This "Rose" invited the thin man inside to draw up an ad. She answered the phone by saying "Sheets Cafe." She wore beautiful cotton dresses, walked like a vixen from a great Bogart film, drank fine Bordeaux and spoke French when she wanted to. Her humor was quite renown.

Rose was rare, like a siren from the watery canyons of Hercules. She was Ingrid Bergman of Cassablanca. She was Grace Kelley of To Catch a Thief fame, with a voice soft and beautiful. She had eyes too. And she had all the powers of rarefied beauty. Her flesh was delicate and freshly bathed. And so within days the thin man left her a bit of poetry. It would become the supreme embarrassment of his youth. Years later he begged her forgiveness. But of course, she only vindicated the poetry by telling him that he should write more of it. It was more kindness than he deserved.

The thin man's boss at the newspaper began dating Rosie's roommate, who went by the name of Maggie. He splashed around cocaine paid for with ten grand his father had given him to launch the paper. He fancied himself as some sort of Sal Paradise. He borrowed terminology from an underworld that he knew nothing about. Became the hip new journalist in town. Within a year the paper had failed but Maggie stuck around for a few more. She was nice when she had to be and mean as hell when she felt like it. The thin man was poor, smoked pot like a chimney and made money doing dirty work for the journalist. Sal nicknamed the thin man "Rocco." It was not so much an act of friendship but rather a reduction to some laughable Jimmy Cagney caricature out of the film Key Largo. You see, Sal was always painting himself as Rocco's personal reformer, all the while paying him peanuts for mounds of dirty loot for years and years. Rocco was purely smalltime except for one noteworthy jewel heist. His modus operandi had nothing to do with the real underworld. He simply had learned to steal as a teenage runaway. He lived in a drugged out dream world.

Sal threw parties. He was generally not a bad fellow, other than being a phony. But the thin man, alias Rocco, could relate to all that. Then one day, Sal was having a little shindig at his flat when along comes Rose. Walks right in the door and stands right next to Rocco. But Rocco was just tortured to be near this stupendously gorgeous woman. It was not to be. And so he dismissed himself under some polite pretext deferring to the social powers of Sal and his whole contrived world.

Rocco had some sort of shadow that he could never live up to. This alter ego wanted to rip Rose into a thousand sweating nights of animal lust. Such dreams were more for the want of winning her than enjoying any kind of pleasure. Of course, that was not the real Rocco, at least not physically. Two years before, Rocco had undergone a tragic injury that made his manly abilities unpredictable. The initial injury occurred at the age of eight. Thus he lived each day for the chance to smoke more and more of the finest marijuana floating around Boulder. It suppressed physical and mental agonies. The real Rock was a sincere sap who could not understand why he respected Rose so much, why it seemed that his whole life was about finding some sort of woman like this in every single detail. Oh sure, he had her up on a pedestal. But he wanted to knock her dead like a love sick cave man. He wanted to believe that this beautiful woman was capable of the supreme kindness.

Rocco was good at reading gestures. Despite fearing that Rose might be a bit of a snob, he took her to be quite sincere. Thus even a moment of kindness made him feel ugly as if being looked upon by Esmeralda. Not that Rocco was the Hunchback. With a good cleanup and a little self respect, he could become quite handsome. He merely felt that way as a caricature, a frequent jailbird and a drug user. Rock's dreams had not been defined. He only knew that he had to be a major success by Thursday morning to atone for a lowly birth. Real life required power and money, two things he knew nothing about.

Rocco never quite knew what Rosie's life was about either. He'd see her walking, vamping, drinking, swinging from a street pole, not sure if he was being looked at or toyed with. She was the purest form of sex a filthy mind could ever dream of. And so he felt so much guilt for knowing he had an ungainly pedestrian life. Even the dogs did better than Rocco. One day Rocco was walking by Rosie's house. It was the only time in his entire life that he ever saw a male dog mating a bitch in the middle of the street. It must have been her dog. It was there to taunt Rocco. Traffic was backed up for blocks and cars were beeping but the dogs were just oblivious. I don't know what happened to the dogs. But ten years later, some lucky dog won the Rose of Rocco's halting daydreams.

For decades Rocco didn't know that Rosie had come from a blue blooded pedigree peppered with names out of history and Wall Street. Given his fruitless search to discover why God created the rich, her pedigree would have meant nothing to the Rock even if he had known about it.

The man that married Rosie was wealthy, influential, and twenty years her senior. He was newly divorced and tired of being scandalized by his former wife who was quite fond of declaring her sex habits publicly. But more importantly, his surname is more famous than Citizen Kane.

In contrast, Rocco, the young wayward character of Sal's little rat pack, has since loved and known fleeting seasons of love. And at times, he has been the object of love. But he mostly learned to prefer living without love. Eventually, he tired of drugs, cleaned up his life, became some sort of two bit writer or something. Meanwhile, Rosie bore the wealthy man's children. Occasionally, the man once known as "Rocco" looked back with yearning memories of the most stunning personality he had ever witnessed in a woman.

Rosie went on to do many of the things she loved in life, just as she had always done. But did the world's most beautiful woman ever want for a true love that she never found? And did she ever know.... love at all? And now you know.... why men like Kane grow old and die with Rosebud scribbled on their minds.

A Thing of Beauty began as a paragraph on the Blog page. A year or two later, on November 5, 2006, I wrote the bulk of it above.