by Krissy Kneen
True love waits.
Holly forced herself to remove her fingers from the slippery lips of her vulva. Her abstinence ring was slick and bright. She was filled up with the torturous dripping of her own desire, ineluctable. The honey of her longing was leaking from her. Pain, but pleasure with it. She would wait. Jack was everything she ever wanted. Jack was handsome, patient, kind. She turned over, pressed her head into her pillow and groaned in frustration. The currawong hopped closer to her window, peered inside and watched her frantic panting grow calmer as she plummeted into sleep. He tipped his head and peered at her with one golden eye as the sun rose up over Clayfield and illuminated the perfect peach of Holly’s naked arse.
The House of the Sleeping Beauties
by YASUNARI KAWABATA
Holly woke to flowers. She was loved; the flowers proved this to her.
A dozen long-stemmed roses, deep crimson, and a long, white box like a coffin for a baby. The flowers inside were so perfect she was afraid to touch them. She put the little flower-coffin down on the kitchen table and lowered her head into it. No smell at all, and the flowers so perfect that they might be made of wax. She touched a downy petal, succulent and soft as velvet, and snatched her hand back quickly in case the petal should bruise under the light press of her fingers.
The card said Happy Valentine’s Day.
Her mother emerged, damp from the shower, the crisp white robe spotted at the shoulder with drops from her hair. Her father was not far behind her, swooping in from the corridor like a wild bird, his hands alighting on his wife, fingers like claws, his other hand gripping her thin waist. The hungry beak of a mouth biting into her neck.
Her mother laughed, then pulled away from him, nodding towards Holly with her damp head. Holly was being spared any hint of passion, for which she was relieved. She picked the roses roughly from their coffin and wrestled them into a vase. A single petal fell from one of the perfect flower heads and landed prosaically in the sink.
‘They’re beautiful.’ Her mother reached out but couldn’t bring herself to touch them. ‘You and Jack doing anything for Valentine’s Day?’
‘Dinner,’ Holly said. ‘He’s taking me somewhere special, a surprise.’
‘He’s so sweet,’ her mother said, tipping her head to one side as if she were admiring a puppy or a small child. ‘Your father and I are so happy for you.’
‘Don’t wait up for us.’ Her father winked playfully at her mother. ‘I have a feeling we might stay out late.’
She didn’t want to imagine the passion her parents still shared but it was impossible not to. They were always touching, holding hands, little kisses exchanged furtively in the corridor, but if they noticed her watching they would spring apart as if they had been involved in some illegal activity. When she married Jack she would be treated to the same simmering life of carnality. Sooner or later it would be hers. She hoped it would be sooner.
‘You’re lucky to have found Mr Right so young,’ her mother said, stroking one of the rose leaves between her fingers.
Holly nodded. Everyone who saw them together knew that this was true. It would be hard, being single on Valentine’s Day. The streets were awash with romance. Flowers, chocolates, little packages tied up with red ribbon clutched in the sweaty palms of teenage boys. Couples kissing in cafés, on park benches, fingers intertwined. Holly was familiar with the state of being in love, she liked its sweetness. There was a certain innocence about Valentine’s Day, a playground kind of fondness relating to the heart but not the body.
She walked through a city in love and knew that without Jack she would feel an outcast.
Bookshops displayed their bestselling romance titles in the window, chocolate shops placed their delights in heart-shaped boxes, florists carried only red flowers, roses, carnations, tulips, the colour of love.
It was the flash of electric blue that caught her attention. The shop was tiny but the peephole of a window was decked out for Valentine’s Day in blue. Not red for love or pink for girlish blushes. Bright, stabbing blue. Holly felt a little uneasy. This was a shop filled with the forbidden accessories of desire—a sequined bra, the flash of a blue g-string, little cups with tassels, all of them the secret colour of her own excitement. Holly leaned closer to the window. It was impossible to tell what the little tasselled circles might be used for but whatever it was, it had the whiff of sex about it.
A curtain was suddenly flung open. Holly jumped back, startled as the tiny window became a stage. On it, a woman in a blue robe leaned forward and pushed aside the tassels along with the rest of the window display. She was extraordinary, her eyes dramatically made up with pale blue lashes curling, her neck unnaturally long, the blue-black hair piled high on top of a fine-boned face. Peacock feathers dangled in the long drop from her ears to the straight plane of her shoulders, and when she turned back to face the window, a glittering flash of blue peeked out from the slight gape of the indigo robe.
Holly was transfixed by the swell of cleavage, the long stockinged leg, the blue velvet shoes with their impossible heels. She reached up and secured a huge fan of peacock feathers on the curling tumble of dark hair.
Holly stepped to one side as a shop assistant struggled out with a large A-frame sign. She settled it on the footpath, smiled politely at Holly and disappeared back into the shop.
