Lost & Found: Where I Was Last Night

NOTE: While going through old files, I found stories I’d written back in 2001—THIRTY years ago (because I can’t do math)! Can you believe that?! This was way before blogs were officially called blogs but somehow I wrote stories and posted them on my old Geocities website. Thank goodness I backed them up because here’s one now, found while cleaning up one of my external drives and revived! I’m also posting them without comment as to why I wrote the story or when or whether it was a prompt from one of the writing courses I took at night or the writing groups I met on Sundays because honestly, I don’t remember. Who knows? It could also be real life. Besides, it’s just more fun this way…

Where I was last night is none of your business.

Although the thought of telling you now eats into my soul like a hungry mouse and a ball of cheese in its grasp. It has begun to fester and infect my soul, never one to be chaste and pure, for I long to tell you though I am afraid to. Where should I begin to tell you what I did last night? Even I do not know where to start my little novella of…shall we say, impurity encased within a woman so chaste in sight, a maiden of the purest of upbringing.

I can still recall the look in my eyes as I gazed at my reflection in the cheap hotel mirror that hung behind the door, its wooden frame nicked at the edges, pieces of hardened gum tucked behind its looking glass. Wearing a short floral dress that clung to curves studiously and meticulously tended for by fasting and furious dieting, running along the beaches of the coast to tone the limbs that now felt the caress of the thin silken threads, I gazed at my reflection on a cheap hotel mirror. I was the most beautiful woman in the world last night… if you ever needed to know. And the reflection looking back at me with an arched eyebrow delicately plucked by a dark-skinned hairdresser yesterday could not have agreed more.

When the phone rang, I ran to the desk and lifting the receiver to my ear, I could hear your voice like music plucked by sinewy fingers against the strings of a lyre in the Irish sea, and I sighed. My knight in shining armor, though tainted, was finally here.

Yet a knight he was to my eyes, and his steed was a ten-year-old white Corvette, its white plexiglass frame having been redone the year past because an impatient New Yorker backed into it while trying to get out of a parking spot. Don’t New Yorkers know how to drive? I had thought once, though I knew the answer already. The hood of the Corvette was white as snow, its smooth exterior glistening in the moonlight. Who needed to know about New Yorkers and plexiglass frames on such a night as this? I slipped into the passenger seat, my stockinged legs revealed as the dress rode up high up my thighs, and I turned to face him as my right hand pulled the door shut.

He had not changed much, except maybe he looked happier. Maybe it was because of me, I could never truly know, although my vain heart would have thought so without a shadow of a doubt. We did not know whether to kiss passionately or lock our arms in an embrace, for inside a Corvette, such an embrace would have been cumbersome with one twisting uncomfortably just to welcome someone to one’s chest. So we kissed, gently at first, then slowly allowing cold lips to suffuse with warmth before fully tasting each others’ nectar as the cars of New York outside our little world blazed with horns and screeches. What did we care? A kiss from such a man was not one I would have refused. He was still my knight in tarnished armor.

And as we continued our passionate reunion of lips long abandoned from each other, I no longer worried about the dress riding high above my thighs, my silk stockings smooth against my skin that now began to prickle in the heat of the reunion. I no longer cared for the hotel room rented under another woman’s name, its bed awaiting with petals of roses strewn across its cheap comforter and pillows, nor the cheap chipped hotel mirror that would bear witness to me and my knight locked in the throes of a forbidden passion.

All I cared about last night as I kissed the man my heart had fallen head over heels for one night in a Queens bar, just days before Christmas eve, was the frantic removal of a band of gold that threatened to choke the life out of me, its metal colder still against the skin of my finger. I last saw it flying, as if with wings, into the cool night air of autumn, its cold metal of gold mined in the isles of Scandinavia shining in the light of the New York moonlight filtering through the skyscrapers above.

Where I was last night is none of your business. But if you ever find a band of gold on a New York pavement on FiftySixth and Fifth, let me know. My husband awaits its return although losing it while shopping at Lord & Taylor is a difficult story to swallow, even for a husband as gullible as mine.