Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 33.1: May 9th, 2010
"Caramel Kisses" is an unfinished novel I began to write back in 2009 and stopped working on in 2010. The two main characters - Adriana Maguire Reynard and Emma Burking - would ultimately be revised for my later completed novella, "The Liffey Is Half-Asleep," in 2011. Several elements of "Liffey" can be found in their original forms in "Caramel Kisses," such as the characters' names, the haiku scene, and Adriana's penchant for writing.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Nineteen
by Belinda Roddie
I bought an engagement ring at the small jewelry shop near the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce. The owner had been patient with me, even helpful, guiding me around the various panels of glass and presenting the gleaming love symbols underneath. Each jewel meant something different, each gold or silver band presenting some form of style. I waited for the lady to begin asking me questions, pursing her bloated lips and scrutinizing me with those dark eyes that looked almost black under her tightened red bun. But they never came.
“Well, if you’re looking for more of a modest look,” she said, directing me to a diamond ring with a slender silver band, “you can go for the less extravagant and still get a look that goes with any sort of woman’s style. I’m guessing, of course,” she added almost apologetically, looking at me closely, “that it is a woman you’re shopping for, correct?”
I nodded and my mouth felt dry as my teeth clicked while my head bobbed up and down. The smile I got in return was enough to relieve me.
“I must admit, you have a lot of courage to come in here and so confidently prepare for such a special event,” she said as we drifted to the other corner of the store. “It’s not too often that I see people like you just walking in here.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You mean the fact that I’m a lesbian?”
The bluntness of my statement caught her by surprise, and her heavy eyelashes fluttered as she composed herself. I didn’t know if she was struggling not to laugh or cry. “Oh, no, that wasn’t what I meant at all. It’s just that usually the couple shops together. You know, to make sure everything looks and fits perfectly.”
I shrugged; I knew she was lying through her teeth, but I didn’t really care. “I’m not too worried,” I said. “Our fingers are pretty much the same size.”
Emma was a gold kind of girl. She preferred the thin sort of band, but wide enough not to feel like a piece of wire was wrapped around her finger. And the best part was that she preferred other jewels to diamonds, which she claimed were highly overrated and could be replaced with a shinier, better-looking cubic zirconium. I was tempted to give her a ruby ring, to bring out the red in her hair, but I knew for sure that she loved her sapphires. It was the blue she loved the most, and blue that I’d most likely get her.
An engagement ring. I was buying my girlfriend an engagement ring. It wasn’t surprising that I had to do it myself – my family had known about my relationship for a few months now, but they had already handed off the nicer looking jewelry to my relatives and the only rings suitable enough for proposal was tossed directly at my brother. My grandparents hadn’t left too many trinkets themselves, and I hadn’t bothered to inherit them. I doubted that Emma would’ve liked those heavy pieces of stone weighing down on her hand, anyway.
I knew I couldn’t afford too much. I knew that my still sporadic pattern of jobs was keeping me restricted on audacious buys, especially since I had just picked up another assignment in San Rafael and I’d take the bus to work for slightly less pay than the last position. But besides the cost, besides the glare of hundreds of rings and other bits of jewelry almost analyzing me as I browsed through them, besides the very pressure of my having to do this, not anyone else – I was buying my girlfriend an engagement ring. Holy God. Holy God Almighty staring down at me and pointing a finger with His jaw hanging past the fancy collar of His white robe like a limp red towel.
We had scoured the entire shop when the jeweler, looking worn out and slightly miffed at how indecisive I was, brought me back to the main counter where we had started out. And that’s where I saw it. I must have overlooked it, but the glint of blue in the corner of my eye was enough to grasp my attention. I eyed the price tag below the band of gold, almost turning to amber in the light of the sun as it dipped into the hills on the horizon.
“I’ll take that one,” I said, and I smiled.
***
Ah, November. I didn’t just remember the fifth of November. I remembered all of November, every single day of it. Especially the fifth. And the seventeenth.
