However, after some fifteen minutes of speculation, trying to tell myself that I should leave, I found myself throwing away common sense, and mustering the courage to knock on her door. After all, she had no idea that I’d voyeured her show, and there was no reason for her to find out what a miserable creature I really was.
I took the steps to her front door in short order and rapped loudly. I then heard shuffling sounds on the other side of the door in response to my knock.
“My god, Michael!” Savannah gasped when she opened the door to see me. Her face was as white as a sheet. She wasn’t just startled seeing me, she was stunned, even frightened. “What are you doing here?” She wore a beautiful peach silk bathrobe wrapped about her, and was still tying the sash tightly at her waist.
“We need to talk,” I answered her.
“You followed me here?”
“Not exactly, but I do need to see you.”
“And tomorrow wouldn’t be good enough?”
“I’m here now,” I said insistently. “Perhaps you could let me in. I haven’t seen Guillaume, is he here?”
“What have you seen?” she asked alarmed.
I shrugged. “I’m afraid, I peeked in the windows, darling, just to see if you were home.”
“My car in the driveway didn’t speak plainly enough?”
“You might have been out to dinner,” I suggested.
“And you could have knocked on the door,” she stated flatly. She clutched her robe even tighter around her, as though I didn’t have the right to see her undressed. “What did you see?” she repeated the question.
“Not much,” I lied. I just wanted to find out if you were here.”
Even to myself I wasn’t making much sense.
“So you spy on me?”
“I’m curious,” I admitted.
“About what?” She was suspicious of everything I said, and I guess I’d given her good reason.
“What kinky things you do with him, I suppose,” I blurted out, as it began to dawn on me that this was about the most foolish thing I’d ever done.
“Kinky?” She queried me with a blank expression.
“I mean are you going to end up in leather and chains, is that what’s going to happen?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No leather, no chains.” She looked empty, frozen. For all the many moods I’d experienced from her, this was nothing like I’d ever seen before. I thought for an instant that she might simply disappear into thin air. Her substance seemed to have fled, leaving her looking withered and vacant.
“Then if you don’t mind. Maybe you could let me inside.”
“Michael, this is awfully forward of you.” She seemed to have gathered some of her wits, at least her voice didn’t sound like a hallow ghost.
“It’s all on the spur of the moment, I admit. But then, I am in love with you. All things considered, I have the right to pursue you.”
“You must not trust me,” she decided.
“It’s not just trust, Savannah. This is where you meet Guillaume. I know that. And while I thought he was out of your life—you certainly weren’t mentioning him and I hadn’t had any recent letters—all of a sudden he appears again. I guess I need to get things straight between us and with him, if that’s necessary.”
“But he’s not here,” she said. “You can see for yourself.” She finally backed away from the door, the best welcome I’d get to step inside.
“Is he coming?” I asked.
“I suppose you might as well . . .” her voice drifted off faintly as she turned around and strolled aimlessly towards the back of the house. I moved with her. Beyond the corner of the kitchen there was a room any woman would call charming for the bank of windows that faced the sea, the chintz sofa, the easy chair and the large bouquet of flowers on the coffee table. It was hardly the home of a man, and that surprised me. However, while I wasn’t surprised to see the photographs, seeing them close up I found them curiously bizarre. My glance was riveted on the corkboard and wouldn’t stop. So many nudes, so many erotic lips and dangerously playful eyes, so many body parts shamelessly unveiled.
“I guess he must enjoy them,” I managed to say.
Savannah was nervous, looking as though she stood at the apex of some cliff and feared looking down. That nervousness unsettled me so much that I moved in and put my arm around her. I led her to the couch away from the dozens of nude and lusty poses on the wall. She seemed hardly comforted. Looking back at the startling display I spotted the typewriter sitting on the table below the pictures, the one Guillaume had no doubt used to type the letters. Thinking back to the dance I’d seen, and now the cottage empty but for her, I knew that she’d been alone, the dance conducted for no one other than herself.
“So, when’s he returning?” I finally asked, because I could think of nothing else to say.
“He’s not,” she replied.
“And that means what?” I wondered. I have to admit I was rather glad that the man wasn’t going to show up, even though I was as curious as hell to meet him, if only for a minute as she sent him packing.
“It means he won’t be here.”
“Your relationship’s over?”
