by Rose, M. J.
Marlowe -
It would be a shame to let all this go to waste.
Gideon
I reached out and touched the letters with my forefinger. My only letter from Gideon. The only words he’d ever written me, after all the words I’d written for him.
The tears started then and I stood in the living room, holding onto the bag, hugging it to my chest as if it were a living person. I wasn’t crying for what I’d lost, but because I finally understood that I’d been writing those stories to Gideon. They were how I felt. Not how I imagined someone else felt. I was telling him what I wanted us to do, how I wanted us to be together.
Hugging the bag, I slipped down to the floor. Holding on as if I were afraid to let go of it. For a few more minutes, I cried, hard choking sobs that only made me feel worse. And then I looked inside and my crying turned hard and silent.
It was so hard to deal with what the bag meant. So difficult not to interpret why he had done this.
I’d written three stories out of the five that Gideon had commissioned - Sound, Sight and Smell. Taste was supposed to be next. We had planned on going on a food shopping spree, we’d even made a list of all the foods we’d buy and then talked about how we’d bring them back to his studio and find a story in the flavors and textures.
He’d remembered everything.
In the bag was a mix of exotic fruits: lychee nuts in their hard, prickly, outer shells, a cellophane bag of fat, dried apricots, two pomegranates, and a box of pale yellow raspberries.
There were two cheeses, both soft to my touch: a small wheel of Brillat Savarin and a wedge of St. Andre.
The two loaves of bread beneath them emanated rich, yeasty smell; the walnut raisin was as heavy as the French baguette was light.
The writing on the small jar of honey was in French and proclaimed it was from Provence and contained lavender. I opened it, bent over, and breathed in.
You could smell the sunshine and fields of flowers.
There was a container of olives glistening in rich oil. Another of pistachio nuts, out of their shell, bright green and inviting – sprinkled with cayenne pepper.
Inside a pastry box was a chocolate mousse tart covered with whipped cream and chocolate shavings.
A bottle of champagne.
And when I thought I’d emptied the bag of everything, I found, wrapped in shiny gold foil, like a last present almost forgotten, a thin bar of expensive dark chocolate.
Sad and miserable, I sat down on the floor with all the food. Touching it. Leaning over, sniffing at it like a feral cat, starved and lost, coming upon a treasure trove of possibilities. Suddenly I was hungry, desperately hungry.
I ripped off pieces of the walnut bread and dipped it into the honey, not caring that the sticky sweetness got all over my fingers. I didn’t bother to get a knife but used a crust of the baguette to break into the St. Andre, scooping up too much of the rich, creamy cheese to fit in my mouth all at once. It didn’t matter. I licked it off the bread, like the cat would, lapping it, feeling its silky texture on my tongue, scooping up more, not eating the bread at all now, only using it as a utensil. Then, I picked out the soft inner middle of the baguette and dipped it in the oil the olives came in. More of the walnut bread with more of the honey. Now more of the soft bread with the St. Andre. Was anything richer?
Still not satiated, I tore at the rough outsides of a lychee nut with my fingers and popped the juicy fruit into my mouth working the flesh off it with my teeth, my salivary glands exploding. The texture of the opalescent fruit was smooth and wet and lush until I had eaten it all and was left with a smooth polished pit that was hard as wood.
I smashed the raspberries on my tongue. One after another. After another.
Still hungry, I tore the paper off the chocolate and broke off too big a piece. After the fruit, the chocolate was bitter. I tasted coffee and burnt beans. I sucked on slivers of it, letting it dissolve in my mouth, thick and rich. As dense as fog. As black as the middle of the night. As overwhelming as being caught in a storm.
I was still hungry. Still unfilled. I ate more of the bread and honey and then I peeled away the papery cover of the pomegranate.
The juice stained my fingers as I picked out the small seeds covered with the clear jewel-like scarlet sweetness. But there was a dryness to the taste of the fruit, too. And if I worked each cluster too much, my mouth puckered from the ugly taste of the seeds.
I pulled apart more of the pomegranate, peeling away the inner membrane that kept the sections separate. I stuffed another handful of seeds into my mouth. The juice dripped. By now my chin was stained the color of the fruit. So were my fingers.
How would this food have led to an erotic story? How would I turn all the tastes and textures into a seduction?
I couldn’t see anything beyond my gluttonous orgy. A woman alone devouring food, salt and sweet and thick and rich and dark and fruity. Trying to satiate herself with flavors because she couldn’t have what she wanted: the man she’d met. She wanted his mouth, not raspberries. His fingers, not bread. His lips, not cheese. And his cock, not champagne.
It was nothing I would ever be able to sell.
I looked down and saw my shirt was stained with ruby splatters. It looked like I was bleeding.
I stood and tore it off.
What would we have done with all this food? Even though it didn’t matter anymore, even though I’d never write this story for Gideon, my imagination refused to obey my logic, and I searched for the key to how to turn the experience from gluttony to seduction.
I looked down at my bare chest to see the juice had not only gotten on my shirt but seeped through and left streaks on my chest. An accidental and violent design.
