Eighty Days Amber (Eight Days)

by Jackson, Vina

  I leaned over the rail and waited. I was unsure whether or not I could take it but I was willing to try. I saw no reason not to.

  She put her hand on the bump of my lower spine, shifting me into the right position. Her hand drifted between my legs, testing my wetness. Whatever she found, it was not what she was looking for. She shuffled in her bag again and I heard a click of a lid flipping open and then flinched as the lubricant, thick, cold and viscous, was applied to my pussy.

  The first stroke did not split me in two as I had feared but filled me to the brim. Her cock was an imprint that travelled all the way from my cunt to my heart to my brain. It made me feel whole, at home in myself. I pushed back against her and heard her grunt. She pushed against me, and we continued in a tug of push and pull until she began to tire, and leaned forward against my back, holding me in an embrace as she rubbed her finger over my clitoris until I came.

  We stood there a while longer staring out over the city. Pedestrians wandered the streets below and occasionally looked up at us. Whether they could see two naked women looking back down at them from fourteen storeys above was unclear.

  When I woke in the morning she was gone. The only reminder of the night before was the scent of smoke and lemon that still lingered, and the pile of crisp bills that she had left on the glass coffee table beneath an empty pack of her French cigarettes.

  One hundred pounds in total. Not even enough for an hour with the cheapest run-of-the-mill hooker. I couldn’t decide what offended me most, that she had opted to pay me, or that she had paid so little.

  I didn’t trust so easily after that. I continued to meet men and women and to fuck them, but I was no longer free with my affections, my mind or my soul. I kept a little part of myself hidden and I threw away the key.

  My emotional detachment may not have improved my dancing but it made it bearable. I came to believe that I wasn’t fucking at all. I was merely an actress, a purveyor of fantasies, an illusionist selling a dream.

  We were not selling sex. That was the job of whore houses and strip joints. The Network’s shows were part fantasy and part irony, a visual affirmation that lovemaking was merely an extension of life and not something to be hidden behind closed doors, sneered at or giggled over. Madame Denoux’s vision was a dance in which the two partners would join in the most intimate of ways, without drawing any particular attention to the fact. The crescendo, the penetration, would be simply another step in the rhythm of life.

  I continued to refuse to meet my partners, Tango, Inca Priest and Ballet Instructor, outside of our set. The only news I had of them in between shows were the regular updates from the Network to confirm matters of scheduling and the health of the members and exchange the certificates that we were all required to complete monthly.

  These elements, off stage, added a hint of sterility and matter-of-fact business to the proceedings, but when the music switched on and my partner appeared from the darkness and into the stage light I forgot the organisational and biological necessities and revelled in the response of the audience and the feeling of a bare cock thrusting inside me, a stranger’s cock, and the knowledge that we had never engaged in a single conversation besides the most fundamental, the one that occurred between our bodies.

  It felt risky and dangerous and endlessly arousing, and cemented my idea that I had become some kind of ethereal sexual being, only half human, the rest a mixture of pheromones and desire, a walking receptacle for lust.

  However, off stage was a different matter altogether. I continued to pick up men and sometimes women and sometimes those who did not identify entirely with either sex but something different again. They were the ones that I was most at home with, the gender benders, the queers and the trans men and women who fucked like anatomy was irrelevant and didn’t seem to feel as though their entire being was defined by their genitals.

  Most of the time, though, my conquests and the feelings that they inspired within me were unremarkable. I bedded a new person in each city. I collected people as though they were souvenirs, to replace the museums and art galleries that I never visited.

  Florence was the only one that I remembered by name. The others I remembered by the music that inevitably reverberated through every room that we returned to, a symphony of tunes designed to relax, stimulate, or simply hide the inevitable noises of lovemaking, the squeaking of hotel-room beds and the slapping of body parts joining in energetic fervour.

  In Prague, I met a black girl who penetrated me with a strap-on against a wall in the dark shadows of a club whilst The Cure’s ‘Lullaby’ reverberated through the speakers and the other punters continued to drink beer and eat crisps and stare at each other with glazed expressions completely unaware of what was taking place in the corner of the room where two women who appeared to be engaged in conversation where in fact engaged in passionate lovemaking behind the feeble barrier of a bar stool.

  Berlin was old-school jazz, a university student who lived in Neukolln and screwed me slow and smooth to Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’ and Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’. Barcelona was a waiter from a tapas bar who called me when I left my phone number on the back of a napkin along with his tip and bought his own playlist of fast and furious Reggae en Español to my hotel room after his shift. Sicily was dark and dirty on the bonnet of a parked car in the back streets of Palermo with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony playing on the stereo. Paris was a local academic who knew all the best patisseries in the Latin Quarter and could only get hard to the sound of Lou Doillon’s ‘I.C.U.’. Reykjavik was a British expat who had a bag full of phalluses and wanted me to penetrate him from behind while Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones crooned ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. In Stockholm a man who wanted me to watch him masturbate while he listened to Johnny Cash reading the New Testament and in Milan a blond German woman on holiday who could have been my double and who licked me to orgasm and then stroked me to sleep to the sound of Ani DiFranco’s ‘Overlap’.

