Oliver Benjamin
I laughed. She said, “Well, I think you’re incredibly sweet to
have bought it for me anyway. If you want to you can grab mine.”
I reached across the table. She slapped my hands and blushed.
“Not here, Jake. Later.”
That evening, we made love and fell asleep immediately in each
others arms. I remember my relief that nothing had changed
between us physically. Every nuance and subtlety of our embraces
and caresses stirred memories of how it had been the previous year.
The only thing different was that where we used to talk and laugh
afterwards, this night we had been unusually silent. No words passed
between our lips. I didn’t even remember falling asleep.
CHAPTER 3
And we continued to make love, sprinkling it throughout the rest of
our time together like an alcoholic baker adding booze to a rum cake.
Through the grassy knolls of Ireland, we pranced merrily, hand in
hand, not knowing what adventures would await around the next
corner: Abandoned castles, the great Van Morrison’s place of birth,
smoky pubs filled with brown ale and endless fields laden with purple
heather. We left no blarney stone unturned, dined nightly on corned
bliss and cabbage.
Onward we pranced, flying next to Greece, the neighborhood of the
original Ulysses, sequestering ourselves on isolated pebbly beaches
where we lay lazy and unclothed, covering ourselves only with the
warm Aegean sea, or sometimes when the coast was clear, each
other. Eating and drinking to excess, we found ourselves fully
marinated in an epic poem of pleasure.
That was why it came as a surprise to me that day, early in the
morning, when a Greek fisherman offered to read the coffee grinds in
my cup and told me that my heart would soon break and that death
would ask me to dance. I laughed and promised to switch to tea, but
he seemed serious. When I refused to pay him for the service he
yelled curses at me in Greek. I responded by pouring water over the
grounds and tossing them in the dirt. He shook his fist in the air and
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