Bella offered a smile. ‘Come through to my office, doctor…’ She hesitated, ‘…Martin.’
After closing the clear glass door to her office Bella moved her chair out from behind her desk to sit almost opposite Martin. They were perhaps two metres apart. Bella leant forwards, and Martin saw the fullness of two large breasts pressing her dress forward.
She was unfussed by his glance. ‘A property?’
Martin’s brain raced. Suggesting that he and his wife wished to buy a new home seemed too suburban. Any agent could handle such a stodgy request. But Belladonna – the name that defined the beautifully elegant woman of Renaissance Italy – encouraged Martin to be aspirational.
‘I’m after an investment. From my super fund.’
‘In what price range, Martin?’
‘Up to two mill.’ Martin vaguely remembered he had about 400,000 in his fund, but such a figure seemed paltry. Such a poultry feed amount. But Martin wondered why he had nominated such an amount. Why not one million or even five million?
Bella’s eyes widened slightly. Martin judged he had passed some test.
‘Tell me about yourself, Martin.’
Where would he start? Age, suburb, car? How did he wish to be codified?
‘I’ve been a general practitioner for a couple of decades. And I run a group practice at Killara.’ It sounded dull. ‘But I have a number of other interests,’ he added modestly. Aware that, while he was being nebulously non-specific, he was nevertheless alluding to being a man with a rich set of skills, interests and even caprices that could not readily be listed or summarised.
‘How wonderful,’ Bella said.
Martin wondered if she would ask his marital status. He would certainly nominate Sarah if asked. But Bella returned to business.
‘I’d definitely recommend apartments rather than a house. Presuming you will be renting out, management is easier and the return is better. And I presume you wish to buy something on the North Shore line?’
Martin nodded, allowing her to continue to lead.
‘I suggest we have three principal options. For your investment amount we could get you three two-bedders, or two three- to four-bedders, or – and what I recommend – a penthouse.’
A penthouse, mused Martin. So simply stated. And without the predictable follow-up clause – with panoramic views.
‘What are the penthouse options?’
‘Quite a few really, Martin. All excellent ones. We have four for buying off the plan, about half a dozen that are being resold and one that I’ve left to last as it is a very exciting option.’
Martin opened his hands in expectancy.
Bella smiled gently. ‘There’s a block now selling at Pymble. The developers want to leave selling the penthouse to the last. It has been set up as a display unit. It’s very elegant and it has quite superb panoramic views. You can see the Harbour and out to Homebush Stadium. I’m sure I can persuade the developers to not be greedy in setting the final price.’
Martin felt one with Bella. She was looking after him. But it was more than that. Her last statement shone with kindness. And she radiated warmth. Their smiles to each other seemed to coalesce across the interpersonal space, now one point five metres, creating a union that made Martin feel blessed with wonder. No woman had ever had such an impact on him.
‘Would you like me to show you the apartment now?’ Bella reached for the keys on a rack.
Martin stood. He did not want to break the mood but there was the imperative of work. ‘I have to start calls at two. They’ll take me through to sixish.’ He wanted to see Bella again. Not wait, even till tomorrow. ‘I’m fairly free after that.’
Bella paused a moment before saying, ‘How about this evening?’
Martin grinned and sat down again. ‘I have absolutely nothing on this evening.’
‘I should warn you…’ And the word ‘warn’ cooled Martin, ‘…that I’m actually occupying the penthouse currently. The developers fully furnished it and they were keen for it to be secure. And I needed to move from my old place. We cut a deal. But at least it will give you a picture of how the penthouse looks fully furnished.’
‘Of course. Sounds perfect. How about seven o’clock and we have dinner together? It would allow me to see how it feels. I’ll bring the wine.’ Martin waited.
Had he been too precipitous? Was he being presumptuous in suggesting that Bella make dinner?
‘I’ve just cleaned the stove. Would it be possible for you to bring some food?’
‘More than possible. I’ll organise everything and presume that you are not a vegan?’
