by Julie Hilden
The small elevator seems uncomfortably close as we ride up. I usher her into the loft.
There I ask her, in a tone I hope is casual, ‘When did you meet Ilan?’
‘Oh, nine or ten months ago. At a bar, I forget which one.’
He met with her shortly before he died, I realize. And he broke his own rules: the rule that I would meet the woman first; the rule that she could not know his name, or mine. But these are such small infractions now, interesting only as evidence. They don’t touch on the real questions: why didn’t he cancel? Did he intend for her to come here even after he had died?
‘I thought it was weird the date was so far in the future,’ she continues. ‘But he said he’d be away for the time in between. Didn’t he tell you I might be coming by?’ she presses, uneasy.
‘No. What did he say when you met?’
‘Look, is something wrong? I could go.’
‘He left me. Just after he met with you. I don’t know why he didn’t cancel this.’
‘I’m so sorry. The way he talked about you, I would never have thought. He said I shouldn’t make a mistake and think he didn’t love you. He said he was crazy about you, and this would be a one-time thing. No one would get attached. He told me he was faithful to you except for this – that was exactly what he said, “faithful except for this.” It appealed to me. I didn’t want to break up anyone’s marriage. I just wanted to . . . you know . . .’ She pauses. ‘Did you do this for him all the time?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And he still left you.’ She says it thoughtfully, with consternation.
‘Do you think he might come back?’ she asks. She gets me on that one. I blink back tears.
‘No. I think he’s gone forever.’ For a few moments, we both fall silent. I am lost in thought, fighting to contain my tears.
‘It’s amazing how much we look alike,’ Olivia ventures.
‘All the women looked like me. But you look like me the most.’
‘Do you think it meant anything? Besides the standard twin fantasy?’
‘I don’t know, but it can’t have been good. I would rather not think about it.’
‘Then we don’t have to talk about it,’ she assures me.
She sits down on the black leather couch, sits just where Ilan’s body once lay. The handprint would be right above her head. It is right above her head, under the paint. It’s just that you cannot see it there.
‘Were you attracted to Ilan?’ I ask.
‘Wasn’t everyone? He’s the type of guy who’s not objectively that attractive, but . . .’
I laugh, startling myself, and then cover my mouth, embarrassed. The first laugh since his death, it had to happen someday.
‘Yeah, that’s exactly the type of guy he was. Once he said to me that he wanted, just once, to hear a woman say that objectively he was very attractive, but personally she didn’t find him sexy. I told him that wasn’t ever going to happen.’
‘It hardly mattered to me how he looked,’ she tells me earnestly. ‘I was in this for you. He showed me photographs. I thought you were beautiful, very sexy.’
‘But you also wanted him. You can admit it. Everyone wanted him.’
‘Not me. In fact, I made a deal with him that he couldn’t ever touch me, he could only watch me with you. I don’t know what you guys did with the other women, but I wanted you, not him. And I’m still sitting here wanting you now. If he left you, that’s his mistake.’
There is an awkward silence, but she does not let it last long. ‘Can I kiss you?’ she asks me.
I hesitate as Ilan’s pattern plays out in my head. We are supposed to go to the writing room, where he will join us, and that is impossible now – so shouldn’t I stop this, say no to her?
Instead I nod, and in a second the rules are broken. Suddenly I am being kissed on the couch, and kissed with some passion that has little to do with fantasy. There is an absent way you can be kissed by someone who is thinking of what to do with you next – Ilan’s way with me sometimes. And then there is this other way, the way she is kissing me now, with a sweet, heedless immediacy.
I am not strong enough to resist her, not in this state of mind. I am not even certain – since, in a way, he has sent her to me – that I should.
‘He was crazy to leave you,’ she says, touching my face. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I try to tell myself that.’ If I am not careful, this double entendre – his death as a mere departure – is going to bring me to tears again, and then my tears will be a sort of lie too.
