by Rose, M. J.
I took strawberries and smeared them on my mouth.
He licked them off and then photographed the bits that were left.
He pulled off my shirt and touched my breasts streaking strawberry juice on them. He licked that off too. Then photographed what was left of the stain.
I don’t know what excited him more; the shots he was getting or what we were doing.
Well, I do know. Now I know. But I didn’t then.
30.
I stopped talking. This was very different than the stories I’d invented in the process of doing my job. I’d told Gideon more than I’d planned to. It wasn’t enough of an excuse that talking to him was so different than most of the people I’d met.
Why?
The way he listened was like an embrace. His certitude that what I had to say was important to him. The eye contact he made and that, once made, he never broke.
He had no agenda. He simply was there to listen to what I wanted to tell him.
Despite my silence, he continued to sit still, his head slightly cocked to one side and somehow his energy reached across the room, accepting me, cajoling me into telling him more things I’d never told anyone. Yes, it happened each time we’d worked on one of the erotic stories, but the way it happened again that night was different.
When I didn’t continue talking he took my hand and held it in his. His skin was warm and dry.
“How long did it go on?”
“Three years.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“Yes. Too much. So much so that I didn’t see what was going on. I missed all the clues.”
“What was going on?”
“I…. I thought…” I couldn’t tell him. It was too personal. Sure what I’d already told him was personal, but what had happened afterward was also humiliating.
“I’m not going to judge you, Marlowe.”
“When you sculpt, when you have people pose for you…” I gestured towards the silent giants that filled the rest of the large space. “How much of the real people do you capture?”
“Capture? You make it sound as if I’m raping them.” He thought and then answered. “I learn from them and try to glean something from them that I can add to my work to make it more about humanity and less about artifact.”
He had been watching my face when he spoke. “Why did that make you grimace?”
I didn’t know what to say. Any answer I gave would be too revealing.
Gideon didn’t move. He wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t pressure me. And it was that lack of determination, that worked on me. I kept thinking that it would be a relief to finally tell someone who might actually understand what I was talking about. I’d never met anyone before who’d have any insight into the odd relationship that a model has with an artist, that an artist has with a muse. But he might.
“Did you ever use any of your lovers as your models?
He hesitated. There was a serious look in his eyes as if he knew that the crux of my problem was tied up in this question and he wanted to give me an answer that would help.
The CD he had put on when we’d gotten to the loft had stopped playing. From the swish, swish of cars driving by in the street, I suddenly realized it was raining outside.
“I have asked two of the women I’ve been with to pose for me. One was self-conscious and couldn’t. The other did but I still haven’t finished that piece. It was complicated to know someone that well and not use what I knew about her – by way of our private relationship - in the sculpture. And that would have been unfair to her. To us. To what we’d meant to each other. I only use the outer shell of people who pose for me. I don’t go traipsing through their souls. And that’s what finishing that sculpture would have been. I use models to give me the muscle and bones. The heart, the themes, the meaning–” He put his free hand on his chest. “That comes from me.”
I took a deep breath. Started wishing that Cole– and then stopped. There was nothing to be gained by thinking about that.
“Cole did the opposite of what you do. He only wanted to get to the private part of me. The sexual part. He needed to have a relationship with me so that I’d open up to him and he could take the kind of pictures he wanted. He was like Rasputin. Lulling, mesmerizing, getting me to open to him so he could steal what he needed from me. And then as soon as I wanted it to stop – it was over.”
“You mean as soon as you wanted to stop the relationship he–”
I was talking too fast and too loudly when I interrupted him but I didn’t care. I was explaining it finally and I wanted to get it out there and away from me. I kept thinking if I said it maybe it would stop mattering so much. Maybe the show wouldn’t scare me so much.
“No. As soon as I asked him to stop talking the pictures… when I finally had had enough of them… when I finally started to worry about what he was going to do with them… he broke off the relationship with me. He ended it. What he loved wasn’t ever me. Or us. God, how I wished it was. I wanted it to be. He was in love with having his very own private poser. His very own model who would let him explore his art on her body.”
“Damn him.”
That was all he said, but he’d said it with so much disgust and vehemence it was enough.
I nodded.
“And you were 16 when it started?”
“Yes, and 19 when it ended.”
“What a prick.”
“It gets worse.”
“What?”
“I don’t know if… Damn, it doesn’t matter anymore. No. It does. It still does matter. Two years ago I met someone and started seeing him seriously and the fact of the photos being out there bothered me. I went and asked Cole to give me the negatives. Or to destroy them. He refused. We fought. I didn’t let up. He didn’t give in. We stopped talking. I’ve been dreading seeing any of those shots show up in print. I never did.
“But now, in ten days, he’s having his first one-man show. And I saw the invitation. I have it here—”
I grabbed for my bag, opened it and pulled out the worn, torn postcard and handed it to him.