When I first laid my eyes on her.
Emma returned home from work with a certain heat behind her eyes. She spoke as if she was wired into a computer program – the words seemed pre-meditated and rapid-fire. She was thinking of starting her own bakery, she said. It’d help pay the rent. It’d get her working more. I looked at her and wondered out loud, wasn’t that a lot of hassle, but she moved across from me as I sat on a chair reading a copy of the Chronicle, and she leaned forward across the tile counter and pecked me on the lips.
“I know it’s a lot of work. And money,” she said. “But who knows, some day. Some day I’ll make it happen.”
Then she went to wash some of the dishes she left behind after breakfast. I watched her work, eyeing the movement of her elbow as it pivoted, the twist of her wrist as her hand disappeared into the folds of the sponge as she scrubbed away. I imagined a flash of gold wound around her ring finger. I remembered the plan for that night.
“Emma,” I said, attempting to be nonchalant about it but failing miserably, “do you know what today is?”
There was a thick silence between us, and my heart started racing while the blood it pumped out was cold and icy and I couldn’t swallow anything down. But Emma saw me in my stricken state and laughed. She reached a damp hand over to stroke my hair and left it smelling like dish detergent and cake crumbs.
“Of course I know what today is. And I was thinking we could go out somewhere.”
“I had an idea,” I replied, getting the words back in my mouth because I couldn’t glare evilly at my queen without feeling guilty. She was focusing on the plates again, rubbing out dried rings of sugar from the transparent microwavable glass. “You up for having a night out in the city?”
***
We took the car to San Francisco, parked it in a garage tucked away along the curb beside the Metreon. I entered the chilled autumn air with my arm wound around Emma’s shoulders. I wanted to take her to a little restaurant called the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, somewhere I hadn’t been since I was eighteen because it was pricey and it was usually much better with more people. But to me, Emma was more than enough to give me an excuse to enjoy some of its dishes again, especially since now that my oh-so-successful play was being rehearsed at the Orpheum, I had gotten a considerate check from the two producers who had taken an interest.
We ordered tapas, patatas bravas and calamari fritos and gambas al ajillo and poti-poti, fancy names and Spanish undertones and it all tasted so good. Our forks clattered together in unison, silver blurs around our plates as we scooped up the rest with our fingers, slurping the crumbs up and smiling. If people were staring at the display, neither of us cared.
When the waiter took the bill, I noticed that Emma had started looking at me intently, as if expecting something. I remembered the small lump at my hip and I blinked and arched an eyebrow as if questioning her. Besides, this was not the place I had planned for the event, and this night had to pan out first. I wasn’t going to rush this because I needed the stars to come out first and the velvet to spread across the night sky and the cold to start caressing us like cold fingers, not bite at us as we walked.
I signed the receipt with a flourish, raised my water glass and toasted to a happy year together. We drank from the other’s glass in a clumsily romantic move, our arms tangling together as our lips struggled to taste even the glasses’ brims. But I didn’t mind.
My first plan had been to take Emma back to the café where we had met, to drink in the atmosphere of that day when she was captivated by newsprint and I wrote on napkins in an attempt to clear my mind of her image, her aura. It didn’t work, and I was happy for it. However, I knew now that the café was closed for the night, so I led Emma back to the car and began driving in the direction of Koit Tower.
“You ever been?” I asked her over the roar of the wind scratching at the windows, the cold trying to break the glass apart and chill us to the bone.
She shook her head.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The night’s perfect for the view.”
I had gone to Koit Tower with Simon Frasier after the prom. We had stood there, staring into the lights of San Francisco, the dark bay lost in the silhouettes of nearby cities as if they were separated on their own little islands. I smirked as I thought about how I had attempted to get in the mood. All right, now, I had told myself, get the sappy soundtrack into your head. Feel your heart thumping. Look into that man’s eyes and want to kiss him more than anything else you’ve wanted before. And I had kissed him, of course, and it had felt nice enough. He seemed to enjoy it, under the impressive stature of Koit Tower. But somehow, it had set me on that course in the opposite direction. How the dramatically romantic scene of my adolescence had succeeded in that was the epitome of irony that had permeated the corners of my life’s fabric for over twenty years now.
