Nights in Black Satin

by Noelle Mack

  “Whatcha thinking about?” Vincent yawned and looked at the sign announcing the ferry for New York. “Never mind. There’s the boat.”

  They went to the middle deck, where they could stand on the platform at the front of the ferry and take in the view of Manhattan once they were most of the way across the harbor. It was a ritual that never varied and they usually had a lot of company up there.

  “We’re going to freeze,” Vincent said.

  “That’s part of the deal.”

  The ferry departed and the wind blew her hair back around her hoodie. No matter how tight the drawstring was, her hair managed to escape. She thought of her long Venetian tresses and thought about growing hers out.

  The trip was swift. The bridges on the east side of Manhattan were lit up, sparkling in the clear, cold air. Manhattan from this vantage point seemed to float on the water just the way Venice did. But its skyline was a lot more aggressive, thrusting up in glittering ranks, magical in a tough way, hard-edged and strong.

  She never got tired of the sight, no matter what the weather or time of year. Sarah used to wonder if she could ever live anywhere else. Since Marco, the answer to that question had suddenly become a lot more complex.

  Come back.

  Someday, she thought wistfully. Someday soon.

  8

  They got off and went down the ramps, wandering around Battery Park and over to Bowling Green, where a few diehard tourists were standing by the bronze statue of a rampaging bull.

  Two nice middle-aged ladies were crouching down behind the statue, patting its big, bronze balls while a third took their picture.

  “C’mon, Sarah. You gotta pat them too. For good luck.”

  “Vincent, we don’t have a camera.”

  He pulled his fleece-lined denim jacket together in front, shivering. “Right. My hands would shake anyway.”

  Just for the hell of it, Sarah dashed over to the bull when the women walked away and patted the balls.

  Vincent laughed and pretended to take a picture. “Got it. That’s going on my MySpace page tomorrow.”

  They walked on, and he caught her up on his love life until they got to Chinatown and made a pit stop for plates of slithery comfort food at the New York Noodle Company.

  “So when are you going back to Venice?” Vincent asked, chasing a final, elusive noodle around in a puddle of brown sauce.

  “When Al Speer gives me a raise.”

  He gave up on the noodle. “Not gonna happen. You’re really into this Marco guy. You gotta go back, Sar. Some other woman might snap him up.”

  Sarah groaned. “God, you sound like my grandmother.”

  “Of blessed memory. People should listen to their grandmothers. Grandmothers are really pretty cool.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She and Marco didn’t have relatives, which was kind of weird. Her parents, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t count. She doubted they would show up for a wedding unless their guru let them.

  “You going to eat that?” Vincent was looking hungrily at her plate.

  “No. I’m full.” She just wasn’t hungry. Marco on the mind. “Go ahead.”

  Vincent jabbed three slices of beef and put them in his mouth at once. Then he demolished the vegetables and the rest of the noodles. At a hundred and ten pounds, she didn’t know where he put it and his table manners weren’t the best. But he always rooted for her in every romance.

  This romance was something else entirely. What she felt for Marco was something different—something intense. She wasn’t sure she could wait a whole goddamn month to see him again.

  Vincent walked her as far as Greenwich Village, heading for his studio on Hudson Street. He wrapped her up in a skinny-man hug first. All she could feel was jacket.

  “G’night, babe. Next time we meet will be Monday at WetPaint.”

  “Right. Hey, thanks for listening.”

  He gave her a wink and a snappy salute. “I’m your sidekick. Born to play the part.”

  She patted his cheek. “Silly.”

  “Hands that pat bull balls shall never pat mine!” he intoned. No one gave him a second glance. This was the Village. “See ya.”

  Sarah settled into her hoodie, not quite warm enough. She didn’t have too far to go to catch the train back to Brooklyn. But the shortcut she decided on put her in front of a store she’d heard about.

  Toys No Boys. The lesbian-owned sex shop with the STRAIGHTS WELCOME sign in the window. Sarah glanced casually at the gizmos in the window.

