Will the real Prince Charming please stand up?
The story of "Boardinghouse Reach" continues...
When, with the help of the stripe-shirted vaqueiro, I climbed down off my horse, I was as bowlegged as a cowboy out of Central Casting.
“If I feel in danger of crying during the wedding,” Isabel told me rapturously, “I will think of your face as you went past me on Special.”
“You will sit in the front row, fofa, and if my mother starts crying, you must make a sound like this—” Adriane made a clicking sound with her tongue, the universal “giddyup” sound that riders make to spur their horses on.
***
The Brazilians have an expression for the state of one’s body after one has taken a long and arduous ride: “You are no longer riding the horse, but now the horse is riding you.”
Isabel thought a sauna was in order. There were terrycloth robes in all our rooms, just like in a fancy hotel. We all three of us walked out under the stars in our bathing suits, flip-flops and robes to the sauna, which some thoughtful maid or other had already heated up for us.
I would have given a lot, growing up, to have had the kind of relationship with my mother that Adriane had with Isabel. There seemed to be none of the mother-daughter touchiness between them—there was no prodding or poking at open wounds, no staking out and claiming of territory, even. Adriane seemed delighted that I was fast becoming friends with her mom. We sat in the cedar-scented sauna and spoke of all things with an easy affability as the sweat curled our hair and brought a pink flush to our faces.
Adriane was the first to slip out the door and step under the generous flow of the shower, letting out a few surprised yips as the cold water hit her overheated body. As we each took our turn multiple times under the cascade of cold water, we began a friendly contest to see whose screams could most faithfully reproduce the sounds of a really rousing orgasm. The two who weren’t in the shower would cheer the other one on.
Dizzy with laughter, sweat, heat and cold, our pores well sealed, we stepped out into the starry night. The constellations—the unknown constellations of another hemisphere—seemed to swirl and dance above my head. It was suddenly the most silent night I’d yet had in Brazil.
What must the maids have thought? I wondered aloud, realizing that our shouts must have traveled with utter clarity through the limpid air. Adriane and Isabel both burst out giggling, more like a couple of sisters than a mother and daughter.
We laughed—with surreptitious reprises of our screams in the shower—all through dinner. The maids served us without letting on they’d heard anything at all.
***
The wedding was on the last day of my ten-day trip. I was taken with all the female members of the immediate family to a beauty palace where we were primped and polished.
I must admit that I felt a little out of place at the wedding, where I didn’t dare sit myself in the front row—and didn’t know anyone sitting near me. But at the party afterwards, I was able to hold my own, of course, because at the party everyone danced.
Someone introduced me to one of Adriane’s many cousins, a handsome young man who at first demurred that he couldn’t dance and couldn’t speak English either. I reassured him that it didn’t matter. I swept him out onto the dance floor.
That was Emílio. We danced for hours together. Later he told me that his mother said wondrously to him, “I didn’t know you could dance!” Many glasses of champagne later, he steered me over to one of the people who worked in the hall, someone who spoke English. He demanded that she translate for him. He instructed her not to change a single word of what he wanted to say to me.
Well, at that point, I didn’t know that Brazilians fall in love the way other men change their socks. It was a beautiful declaration of love, like something out of an opera. I was utterly charmed. Emílio is a lawyer, although he doesn’t at all like being a lawyer. He lives for films and books and music and plays, like one of the literary lawyers from a Balzac novel. He can quote just the right passage of poetry at just the right moment.
But I didn’t take his declaration of love all that seriously. I thought he was adorable—and certainly irresistible. But the next day, when I was flying home, I thought to myself, What if it was real? What if he really is my Prince Charming? And here I am, flying six thousand miles away from him while he sleeps off his hangover.
I bought a better Portuguese dictionary and a verb book when I got home, and, painstakingly, over the course of several days, I wrote a little letter to Emílio. I enclosed a packet of forget-me-nots. I sent him my email address.
And there ensued a magical correspondence. I think we wrote each other about 200 letters—long, beautiful letters. He wrote to me in Portuguese—and never have I learned to read a language so quickly. I wrote to him in English. We are both keen writers, and neither of us wanted to compromise the quality of our writing by trying to write in the other’s language.
Finally, after three months of this, I arranged to return to Brazil, to spend New Year’s Eve with Emílio in Rio de Janeiro and to give a reality check to the relationship we’d forged in our letters. Unbeknownst to me, Emílio immediately set about redecorating his apartment, making it more comfortable for me and even planning which little room Kyle could call his own if what we both hoped for so much came to pass. The plan was to spend three weeks together.
Stewart stayed at my house with Kyle.
❤️
