Eighty Days Amber (Eight Days)

by Jackson, Vina

  Watching you eat, watching you laugh

  You singing old Russian lullabies when you don’t think anyone is listening

  The way you walk, so gracefully, gliding and sexy

  The way you would say ‘I want you inside me’

  The way you would say my name

  The peacefulness of your sleep

  The way you rode me on the beach the first time we made love

  You cuddling against me for warmth between cold covers

  The book I was hoping I could write about you, if I only knew how to write

  The way your body sprawls across the bed

  The velvet feel of your mouth around my cock

  Our silences

  The delicacy of your small breasts and the colour of your nipples

  Your natural pallor

  The blonde down in the small of your back

  The beauty of us together

  The time you cried on the phone because you missed me

  Entering you, penetrating you and every time it feeling like the first time, again and again

  The look in your eyes when we were having sex

  The sheen of sweat on your white skin

  Your legs, long and endless

  Your Eastern soul

  Your emotions

  The delighted look on your face when I managed to surprise you

  The way your eyes shone with each new gift of amber

  How we could argue about the Clash and talk together of books and films, music and life

  The way it felt then, like we would never tire of each other and always have something to say

  Crossing Washington Square and seeing the dogs, children and squirrels

  Walking down Broadway

  Sleeping in the same bed as you and staying silent in the morning and watching you wake

  Introducing you to Veselka, that Ukrainian restaurant on 2nd Avenue, and seeing you licking your lips in anticipation

  Being so proud of being seen with you, with no guilt or doubt

  Becoming a better person by being with you

  The hope that we could have a future

  The terrible dream of having a child together

  You not talking to me, sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, childish, selfish, but still irresistible, that time we had our first row

  You allowing me to tie your hands together

  Your surprise text messages

  The dark, untidy forest of your pubes and then your dazzling smoothness, a contrast in worlds

  The way you would orchestrate my movements when I went down on you

  The view of your most private openings when you got down on your knees and allowed me to take you from behind

  My penis moving in and out of you

  The way you’d examine my body, parts and whole, perfecting your sexual education

  Walking down unknown streets

  Searching for restaurants to eat in

  Your tongue against my balls

  Playfully fighting in bed until I inadvertently hurt your neck

  Your tongue against my tongue

  Sitting in bars and terraces together, sipping drinks and coffees

  Watching you in the shower

  Taking you in the shower

  The white towels draped across your body after your shower

  The single beauty spot on your arse

  The sadness in your eyes when you talk of your father and mother

  You once going pantieless for me

  The way you made my heart sing

  How you revived my life after years of sorrow

  Your prejudices, your tastes, your likes and dislikes

  Your jokes

  The fact that you understood me

  Walking up the steps in Central Park together

  Helping you locate a CD of Russian songs you remembered from your childhood

  Exploring New York together

  Standing still together at Ground Zero

  Your quiet energy and your intense Russian personality Your quiet moan when you come and the way it lights up the emerald darkness of your eyes

  You stripping for me in the corridor

  Your playfulness

  Fucking on floors and sofas when we couldn’t make it to the bed

  Being a couple, an ‘us’

  Watching a World Cup match on the big screen at the Red Lion, surrounded by noisy German fans

  Fingering you on the highway when we drove to the Hamptons

  Your white skirt

  Your flimsy bathing costume top which hid nothing

  You undoing my trousers in the silence of the High Line as night fell

  Your style

  Your exuberant love of life

  Your moods

  Your defensiveness

  Our telepathy

  Your dreams, whether wonderful or misplaced

  Your wantonness

  The vagueness of your ambitions

  Your deep love of sex

  The honesty of your intimacy

  Your body

  Your soul

  Your uniqueness

  Your need

  The gentle way you so often said that things or people were ‘nice’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘interesting’ even without knowing them truly

  Your generosity of character and soul

  Your intellectual interests and how much they paralleled mine

  The fact that we were so good together, we were ‘one’, we were happy

  You

  Nowhere in the letter did Chey beg me to return or ask for an answer. He even forgot to sign the letter.

  Chey.

  7

  Dancing with Amber

  Chey’s letter released a torrent of memories, each of them sweeter and more painful than the last.

  A barrage of images and remembrances flooded my mind, as if our relationship could be broken down piecemeal, the moments lining up one after another to break my heart.

  The sound of his laugh. The way that he said Luba, always extending the u sound, as though he was caressing my name with his tongue. His habit of hanging his shirts over chairs when he removed them so that all the furniture in the apartment carried his scent. The way he spread his butter two inches thick. His passion for music. His passion for me. The firmness of his hands and the softness of his lips.

  I carried the letter with me everywhere and read it over and over again until I feared that I would wear the ink off the pages. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. I knew the words by heart.

