Lying In Bed

by Rose, M. J.

  It made me feel something I hadn’t remembered for a long time.

  Not what want is. But what craving is.

  How much I had savored every second of it and played with it and shared it and used it with my first lover. And how it flavored all of our time together.

  We were bitter and sweet, dark rich chocolate perfumed with oranges. The kind of chocolate that you don’t eat quickly, but hold on your tongue, almost like a communion wafer, and let dissolve, your mouth alive with subtle bursting flavors too complicated to identify.

  Who was she?

  What did she write to Gideon?

  What would he add to the end of the stories I wrote for to make the letters more personal, more wicked, more promising, more salacious, sweeter, more loving?

  And then, as I was finally falling asleep, I realized none of those questions were the ones that mattered. There was only one I needed to understand before morning.

  Why did any of this matter to me?

  25.

  The flower district opens early, before other businesses do. In midtown Manhattan, on the west side, is where hoards of small florists, restaurant owners, and retailers come to pore over the day’s offerings and choose from among the hundreds of thousands of flowers that are delivered fresh each morning.

  By the time I got there, at 9 a.m., the foot traffic was slowing down. To be standing on a street corner in the middle of midtown Manhattan, with traffic whizzing by and bus fumes filling the air, and yet have the overwhelming scent of flowers waft over you is incongruous.

  The late May day was unusually warm and I’d taken off my black sweater and tied it around my waist. My crisp white shirt, and khakis were already starting to stick to me.

  I saw Gideon across the street before he saw me and I watched him cross: his long strides, his observant eye taking in everything around him as if absorbing it into his consciousness. It was an artist’s trick. My mother and Cole and my stepdad did it, but through the lens of a camera. My mentor and teacher, Kim Cassidy, did it by making tiny drawings in a sketchbook that she always kept with her. No matter what other kind of art she created, it was those minute observations she drew in a flurry of movement in less than a sixty seconds that were her best work. I had a notebook, too. But my drawings were mediocre. I don’t have the patience to draw well. I wondered how Gideon stored his impressions.

  “This place is amazing,” Gideon said as he handed me a steaming Styrofoam cup. “Black, right?” he asked.

  I took the coffee. “That was really nice of you.”

  He shook his head. “That’s me, courteous to the core.”

  “What about that bothers you?”

  Now it was his turn to be surprised by something I’d said. “In everything but my work, I can be far too accommodating.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Yes, I do. But it doesn’t help that I know.”

  “So why?”

  “I just feel so damn grateful that I get to do what I do with my life. I almost lost my hand once. In an auto accident.” He pushed up his shirt cuff and showed me the old scars on his wrist and arm. More scars. “I was in the hospital for a long time. I couldn’t work. Missing it, worrying about whether or not I’d still be able to sculpt… it changed me.”

  I nodded. “What did you mean about not being accommodating when it comes to your work?”

  “I’m too stubborn for my own good. I won’t bend. That’s why I left Cornell. Me and my damn principles.”

  I sipped the coffee. It was good and strong. “What happened?”

  He laughed sardonically. “The dean of the art school relaxed the requirement of figure drawing for students majoring in fine arts. I went crazy. How can you break the rules if you don’t know the rules? I refused to teach unless the figure drawing requirements were reinstated. They weren’t. So, I’m here.” Then he shrugged as if the conversation were irrelevant. “Now where are all these flowers?”

  The first small stall was filled with tulips. Long-stem, french tulips, tight in the bud, in soft colors that looked like faded curtains in a chateau. The flowers were elegant and lush, in bunches so big that their opulence was almost an embarrassment.

  But tulips don’t have a strong scent and we moved on.

  Have you ever spent two hours walking among cut flowers? Touching them and smelling them? Letting their perfumes mix and mingle and impregnate your pores?

  We began with lilacs, buying two large bunches of pale lavender blooms that emitted fragrance without you having to bury your nose in them.

  Their smell was sweet without being cloying, and fresh the way no perfume can be.

  Next we found precious bundles of hyacinths with a scent more exotic and deeper than the lilacs. It opened my heart to sniff them. Made me close my eyes and hold my breath once I’d the smell was inside me.

  In a corner of the next stall we found rubrum lilies with their aroma of ritual and passion. These are Easter flowers, the only ones worthy of the story of Christ rising from the cross. But when I breathe them in, I don’t think of resurrection. I think of Mary, finding solace in this fragrance. Of a man’s mother weeping and of her tears turning into this scent.

  We bought roses, too.

  Alone, they can be too sweet and too familiar. But not mixed in with all the others. These were white and fat, and their edges were tinged with a blush of pink. They perfumed the rest of the bouquet with an edge of nostalgia and old-fashioned seduction.

  “What kind of flowers does she like?” I asked him as we walked to the next stall, our arms laden with flowers.

  He looked at me but he wasn’t seeing me. I could tell that. He was picturing her. But something in his expression wasn’t what I expected. No smile. No softening of his features. And then he refocused so that he was seeing me again.