I picked up a few of pomegranate seeds, but instead of putting them in my mouth and sucking off their flesh, I used them like a paint brush, drawing long swaying lines down my neck and my chest adding to the pattern already there.
More fruit.
More vermilion lines around and around my breasts.
More fruit.
I continued painting.
Colorful swirling lines, down across stomach, over my thighs, all the lines leading to and ending at my sex disappearing into my thatch of hair. But I wasn’t done. There were more seeds left, full of blood.
I drew with those on my inner thighs. Big X’s. One over the other until they became a crosshatch of angry lines. My skin was covered. At least the skin outside of my body. But inside was untouched. I rubbed the seeds up and down the lips of my sex. Teasing and tickling, cruelly confusing my nerve endings into thinking someone was touching me when it was no one at all.
My stupid body didn’t know the difference.
I was wet in seconds. Primed. My cunt was waiting. For who? Gideon? That fast?
I’d been with him once and my skin and my bones were already craving him. Longing for him.
And all I gave it was fruit.
The loft was dark, the mess was all around me on the floor. Crusts of bread. An almost empty champagne bottle. Cheese rinds. Spit out and gnawed bare olive pits in a pile along with the pomegranate pits. Foil and paper ripped off of the chocolate bar.
I wasn’t focusing on the garbage. My head was full of images of Gideon. I could see his green black marble eyes and smell his cologne between my thighs. I twitched for more. Using my hand, I thought about his scarred hands and stroked faster and then slower, working out a rhythm that would have matched the rhythm of his breathing. If he were here.
I imagined his breath on my neck.
My hand did more. Rapid then slow, then hard then soft. Rapid then slow then hard then soft.
My body, stupidly, responded, stumbling over itself to get to the end of the effort, wanting for the release, thinking maybe the explosion would satiate the hunger that the food had not.
I fell deep into the fantasy that Gideon was with me, that one of his hands was gripping my buttocks, pulling me closer and closer to him, that his other hand was
touching my clit while his erection thrust into and out of me in slow and easy pulls and pushes and all the while he was whispering in my ear – words that I was whispering out loud, fooling my poor ears into thinking they were listening to him.
“Marlowe, let me inside. Let me go deeper. Tell me how it feels. How it pleases you…”
And I did what he asked and told him how it felt and that his sixth sense about me was informing him well. How the way he was biting my shoulder was sending perfect shivers down my side. How the pain of his fingers, digging deep into my muscles, was making me quake. How this fucking was closer to something divine than I had ever felt.
I heard him respond then, clearly as if he really were with me at that moment. “Yes. It is. We are.”
It was hearing his voice say that – or thinking I’d heard it – that sent me crashing over the rising swell, and as I came I started to cry, realizing as my orgasm beat at my bones and boiled my blood that I was alone, that Gideon was gone. That he had never even been a possibility. And wondering, at the same time, how even the idea of him pushed me into a passion that I’d never even guessed I was capable of.
38.
The next week moved slowly. I watched the clock not knowing why or what I expected. I didn’t connect to anything I was doing. As requested by Grace, I’d sent out the letters to all of my clients asking them to sign the release form, wondering as I wrote out each envelope if perhaps it was time to move on. If writing other people’s letters or telling stories for them wasn’t that good an idea.
I called Jeff and asked him how many covers he thought he might be able to give me a year, told him that I wanted to get more involved. He gave me a number that would more than make up for the letters and stories. I thought about how I would tell Grace.
And then, after we’d finished talking, as I was about to say goodbye, Jeff asked if was going to Cole’s show that night.
“No.”
“I think you should. Cole’s pretty shook up over what happened between the two of you at the gallery.”
“He told you?”
“We had dinner. Marlowe, let me take you. Grace and I are going. Come with us. It’s the right thing to do. Cole wants you there. And you have to get past this.”
“I can’t.”
Jeff didn’t argue and in his silence was a worse indictment than if he had.
He was right, though, I thought, after we got off the phone. And Gideon had been right, too. I couldn’t run away from this, too. I had to deal with Cole, finally.
The gallery was in Chelsea, about a dozen blocks from my loft, so I walked. Slowly. It was the second week of June and the sun had starting to drop, bathing the streets in its glow. People were going home from work or going out for the night and, as I passed through their groups, I wished I could walk up to them and ask if I could join and go where they were going, become part of their lives for this one night so that I didn’t have to be part of mine.
Desperately slowly, I walked the last two blocks. Wishing something would happen so that I’d have a good excuse for turning back. My cell phone didn’t ring. A police car didn’t come careering down the street knocking, me down.
Step after excruciating step, I got closer, until I was standing in front of the gallery.
With great trepidation I peered in through the large plateglass windows, wanting to see the photographs on the wall before I stepped inside, to reassure myself that Cole had been telling me the truth, that there were no shots of me.
But there were too many people milling around: I couldn’t see the walls.
I noticed my mother in a peach-colored jacket, white shirt, and black pants. She was standing with my stepfather. If I could catch her eye maybe she’d come out, so that I wouldn’t have to walk in alone.
While I watched, I saw Cole walk up to them, smiling and gesturing with his hands. He was in his element, with all the attention on him.
