This holiday week, during one of many conversations, I brought up Myrna Loy (as I am wont to do)—and most of the people had no idea who she was.
Blank looks, all around.
Shocked, I asked, “Did you ever see Bonnie and Clyde? Their driver, C.W. Moss—played by Michael J, Pollard—had a tattoo of her that he had to explain to his disapproving father. Moss was, like countless others, beguiled by her glamour and aura of saucy impertinence.”
It’s possible that none of them saw, or remember seeing, Bonnie and Clyde. Hard to believe, no?
Next month, Myrna will have been dead for thirty years—yet she’s still able to melt the infatuated hearts of erstwhile, or perhaps even current, hapless males. She graces several of my stories (obviously, I consider us to share a first-name-basis relationship). She has only a cameo role in the story, below, having been upstaged by another heartthrob—a bella donna from a much earlier time.
Today’s tale is part of the collection, Ephemera: a short collection of short stories.
Across a Crowded Room
He knows his love for Simonetta is forbidden, but that just makes it that much more enticing. For one thing, her husband is Marco Vespucci—who, like the wasps that provide his family name, could be expected to fly into a rage at the mere thought of a rival.
For another, she’s been dead for over five hundred years.
Still, from the first moment he laid eyes upon her, in the tourist-filled rooms in the Ufizzi, he knew he could never love another. Every year he eschews all other pleasures, in order to save enough money for just one more flight from Philadelphia to Florence. It is worth any sacrifice, just to get the briefest glimpse of her, either floating demurely on her scallop shell or wandering through the enchanted forest that has become, for both of them, eternal Spring.
His love is pure—not like the brief fling he’d had with Myrna Loy. That was a mere flirtation, nothing like the reverence he feels for his Simonetta. Even in dreams, where she often appears naked, she chastely covers most of her body. He never sees more than one of her tiny, perfectly formed breasts—and that inspires not lust but adoration.
No, his other romances—with sparkling Myrna, sultry Clara Bow, sweet Lillian Gish, and even the divine Audrey Hepburn—were as nothing to him now. He had once been smitten with a photo of the dark-eyed twenty-year-old Alice Liddell, taken by Lewis Carroll, but—in time—that, too, faded before the luminous Simonetta Vespucci.
Thoughts of her occupy his every waking thought. He knows that he is not alone in loving her. Sandro Botticelli and Giuliano de Medici loved her too, but he rejoices in the fact that they’re both safely dead. It does trouble him to think that other men’s eyes, living eyes, can linger over her fair features. Especially vexing are the leers of Italian men, men who—as he believes everyone knows—are over-sexed and rudely insensitive to the finer feelings of the women they ogle.
Her eyes haunt him. Their heavy lids suggest that she has just risen from her bed—as if to meet her lover, the lover he longs to be. Her focus is somewhere in the distance, not at him, to a place where a particularly delicious memory lingers, like a whiff of not-quite-forgotten perfume. The sweet tangle of her strawberry-colored hair holds him more securely than any chain.
No living beauty—let alone his former imaginary sweethearts—can hold a candle to her radiance. It’s been years since an actual, live, woman appealed to him. They’re all so physical, with smells, and opinions, and needs. They come and—always—go, leaving no evidence of their passing. But his Simonetta is eternal; she never fails to beguile him with her calm elegance.
Paid subscribers to these substack pages get access to complete editions of two of my novellas. Noirvella is a modern story of revenge, told in the style of film noir. Unbelievable is a kind of rom-com that forms around a pompous guy who is conceited, misinformed, and undeservedly successful. Both books are sold by Amazon, but paid subscribers get them for free!
Also, substack pages (older than eight months) automatically slip behind a paywall—so only paid subscribers can read them. If you’re interested in reading any of them, you can subscribe, or wait until they are re-released in book form (something I’m in the process of considering).
Meanwhile, it is easy to become a paying subscriber (just like supporting your favorite NPR station). It’s entirely optional, and—even if you choose not to do so—you’ll still get my regular substack posts—and I’ll still be happy to have you as a reader.
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