Bella laughed at two levels as she answered. Outwardly, to indicate no such status. Inwardly, as she initially thought Martin had said ‘virgin’, and in explaining to Martin that she was a dedicated ‘meat eater’, she had nearly slipped and said ‘man eater’. She wrote the penthouse address down for him.
Martin stood and glanced at the address now written on the back of her business card. He smiled again when he saw her name in Italian cursive. Bella Donna. Ah, not Belladonna – sorceress’s berries or deadly nightshade.
What a name for what a woman. He bowed at her, as if an Italian knight, and restated the time they had agreed on.
Martin went straight to the toyshop where he bought a large skateboard and skated for the first time in his adult life, racing it, stabbing his right foot into the ground, at times on the footpath and at times on the road, before alighting quickly and tucking it under his arm just before arriving back at the surgery, with some of his excess energy depleted.
Bella sat quietly in her office, musing about doors. How she was able to open and close doors almost simultaneously. Thursday night had been horrendous as her relationship with an English cricketer had abruptly deteriorated over the evening with a fierce argument. He had shoved her and pulled his hand back, ever so close to hitting her. She screamed at him in response, picked up a pot plant from the kitchen, walked onto the balcony and dropped it onto his panoramically viewable rental car.
‘How’s that, buster? Out! You’re out!’ she screamed. Again she thought he was going to hit her. She ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife, waved it for a bit and glided it firmly across her left arm, with blood slowly welling before dripping onto the Display Penthouse kitchen ceramic floor. The cricketer pulled back aghast. Yet he managed to enunciate his more basic disquiet.
‘You can’t use a tomato knife for such a purpose, Bella. What if I wanted to use it tomorrow? It’s extremely unhygienic, don’t you know.’
Bella had screamed in his face. ‘There’s no tomorrow for you, shit face. Get your gear packed or I’ll throw it in the fire. Then you can take some ashes back to England.’
He had packed remarkably quickly and Bella heard his car drive off less than ten minutes later.
He had been one of her cricket heroes for several years and yet, after a wonderful week together, she had discovered text messages indicating he had left her apartment on Wednesday night to go straight to the well-known New Zealand cricket groupie, known in the game as Hit. As in Hit for Sex.
Bella now felt completely abandoned and debated whether to cut herself or wipe herself out with alcohol or sleeping tablets. The wine won. After two bottles she slept deeply and was only an hour late for work.
But now that Martin was coming to spend Saturday evening with her she felt aglow again and almost enjoyed cleaning the lounge and kitchen. After checking that the ensuite bathroom had no residual vomit spits from the previous evening, she quite enjoyed making up the main bedroom. Doors, she mused, as she walked out of her office and back to the reception, they’re designed to open. The clear glass door certainly did – abruptly though, as, distracted, she walked straight into it.
NYMPH-O-MANIA
Martin arranged for the local French restaurant to have two servings of their best meal – Tournedo Rossini servi sur un lit de pomme lyonnaises – ready for collection just before seven. He stopped by the bottle shop
, went straight to the imported French collection and reached for the second most expensive bottle, only briefly scanning the label. The shop owner was bantering with a customer and Martin felt impelled to interrupt them. His impatience had increased and he was frustrated by people not being able to keep up with him on his ever faster clip, at times feeling as if on fire. Aware that Bella had stirred something up in him. She now provided the fuel for his exhilaration at being engaged in a process that would somehow shape his destiny. He suspected he was being lured but quite how and for what reason was obscure. He decided it was not for him to reason why.
As he walked through the shopping mall he found something attractive in nearly every woman he passed. He felt a sense of empathic connection and, out of that, desire. But a desire that could be resisted.
When he arrived at the apartment block he could see the penthouse from the street. For a moment he was tempted to climb the wall like Spiderman. The lift was tediously slow. As he knocked on the penthouse door, his balls felt full, clamping and hot – heh heh goodness gracious great balls of fire – and his libido had panoramic propensities.