I parked where the steps led to the circular garden area around the tower and opened the car door for Emma like any gentleman should have done. She smiled at my courtesy, as it wasn’t unexpected, but as I took her hand, there was intensity in her grip, her fingers looped around my knuckles like hooks. We walked together to the view, and I felt a massive sense of déjà vu, but it was a beautiful sense of déjà vu, a better one, a new and improved one like I had run it through a rewrite and subsequent revisions and a few critiques. We weren’t dressed for the prom, but we had dressed formally enough, and in my slacks and vest and long coat, I felt more at ease that my love was in the dress and I wasn’t. Now all we needed was our crowns and scepters and we would be rulers of the “forest” in which we had dwelled for so long.
This night, this November night. It seemed to have come too soon. My plan may have come too soon. One year. Was that enough? Was that too much? Emma had stayed with me for this long, and yet –
She was waiting for me to do something. Instinctively I moved toward the pocket of my slacks. I drew out six small, thin pieces of paper, thin enough almost to wisp away between my fingers. They were heavily creased with black pen, and folded into fancy triangular shapes as if I want to see them float in the air like the wings of a bird, for the words to fly around our heads. I handed the papers to Emma, who unfolded each one and read them slowly with a furrowed brow and confused expression.
“They’re haikus,” she said.
I nodded. “I wrote them when I first saw you, in the café.” I prodded her when she didn’t reply. “Where we met.”
“I know it’s where we met,” Emma retorted, but the soft volume of her voice subdued the sharpness of her statement as if her breath was caught in her throat. She held the papers tightly, and as I reached for them, she pulled back. “You really wrote these because of me?”
I nodded again.
“They’re wonderful,” she said, and for a moment, I thought she was on the verge of tears. “I’m flattered. Really, I am.”
We stood there, facing each other. The glittering horizon of lights and water were forgotten to me, and I knew they were to her. All at once, I felt as if my whole body was floating, my chest swelling out as if with helium to carry me away into the darkened skies. Fuck, I thought, I can’t do this. I don’t have the guts. I don’t have the guts or the mental capacity to do it. And besides, she’ll say no. She’ll say we’ll need more time. She’ll say no.
Emma, I love you. My planned speech was falling to pieces, but I was fumbling around in my coat pockets nonetheless. She watched me with widening eyes. Emma, I love you and I want to be with you for the rest of my life. Emma, you are the only one who allowed me to be who I really am. Oh God Emma, I cannot imagine another day without you and I hope you can feel the same way. Oh God Emma, please forgive the humility of this gift, but in it is all I have to give to you and more. Emma, will you marry me? Emma, please marry me. Oh God I love you, Emma, and I want you to marry me. Emma, Emma, Emma.
I said nothing. My lips quivered, parted so that the air passed into my mouth, but nothing came out. All I could feel were my knees folding in beneath me, not the fancy on-one-knee trick at all. I had torn the small plush box out of my coat and snapped it open clumsily, exposing the ring, lopsided in the case’s little indent ordained for it. I was on the pavement, looking up at Emma fervently, drawing breath into my slightly opened mouth, in and out, in and out.
It was all I could do, and the best I could do.
We were silent together in the dissipating shadow of the Koit Tower. The landscape of San Francisco was below us, looking up at us like we were sculptures of something many people had wished to see elevated for so long. Slowly, Emma stepped toward me. I couldn’t even move from where my kneecaps had threatened to crack on the cement. My chest continued to jolt with shuddering breaths, the cold wrapping around my head and squeezing my temples together as if in a vice.
