Having become lately something of an amateur meteorologist, I take no small pride in saying I saw Imogen coming a solid two days before she hit the news. There was, if I may, an archness to her premonitory radar blooms, green pubescent freckles upon the baby-blue of a subtropical cheek whose subtle pulsing masked explosive potential, but bathwarm seas and the sudden collapse of a meddlesome mid-altitude windshear laid bare her intentions like batted eyes. “Cat three,” I murmured, and in forty-eight hours it was all but confirmed by good old Leo at WJXL, Leo who could hardly say a word like “devastation” with a straight face, that our Jacksonville, for all the shelter of the bight it commanded from Hatteras to West Palm, was happily fated for its second major landfall in as many years. Then the weatherman said her name and in his muddy drawl I perceived her name, that of my gratuitous obsession, and I swear he winked straight at me, and then I slapped my knee and covered eyes with palms and let the goodness of heaven’s poetry carry me aloft.

There was no question of our getting in touch right away. Always rules to these things. For her they were pragmatic and banal, for me they formed a game, a set of constraints whereby tensions would mount and strategies would present themselves until a suitably creative apotheosis was reached. So I came to realize in those two anxious days before my departure. If I have learned anything from my unfortunately congested C.V. it’s that the first time is always scripted and hormonal, that the game only appears when a second time hangs in the balance and this, I admit, is my first second time. Here I take the novice’s route and gather my pieces, all those striking memories, in the center of the board.

Our matchmaker (or mutual friend, or foot-in-the-door) had been Nicole, a ninety knot ordeal expected to pummel Ponte Vedra and drive, by brute Coriolic force, the brunt of a king tide up St. Johns’ mouth and over frame and floormat of the refurbished Plymouth Prowler sitting in my driveway courtesy of a particularly beloved uncle (RIP). The timing could not have been more fortuitous. I had business across the line in Valdosta, a safe two hour drive from all the ruckus, where it had come to my attention that a local supermarket sorely missed a self-service lottery printer, the rectification of such absences being my life’s passion. As that first infinite steamroller of a rainband approached I was already off in the Prowler, by nightfall ensconced in the desultorily papered walls of a festering Best Western. I found the television landscape appropriately desolate, its only lifeforms a Braves’ game in rain delay and Bonanza in its Tithonian syndication. Hoss got himself in some trouble over a case of mistaken identity. It made me want a stiff drink.

To this end I patronized, tongue firmly encheeked, one of those downtown joints that insist on conscripting the word “Southern” for their titles when their attitude is anything but. “Southern Patio” (for all my astounded searching, no actual patio revealed itself during my patronage) was the sort of place that ought to make a reasonable person feel ashamed being there unless he’s already too ashamed of something else to notice. The Rolling Stones obligatorily played on, louder than warranted. Shadows moved in the corners, lone sons of Adam wallowing in that well-earned shame, obscured by a combination of the Patio’s spitefully dim whiskey-orange fluorescence and the incongruous accessorization of the lone barfly, laptop screen on the countertop ablaze with a spreadsheet into which he tapped inscrutable figures while sipping from a copper mug. I took the specialty gin cocktail, subsequently regretted it. Whether I joined the barfly or the legions of shame escapes me, but I half-finished my saccharine abomination and said good night.

Leaning against the Prowler I lit a cigarette, gave another to a vagrant. “A mother of a vee-hickle,” he whistled, and I nodded in agreement. After an expectant moment came Emma Jean’s voice from behind: “Any more where that came from?” In the corner of my eye I’d spotted her emerging from the Patio, no doubt one of its formerly obscured legionnaires, but seeing her now exposed beneath the strident streetlamp, the moths and mousy hair between our eyes and her round good-girl face and office attire and the kitsch and artifice in her greeting and her smile, I thought she might have been posing for a Powerball ad. We took my car to her place, the Holiday Inn.