  She stopped and stared. Geez, the names. Lickety Split, the mechanical silicone tongue. Cheep Thrill, a small whistling dildo that was paired with the enormous Cock-A-Doodle Doo. She couldn’t imagine stuffing nine wobbly inches of fake dick into her pussy. Who bought these things?

  A happy—and heterosexual—couple came out, clutching a bag with Toys No Boys on it in bold black letters.

  “Woo-hoo,” the guy said. “Let’s get in the SUV, get across the GWB, and fire up a DVD.”

  Urk. Typical suburban dimwit, talking in acronyms and loaded up with porn so he didn’t have to tire himself out with foreplay. Right now Sarah really, really wanted her suave, sensual, intelligent Venetian lover who prided himself on giving a woman what she wanted. She needed some of that Euroglide action, badly.

  She went into Toys Not Boys and came out five minutes later with an Italian Stallion.

  Two weeks later…

  Sarah was filing invoices in the back office at WetPaint. The work was mindless, and Al Speer had bumped her up by $2.47 per hour, an unheard-of raise for someone who had quit and come back.

  Vincent pretended to be jealous. These days he was her main man, and she was grateful for the unthreatening company while she was missing Marco. She didn’t want to date straight men, for God’s sake. They seemed to think that the word “no” had a lot of alternative meanings.

  Especially Colbert Symmons, the anointed king of New Figurative Painting. Colly had been coming around the store a little too often.

  He’d asked her to model for him last year and Sarah had said no, well aware of his letchy reputation. She’d been to a party in his vast studio before she went to Venice. Pretty good but basically repetitive paintings hung on the white walls. There was nude after nude after nude, all of whom were female. And they all had an expression he couldn’t seem to paint away. Sarah would call it Get Me Out Of Here.

  Vincent came into the back office, looking for an invoice for a framing job. “Hey, Sar. Guess who’s out front.”

  “Colly Symmons.”

  “How did you know?”

  She pulled a folder marked D through B, wondering why Al filed things backward. “Colly’s totally famous. His glory penetrates the walls. And I heard his loud voice.”

  “He asked if you were here.”

  “Tell him I’m not.”

  “Ah, I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I already told him you were here. I didn’t know you didn’t like him. He’s rich.”

  “Don’t be so shallow, Vincent.” So was Marco, if it came to that. His being rich was something she was still thinking over from her non-rich perspective.

  “Colly could probably sell his paint-stained jeans if he wanted to.”

  Sarah wrote B through D on a new folder, switched the contents, and tossed the old one. “Don’t give him any ideas.”

  Vincent stroked his ponytail thoughtfully. “I keep forgetting that you’re saving yourself for Marco. You know, I don’t see him coming around.”

  “No, he lives in Venice. Tough to just stop by.”

  “Well, you don’t get flowers from him. Come to think of it, you haven’t even showed me a picture of him.”

  “I don’t have to,” Sarah hissed with exasperation. “I know what he looks like.”

  “I guess I just don’t think you should be deprived of everything in the meantime. You could date. Mr. Magic Marco probably is. Be realistic.”

  Sarah threw
him a fierce look. She was fed up to here with reality. But romance seemed very, very far away.

  Al Speer dashed into the office. “Sarah, come on. I need you in front. The cashier spilled coffee on her new tattoo. You gotta do something. She’s crying.”

  “Get the first-aid kit, Al,” she sighed. “Rinse the area with cool water, put hydrocortisone ointment on it and put on a bandage.”

  “You don’t understand where this tattoo is. A girl has to put the bandage on. I could get slapped with a lawsuit here.”

  Sarah set aside the files. “Gotcha.”

  She went out to the front, followed by Vincent. The cashier was dabbing at the inside of her thigh, holding back tears.

  “You OK?” Al asked anxiously. “Vincent, you take over. Sarah, play doctor.”

  “C’mon, Lucy,” she said. “Let’s get you fixed up. You don’t have to go to the emergency room, do you?”

  “It’s not that—that bad,” Lucy sniffled. “But it does hurt.”

