by Rose, M. J.
Gideon turned to me. I felt his eyes but didn’t look at him. I remained where I was, staring into the mottled mirror. The idea of this second assignment – to create an erotic story about sight – was coming together in my mind in a series of disparate images. One overlapping the other.
To get through this I had to hold on to what I’d learned at the beach: that making up a story for Gideon was no different than creating a collage. It took the same mental action. An ability to let go of following a rational line of thinking and let the random visuals tell their own story. Not to impose structure on it until the internal logic revealed itself. Yes, it was a three-dimensional manifestation of the imagery that I ordinarily would have created, with papers and scissors and glue. But it was still the same process. And that gave me courage and some – well at least a little - self-confidence.
“She wouldn’t turn away from the mirror, no matter how much she wanted to…” I said a little braver and at the same time more nervous than I’d been at the beach. I knew what to expect this time. I wanted it for the thrill of creating it. I just wished Gideon wasn’t there. That he wasn’t so real.
“She would watch herself undressing. Not look up or out the window or even at the bed. She knows that her goal is to seduce him and she knows how to do that. All her energy and enthusiasm is for that. Her power will be in being powerless. He wants her to undress for him, and that’s enough. She can obey. Because the act will excite her too. Knowing his eyes are on her, that he is completely riveted by her disrobing is all the incentive she needs.”
“Why are they here?” Gideon asked, almost in a whisper as if he was afraid to break the mood.
“He has brought her to show her this room. He had it built and designed for her. This secret room where she can come and go from a separate entrance. A secret entrance to a secret room.
“She is his mistress. For far longer than any of the others were. And he has rewarded her with this clandestine bedchamber to keep her happy. To give them a trysting place that is both comfortable, opulent, and convenient for him.
“It makes him almost deliriously happy that now he can leave a dinner or a meeting in his residence, where he lives with his wife, children, and many servants, and walk through a bookcase, down a short hall, then up a hidden staircase to their place. The rest of the house can carry on around them and no one can know, will know, ever, where they are.
“There is also a second exit and entrance to the room. This one can be accessed from the canal. A small door next to the servants’ door, in the back. He has apologized to her for this, but she doesn’t mind coming to him from near the servants’ entrance. It is safer for her, because she is married, too.
“Marriages are arranged for financial and political reasons and so it is the custom of the city at this time, that affairs of the heart are acceptable and engaged in frequently but still conducted clandestinely.
“He’s proud of the room. It’s the most beautiful in Venice. He imported a sculptor, from Rome who arrived with three apprentices, to create a magical, heavenly place. And while she does think it’s beautiful, and appreciates the effort he went to, she is most mesmerized by the mirror: the finest she has ever looked into. She can’t take her eyes off of it. Or off the two of them, facing each other in the reflective glass. She has never seen her own face flushed by any kind of desire before, so it comes as something of a shock to her…”
I stopped. Took a breath. Closed my eyes. I could tell Gideon was waiting for more. But I didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t.
“Don’t–”
“What?”
“Don’t stop. You’re really seeing it. Seeing them. You disappeared the way you did at the ocean.”
“It was getting complicated.”
“You mean it was getting too erotic too quickly?”
I shrugged.
“It was. It was even easier for you this time.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling. I could feel his eyes on me but I didn’t turn. I kept facing the mirror. Looking at the two of us. At his fingers flexed beside his thighs. At the dark hair falling into his eyes. He was watching, waiting for me to go on or explain more about why I didn’t want to.
“Didn’t I prove that I could do this with the last story? Isn’t it enough for you to see the room and know the direction I’m going in? I want to go home and write it myself in my own way.”
“But I wouldn’t be part of it then. I can’t send the story as something connected to me unless I’m somehow intrinsic to it. I need to know what you are going to write. Besides, why do you care if it’s becoming erotic? That’s what I hired you for, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you do for everyone else?”
“Yes, of course…”
But I was embarrassed. There was a difference between creating these fantasies in my own bedroom and speaking them out loud in front of someone. Just because I’d done it once before, that didn’t mean it was any easier this time.
Like I had at the beach, I felt exposed in front of Gideon. And I resented it. Why did he make me feel this way? And why was he so insistent on being present when I created the story? Being present wasn’t being part of the story.
We were at an impasse.
“You know I have three other possibilities of locales for the sight story. Now that you know the direction this one is going in, wouldn’t you like to see the others so you can decide?”
He shook his head.
Mixed in with my discomfort, I also felt pride that he’d liked my first choice.
“Tell me more about them. The couple. Why they are here. Who they are,” he said, offering me a way back into the tale.
I turned to the bed instead of the speckled mirror and tried to imagine that no one was in the chamber with me.