I here implore the reader not to judge too harshly my involuntary nocturnal habit, an instance of which I’ll momentarily describe, my hyenic predation on the wounded conjugal bed. It is not a conscious proclivity (and how could it be?), indeed it must be biochemical, a pheromonal magnetism which seems to envelope frustrated careerists and open-minded loners alike, mushing them inexorably together no matter the mood or setting. I do not seek, I merely accept — not without fascination, mind you. Is it so wicked to gape at a car crash one is powerless to stop, to not avert one’s gaze? And there is preliminary questioning and counsel, oh yes, as sexless and didactic as common courtesy would have it. If no precedent exists, if the dam has yet to burst, strict scrutiny is applied. My own distaste is made perfectly clear, without mention of any prior abetments. Well, is this enough of a gas for you, this debasement, this pathetic spectacle (by this point I am in my briefs), has the thrill gone, is the itch in the deep tissue after all or only the dermis? If I leave you with your high-road intact, will you take it? Or forsake it for whatever unscrupulous stooge next grants you his light? (Always cigarettes and lights with these people.) You see, I am never the prime philanderer but a bumbling accomplice. Yet for all my highfalutin rhetoric (I was known as the Wordsmith of DePaul) I’ve never made a repenter of anyone. At the end of the day, we’re all grown-ups. And the fruits of repression, my friends, burst in your mouth with all the sweetness and bitterness of life itself.

Like me, Emma Jean had fled the frothing St. Johns, upon whose banks rested her fetching bungalow aside a particular forlorn tree which dangled a hopeful rope-swing over the water in anticipation of some forecast but never precipitating child. “It won’t be anything,” she mused. “They never get to Jacksonville.” Still her husband had sent her away, as he always did at the first sign of cyclonic action, for her own safety — imagine! “Get out of town, sweetheart, there’s no point in risking it, give the Jag a chance to breathe.” As if it weren’t business as usual everywhere but the beach! This being the fifth or so iteration of the charade, she’d decided to venture further inland than her traditional refuge in Lake City. 

“Do you suspect it’s all an excuse…” I began, reclining in bed, and she cut me off with an icy glare. “Not one bit,” she said. There was no question as to her intentions, yet absent was any impulse on her part. She treated the matter as an errand to be dispatched, asked me to climb on top the same way I planned on asking Joe Jessop of Fine Goods Market to install in his store one of my fantabulously efficient self-service lottery printers. I acquiesced as obligingly as Joe soon would. There was the awkward fiddling and murmuring which I despise but which such debuts require. Do you like that, is that good, yes, yes. She clasped her hands above her head, in a lazy yawning motion, and I by some fortunate instinct tried to circumscribe those wrists inside a ring formed of thumb and middle finger. The shadow of a smile. “I’m trapped,” she said. “What are you going to do?” Nothing special, apparently.

Afterward came the nightcap of bathwarm hotel whiskey, the real pleasantries, beans upon beans which spilled more readily than I’d expected given the earlier performance. Oh, it was horrible, horrible, she told me. (And who else was there to tell?) Horrible, to gaze into a dilated candlelit eye (my rival’s, of course) in passion’s throes and see the eye of another echoing from his throbbing libidinous lobe, shaking his concentration, softening his resolve, was singularly disarming. But there was understanding at first, the understanding that the heart is closer to the stomach than to the groin, the understanding that a fixation is fixed in youth but a marriage is cognized in adulthood. Then came the concessions, the masks she wore and traits she affected which were not hers, those Sisyphean whirls at sating the insatiable. So what if all dignity was lost? She was an unapologetic Catholic (ideologically) and placed that faith’s paramount temporal sacrament above such small potatoes as pride. Purifying sacrifice was the silver lining on the dense overcast of her predicament. There was so much more to her life than a bit of sparring in the dark. Oh, but truly was there? Who was he to deny her that fundamental spiritual pipeline, man to wife, consecrated by consummation (could it really be said they were consummated if she was never the full object of his consummatory expression)? Wasn’t she a woman of desires? and needs? and etc.

She began to weep, first in fits and starts and then in swollen rivulets. Even in my seediest of exploits I’d never been wept at, and I confess I found myself remarkably titillated. Well, you’ve put me down for hell already, so to hell with you: my flag was flying. There must have been in her some dormant musk given potency by that miserable drizzle, some sultry vocal fold which resonated only in hoarse sobs. Gone was my usual mode of fascination, reaction. Lapsing into solipsism, I collapsed upon her, comforting, caressing, kissing, unable to verbally counter her various complaints, conscious only of the elysian frontier I was crossing. Something in my action must have gotten through to her because soon she was supine again, dainty chin doubling to catch a glimpse of my mischievous eyes rising above her abdominal curve, laughing, weeping, laughing again, crying slow down, slow down until I rose above her, pinned and skewered her like a chessmaster (as she told me later she’d secretly hoped I would) with ardor and force that would have frightened me if not for that pheromonal petrichor, those absurd red bags below her eyes. I pride myself on my tenderness and composure in the face of the primal act but this was too much, my friends, too much!

