Wanda had her nipples pierced back to front and had a little stud custom-made, with the eagle, globe and anchor in 24 karat gold, to go on each one.

Wanda said there are no ex-Marines. Even when they're dead and shoveled under, they are Marines. If you met Wanda, you would thank God they're on our side.

Maria is like a daughter to me. She's the same age as my elder girl, Emma the tax practitioner. Emma and her husband Mike the civil engineer live 1500 miles away, one city block from my younger girl, Anne. Anne is straight and unattached but looking while she manages a national chain store in an upscale mall. I miss them terribly. There are no grandchildren yet, but I pray every day.

The day I went to this concert Maria told me that her breast cancer was back. She thought they'd gotten it all when they took out the lumps the last time. We'll all walk with her, I said, but I thought "the hard part of the walk is for her alone". Maria's news was not happymaking. I told her, not for the first time, how much I love her. Jokingly, I said it was like having another daughter with none of the work, or the expense. In my head I thought, "but with all the pain of loving and losing." I turned away and walked quickly back to my office, shut the door and lost it. I buried my head on my desk and sobbed. Stupid fucking old man, I thought, but I couldn't stop crying.

Somehow I made it through the afternoon, and my wife and I went to the concert.

The inside of the church had been done in fake Italian renaissance; modeled on the del Gesù in Rome, the little booklet in the front door rack said. Big murals featuring St. Christopher (even though he had been cut from the team), a few virgin martyrs, and St. Francis of Assisi with a few animals in the backfield. And enough aerial perspective to make Leonardo wince. Still, it beat being outside, where the snow was falling, or at home, where I'd taken over cooking dinner. I didn't feel like cooking that night.

So I paid the twenty bucks for two senior citizens (the one good thing about growing old is I'm a cheap date) and eyeballed the program. Italian seicento music for portative organ, theorbo (that's a supersized lute), Baroque violin and recorder. Nice and restful, not over-intellectual, just the thing for a Wednesday night in winter with no interesting hoops on the tube and someone you love fighting for her life.

Enter the musicians. We have the moonfaced Chinese violinist who organized this group (why is it that all male Chinese violinists are moonfaced, and all male Chinese pianists are lantern-jawed?), the large lutanist in the ruffled shirt (he'd be right at home in the office), the organist lean and slightly stooped, and the recorder lady.

The recorder lady stole the show. She was tall and thin, with tiny tight boobies like she was stealing apples, taut muscular butt that hardly jiggled when she walked in her high Taryn Rose slingbacks. Fresh-faced, wide-eyed, with a cute little cupid-bow mouth but not pouty. Young, I guessed, maybe two three years out of college; but her resume in the program told me she had been around a while, with some groups whose names I recognized. So she was nearer thirty than twenty.

She could play the recorder. Her thin agile fingers were all over that stick. Her mouth was all over it too. She moved the instrument elegantly up, down, back, forward, touching her lips, tantalizing it, blowing so softly and sweetly, then taking it firmly in her mouth and running her fingers over it. I wouldn't have minded trading places with the recorder. I may be shorter and thinner than the handmade Dutch model she was playing, but I could probably hit a few good notes if she felt like playing me.

Now you may ask why I was so fucking horny that I forgot Maria. Essentially because sex in my marriage was on its way out. Charlotte had been a wonderful lover. I had reveled in her body, in her intensely female form. I remember even now orgasms from 25 years before, intense, soul-cleansing proofs that God wants us to be happy. Even during her pregnancies and after the babies, the good times rolled on and on, like an endless summer.

But no person, no body, survives when Time starts pushing. Menopause was remarkably light at first, and I thought we were still in the magic bubble. Then came the dryness, lack of interest, "yes I will if you'll get some lube", soreness, and the arthritis of the spine.

I was still all right. I joked with her that "I might not be as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was." Then my urologist, a dour, head-of-the-department type who exuded seniority and Michael Kors for Men, suggested I might need Viagra, as my blood work showed I might need a certain assist to reach the Moment of Truth. This I vehemently denied, but it did give me pause.

And, dear reader, before you snark, scoff or hit the "delete" key, remember the old epitaph: "As you are, so was I; as I am, so will you be." Snark, scoff or delete when you get to 70--if you get to 70.

After the performance, which I really enjoyed (when not distracted by those lips on that stick), my wife dragged me over to meet the church organist, who organized this concert. He was the former assistant organist at the cathedral, where the chief organist was notorious for his taste in willowy assistants and just-legal choristers who looked divine in lace. This church's organist fitted right in there.

James, the church organist, twittered before Twitter was invented. He and my wife (who had appointed herself fag-hag extraordinary to the local university's music department) were having what he called "a jolly chin-wag", when the recorder lady came by to thank us all for attending.

"She sings soprano in my choir," said James, with a proprietorial smirk. "She's so multi-talented, so multi-everything, it's a shame she isn't male."

"Rein it in, girl," she told him, "the night is young, don't waste it on me."

"Chet and Charlotte, this is Priscilla. Priscilla, these are my dear dear friends----" and he was off.

