Love Handles by Susan DeFelice

After his anxiety attack in the barely cold sea water, Barry walked to the outside European-style tiki bar where a woman with a roiling accent was singing Sinatra, with just a stand-up bass and conga player accompanying her.

“I’d like an Aperol Spritz, please.” The waiter nods and produces a wide wine glass filled two-thirds with the blood orange-colored drink, a thick orange wedge dunked in, ice cubes already melting into the unctuous liquid when Barry grasps the glass stem. A simple, fashionable drink, Barry thinks, a statement of how monochrome works, orange upon orange. Everything works here – splashy colors and even shimmering purple appear conservative beneath this beating sun.

Barry tosses back the incandescent drink, knowing it isn’t politically correct doing it in this place on the burnished blue Adriatic Sea. Unless it’s beer, folks nurse their drinks. Everything is right here, Barry muses, tasteful, balanced, sympatico all the way. In his mind, the word balance is anathema, a scolding for wanting it all. And yet, with the Aperol cloaking his angst, it could be something to strive for, balance. At home chaotic relationships colored his world, starting off dynamic, tempestuous even?, evolving into distanced, then finally heartbreaking. Barry chuckles to himself, that’s balance, in that they’re equally weighted at beginning and end with high emotion.

Here though, it was damning to him how people get it effortlessly right. He ordered another Aperol, noticing the waiter’s restrained though protective expression as he placed a gratis bowl of potato chips laced with sea salt next to Barry’s drink. He studied the ultramarine sea cut everywhere on its water canvas with sharp diamond and dagger shapes, sloshing back his Aperol spritz, leaving the chips untouched.

People here, Barry examines those two words, realizing the separation they connote. There’s them and there’s him. Yeah, he be some kinda island in an insouciant sea of style and classiness. Barry chuckles into his wide empty glass and digs out the orange slice with his thumb and forefinger. He peels off the thin rind and chews the liquor-soaked wedge like a divinity.

The Aperol languishes his thoughts: Ah, Leah and her family are perfect, a clan itching for him to dissolve into them. They were gonna accept him, flaws and all, and he couldn’t do it. Leah had her own, but her irritating confidence bugged the shit outa him. What kind of monster was he not wanting this for himself, instead fleeing far away as possible to this subtropical paradise. Having anxiety attacks. Ha! Leah, all princess, with caramel skin and round light eyes like sunflowers, the female version of Terrance Howard. She would rub his back and squeeze his love handles in public and Barry liked it in a queasy matronly way, but she and her family were devouring him with their good naturedness.

He drank the third spritz past worry about public displays of drunkenness. The waiter had become an instrument and he would only look at his hands deftly dropping in the six ice cubes, the liquids, and finally dropping in the orange slice. It was his third and last and he left the chips. It’s not like they were that strong even! But he needed to toss ‘em back in defiance to being swallowed up by Leah’s cloying clan.

He looked up at the waiter, “Later I’m buying me something purple and possibly shiny.” The waiter shrugged and smiled sideways. “Perhaps it will be a tight swimsuit like y’all wear around here. Yeah, I will get my Boogie Nights on. I might ask that lovely lady over there who sings like a chain-smoking dove to dance with me. Her voice is screechy but she belts it.”

The waiter left his empty glass sitting, wiping around it carefully. “Ah yeah, they never rush you here,” Barry nearly shouts, “it’s kind of hard to get used to, actually having to ask for the bill!” The waiter again shrugged. Barry pulls a copy of Moby Dick from his beach bag. Was it being by the sea that drew him to reading it or was it about facing his monomaniacal self, forever choosing autonomy over steadfast relationships? ‘Steadfast,’ damn, another one of those stifling words.

He waves Moby Dick at the waiter, “Hey, Garcon, you familiar with this book?” The waiter nods. Barry pontificates, “You know, the term sperm whale is inaccurate. The substance extracted from the large part of the whale’s head in front of its brain is not sperm at all, but a waxy, oily substance that burns ideally. Odd it was never renamed. I’m a dude but the name ‘Sperm Whale’ is gruff and sexist, especially if you are a female sperm whale. Ah, poor Moby Dick, and damn to hell Captain Ahab and then there’s tragic Pip, who went crazy abandoned on shark infested waves by his crew! They rescued him, but his brain was totally shot afterward.”

The waiter was suddenly engaged and looked grave. “I did read this book, Sir. It was required reading in, ‘owa you say, in ‘igh schola.” Barry hung his mouth in disbelief. “In high school you say? But the colloquialisms, even Americans’d have trouble with the sailor’s slang and all the damn Biblical references. Well, hats off to your people!” Barry pays the bill, saluting the young waiter as he leaves the cypress and palm tree-lined bar.

He gathers himself to swim in the strawberry-tinted dusk water, floating on his back still numbly anxious, the orange liquid in his belly sloshing along to the motion of the sea, churning reflections. This is an ancient place, kept vibrant by jaunty renewals. This sea is light’s playbook and it bleeds into their colorful fabrics and drinks, into their baroque and rococo bling bling bling. But everything underneath is a spiritual bedrock—wish I had it.

After swimming, Barry lay under one of the everglade trees dotted along the beach, flattening Moby Dick over his eyes to shield them from the perpendicular-pointing sun. He nods off, having a peopleless dream filled with resplendent light.

Susan DeFelice

Image by MauroPérez from Pixabay – glass of Aperol Spritz – an orange drink in a stem glass with a slice of fruit against a blue sea and sky.