The Holding Pen: A Novella

By B. K. Smith

A Modern Day Romance - if you can call it that. The quintessential Baby Boomer story of mid-life dating.

HE lives in Connecticut, runs a high end home furnishings company, works in his garden, has his kids on the weekends, and attends law school at night in order to quell his boredom and loneliness. Oh, and he has a gaggle of women friends.

SHE lives in a high-rise in NYC, trades stocks and bonds, has one child who spends a lot of time with his father, SHE attends literature classes at night to encourage her to read something other than financial news. There are snippets of the books she is reading and then a poem that she had to write and submit for the class. It is classic.

SHE would like to find someone to love and possibly settle down with. They meet in a restaurant bar in New Canaan and begin a short interlude. Their dialogue is very real and one can only wonder how people do get together, commit, and marry. Never mind stay loyal.
If you are out there looking for love, you will clearly see yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Jun 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9780990930587

Book preview

Tryst

The Holding Pen

An Unusual Love Story

A Novella

by

B. K. Smith

The Stilleto Stories

The Lipstick Mountains Press

www.MadisonAvenuePublishers.com

Is the pen a metaphor? Is the art of letters, the masterly execution of prose and poetry, a creative male gift? Is male sexuality not just analogically but actually the essence of literary power? Is the poet’s pen therefore a phallic, and not writing, instrument?

The patriarchal notion that the writer fathers his text just as God fathered the world has been all-pervasive in Western literary civilization. According to critics too numerous to cite here, the metaphoris built into the very word author, by which writer, deity, and pater familias are identified.

Where does such masculine theory of literature leave literary women? This patriarchal etiology and solitary male creator have long confused literary women, readers and writers alike. If the pen is indeed a phallus, with what utensil may females generate text?

It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in woman than in men. The moral nature of women, in its finest and richest development, partakes of some of the qualities of genius; it assumes, at least, the similitude of that which in men is the characteristic or accompaniment of the highest grade of mental inspiration.

Yet critics continue to claim that feminine literature lacks a strong male thrust. Such male expectations and designs have long silenced many talented women. With no voice to speak our dread, no sigh, no speechless woe, we have an invincible sense of our own autonomy, our own interiority; we share a sense of our own experience—individually and en masse.

I write stories about relationships of all kinds, with husbands and lovers, and children lost and found, relationships with friends, neighbors and natural enemies, with spirits and even with God. How do we relate to one another in this culturally and politically diverse world? What preconceived notions and prejudices do we bring to the proverbial dinner table—beautifully set with scented aerides odorata orchids as a centerpiece? Who do we love? Who do we hate? Who and what do we believe to be true - and what is truth?

Before literary women can journey toward autonomy, however, we must come to terms with the pervasive intellectual imprisonment and break out of the holding pen—with a hard thrust and a lot of seminal ink.

B. K. Smith

2017

The Holding Pen

An Unusual Love Story

O, Hamlet, say no more.

A Novella

By B. K. Smith

Does like attract like? That was the question. Does like attract like? Essay due in two weeks.

Often what appears different on the surface is the same after only one layer is peeled away. Just like an onion. Sometimes it takes many, many layers to get there but eventually, if you keep peeling, you will see what’s really there. And sometimes it’s really just an onion.

Black and white are opposites, but an argument can be made that they are non-color and all-color, which makes them more alike than not and when drawn to each other and patterned into herringbone, it can give us an endless palate of grays and the spectrum with which we perceive light and shadows, and that’s what puts our universe in perspective. The faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship leads to understanding that reality can only be known in terms of perspectives and angles, shadows and reflections, as perceived by individuals or populations at a particular moment in time.

What?

*****

You’re too deep, August told me standing at the bar that first night we lay eyes on one another.

His movements were poses. Don’t complicate my life, his poses said.

To this I said nothing. I barely listened.

I would spin avery fine web.

This lace would adorn our wedding bed.

I smiled.

Penny for your thoughts, he said, uncomfortable with my silence. He put a penny down on the table in the bar area, face down. I looked at him and said nothing. He put another penny down and then a nickel and a dime. He took back the dime, put down another nickel, and looked up at me. He turned them all face-up. I looked away. I said nothing. He nudged me under the table.

We were both grown-up yuppies, you might say. August was the CFO of a publicly traded home furnishings company headquartered in Fairfield County. I managed institutional money for a small securities firm in lower Manhattan.

Even our avocations, however dissimilar on the surface, confirmed our truly compatible natures. August lived on his estate in pristine Connecticut where he roamed through his fruit orchards, his sculpted vegetable gardens, and trellised flowers. I lived in a high-rise penthouse apartment in Manhattan where the closest I came to nature was some watercolors from a still-life class I took last semester at The New School in Greenwich Village. This semester, however, I decided I’d take a graduate course in classic literature: critical Analysis and Composition.

Still, August was truly Father Nature. I was truly Mother Time.

All we needed now was to establish a common space where we could co-exist. Or, a plane - the unlimited or indefinitely great three-dimensional expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur because to me, you see, space meant the illusion of depth on a three-dimensional surface, a home, while to August space meant the region beyond the earth’s atmosphere that contains the rest of the cosmos. For simplicity, let’s just call it a place.

His name really was August, but everyone called him Skip, Skipper, and Skippy.

In conversation, we had a hard time agreeing on virtually everything. We came from different industries, and we had different skill sets. It was enough to exchange business cards with phone numbers that would never be dialed, and to pass fruitless, although cordial amenities, which characterized endogamous breeding, and to shake hands in a very starched manner.

An electric current snapped as we touched hands.

Ions, August quipped. Positive and negative electrodes.

Omens, I replied. Good augury. I sipped my wine.

Augury? he questioned.

Good augury. When Julius Caesar landed at Adrumetum, he tripped and fell on his face. This would have been considered a fatal omen by his army, but, with admirable presence of mind, he exclaimed, ‘Thus I take possession of thee, O Africa!’

August smiled at this warily. Step away.

Seeing this, I thought better than to say that Augustus Caesar, heir and successor of Rome, Julius, was a patron of arts and literature. My own patron saint lived her life as a virgin and martyr. But, that’s another tale, except to tell you that her father, a fanatical heathen, delivered her up to the Governor of Nicomedia, for being Christian. After the cruelest tortures, and just as her father was about to strike off her head, a bolt of lightning laid him dead at her feet. Ever since she is invoked against lightning.

August was having a private, friendly word with the bartender.

The houseleek, an Old World herb of the Sempervivum tectorum family with pink flowers