“He is a Venetian prince and she is his mistress. Both are married. Each of them has had other lovers, often more than one at time. This is the first experience they’ve had with being faithful – in their fashion. And because he is so in love with her, he’s built her this room – created for her pleasure. It’s full of secrets for her. Magic boxes that open like puzzles, revealing jewels for her to wear. Erotic paintings on the wall that hide behind damask curtains until they are lifted. Special clothes in the closet that he has had sewn for her: gowns with pockets that are open at the other end so he can put his hand through them and stroke her under the folds of the silk. Bodices cut even lower than the current style to reveal all of her breasts, not only her décolletage.
“This is the first night that he’s brought her here - slipping away during the masquerade ball going on in the main part of the residence. Over a thousand people in velvet and silk -bewigged and bejeweled -their eyes and noses covered by elaborate masks- dance and eat and drink and make love in hidden alcoves, only a few hundred feet away. They’ve left all of them to come here. No one realized they had left the party. Even if anyone saw the two lovers escape, their identities were hidden by their masks.”
The present day, the museum, New York City and the man I was standing with had disappeared and I was instead looking in on a scene to which I had not been invited. I was hiding in an alcove of the room, observing the two lovers, hearing them, smelling them, in awe of them and moved by them. I was an observer who had found a way not only to see what was going on but also viscerally experience it, feeling their emotions and the sensations in their bodies.
I knew how her heart lifted when she saw him reach out to touch her cheek. It was not the way my heart had ever soared. But I wasn’t important. I was here to bear witness to their passion. I continued to talk to Gideon, no longer aware of speaking the words, the way a translator does not hear individual words consciously as she works.
“Tonight, two hours ago, she entered the villa through the front door with her husband – a nobleman twenty years older than she is. She is wearing her finest gown, blue velvet laced with silver threads in an embroidered leaf pattern. The gown is cut low in the front, as is the fashion, to show off a woman’s breas
ts as if they are jewels.
“He waited until all the guests had arrived and the eating and drinking had begun. He waited until everyone was drunk on wine and lost in the luxury of the food and the company and the mystery of the masks.
“He had sent his servant to her villa earlier in the day with a letter, written by him, in private, and sealed by his hand. In it he had given her instructions, a map, and a key. He explained that after the party got underway, sometime around midnight, he would catch her eye. That would be her clue to make her way outside and walk west of the palazzo. The map showed her where the servants’ entrance was and where the door was that she would use the key to open. She was to walk up the flight of stairs and there, he promised with all of his heart, she would find him waiting for her.
“She saw him giving her the sign shortly after midnight and had little trouble slipping away, so thick was the crowd. She had memorized the map and found the doorway easily. The key slipped into the lock the way a man slips into a woman who is waiting for him.
The candle-lit hallway was small and intimate and there was nowhere to go except up the staircase. As she climbed, she marveled at the intricate balustrade - carved into wood, a man and a woman were erotically intertwined, their forms repeating over and over in different sexual positions all the way up, so that her fingers made out the woman’s waist and thighs and breasts and the man’s arms and thighs and buttocks over and over as she ascended.
“At the top of the steps was a door, carved as intricately as the balustrade but with only one couple in bas-relief, embracing under a tree, heavy with fruit. The couple’s limbs and the tree’s limbs all intertwined, so that it appeared as if they were all part of an au natural menage a trois. The man, the woman, and the tree. All lovers.
“She opened the door and saw him standing by the window. In the candlelight, wearing his black silk mask and only the bottom half of the costume, he looked dangerous and delicious. His chest was bare and his skin had a slight slick to it – as if he had rushed here and overheated. His skin drew her to him.
“One hand outstretched. To touch him. Make sure he was real. To feel his heart beat faster under her fingertips. To know that his excitement to see her was as great as hers to see him. Her mouth was dry, between her legs was wet.
“She only had to glimpse him for her body to respond resoundingly.
“On the table, by the window was an open bottle of wine and two glasses already filled. He picked up both and began to walk toward her.
“She, too, was wearing her mask - the same dark blue, shot through with silk thread, as her dress - and, as always, he was instantly aroused. Seeing her in public made him yearn for her, but when she came to him in private, his longing turned into something else. A kind of fire that coursed through him and made him hot inside his skin in a way that no woman had before. He wanted to grab her, to pull her to him, to kiss her and lose himself in her. But he held back.
“There was nothing more pleasurable than the pain of waiting. Of knowing that she had come here for him. And risked so much to do so. He wanted to seduce her slowly. So that she enjoyed it. So that he could relish it. And he wanted to rush it and overwhelm them both all at once.
“He handed her a thick emerald-colored glass filled with red wine. And he smiled. He whispered one word: Welcome. And clinked his glass against hers.
“Her eyes twinkled and she smiled at him before she drank. Then, to make them both wait for the taking, he showed her around the room, slowly, explaining where he’d had everything made, where the craftspeople had come from, why he’d wanted damask on the walls that was that particular rose color. Why only the carpenter from Milan could make the headboard. It would have been interesting had they not been so anxious to take each other to bed. Instead, it was torturous. But it was a game. And they played all games well. It was part of their mutual seduction.