  The songs became more important than the sex and soon it was just a sea of cocks and pussy and the soundtrack that became the backdrop of my life.

  When I wasn’t dancing or fucking I slept, or wandered the streets and stared at the outside of monuments and museums, enjoying gelato and pizza slices or currywurst or caramelised hot nuts or whatever else was the flavour of the place, and never bothering to go any deeper, to get to know the cities that I passed through any more than I bothered to get to know the people who inhabited them beyond taking one member of the population to bed before finding my way to a different airport and a different city.

  And all the time, I thought of Chey.

  Quickly a whole year had gone by, I realised with a shock one morning as I showered and scrubbed on automatic pilot in readiness for another set in front of another invisible audience whose gasps and arousal I could only sense from where I was on the improvised stages, spectators from another world. The travelling had become a quiet routine, a whirl of airports, hotels, dark nights and bodies. I had seen their world but, deep inside, I knew I had seen nothing, just a tourist in the house of flesh.

  I had begun to tire of my sex dance. What had seemed a daring performance art in the beginning soon became just another money-earning chore, and when the men I danced with eventually ceased to fill me, and I was left vacant and alone in another hotel room with just the sound of my own thoughts screaming through my mind, I wondered what would be next for me. Where I would go and what I would do when this part of my life too reached its inevitable conclusion?

  Next, I was scheduled to go to Amsterdam. But that was still a week away and I was at a loose end so opted for a few days of sunshine further west down the coast in France. Me time.

  Another day, another dollar, another dance, another city and another cock.

  Or at least, so I thought, before the letter arrived.

  It had followed me halfway round the world. The corners of the white envelope crumpled, a slight tear along one side that some postal w
orker along the line had repaired with a strip of narrow brown tape and a succession of hastily scribbled addresses and stickers redirecting it from place to place.

  It had finally reached me, caught up with me, in the South of France, where I was taking a short break at a small beach resort close to Montpellier between assignments following a well-attended (and well-paid) performance with Tango in the grounds of a remote villa in the hills beyond Cannes during the film festival. I assumed the majority of the audience had consisted of people from the film industry or its attendant financiers, but no Hollywood offer for my services had resulted, just the customary suggestions of sex for money that I had long got used to.

  Chey had posted the letter in Miami and addressed it to me c/o Lucian in Venice Beach in California who had redirected it to New Orleans from where it had travelled to Europe and a handful of poste restante addresses I had used as I flitted from place to place on jobs.

  At first I did not recognise the handwriting on the envelope spelling out my name. I had never been to Miami and didn’t know anyone there. I wondered if it was from another dancer I had somehow befriended in the waltz of dressing rooms I had passed through, but there was something masculine and firm about the script and the slope of the letters.

  Even then, I thought it unimportant and neglected to open it for half a day while I busied myself with a late breakfast and a leisurely walk to the beach and a swim. All my communications with Madame Denoux and work-related correspondence took place online as my Mac Air accompanied me everywhere.

  I couldn’t keep out of the midday sun during the trek back from the beach to my small hotel, and the first thing I yearned for was a shower, but the letter stood there on the bedside table as I opened the door, its haphazard stickers calling to me.

  Kicking off my flip-flops I grabbed hold of my nail file and slit it open.

  It was from Chey.

  By the time I finished reading it and came to my senses, the abundant sweat coating my body had dried unpleasantly across my skin under the sustained assault of the room’s air conditioning.

  Luba,

  I can just picture you reading these opening lines and realising who has written them. I beg you: don’t be angry or hasty and tear these pages up without reading them.

  Don’t.

  I miss you . . .

  There were another four pages. It was a love letter and the first one I had ever been sent.

  A love letter in which Chey never attempted to explain the presence of the gun in his drawer or justify his repeated absences on so-called business or explain where he was while I lingered in New York. He alluded to reasons that maybe one day he would be able to reveal to me, but just expressed sadness that now was not the time.

  But what hurt most was having the strength of his feelings for me confirmed in such a naked, emotional way while on the other hand, his words made it clear that he had resigned himself already to having lost me.

  With every passing day I just feel you fading away, retreating further from me. It feels like ages since we were together, spoke, touched. And as much as it hurts like hell, it’s okay. I am slowly learning to accept it. Your future life is elsewhere and cannot be with me. It’s painful, but I have to be realistic about this. To hang on to you would be to do you a disservice. Even if every day I spend away from you is like living a life by only half, a life in which an empty space has taken hold of my body, my heart, your soul.

  Ten times every single day at least, I resolve myself to having lost you once and for all, and cry a little inside (or for real if I’m alone), only to find myself minutes later fighting against that resignation, not wishing to accept what is happening or will happen or has already happened. A battle I seem unable to win . . .

  Was he unwilling to fight for me?