  They went to the ladies’ room, snagging the first-aid kit from a shelf on the way. Colly Symmons, squeezing tubes of oil paint the way old ladies squeezed fruit, turned around just in time to see them go by. Sarah walked faster, almost dragging Lucy.

  “I said it’s not that bad,” Lucy murmured.

  Sarah got her into the ladies’ room and shut the door against Colly’s ardent gaze.

  How was it that the men you wanted least could be on fire with lust for you? Sarah chanted Marco, Marco, Marco to herself. Her thoughts of him never faded, but she could kick herself for telling him not to call or e.

  She got Lucy patched up, admiring the tattoo in the process—a big arrow pointing to Lucy’s pussy—and they left the bathroom.

  Colly was right where he’d been.

  “Excuse me,” Sarah said coldly. The king of New Figurative Painting didn’t move. A big stretchy grin spread across the lower half of his face. “Hey. Excuse me,” Sarah repeated.

  Colly came forward, boxing the two women in. “Are you lesbians? I think that’s terrific. I have many lesbian friends. You really should model for me, Sarah. You, too,” he said to Lucy, whose lower lip trembled.

  “Fuck you, Colly,” Sarah retorted. She set her hands on her hips and gave him a steely glare that was meant to make him back off.

  “Any time,” he said.

  That was enough for her. She gave him a good shove and Colly went down on the paint-stained ass of his baggy jeans.

  Sarah stepped over him. He grabbed her ankle. Lucy got a plastic bottle of acrylic paint, popped up the lid and squirted it at him in thick ribbons. Colly was yelling his head off when Al got to the aisle. Lucy gave her boss an accidental squirt from the bottle of paint and abjectly begged his pardon.

  “What the hell is going on? Colly, what did they do to you? Lucy, put that down!”

  The cashier squirted him again, not meaning to. There was an ejaculatory strength to the bottled paint that made it really shoot.

  Colly reached for Sarah’s leg again and she stepped on his hand. “Oh my God!” he shrieked. “Ow!”

  “Shut up, Colly,” she hissed. “I didn’t break anything. But I will next time.”

  “There isn’t going to be a next time, Sarah Ryan,” Al yelled. “And this time you can’t quit. You’re fired.”

  “OK! Unemployment office, here I come!”

  As battle cries went, it wasn’t the greatest. Sarah stood in the long line, watching the others shuffle forward inch by inch. They looked like penitents from an engraving of Dante’s Inferno. A cold day in late winter in a New York City unemployment office was pretty hellish.

  She’d received no severance. Vincent had slipped her a fifty, but she couldn’t mooch off him. Sarah didn’t regret what she’d done, but she had to feel Marco’s arms around her, cry on his shoulder, tell him to move up the date on the ticket and pay him back somehow.

  Fuck a duck. She had no way to get a fast message to him. His palazzo had a street number but she wasn’t sure she remembered it right and Venetian addresses were notoriously screwy. You had to be there to find anything.

  She wasn’t. Rescue me, she said silently to the stained acoustic-tile ceiling. A piece of it crumbled off and almost hit her in the eye.

  Hey, maybe she’d gotten through.

  When she got home, there was a package propped against her apartment door upstairs. A note taped to it bore a not-very-reassuring message.

  I didn open it she did.

  P.s.it was an axident.

  Whatever. Al had probably cleared out her desk and sent her pathetic belongings here. The person who’d opened hadn’t got far and had taped the package up again.

  Sarah picked it up without really looking at it and took it inside, dropping her purse and the package on the kitchen table.

  She opened the cabinet and steeled herself, selecting a package of ramen noodles with her eyes closed. She’d taken the Ramen Challenge in college—they all tasted exactly alike no matter what the package said.

  Kneeling to retrieve a battered saucepan from a lower cabinet, she filled it with water and set it on the stove to boil. Poor girl’s blue-plate special, coming up.

  In her case, the blue plate was a white china bowl. But it held a whole package of ramen, with room for protein, if and when she could afford any.

