Eventually Rafik’s tongue made its way up to my thighs, where he settled in for a while. Lips and tongue and teeth conversed freely with the tender flesh on the inner side of my thighs, while his hard member toyed with my tootsies. He licked and chewed and pinched within millimeters of paydirt, breathed his hot breath on it, teased it all plenty, but never made contact with the external center of my sex. The torture made my rod pulse and drool in wild anticipation, ever ready and eager for his lips and tongue, ready for what it seemed would never happen.
I wondered, Is this how an accessory to murder makes love? Then I wondered, Why is it so easy to believe him guilty of something, instead of innocent? But finally I surrendered to the pure simplicity of what he was doing, what he was saying, talking without guile to some deep lost part of me with some bold and present part of himself—a hand, a lip, a shoulder, a thigh, what did it matter? I was being recharged with zings of electricity, small sparks that grew and intensified into small jolts and caused my muscles to tremble rapidly, then to vibrate, and then to fibrillate wildly out of control. And once Rafik had got my body into that state of electroshock, he played with it, improvised, navigated his way through the surges and eddies of pleasure, and coaxed from my lungs cascades of whimpers and tremulous wails of astonishment and delight. I heard myself saying, “You do love me. You do love me.” And just before I left the earth, I realized I’d stolen the line.
Nine days later, or so it seemed, when the drama had run its course and I’d regained consciousness, Rafik was stroking my belly gently with a towel. Physically I was completely spent, yet I sensed something odd with my body, a vague feeling of fullness, of being more than I was before the sex. I suppose it was the afterglow. Then I realized that despite Rafik’s Olympic-class ministrations, I had not let off. And though he had drenched my abdomen with his release, my usual copious climax had been internalized and contained. Well, superb as the sex had been, that’s not exactly the way men come, and it troubled me for a moment. Was Rafik now robbing me of genital pleasure too? What was next? No erection? Or had he finally transported me far beyond the meager sensations afforded by a dangling attachment, transported me to the more elevated ecstasies of the soul?
“I did nothing for you,” I said.
“You let me do this,” answered Rafik, as though ravishing my body was pleasure enough for him. “And you already make love to me when you promise to help Toni.”
In the warmth of his presence and the rumbling purr of Sugar Baby, who was lying at our heads, I asked myself, Was that love?
Later that night I awoke calmly. In the moonlight I could see Rafik and Sugar Baby breathing together, two of hers to one of his. I wondered how Rafik had managed to change the occasional horrors of life into a creative force. How could anyone make love the way he had after a day like his? He had been inspired, not exhausted in his lovemaking. There was something disturbingly divine about how he could transform the mundane debris he was dealt every day. Maybe that’s what ultimately separated the artist from the ordinary mortal: The normal person resists or ignores or flies from the circumstances at hand, while the artist grapples them and seeks to create something from them, no matter what they are.
I resolved to use my artist lover as an example. I would accept the circumstances of Max Harkey’s death as an opportunity to apply myself body and mind until I found the killer. That would be my particular piece of creation. For the moment, with that decision, I was at peace.
7
For the One I Love
THE NEXT MORNING RAFIK WAS SCHEDULED to teach company class at the ballet, so we were both up early. While he showered and filled the apartment with the steamy scent of wild fern, I fixed our breakfast to the strains of an old Fanny Brice song about the very scene of domestic bliss we were depicting at that moment. The big difference was that I wasn’t making “hot-meal” for Rafik, but French toast. As I moved about the small kitchen, singing along and swinging my hips and shoulders to the lively beat of the music, Sugar Baby watched me warily from atop one of the tall stools.
I’d placed everything on the kitchen counter when Rafik came into the kitchen, all ruddy and moist and cleanly shaven, wearing a white cotton T-shirt hanging outside his khaki chinos and bulky white socks on his feet. (Rafik never came to the table bare-chested.) With his eagle’s beak of a nose he surveyed the kitchen air, which I had managed to fill with the happy morning smells of coffee and browned butter and crusty grilled bread.
“Delicious,” he said after a deep breath.
But to my nose the real treat was the scent that Rafik had brought into the kitchen with his scrubbed skin and his damp hair redolent of wild forest greenery. I opened my arms to him and we embraced like two virgins who had just spent their first night together.
Sugar Baby watched us wrapped in each other’s arms. She cocked her feline face one way then the other, then said, “Gwow?” Though my girl’s vocabulary may be limited, the message is always clear: When are you going to feed me?
Over breakfast I told Rafik that I needed to talk with people at the Boston City Ballet studios, especially the ones who’d been at Max Harkey’s dinner the other night, if I was going to make any headway in getting Toni di Natale out of jail. Rafik agreed to help me any way he could. But then he added, “You will show discretion, of course.” I promised that I would … try, that is. We finished eating and Rafik departed for the BCB. Ever the dutiful spouse, I cleaned up the dishes, then got myself ready to face the day—after feeding my favorite cat.
When I got to Snips I took Nicole into my office and related the turn of events to her. As usual, her response was blunt.
“I disapprove.”
I shrugged. “I’ve got to do it, doll.”
