by Ali Eteraz
“That’s my point,” he persisted. “You did it without even thinking.”
“It’s just a decoration, George,” I said. “And besides, if I was thinking of anything, it was of my late mother.”
He became apologetic, returning to the inquisitive and empathetic person he had been earlier, when he had been kneading my shoulder. I felt his firm hands on my back again, this time a little lower than before. “Hey, cheers,” he said, offering his glass. “To matriarchs.”
He appeared genuine. There was a glimmer of gentle warmth in his eyes. I nodded with a smile and clinked, leading him away from the bookshelf. We briefly discussed what we most missed about our mothers and grandmothers. His mother had left him when he was a teenager and his grandmother had died during the bombing in Dresden. He said she deserved it; she had been an avid Nazi.
As the night went on, people became increasingly drunk, and the frostiness outside kept the party going. In her drunken state, Danielle declared half the firm to be anti-Semitic and revealed that her love of Jews began as a result of a tryst with Woody Allen. We had a good time cross-examining her and revealing the story to be hokum.
As for George, once he was properly drunk, he sidled up to Marie-Anne and asked her probing questions about where she had grown up and what she did for work. She managed to keep him at half an arm’s length, and yet he was wound up in her like a comb in her hair.
I moved aside with Candace Cooper. When I put my hand on her waist she downed the wine like a shot. Dabbing her mouth with the back of her wrist she tried to lock eyes with me. But she separated her mouth from the skin too quickly and there was a little runoff of wine down her arm, into her sleeve. She was about to say something when Dinesh appeared and took her away by the arm. I bubbled in anger at the ease with which she was swept away. She always had a tendency to let people strong-arm her.
Marie-Anne saw me standing alone and came over to hold my hand, encouraging me to take in the scene, telling me of a job well done, running her middle finger down the center of my palm to indicate her approval. Whenever we organized a party and it went well, she tended to want to play. It had something to do with having expressed Southern hospitality perfectly, the satisfaction of having done something that would have made her mother happy. I asked her about the bleeding. She said that the success of the party had improved her mood and things were under control.
My eyes stayed on George Gabriel. He walked to Candace and pulled her out of the conversation with Dinesh and led her toward the window. I willed for her to resist him but she did not.
I turned to Marie-Anne and smiled, doing whatever I could to not look at the bookshelf looming behind her. Every time my eyes went toward the top shelf, I redirected my gaze to a picture of Marie-Anne playing volleyball in college. Her youthful beauty was the only thing in the room that could prevent me from spinning into the hole that George Gabriel had opened.
* * *
Once the guests were gone, Marie-Anne waited for me to get into bed and then spooned me from behind, reaching around and taking my cock in her hand. Our feet were at the same level; her head was higher than mine. She threw one wide thigh over my hip and planted kisses on the top of my skull. This was the position in which most of our play was inaugurated.
“How tall do you think that girl Candace is?” she whispered.
“She can’t be more than five feet tall,” I replied, pushing my buttocks into her groin. Marie-Anne had often told me I had a “model ass.” Once, during the early days of her weight gain, she even made me wear a pair of her boy-shorts because she said my ass looked better in them than hers.
“Five feet? She might even be shorter than that,” she said.
“She’s skinny, isn’t she?”
Marie-Anne bit into my neck. “Skinnier than any black girl I’ve seen.”
“She’s actually a mix.”
Marie-Anne bit again. “Crafted like a ballerina. An ice skater.”
“I think she used to be a gymnast. Now she wants to be an actress.”
“Tell me where I run into her.”
I knew where she wanted to go and cleared my throat to take her there. But I was still caught up in my encounter with George. I straightened up a little, stiffened my back, and turned to try to talk about the incident at the bookshelf; but Marie-Anne didn’t let me start. She was in that tipsy place. She put a finger on my lip and put her mouth on mine. My protestation became passion. I kissed for a while and pulled my mouth free to give her the bedtime story she wanted.