A few minutes of social babble later, and my wife turned the conversation to the latest music department gossip. In the tiny music world in our city, everybody knew everybody else. I tuned out. Most of the musicians didn't interest me on a personal level; most of them engaged in much soul-searching and not a lot of sex, except for one flaming organist whose goal apparently was to skewer most of the male population.

Priscilla and I drifted away.

I turned to her. "You must wear out a lot of recorders."

"Oh yes," she said, "Blowing moist warm air through them really warps the wood."

"So I take it there is a lot of warped wood around where you are blowing."

"Some," she replied, "but I get enough straight hard wood in my mouth to make up for it."

"Now that we understand each other, where can we finish this conversation?"

We were smiling and obviously joking-flirting. I was old enough to be her father (and if I had gotten dispensation to marry at age fourteen, her grandfather). She wore no ring, but may have taken it off while performing.

More importantly, I had given Charlotte my word of honor 40 years ago, If a man's word of honor is worthless, what's the rest of him worth?

Charlotte and I agreed from the inception. No physical violence, no fucking around; any of that, the other is gone, no second chances. Just before we met, she had left a ten-year, extremely psychologically abusive, relationship with a Class-A piece of shit disguised as a man. He had cheated constantly, raped her frequently, and impregnated her so she had to get an abortion, which almost killed her.

But for the fact I would have gone to jail and lost her, I would have killed the son of a bitch. Anyway, God took care of it. The bastard died later of prostate cancer. Charlotte was sad, remembering the good times they had; I wanted to cheer and shit on his grave. Charlotte was mine and I was hers, good times, bad times, whatever, from day one to day last.

Priscilla said, "Let me show you the choir loft, where we sing."

"All right," I said, and we went to the back and up the circular wrought-iron stairway.

The choir loft was quite generous. Most churches barely gave the choristers room to stand. The balustrade separating the loft from the church was quite high. You couldn't see up there from pew level.

She said, "You looked so unhappy, but your wife is so vivacious. Why are you sad?"

"You don't want a hard-luck story, do you?"

"Only if you want to tell me one."

"You can't possibly see anything in a fat old wreck. Go play with someone your own age."

"It isn't what I see, it's what I get. First I get, then I see."

She moved closer, smelling of good soap, organic shampoo and a healthy young life. "Mmm," she said, "Canoe. I like Canoe."

"So does Charlotte," I said.

"I guessed she would. She seems like a nice lady."

"It was wonderful before her change-of-life. Now I have the memories, and some of them hurt."

"I can make the hurt stop for a while. My music does that, but I can do something else too."

"Does it also have to do with your mouth and your fingers, and wood, and soft moist breath?"

"It might. I like using my mouth and my fingers and my soft moist breath on wood. I would practice all the time if I could find the right wood."

"Even old wood, like you have to work on before you can play?"

"I love a musical challenge."

I stopped. She was very close. I was past having a spontaneous erection (go ahead, laugh or sneer, dear reader--just wait), but I was having serious thoughts about trying. Her scoopnecked black beaded shirt was very close, and her breasts looked inviting, small as they were. Charlotte was always a D, and even after two children and some very hard years, they were still fun.

Priscilla's eyes were bright. Release was just a moment away, and I wanted release very very badly. That small soft mouth and the warm moist breath were close. From my mouth they could have worked their way down to where they would have done me a world of good. Charlotte was good for half an hour when she cranked up the gossip machine. I would probably not have lasted five minutes in that beautiful mouth.

Priscilla said, "It's really true, it's better to give than to receive. May I give to you?"

Every fiber of my body wanted to say yes. My eyes shut, my hands clenched, I felt like I was going to jump from a great height. I could imagine that mouth on my cock. I'm not huge or thick, but I've never had any complaints and Charlotte was always multi-orgasmic. The women I had before her never complained either.

Charlotte's view on oral was opposite to Priscilla's. For Charlotte, it was better to receive oral than to give. She did fellate me on our first date, because I stupidly had no condom and she didn't want to fuck on a first date. We took care of that shortly thereafter; our second date was not at a fancy restaurant like the first date, but in her bed. We didn't put on clothes for two days.

"No," I said, "not because I don't want you to, not because you're not beautiful and desirable, not because you wouldn't give me a screaming orgasm, and even not because we're in church because God made our bodies and if I were free there is nothing I'd rather do, and then do whatever you want me to do to you--but I can't. I promised Charlotte. I owe her and our children. And corny as it sounds, I owe God. I'm not holy, and I'm the last one to preach, but I owe. And the only way to pay what I owe is to say no. Priscilla, you're lovely. Go find a man worthy of your love, spend your life playing that wonderful music and sharing his life. God bless you, and I'm sorry, but no."

"Oh God," she said, "All the good ones are married. I'd even take a share of a first-class man, it's better than all of a second-class one. Well, it was a nice flirt. Good luck, Chet."

"Good luck, Priscilla."

We went back down. Charlotte was winding down the gossip machine as the assembled musicians and hangers-on switched off their glazed-eyes look and started packing up. I shook hands with Priscilla, who turned suddenly and walked to her coat. I hoped she wasn't crying, because I couldn't possibly cry with her.

I helped Charlotte into her coat. We walked outside, she talking away and I not listening.

The night was cold, but my heart was colder.

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