The Leaf
- 4 years ago
- 8
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Falling Leaf free porn video
He sat by the large window in the living room, looking out over the marina – and the raging Pacific beyond. A small boat, an open cockpit fishing boat, was pounding through heavy swell, beating it’s way against strong winds towards the T-shaped breakwater that protected the marina entrance, and as he watched the scene unfolding below the apparent anxiety of the skipper down there was almost too easy to understand. That poor yellow-slickered man was in the thick of it now, struggling to keep his little boat from being swamped by steep following seas that rolled under his boat on their way to the rocky breakwater. He watched as the skipper struggled anew as the boat yawed atop a truly monstrous wave – then slewing backwards, down into the next trough.
Terrence Carpenter watched the man in the boat from the safety of his living room, safe in the house he had first designed in his mind forty years ago. His house, his refuge from the storms of life, embodied all that he cared about in architecture, and this house – where he had lived and worked incessantly since1980 – had become an extension of his soul. Now he watched as the little boat rounded ‘the T’ and slipped into Marina del Rey – into the safe embrace of calm water – from the equally safe embrace of the island sanctuary he had built along this hillside. He felt a certain sense of relief as the boat motored into the marina, because from bitter experience he knew how treacherous and unforgiving the sea could be. He watched as the little boat disappeared from view, and only then did he relax.
Carpenter turned and looked at his house with pride, as he always did. Today the rooms felt like a cocoon, all safe and warm, protecting him from the coming storm. He stood there, taking in the reddish-gray brick and varnished redwood walls, the deep gray slate floor, the massive fireplace – all the visible hallmarks of one who’d studied Wright’s style of architecture for decades. His house had become his calling card, and then his reason for being, for more than thirty years he had called this place home, and to this day, several times a month people in fact, knocked on his door, asked him about his house, and many asked him to design them something ‘just like this’. And he did too, so many times over the years he had almost lost count, but his vision and the legacy he built around the integrity of his belief in that vision had sustained him. And quite comfortably, he said to himself as he smiled.
He turned and looked to the monstrosity beyond the trees outside his kitchen window, a huge slab of cheap beige stucco, torn screens and corroded aluminum windows, an eyesore of an apartment building that had popped up a year after he’d finished building his house, an aesthetic affront that had kept him up nights for years. His office, and more importantly, his drafting table, was on the other side of the house and looked out over the Palos Verdes peninsula, and his office had become his sanctuary, that one space where he spent most of his life. He looked at the beige monster and sighed, as always angry when he laid eyes on ugly architecture – if only because such buildings represented an unnecessarily lazy, and intellectually compromise approach to life.
It was growing almost preternaturally dark outside now, he stopped where he stood, looked out over the water and his almost heart stopped. A sinewy rope of white water coiled up into a gray-green wall of cloud – a waterspout! – and he almost gasped aloud as the writhing snake danced it’s way north towards Malibu. Savage gusts whipped the water now, and Palos Verdes disappeared behind streaking walls of rain. He stepped out onto the terrace and smelled the air – pure, cool ozone covered his flesh and he closed his eyes, slipped into memories of that distant day, and another storm too desperate to forget.
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Amila Sirri dashed inside her apartment just as the first ragged gusts tore into the palms that lined the street, from her open door she turned and watched them sway in the wind, then – after one huge frond tore away and landed on the walkway leading away to her patio – she hopped inside and slammed the door behind her. With her hack against the door she sighed, glad this day was over.
The bus ride home had been interminable, the air conditioning barely able to keep up with the knotting press of hot sweating bodies, and she had found herself wishing for the hundredth time that day she might soon be able to afford an automobile. Life would be so much better, she thought, so much easier – with even a little Toyota or Nissan. If only…but no. Things were still just too tight. Money didn’t go very far in this city.
She hung up her white lab coat in the closet by the front door and walked into the little living room where her only child, her daughter ‘Suki’ sat studying.