“I didn’t say that, Michael,” she said. “What I mean is, he never was here.” She looked me straight in the eye. “He doesn’t exist.”
I stared at back her. Though she’d been scared to tell me, she now bore that regal bearing she often presented me. Even if it was forced, she was trying not to be embarrassed by her revelation.
“There’s no Guillaume,” she added.
I thought for a moment before I spoke, remembering how real and yet how bogus the mysterious Guillaume had been. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d wondered if he was nothing but her imagination. “No Guillaume,” I finally repeated.
She shook her head. “You probably think I’m crazy,” she said. I thought I saw tears in her eyes, though she did an adequate job of holding them back.
“The whole game with Guillaume was just a charade? You came to my studio on your own, just because . . .”
“I wanted to pose for you,” she said.
“And the second time too?”
“Yes.”
“And the spanking?”
“Because I wanted it,” she said.
“You typed the letters?” I surmised.
“And mailed them,” she added.
I was in awe of her for the thousandth time. But in this moment I was almost scared of who she was. I’d never felt that before.
“Why?” It was the simplest question and all I could ask. I’d been struck dumb.
“Because he’s been in my head.”
“Guillaume?”
“A dominant presence. It doesn’t matter what I call it. I don’t know how it started with the letters. But there were at least a dozen before I even came to you.”
“And you chose me?”
“I was lucky in that choice,” she replied. “You were the only photographer who listed boudoir sessions in the yellow pages. I saw you once. At least your picture in the newspaper. I cut it out, stared at it endlessly, wondering if I’d have the courage to bare my body for you. And yet the voice inside this queer skull of mine kept telling me to call you, to visit you, tell you that I was driven to you by a mysterious force, or better yet, ordered by a dominant lover to have my picture taken in the nude. I did it once, and then everything I did made the voice more real. I could hear his words and I was bound to obey. I know this is odd, but I couldn’t stop it. And then when you agreed to dominate me the way I thought of Guillaume dominating me . . . well it changed everything.”
“Because I was real,” I suggested to her.
She nodded. “Because you were real. You are real. But please, please, Michael don’t think me insane.”
It took some moments to think of a reply. Insane? Was I sane enough myself to make a judgment on her sanity?
“I watched you dance,” I finally spoke. The admission was important. If
she was being honest with me, I could be nothing less with her.
I saw her start at that revelation, almost like she’d been when she answered the door, thinking I’d violated her.
“You were beautiful, and doing something I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know if I was watching a pagan ritual, or just a gorgeous sexual woman being herself. But I loved it. I’m here Savannah because I didn’t want to lose you. Tell me,” I asked her, “why are you here?”
“This is my beach house,” she said.
“Where you play your fantasies?”
She nodded. “The compulsion came back while you were gone, at least part of it. I had to come. It’s been months. If nothing more than I wanted to close it down, say goodbye to Guillaume, strip the pictures away.”
I stared around at the lovely room. It was hers, vintage Savannah, from the chintz, to the pounding surf outside, to the pictures of her hanging on the wall. “You could leave it just the way it is,” I suggested another plan.
“And how could that be?”
“Maybe Guillaume will never be gone from you,” I speculated. “Maybe you don’t want him to leave.” I felt quite sure of my appraisal.
She looked at me curiously, appearing not half so frail as she’d seemed earlier. I gathered she understood what I was saying. The trust was returning. Though that trust had been strained a bit by the evening’s strange doings, we seemed to be successfully carving out another understanding in our relationship.
“Perhaps you could dance for me Savannah,” I suggested. “And perhaps if you dance, this place will become as real as all the other places in your life?” It was sheer speculation, but I thought it was decent theory. And she thought so too.
While sitting back on the couch, I beheld the chameleon woman, the phantom siren, the dangerous submissive changing her colors again. From embarrassed and ashamed, I saw her take on the haughtiness, the regal vision of womanhood, that paradoxical luminary that had so enchanted me for months.
Rising from the sofa, Savannah turned on the record player again. And while I listened to the scratchy sound of some throaty woman’s voice sing about sex, Savannah danced for me and made all the photographs on the wall come alive.
I figured with this secret out in the open, there could never be a place that Savannah wasn’t free to go. I’d seen it all. At least that’s what I hoped. Then of course I’ll never be sure.
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Dance For Me Savannah Page 13