I had to see her again, this I told her in the haze of afterglow, and for a moment I feared (on account of my depletion) she would weep again. But she regained composure (here I slipped back into fascination mode) and told me she would like nothing more and that the reunion would promptly occur whenever the next hurricane should chance to strike our fair city. The next hurricane! I nearly called her insane. A hurricane striking the First Coast head-on is such a rare occurrence it might well be a miracle. How ridiculous to wait, when we both were Jaxons, separated by a mere wrong turn in our daily comings and goings! She and her husband worked odd, inharmonious hours which were nonetheless as reliable as the nightly news. Why, if we so fancied, every day we might —

“I am not an insouciant adulterer,” said Emma Jean, cribbing from a previous remark I’d made, and cribbing another: “I am reactive, not proactive.” Incomprehension on my end. I watched as a drama unfolded in her eyes. “You asked — before — if I suspected — ” (exeunt tears, severally) “ — Well, you were right, and I know when he does it. His excuse, y’know. He’s not so indulgent. Or she’s not, I guess.” Perhaps it was the aforementioned depletion but I could muster only tenderness for her, all sagging shoulders and sympathetic grimace. She looked down and said, “I’ll let myself be as bad as him, but I can’t be worse.” Here ended my argument. Her condition was no skin off my back. After all, how rare could a weepy two-timer be? No phone numbers were exchanged, no scraps of iniquity left but in the trash. Our fledgling tradition being set (Valdosta, Patio, Prowler, Inn), we kissed and parted amicably. With an inward wink I left my brimming Hydro Flask on her nightstand in the hopes that it might replenish her tears for the next romp. In the churn of the Prowler only one thought echoed in my mind: how does one bait a hurricane?

I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I was faithful to her. Call me a dope, a schmuck, but Jack the Homeripper managed to stay true to his vanished adulteress for a year, a full year whose predictably placid winter and all-too-sunny summer crawled on languorously. It wasn’t for lack of trying. That is, there was rarely much effort on my part in the first place, but the magnetism I’d once wielded toward Duval’s unfulfilled sybarites seemed to have fled me at last. If, as I suspect, it had been the result of an overpouring of openness and fascination, then everything tracks: all my openings were now closed and my fascination directed inward at the woman whose dolor had delivered me into new life (months prior to our tryst, I’d halfheartedly given the old Tylenol trick a go and even with all the unpleasantness that followed I’d soon found my eyes drifting back to the shelf). Adolescent lechery aside, something about her memory kept tugging at my sleeve like an insistent child. 

I’m a poor Freudian and a worse mathematician but I can tell when the sums of word and action don’t add up. An intrepid little reporter, I assembled a mental pin-up board of connections. Long-awaited catharsis went in one circle, self-explanatory. Another circle for sorrow, guilt, and regret, and beside it another for vengefulness, tit-for-tat. A line between those two, a question mark above it. Was she really so virtuous as to feel shame in stooping to my rival’s level? (We are adults, adults!) No, of course not, she was merely in grieving after the unthinkable act of driving an illusory stake into the illusion of a marriage which she’d constructed atop the long-dead one. Thus the mechanical nature of our encounter, what a solemn and pitifully needful thing it must have been for her! But, oh but, had that foundational marriage ever existed in the first place? It was she who’d said it: never consummated! Perhaps the consummation was revoked, if one can do so, once my rival’s initial temperance gave way to tropical preoccupations. Here memory failed me. I saw her so plainly saying, “I knew from the get-go…” but wouldn’t that mean a sham marriage? And then why the guilt?

I kept the sleuthing to a minimum. After all, I didn’t even have a surname to go by. A blind Internet stab at the name “Emma Jean” yielded a frumpy trumpeter who resembled my inamorata in age and nothing more. “Emma Jean — Jacksonville” brought me to a cul-de-sac in an Arlington development and a few all-too-enlightening accounts of E.J.s on death’s door or long past it, and it struck me that the oddly anachronistic handle she’d given me may well have been a decoy. I didn’t look much further than that, and when the urge struck me I chided myself, “Giacomo, you obsessive swine, let the mystery marinate.”