And partly for that reason, so as not to lie anymore, and partly because I feel so alone – because I have been, for so many months, so alone – I take my blouse off and slip her soft pink sweater off, and we move into the writing room, and it begins the way it always does but slower, and far more tenderly. She joins a little gallery of women in my head but at the same time she is different, she is herself.
It is hallucinatory sex, uninhibited because it is out of sheer and pure despair. There is no conscience inside me anymore to feel shame, to hesitate. I have willfully cast off the self that would have felt these things. Like a sleepwalker I move purposefully but in a trance.
She holds me from behind, with her hands first on my breasts, then pressing on the insides of my thighs. The shiny bangles on her wrist scratch me slightly as she presses harder. Then she is opening my labia, to touch them. And it is as if I can hear Ilan saying ‘so soft,’ ‘so wet,’ close to my ear – doing little more than breathing the words, the way he would when he would touch me there.
I shiver again. All I do is shiver now, it seems. The posture is so odd, with her touching me as she holds me from behind. It is as if my body is still being presented, for show, to Ilan. As if she were offering my breasts to him, as they have so often been offered to him by other women; as he has so often taken them with his hands and tongue. I think, You are the ghost now, Ilan. This is the life that goes on without you.
I have so many memories of being here with him and they are so strong, but it’s funny, in my strongest memory I cannot even see him, I only know he is here. In this memory, I am on the bed with one of the women, and he is in the closet, though she doesn’t know it yet. He has yet to open the door to reveal himself. In this memory, he is only watching, as I imagine he watches me now.
If he were in the room – if he is in the room somehow, a ghost, a silent watcher – he would see my body shiver with pleasure and my face, with pleasure, convulse.
He is here as Olivia and I face each other; as she brings her nipples to her own lips and licks them so I can watch her; as afterward, she brings my nipples to her lips and licks them, too.
He is here, I know it, as she moves delicately toward me, holding her breasts forward, to touch her nipples to mine, like circuits connecting; as I shudder with arousal at her slightest touch.
He is here, later, as surfaces are breached, the way he likes them to be: so soft, so wet, so inevitable the penetration. So sweet the second seduction – to give in to her, now, as I once did to him, and yet not to feel unfaithful, because I believe he wanted this, he planned it.
She takes me to orgasm and beyond it, she takes me there several times, and for the first time in so long, the way I come is the willed, concerted way I learned from Ilan long ago, in college and after – not the forced way, achy and compelled, in some respect unpleasant and in some respect alluring, that he later taught me and that is, to me at least, an entirely different pleasure.
This pleasure, the only one I have allowed myself since he died, I accept entirely. I lose myself in it, and for moments I almost forget that he is gone.
‘Do you miss him?’ Olivia asks me afterward, lying next to me in bed.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You’d still take him back?’
‘I don’t have the option.’
‘What if he came back? Then would you?’
‘I guess I would.’ I know I would. ‘But he’s n
ot going to, I’m sure of it.’
‘Why did you let him sleep with other women?’
‘Well, that was the bargain. He told me before we got married it would be this way.’
‘You’re not answering my question, Maya. Why did you agree?’
‘It was the choice I had, so I chose it. Lots of women make choices like that, they just don’t admit it. They know their husbands cheat and they ignore it.’
‘Lots of women don’t make those choices too. You could have had a different kind of relationship.’
‘Not with him I couldn’t.’
‘With someone else then.’
‘There was no one else.’ But I lie: there was the actor, I think there could have been the actor.
‘You deserved someone who wasn’t abusive to you,’ she says carefully.
‘Ilan wasn’t abusive,’ I retort. ‘I chose what I did. I knew what I did.’
‘But you didn’t want to do it.’
‘Not entirely,’ I admit. ‘Not all the time.’
‘And he made you do it. And now he can’t. So there’s a good side to his leaving, isn’t there?’ She strokes my shoulder gently.