  I remember every single second spent with you and love you even more for it. Every coffee or drink we shared, the walks, the meals, the embraces, the silences. Thank you, Luba, for giving me so much in the short time you allowed me to be yours as much as you were mine (even as a greedy me tries to interject that it was, however, not nearly enough).

  Ah, all the places I still wanted to take you too, knowing your hunger for travel, your fervour for new horizons. The cities, the landscapes I could have seen anew through your eyes, the streets along which your wonderful endless legs could have walked down, the thousand private stages I wanted you to dance across for the pleasure of my eyes only, my prima ballerina, my private ballerina, my dancer caught in amber.

  There was no mention of the initial displeasure I had witnessed when he had learned that I had begun stripping, no allusion to Lev, and just a bare mention of the gun and what I had done.

  By the way, that was a great shot and the TV never recovered . . . Not that it matters, as we never watched it much, did we?

  At which stage, the letter, on its second page, became more frantic, his handwriting abandoning its discipline, its regularity, maybe he had been drinking, but his words lost all restraint and it all began flowing like a river bursting its banks, a stream-of-consciousness torrent, in which every wavelet breaking against the dam of my heart felt like a dagger.

  Right now, I’m in a small village down South, in a tiny room in a bed and breakfast (there are no hotels here) in which the air conditioning has broken down, so I am sitting dressed only in an old pair of shorts, haven’t shaved for a few days. I’m sweating like a pig. I’d describe the bedroom and the view from the window but it would be of no use. I just feel terribly lonely, assaulted by thoughts of you.

  I am waiting. Can’t even tell you why. And, as you no doubt guessed it has nothing to do with amber, although that side of my life is legitimate, and I have a terrible fondness for it. I hope you still treasure all those pieces I gave you; I saw they were no longer in Gansevoort Street after you left . . .

  I slept badly yesterday night. Nightmares or dreams, it doesn’t matter what they are if you appear in them, a radiant star of my troubled nights. I had a lustful dream and it still flows through my brain now that I am fully awake. I was revisiting all the times we spent together. Amazed and shocked at the things we have done.

  In the dream, we were together again and you stood, naked above me, your legs apart. And then, that crazy sensation of your mouth around me, sucking on me, licking me, protecting me. And the whiteness of your skin and deep green pit of your eyes, of the awesome puckered hole of your arse, the welcoming wetness of your cunt, and the forest of your curls. I close my eyes: the softness of your small, perfect breasts, your hands touching me everywhere, your tongue in my throat, oh my love, you’ve spoiled me forever for others.

  And every vision and colour and sensation of that dream was totally pornographic. But it was also pure, as if we were angels, we were beautiful together. And the thought then returned of how good we are together and not just in bed, the comfort we found in each other, despite the differences in culture and backgrounds we do not share. We were friends, not just lovers, perfect companions, weren’t we?

  So now I must treasure these memories. I am a weak man, Luba; I am not noble. I know that the day will eventually come when I succumb to both nostalgia and temptation and try to recreate those joys, that lust, that happiness with others, and I want you to forgive me in advance, because I know that the spectacle of me fucking another with the same abandon and transgressiveness will never equal the beauty we achieved; it will be dirty, immoral, but I fear I am just a man and part of me will want to try again, even while the other half of my brain knows I could never conjure up the transcendence of you again and all others, all other things I will do will be just a vulgar imitation.

  I love you so much, Luba. Why couldn’t I express it better when we were still together?

  Sometimes I make the wish that by magic (pact with the devil, fantasy, the power of dreams . . .) you could live inside my skin for just a day. Then you would feel what I feel and realise how unique and strong it is and what you mean to me. I would kill for you. You now wit
ness the pitiful desperation your decision to end it has caused in me. The madness it provoked when you so suddenly withdrew your love, your affection. It was so sudden that the pain was intense, blinding, like an onset of panic. Words fail me to describe how I felt when you left.

  But it’s fine. It’s okay, my love, my gypsy, my treasure.

  Accept my confused clichés for what they are and do not think badly of me.

  I love you.

  I can write no more words. I know no more words. I’ve run out of them.

  This is where my winter begins, I guess. The years without you . . .

  The final pages must have been written on a separate day, later maybe, as the writing was slanted differently, less frantic, just a list he had titled ‘The things about you I will never forget’.

  Your love

  The tenderness in your eyes

  The sound of your voice and the charm of your accent

  Your occasional awkwardness, your feelings running hot and cold depending on the moment

  Your spontaneity

  Your impish sense of humour

  The heart-wrenching experience of watching you undress

  Or undressing you myself

  Your quiet beauty, the silk of your skin

  The warmth of your mouth against mine

  The way you kiss and allow yourself to be kissed until the air in our lungs is screaming for relief

  Sharing a bath with you in Gansevoort Street

  You walking through the New York snow

  Your naked back the evening we went out to Momofuku’s

  Sitting with you watching a Pixar movie surrounded by little chattering kids

  Your hand holding mine in the auditorium and then in the cab going back