Gideon looked down at the black and white photograph of the woman’s open mouth. The lips moist and swollen. The unmistakable expression of passion. And the mark on her cheek. It was a smear of strawberry juice - but only if you know that’s what you are looking for.
Gideon knew.
“This is you.” He didn’t ask but I nodded anyway.
“He’s showing the photographs. He’s showing me. To anyone who wants to see. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Everything about me that’s private will be public. On display. Sexually. Out there.”
I was sure of it. Certain that no one could do anything. Certainly, I couldn’t. I knew Cole. Knew how much his career meant to him, knew nothing else mattered.
Except the expression on Gideon’s face was saying something else.
31.
We sat in the darkened living room for a few minutes without speaking. I didn’t know what to say. I felt depleted. Having put the story into words and spoken them had left me with a deeper sense of anger than I’d felt before. And at the same time, a deeper sense of sadness.
“Do you want to take a walk? Get out of here?”
I nodded.
When we reached the street he took my arm and practically led me the three blocks to a French Bistro called Lucky Strike. I’d been to the dark-paneled, crowded restaurant before and its noisy familiarity was welcome.
He ordered a bottle of cabernet and we talked about inconsequential things that I don’t remember now. But what I can remember was the way he never took his eyes off me and the way he leaned in whenever I spoke. The sense of intimacy I felt. Sharing my history with him was so novel, and so shocking, that I wasn’t sure of myself.
I’d been with several men, even had fallen in love with Joshua, and yet I’d never told anyone about Cole. My mother didn’t know. My closest girlfriends didn’t know. And Grace, who was closer to me than my own s
ister, had no idea.
I realized I was hungry, that I’d never eaten those eggs I’d made myself hours before, and when the waiter came I ordered mussels and pomme frites and Gideon ordered the same thing, and after we’d started into our second glasses of the smooth, velvet wine, the waiter came out with big white stoneware bowls full of glistening black shells with steam rising from them and a huge plate of thin, golden, salty and crunchy French fries. The scent of the broth the mussels were simmering in wafted up. Garlic and wine and butter and the briny smell of the shellfish themselves. Using my fingers I spread apart the shell, felt the ligament break, put the half that held the meat up to my mouth and sucked the mussel in. It was hot and wet, sweet and full of the sea all at once with only a tiny bite of the onions that had been used to flavor the dish.
The contrast of the potatoes, which were light and crunchy to the chewiness of the mussels was perfect, and for a few minutes we gorged ourselves on the food without bothering to talk.
Halfway through the meal, Gideon leaned over with his finger and wiped the corner of my mouth.
I stopped eating. Didn’t take anything to drink. The action had been so natural and at the same time so provocative that I was stunned with the sudden knowledge of how much I wanted him.
It didn’t matter that he was with someone else, that he was a client sending my erotic stories to a woman who was away somewhere, that I might never see him again, or that if I gave in to how I felt he might not want to go forward and finish the last two stories with me.
I just wanted him.
It wasn’t something I can articulate. It was an urgency that was far down and high up in my solar plexus. I wanted Gideon inside of me. His arms around me. My face buried in his neck. His arms around me. My legs around him. I wanted the whole world to fall off and leave us alone, wrapped up in each other. For as long as it could last.
The kissed had been powerful, but the small touch had been a firestorm.
What is it that happens to our bodies when desire stings us awake like that? Where is it in our body? What feels it first? The brain? The womb? The nerve endings in the back of your head? And how do you manage to translate it so quickly and share it so seamlessly with the person you are with? What happens to your eyes, the lay of your lips, the muscles in your face that tells the other what you are feeling? I don’t know. It happens too fast to notice. It happened too fast that night. I knew that Cole had pictures of a face – my face – being transformed by passion. But it had been eight years since I’d seen them, and when I had, I hadn’t really recognized the transformation.
It didn’t matter. Cole didn’t matter. Not anymore. I didn’t have to say anything but Gideon knew and paid the check and we walked out into the street. He turned me to him, there on the sidewalk and slid his hands around my back and pulled me to him hard and kissed me even harder.
I could feel the entire length of his body against me and hear the traffic and knew that people were walking by us, but I didn’t care. It was the first time that I can remember in years not caring who was watching.
It had been eight years since I had been un-self-conscious about being with a man.
That night I could have made love standing on the sidewalk. And we almost did.
We kissed until our lips burned and then we walked back to his loft, alternately taking steps and then stopping to kiss each other again.
He put his hand up my shirt and brushed my breasts with his fingertips, my nipples hardening under their light touch. I felt weak- kneed and couldn’t walk forward. He took the opportunity to push me up against a wall and kiss me again, this time his hand snaking into the waistband of my jeans and down, down to where it was dark and damp. His fingers played there long enough for me to feel my insides tightening. A sound escaped from my mouth that sounded like a moan except it was far away in my ears.
He pulled his hand out, his fingers glistening in the street lamps and when he was sure my eyes were on him, he sucked off the slick. Smiling at me. I wasn’t sure I could keep standing. Or that I could walk. Or that I could wait.