The first storms of the season blessed the Bahamas, graced Galveston, even favored Newfoundland over our unhappy haven. Then came an aching lull (here was WJXL hailing September as the second most derelict in history) where I watched green red purple flare and dissipate above spoiled-rotten Venezuela, willed the bellows of Maracaibo to fan their fires toward a cooperative wind. The most flagrant tease came in October when Cat-Five Enoch arose from those hot sea-courses and one-by-one felled the Antilles, saving his sternest reproach for the prideful habaneros, before curving to answer Tampa’s challenge, and (as the runs on toiletries and vodka were just beginning) was prematurely vanquished by that indefatigable city. I composed his canonic elegy:

Ingenious brutal conqueror, you roared

With such abandon, for your blinded eye

Glimpsed not the peril in the verdant sword

Remote and meek beneath your boundless sky

Whose arid hilt you never would supply

With more than but a kiss of vestal dew.

O hurry, son of Cain, be born anew!

These were my ten torments (twelve if you count the Pacific basin), and by the time November rolled around I was feeling a curious but undeniable prickling at the first suspicion of any so-called threat. My libido, heretofore staid and obedient, was beginning to frighten me. How opaque it is, that permeable barrier between cognition and compulsion! There is nothing in the innocuous accidents which are the genesis of deviance (nor in the aesthetic/functional act of smoking, if you will) rationally tying them to the absurd hankerings that are their children. Why, here’s Meryl Streep in a tearful climactic scene, and here I am with her. Where are you, Freud? 

But now here’s November, here’s Imogen. The news called her a freak accident, the miscegenous offspring of two muddled oceanic climes, spawned on the northern horse latitude and pushing due west like a militant pioneer. She reached peak strength eighty miles off Neptune Beach, as I handily outpaced her down the I-10. Resolute ecstasy was all I felt. The carnal anticipation, the intellectual desire to fully untangle the knot of my problematized Emma Jean. And it was only noon! 

To curb myself I lunched at a diner on the outskirts of Lake City, all abuzz with talk of the coming deluge. At the counter I took a pastrami reuben, watching conditions deteriorate in real time around good old WJXL Leo on both TV screens. They had him out on the pier, above what would have been land if not for the tides, the waves below alien and murderous, the wind bouncing him like a pinball off the two railings. “That poor boy!” exclaimed my countermate. “They’re gonna get him killed out there. Man’s gotta crucify himself to tell everybody it’s raining.” Oh, the menace, so close to home! I chuckled that even if my tentative rendezvous were to fall through, at least heaven had actually produced a storm worth skipping town for. However fastly Emma Jean had previously planned on holding to our ambiguous arrangement, it must by now have looked more appetizing than taking refuge in an attic while hubby cavorted with some Town Center type (“Em, be a darling and watch the plants while I nobly survey the damage at Glen Kernan!”) The confidence I squeezed from this notion billowed my sails, and I was off again.

En route I trailed every Jag I saw, every similar roadster for that matter, pulling abreast of them and offering a defeated smile of kinship to their invariably unsatisfactory drivers. The rain poured down as I moved northward and at times I found myself caught in a miserably obscured parade of flashing hazards, with more than a few shoulder spectators prudently waiting out the torrential conditions. Be brave, be reckless, Emma Jean, there’s no time to lose!

I arrived to find Valdosta still standing but the Southern Patio finally living up to its name, a vacant lot of rubble, destined no doubt for parking lotship or credit unionhood. So much for tradition in the heartland. The Holiday Inn, which I’d booked in reflexive haste at the first inklings of Imogen, proudly announced its repletion on a sign out front and I worried that a hypothetically unprepared Emma Jean would be turned away. Resolving to intercept her in the lobby, I took up sentry in the coffee area next to a pair of pensioners playing travel chess. I sipped espresso, flipped through a woefully idiomatic translation of Chaucer’s Troilus, watched overeager exchanges end in frustrating pawn-problems over and over as the gloom of the recently-activated winter standard time fell outside. Drenched latecomers filed in, their watery faces playfully pinching my yearning neurons. The receptionist who’d checked me in gnawed unsympathetically at a row of apples. At around five she answered a ringing phone, listened for a moment, then looked at me suspiciously. Hanging up, she called to me, “You’re Giacomo, right?” I would not have wanted to be anyone else. “The occupant of 320 just asked me to send you up once you check in.”

