Drinking Port on a Couch at a Hotel Bar

Fantasy #8 – “Drinking Port on the Couch of the Hotel Bar”

We were sitting together on the couch in the art deco lounge of the hotel bar, laughing and enjoying our glasses of twenty year old Noval Ruby Port, but it wasn’t so just an hour before, and you remember why, don’t you. We hadn’t been together very long, really, and because we didn’t know each other very well, I had done something that startled you.

It was that absolutely incredible evening in the Caribbean, an hours drive outside Santo Domingo, and we were having dinner at a place you knew of, but that was new to me. This place was both strange and a little odd but also beautiful. It was a resort sort of place, with shops and restaurants and plazas and an amphitheater, and the whole scene had been designed just twenty-five years ago by a landscape architect from Florida. She was a very good landscape architect. She primarily used as her building material the indigenous rock of the island, and she tried and succeeded in making the entire site appear as if it had been there for two hundred years or so. It was an old looking place. The ground was uneven, and the pathways narrow, and the buildings a little crooked and out of plumb, and the trees really were old and everything else had been built around them. And my God, was she the lucky one to have been given a location such as this to design and build on.

The site was on top of a river gorge, and the river ran through a Caribbean landscape of verdant greenery with the river 200 feet below. And at that exact place the river wound in a beautiful sensuous curve slicing the jungle into halves. This newold resort village of round stone and dirt paths and Italian restaurants and Gucci shops sat overlooking the curvaceous river and the palm trees and the rocky cliffs on the opposite side.

You liked this place and you liked a certain restaurant and that is where you took me, and I was glad you did…I was very glad you did, because there and then I had a great and wonderful romantic interlude that remains in my memory. You remember that we had called ahead that morning and asked to have the bottle of “89 Bertolucci Barolo decanted at 10am so it would be ready for us at 10pm, and of course they had obliged (they better, at $150. a bottle). And because we showed this smidgen of cultural dexterity, the Sommelier greeted us at the door and took charge of our needs. He asked if we wanted to sit inside or out, and of course you chose out. I had no idea the affect and impact this would have on me, but you certainly did. Bless you.

He led us through the dining room and out the patio door, and that is when time stopped just for a second, because there we were, hanging out in space over the edge of the rim wall, vertiginously floating above the river and the canyon. What a stunning view, what a careening feeling, what a rush. The river’s “S”, the revealed geologic time, the plant life of mother earth, the stars of a Caribbean night.

Our host led us to a table at the iron railing where our purple elixer sat ready and waiting in the decanter on the white linen cloth, and the nearby gaslights were refracted in the Reidel stemware. In the center of the table was a perfect blossom of that island flower the locals call “preseemglissando”…and what we call Passion Flower. We were seated, and I was stunned. You can see my dilemma, can’t you? Which was I to look at first and foremost, the beauty of nature as displayed in this place, or the beauty of nature as embodied in you, the one who brought me to this perch of wonder? I chose right, I looked at you and smiled, and in my smile I said thank you dear, and tonight I love you very much.

The sommelier was patient with me in my thoughtless state (because he too was looking at you in your black frock with one bare shoulder and the black opal earrings and one diamond on each hand and the curve of hip just slightly overflowing the chair), because he understood a little something about the moment. And then he said buenas noches, and I returned to consciousness. So we began our dining and our drinking…and you reader…may think that was the last time I ventured into special space that evening…but you would be wrong. Because that was only the first of three times sitting there that I would visit grace with that woman, and I will tell you about the other two now. And of course I will tell you what I did to startle my friend, my precious friend.

The first sip of the northern Italian wine was good, the second sip was delicious, and the third sip was great. The antipasto was good, and the feelings were fine, and we were relaxing and settling in to this place. The second course soup was rich and from the sea, and you had one shoe off, which is a very good sign). The dining was languorous, and so were we with our feelings and thoughts, and time passed almost unnoticed. Something was nagging at my memory, though, something about the river gorge; I couldn’t get to it, I couldn’t form the memory and identify the source. I was looking out over the gorge space, down to the river and the green jungle and the clusters of palm trees…and suddenly the nagging turned from a cognition to a sound, a memory sound, a strange unpleasant sound, something like a thump thump thing, something like a motor. Why a motor, why a mechanical memory in this place of quiet and wine and black opals against ivory skin? Oh, then the blast of memory, then the recognition, then the synapses earned their keep, then I had the thing from the past…the movie, by God, the scene from the movie, the film about war machines and war actions and war tragedies, and great acting, and above all, great film directing. Shit, it was APOCALYSE NOW, this place was that place, that incredible scene of Coppola’s, the scene driven by the sound of a phalanx of helicopters riding the “S” of the river in attack formation, breathing fire and destructive intent. This was the place that was surrogate for Vietnam and the horrors that occurred there. Right down below me, me in my gentility, was where that incredible piece of film-making was done. The thump thump thump sound of pistons and the smell of hydraulic oils and the felt textures of cold steel and the sights of whirling blades and the knowledge of men ready to kill or be killed. There the scene played out again in memory, sitting there then, and it all happened in an instant, and then it was gone, and I was back with my girl and the fine wine.

Yes, she knew that movie scene had been filmed there, she had forgotten to mention it. Isn’t it an incredible place, she asked? Little did she know how incredible, but she discovered that very soon. In fact, it happened right after the salad course. Our hands had been touching while resting on the ornamental iron railing, and the wine was working its magic on our chemistries, and then I saw a hint of light above us, just hidden behind the eve of the restaurant’s roof. Three minutes later she saw it behind me, she saw the moon. It was creeping inexorably across the sky, and was ranging towards the jungle along the river and towards the stone cliffs and towards any other place in the landscape where it knew it could reside for a minute and provide humans with a reason to live. It ranged fast across the sky, and it was full, by God, it was just a big white disc against the blueblack of the sky, just like the beauty of an Asian girl’s white face set against the coif of beautiful black shining and glistening Asian hair…ivory and ebony. An ivory moon reflecting the sun’s rays toward us on the cliff and onto the dark river below.

We looked at the linen table cloth, and it was as though it was lit from below…it positively glowed, and with it the wine glasses turned silver and the wine turned from burgundy to scarlet. So, there we were, that was our scene, that was our place, that was our experience, and those were our high feeling of romance. For me, and for her too, it was special. But now, I tell you what it was that made me act to startle my friend, because nothing up to now had motivated me to do something like that. But it happened now.

Now, everything escalated, if you can imagine that. Now, grace grew even greater. Because now, the light of the moon dimmed from its searing brightness, and it did not dim because of a passing cloud, it dimmed because, yes, you guessed it, because of the eclipse…the unknown, to us, full eclipse of the moon. And then and there it transpired, from start to finish, the wash across the face of the moon, across our eyes and our memories and our feelings, and for seven minutes of no talking, just looking, and then it was gone, and it was over. Well the event was over, but my feelings were not over, they were full blast with me, and they came out, and I looked at the woman I was loving then and there, and I stood up and slid around the table, and I put my arm around her relentlessly sensuous shoulder, and I bent down and I kissed her. And that was my act, that was my feeling made manifest, that was what startled her. Because, as I said at the beginning of this little piece, we didn’t know each other perfectly well yet, and she had never seen this side of me yet, this spontaneous passion, this need for the glory of a special woman in a special time and a special place.

And now all that special stuff was over, and the dinner was over, and the wine was gone, and moon was down, and the sommelier was well-tipped, and we had wandered to this hotel bar with its art deco shapes and themes and colors, and we were sitting on the couch drinking a superb port, and we were loose and laughing and loving being together.