by Vina Jackson
The phone rang. The first time it had in days. I picked up the nearest receiver. Aurelia wanted to see me. In her suite. I hadn’t set eyes on her since the desert.
I slipped on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and made my way down the corridor. I was curious to see Aurelia in a different environment.
The door to her apartment was already open and I ventured in.
To my surprise, there were toys in all colours, shapes and sizes littered across the parquet floor all the way to the living room. What appeared to be Lego pieces, dolls, a legless Wonderwoman figure, furry animals, wooden construction blocks, tiny pink handbags and a miniature plastic cutlery set.
‘Come on through,’ Aurelia called out to me and I followed the trail of toys.
She was lounging on a deep-cushioned orange angled five-seater sofa by a vast set of bay windows overlooking the Bay. At a nearby desk, Andrei was typing at a computer. On the floor facing Aurelia was a small chubby-faced little girl, with a mass of blonde curls and deep brown eyes. Two years old or thereabouts, I reckoned. The child looked up at me, watched me approach and smiled broadly, then returned to the toys she was playing with.
‘This is Alice,’ Aurelia said.
I must have looked puzzled.
‘Our daughter,’ she continued.
It was the last thing I’d have expected. The little girl wore a pair of skinny jeans and a superhero T-shirt and was bare-foot. Aurelia’s outfit mirrored hers, although her top advertised an oyster bar in New Orleans. Back at his desk, Andrei was similarly casual as he typed away and ignored us.
I was offered a coffee.
I had nothing against children, but felt uncomfortable around them. While we sipped and made small talk, little Alice drank apple juice from a blue plastic cup.
Finally, a Network employee whose face looked vaguely familiar from my sojourn in the desert walked in and took the child away, after Aurelia offered Alice the choice of visiting two nearby playgrounds. Andrei excused himself shortly after, pretexting some errand and we were left alone.
‘She is very pretty. Looks a lot like you,’ I told Aurelia.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘She’s the future, my future.’
I nodded, still coming to terms with the revelation she had a child.
‘Will she …?’
‘Yes, one day, she will become the Ball’s new Mistress. But there is no rush. Lots of time to enjoy her childhood. I owe her that.’ Her face darkened as the thought of the heavy burden the child’s inheritance carried reminded itself to her and she recalled the roundabout way she had come to assume the position.*
‘Anyway,’ she composed herself again, ‘let’s talk about you, shall we? And what your plans for the future might be. It’s come to my notice that you haven’t played the violin since the night of the Ball. Is everything OK?’ she asked.
It was true. Rarely had I spent so much time without practising, rehearsing, playing. Only Dominik’s death had caused a longer defection. It all now somehow felt pointless. As if on that night in the desert I had reached a pinnacle, where the music had entered me, become part of me forever and lost its magic in the process. For a brief second I had merged into the music, and it seemed as if there was nowhere else to go now, nothing that could match the experience. Anything would be repetition, imitation, treading unfertile ground.
I tried to explain.
Aurelia listened to me, a thin veil of empathy drawn across her face.
‘I think I understand,’ she said.
I had thought of telling her that watching her at the Ball’s climax had raised a torrent of questions in my mind. That witnessing her in all her glory, so luminous, inhabiting her sexuality so openly had made me realise how minor my own epiphanies were and how insignificant my own adventures among the tides of lust and sex had been. So ordinary. But I knew she already had an inkling of this, a second sense that allowed her to weigh the thoughts of others, as if the tattoos that appeared at will across her pale skin gifted her with extra powers of perception.
Which made the revelation that she was also the mother of a child even more overpowering. Goddess, mother, magician, sorceress, confessor. She felt like all that and more.
She asked me about Antony. And I had no shame telling her about the sex we had, the closeness and attraction, the madness we sometimes achieved, the kinks that made it possible, the despair that we clung on to like a raft which kept it alive and burning against all odds. Our imperfections, our ghosts.
‘He arrives later today,’ Aurelia told me. ‘You’ll find his message when you return to your suite. He plans to be here for a week.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said. I was in bad need of a fuck. But the news of his return didn’t move me as much as it should have. Because I had come to realise that Antony, men, even Dominik, music were still not enough. I wanted more out of life than just living and fucking and playing and challenging myself by breaking invisible barriers. But what?
‘I don’t wish to go back to my old life,’ I said to Aurelia. ‘No more concerts. No more emptiness.’
‘Stay with us, then,’ she asked.
‘Here?’
‘Not necessarily in Seattle, although you could base yourself here should you wish. But we own places all over. Remain with the Ball. Full-time. Travel with it. Gift it your soul, Summer, and it will give you so much more in return. You are a creature, a delightful one, of emotions. They’re like a vibration skimming across your skin, an aura that floats above you. I can see it. As have others too who’ve conquered the blindness.’
‘I …’
‘Don’t say anything quite yet. Take your time. Spend some time with Antony before you decide …’
It would be a different life, I knew. And the moment Aurelia made the offer, I knew she had me hooked and I would agree. Tomorrow. Next week.
And she knew it too.
‘Where are the next Balls taking place?’ I asked her.
