It was late. We had been talking for some two hours already, my uncle having gone to bed just after midnight. She was sitting at the far side of the room, somewhat tired I gathered from her yawns but for some reason she was resisting the urge to retire. Sipping a beer, I described the somewhat cathartic conversations my younger brother and I had often had. Years after our parents had divorced, we both struggled to understand how their relationship could have ever come to be, so many years ago.
Neither of us was bitter about the divorce, it had happened when we were very young and we both adjusted with little negative affect... but they seemed so unlikely a pair, so contrary to each others sensibilities. Growing up with my mom and her new husband, a wonderful and eccentric man, what we knew of our father (in our limited experience of him) was vague and contradictory. As we both investigated our own characters and natures, my brother and I often compared observations and conundrums, trying to understand those ways in which we took after a father we hardly knew, and seemed at every turn to be at odds with the essence of our main parental influence, our mother, once his wife.
I felt I had been talking for too long. Although we had talked politics some, most of our focus fell on family relationships, which is to say her relationships with my family. My uncle had married her twenty five years ago, the same year I was born. She was from the south of France, and there was little secret that the marriage was a difficult one. We had discussed at length her feelings of alienation, both from her family back in France, and from her American family, the family of her husband, my family. If you were to ask anyone, this was mainly her own fault. She is an incredibly difficult person. Highly critical, patronizing, impossible to please, opinionated and down right insulting, Isabelle made almost anyone feel that she had little respect for their intelligence or feelings. Obviously this caused a lot of tension. But I always say, different strokes for different folks, so we got along just fine most of the time, and when we didn't, I just blocked her out and enjoyed the peaceful silence.
As we talked though, I listened, offered my opinion and advice, and played diplomat and apologist for those less patient in my family. I even offered my own criticism of those she felt most angry towards, while trying to draw parallels between their motivations and her own. We were left not so much with an understanding, but rather the intimacy that comes from speaking truthfully, without strong emotion. Whether or not we understood one another, I am not sure, but it was clear neither of us held up a façade. I looked at her intently as she related a story I had heard countless times before, and for the first time, as I drank a beer in the early hours of dawn, I realized that I wanted to fuck her.
Her hair was very long, held up in a clip, dark blonde with smoky wisps of gray. She had large, hazel eyes, and fine features... a long and slender neck. Her breasts were full and round, filling out the front of her blouse and betraying their contour through the taught fabric. She always wore skirts and high heels, showing off her calves, the backs of her knees, still smooth and firm, tanned golden.
