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I was once a smoker.
Yes, yes, I realize. My head is bowed in shame. I know it’s as though I just said “I was an ax-murderer” or “I once drowned puppies for fun.”
Thus, although it’s a confession that merits apology, the fact is that smoking was fun. No, “fun” is not the word I want. It was pleasurable, comforting, even smart and social.
If you, the reader, are under thirty or forty, you will think that is an insane summary. You will even adjust your thinking of me, no doubt. But I will carry on here, telling of it.
I smoked throughout several relationships, including the most recent one with a husband who lasted over thirty years. We didn’t smoke all of that time, of course. We gave it up years ago, as times changed. But we did begin that way.
Who can imagine the cozy happiness of two people, compatible in all ways, having so much to talk about, evening after evening, pouring glasses of wine (me: white; him: red) and arranging ourselves in the living room with ashtrays? For years we didn’t have a TV or think about it. We did buy cheap wine and cigarettes by the cartons.
I remember it all, not with apology and chagrin, but with longing.
And before that – the relationship with D or S: The men smoked; I smoked. The sex. What did people who didn’t smoke do after sex? It was always another consummation, a sweet relaxation, to roll on my stomach, light a cigarette, smile at him, share an ashtray.
I associate the smoking with sex—they were both abundant once upon a time—with several partners (not all at once!) who were all smokers themselves. Sexy men.
There came a time, though, that the social pressures, the warnings, the now-proclaimed ugliness of the habit started working their ways through to me. Not easily, not readily.
I couldn’t see what was deemed unattractive. “Stand in front of a mirror,” the non-smokers advised. “You’ll see how ridiculous you look.” I tried that. I smiled at myself, the cigarette held at a jaunty angle, my pantomiming a pretend response to a pretend cocktail party guest: “Yes, I think so too. . . .” I thought I looked sexy in that mirror. Why would I give it up?
And yet. My husband put himself through an intensive quit-smoking program, concerned with his health, and I reduced myself, because of him, to one cigarette a day. The joy of our camaraderie as we settled into soft chairs and evening cigarettes was a thing of the past. Still, I went outside each evening over the next year, nurturing that one.
Then there were none.
So: all that was a long time ago. However, I’ve been digging up my short stories, wondering what to “do” with them. Because I wrote a short story based on some episode of my life, often changing the outcomes (the joys of writing), these stories are of characters who are always smoking. Good lord! I just read an old story yesterday, which has some really good passages, actually, about two friends who are floating in innertubes in the ocean at Fort Lauderdale–and smoking. They tuck their cigarettes and lighters into their bikini tops. Obviously, that was based on me at some point, the gestures of lighting up now as remote as that lulling water, a close friendship that dissolved many years ago, an exotic setting that I was once a part of, as I — as those of us who get old realize with chagrin—was once young myself. Seems impossible, all of it.
I guess I did burn up a good part of my life. It was also so much the best part—was that coincidental? Maybe.