by Chris Morvan
I found her in a back street in Willemsburg, Curaçao, down where the Venezuelan fishermen come in and sell fish and fruit and vegetables along the dockside. It’s like a foreign country within what is, for me, a foreign country. We only had 14 months together – but what life we packed into that short time.
To be honest, I had had one like her in the past; it wasn’t so much the word Curaçao emblazoned on their chests as their substantial softness and some indefinable element of class. They both possessed it. They were different in some ways, certainly in terms of color, but each exuded style and refinement. I touched her and knew immediately I had to have her.
She was a rare shade of red, a dusty effect such as you might find on a peach, and with a similar coating of down. And she was soft and sensual but well-built.
She draped herself around my shoulders and down my chest and back and I knew we were meant to be together. She felt so good I instinctively picked up her sister too: comparatively serious-looking in her dark grey, but with an unmistakable family likeness.
I was alone in that country, my wife having gone on ahead. We had arranged to meet there, but Curaçao was awash with foreigners from a distressed land across the sea and its immigration people had become suspicious and hostile.
So my wife had bypassed the island and gone instead to Panama, where people were still welcome. Would she approve of this character I had found? I felt sure she would. She would like both of them, just as she had appreciated the first one some 18 months earlier.
She wouldn’t feel threatened, because she was a grown woman and these three – the old one and the two new ones – were t-shirts.
Yes, I’ll say it out loud: t-shirts. I’m not ashamed. I’m not embarrassed. Who hasn’t known the thrill of falling love with an article of clothing?
A less romantic man might shrug as he pulls on the baseball cap that’s been with him for years, bringing anonymity when he wants it and protecting his thinning thatch from the harsh Caribbean sun. And he might call the emotion something else, because love is too brazen and naked an emotion for a man like him to concede more than once in his life.
The first thing I fell in love with was an olive green corduroy jacket. Not a common-or-garden thin-corded jean jacket, but an altogether smoother, slinkier number with thick cords, and cut amost like a sports jacket, with a touch of the Beatles bum-freezer in the length of it. I’ve never seen anything like it since.
But like any feckless young man I eventually took it for granted, bowed to its age and changing fashions and discarded it some time, somewhere.
So I’ve got history in this area.
Dusty Red and I went to Panama and found ourselves in a hot, humid village on the Pacific coast. She being a hot-blooded Latin type, having her next to my skin made me sweat, so we went out together only occasionally, because just setting foot on the hill up to the shops made the perspiration start. I dallied with lesser garments, thin and inferior, while she lay and waited patiently in the relative cool of the bedroom.
After six months we left Panama and found ourselves in the very different environment of Colombian flower-growing country, halfway up a mountain. At 8,000ft the temperature was low, even when the sun was shining, and I would reach for Dusty Red in the morning and pull her on, but only to be covered with a shirt and jacket, because even indoors it was cold. The hardy local people considered heating an unnecessary expense, so their houses were chilly places where an extra sweater was the preferred way to get warm.
Finally we reached Sint Maarten and the January weather was perfect for Dusty Red and me. We paraded around Philipsburg and Simpson Bay, proud and hiding from no one.
And then it happened: an accident that changed everything. While pouring bleach down a drain-smelling sink, the liquid splashed back without my noticing and the next time I looked my beloved Dusty Red was ruined, pockmarked with disfiguring colorless spots.
But even now it’s not quite over. We get together in secret, in private behind closed doors and do dirty jobs together. She’s still the finest in the land but she’s too proud to be seen out in her decrepitude.
Meanwhile her somber grey sister gets to make the public appearances. I feel bad, unfaithful, but what can you do? Life goes on.