And in that night air, with the gleam of gold and sapphire being one of the few lights glowing around us, I swore that both of us thought the same thing, in perfect synchronization. For in the next instant, the warmth surrounded us, and we were folding into one another like fabric, like the leaves of trees as our heads were crowned were laurel and we danced in San Francisco air where I had first fell in love.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Nineteen
by Belinda Roddie
I bought an engagement ring at the small jewelry shop near the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce. The owner had been patient with me, even helpful, guiding me around the various panels of glass and presenting the gleaming love symbols underneath. Each jewel meant something different, each gold or silver band presenting some form of style. I waited for the lady to begin asking me questions, pursing her bloated lips and scrutinizing me with those dark eyes that looked almost black under her tightened red bun. But they never came.
“Well, if you’re looking for more of a modest look,” she said, directing me to a diamond ring with a slender silver band, “you can go for the less extravagant and still get a look that goes with any sort of woman’s style. I’m guessing, of course,” she added almost apologetically, looking at me closely, “that it is a woman you’re shopping for, correct?”
I nodded and my mouth felt dry as my teeth clicked while my head bobbed up and down. The smile I got in return was enough to relieve me.
“I must admit, you have a lot of courage to come in here and so confidently prepare for such a special event,” she said as we drifted to the other corner of the store. “It’s not too often that I see people like you just walking in here.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You mean the fact that I’m a lesbian?”
The bluntness of my statement caught her by surprise, and her heavy eyelashes fluttered as she composed herself. I didn’t know if she was struggling not to laugh or cry. “Oh, no, that wasn’t what I meant at all. It’s just that usually the couple shops together. You know, to make sure everything looks and fits perfectly.”
I shrugged; I knew she was lying through her teeth, but I didn’t really care. “I’m not too worried,” I said. “Our fingers are pretty much the same size.”
Emma was a gold kind of girl. She preferred the thin sort of band, but wide enough not to feel like a piece of wire was wrapped around her finger. And the best part was that she preferred other jewels to diamonds, which she claimed were highly overrated and could be replaced with a shinier, better-looking cubic zirconium. I was tempted to give her a ruby ring, to bring out the red in her hair, but I knew for sure that she loved her sapphires. It was the blue she loved the most, and blue that I’d most likely get her.
An engagement ring. I was buying my girlfriend an engagement ring. It wasn’t surprising that I had to do it myself – my family had known about my relationship for a few months now, but they had already handed off the nicer looking jewelry to my relatives and the only rings suitable enough for proposal was tossed directly at my brother. My grandparents hadn’t left too many trinkets themselves, and I hadn’t bothered to inherit them. I doubted that Emma would’ve liked those heavy pieces of stone weighing down on her hand, anyway.
I knew I couldn’t afford too much. I knew that my still sporadic pattern of jobs was keeping me restricted on audacious buys, especially since I had just picked up another assignment in San Rafael and I’d take the bus to work for slightly less pay than the last position. But besides the cost, besides the glare of hundreds of rings and other bits of jewelry almost analyzing me as I browsed through them, besides the very pressure of my having to do this, not anyone else – I was buying my girlfriend an engagement ring. Holy God. Holy God Almighty staring down at me and pointing a finger with His jaw hanging past the fancy collar of His white robe like a limp red towel.
We had scoured the entire shop when the jeweler, looking worn out and slightly miffed at how indecisive I was, brought me back to the main counter where we had started out. And that’s where I saw it. I must have overlooked it, but the glint of blue in the corner of my eye was enough to grasp my attention. I eyed the price tag below the band of gold, almost turning to amber in the light of the sun as it dipped into the hills on the horizon.
“I’ll take that one,” I said, and I smiled.
***
Ah, November. I didn’t just remember the fifth of November. I remembered all of November, every single day of it. Especially the fifth. And the seventeenth.
When I first laid my eyes on her.