  “I don’t know her that well yet. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  I wanted more explanation. I wanted it. It meant something to me. How had he gotten to be so obsessed with her without knowing her? I didn’t want him to be shallow. To have fallen for an image without soul or substance. Except why the fuck did that matter? Why did I care what kind of man he was?

  “I don’t want to talk about her. Tell me what kind of flowers you like best.” he said. “Show them to me.”

  “They don’t have that strong a smell.”

  “Show them to me.”

  We went in search of them.

  The next few stalls said they were out of them. But finally, after six more tries, we found them.

  Pure white peonies.

  Each flower was at more than 8 inches wide. Overwhelming, multi-petaled, lush and provocative. I wanted to take them and pull them apart, to tug the petals off and dig deeper to find the odd center of the flower where a few blood- tinged petals and saffron-colored stamens were hiding.

  I pointed them out to Gideon.

  He reached down, scooping up two dozen, and took them over to the owner, who quoted a price. Gideon paid.

  “What else do we need?” he asked.

  If he noticed my surprised smile, he didn’t comment on it.

  We spent another half-hour walking through the flower market, buying more and more until, finally, we couldn’t carry anything else, and then we hailed a taxi.

  As soon as the door closed the driver said, “I hope you’re not going far. I have allergies.”

  “Where are we going?” Gideon asked me.

  I realized I had no idea. My loft? His? I hadn’t thought that through. Where should we take the flowers? And then I knew, absolutely.

  “You can take us to the 79th street entrance to Central Park,” I told the driver. And with a grunt of something I didn’t understand, he took off.

  Fifteen minutes later, Gideon followed me as I led him north past a playground, down a path until it forked, then left onto another path. To one side was a deep green lawn, to the other wooden park benches with young mothers with baby carriages and elderly retirees
sitting and enjoying the morning.

  We reached the toy sailboat pond and walked halfway around it. Exactly where the oversize sculpture of Hans Christian Andersen sat, I stepped off the path and started climbing up the hill to a grove of cherry trees, thick with pink blossoms.

  There was a very slight breeze. As we reached the trees, the wind blew and petals fell like a pink rain. There was grass beneath the trees but it was almost invisible under the thick carpet of petals.

  This was my destination.

  I laid down my share of flowers, as did he.

  Once they were out of our arms and I could survey them, I was surprised to see how many we’d bought. There must have been two hundred stems. I hadn’t realized how much money he’d spent.

  The only flowers he didn’t put down on the ground under the tree were the peonies. Instead, he handed them to me. “These are for you. Not for the story.”

  I bent my head into the fat open blossoms. Surprised by the gesture. Seduced by the man or the flowers? I wasn’t sure which. They were so obscenely lush, it was as if he was handing me a bouquet of erotic suggestions. They had stopped being flowers for me years ago. But, until he handed them to me, I had forgotten about those first peonies I had discovered. At our house in Vermont. Those had been pink and Cole had picked them for me from my mother’s garden and brought them to me in the dead of night, into my bedroom, stealing in silently when everyone else was asleep. He had undressed me first, slipping my thin nightgown off my shoulders and down my hips so that I was lying in bed, naked, the only light coming from the half moon shining through the window. Then, one by one, he had laid the flowers on top of me. Covering me with them. Dressing me with them. Until I was blanketed by flowers. Finally, when there was no bare skin showing, he smiled at me and said, “As pretty as a picture.”

  That was when it began.

  When we made love that first night, our bodies crushed the flowers. In the morning when I tried to gather them up and make them into a bouquet, I found that our twisting and turning had ruined them. But I’d kept the petals in an envelope. For years.

  It wouldn’t matter if I borrowed that story for Gideon. Its emotion had disintegrated for me along with the petals years ago. I could at least make some use of it now. Maybe by recreating it for him, I could even salvage some of what made the flowers so beautiful that night and redeem them, turning them into something other than another memory that I kept at the bottom of a drawer along with the rest of the detritus of that old affair.

  “You keep leaving,” he said.

  “I was thinking of how to start the story.”

  We sat down, surrounded by the flowers. He was leaning up against the trunk of the tree, watching me.

  I wanted to look away, but I didn’t.

  “The woman is sleeping. She thinks you are away. That it will be weeks until she will see you again. She goes to sleep every night trying think only of you so that while she sleeps she’ll dream about you, because sometimes in a dream you can make something real. You can taste and touch and feel and, for a while, be reassured and lulled into thinking that you aren’t dreaming at all but living. And that’s what she wishes. That while she sleeps she can make you come to her in at least that way, so that she will miss you less. Because the missing is turning her pale and making her cheeks hollow and her eyes dull. And it’s leaving an ache inside that she is aware of all day long.

  “Women can’t feel their wombs, we can’t feel our cavities, except we can feel their emptiness. The lustful ache it causes in her interrupts her when she is doing other things.

  “That night she thinks she is dreaming of a garden. Even in her sleep she smells the scent of flowers. Jasmine. Lilac. Gardenia. Rose. Hyacinth. In her dream these scents all combine until she is floating on them and they are holding her aloft in their stem-and- leaf arms, and they propel her so that she is sailing on the scents.

