Chemical Wash
by Wendy C. Ortiz
in Lounge Lit: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction by the Writers of Literati Cocktail and Rhapsodomancy, 2005, LitRhap Press

Sitting in the theater with the only man I have ever imagined a wedding with (I had known him only weeks, and knew I wanted a blue dress, like my mom wore in her 1969 Las Vegas wedding to my father; Shawn would be in a dapper classic tux, standing at an altar, on a cliff, yep, a cliff overlooking the ocean, like a fucking soap opera [which it all was, it all was], knowing this boy would be mine forever...), I bunched myself up tight in the cushy seat and constricted any impulses I might have to touch him as we watched a nude woman squatting delicately over the face of a blindfolded man on a 60 foot screen (but I don't really know the size of the screen, the important part is that you get the picture).

And if you knew me, you would know that I spit on the marriage contract, I eye the act suspiciously, I run from the thought (in damn good running shoes, my braids flapping against my shoulder blades). If you knew me, you would also know the significance of the bitter gift this relationship has wrought on my life and what would bring me to suggest, index finger to my full lips, how about we go see Sex & Lucia?, to a man with whom I dove deep, only to find out he had emerged and walked out on land long before I ever even came up from underwater for a breath.

So it was that we stood at the ticket booth (I had withdrawn money on the credit card, in haste, since my bank account was, at the moment, bone dry), and I bought two overpriced tickets (this is West Hollywood, of course) for a film I knew contained cavorting nudes and lusty scenery and the promise of at least a damp spot in my underpants at the end of the night.

But now I’m just dancing around it. The story itself is simplistic. Two people, a twelve week tryst, intense and often dark, enveloping like a vise around the neck, or warm water around the body, dependent on our moods (which were often at odds), a drowning (me), a dry landing (him), and now, roughly sixteen weeks later (yes, that’s me, morbidly counting the goddamn weeks, like it was a pregnancy), the two of us attempt something like normalcy. There was a Sunday afternoon on an outdoor patio, sharing Mexican food; before that there was a meeting in a dark red room over candlelight, when I felt the certainty grip me (yes, I want him in my life), and the time before that a guarded and mellow sidewalk meeting, a shared bottle of wine, his intense blue-eyed stare at me across the plastic table, the stare (steely, and at turns lascivious, at other times, probing, [and yes, sometimes, mostly, both]) I had missed in all the silence of our break-up.

Right. Simplistic. As though there was a lack of complication. My friends would shake their heads, knowing that I now introduce a bit of fiction, not for your sake, but for mine. So I’ll go back on that. Yes, it was complicated.

And if you knew me, you know I thrive on complexity and a bit of drama (a lot, Sarah might say), and so it was with this intention that I suggested, playing innocent (if you knew me...), that we see a sex-drenched motion picture, on the night of a full moon, the last show of the evening, when only couples were in attendance, sitting far apart from each other in the dark (and when even the slightest rhythmic squeaking of a seat made me want to turn my head around to see who was enjoying the film and themselves so much).

The universal themes of Sex & Lucia (Yeah. Those.) flung themselves out at me like ribbons unfurling, and as usual, I gave out my wrists and asked to be tied up in their meanings:

the full moon
the ocean
the sun
sex
conception
birth
the month of May
loss
the number 23
the name 'Luna'
the uninhibited expression of sensuality and the physical acts of desire

All of these things swirled around the film, inside the film, and the lips I had once pointed an index finger to in (pseudo) innocence were now being bit by teeth that belonged to a woman, now embarrassed, at the suggestion of this movie. As though I had known ahead of time its leitmotifs and wanted to pose them, naked, in front of my ex-lover, to see if he could suss them all out, take hold of the deeper meanings, remember the contexts all of these things had in our relationship.

I mean, I had skimmed enough of a review to know that we would be subjected to some explicit scenes of sex, and, well, I missed the sex with Shawn. It always felt so metaphysical, why not watch others do it, act it, on a big screen, while held captive—but by choice. I would easily pay for that—and did (for his ticket, too)—and it was with this transaction and its aftermath that I would recall all of the things I had loved and all that I had hated (love and rage, the continuum I like to tiptoe down) and in the end, like a curtain closing over a screen, I would end the relationship once and for all with all of its visual cunning and fictive qualities. Decided upon, post-film, and with all the drama of the drama I had just witnessed before me: snap of the finger, a pinching of the most violent sort to the heart muscle, and the magical spell was [until the next film, verse, melody that reminds me…] broken (we can only hope).