‘We have two at advanced stages of preparation,’ Aurelia said. ‘One in the heart of the rainforest, near the Amazon river. So many wonderful possibilities. And then, to follow, we envisage another in the far north of Iceland, a mostly uninhabited ice plain which we have recently discovered. We’re studying the possibilities. Actually, Antony is bringing along some sketches and ideas with him. We’ve put him on retainer.’
‘What would my own role be?’
‘You’d create it, make it what you will. Your imagination the limit. There’d be no need for a title. Everything to do with the Ball is fluid, ever-changing. But I know you’d fit in and we’d love you to become one of ours.’
‘It’s appealing, I must confess,’ I admitted.
‘Giselle, Madame Denoux, could initially mentor you, if you agreed.’
What would I be leaving behind? London and a lonely flat. A musical career that was already going around in circles. My demons, hopefully?
I left Aurelia, Andrei and Alice’s apartment with a lightness in my step at the prospect of this new life I was being offered. Another chance to get it right, maybe.
Antony announced his arrival with just a brief tap on my bedroom door, though he waited for me to call out my approval before he walked in. Even though it had just been a few weeks, I was strangely nervous about the prospect of seeing him and had spent the last hour or so showering, getting dressed into a pyjama set of short cotton pants and matching chemise, white patterned with a deep blue, small floral print, that I hoped was sexy without looking like I was trying too hard and had spent the whole time we’d been apart thinking about him. I left my hair out and dabbed on just enough make-up to cover the dark circles under my eyes, sprayed on a light spritz of perfume and spent at least 20 minutes lying on the bed with a magazine that I didn’t look at once and rearranging my position a dozen times to affect an attractive nonchalance.
But when I heard t
he latch turn, I forgot all of that, and leapt up off the bed to greet him by the door.
‘Hi,’ he said, dropping his bag on the floor and pulling me into his arms.
We kissed. The softness of his mouth on mine made me greedy to feel his tongue on other parts of me and I moved my hands from their position, slipped down the back of his jeans where I was grabbing his arse, to his belt buckle which I began undoing, all without interrupting the pressure of my lips against his.
He pulled back and held me slightly away from him with his hands wrapped around my bicep muscles, at arm’s length.
‘I just need a shower,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be right back.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee, a drink?’
‘Glass of water would be great,’ he replied, and I pointed out the bathroom. He unzipped his bag, rummaged for his toiletry kit and went off to wash away the journey.
I poured two glasses of sparkling mineral water. Even ventured out of the room to fetch some ice from the machine down the hall.
The water was still running when I returned.
I sat on the bed and sipped from the tumbler, wincing at the cold, and resenting the fact that I now wanted a gin and tonic but it felt mean to pour myself one, since I had guessed, by default, that Antony had given up drinking and to drink without him seemed cruel, but to tempt him into drinking seemed crueller.
His arrival now felt like an anticlimax, and I was frustrated, though also angry at myself for being vexed. In his position, I probably would have wanted a shower too.
No, I wouldn’t, I thought. I’d have wanted to fuck right then and there, and the ardours of long distance travel be damned. I wanted him to want me enough that his arousal outweighed his immediate discomfort. And I couldn’t have cared less about any slight hint of sweat he might have picked up by wearing the same clothes for the duration of a lengthy flight.
My good mood swiftly returned when he walked out of the bathroom trailing the remnants of a steam cloud, wearing just a towel around his familiar hard-as-washboard stomach and running a hand through his half wet, dark blond hair.
He smelled pleasingly of lightly scented soap, and I chastised myself for being unreasonable.
Then even those thoughts were obliterated as he fell to his knees in front of me, hooked a finger around each side of the waistband of my cotton shorts, pulled them to the floor, parted my legs and began to lick my pussy, without further ado.
‘That was incredible,’ I told him afterwards, as we lay on our backs alongside one another, getting our breath back. He’d made me come twice with his tongue, and we’d fucked in between. I was utterly relaxed.
‘Yes, it was,’ he replied, and stretched his arm out into the space that unofficially made up my side of the bed, his silent invitation for me to curl up into the crook of his underarm, my own arm hooked over his chest and one of my thighs folded at a right angle over his legs, our regular post-sex position.
‘I missed you,’ I told him. It was true. I had missed him. The connection of my past work and his, and the way that being near him, engrossed with his notes and plans for his current or next production, had always encouraged me to pick up my violin and bow when I might otherwise have just lazed a day away. I probably would never have begun creating my own music without Antony’s involvement in my life, and that was a skill that now seemed so much a part of me I couldn’t imagine a time when riding the free flow of a melody instead of reading a sheet of music and blindly obeying the composer’s direction didn’t come naturally. Although now I no longer felt the need to actually play the instrument as the music lived inside my head. Constantly.
And I’d missed the feeling of his body against mine. Watching him dress and undress, the taut line of his muscles moving under his skin as he slipped into a pair of shorts, quite unaware of the feast my eyes were making as he covered himself up. The sex was good. It was great. Hard and physical and regular. It was the kind of plain good fucking that I loved. And if we lacked that tiny, extra particle, the D/S connection that I had with Dominik, well, that was easy for me to overlook, almost all of the time.