Relief washed over me, the sugary-sweet realization that we’d each inadvertently kept the other waiting. I guess it was our due for such a poorly planned assignation but all that mattered now was our glorious concomitance in the same time and place, the tender mystery infused with marinade and ready for the broiler. In the mirrored elevator I furiously retucked my shirt, military-style, and at the last moment popped a mint which I nearly choked on as she opened the door. When we’d first met, when she was but dipping her toes into the waters of immorality, she’d matter-of-factly cloaked herself in the garb of a platonic coworker, a long mauve skirt and tan blazer, her only shibboleth of naughtiness a pair of ruby stilettos. This time she’d dressed for the high dive, might well have been in a bathing suit for how exposed she was, hair recently styled and straightened and splitting her bare shoulderblades like a dagger, complexion made up with assiduous care, perfumed and practically pulling me inside.

Her appearance and attitude had my fascination, not my physicality, in a frenzy. Her mere presence (only later did I admit how preposterous it was to see her again) was evidence of little improvement on the home front. Perhaps she’d jumped fully off the wagon sometime during the year, realized that once is as good as always, handed over her keys to that repressed voluptuary drive. She hadn’t expected me to come either, she said, after what an embarrassing scene she’d put on last time. Well, I said, here I stood. By the look in her eyes I feared for a moment that the death of my mischievous magnetism extended to her, too, but no, that couldn’t be true, the engine had died because of her, for her, was reborn as a function of her, of Emma Jean. I took her in my arms, I took her out to dinner.

Waiting for a table at Eos Med she popped the top two buttons of my shirt, letting her hand, finger, ring, swirling black opal, linger lazily on my collarbone. We hadn’t talked much on the drive over, or maybe it had only seemed that way, the bulk of my inquiries so far outweighing what can be appropriately catechized in conversational cadence. On her part there was a reluctance, it seemed, to deviate too far from whatever idealized vision of me had kept her going over the months. She asked if I’d ended up closing the sale and it took an awkward explanatory detour to jog my memory so I could blandly recount the success at the general store (which, I later noticed, had gone the way of the Patio). Nothing about my life outside that tidbit mattered. Had I seen this movie, this TV show, this Congressional hearing? No to all, but heard good things. I’d been watching The Weather Channel. She chuckled at this perfectly reassuring bit of nothingness and I seized the opportunity to ask: “Did you get bored? Were you wishing just like I was?” Not because I needed her missing me, nothing of the sort, but if she indeed was, then why the need for temperance, why the false modesty? She cast her eyes roofward and said silkily, “I’ve been frustrated... but there’ve been improvements.” She’d used to hate it, she said, more than she’d let on last time, seeing him in his ecstasy, imagining her as someone else. Now that she had someone of her own to think about, she was managing.

“Isn’t that just so petty?” I lamented, and she assured me it was a mere transitory period, a holding pattern until something was figured out. There were other considerations which went far beyond what she called our “our little thing” — the bank account, a dental procedure planned for March, the imminent passing of an innocent mother-in-law. A place to stay, of course. “To stay?” I nearly cried. “In your own home, how about, in the home that’s yours as much as his, in the home which you weren’t even the first to defile—”

She gently silenced me and told me not to be so presumptuous. “You don’t know my situation, and that’s fine. I’m not asking you for help.”

But how does one explain that one inquires less in the capacity of the Women’s Shelter than that of Us Weekly? “I only mean,” I said, “to ascertain your status. I have my own life to plan.”

“The planning was done a year ago,” she urged. “Now we’re here. Let me live, let me have an evening.”

I dropped the subject and the conversation reverted to the primitive, to pita and tzatziki and banal pokes at redundant flirtation. In my attempts to set an example to be mimicked I spoiled the ambiguous air she so wished me to maintain, sharing needlessly graphic anecdotes about my long-forfeited habit of exploitation, the thrill of cuckolding, my utter shamelessness. Her mood disintegrated accordingly, and no amount of protestation, no pleas of But not once since you! could repair it. All that remained was my cruel hidden ace, I am wicked but you are more so, which I nimbly saved for the ride back, and what a rush it was seeing that boldly competitive spirit leap out and try to wrest the wheel from my grip, earning us a warning herald from the oncoming lane. Now don’t you see, Emma Jean, that we’re on the same team?

