Madame X

by Jasinda Wilder

  Do my hips always sway so much when I walk? Do my thighs always brush so deliciously against each other with each step?

  I watch a man and his wife walk hand in hand together, thirteen stories down. I cannot think to invent a story for them. I can almost see myself down there, walking hand in hand with a blond man. Neither of us talks. We just walk, fingers twined, moving in sync. I don't know where we go, the blond man and I. It doesn't matter; we're just going, and we're going together.

  I shake my head, turn around--freeze, gasp. He's there, somehow behind me and I didn't hear him move or sense his presence. Scotch left on the table, hands loose at his sides. Indigo eyes knowing. Seeing. Piercing.

  "Who are you, X?" Voice like a bow drawn across a cello string, the lowest, deepest, most soulful note. Caressing me, shivering my bones, making my skin pebble, just his voice. It's like a touch, somehow intimate.

  How do I answer? I feel tightness in my throat. "I don't know." My capacity to lie is snared and discarded by the openness in his eyes.

  "You don't know who you are?" Disbelief.

  I find myself defensive. "And who are you, Logan Ryder? How would you answer such a question?"

  He blinks slowly, stuffs both hands in his hip pockets, gazes at me for a long moment. "I am Logan Ryder. I'm an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and a philanthropist. Unmarried and unattached. A semireformed troublemaker."

  "That's what you are, Logan. Not who you are." I press my back to the window, needing space.

  When he's close, I can't breathe, but not from panic. From something else. A chest-tightening anticipation. Memory. Fear of what I might do if he presses in again, the way he did in the bathroom. I have no control when he's near. He short-circuits me, and I am unnerved.

  "I was born in San Diego. Grew up poor. Surfer kid. Spent my days on the beach, on the waves. Skipped more school than I attended." His eyes are distant, seeing the past. "Got into trouble. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Did some bad shit . . . saw friends die, and I realized I had to get out of that life or I'd end up either dead or in jail. Seemed to me at the time that the only way out for someone like me was to join the army. So I spent the next four years wearing army green. Never saw combat, but I did get plenty of training in how to work hard and party hard. Got my GED, so at least some good came of it."

  "That's your past, not who you are." My palms are flat against the cool glass.

  "It's more than anyone else knows about me."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah . . . oh." He smirks. "I'm getting to the part that starts to define who I am. After I phased out of the army, I was bored shitless. Had some money saved and nothing to do. Bummed around a bit, started getting into trouble again. I've got a knack for trouble, you see. It follows me, and I follow it. We're very closely intertwined, trouble and me. I met this guy at a bar in St. Louis. He was a private security contractor. Talked a good game, got me to sign up for a tour in the desert. One tour as a defense contractor turned to two, turned to three. Good money, bad shit." He shrugs. "Got out after the third, took my money and ran. I'd seen enough. Done enough. So I took what I had, bought a bar in Chicago, redesigned it, rebranded and restaffed it. Sold it. Did it again. Made good money, discovered I had a good head for that kind of thing. And I liked getting my hands dirty, ripping the places apart and rebuilding them. Then I had this investment opportunity . . . over here, in Manhattan. A big money investment, big risk, big return. It . . . didn't pan out. Let's just say that and leave it there."

  I sense a major plot hole. "You're skipping something, Logan."

  He nods. "Yes, I am. That's a story I'm not interested in telling just yet. It's a big part of who I am, but it's still hard to talk about. Still sort of learning how to move past it, you could say."

  "But you ask me who I am. Not so easy to answer, is it?"

  He merely shrugs, a Gallic lift of one shoulder. "Is it fair to ask a question I find difficult to answer myself? No. Of course not. But how you answer that question, it tells me something. You, for instance, didn't answer at all. You merely turned the question back around on me. You're defensive. Private. Impossible to know. Who are you, X?" His eyes are deep, and sharp. "Make me an answer. Something. Anything."

  I'm not supposed to talk about me. It's never been said outright, out loud. It's an unspoken rule. Don't talk about myself.

  But how can I not? He's looking at me, looking into me, eyes like the deepest seas, turbulent and roiling and fraught with chasms of such impenetrable depths I could get lost and crushed and devoured.

  "I am Madame X." It's an answer, isn't it?