  When the express train reached Brussels for the changeover I was moody and impatient, bored of staring out at the interminable green fields flying by outside the window. I couldn’t face another minute sitting cramped and still, so skipped the half-hourly connection and walked briskly into the town centre where I wondered why the silly bronze statue of the small chubby boy pissing was so famous. I threw a coin into the water anyway. God knows, I could use some good luck, I thought. Then I picked up a box of the most expensive chocolates that I could find in the nearest tourist shop, filled with caramel, hazelnuts, pistachios and nougat and nestling prettily in a white box tied with a purple ribbon. I returned to the station, settled into a window seat on the next train and shoved the sweets into my mouth one after the other until I felt sick as a thin man in a chequered shirt with a button-down collar stared at me. When I noticed him gazing I ate them two at a time until he looked away.

  I was tired of airports, tired of travelling and suddenly uncertain about life altogether. I had chosen to travel by train from Montpellier to Amsterdam just to avoid getting on another damn plane.

  By the time I arrived I had virtually decided to hand my notice in to the Network and give up dancing for ever, or at least the kind of dancing that culminated in a public sex show.

  The way that Chey had described what we had together was so personal, so private. Reading through the memories of our relationship described in such vivid detail made the contrast between m
aking love and fucking seem like a chasm. An unbridgeable divide.

  I had been fooling myself. There was no way for two people who hadn’t even properly met to mimic the emotion of coupling on stage. Even in its barest form what I was doing could be nothing more than a poor imitation. And I did not believe that the audience appreciated the skill involved. They did not see the complicated steps and turns. My perfectly executed entrechat and bourrée went unnoticed. The punters paid a lot of money but they were just there for the fuck, for the cock and the pussy. They were no different from the drunks at Barry’s or the stoners who hung around the run-down bars in California. All that separated the exclusive clientele from the riffraff was the size of their wallets.

  But I considered myself a professional and despite my misgivings, pulling out of the show was not an option. Tickets had no doubt been booked ages in advance and the discreet venue arranged. Some of those in the audience would have travelled to Amsterdam especially to watch me perform. The Inca Priest, my partner for this act, had a schedule to stick to and money to make just as I did. Whether rain, shine, good mood or bad, even when I was on my period, I still danced. Reliability was a matter of personal pride.

  Tonight, at least, we would not be the only show on. We were performing as part of a series of perversions. It was an Amsterdam weekend celebrating the erotic and the exotic and we were just one of the acts on the bill, though as ever advertised to only a select few.

  We were performing in the basement of an exclusive art gallery in Jordaan, right in the middle of a gentrified residential area where all the inhabitants were likely at home behind the customary curtainless Amsterdam windows and blissfully unaware of the ‘private exhibition’ being held just a few doors down.

  From the outside, the building appeared to be closed, but the door swung inwards when I pushed it and inside a small handwritten sign painted in deep red letters bore the word Expositie and an arrow that pointed to a flight of stone steps leading downwards.

  The corridor at the bottom of the steps was whitewashed and bare. A tall blond man wearing a tuxedo stood outside at the end, blocking another doorway. I showed him the card that identified me as a bona fide Network dancer, and he pointed the way further down the hall to the dressing room, which proved to be an old storage cupboard that had been temporarily converted. I would be paid a princely sum for tonight, but you wouldn’t know it from the less than salubrious quarters provided to the performers.

  A troupe of dancers were packed into the small room. Each of them naked, and painted like an animal. There was a zebra – black and white from her head to her toes – a giraffe, a panther and a lion. The zebra was wearing headphones and practising her dance steps. Her footwork was not classical in style but something more foreign to me, a kind of tribal belly dancing. The music flowed through her body in waves as she swayed and gyrated to an invisible beat.

  Leading them all was a beautiful dark-haired woman dressed in a ringmaster’s costume complete with leather whip and a pair of glittering red stilettos. She wore a curling false moustache, neatly waxed at the ends.

  I nodded a polite hello and stacked my tote bag on top of a stack of paint tins in the corner alongside a pile of coats and feather boas strewn haphazardly in a kaleidoscope of colour.

  There was a crack as loud as a gunshot behind me and I turned in time to see the ringmaster shooing her menagerie out of the door. She turned and winked at me, an action that took some effort due to the length and weight of her false eyelashes, which were red tipped at the ends and added a menacing arachnid quality to her appearance. The animals filed along ahead of her. They moved as if they were truly inhuman, their bodies swaying like Saharan beasts taking a leisurely trot to the nearest waterhole.

  The presence of pseudo animals in a sex show gave a somewhat bestial slant to the proceedings, and curious to see more, I dressed hurriedly, wriggling out of my modest jeans and T-shirt, slipping into the white gown, dabbing a little powder to take the shine from my skin and glancing in the mirror for one final hair check before racing through another corridor to the backstage area where I could hide behind a curtain to watch the first acts.

  The stage was decked out like the interior of a jungle. Even the air felt humid, as though we were trapped in one of Amsterdam’s greenhouses. The wooden floor was surrounded by a dearth of ferns and tropical flowers in pots in vivid hues of red, purple and orange. Even the sound system had not escaped the jungle theme, as the tweeting of birds and the rush of flowing water permeated gently through the speakers between the acts. The menagerie of animals had settled themselves in to various corners and, rather than dancing, they were behaving as animals would, slinking around trees, nibbling on ferns, staring at the dancers with wide eyes and occasional roars and jumping back when the ringmaster cracked her whip.