“She stopped in front of the mirror and stared into it. He moved so that he stood behind her, the two of them looking at each other in the glass. He lifted his left arm and wrapped it around her body so that he could stroke her breast.
“With his right hand, he reaches up and pulls the elaborate jeweled comb from her hair, releasing the golden twist and with it a fresh breeze of her perfume. The finest. Imported from France.
“He breathes in deeply. She can feel his body up against her now. The broad torso. The hard stomach. The thick bulge of his erection pressing, pressing into her buttocks. She leans back. Not overtly. A discreet action he couldn’t be sure was conscious, but it gave him maximum contact with her body – a pleasure for him – and it gave her the feel of the full length of him – a pleasure for her because knowing how excited she makes him excites her. She is young and holds nothing back from him. She feels her insides tighten, getting ready. He is not her first lover since her marriage, but he is the first to show her how much pleasure can be extracted from an encounter between a man and a woman.
“He is entranced by her.
“He buries his face in her hair. And she watches this man, who is still something of a surprise to her, in the mirror, looking at his eyes heavy with want and then at his hand as it caresses her exposed skin.
“Now the wantonness she’s felt all night becomes the only thing she’s conscious off. The pressure and pinpricks of sensation between her legs are becoming more intense and demanding. But she waits. Like him, she’s learned that the longer they can play, the more exquisite her final explosion will be. Squeezing her legs tightly together, she watches as he undoes her dress and exposes her full breasts to the mirror, and she stares at her own dark, extended nipples. It’s not that they are her breasts, or that she admires them, rather it is his hands moving over them, the way his thick fingers look so masculine against her white skin, the way her nipple puckers as he flicks his fingernail over it. It’s not her body, not his, it is the salaciousness of the image itself that brings her to the edge of her orgasm. It’s that want and desire can be seen – so clearly, so vividly – in the mirror. That she has become a voyeur of their lovemaking.
“He has never met anyone who he cares as much about giving to as he does with her. He watches her nipple harden in the mirror and that makes him smile. It is visual proof that she isn’t pretending – the way other women he has known have done – there is nothing perfunctory about the way she responds to him, and that is something he can see in the mirror.
“Her eyes are half shut, her lips are parted. Her tongue licking them, wetting them down again and again. As if she is parched from their foreplay and this is the only way that she can quench her thirst.
“Or, he thinks, she’s licking her lips to make him think of her other lips, to suggest to him that they are as open to him, as slicked.
“She reaches up and puts her hand over his, covering his fingers as they linger on her breast so that she can feel him move on her.
“This desire on her part to feel his fingers move inflames him even more and he disengages her hand to pull down her bodice completely, leaving her naked from the waist up. The sight in the mirror momentarily and literally takes his breath away. In between her breasts, an emerald teardrop, hanging from a gold chain makes her appear even more naked. The contrast of the deep green stone and the soft pale skin is as artful as if Carravaggio had painted it.
“Neither of them has ever made love in front of a mirror. But that’s what he tells her they are going to do. Every moment watched and felt at the same time. Eyes not looking at each other directly but into the reflective surface. It’s a seduction of sight. The sight of him touching her and the sight of her watching him. She will never face him or he her in a way that will excite either of them more than this exchange as they face each other in the mirror.”
17.
“Marlowe?”
His voice, like a breeze, rushed in - it was light, not quite worldly, and it brought me back to the present. I was, frankly, too astonished to even be self-conscious.
And I was confused.
&n
bsp; First because I had seemingly gone into another trance - one even deeper than the one I’d experienced at the ocean. I’d disappeared, had become unaware of where I was or that someone else was with me, or that I had been talking – creating this other world — for at least ten minutes.
Drugged? Deluded? Deranged?
I didn’t know.
And there was the story I’d told. Where had it come from? From what place had it erupted, almost as if it had already existed and I was channeling it.
How had I gone so deep into it?
And, even more than that, how had I been brazen enough to tell it?
I didn’t turn around to look at Gideon but knew he was slightly behind me and to the left because I could see him in the same mirror I’d been describing. And he was looking back at me in the mirror. Exactly the way I had imagined the lovers in the story had looked at each other. Locked in each other’s steady gaze.
“I don’t know what happened… I…”
Gideon didn’t smile, but neither did he take his eyes off of me. “You got completely lost in the story.”
“That’s never happened before… not like that… not when everything else gets knocked out. When I’m by myself, alone, writing … it always feels like slipping over some kind of divide where the characters are real and I’m a chimera. But this… its never been like this… even at the beach I was still aware of being there and of you being there… but this time I wasn’t even…” I broke off.
There was a long beat where neither of us said anything, but he continued to look at me in the mirror. My response started in my solar plexus. Deep and kicking, like a reminder of a hunger that you suddenly realize you are suffering from. Two seconds before, you didn’t even know you felt empty and now you can’t wait to get something to eat.
“It was a beautiful story,” he said.