From “Heat”
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

When I was a young woman I had a secret passion. At first I didn’t quite grasp that it was a genuine passion. I was married and thought I already had what I wanted. This other thing, I thought, was just fascination and fondness. Also he was too old and a little ugly. But as time passed I recognized it for what it was.

It was his size, first of all. Very large. Imposing. When he got up out of a chair I could see the air shifting deferentially to make room for him, as if the very air at his proximity undulated in its yielding, like fabric or flesh. He was infused with gravity, like a rooted tree or a large piece of machinery, and walked with deliberation, as if he drew strength from the ground and was reluctant to lose touch with it. And his darkness. His skin was leathery, his hair so black and smooth it looked like metal. And his voice. Deep, as if it snaked up from someplace near his groin. Deep and a trifle harsh, almost with a sneering edge. Yet full of kindness. A kindly sneer, if such a thing is possible. And courteous, safe, gray eyes.

He came to our house, sometimes with his wife. He sat in the big armchair, a golden drink in his hand, his feet rooted to the floor, his arms resting on the armrests like Lincoln in his stone chair in his monument. He spoke in his deep, pebbly, sneering, warm voice and smoked cigarettes, wrinkling his brow with each puff, holding the ends facing inward so I wondered how his palm didn't get burned. He befriended my young, boyish husband, took him under his wing in their shared line of work. He was kind. And I wanted to be near him and hear his voice.

He felt it too. He looked at me with appreciation and desire, the kind of desire that is civilized and tamed when it would be out of the question to let it run free. The kind of desire that in a man of his age grows wry and ironic and mellow, yet doesn’t shrivel or seep away. He made gallant, civilized remarks of the kind that older men are—or were—permitted to make to younger women, meant only half-seriously, tinged with rue, the erotic seasoning of his aging. I wanted to let him know that I did take them seriously, that I felt the same even though he was so much older. I didn’t think of him as fatherly. No. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to see how pleasure would make him look. I wanted precisely the wry, rueful, and, I imagined, heated gratitude he would offer in return. I wanted to whisper in his ear that I wanted him, and to see his melancholy surprise—for he was melancholic, he had had disappointments—and then to take off his clothes and make love to him as if he were a stony monument I was bringing to life with my hands….

Ontario Review #53