In it Marie-Anne was a vampire queen, the mistress of a sector of Philadelphia, assigned by the vampire high command to convert pretty little girls to darkness. “You see Candace at the gym,” I said. “You are doing the elliptical. She’s in the dance area. Glass separates you. She is dressed in stockings and a leotard. Her hair is up in a bun. Her skinny neck is exposed.”
“Her clavicle is thin. Breakable.” Marie-Anne started sucking on my neck. Then she rolled back and lifted her leg for a moment so I could turn around and face her. She gave me a little kiss and with both of her hands on the top of my head pushed me down until my mouth was latched onto her breasts. She took a pillow and put it between her legs. I suckled and periodically glanced up at her.
“You are sweaty and hot after your workout. You go into the dance studio to stare at her. She is stretching with her leg up on the bar. Suddenly she loses her balance and you rush forward to grasp her. You hold her, you keep her upright. You inhale her scent. She is overwhelmed by your scent.”
“My tits . . .”
“Your big tits press against her back. You hold her small body in your arms. You tell her she is safe.”
“I tell her she is tiny.”
“Yes,” I licked her nipple, “you tell her she’s tiny. A toy.”
“She’s a doll.”
I licked harder. “You know what to do with dolls.”
Marie-Anne nodded and increased her pace. “I know what to do with dolls. They are to be played with.”
“Do you play with her?”
“I take her home. I play with her. All the people see me leave with her. All the men. All the men were staring at her. All the black men and all the white men. They all want her. All the big swinging dicks. But I take her.”
“Do you play with your doll in your bed?”
Marie-Anne’s thighs squeezed harder on the pillow and she rocked faster. “I throw my leg over her like I throw my leg over you and suck on her tongue.”
“What else do you suck on?”
“I suck on her neck,” she growled. “I suck on her neck. I bite into her neck. She is afraid. She is afraid I will bite into her jugular. I will drink her blood.”
“Are you converting her?”
“I am converting her. I’m showing her I’m her boss. I’m showing her she can’t show herself off to anyone but me.”
“And she will know you are her—”
“Mistress!” Marie-Anne screamed her trigger word. Whenever she uttered it I knew my job was to start licking her nipple even harder, to clamp onto her erogenous point with puckered lips and teasing tongue and not let up until she climaxed. The rest of the Candace story wouldn’t take place with words. It would take place inside Marie-Anne’s mind. Her eyes closed. Her mouth opened. She was in that imaginary bed with Candace, where Marie-Anne was the owner, where Marie-Anne was the empress. I licked. My mouth grew tired, still I licked. My tongue dried up, still I licked. My jaw hurt, still I licked. It wouldn’t be long now. Within her vision Marie-Anne would soon reach her desired apogee. The moment when her authority over Candace would be so immense that it would make her explode. I just had to keep licking, to do nothing surprising, to let her have a perfect mental encounter. Ballerinas. And dolls. And sluts. College girls who wore yoga pants with dirty words written across the backside. And interns in six-inch heels. And masseuses with tight little bodies. And innocent virgins brought into the realm of vampirism. Marie-Anne consumed them all, in this, o
ur interpretation of sex. Marie-Anne clutched my head to her chest. I felt the tension in her thighs. And then there was no more, only the unreeling of her existence. A shudder. Then a harder shudder. And then she was still. She’d consumed Candace, chewed her up, turned her into wetness.
“Goddamn,” she said with a kind of ripple in her voice. “That was so perfect.”
“You’re perfect.”
“Your turn,” she said. My face was between her breasts. She considered them necessary and sufficient for me to climax.
I stroked. Because she didn’t take birth control for the weight gain it caused, I was expected to stay out of her. Condoms weren’t an option because I couldn’t stay hard in them. We had tried every kind.
I suckled and pumped. Marie-Anne encouraged with touching and cooing. Before long I was at the threshold. I made sure to angle myself so I spilled on her thighs and not between her legs. An accident like that would have messed up her buzz. The last thing she needed was a reminder of mortality.
Before she fell asleep Marie-Anne said that she liked how I was always willing to channel girls into our bed for her. She said it was my superpower.
I kissed her on her hand and told her she was my superpower.