Two people I didn’t know approached from the south and looked at me strangely as they passed me on their way to the door. It must have looked strange. I was, like the poor little match seller, standing outside looking in.
How long could I wait? Until the crowd thinned out? Until the party ended? Until tomorrow?
And then, like an answered prayer, my mother did notice me. Smiling her broad grin, waving, gesturing to me to come inside. But I couldn’t move. She frowned then, gestured again. And finally seeing that I wasn’t making any progress, she excused herself from the people around her and came outside.
“Marlowe,” she cried as she hurried over and enclosed me in a big hug. Oh, how I wanted to stay there, safe in her arms, pretending to be six or seven years old, having her take care of me.
“What are you doing outside? This is so exciting. Come in. Come in. We’ve been waiting for you. It’s so wonderful. Everyone’s here.” And then she rattled off a list of names: dealers, collectors, critics, old friends of hers and my stepfather’s. The who’s who of the photography world. It was a proud night for her and for Cole’s father who both had stood on this same precipice years before.
My mother was usually more sensitive to my emotions, but her own were too high to notice that something was wrong with me, and I was petrified. Taking me by the hand, she pulled me inside.
The air smelled of all the different colognes and perfumes and fresh flowers arranged in large vases around the wide-open space. The crowd was thick, and I almost lost her as she led me towards my stepfather.
I could see the back of her jacket and followed, clearing the crowd. Troy took me in his arms and kissed my cheek. And it was when he finally let go of me that the people in front of us moved, revealing, at last, the wall beyond.
That’s when I got my first glimpse of Cole’s photographs.
Breaking away, I walked closer, toward a black and white shot of a woman’s naked torso, twisted in obvious passion, sweat glistening on her skin.
Her skin.
Not mine.
I took a breath that felt like my first in awhile. And then, more quickly I began to make my way around the room, almost racing as I looked at each photograph just long enough to check.
Not me.
Not me.
Not me.
I’d done two walls of the front room and started on the third.
Not me.
Not me.
And then, there I was.
Me; half of my naked torso thrust out in a blatantly sexual pose.
The heat rose to my face. My cheeks burned. I was afraid to take the next step, to look at the next photograph.
But I did.
My mouth. Open. Waiting. Ready. The lips pouting. The tip of my tongue the center of the shot. Damn. I moved on.
In the next photo, a woman - from mid-hip level - naked, standing in a thicket of daylilies. The flowers all open and full. My legs were partially covered by the leaves. My thatch of pubic hair was half hidden by blossoms. So suggestive.
I spun around and found my mother in the opposite corner of room. Had she seen these, looked at them, studied them? Of course she had. And yet she hadn’t guessed?
How was that possible? I was her daughter?
But she didn’t know what my eighteen-year-old body, my nineteen-year-old legs, my seventeen-year-old mouth, looked like out of context and in such lascivious poses.
A mother doesn’t know her children naked as adults, or their features suffused with desire.
Three walls done. One left.
Damn you, Cole.
The next wall was all me. Eight separate shots of my bare breast. A sequence of a headless female taking off her bra, then touching herself, exploring, arousing, brazenly showing off for someone beyond the frame.
I went to the first in the sequence. 18 by 24 inches.
Simple, two-inch, flat black wooden frames.
A single sheet of glass.
They were hung at eye level.
I only had to reach a little to pull the first one off of the wall. It was in my han
ds, I was holding on to it. I never thought about being strong or weak until then. Lifting it as high over my head as I could, I took a deep breath and threw it down hard on the floor at my feet.
I watched it fall, saw my own breasts flying through the air and then landing and saw glass shatter across the shot. With my foot, I kicked at it, and then took three steps and stood on it. Feeling the heels of my shoes breaking through the paper, hearing it tear.
I don’t know how many people turned and looked, I didn’t care. I had moved backward and was pulling the second photograph off the wall. Now smarter, not bothering with throwing it on the floor, but instead, taking it with both hands and smashing it against the wall. I reached for a shard of glass and ripped at the photograph with it, slashing my torso into thin irregular strips, turning my breasts into torn paper and meaningless pulp.
If anyone one was speaking, I couldn’t hear them.
I pulled off a third photograph. Like all the others, it was black and white, but there was red on the glass. I didn’t stop to wonder where it had come from; it didn’t matter. I had to destroy this one, too. This one most of all. My hands holding my breasts, offering them to him as if they were food. I dropped it. Stomped on it. Heard cruel music, like ice breaking, felt my feet sinking into the paper.
“You’re hurt.”
I didn’t stop.
“Marlowe. You’ve cut your hands. Stop. You are bleeding.” The voice was like wind in a storm.
I looked up.
Gideon was standing in front of me, pulling the fourth frame out of my hands, letting it drop to the floor, gently taking my hands and inspecting them. Then quickly, no longer gentle, he grabbed my sweater off of my shoulders and wrapped it tightly around my right hand, making a tourniquet. He worked fast and was done in seconds.
I heard the screaming now: a deep lion’s roar, so loud I wondered how I had not heard it before.
“You crazy lunatic bitch…” Cole’s voice was coming from somewhere in the background.