Bella waited a full two minutes before opening the door to his knock. She was demure, her black eyes flicking up almost deferentially and he had an image of a geisha girl. She looked younger than he remembered from the morning. What, only six hours ago. Her long hair in ebony curls – smooth and parted at the top but, halfway down, curls emerging with their texture providing higher resolution. A Botticelli beauty. She wore a racy red shredded lace dress with long sleeves with cut outs. Exposing flashes of olive skin, a warm Mediterranean colouring. Natural and not tanned. Demanding to be touched and stroked. Martin wondered whether she was thirty, or even younger. He felt dizzy as he absorbed her beauty. Certainly not a teenager but, in part so, as she radiated a physical sense of blooming. For an instant he felt like Humbert Humbert gazing at his Lolita and he remembered a Nabakov excerpt. Of Humbert looking at Lolita and declaring as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I have ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.
All Martin’s senses were ablaze. He could smell the rain in the street, the cleaning odours in the penthouse hall, and the food in his basket – the beef, the foie gras, the port wine sauce, the sautéed potatoes, the onions and even the baguette – their aromas separating and merging. And, most distinctly, smells emanating from Bella. Perfume, again with its constituents parting and rejoining, but with the base musky scent of the perfume fixative, and with an earthier subterranean base of almost intoxicating sweat smell. Ever the diagnostician, Martin differentiated the watery sweat as coming from Bella’s eccrine glands and the fatty sweat from the apocrine glands of her armpits and groin. He suspected that the latter were the engine room for the pheromones that were subliminally seducing him. Again he felt like Nabokov’s HH. He too was going – and wanting to go – mad with tenderness.
He put the food and wine on the floor of the entrance hall and, ignoring Bella’s outstretched hand, enveloped her with a hug, pressing his chest against her firm breasts, feeling ecstasy while tears of wonderment ran gently down his face, and, for whatever reason The Choirboys’ ‘Run to Paradise’ refrain repeated and repeated in his head.
Bella allowed him to hold her for nearly a minute before pulling back. She murmured, ‘I do appreciate your house call.’ Martin wordlessly drew her close to him again, just holding her, rejoicing in her body warmth. Bella stroked the back of his neck slowly and gently. Martin held her, and the two rocked backwards and forwards, until Bella again pulled back. Again Martin had the image of a spooked pedigree filly that could only be handled by soothing.
Martin stared deeply and warmly at her. He smiled. The complete Martin Homer Duchenne smile. Bella lifted one eyebrow.
‘Definitely not the usual inspection visit, Martin.’
Martin could only say, ‘I need you, Bella.’
‘Well then, Martin, I suggest we commence the inspection in the master bedroom, first door to the right. But let me just check that everything is neat and tidy. First impressions generally count.’
Bella went ahead while an agitated Martin set the food and wine on the divider and looked in the toffee-coloured kitchen cupboards for red wine glasses. It was only two minutes before Bella called him.
She was lying on a queen bed, naked apart from two long black fingerless leather gloves that reached to her elbows. Martin had an instant image of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Bella too had her left hand partly covering her pubic hair, but her right hand was hanging down by the side of the bed while her head was tilted demurely, a waif-like image of naïve vulnerability. Such beauty, judged Martin, as had caused Camus to describe a glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time. Her colours vivid and amplified. Her olive skin bewitched him. Her rich black hair. So intense. He focused on her alone, able to observe and assimilate with total clarity one part at a time, while the periphery of the room expanded. She – or perhaps more simply, her beauty – was giving him a hit of what it meant to be alive.
Martin tore off his clothes and threw himself beside her. He kissed her firmly and felt her lips meld with his in union. He wanted to touch, stroke and fondle every inch of her body – but resisted asking her to remove her gloves. The roughness of their leather made him feel somewhat itchy wherever they pressed or clasped, although she lay passive most of the time, her black eyes staring into his, her face expressionless. His penis was near bursting – crying out for hedonistic self-indulgence and, like an auto-correcting homing pigeon, he was able to enter her without any navigational assistance. Look Mum, he laughed to himself, no hands. His scouting penis sent back rapturous reports of warmth, wetness and sponginess. And as Martin moved slowly inside her he felt her vaginal rugae clasp his penis and provide the perfect friction, so that, frenzied and bellowing, he ejaculated within a minute. Wild eyed, wide eyed, glorified and gratified.