* * *
I soon got up to take a shower.
Under the water I was calm because of the orgasm and thought about the party in a new light. I told myself that I had panicked for no reason and recited a couple of quotes by Nietzsche. He and Goethe, along with Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson, always had a calming effect on me. The dead poets represented the apex of Western wisdom, a revelation made not of light but of words, one that was approachable, which you could access because it was made by fallible beings instead of dropped down by faultless angels.
When I came out and dried myself, I did so in front of Marie-Anne’s volleyball picture. It reminded me of our origin story, and a good origin story, like the kind we had, was the best thing in the world.
I had met her in college, when she played volleyball at Emory and was called Hangtime. The name had to do with her aerial prowess. When she leapt there was a natural double-clutch in her body, a kind of belated twitch in the torso that allowed her to stay airborne far longer than any other player at the net. In volleyball terms this made her ideally suited to play the position of the destructive outside hitter. Just as everyone else would be coming down, her legs would fold a little and she would rise for a brief moment longer—a girl turned hovercraft—as her arm with the force of a trebuchet knocked the ball back into the court, leaving blisters on the hardwood. “Haaang-time, Haaaang-time,” the crowd would chant. For three years Marie-Anne led the conference in kills and regularly had as many blocks as Jackie Joao, the star Brazilian middle blocker who had an inch on Marie-Anne and weighed about twenty pounds less. It was rare for a joust—a loose-ball situation at the net—to go against Marie-Anne’s squad. Like an alert sentry on a medieval rampart she would push the ball down onto the heads of the opposition. At her best, Marie-Anne’s approach and jump were measured at nine foot eight. This would have allowed her to play for Division I powerhouses like Stanford and UCLA and possibly even take a shot at the Olympics. But the strike against her was that she had no high school experience, nor even any exposure to club play, and had not developed the necessary tactical agency to be part of a successful offensive system. Marie-Anne blamed her mother for keeping her “stunted.”
Her mother had thought that sports were an inappropriate and undignified way for a young lady to order her life. There was the endless travel that inhibited stable family building. The casual dressing that indicated a complete disregard for aesthetics and fashion. And there was also the fear of lesbianism. Women couldn’t be allowed to turn into men, her mother had consistently preached, and one way this pernicious thing happened was through sports. As a result, Marie-Anne’s exceptional collegiate career went entirely unknown to her parents. They didn’t find out how good she was. How she could fly. A butterfly of thunder and lightning, adorned in spandex shorts and crew socks, her ponytail like some manic crankshaft, pushing her up and down the escalator that only she could see.
I used to cover women’s sports for the Emory Wheel. My beat was the tennis and swim teams. But one day at the student center, as I manned a table for a toy drive for tots, I saw Marie-Anne headed toward the gym with her friends, in those spandex shorts. The knee pads around her ankles loose like unwilling manacles; shoelaces undone; nearly a head taller than anyone around her. There was a drawstring bag over her shoulder, clapping against her sculpted thigh. She passed by me without looking my way, and in her lengthy form there was so much presence that I followed. I told myself that I was just going to the gym to write about the volleyball match against NYU. What I ended up writing, however, was a four-page, single-spaced biography of Marie-Anne. Her monstrous attacking prowess. How her coaches devised offensive schemes around her ability to hit kills crosscourt even if she was fading down the line. Her extraordinary leaping. Her jump serve, the only topspin serve on the team, that had an ace-to-fault ratio higher than former all-American Bernice Darren’s. I took particular delight in that serve. What a thing of beauty the toss was. Like she was a waitress passing through a crowd with a tray, she would perch the ball on her palm, way up in the air, taking a moment to look around at her team, at the opposition, at her coaches, at the crowd. With a flick she tossed the ball both forward and high, releasing it as if it was a dragonfly, and then proceeded to run after it like an obsessed entomologist. She leapt over the line, the drawn hand smashed the ball, and the spanked sphere screamed through the air and made a dipping arc over the net. Sometimes the ball dipped so hard and so fast that the opponents didn’t even have a chance to move. They would just look at one another after the play was over, as if the ball had traveled faster than communication.