  The opening act was a contortionist, so flexible that she made my bones ache. The next, a femme fatale in a black silk dressing gown who danced with a gun and ended with a shot into the audience. She was almost making love to the barrel and so passionate was her embrace of the cold metal that I could see myself again in Chey’s living room swaying and gliding across his wooden floors with the Sieg Sauer before taking out the television. Not that it matters, as we never watched it much, did we?

  Chey’s words rang in my ears. His letter was tucked into my tote bag and all I wanted at that moment was to be back in bed pressing the sheets of paper to my chest, or better still, lying alongside him, telling him that I was sorry, that I loved him, that we should be together. Tears leaked down my cheeks and dripped onto my gown, sticking the thin fabric to my skin.

  I watched the next dancer begin her routine through a watery blur. She was dressed as a unicorn, complete with a slender flashing horn fixed to her head and a sequined harness that glittered as she moved. Her steps were so naturally equine that she made the hooves and harness that Chey had bought for me to wear and which I had been barely able to walk in, let alone dance in seem like a poor parody of an eroticism that was so animal to its core I wasn’t sure where the human ended and the creature began.

  My eyes were focused on the girl doing her thing but my heart and soul were back in Chey’s study remembering how it had felt to lean back against him as he pressed his cock into my arsehole so deeply that eventually I had collapsed onto the floor and he had laid alongside me stroking me back to life.

  When she removed her shimmering tight shorts and crop top to reveal a tiny pair of sequined pants that revealed neither breasts nor the demarcation of a vagina or the bulge of a penis but rather a slim and completely flat chest bordered by the straps of the harness it seemed as though she was birthing from a chrysalis rather than taking her clothes off. I had the sense that I was witnessing a creature reveal her natural form rather than a person remove her clothes.

  I was accustomed to being the most daring, original and exotic act on the bill. Up to this point, the Network shows that I had completed were one-offs, just me and my partner performing a single set. This was the first occasion where I was just a part of a line-up. And the girls who I had danced with at The Place, Sweet Lola’s, The Grand, or any of the other establishments that I performed in, had simply been strippers of one persuasion or another and varied only in their beauty and ability to shimmy and contort themselves with varying degrees of skill and elegance around a steel pole.

  The acts on stage tonight were of a different sort altogether, and for the first time I realised that I was not the only erotic dancer on the planet who could do more than just take off her clothes. I felt like an amateur.

  The first notes of Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ penetrated the sound system. I pushed myself to my feet and through sheer force of will moved onto the stage and began to dance. This would be the last time, I told myself. As soon as I was back at the hotel I would call Madame Denoux and tender my resignation. This would be it.

  To compound my misery, I had discovered at the last minute that my regular partner had fallen ill and I had to dance wit
h a replacement, a man whom I had not previously trained with and whom I had no experience dancing or coupling with before. He was tall and thick-bodied with a hard look painted across his face. Maybe he was just as nervous as I was and that was what made the angle of his jaw so tight and his expression so fierce.

  When we danced he moved a half-beat behind the music and we were never quite in unison and lacked elegance as we went through the motions for what felt like an eternity.

  When he finally penetrated me in accordance to the established scenario of the show I felt dirty and used. And never had I been so glad to hear the final notes that signalled the end of my set.

  I felt sickened by what I had just done, not only tonight but for all the previous months now. On the way back to the hotel on Leidseplein where I had been booked into, I couldn’t help playing the event over and over in my mind.

  I should have taken a cab back and the thoughts would have lingered less, but I knew I needed a shot of fresh air to cleanse my mind before I reached the room and had the opportunity to jump under the shower and wash the infamy away.

  It was three in the morning and the city was sleeping. There was just the gentle shimmer of the still water on the Singel in the moonlight and the irregular cobblestones of the canal walk, rare lights emerging from the curtainless windows of old buildings. Passing the dark windows of the neighbouring Athenaeum Bookshop and American Book Center on Spui, I took a detour and made my way to the Dam where just a few stragglers and drunk survivors of unknown festivities staggered by. Then, still in a daze, I took Kalverstraat, a pale ghost amongst its flickering neons, and then yet another canal, which l followed all the way to Leidseplein.

  By the time I reached my bedroom, I was exhausted. But also angry at myself. For picking this life, for leaving Chey, for not having the strength to return to him now. The dancing made me feel dirty now, in a way it hadn’t before.

  I switched on the shower, threw off my clothes and, eyes closed, stepped into the water, turning the heat up until it shocked me back into reality. I stood motionless, letting the water pound against my skin, allowing the steam to envelop me.

  By the time I exited the shower cubicle, my body was coloured scarlet red, from the heat and the steam. But my mind still felt dirty. And some of the words in Chey’s letter came rushing back to my mind, perverse, beautiful, dirty but so unlike the experience I had just participated in. The contrast was enlightening.