As he rolled off her, Martin expected his sexual frenzy to settle. But Bella was now kissing him intensely, fondling him, looking intensely into his eyes and murmuring words that were unintelligible but which sounded to Martin like a cat on heat. Over the next three hours Martin and Bella petted and mated animalistically. Any CCTV camera in the ceiling would have suggested two wrestlers, as their bodies came together, separated and rejoined. Martin was bewildered by behaviours he had never previously experienced or countenanced, but considered it was not the time for philosophical reflection. Apart from smiling wryly at the real estate mantra – that it all came down to position, position, position.
It was Bella who suggested they have a shower together. As they did so – with Bella still wearing her long gloves – Martin continued to rejoice in her body. Shining and radiant. Her toned, supple, alive olive breasts now jutting firm, while her swollen pink nipples reached out parallel to the ground, surrounded by rich red raised areolae that gave him goose-flesh as he marvelled at their beauty. Her eyes searched his face. He knew she was searching for confirmation but of what? At times they held each other close as the shower sprayed over them, and Martin revelled in her warmth and softness.
Dressed again, they sat at the kitchen table, devouring the reheated food and agreeing that the Medoc was special. Martin, with his excessive energy sated, occasionally reached across the table to touch or pat her hand, rarely taking his eyes off her, still mesmerised by her beauty and by her mystique. Bella, her hair more tousled, now barefoot and wearing a silk pantsuit, was demurely tantalising.
‘Not your usual house call, I imagine?’
Martin nodded, wanting to learn more about this woman. She looked pleased to see him embarrassed.
‘Is there a Medicare item for such visits or would that be overservicing?’
Martin avoided the question, responding effusively. ‘Bella, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met. I am enthralled and stunned by you. By your very essence. I’m a doctor and so I deal with life and death. In some mystif
ying way you capture what it means to be truly alive. You strike me as a passionate free spirit, raw and untamed.’
‘Not some shrew for taming?’
‘Don’t be too cynical, Bella.’
‘If not for taming, what?’
‘I honestly don’t know. I’m in uncharted territory.’
‘You have a wife?’
‘Indeed.’
‘And she doesn’t understand you?’
‘But she does. Well, at least up to recently.’
‘But you find her a bit boring? No longer in love?’
Martin shook his head. ‘I love her dearly. She has been my life’s companion and I have never previously strayed.’
‘Strayed? That’s a limp descriptor?’
‘I agree. A weasel word.’ Martin refilled their glasses.
‘And will tonight be swept under the carpet? Simply a fling that will never be discussed? And you’ll go home tonight and say you were working late?’
‘She’s overseas. At a conference. Won’t be back till next Sunday.’
‘So as simple as the cat’s away?’
‘Bella. Please.’ Martin resisted saying he loved her, because it was more cosmic and oceanic than just love. It struck him again that, as the depression had disappeared, he had moved into a state of sensory overload, of appreciating how much radiance and beauty there was to life. And that Bella personified and embodied life as it was meant to be. A conduit for Martin – with his own will suspended – to be taken into a world of noetic quality, for its depths to be explored and its intrinsic revelations disclosed. A quasi-religious experience. Her animate life force and improbable siren-like beauty, capriciousness and passion had left him Nereid-struck. Yes, he thought, she’s a modern day nymph. But now not so driven, Martin sought to know Bella, to understand why she was such a life force. He refilled their glasses.
He avoided closed questions, instead invoking the same open-ended approach that he employed when interviewing a new patient. ‘Can we talk about… Tell me what you like about… I get the feeling that…It sounds like you enjoy…’ No direct seeking of specifics. His voice gentle. Different to the strident and urgent voice he had brought to their coupling.
In Two Minds Page 10