‘Yes,’ I agree – defeated, unwilling to fight her logic. But the truth, though I don’t tell it to her, is that I want him. I want him back. I liked it, and I couldn’t leave it, and I would have died of it, if he had not.
* * *
I let Olivia stay in my bed that first night. I realize there is no reason anymore for our rule, Ilan’s and mine, that the woman has to leave. The woman can stay. It is not personal to let her stay, to have her sleep beside me. A dog or cat would have been welcome that night, any breathing thing in the bed beside me, its breath a charm of life.
As I go to sleep, I think of the longer, more truthful explanation I might have given Olivia when she asked why I stayed with Ilan. I would have explained, I think, that the most jaded people often start out as the most vulnerable; there must be a world of soft expectation for it to seal over so hard. That the cold persona that is developed for someone else’s benefit can steal inward, until you mistake it for yourself.
And more than this, that there is something alluring in giving yourself up to love, or even simply to another person; in giving up the control that is tiresomely exercised, insisted upon, in every other part of life.
All of that, I would have told her, and then the kick of that helpless coming. Helpless, hopeless, exquisite. The self in yourself brought back to you in a flash of feeling, of closed-eye seeing. Is it really so hard to understand, so easy to dismiss – my love for Ilan, my inability to forget him?
* * *
In sleep, Olivia and I curl up together. In the morning, as I awaken, the back of her hand is on my mouth, so much softer and smaller than a man’s would be. It feels so small and fragile that I lift it and move it aside, rather than brushing it away or simply turning my head away from her.
While we are still in bed, I tell Olivia that Ilan died. I tell her I lied to her, explaining that I didn’t want to tell a stranger the truth. She is not even fazed. Instead she accepts the news calmly.
‘Maybe it’s fate,’ she says, ‘that I still came to you.’
‘It’s not fate,’ I scoff. But I don’t tell her to leave. Instead we go to brunch, and for the first time in my life, I tell someone a little of how it really was with Ilan. On a wooden table, next to our bagels and fruit, our cappuccino, I lay my arms out for her and she touches, gingerly, my scars.
When we return to the loft, I give myself up to the tears I have so far restrained. Olivia holds me and lets me sob in her arms, until I make myself sick from crying. Afterward she tells me to lie down, brings me a cold cloth, and holds it to my forehead.
Olivia stays with me again that night. The next morning, she asks if I’d like to spend the day with her, and I say yes.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ she tells me, and asks if I will walk to SoHo with her.
‘Of course,’ I tell her. Today I have nothing else to do – I am between interviews.
She leads me to the Prada store, on the corner of Prince and Broadway. It is huge and strange, with a circular interior glass elevator, a central sloping panel of light wood, and huge naked, headless male and female mannequins.
She leads me to a dressing room on the first floor, and asks me to stand there in front of the mirror. It takes a few seconds for me to understand, but then I see it: the mirror is on a time delay. I realize then that it is not really a mirror, exactly, but a screen, and I look for the camera that must be recording us – for the image we see is not the image of us in the present, but in the very recent past, perhaps a few seconds, even a minute, ago. I find it, a black machine staring down at us from a high corner of the dressing room with its single eye.
It is then that Olivia begins to undress me, and I her: I would not have been able to endure the exposure if she had not joined me in it – if she had not led me to it.
Olivia licks my face, my breasts, kisses the back of my neck. Before the mirror, and its camera, she undoes me.
I am naked not just for her, but for the camera, exposing my breasts to it on purpose, giving it seductive glances, just so she can see the images a few seconds later. I worry for a moment that someone else might be watching us too, but then Ilan’s words again come back to me: Let them watch us, they are strangers.
Our sex is urgent, slick, passionate and intimate, exhibitionistic and private at the same time. There are knocks at the dressing-room door, but we ignore them.
Soon we fall into a cycle in which we kiss and touch each other, and then stop and watch the last moments of what we have just done – both as an act of voyeurism, and to delay our pleasure in order to make it all the more acute when it arrives.