Suki was all that was left of that other world, that life before this one. Her daughter was all that remained of the life they’d both been forced to flee, when beautiful Sarajevo had crumbled under storms of constant shelling and aerial bombardment. She shuddered still when she recalled how crossing the street had meant exposing yourself to random sniper fire, and you had to cross many streets just to fetch enough water to drink. Her soul mate, her husband, had fallen not a meter from her, a sniper’s bullet shattering the left side of his face, blood and bone spraying everywhere as they’d carried little Suki home from the hospital. Four days old, her father’s last smile disappeared as her eyes opened for the first time, and as her father’s eyes closed – forever. Amila’s world had turned dark that day, for Suki would never know a father’s love. Their desperate flight to Germany, then America, was an echo of that day, a moment in time that had left both survivors bitter, their lives empty, devoid of all love save one for the other.
And that love had always been enough for them both.
‘And how was your school today?’ Amila asked her daughter.
‘Good. We’re going to be doing some cool projects next month!’
‘This is good. You are happy still?’
‘Very much. Why?’
‘There is so much in the news these days. So much hate. Sometimes I wonder…’
‘It’s no worse now than when we got here, Mom. Sometimes people’s hatred is palpable, other days it’s not there.’
‘But still, no one suspects…?’
‘No, Mama! What is there to suspect? You need to relax!’
They had arrived in America weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001, and Amila had been wise enough, or perhaps simply paranoid enough, to understand that affirming their Islamic faith in America would be tantamount to suicide. On their immigration forms she put down that they were Catholic, and though they did not practice any religion these days, she and Suki had seen enough in America to understand that the simple act of acknowledging any sort of Islamic backgrounds could mean certain ruin. This was not a problem for either to understand: they had both just escaped Milosevic’s campaigns of ethnic cleansing on their desperate flight to Germany, and Amila had witnessed more than her fair share of Islamophobia both in Germany and upon their arrival in California. To this day she feared being exposed, yet some days she wasn’t sure her fear was reasonable.
Still, she considered herself lucky to have survived the civil war. She was from the former Yugoslavia after all, with all it’s complexities of ethnicity and history, and while Amila had been born near Rabac, on the Istrian Peninsula – and not all that far from Italy – she held no illusions. She comforted herself that she looked as ‘European’ as anyone from Italy might, or perhaps even the South of France, but she hadn’t understood the true import of her looks until she arrived in the United States, where everyone seemed to think Muslims were either Arab or African. She and Suki were as ‘white’ as anyone from Iowa, and Amila’s honey colored blond hair
looked anything but Muslim to the people she worked with.
Her husband Viktor had been another matter entirely. His features were more classically slavic, and he’d had thick brown hair and the deepest brown eyes she’d ever seen. Suki had inherited his looks, which Amila loved – if only because when she looked at her daughter she felt Viktor was still, somehow, with them both, but Suki’s differences worried her.
Amila had met Viktor at medical school, in Sarajevo. That had been in 1989, she remembered, the year the Berlin Wall fell. The year real change cascaded through all the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, the year when Soviet troops faded away like leaves on autumn breezes, falling to an unusable history.
Their love had blossomed in the heady rush of independence that followed, and the first feelings of freedom either had ever really known had shaped the contours of their love for one another. They had just finished their clinical year when the civil war broke out, and that had been that. A sniper’s bullet put an end to all their dreams just when the future had seemed so limitless.
On their arrival in California, Amila began working in the Pathology Department at the UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, that peculiar little academic enclave sandwiched between Beverly Hills and the Pacific Palisades, but her medical degree had not been recognized and she simply couldn’t take the time off from work to study for the exams. She had found, more a simple matter of inertia than anything else, steady work in the bowels of the medical center, in the labs that classified tissue samples send down from operating rooms. Being a de facto physician, the work came easily to her, and she enjoyed her contributions to the lives she, perhaps, saved from time to time, but she was not at all content with this life. Nevertheless, she had found a steady rhythm within this existence, yet even so she still feared being ‘discovered’ more than anything else. Experience taught her that all that she had endured, all the stability she had worked so hard to achieve, would unravel if someone, anyone, discovered she was not a Christian.