Honey Birdette, read the sign, Valentine’s Burlesque with Madame Glimmer. 1pm
Holly checked her watch. It was five minutes to one. Burlesque was something to do with stripping, wasn’t it? She felt nervous. She found herself turning her abstinence ring distractedly on her finger. Other passers-by had stopped to watch, a group of Asian schoolgirls hiding their excited grins behind their hands, a middle-aged woman in a heavy cotton skirt, three women who might be burlesque dancers themselves, tall and gorgeously adorned with a rattle of glittering bracelets and diamantes in their hair, an old man with a stick and a slight hunch. Surely if an old man could watch the show then it wouldn’t be a problem for Holly to take a peek.
A brassy blare, a pause, another brazen blast of horns shouted out from a portable stereo. The dancer leaned back onto a tall pillar that looked like a structural support but was transformed, with her elegant body stretched against it, into the entry to a temple. The practical suddenly become decorative, a simple shop window transformed into a magical diorama, the ordinary made extraordinary. The woman moved her hips. A deep throbbing rhythm set up by one foot tapping, the movement displaced the blue robe and Holly was treated to a glimpse of the sequined gown beneath. Her hips shimmered, a bright blue waterfall of tassels swaying to the gentle rocking of her frame. Her body twitched out of the robe, one rhythmic hip-bounce at a time, until her whole body was finally, glitteringly, exposed. Holly heard the old man beside her draw in his breath. The dancer began a gentle shimmy of the shoulders that slipped the robe like a silky skin to show the heavy sequined train starting at the very base of her spine and plunging, full as a waterfall, to the floor.
She danced. Holly was transfixed. The woman’s hips were fluid. It seemed impossible that she could sway so easily on such heels. Her spine became a snake. Holly could see every nub of it flexing and curving with the movement of her thighs, responding to each whim of her hips. In perfect timing with the music’s crescendo she swung around to
face the growing crowd, and stilled. Her gloves were long, fastened with a zip along their length. The music continued to sway but the dancer remained motionless. Only her fingers moved as they pulled the long zip, tooth by tooth, down to the palm of her hand. She peeled the glove from her flesh and it was almost pornographic, that sudden white expanse of wrist, a sexual gesture. The soft inside of her forearm, just as shocking as if she had lifted a breast out of her sequined dress and held it up on her palm. When the fingers slipped out of their encasement she stretched and flexed them and the gesture was a provocation. Holly imagined the perfectly manicured blue nails of those long, thin fingers could caress or cut you, and that the dancer would be just as happy either way.
The second glove came off. The dancer let it drop to the floor, swept her shoe in a graceful glittering arc and both the gloves were behind her and out of sight. She leaned forward then and Holly could see the lovely curve of her hanging breasts, suspended in the precarious embrace of her neckline. It was like watching someone swimming underwater, her motion slow and contained as if the air itself could hold her in suspension. Indeed it seemed as if the air was thickened by the dancing. Holly found she was having trouble with her breath. She concentrated on the rise and fall of her chest as the dance continued. Then the dancer turned her back towards the audience once more and lifted her arms and, as if by magic, her thin shoulder straps snapped open and the dress plummeted. The audience saw only the elegant curve of the dancer’s back, the arms raised, the hint of one breast just visible and the pleasant swell of it reflected in the shape of her buttocks. There was nothing but the thin blue thread of a g-string left to outline the shape of her back and separating the cheeks of her toned arse. The music blared a final chord and the dancer spun around.
The young girl beside Holly gasped and Holly flinched, expecting to see the woman in all her glorious nakedness. But although the breasts were heavy and taut and thrust in their direction, the nipples were completely covered by the little sequined circles with tassels that Holly had seen in the window earlier. The dancer shimmied one last time, the breasts gyrated, making delightful heavy circles on her skinny chest, and the tassels followed. Just a small delay but they came spinning after the heavy flesh, hypnotising the audience with their slow, certain rhythm. Holly found herself leaning forward, gazing at the movement of the sparkling circles. She wanted to reach out and touch them through the glass. They would be soft swishes on the palm of her hand, like a horse shaking its mane.
The window snapped suddenly to blackness, the light extinguished. Holly regained her balance. The group of schoolgirls giggled and skipped quickly into the shop, perhaps to catch the dancer before she put her clothes back on or to look at the nipple tassels, which were obviously for sale. The rest of the audience drifted off, released from the dancer’s spell, slightly dazed as they ambled back towards their routine lives.
Holly caught her breath. What would Jack make of such a display? She thought back to the way she’d kissed him as she stumbled out of his car last night. She remembered his face, appalled by her wantonness. She hesitated. She could still see the little glittering circles made by the spinning tassels over the dancer’s breasts. Her credit card was linked to her parents’ account; this is how it was for all of them, the privileged angels still nursing at the maternal teat. All she had to do was walk into the shop and those wondrous minuscule garments would be hers. She watched as a hand appeared in the window, settling the little blue sequined tassels on the glass shelf there. Pasties, $120, the sign said. It was nothing. Her parents spent that much on a Sunday breakfast. She stepped away from the window.
