Persimmon

You knew it was a word, even knew it was a thing, supposedly edible. You knew there was a tree behind the Chateau Liberté in the Santa Cruz Mountains where you lived once that dropped them in huge piles unattended by anyone save the bees that swarmed around the coagulated pools of overripened pulp.

You never had the desire to become familiar with this alien thing. The name itself seemed to describe a bitter, solitary crone, lips pursed, simmering in an overcooked stew of regrets and grudges.

You were content to remain a stranger until you met K, the son of the elderly woman you took care of two nights a week. K lived in Maine, visited his mother in Cambridge twice a month on average. He was in his mid-seventies, a sculptor, so invitingly handsome and conversationally disarming that on the occasions when he’d visit his mother and sit at her table talking of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Beckett, and Brancusi once again, the same stories, same associations, you hardly even noticed because all you could do was sit there across the table from him bathing in his smile and wishing to hell that he’d undress you with those big, wideset, brown eyes. But you knew you were not his type, not lithe enough, not young enough, not neurotic enough. You would have to be satisfied knowing that he liked you because you always returned his smile and you got all his cultural references — even offered some of your own.

Every October, one of his other great loves — the persimmon — would invariably spice up the conversation. He would buy a half dozen at a time and leave them in the fruit bowl on his mother’s kitchen counter, inspecting them every day like a mother hen, squeezing the delicate flesh, appraising the fruit’s ripeness.

And he would sit at his mother’s dining table and talk about art and literature and women: his past relationships with dancers, captivating women whom he loved and loved loving for their beauty and their art, women who would either self-destruct or grow weary of his charm. And then there were his recent discoveries online and in art museum cafes, women considerably younger, almost as young as his 30 year-old daughter, gorgeous intellectual women whom he would approach with his disarming charm and woo them with his broad smile and unabashed flattery. He would confess this wolfish behavior, saying it was purely innocent flirtation, a genuine expression of aesthetic appreciation for all manifestations of beauty.

And he would reach for the fruit bowl, pick one of the persimmons up, test its ripeness, raising an eyebrow when the plumpness of the flesh was just right. Leaning over a napkin with his catch in hand, he would pull the fruit apart and smile the smile of a predator just before the kill.

And he would hold one of the halves up to his mouth, slowly slurp at it, and look at his mother and me and say with a sly smile and a wink: “Just like a woman.” His mother would look at me and shrug. “What!?” He would say. “It is!” Then he would chuckle and offer the other half to us. We both indicated that the kill was all his to consume.

The following year in October, K came to his mother’s house with another half dozen persimmons and then went to visit his doctor. He’d had a persistent cough. The doctor diagnosed chronic pneumonia and recommended he check into Mass General. While he was there, they discovered the leukemia.

That fall the persimmons remained uneaten. They lay there in the bowl and progressed from unripe to just ripe, and then to overripe, bruised, seeping their juices in pools at the bottom of the bowl until the cleaning woman, a former school teacher from Brazil, tossed them perfunctorily into the compost.