  "More." A quiet demand. A command.

  "I . . . I don't know." I turn away, desperate, rest my forehead against the glass and fog it with my breath. "You should go."

  "I have fifty minutes left, X."

  Ten minutes? That's all that's passed? An eternity, stretched thin and twisted into a loop, all within the space of six hundred seconds.

  "Tell me one fact about yourself. It doesn't have to be embarrassing, or a secret. Just . . . anything."

  "Why?" I whisper it.

  This should be a simple conversation, but it isn't, and even the why of that is beyond me. He confounds me, sets all I know of how my life works upon its head.

  "Because I'm curious. I want to know."

  "I'm Spanish."

  He's too close. Leaning in. Breath on my ear. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

  "What happened? With the investment?" Why the hell am I asking him this?

  He laughs. "Right for the jugular. It was . . . complicated. Certain elements of the deal weren't exactly legal. I knew it, but I thought I'd gone through enough layers to keep myself clean, you might say. But . . . I got betrayed."

  "So you're a criminal."

  "Once upon a time, yes. Semireformed, remember. All of my current business endeavors are entirely legal."

  "You don't seem the type."

  "Which type?"

  "To be a criminal."

  "I came to a point where I had to reinvent myself." He's still so close I can hear him swallow, hear his breath.

  He still smells faintly of cinnamon gum, but that scent is overpowered by scotch. I don't know what he did with his gum; a strange detail to notice. He's not touching me, though. Just standing in my space.

  Why am I not pushing him away?

  "Reinvention of one's self is difficult," I say.

  "Yes. It is." His finger now, index finger, on my chin. Just touching. Not turning me to him, just touching. "Why did you have to reinvent yourself, X?"

  "Because I . . . got lost." It is the shape of the truth, if lacking in substance.

  "You're leaving something out, X."

  "Yes, I am."

  "How about your real name?"

  "I told you already. My name is Madame X."

  "That's not even Spanish." There's a smile in his words, though I don't look at him to see it. I can hear it, and it is blinding enough in its beauty, even heard but unseen.

  I let out a long, slow breath. "It's the only name I have."

  I sense the smile fade. My eyes change their focus, and now I can see his reflection in the window glass. His eyes are searching, a strand of golden hair across his eye. The corners of his eyes are crinkled, as if from long hours squinting in the sun. His skin is weathered, leathery. Rugged. He is beautiful, but hard and sharp, threat seeping from his pores. Yet somehow utterly gentle. So powerful, so sure of his capacity to eliminate any threat to himself that he need not posture. A tiger in the jungle that knows he is king.

  "X. Why X?"

  My eyes go, of their own will, to the painting on the wall. He turns away from me, and I sigh in relief. But I trail after him to stand beside him in front of Portrait of Madame X. He examines it. We stare at it in silence for a long, long time. I, remembering. He, perhaps, seeking clues. He will find none in the brushstrokes, nor in the composition, nor in the subject, nor in the use of color, the black and the white and the browns, not
in the arch of her neck or the sharpness of her nose, the paleness of her skin or the drape of her hand. The only clues lie within me.

  My voice, quiet in the golden evening light. "I lost myself. I lost . . . who I was. Who I could be. I lost . . . everything. And I saw this painting. I don't know why, but it struck me. I had nothing, no name, no past, no future. And I saw this painting, and it . . . it meant something to me. I saw myself in it, somehow. I don't know. I'll never know. But I chose this painting. Madame X. Other portraits of the time, they're given names. But this one? Just . . . Madame X. She has a name, you know: Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau. But in this portrait, she is Madame X. The subject of a painting, no more, no less. Something in that meant something to me."

  I expect a comment, something deep and meaningful. Instead he turns and moves across the room to the wall opposite, to Van Gogh's Starry Night. "And this one?"

  I shrug. "I just like it."

  "Bullshit."

  I frown at the sudden and harsh vulgarity. "Logan--"

  "Tell me the truth, or tell me to shut up, but don't lie to me."