“You have no idea how damn fucking hard it has been to listen to you spinning those fantasies and keep my hands to myself,” he said.
He took my arm, he smiled. Despite the heavy sexuality that I could read in his eyes, there was a sweetness to the expression on his lips that was so kind I wanted to stand there and cry.
But not as much as I wanted something else.
We walked up the steps, and he opened the door to his loft and turned on the light and started to make love to me there in the entranceway.
And even though the light was on I didn’t shy away.
Cole had always needed the lights on when we had sex. Because he needed to shoot me in the light. Not even our fucking had been a camera-free zone. The camera came to bed with us. The lights. The clicking. His fingers. His tongue. His cock. The camera. It was all part of the same haze.
And so it had been eight years since I’d been willing to make love in the light. Eight years since I had not asked a man to turn off the lights. And eight years since I had stood in front of someone who watched me as I took off my clothes. Piece by piece. Slowly. Openly. Facing him. Not caring that he wasn’t doing anything but watching.
No. That’s not true. It wasn’t that I didn’t care that he was watching. It was that I wanted him to watch.
And then when I was naked, and all my clothes were on the floor, I didn’t go to him. The sculpture was behind me. And that was where I went. I wasn’t thinking, it was not planned. But as soon as all my clothes were off I knew that I wanted to walk among his work.
I walked up to the first man and stepped forward, and took the path between his two halves, watching myself in his mirrored interior.
Gideon walked over to where I was and watched my strange dance through his people.
Inside of the first man, I stopped and faced one side and then the other, looking at myself reflecting back at me in the man’s silhouette. My breasts, my thighs, my feet strangely superimposed on the man’s mirrored insides.
Next, I walked around to the youngest woman and into her, this time putting my hands up to the mirror. Touching the reflection of my face. My shoulders, my hips. Making sure that it was me I was looking at and not the woman Gideon had sculpted.
It was as if I was showing him that I was different than his static people. Making sure he understood that I was flesh and they were metal and that I moved of my own accord, that I could not be posed or frozen or perform the way he wanted. Even though he had not wanted that. Even though he had not asked any of those things of me. But I had my own history.
I needed to walk naked in his work and show him that I wasn’t afraid.
Gideon stood and watched me walk through the second man. And then he held me with his eyes and stripped off his shirt and his pants. Once he was naked he walked to me. I waited for him, there in the protection of the tall bronze man.
I looked at Gideon’s reflection in the mirror. I watched as his arms went around me. As his erection nestled between my legs. I watched my legs move to accommodate him. Watched my hands go around to his ass and grab hold of him.
I was two people – one performing for an audience and the other watching the performance. A participant and a player at the same time. He buried his head on my chest and I watched his mouth open to suck in the nipple of my right breast and I watched myself pull him up because that wasn’t what I wanted, even if he did. I pulled him down with me so that we were on the floor, and I climbed up on him, straddling him, lowering myself on him. It didn’t matter what he wanted. Not right then. It didn’t matter if he wanted to go slower or taste me more or feel more of my body or have me do something to him that I wasn’t doing. I had to have him up inside of me the way I wanted it. I had to have him watch himself go in and have him watch my face as he did and for me to watch my own face as I did.
And that was what happened.
We watched ourselves in his mirrors an
d I made love to him and he responded. I watched my face get thick with the wanting and my eyes half close and my mouth open of its own accord. But I never stopped looking, and when he did I would nudge him enough so that he would look again.
32.
“Will you stay tonight and sleep with me?” Gideon asked.
At first I didn’t think I should but he wrapped me up in his robe and ran a bath and then sat beside the tub and rubbed soap into my back and between my legs and under my arms and then he pulled me up out of the warm water and surrounded me in towels and carried me to his bed.
I stayed. And I slept. Wrapped in his arms, in the empty loft, not dreaming at all. When I woke up, he was lying in the bed next to me, his almond-shaped eyes focused on me. The green even more vibrant in the morning sun that flooded the room.
His smile came slowly, but I could see it deep in his eyes and it made me happy that I was there. That I had stayed. Until I suddenly remembered about the woman whose name I didn’t know but who I was helping him seduce.
“What?” he asked.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Read me, so well. I think it scares me.”
“No it doesn’t. It awes you and amazes you,” he teased.
I laughed. What might be arrogant in someone else was sweet and certain in Gideon. And the truth was the connection that he kept showing me, over and over, did in fact awe me. I didn’t understand telepathy. I’d never experienced it before.
“You have some trick way of doing this.”
“How could I? I told you. It’s in your eyes. I can see what you’re thinking.”
“Have you ever done it before with anyone else?”
“Yes,” he said and paused.
My breath stuck in my throat while I waited to hear the name, finally of the woman I’d been helping him woo. Or, worse. the name of a woman who’d broken his heart and who he’d never gotten over. Or–
“I can do it with Dana.” Another pause. “My sister.”