  Not tonight. Her unemployment check had been halved, according to some regulation that ensured usually hardworking, tax-paying, out-of-luck people would promptly starve and cease to be a burden on the government.

  She dropped the block of curly noodles into the bubbling water and ripped open the Flav-Er-Packit, irritated by its eye-catching misspelling.

  She only used half the Packit anyway, and then what was she supposed to do with the other half? Sprinkling some into the seething water, she watched it rise to the top of the saucepan and turned off the gas. She let it calm down, poked at the noodles, and poured the whole mess into the white china bowl.

  Then she looked at the package. Holy cow. It was from Venice. The white bar-coded label and printed postage sticker had fooled her into thinking it was, well, not from Venice.

  Sarah set the bowl of ramen in the sink where she couldn’t knock it over if she got excited. She knew she was going to get excited. It had to be from Marco.

  She peeled off the tape the almost-opener of the package had used, and got down to a second layer that hadn’t been touched. That she clawed off.

  Tissue paper rustled inside. He’d ignored her stupid rule about no contact and sent her a gift. Sarah parted the inside layers of tissue paper with reverent care. She glimpsed black satin…and tiny hooks…and black satin rosebuds. It was a corset. From what she could see, an extremely elegant, ultra-sexy corset.

  There was a card on top of it. She opened it and ran a fingertip over Marco’s exuberant handwriting.

  Cara mia,

  This is an antique, but never worn, from the collection of a haute couture designer. It should fit you perfectly. I cannot wait to see you in it. I want to caress your uplifted, naked breasts and squeeze your beautiful bare behind when you model it for me. But I will wait.

  All my love,

  Marco

  It was perfect. She pulled it all the way out and twirled it in midair, making the garters dance. Model it for him? You bet. He could have a whole night with her in black satin. Sarah hugged the pretty thing to her chest. He was an angel. It was going to work out. She had a ticket back to Venice.

  And a few bills to pay, she reminded herself, setting the corset against the other chair where she could look at it while she slurped her noodles. She retrieved the bowl from the sink, got a fork, and sat down.

  A corset made a nice companion. Looked good, didn’t talk, put you in mind of all the sex you were going to have…Sarah twirled her fork in the noodles. Given the right circumstances, even ramen could make you think of sex. She forked up a hot, sloppy mouthful, grinning, and ate it.

  Back the next day at the unemployment office, Sar
ah was determined to find a clerk who had warm blood and a beating heart. Her benefits shouldn’t be that low; she’d checked the paperwork, and the error was theirs.

  Five hours and a stale doughnut later, she emerged triumphant with a new check that made up the difference and then some. She had enough to get back to Venice sooner if she acted fast.

  Sarah walked fast, ignoring the siren song of clothes boutiques and shoe stores. Then she stopped. Art books were on sale at The Strand. New and used. But they were all big, luxurious art books, crammed with paintings and photos. Books that you could turn into a coffee table if you didn’t have a coffee table to put them on.

  Worth a look. She went in and found them displayed right up front. Oh my. There was one she had to have. Only ten dollars and like new. Venice In Art. She picked it up and leafed through the pages, thrilled by the excellent reproductions of paintings she’d seen in the Accademia and the Ca’ Rezzonico.

  The book took an in-depth approach, featuring sketches and preliminary drawings for the masterpieces, and lesser artists of genius as well. She didn’t know a lot of them—wow. She had to have this book.

  Sarah turned a page and came to a sensual drawing of a male nude that she recognized instantly. Marco. Naked. Powerful even in his sleep. Drawn by her, stretched out in a languorous pose, his aristocratic profile against the arm bent to support his head, one hand over his cock.

  Staring in disbelief, her mouth open, she looked at the caption at last. Unknown artist, Venetian school, late eighteenth century. Pencil and charcoal. Private collection.

  She looked back at the drawing. The sleeping man in it stirred on the page, opened his eyes and looked straight at her. He said something—his lips moved. Sarah gasped.

  Cara mia. Come back. She was sure that’s what he’d said. Sarah touched her hand to the page and he arched under her touch, laughing as if she had tickled him.