  "I wasn't lying. I saw it, and I liked it. I felt empty, and . . . blank. Numb. The kind of numb where you have so many feelings you just stop feeling any of them. I couldn't express them, couldn't express anything. And this painting? It expresses so much. Loneliness, but also peace. Distortion, confusion, passion. Insanity, even. There is something to latch on to, though, in the church steeple. You look at it, and you can see so many things. Whatever your past has brought you, there is something of this painting in you. Of course, then . . . I knew none of this. Not even my name. I just . . . knew I could look at the Starry Night and it would help me make sense of some of the many things in my mind."

  "I have so many questions." His voice is quiet as he says this, as if admitting a secret he fears will gut him.

  "Me, too." There is far more truth in those two words than I can even withstand.

  I am compelled to turn away, to let myself collapse on the couch. I find my fingers wrapped around the glass tumbler, eyeing the finger's worth of scotch whisky. Touch it to my lips. And yes, my lips touch the faint smear on the rim where his mouth pressed against glass: an intimacy. My lips burn, my throat burns, my eyes water, I cough and swallow, cough. Liquid fire races down my throat, spreads through my stomach and into my veins.

  Oh.

  This is why they drink such vile stuff.

  The afterburn, the heat in my blood, the dizzy warmth in my skull . . . another taste, another cough-swallow-cough-cough, and the buzz expands.

  I could float away.

  Elbows on knees, knees together, feet wide apart, leaning forward, staring at the map with its strange spelling and bizarre curvature and not-quite accurate geographical relationships, I am dizzy and floating in the clouds, finding a looseness in my skull, something vital disconnecting. A tether, snaking and curling into itself, no longer attached.

  His hand, wrapping around mine. Not taking the glass away, but rather his hand on mine, over mine, engulfing, enveloping, covering. He's on the couch beside me. How? When? He isn't massive. He is perhaps six feet, an inch or two more, at most. Compact. His muscles seem . . . harder, somehow. Thicker, though not as hugely bulging and perfectly designed as . . . I shake my head, forgetting where that train of thought was going. He is a predator. Every muscle honed from use. Nothing spare, nothing excess. I'm staring. Helpless.

  My stare is drawn up, away from the sculpture of arms and chest and thighs, up, to tumultuous indigo pools, so bright and vivid as to be nearly luminescent.

  Oh . . .

  I'm drawn in. Falling forward. I see eternity in that shade of blue.

  My hand, beneath his, tightens on the glass. His, on mine, lifts. The tumbler with its scotch contents touches his mouth. I tip the glass upward, my hand forming the motion, spilling the liquid onto his tongue. I can see his teeth, a pink splotch of tongue. I watch his Adam's apple bob. He doesn't cough as he swallows. Now the vessel, nearly empty, is moving to me. My hand under Logan's. Our hands moving in sync. He brings the tumbler to my lips, we tilt it, and I swallow.

  Fire burns.

  In my throat, in my veins,

  between my thighs.

  Heat and moisture, fiery and potent as the scotch whisky in my belly, pools between my legs.

  Logan's nostrils flare, and I wonder if he can smell my essence. How long has passed now? How many minutes have been taken in the exchange of sips, mine and his? They've passed in silence, however many it is. But this silence--it is alive. Not mere absence of word or sound, but communication of something deeper, some language of eyes meeting and hands brushing and breaths counted, a syntax of sensuous gazes, and something deeper yet, something felt in the gut, something shared that cannot be enumerated or encapsulated or communicated in mere thought or language.

  As there is something in the beauty of art that stirs the soul, so is there something in a profoundly vital silence that moves the heart.

  His eyes move to my lips as I swallow the scotch, and this time I do not cough. I lick my lips, and his eyes follow the path of my tongue from mouth corner to corner, capturing each last drop of the whisky. His tongue moves, too. Between his lips, and I watch it as he watched me. I can almost taste his tongue and lips rather than my own.

  His lips part, and he sighs, the air passing slightly through his nose as well. His brows are drawn down, the wrinkle at the bridge of his nose furrowed and deep. The sigh . . . it was the sound he made after kissing me.

  Huh. That's how it sounds. Huh, but a breath, rather than vibrating vocal cords.

  I have that sound captured in my soul.

  The tip of my nose touches his. The earth has tilted and I am falling into him. My elbows still on my knees, but my arms are crossed in an X, left hand drooping to my right knee and vice versa.