In the images, we too seem at moments like mannequins, so similar to each other do we appear. We seem to have been cast from the same mold, almost to share the same skin and eyes, as identical twins would.
There are only small differences between us: Olivia has light stretch marks on her breasts and thighs; they are just discernible. And I, of course, have all of my scratched scars. But these contrasts are tiny, and barely show up in the mirror. Often a second passes before one of the red-haired women in the tape turns her head and shows her face to the camera, so that we can tell ourselves apart.
Olivia puts her hand in my mouth and lets me bite down on it, so that no one will hear my cry, and then I do the same for her.
We dress silently, slip out of the dressing room, and walk like any other shoppers through the store – still not knowing if somewhere a camera recorded it all, or if somewhere, our sex is being played for someone on a screen.
Afterward, we walk out into SoHo disoriented, intoxicated. Olivia suggests we go to a movie, and I realize I have not seen one in a theater since Ilan died. In all that time, I have only rented videos, mostly for the company they provided – rented perhaps a hundred by now, in the months that have passed, the number a measure of how much I have stayed inside, how many days I have been alone.
Traveling to the theater – the Angelika, only a few blocks away – we are caught in the middle of a rainstorm, which is violent but tepid. The rain soaks my long skirt until it is heavy with water, douses Olivia’s suede jacket, darkening it until it changes color. We take refuge in the foyer of the theater, and then we wait in line.
We sit in the calm of the warm movie theater, the audience silent in the darkness, the screen lurid with color. My skirt drips as we watch, clinging to me. I touch Olivia’s hand. I feel so sexual with the wet skirt on my thighs, I want her so much.
The movie is good, excellent in fact, but I am agitated.
‘Let’s go,’ I whisper to her, and she nods, I can tell she feels the same. What happened before the time-delayed mirror happened so recently, but still it was not enough.
Heads turn to watch us as we exit – two redheads who might be sisters but who touch each other as if they were lovers, walking urgently
up the aisle, leaving a movie everyone knows is good. Since it is too dark for me to be recognized, the stares only amuse me as we run their gauntlet.
Outside it is still raining, and we slip into a cab and dash into the loft, waiting impatiently as the elevator rises, following our own momentum into bed.
Our wet clothes drip heavily on chairs. The wind drives the rain against the closed, curtained windows. In the dark, Olivia’s red hair appears almost black.
I begin by caressing the deep scoops of space under her arms, with their gray shadows even after she shaves. I touch the lush, fleshy breasts that slip slightly to the side in crescents as she lies there supine. And I pass my fingers over the two creases that slice her lovely neck horizontally, like quick, healed cuts in the skin – cuts inflicted on her only by time, by its gentler and slower blade.
Then I am down between her legs, my hands under her hips to tilt them, my fingers pressing deeply into the muscles in her ass – hard muscles that she flexes when she is aroused. I want her almost as much as I once wanted him. Yet for now at least, I love her less. For once, I am the one who takes advantage.
Olivia moves around so she can lick me too. We tongue each other delicately, reveling in each small flinch. Each of us copies what the other is doing and I imagine, when this happens, that our bodies really are exactly the same.
I shift my hips away from Olivia and slide toward the foot of the bed, until she is no longer touching me; I touch her and that is all. I want her to concentrate solely on her own pleasure; I want her to watch my red hair spread out over the bed below her as I touch her and lick her between her legs.
It makes me happy to watch her lose herself this way. I will not reveal myself today, but she will reveal herself to me, I will insist on it.
I watch her face tip back as she forgets I am looking at her. I watch her stop caring how long it is taking for her to come. I watch, and it is erotic for me to watch, as she becomes consummately selfish for a time: there is only this one thing in the world and she will have it.
I see in her an inexorable wanting, strong and desperate. I watch her mouth as it opens and stays open, as it goes slack. I listen to her small murmurs of pleasure. I watch the way she is unprotected, unashamed.