Emma returned home from work with a certain heat behind her eyes. She spoke as if she was wired into a computer program – the words seemed pre-meditated and rapid-fire. She was thinking of starting her own bakery, she said. It’d help pay the rent. It’d get her working more. I looked at her and wondered out loud, wasn’t that a lot of hassle, but she moved across from me as I sat on a chair reading a copy of the Chronicle, and she leaned forward across the tile counter and pecked me on the lips.
“I know it’s a lot of work. And money,” she said. “But who knows, some day. Some day I’ll make it happen.”
Then she went to wash some of the dishes she left behind after breakfast. I watched her work, eyeing the movement of her elbow as it pivoted, the twist of her wrist as her hand disappeared into the folds of the sponge as she scrubbed away. I imagined a flash of gold wound around her ring finger. I remembered the plan for that night.
“Emma,” I said, attempting to be nonchalant about it but failing miserably, “do you know what today is?”
There was a thick silence between us, and my heart started racing while the blood it pumped out was cold and icy and I couldn’t swallow anything down. But Emma saw me in my stricken state and laughed. She reached a damp hand over to stroke my hair and left it smelling like dish detergent and cake crumbs.
“Of course I know what today is. And I was thinking we could go out somewhere.”
“I had an idea,” I replied, getting the words back in my mouth because I couldn’t glare evilly at my queen without feeling guilty. She was focusing on the plates again, rubbing out dried rings of sugar from the transparent microwavable glass. “You up for having a night out in the city?”
***
We took the car to San Francisco, parked it in a garage tucked away along the curb beside the Metreon. I entered the chilled autumn air with my arm wound around Emma’s shoulders. I wanted to take her to a little restaurant called the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, somewhere I hadn’t been since I was eighteen because it was pricey and it was usually much better with more people. But to me, Emma was more than enough to give me an excuse to enjoy some of its dishes again, especially since now that my oh-so-successful play was being rehearsed at the Orpheum, I had gotten a considerate check from the two producers who had taken an interest.
We ordered tapas, patatas bravas and calamari fritos and gambas al ajillo and poti-poti, fancy names and Spanish undertones and it all tasted so good. Our forks clattered together in unison, silver blurs around our plates as we scooped up the rest with our fingers, slurping the crumbs up and smiling. If people were staring at the display, neither of us cared.
When the waiter took the bill, I noticed that Emma had started looking at me intently, as if expecting something. I remembered the small lump at my hip and I blinked and arched an eyebrow as if questioning her. Besides, this was not the place I had planned for the event, and this night had to pan out first. I wasn’t going to rush this because I needed the stars to come out first and the velvet to spread across the night sky and the cold to start caressing us like cold fingers, not bite at us as we walked.
I signed the receipt with a flourish, raised my water glass and toasted to a happy year together. We drank from the other’s glass in a clumsily romantic move, our arms tangling together as our lips struggled to taste even the glasses’ brims. But I didn’t mind.
My first plan had been to take Emma back to the café where we had met, to drink in the atmosphere of that day when she was captivated by newsprint and I wrote on napkins in an attempt to clear my mind of her image, her aura. It didn’t work, and I was happy for it. However, I knew now that the café was closed for the night, so I led Emma back to the car and began driving in the direction of Koit Tower.
“You ever been?” I asked her over the roar of the wind scratching at the windows, the cold trying to break the glass apart and chill us to the bone.
She shook her head.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The night’s perfect for the view.”
I had gone to Koit Tower with Simon Frasier after the prom. We had stood there, staring into the lights of San Francisco, the dark bay lost in the silhouettes of nearby cities as if they were separated on their own little islands. I smirked as I thought about how I had attempted to get in the mood. All right, now, I had told myself, get the sappy soundtrack into your head. Feel your heart thumping. Look into that man’s eyes and want to kiss him more than anything else you’ve wanted before. And I had kissed him, of course, and it had felt nice enough. He seemed to enjoy it, under the impressive stature of Koit Tower. But somehow, it had set me on that course in the opposite direction. How the dramatically romantic scene of my adolescence had succeeded in that was the epitome of irony that had permeated the corners of my life’s fabric for over twenty years now.