Our first tumble in the hotel room can only be described as the obligatory result of anticipation to the point of exhaustion. No matter how I willed a surplus of buttons to appear on my shirt, an extra clasp or two on her frivolous undergarments, a risible faux-pas to draw out the tension, the tide of our desires rose madly, lurching us into that uncountable dream-time with its accompanying impotence of the limbs, both parties powerless to do anything but reenact their inimitable first explosion with all the perfunctory deference of altar boys carrying out the Roman rite. There was hardly even time to imagine her weeping: the instant the first shadow of that thought crossed my mind I was dying, waking, sober, huffing, puffing, plotting. In the time it took to carry her across the finish line I laid down my next steps.

“Since we met there’s been no one to me but you,” I said, my form shading her from the sultry lamplight. Her eyes were closed, hair cascading over the pillow. “And seeing you again tonight, I really didn’t think I would, so I know, I know, you are of a similar mind — ” (There was the wry smile!) “ — and are we really supposed to carry on like this, our perfectly reasonable pleasure contingent upon a freak of nature?”

“Please,” she breathed, “be patient. The waiting is half the fun.”

I sighed. Within this unknowable hunk of marble lay the figure of Veritas. I placed my chisel and began to chip away. “You’re unsatisfied,” I said. “Time is wasting away. You’re doing yourself a disservice.”

“If you know I’ve made it this far, you must know there’s more to the issue than sexual satisfaction.”

“Do you get off denying yourself pleasure, is that it? The most Catholic of paradoxes.”

“More times than I’ve spared a thought for you, if you’re wondering.”

“Come on, don’t be coy. You’re not a saint.”

She looked at me, big doleful eyes, truculent and envious. “Isn’t your room down the hall?”

I stood up, shoulders hunched zombielike, shirt buttons mismatched, and made for the door. “No,” she whispered. 

I cocked my head. “Did I hear something?”

“No,” she repeated. I changed course and grimly retraced the bedside popping and pouring which a year ago had led to two tumblerfuls of Interstate Special. 

After one sip: “Is Emma Jean your real name?” It was, and there were bylines in online magazines of dubious integrity to prove it. 

Another sip: “How many times have you been unfaithful?” In deed, just our twice, in mind — good Lord.

A confident gulp: “How many times have you been the victim of similar indiscretion?”

“I have no idea.”

“At least once?”

“Don’t be condescending. Get back in bed.” She bunched the blankets to her neck in defiance of the aggressive air conditioning. Outside the rain began to fall decisively in a mockery of our stalemate. What I would have given to collapse and fold myself into that rising dough of fabric, to vanish into her heat, comforting prelude to all unbearably simple finalities! As a compromise I sat at her feet, forcing her to splay and flatten them into the mattress. “Have you taken the personality test?” she asked, as though a well-known case existed deserving of the coveted definite article. I answered for all possible cases: no, I will not be pigeonholed. “Well,” she said, “If I had to guess I’d say you were a Contender.” 

“I was borned to play the lonely part, o’ contendin’ for yer fickle heart…” I sang.

“The Contender,” she now read from her phone, “is knowledgeable and curious, with a playful sense of humor, an offbeat, contrarian idea of fun… Most of my friends get that one.”

Feeling humbly demarcated, I asked, “And your husband?” She explained that he was an Analyst, a mere crossed wire away from my own heavenly path. “Don’t think less of me,” she said. “I put about as much stock in it as you do. Only it’s interesting, because I used to be one of those embarrassing ones, a helper type, and when I took it again, six months ago, do you know what I got?” She cleared her throat and recited again: “With her acute sensitivity to injustice, the Protagonist takes an active role in the harmonious resolution of conflict.” (The irony is not lost). “It got me thinking, y’know, did you ever wake up and realize you were a different person, more in tune with who you wanted to be? And God forbid, is it because I finally did something bad for once in my life?”

“It’s a part of growing up, honey,” I mused distantly, not intending her to take it to heart as she did. 

“That’s morose,” she said. “You know, I turned thirty-three while we were waiting — and God, how pathetic — for my birthday, y’know, he took me to the park where we had our first picnic, and then to this uppity restaurant, and afterwards, I could see he wanted so badly for me to like it — but I had to do it his way — it was the only way…” 

She was flustered, dabbing at her eyes maniacally. “I just don’t think he can understand what it does to me. When I was young, I was obsessed with vacuum cleaners, y’know, one of those weird fixations. I had this kiddie Hoover and I’d help my parents clean the rugs after dinner like it was a game, useless as I was, and they played along so earnestly — until one Christmas I threw glitter all over the stairs for all of us to clean up together. And that’s how I learned that adults don’t like being given chores for special occasions. That’s just what this is. Seven years vacuuming up after the same manchild, like I learned nothing. Only a child could fall for that, I’ve been a child!”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I croaked, an effervescent bubble of questions and quivers burgeoning inside me as the tears welled in her eyes. 