  “She knows she is naked. She can touch her own skin. Soft. Dry. And then she feels something else - a touch not her own. It is softer and lighter than fingers can be, but more than breath would feel blowing on her. She shivers in her sleep. Tingles. Her nipples harden. She can feel that. And that she’s wet between her legs, too.

  “As if the smell has aroused her.

  “The perfume is intensifying. At first it was one layer deep, as if a single fine cotton sheet had been laid over her body. And then it thickened, as if an almost weightless blanket had been placed on top of the sheet. The scents are commingling and becoming more complicated.

  “She moans. Feeling for a moment as if she is being kissed by the scent of the lilacs and roses. And then yet another layer is added. Still the combined weight of them is feather light. But the fragrances themselves grow heavier. Making her drowsy even in her sleep but stirring her at the same time. She wants to hold on to the aromas. To stay in their thrall for as long as she can.

  She wants to breathe in the perfume, and press it into her skin, and have it fuck her pores. She wants to soak it up the way you soak up a lover’s kisses. Swallow it so that the scent becomes part of her and makes her skin and her hair fragrant.”

  I didn’t realize I had shut my eyes until I opened them. And then the first thing - the only thing - I saw was Gideon’s face. His marsh green eyes, like a cat’s, staring at me.

  “Don’t stop.” His voice was husky and sounded a warning. But for a perverse reason I couldn’t name, that only made me want to go further. Nothing mattered anymore. It was as if I was trampling on something that had once been important but wasn’t any longer and it was all right for me to ruin it. I needed to keep going. To defile it.

  I knew that I wouldn’t understand until much later what I was doing or how I was finding the guts to do it without being ashamed. There was time for all that. For now, it felt too good to see these things in my mind and to say them out loud. Damn the repercussions.

  “You have been watching her sleep. Seeing the expression change on her face, and it goes from peaceful to wanton. And the longer you watch, the more you want to touch her. Not only with the flowers, the way you have been doing, but with your fingers and your tongue and your cock.”

  A chill went down my spine. I had crossed a line. It felt like I was shouting the words now. As if I’d thrown off some heavy winter coat. Had leapt out of it and was finally able to breathe.

  “You’ve been covering her with the flowers. Making a blanket of them that hides her body from you. And still she sleeps. You want her to wake up so you can go to her and hold her. So that she will open to you and swallow you whole with her body. But at the same time you don’t want to lose the expression on her face. Because you’ve never seen a woman like this before. Unaware. Not acting. Not conscious of being watched. Showing a desire that is most like the way desire feels inside you. Not some shy kind of wanting. Or brazen greed that is almost angry in its insistence. This is neither feminine nor masculine, pushy nor restrained. It is simply a true feeling. Longing the color of the hyacinths.

  “You have put the last of the lilacs around her shoulders. And now you cover her chest with the roses. A necklace of rubies that open as they touch her skin.

  “What you have left are the peonies. The pure, white, full, open flowers. But she is covered. There is nowhere for them. Except, you think, between her legs, which even in her sleep are bared to you.

  One of the peonies is open wider than the others, this is the one you choose. Slowly, you kneel down between her thighs and brush it against her vagina. You stroke her with it in one direction and then change direction. You feather her with it. And then tease her with it. You crush it against her.

  “Your own body is responding and you want to brush all the flowers off her skin and get on top of her, but you don’t because there’s one thing you want more.

  “She opens her eyes. But you don’t see her do that. You are looking between her legs at the flower you are pressing into her, mashing into her. Then you bring it up to your face. You bend over it and lower your
face to it.

  “And then you breathe. Deeply. Now the aroma that the flower gives off is not its own, but a mixture of a light floral scent and her musky scent. Now the flower smells like the deep earth center of a woman – this woman. And this is what sends you over the edge, what pushes you finally past wanting her, past thinking, into sensation. The scent is a more potent perfume than the roses and the lilacs, heliotrope and lilies, all together. It is more powerful than the hyacinths and jasmine.

  “She sees that in your face. And that is when she gives herself to you.”

  26.

  A kiss is something that you take for granted when you have been in a relationship for a long time. It’s given easily. As a thank you, a goodbye, a hello, a punctuation mark, a prelude to love making, a show of comfort or support.

  But a first kiss is none of those things. It is an invitation to a sensate world that is yet unknown. It is dark in the light and light in the dark. It is foreign in its tastes and smells. It may begin with your lips but it moves along your body in a way that brings your blood to the surface. It turns you inside out so that you become your feelings and your thoughts retreat, bowing to the physicality of the kiss’s moment. The rest of you withdraws to allow the coming together of a mere two inches of flesh that fly you to an unknown place – the way you can travel to a new city or town and recognize that you are in its center without knowing the particular buildings, foliage, storefronts.

  There is one kind of first kiss that is like a meal. It begins with a taste. Sweet like honey, and fresh like mint. It feeds you in a way that food cannot, giving you immediate nutrients. It is delicious in the way that something you have never eaten can only be.

  It has a beginning that is soft and patient. And sometimes stays in that place. Which is all right.

  Or else it slips into a more potent activity.