Suki, as it turned out, had no interest in studying medicine. She had, instead, majored in mechanical engineering and had graduated from UCLA last year. She had been accepted to, and had enrolled in USC’s School of Architecture, and now there was a huge Apple computer on her desk in the living room. She was either at school or sitting at that desk, working on drawings night and day, and while Amila had at times felt depressed that her Suki wouldn’t follow in her footsteps, she could see her little girl had grown up with a real passion to understand the simply amazing structures they found around Los Angeles.
And now her daughter was looking up at her with the most astonished eyes she had ever seen. She was holding a book in her hands, an architectural monograph she called it, a book dedicated to just one house.
‘What is it you are looking at, Suki?’
‘Come. See for yourself.’
Amila came and sat by her daughter, and she took the book from Suki’s hands and gasped at the pictures she beheld. Bold horizontal lines defined the spaces she looked at, lines defined by bands of brick and wood. Traceries of wood stood like the branches of trees, supporting a delicate glass roof that defined an atrium that appeared for all intents and purposes to shelter ponds and a Japanese garden. Pages after page she turned, each image washed over her soul leaving an almost iridescent feeling of peace. How could it be that she had never heard of such a place?
She closed the book and looked at the cover, and her hands began shaking. ‘Terrence Carpenter’s Falling Leaf’ was the title, and when she looked at the cover photo of the house’s exterior she cried out loud. ‘Is that…?’
‘Yes, mama,’ Suki said. ‘That’s the house next door. The house just outside your window.’
+++++
The waterspout was perhaps a mile away when it turned towards the marina, and appeared for a moment to take direct aim at Carpenter as he stood out there watching the noisome creature, then the roaring beast turned north once again and skirted the surf just off Venice Beach before suddenly dissipating. Deep gray clouds scudded along the horizon, and he could hear a mad surf crashing on the sandy beach below. His hands were shaking he saw, but not from fear. A strong wind was coming off the ocean, and the temperature had suddenly fallen into the fifties, and now he was cold. Very cold. He slipped inside and walked to the kitchen, and there he put on a kettle. He found the tea he wanted, and the mug he always turned to on rainy days like this one, and he smiled at the memory the cup offered.
While the water boiled he prepared the tea, and when the water was ready he filled this ancient cup, a gift long ago from the Emperor of Japan. He held the hot cup to his face and breathed in cardamom and cinnamon, felt the heat penetrate the bones of his fingers, then he looked up, looked at the window on the beige monstrosity that stood there so menacingly, hoping against hope she would be there.
+++++
She put the book down, looked at Suki. ‘Hard to imagine, isn’t it? We’ve lived here almost fifteen years and had no idea what was right under our nose.’
‘We’re studying it in our Theory class this week. Professor Sloan kind of implied it’s one of the most important houses built in the last fifty years, and maybe even the most impressive ‘neo-Wright’ style house ever built. Wouldn’t you love to go knock on his door and take a peek inside…’
‘Well, why don’t you?’
‘Mom, you’re like – nuts. You just don’t…’
Amila regarded her daughter’s speech…so American, now so completely ‘California’. So unlike her own slavic accent. She looked at her daughter as they talked. Cute in a way, but short and a little heavy, Suki had her father’s eyes: deep, penetrating eyes that radiated soulful warmth, unlike her own cool gray orbs. And while Suki was short, again, like her father, she had always considered herself too tall, and too thin. Her breasts were too small, or so she thought, and now her hair was turning white. Streaky white in places, and the honey tones she loved were beginning to fade. And the wrinkles!
She smiled, laughed inside her vapid thoughts. ‘And I’m becoming so American!’
‘What is it, Mama? Why are you smiling?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking. About you. And this architecture stuff. How your face changes when you talk about the things you study. Your passion. And how proud I am of you.’
The two hugged, Amila wiped away a tear as she thought how proud Viktor would be of this girl.
She would always love Viktor, always remain true to him. That much was bedrock.
Amila stood and went to her bedroom, turned on the light as she walked in, and she saw the man in the house next door, and this time, and not for the first time, she smiled at him, and waved.