“Then don’t judge me,” she said. “Don’t judge me, please. It’s driving me insane, the excuses I make. It’s not his fault, I know it’s not his fault. But for every inhuman hole like his there’s got to be someone to cram into it. I didn’t know what I was getting into, how could anybody know?”

“Not his fault?”

“Who am I supposed to talk about it with? Even my most normal friends wear leather in the bedroom, they’d take his side — I mean, I like it a little rough like anyone, but I can’t — I can’t be what he wants me to be…”

“You’re only incompatible…”

“I made it work for a while, it wasn’t so bad, but now I’m deep in the water, y’know?”

She sniffled, wiped away the tears, grew thoughtful in a way that was patently unacceptable to my raging temperament. My reaction was swift and entirely unconscious. I said, “I’m failing to see how you’re any different than the others. You soiled your marriage and you want to blame it on him.” Hardly a logical statement, but it had the intended effect. She folded inward, a mess of heaves and moans (too distinguished to wail, I admired that), and my curiosity being justly suspended I rose and crept heel-toe toward that Promethean apotheosis I’d so cruelly devised. As I engulfed her I wondered, is there anything that’s worth the trouble? Here, now, it was time for the high-dive. I was drawing back a stray poniard of hair when the downburst commenced.

She clawed at me, slapped my hands, drove back my limp aggression with a furious and systematic pressure. “Don’t you accuse me!” she said through teeth and tears. “You judgmental freak! You want to see a whore? I’ll show you a whore, I’ll show you a whore…” She fumbled for the television remote, mascara-streaked eyes deep and gaunt like stadium bowls, dialing the channel by muscle-memory into a screen she couldn’t have seen for my astonished figure in the way. The ruckus outside reached a hysterical crescendo — only it was not that, not the cyclone’s sedate exurbs outside but its lurid, televised metropolitan core, corrupt ministers stationed in cumulonimbic skyscrapers unleashing their perdition upon an all-too-willing sacrifice, by whose enchanted masochism were the people of North Florida being saved through the vicarious sacrament of existential threat… A flooded Riverside street, Pentecostal globes of light blooming through raindrops on a voyeur’s lens, a shrill voice above the din ecstatically deploring devastation unheard of in our neck of the woods… Monstrous roars ripping through a futile microphone windmuff, mingling with the salacious howls of a figure whipped and driven in and out of frame by the gale… The figure beside me at last confronting her inescapable, utter deficiency, laughing, weeping, laughing again… I, staring in dumb shock, waiting in vain for the burlesque to coalesce into tragedy, then clutching her, the poor deprived creature, joining her in joyous incredulous laughter.

And how mortified she was when I asked her to show me how the business was conducted! “You can’t imagine it,” she protested. “You’ll laugh, I know you’ll laugh.” But, my friends, I couldn’t resist that final fascination. “We are adults, adults who were once children,” I said. “Let’s complete the synthesis, fold the old into the new.” She gave me a harried look, killed her whiskey, fled silently to the bathroom. There came the sounds of shuffling, the shower running and then the blowdryer. The television broadcast had cut to studio, volunteer photographs of carnage were being showcased. Somewhere a lust as loathsome and earnest as any was sharing an intimate moment with the rain.

After twenty minutes Emma Jean emerged. Streaks of mascara and rouge cascaded from her shoulders down her glistening nakedness. Her hair, before only slightly mussed by our earlier tussle, was whipped by a cocktail of adamantine product and expert technique into a two-dimensional swirling, spiraling, unmistakable shape. On her feet were the stilettos. 

She halted at the threshold, diabolically leering. Permitting me only a moment to take in the deranged spectacle, she prompted in a ragged whisper, “What does he say?”

“What do you…?” I halted, needing no affirmation to know what she meant. Into my childhood, cereal and orange juice slurped before the 7:00 news, I reached for the words and cadence. I implored my rival to sing in me, to spare me a morsel of his momentary glory. There was no time to panic, no time for irony. Here was the revelation I’d invited upon myself.

