Nat "King" Cole

I go through phases where I sometimes miss a certain era. In a way, missing it also helps me relive it, at least in my heart. Tonight, for example, my Here and Now are not Washington, DC in 2005, but New York City in 1952. I thought I was in love with this man then. Ironically, it was not the man I was living and sleeping with at the time. No, this man was a little different. I met him in an uptown club one night James had stood me up. I remember I was wearing red, my hair swept back, although I’d let it grow quite long by then. Strangely, it was my natural color. I recall lighting a cigarette for myself and being in a rage at my table-for-two, inhabited solely by me.

That was when I heard his voice.

He was telling a story to a group of friends, three females and two men. They were sitting in one of the larger booths, laughing, and I had the feeling that they were all enthralled with him. Just one glance and I felt enthralled. –He looked like my typical train wreck. Tallish. Dark. Probably came from an Italian family. Handled himself like he owned the world.

But God, that voice…

I straightened up as the band hit full-swing. Most of his table got up to dance, but he waved them off, uninterested. He had seen me looking, but then I was purposely looking away. I finished my cigarette coolly, but quickly. I waved off some acquaintances who attempted to catch my attention. All the while, I could feel his eyes, and I swear that I could hear his silence. 1952 was not a time for forward women, but I had known more constrained times, so I turned –deliberately, and calmly –to look him directly in the eye. He smiled this…this great smile, all even, white teeth, and though I didn’t smile back, I held his gaze. Sometimes I feel empowered by my eyes, and I willed him to my table. He rose and complied, but his face said that he not only knew he was answering my own desires, but that mine coincided with his.

He said something wretched in that marvelous voice. Something about a beautiful woman sitting at a table alone. “Well, since you were kind enough to notice, won’t you ask me to dance?” I asked, raising an eyebrow, a skill I had only recently acquired and used to deadly advantage. “You preempt me, my dear.”

My dear.

He said it as though he’d called me his dear all his life. The band hit the notes for “Unforgettable.” He sang it in my ear as we danced too-closely together. I remember being, not breathless, but breathing erratically. I had had sensual moments in my life, but that particular moment felt as though it were set on fire. –And we still had our clothes on then. Oh, yes. Later, I let him take them off of me, and his voice whispered a name that I’d chosen for my name at the time, and I remember almost wanting to cry for wishing that he had, instead, said the name I was born with: that quiet, secret name. There was just something about his voice that felt more right than any other thing I’d known.

Tonight, I can hear his voice. And just once, I say his name out loud as I play Nat “King” Cole’s Unforgettable. The moment melts in my mind and my mouth. I loved that man, and that man loved me for a little while. It’s because of that love that he is still alive inside me –fifty years later when he himself is either dead or too old to move.

“Unforgettable…that’s what you are…”