“How can you think that meddling in a murder case is going to solve your romantic problems—the ones you’ve created yourself, I might add?”
“It’s the only way I can be sure of Rafik’s love.”
She shook her head in disdain.
I went on, “Last night we had sex, Nikki.”
“So?”
“It was strange, almost troubling.”
Nicole said, “Maybe you should consult a newspaper columnist about it. Everyone else seems to.”
“No, Nikki. It was different this time. I felt more than I ever have before.”
“Bosh! Felt what?”
“I can’t explain. Some kind of shift.”
“Stanley, what are you talking about? A shift where?”
“Everywhere. Nowhere.”
She shook her head ruefully. “Dear boy, you should be happy that your lover is still finding ways to thrill you instead of trying to analyze what’s happening.”
“Doll, I’m telling you, this was different. I didn’t even come, at least not in the usual way. It was as though it all happened inside me, but not physically.”
“Are you telling me that you now understand the way a woman feels?”
“Not since women have been learning how to ejaculate. What I’m questioning is whether Rafik and I have finally transcended our bodies to experience a more elevated kind of sex, one borne in the soul. Have we finally surpassed the limits of physical love?”
Nicole took a few sips of her cream-laced coffee.
“Darling, you’ll forgive me, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. If you’re not sure how you feel about Rafik, maybe you should look for the answer within yourself rather than setting up this test between him and that woman. You’re basing your whole future with him on whether he passes or fails this arbitrary little quiz you’ve invented.”
“It’s not like that, Nikki. I have to know if Rafik wants me for love—for who I am myself—unconditionally. Or am I just a plaything? I know I’m not perfect. I’m not even intelligent most of the time. But this feels like one of those small opportunities to discover some bit of truth about my life.”
“It sounds like a house of cards to me.”
“It may be,” I replied with a sad li
ttle sigh. “But just for the record, I promise to stack the deck in Rafik’s favor.”
Disregarding my bad pun Nicole said, “And just for the record, Stanley, I think you’re courting disaster.”
“So be it.”
“What about your work here at the salon?”
“I already do a lot of the office work after hours.”
“So you’ve worked everything out.”
“Hardly,” I said.
Nicole finished her coffee, then got up and went toward the door. She turned back to me and said, “I suppose as a friend I ought to offer you any help I can in your quest for the Grail.”
“Thanks, doll.”
She shook her head dubiously. “Good luck, then,” she said, and closed the door.
I finished some of the urgent business I had on my desk, then left the salon a few hours later.
When I got to the studios of the Boston City Ballet I saw that the police were finishing up their own work and were just leaving the building. I entered through the main doorway where Lieutenant Branco saw me and waved me over to him.
“You’re looking lively today.” he said. “Things must be back on track at home,” Then he raised one eyebrow as if to end his simple statement with a question mark.
“Things are just fine, Lieutenant.” I replied with a caustic edge on my voice to counter Branco’s presumptuous attitude and his bull’s-eye accuracy about my personal life.
He said, “I’d like to have a little talk with you at the station when you have a chance.”
A casual invitation to questioning by a cop is not exactly standard procedure, so I wondered what was on his mind.
“I’ve got some time now.” I said.
Branco replied. “But I don’t. It can wait, but do it soon ” Then he left the building, the last cop to walk out the door I headed up the broad staircase to the main reception area, taking the steps two at a time with my strong Slavic legs. Up there I found small groups of dancers and company staff milling about in the expansive skylit area. Through the general hum of voices I heard one penetrate through all the rest with its unmistakable shrill staccato. Then I saw Madame Rubinskaya chattering nervously to a young man in sweat-dampened workout clothes, seated on the floor, drinking coffee and eating a hard-boiled egg—obviously a dancer.
“Bozhe!” muttered the old woman to him. “They are asking too many questions. Too much. Too much.”
Madame Rubinskaya’s magpie complaining must have wearied the young man because he glanced up at me with eyes full of hope, as though I might rescue him from humoring the old woman any longer Madame had sensed my presence as well, either from the young man’s look toward me or from the physical energy of my approach, for she turned and faced me with her watery pale-blue eves.
‘‘Finally you are coming,” she said with great relief. “Rafik says you will help us, tank God.”
“I hope I can,” I said.
“You must.” she said, raising her voice to a henlike squawk. “The police are making many questions but giving not one answer. I want to know who did that to Maxi Who can be such a monster?” Madame then threw her head back and raised her wrist to her forehead, eyes closed and mouth agape in cliche pantomime from nineteenth-century melodrama. She moaned in a quietly descending glissando that ended with a slight gasp. I don’t know what she intended by the gestures, but they elicited neither sympathy nor even a suppressed smile in me. Instead they produced an unsettling sense of deception, and I wondered what she was hiding. I recalled the night of the dinner party, when she and Max Harkey had openly disagreed on some programming change that he had proposed in connection with her young niece. Madame had left the party immediately after that episode. She had claimed to be tired, but she was clearly more angry than spent. Could that small disagreement, which so many people had witnessed, have motivated the old woman to kill Max Harkey? It seemed unlikely. It wasn’t important enough. Her voice broke into my meandering thoughts.