  Three mouthfuls of scotch. I am not drunk; I am intoxicated by Logan.

  There is a dab of liquid at the corner of Logan's mouth. I am utterly seized by the need to lick it away. To kiss it away. To taste scotch on his skin. I lean forward, breathing slowly, tongue sliding along my lips.

  But at the last moment, I catch myself, stop. I could weep from the need to taste his kiss, to taste whisky-honeyed flesh. Instead, I touch my thumb to his mouth. Wipe. Smear. And then . . .

  I suck the hint of moisture off my thumb. Logan's chest makes a sound as of mountains colliding. A groan? A murmur?

  Sense returns, albeit in dizzy snatches. I lurch to my feet, stumble away, bedroom bound.

  He is too much. Too close. Too intense, too embedded in the meaning of my need and embroiled in the substance of my desire. I cannot fathom moments without him now. Yet I cannot breathe because he is all of the fractal seconds I possess, he is every stuttered fragment of time, and each breath is a drink of him. Intoxicated, I breathe yet more of him. Drowning, I am become nothing but the taste of his presence, the flavor of his eyes on mine and the glance of knuckle past knuckle, the feast of a memory of a kiss.

  I close my bedroom door and collapse backward against it. I hear nothing. Only the thunderous pound of my heart, the knowledge of my guilt. The promise of what cameras have seen, and what I will suffer for it.

  I hear my front door open. It's a subtle sound, a click of the knob twisting, the latch sliding in. The whisper of weather seal on hardwood.

  Suddenly, panic seizes me.

  If he leaves now, I will collapse inward like a star under its own weight.

  Unthinking, I tear open my bedroom door, flee out, across the living room, the tumbler, now empty, alone on the coffee table. My front door is closing. I catch it.

  "Logan?"

  I don't know what comes next; I haven't thought this far ahead. I just knew I couldn't let him leave like that.

  I see him now. Back turned to me, broad shoulders bowed and hunched, hard fists clenched, beautiful head ducked. An imposing, virile, masculine figure, arousing and erotic.

  "Cinderella." He hea
rs my door, twists his head to look at me over his shoulder. He is not smiling, and his chest is heaving as if his breath has been leeched by intense physical combat.

  "Prince Charming." It is whispered, barely audible, a small, sibilant sound.

  I have stepped across my threshold. Out into the hallway. Out of the purview of the cameras.

  Another unspoken rule, violated.

  What comes next?

  I crash against his chest, and his hands are on my back, low, pulling me against him. We twist, a dancing series of steps, his mouth slanting across mine, not just kissing but tasting, feeling, probing, daring, teasing. We spin. I am lifted free of the ground, and my spine is up against the wall beside my door, a full 360-degree rotation. His hands on my back. Oh . . . lower. Fingertips digging into the soft bubble of my backside's upper swell. I feel his heart beating a double-hammer rhythm in his chest, as furious as my own. My arms . . . slipping serpentine around his neck, hands cupping the back of his head and his nape beneath his hair, soft, firm, warm, strong.

  I kiss him.

  Push up with my mouth and engage his kiss.

  All the world ceases to exist. Fades. Flickers and gutters, a candle flame extinguished.

  Oh, this kiss.

  It is all.

  The whole of history and the entire potentiality of the future.

  The minutiae of the present, compressed into the singularity of his mouth on mine, his hands tender and strong and confident, gently exploring the curve of my bottom and the bell of my hips. Tug, keeping me taut against him.

  I feel his erection thickening between us, so flush against his hard body am I.

  I am condensed into a mass of need.

  The kiss is rapture, his tongue sliding between my lips, tasting me, slipping and seeking. I taste him in return, kiss him back. Demand with my body his kiss, his touch. His hands move down to the backs of my thighs, cup, curl, and suddenly I am airborne, and my legs seem to know what to do. They wrap around his trim wedge of a waist. I writhe. Moan. Is that my throat, making so needy a noise? It is. His hand is at the back of my neck, under the knot of my hair, his other arm beneath my bottom, supporting me, holding me.

  Our kiss is one of starvation, as if we've both gone all our lives without this, knowing in our guts we needed it and not having a name for it or a definition of it but now here it is and we cannot live without it another moment. A kiss of utter need.