“Recently exploding in strength to Category Five,” I murmured as seriously as I could, “Hurricane Emma Jean made an unexpected turn westward this morning. Most models now predict a direct hit on our shores.” The Tempestas in the corner took a step forward. Encouraged, I continued, “Maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour were measured by NOAA reconnaissance aircraft, and we are just so thankful to those lucky, lucky boys…” Another step. In my imagination the stiletto crackled like thunder on the hardwood floor of a blessed home. “A nugatory evacuation order is in effect for low-lying areas in counties Duval, St. Johns, Nassau… Residents are urged to accept with grace and dignity their inevitable fate...” Onward she crept, heel-toe. “This is a buzzsaw of a storm, people. The kind you see in South Beach, Rio, Ibiza, not here. When you get an eye this developed, you know you’re in for trouble…” Rounding the bed now, on final approach. The composure of an actress, the menace in her expression just convincing enough to threaten. “Surge of up to twenty feet expected, if we’re being conservative, the worst of which you’ll see in the south-anterior quadrant of the hurricane, what we in the business call the ‘dirty side’...” I could touch her shoulder now. She looked at me unblinking, in character I suppose. I pressed my mouth against her ear, trying to avoid the creeping self-consciousness, couldn’t help myself — “You look ravaging.”

She nodded, crouched, and summoned what little of me remained to be summoned with a pleasant breeze across my figurehead. Rising, she pressed her magnificent opal to my chest. I let myself be carried backward against the windowpane. Her hands dropped to my hips and she looked at me with what I took as a note of gratitude, then, with a hidden strength or perhaps the skilled application of some depraved martial art, flung me onto the bed and commenced the walloping. Whether the sensations could be called pleasure which I derived from that melange of tossing, elbowing, slapping, punching, kicking, and heel-stabbing all rising to a screaming intensity, I cannot say. I didn’t think to reflect on them in the moment. I do recall a fair bit of moaning. “Keep at it,” she urged maniacally. “How are the conditions?”

“Fair to poor,” was about all I could muster for the remainder of the charade.

Regrettably, it hadn’t been lost on her tutor that the true danger of a hurricane lies not in the wind but in what the wind carries. This is the only plausible explanation for why the bedside phone, the remote, and the mercifully plastic whiskey bottle got involved in the congress. At one juncture, panting, she allowed me but a moment to caress my smarting appendages, considered the receiver in her hand, and realized out loud that I, unlike Leo, didn’t have a career in television. “Wouldn’t he be jealous,” she said, and whacked my cheek till it turned blue.

After ten minutes the barrage began to subside. I suppose it was my due for being such a curious cat. As the tempest-tost accouterments left the picture I was subjected to a sequence of waning slaps, and finally my aggressor sat me up straight and sympathetically informed me that “usually he gets off by now.” Then with only a farewell puff for my wiltedness the extratropical remnant dissipated into the bathroom forever.

On television the howling fury had returned unnoticed amidst our tumbling, weaving itself into a blanket of background noise around good ol’ Leo, who was getting ready to send it back to Bob and Debra for the night. In his expression I perceived no winking, no coded assurance to the discerning viewer that sure, you’re not insane, you know exactly what you just watched. Nor was there shame, as is sometimes encountered in the civic-minded postcoital exhibitionist. He simply signed off with a gleeful salute, pledging in that irresistibly humane drawl his continuing and resolute service to the vicarious stormchasers and Lotharios of the Jacksonville area. “Thanks for joining me, folx — when you can’t count on the weather, you can count on WJXL. From Stanley Kubrick’s Hollywood soundstage, this has been Hurricane Imogen.”

The shower in the bathroom hisses to life, drowning out the pitter-patter of raindrops on the window, far-flung bastards of some distant unholy affair between cold and warm, sea and sky, tropic and temperate. Through the wall comes the sportive keening of a fading cataclysm, “Stormy weather… since my man and I ain’t together…” and I realize there is a tragedy to be salvaged from all this debris, a tragedy whose culprits (fine, here’s your mea culpa) will be long absconded before the Red Cross can fan out, a vital truth to the farce. But speculation has finally fallen out of vogue with the intelligentsia. I cast down the mantle of philosopher-philanderer: my Emma Jean lies gracefully in a celestial bed far above, and I dutifully await those indulgently frequent historic tides which will lift me to her arms again and again. I await with especial interest that surging wave which I call le Libérateur, vanguard of hypothetical strumpet-cyclone Sally, looming out of a tumescent sea, sweeping with consummatory flourish over the Jax Beach pier to catch by surprise an intrepid local weatherman, already off-balance in the wind…

☉