The man turned and walked away, the confusion in his eyes, on his face so achingly clear it almost took her breath away. She knew who he as now, and though she had smiled at him a few times over the years she’d never thought much about it, only that she thought he looked like a nice person, though getting very old.
They decided to eat out that night, and dressed to walk up to their favorite little Indian place up on Pershing. It was a weeknight, and the storms had cleared – leaving a windswept, crystalline sky, and the rising moon was brilliant. Gulls called out in the evening sky, and the fresh breeze that crossed the treelined street lent a spooky, almost enchanted air to the evening. They walked along under swaying trees, and Amila thought she felt magic in the air.
A huge jet thundered into view as it took off from LAX, the white and red Qantas livery still visible in the twilight before it turned south. ‘It’s Halloween this weekend, isn’t it?’ Amila said to no one in particular. She st
ill had the Falling Leaf monograph in hand, wanted to look at the pictures again while they ate, but the lumbering jet had awakened some long repressed sense of wanderlust, and she found herself wondering about the people on the airliner as she walked along.
‘Yup, it is. Wanna go ‘trick or treating’ again, Mom? Been a few years…’
Amila laughed at the memories that came calling, and she smiled when she felt Suki’s eyes fall on her own. ‘Wouldn’t that be fun!’
‘Let’s do it, then!’
‘I don’t have a costume! What could I possibly wear?’
‘Oh, we can figure that out. Can we do it?’
‘Sure, why not!’ They stopped at Campbell Street and looked across the street to the restaurant. There was a car pulling into the parking lot, but the place looked quiet, and they crossed Pershing and cut through the parking lot as a man got out of his just parked car.
Her eyes went wide when she saw him. It was the man from the house next door, from the Falling Leaf, and she clutched the book deeper, protectively under her arm. She had never seen him up close, but now she was more than a little curious what he looked like. She looked at him intently, took him in…
He was very tall, and impossibly thin, but it was the man’s skin that was so astonishing. His hands were the purest white, and the flesh was almost translucent, yet the skin around his eyes was whiter still. And his hair! Pure spun silver, long and straight, gathered in a ‘pony tail’ that hung almost to his waist, and she noted how his hair stood in stark contrast against the long, black woolen overcoat he wore against the evening chill.
They walked up the steps ahead of the man, and yet he made his way to the door first and opened it for them, then he stood aside to let them pass.
‘Thanks,’ Amila said, and the man nodded silently before he followed them inside.
The restaurant was a family run affair, and locals were always greeted as friends might be. Amila and Suki were hugged by one of the daughters, led off to their usual table, while the owner greeted Carpenter and took him to a large corner table well away from the two women.
Amila looked at the man’s back as he was led away, a feeling of fire in the pit of her stomach, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in many years, and she thought magic was alive in this night, over and over again.
+++++
The instant he’d recognized her he’d felt weak in the knees, and he had seriously considered getting back in his car and driving off into the night.
When he’d seen her in the window just after the storm, when he’d watched her enter that small bedroom while waves of cardamom and cinnamon sated his parched soul, he danced in the memory of the first time he had seen her, oh those many years ago. Those eyes of hers. That golden hair. And he had just turned sixty, hadn’t he, those oh-so-many years ago! Seeing her that first time, feeling her beauty had left him feeling more impotent than ever, and his age became a gulf between whatever happiness remained in this life and the reality of decline that lay ahead.
He would go to the window in his kitchen and look across that gulf from time to time, hoping she would be there – if only to rekindle memories and possibilities, yet praying she wouldn’t be there – as that would only force him to pick away at the wounds that lined the edges of his soul. He saw her perhaps once a month as it turned out, just enough to measure his advancing years against the certainty of her beauty.
And when he’d seen her in the window this evening? He’d recoiled from the sight of his own reflection in the window, an image of decline that lay superimposed over her eternal beauty. He’d hated himself in that moment, loathed the emptiness he saw within that gulf of time. Now he turned away from her, turned to the solace of a menu well known, already knowing what he’d order for his evening meal but wanting to turn off the vision of her legs as he’d walked up the steps behind her just moments ago. His hands shook as the memory lingered. He’d never imagined any woman could be so incredibly attractive.
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