But not quite all of the time.
I still longed for more. Maybe that was just in my nature.
The rest of the week, predictably, flew by as if it were just a day. When we weren’t having sex, and neither I nor Antony was engaged in making plans with Aurelia or Giselle, we spent the time eating in restaurants across Seattle, or sipping cups of coffee on the small balcony attached to my room that overlooked the city, chatting about life in London or ruminating together on what other secrets the Ball might hold that we were not yet privy to.
Alissa, it turned out, was bunking in with Lauralynn and Viggo.
‘Dating them?’ I asked Antony.
‘Well, that might be too strong a term. Fucking them, for sure. I think your friend Lauralynn is enjoying teaching Alissa to, ah, step into her more precocious self,’ he said.
‘Poor Viggo,’ I remarked, imagining the torture that they were probably subjecting him to.
‘Oh, I’m quite sure that he’s enjoying himself,’ Antony replied.
When I kissed him goodbye at the airport, I didn’t want him to leave.
‘I’ll be back, Summer, I promise,’ he said to me, untangling my arms from around his chest as the tannoy announced that the check-in for his flight to London was about to close.
I knew I could still find plenty of things to keep me busy here in Seattle, but that didn’t stop my feet feeling like they were made of lead when I turned and walked out of the airport, nor did it hold the feelings of emptiness at bay as I travelled back to the suite.
When I arrived back in my room, I masturbated, and in my fantasies Antony’s body loomed over mine. My skin recalled the texture of his touch, my lips the press of his mouth, my cunt the flick of his tongue, until I came.
But the next time that I would try to orchestrate my own pleasure my vision of him was blurred, and he merged in and out of focus along with the faces of a dozen other men who were burned into the fabric of my imagination.
Yesterday I had been in New York, seeking out fabrics for a future Ball in the back room of a top floor dim sum emporium that doubled as a warehouse just off Chinatown. I had been led there blindfolded and, initially, only allowed to touch the materials, infusing myself with the silky softness of the folds and heavy rolls of fabric and guessing at the intricate patterns they concealed, practising my second sense, fine-tuning my ability to perceive beauty in new places. Once I had operated an initial sort, I was then finally granted full vision and marvelled at the sheer details and sensuality of the materials I had pre-selected and began to match them to the themes, colours and moods I had been asked to address. This was a new art for me altogether, but I was confident my intuition would serve me well. Beauty was not exclusive to music and could be found, I now knew, in so many avenues of the life sensual.
I’d taken a cab to La Guardia Airport and then a flight to New Orleans, where I would now be based for the foreseeable future. Madame Denoux was returning to her San Francisco retirement and I had been offered to run her establishment there and had jumped at the opportunity. My memories of the night I had spent there would remain with me forever, and this would be a way to establish a bridge between my past and future, in the heady, humid atmosphere of the Crescent City, a city that appeared to be unchanging, unaffected by the arrows of time. Timeless streets, sounds and smells that now marked me inside better than any tattoo or photograph.
It was already dark when I arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport and there was a long line for taxis. I only had carry-on baggage as all my belongings had been forwarded from Seattle some days earlier. It felt odd not to have a car waiting with the Network’s traditional grey-uniformed chauffeur in attendance, as if I had been downgraded from star material and was now just another cog in the Network’s m
achine, one of many Ball acolytes scattered across the wide world.
‘Are you Summer Zahova?’ a strongly Italian-accented voice standing behind me in the queue asked.
I turned round.
A tall urchin-faced young woman with a dazzling smile was staring at me. Her hair was cropped short, dark as ebony, gamine-like. Two heavy cases trailed behind her. ‘I saw you playing in Rome a few years ago,’ she said. ‘You were wonderful.’ She pronounced W as a V as in Vonderful. I remembered that concert, the music I played, the dress I wore, the stranger I met at the hotel bar later that night and slept with. But I couldn’t recall his name.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I was.’
‘You were my idol,’ the young girl said.
‘I’m flattered.’
She was from Pescara in Italy, and a dancer, she informed me.
‘Your music inspired me,’ she said. ‘I often dance to the same pieces. What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I’ve come to live here,’ I said. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I had, in all probability, forsaken music.
A cab arrived. Her destination was also the French Quarter, so we agreed to share. She was staying in a small bed and breakfast off Burgundy Street where, she informed me, the old slave quarters had been renovated and turned into small bungalows. She sounded excited by the fact.
The taxi rushed down Veterans Boulevard towards the bright lights of the city ahead. On our right, a vast cemetery and then the taller buildings of Tulane University.
Her name was Marirosa. She had a six weeks engagement as a lounge dancer at the bar of the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street. It was her first time outside Europe and she was thrilled to bits by the opportunity. I knew the hotel, a highly respectable if fussy establishment with Grande Epoque pretensions. At least the job sounded respectable. I envied her enthusiasm.
As the taxi dropped her off, I gave her my new business card, suggesting we have a coffee together soon. She agreed.