I parked where the steps led to the circular garden area around the tower and opened the car door for Emma like any gentleman should have done. She smiled at my courtesy, as it wasn’t unexpected, but as I took her hand, there was intensity in her grip, her fingers looped around my knuckles like hooks. We walked together to the view, and I felt a massive sense of déjà vu, but it was a beautiful sense of déjà vu, a better one, a new and improved one like I had run it through a rewrite and subsequent revisions and a few critiques. We weren’t dressed for the prom, but we had dressed formally enough, and in my slacks and vest and long coat, I felt more at ease that my love was in the dress and I wasn’t. Now all we needed was our crowns and scepters and we would be rulers of the “forest” in which we had dwelled for so long.
This night, this November night. It seemed to have come too soon. My plan may have come too soon. One year. Was that enough? Was that too much? Emma had stayed with me for this long, and yet –
She was waiting for me to do something. Instinctively I moved toward the pocket of my slacks. I drew out six small, thin pieces of paper, thin enough almost to wisp away between my fingers. They were heavily creased with black pen, and folded into fancy triangular shapes as if I want to see them float in the air like the wings of a bird, for the words to fly around our heads. I handed the papers to Emma, who unfolded each one and read them slowly with a furrowed brow and confused expression.
“They’re haikus,” she said.
I nodded. “I wrote them when I first saw you, in the café.” I prodded her when she didn’t reply. “Where we met.”
“I know it’s where we met,” Emma retorted, but the soft volume of her voice subdued the sharpness of her statement as if her breath was caught in her throat. She held the papers tightly, and as I reached for them, she pulled back. “You really wrote these because of me?”
I nodded again.
“They’re wonderful,” she said, and for a moment, I thought she was on the verge of tears. “I’m flattered. Really, I am.”
We stood there, facing each other. The glittering horizon of lights and water were forgotten to me, and I knew they were to her. All at once, I felt as if my whole body was floating, my chest swelling out as if with helium to carry me away into the darkened skies. Fuck, I thought, I can’t do this. I don’t have the guts. I don’t have the guts or the mental capacity to do it. And besides, she’ll say no. She’ll say we’ll need more time. She’ll say no.
Emma, I love you. My planned speech was falling to pieces, but I was fumbling around in my coat pockets nonetheless. She watched me with widening eyes. Emma, I love you and I want to be with you for the rest of my life. Emma, you are the only one who allowed me to be who I really am. Oh God Emma, I cannot imagine another day without you and I hope you can feel the same way. Oh God Emma, please forgive the humility of this gift, but in it is all I have to give to you and more. Emma, will you marry me? Emma, please marry me. Oh God I love you, Emma, and I want you to marry me. Emma, Emma, Emma.
I said nothing. My lips quivered, parted so that the air passed into my mouth, but nothing came out. All I could feel were my knees folding in beneath me, not the fancy on-one-knee trick at all. I had torn the small plush box out of my coat and snapped it open clumsily, exposing the ring, lopsided in the case’s little indent ordained for it. I was on the pavement, looking up at Emma fervently, drawing breath into my slightly opened mouth, in and out, in and out.
It was all I could do, and the best I could do.
We were silent together in the dissipating shadow of the Koit Tower. The landscape of San Francisco was below us, looking up at us like we were sculptures of something many people had wished to see elevated for so long. Slowly, Emma stepped toward me. I couldn’t even move from where my kneecaps had threatened to crack on the cement. My chest continued to jolt with shuddering breaths, the cold wrapping around my head and squeezing my temples together as if in a vice.
And in that night air, with the gleam of gold and sapphire being one of the few lights glowing around us, I swore that both of us thought the same thing, in perfect synchronization. For in the next instant, the warmth surrounded us, and we were folding into one another like fabric, like the leaves of trees as our heads were crowned were laurel and we danced in San Francisco air where I had first fell in love.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since May 9th, 2010.
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