True love waits: it was Valentine’s Day, Jack had planned something special and she need only wait to see what it was. There was something predatory about the performance she had just witnessed, she thought as she continued down the street. The fog of desire had clouded her vision. The dancing was lewd and somehow almost…masculine. The dancer was physically splendid, but wasn’t she overly muscled? She stared directly at her audience, she held their gaze as a man would do. There was nothing sweet or coy about her striptease. By the time Holly had reached the intersection of Queen Street and Edward she knew that she had been temporarily seduced. Striding through the mall, she saw all the sweet, childish hearts, the pink and red roses in the shop windows, the schoolchildren still in uniform holding hands. She was glad she had resisted the purchase. If she had bought the tassels she would surely have worn them to her date that evening and what would Jack have thought of her if he happened to graze her breasts with the palm of his hand?
Jack smelled of rum, maybe scotch. Holly rarely drank spirits and she was guessing at the dark sweetness on his breath. Not just his breath; the smell seemed to rise from his skin as she bent to sniff at his face. Sweet like molasses.
He lay with his body turned towards her, his cheeks unshaven, the edge of his beard, usually neatly trimmed, creeping out to the rest of his face. His shoulder was bare where the sheet rested on it. She could see the skin above, the honey of his tan, the clearly defined muscles. She had admired his shoulders often when they swam but essentially his body was a mystery. To be admired only from a distance as he dragged himself, wet as a fish, out of the salty chlorine of the pool.
She saw now that his neck held secret hollows, a certain tension of the muscles with the young skin stretched smooth across them, even now in this deep sleep. She noticed a pulse in the hollow behind the raised muscle; he was alive then. He had not drunk himself to death, only into unconsciousness.
She sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets were cool against the palms of her hands as she smoothed them out at her side. There was a slight breeze from the window. She could hear Jack’s mother washing the dishes. Marilyn had smiled at Holly so gently when she opened the door.
‘Oh darling,’ she had said with that sad smile touching her pretty dark eyes. ‘He was going to take you out for Valentine’s Day, wasn’t he?’
Holly had nodded. She was wearing her best dress, deep blue. Her bra was pale blue lace, not that he would ever see it, but it made her feel good to wear her best underwear on a date. Her stockings had equally lacy tops snapped into a suspender belt. She had decided not to wear any underpants. Perhaps his hand would graze her hip and he would wonder. Even if he kept his usual, respectful distance it made her feel bold to know she was completely bare—down there.
‘Sweetheart, he came home in a terrible state. You young people and your parties. You can go up and see him if you like, but he only just got home a few hours ago. He was rather a long way under the weather, I’m afraid. I couldn’t even rouse him for coffee. I’m sorry dear.’
Holly had climbed the stairs, her dress trailing, catching on the balustrade. He had dropped her home. She was tipsy. He was still sober enough to drive. What had happened after she left him? Had he gone back to the party? Had he gone on to a bar? Arriving home so late in the afternoon?
She opened the door and the smell was distinctly masculine: the alcohol, his feral breath, his skin. She had entered as if tiptoeing into the den of some wild animal, only to find him sleeping so deeply that he might have been dead, bled out in the quiet of his lair.
She reached out to touch his shoulder, pressed her palm against the muscles of his arm. Solid, real, her Jack, only transformed through sleep into someone vulnerable.
She touched the skin above his lip, felt the gentle
outward breath drift across her finger, the prickle irritation of the hair there brushing her skin. She checked behind her to make sure the door was securely closed. She bent her head towards his face, noticing how her hands had begun to tremble, and placed her lips where her finger had been, hovering just above his. When he breathed out again she opened her mouth and took his breath into her, holding it inside her till her temples throbbed. Then she exhaled, aiming her breath at his lips, seeing his chest fill with her, lifting the sheet slightly, spilling that earthy smell of his skin out into the evening.
Holly slipped her shoes off and lay down beside him, her head on the cold cotton of the spare pillow. He shifted slightly, pulling his hand towards his chest, the sheet shifting with it, off his shoulder, exposing the smooth expanse of his chest, the small pink whorl of his nipple, the little hairs surrounding it.
She wondered if he was wearing jeans or just underpants under the sheet, or, like her, nothing at all. It would be a simple thing to lift the sheet just an inch and see. Now the thought was in her head it seemed impossible to forget how easy it would be. Terribly wrong, of course, but he wouldn’t know. No one would be the wiser. She had a sudden urge to pull the sheet away and cup the fruit he had hidden there, bury her head in that salty sweet man-smell, to taste it. Perhaps even like this, with the sleep of the dead on him, she could arouse him with her fumbling explorations.