“So,” she said. I saw that she had recovered her composure, probably because her antiquated acting had had so little effect on me. “Rafik is rehearsing now.” She pointed toward a wide, carpeted corridor off the main lobby. “You will find him there.” I was about to explain that I hadn’t been looking for Rafik at all, but she had turned and was walking away in the opposite direction. I stood there stupidly wondering how to get her back, but no ideas came. Nancy Drew had had a lobotomy.
Though I hadn’t intended to visit Rafik, I headed in the direction Madame Rubinskaya had indicated. Perhaps the sight of my beloved would inspire me to more successful investigative techniques, to emulate my true hero, Perry Mason. Besides, if I lay low I might even catch a glimpse of the new choreography Rafik was being so secretive about. Sure enough, one of the curtains that usually closed off the long viewing windows of the rehearsal studio had been left partially open. A six-inch gap allowed me to spy unseen by anyone inside.
Rafik was demonstrating some elaborate movements to Scott Molloy and Alissa Kortland. The two dancers were in leotards and tights, while Rafik was in his T-shirt and khaki chinos. I watched him shape the air with his strong arms and legs and torso, mold it with the same love and conviction as a master sculptor. Every line and gesture he made seemed to push beyond the confines of his body and extend outward to infinity. Inspired by his dream world, he moved; then forced by the limits of the real world he would freeze the movement and clarify his intention to the two dancers. They nodded in assent while they imitated Rafik’s moves in miniature. Then Rafik would return to the ethereal realm and once again redefine the space around him, only to stop mid-pose and explain some more. Creating art seemed to be a cosmic version of Simon Says, alternating between divine force and mundane response.
The mundane had its intriguing elements though—Scott Molloy’s body, for example. Since he was in his early twenties, his soft-tissue structures—muscles, tendons, and ligaments—were all at the peak of elasticity for an adult. No matter how high he soared in a jump or how many tours he completed in a pirouette, when he finished the move and returned to earth he made no vibration, no sound beyond that of his kidskin slippers flexing through his pliable feet back onto the floor. Next to the younger man, Rafik’s physical maturity was more evident. His muscularity had filled out with the proportions of a man, while Scott Molloy retained the slight imbalance of extremely developed calves and thighs and buttocks supporting a slender, boyish torso. It gave him an odd vulnerability, as though he hadn’t grown up yet, but was expected to do adult things with his body. And when Rafik told Scott Molloy what to do, he obeyed unflinchingly.
Alissa Kortland’s face was beautiful but inexpressive, as if cut from marble. It was at once captivating and disturbing. Her body was neither girlish nor womanly; by some aberration of genetics it resembled an exotic asexual humanoid that had been trained to perform ballet. When she stood at rest watching Rafik, she appeared ungainly and almost grotesque. But when Alissa Kortland put her body into motion or into a pose, she became a piece of living sculpture, breathtaking and mesmerizing, the lines of which no ordinary mortal could ever assume. She was a ballerina-machine of which Rafik was the virtuoso operator.
Watching Rafik create his art on these two rare specimens of Homo sapiens I wondered about my own work in the salon. Though in pursuit of another kind of beauty, it seemed pedestrian compared to Rafik’s attempts at pure expression. I’ve tried to accept these vast differences in our work, yet I can’t comprehend why any act of creation has to exact such a heavy toll from the person doing it. My work is creative, but a major project for me means a few hours of concentrated work, and then it’s over. I’m happy, the client is happy, and it’s on to the next one. For Rafik though, creating a piece of choreography can take months—often many long, moody months—yet the finished work might be a series of movements and poses that, however grandly eloquent or playfully lighthearted, might last only ten or twelve minutes on stage. And the emotional distance that appears during those dark months
of creation might trouble me gravely, especially since Rafik the creator is such a contrast to other side of him—the generous, mischievous lover, the man who, a patriot to the end, once hummed the national anthem on the Fourth of July while juggling my testicles within his cheeks.
With that fond memory, I turned away from the rehearsal studio and went back to the main lobby. Returning by a different corridor I made an unlikely discovery along the way: The new studios now housed a fully equipped workout room complete with stair climbers, ski simulators, and stationary bicycles; barbells, dumbbells, and cam-driven weight machines; and the requisite walls of mirrors. I wondered, Would the visions that possessed artists like Rafik ultimately be vanquished by the health-club mentality? Would balletic ideals of form and motion evolve into nothing more than the athletic prowess of a jock, a super-refined exhibitionist produced in the name of art? That the workout facility was vacant offered some hope that art might yet exist outside the gym.
I was passing through the main lobby on my way out the building, already discouraged by the my lack of progress, when I heard a voice call out to me, “Hello there!”
It was Marshall Zander.
“How are you doing today?” he said.
“As well as anybody after a day like yesterday.”
He nodded as though he understood me completely. “It’s hard to believe it happened at all.” He appeared relaxed and rested, and I commented on that. He smiled broadly and replied, “It’s an illusion. I’m on medication. It’s the only way I could face this catastrophe. When the time is right I’ll confront my grief.”
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