location when the wind is very still, and the reminiscent bark of gunfire from the direction of the Pima Pistol Club.
But like I said, what I loved most was Carlo. Tall as Lincoln with a slight Italian accent, Roman beak, mournful Al Pacino eyes, and a bad-boy smile to contradict them.
When I lugged the backpack into the kitchen and dumped the rocks in the sink to rinse them, Carlo was making hummingbird juice, mixing water and some strawberry-colored powder. Without my asking him to, he had hung the feeder on the white thorn acacia tree in the front yard where I could watch the hummingbirds from my office window.
The sight of him fixing the feeder for my pleasure made my heart … swell to overflowing is supposed to be a worn-out phrase, but for me it’s a brand-new feeling.
This may seem an unusually strong reaction to a man filling a bird feeder. If you have led a relatively peaceful life you will not appreciate its value and treasure it the way I do, not understand what it feels like to go day after day with that vibration in your chest, as if you carried inside of you a violin string that has just been plucked but now the string is silent and still because the threat of violence is long past.
Now I was living in peace with a man so gentle and sensitive he gave sup to hummingbirds. Does this seem precious? I don’t give a rat’s ass.
“What do you have to give me?” he asked, pouring the juice through a funnel into the clear plastic container. His low voice and the glint in his eye made the question a double entendre.
“Just some pretty rocks, Perfesser. You’ll have to tell me what I have.”
I turned to the sink where I’d dumped the stones, rinsed them off one by one, and placed them still wet on the dark granite counter for Carlo’s examination.
The rinsing heightened the vivid colors, smooth blood red, vanilla ice cream, round and speckled green like a dinosaur egg, silver shot with black specks. We opened the color atlas of minerals in the southwestern United States to see what we had.
Carlo was no more a geologist than I was. Rather, before becoming a philosophy professor, and before marrying Jane, he’d done time as a Roman Catholic priest. Father Dr. Carlo DiForenza could explain either linguistic philosophy or comparative religion so simply a learning-disabled bivalve could understand.
Carlo and I sat side by side on the stools by the breakfast counter where he leaned his gaunt frame over the stones like a giraffe protecting her young. His thin fingers tickled the rocks as he admired each one individually.
“Pudding stone,” Carlo said, pointing out the picture in the book. “See the quartz plugging it? I can imagine the megasurge of heat that boiled the granite into a juice that mixed all these elements together. Then a plunge of temperature that hardened the elements into a single mass with each mineral distinct. Gorgeous, Brigid. Oh, and you found some more shot with copper.”
I squirmed a bit and leaned closer. Plugging, megasurge, plunge, juice, shot—is it just me, or did Carlo talk dirty about a billion years of geologic activity as if they were one hot night of sex? Plus I got a kick out of watching him stroke the rocks.
The geo-erotica started working on us both. We went from stroking the rocks to stroking each other’s fingers stroking the rocks, and I made a lame joke about getting our rocks off and then I started licking his fingers and then Carlo started murmuring Bella, Bella, which is what he calls me when he’s feeling romantic and I didn’t care if he used that so he wouldn’t accidentally call me Jane because I knew in my heart that this time Bella meant me. That’s how it goes when you have a lot of life behind you, no self-delusion.
He didn’t mind that I hadn’t showered yet. We slipped off the stools onto one of Jane’s faux Persian rugs. Turkish. Oriental. Whatever. And kissed. But the Pugs stared, and lovemaking on the floor didn’t have quite the charm it once had. We moved into the bedroom and tossed aside Jane’s pink satin comforter with the blue trim.
The sex was spectacular, but don’t worry about my going into details of the act. You may be younger than I, and won’t like to think about someone outside your generation making love. For you the image may be