Bellagrand: A Novel by Simons Paullina

Author:Simons, Paullina [Simons, Paullina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

There was music in the house, from restless jazz on the radio, from Gina’s attempts to play Esther’s Schumann’s Traumerei, to Fernando’s Spanish-tinged guitar easing out a slow habanera. Fernando sat in the marble courtyard, smoked, and strummed his Cuban childhood through their palms and walkways. The sun shined morning to night, there were whooshing fans and clanging knives and slamming drawers. There was life. They planted inkberry in the loamy earth, and tomatoes for later in the summer after the baby came when they could make paste again from homegrown, not market-bought tomatoes. Together they made luscious sauce, and had pasta with garlic, clams and shrimp, vegetable lasagna, capellini primavera. He drank red wine and kissed her with the opulent juice still on his lips. With his new Kodak Brownie he took photographs of her that he never developed, the film thrown into the drawer until later, the later that never came. Harry said he didn’t know how Gina could show herself at the public market. He said being with her was like constantly walking through the red-light district in New Orleans. She was lust on parade. She told him that was the nicest thing anyone said to her.

Late at night he would draw them a bath and build a fire in the delicate light blue bathroom. He was careful with her, and tender. He soaped her like he loved her, held her like he loved her, loved her like he loved her. Some nights there was a slight breeze through the darkness past the open windows. The room would be filled with the smell of fragrant soap, salt water, and love, like heady perfume, like opiate.

March and April dissolved into sweltering May, elusive intimacy, unabated ardor, boat-bobbing bliss.

The lemonade is made, the sugar bowl is on the table. The sun shines every day and the moon and the stars are out for us at night, she murmurs after him, like a love song.

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