There were other things too. Like the leadership Marie-Anne displayed, hugging, yelling, clapping, gesturing; I speculated that she was an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs scale. She was intensely protective of the smaller players, especially when the enforcers on the other side tried intimidating them with stare-downs and smack talk. But the high point of the profile was a long paean to her presence, inspired by my course work at the time. How she redefined feminism, because instead of slouching and compressing herself to fit some ideal version of what constituted femininity, she occupied as much room as she desired. How she moved all over the court, confident in her mastery of space, a lioness in the Serengeti—an attitude that she would one day carry out into the world, and from which both men and women could draw lessons for their own lives. Without meaning to, I had taken her biggest sporting shortcoming, namely her freewheeling, and turned it into her asset, her strength. I finished by comparing her double-clutch to Michael Jordan’s.
For me the profile hadn’t been an attempt to appeal to the real Marie-Anne. It was something akin to worship, an articulation of sentiment that didn’t demand affirmation in return. The thought of accessing someone like her—someone who looked like her, who hobnobbed with the fraternity boys, who drank alcohol on a fake ID—had never even entered my mind. I was content with the idealized version of her that I had put on paper. The tall, glorious athlete. The apex of vitality and unrestrained energy. The superstar. Besides, I was cognizant of the distances between us, particularly related to size. I was short enough to be a jockey. She carried herself like an undomesticated mustang. There couldn’t have been communion between us. But then, out of the blue, she had reached out. You marketed me really well, she wrote in an e-mail. Do you want to come to the Tri Delt house and write a follow-up piece? ;-)
It hadn’t been an invitation of the romantic sort. It was exactly what she had written. In the meeting she and her sorority sisters decided that I could be very useful to them in promoting their activities and wanted to know if I was up for it. I agreed to everything, turning into Marie-Anne’s personal publicist. Her life became my beat. If her sorority held an event, I wrote about it. If a gro
up of her friends hosted a speaker, I was there in the front row. I helped her publicize her fundraising and I pushed feel-good stories about the volleyball team to various news stations around the city. It was an internship where the only payment was her validation. I never asked her out and she never suggested that there could be a romantic spark between us.
But loyalty became its own seduction. Because I was always around, always observing, always learning, Marie-Anne told me things that she didn’t tell others, particularly her secret fondness for writing fiction. Between the volleyball team and the sorority house she never had the requisite solitude to write her stories, the ones about growing up under a suffocating mother, the ones about experimenting with girls at Christian youth camps. So under the guise of taking her away for an interview, or to have her look over my latest write-up about the sorority’s activities, I would sneak her into my dorm room and let her write. I, meanwhile, lingered around, listened to Portishead, or printed quotes and plastered them on the wall. Once she finished a story, she left it for me to read when she was away and then tell her what I thought about it. We weren’t in a relationship, but we were slowly getting there.
The story that brought us together for the first time was called “The Jock.” It was about a muscular athlete named Henry, the star center of his college basketball team, who was regularly humiliated by his teammates because of his chastity. He pretended that it didn’t bother him; but it hurt him that his love of the church, his immersion into the essence of Christ, didn’t eliminate from the world the taunt of the peer, the sarcasm of other youths. The bullying became so bad that Henry killed himself, dramatically hanging himself in the nylon nets of a basketball hoop in the practice gym. The morbid story gave rise to our first conversation about sexuality. It allowed me to reveal to Marie-Anne that I was still a virgin. She shocked me and said she was too, and that she intended to remain that way until marriage, because she didn’t trust anyone except her future husband, who was bound to her by something more meaningful than the accomplishment that was intercourse. “That’s what I want too,” I said. “To wait till marriage.” I had exulted in response, because my parents had told me to stay a virgin until marriage, and because following their diktat had been easy given my anxiety with women. Within a few hours, in the sanctuary of the dorm room, surrounded by Marie-Anne’s stories, I was in her arms, writhing and wrapping myself around her river of a body, lapping insistently, letting her tongue into my mouth. Oral penetration had been enough for us.