And after forty or fifty minutes, the endorphins kick in and the childish drawings on the wall assume a crystalline edge, the colors deepen and bloom, and my face relaxes utterly. All there is is a tide of breath, sweeping up and down the beach of my body, until each cell is as distinct as a grain of mica and I feel washed clean. I sometimes wondered what would happen if I just…stayed there; whether the endorphin high would burn itself into my cells permanently and for the rest of my life I would smile gently around the edges, even when I was breaking someone’s legs. But then Ian would take the pole away, shout, and we would be running around and around the hall. Twenty minutes. Two or three miles, usually. Then we would do a kata.
Katas are choreographed series of fight moves against one or more imaginary opponents. Done well, they are a meditation and a dance. They range from the most simple, railway-straight line moves against only one opponent where you use nothing but punches, to the flying, whirling battle-an-army dance of the Basai Dai. You don’t learn the Basai Dai until you get your black belt.
The first few months I studied, the katas were my reward, the fluid dance, the grace, the hot whistling power of punching tight air, of using my whole body. It was only after my blue belt, the second kyu, that I learned that the real reward of learning Shuto Kai was understanding my will. I learned that pain is only pain: a message. You can choose to ignore the message. Your body can do a great deal more than it wants you to know.
And so, although for all practical purposes Shuto Kai is not a particularly good martial art, I still dance its katas.
I did the fourth, which has all those difficult kicks, and the Basai Dai. My breathing was as smooth as cream, my blood oxygenated and rich. I was probably smiling.
I moved on from karate to kung fu, a Wing Chun form, the Siu Nim Tao, or Simple Idea. I was on the second round of pak sao, the slapping hand, when the door opened. Even with my eyes closed I would have known who it was. Her scent was a little more pronounced today, even though her hair was dry. I nodded very briefly but did not stop. Ding jem. Huen sao. She started stretching. Bill jee. Moot sao, the whipping hand. She was wearing black spandex pants and an emerald body sheath. I concentrated on the form.
When I took the last slow breath and released it, she straightened. “First form?”
“Yes.”
“Want to chi sao?” It was a challenge.
“Take off your shoes.”
“My shoes?”
“I value my feet.”
That angered her. It was meant to. Always take the advantage. I extended my right leg, and my right arm, elbow down and in, wrist level with my sternum, fingers parallel to the floor. She did the same. The backs of our wrists touched. Well-shaped nails, no wedding ring. Her skin was dense and fine grained, taut over smooth muscle, and her bones slender. She looked the sort of woman who has studied ballet for twelve years. Her eyes were blue, the deep blue of still-wet-from-the-dye denim, with lighter flecks near pupils tight with concentration. Her hair was in a French twist. A French twist for the gym.
Chi sao means sticky hand. The wrists stay touching. All moves are in slow motion. It’s a game of chess using balance.
I moved my hand forward, the first inch of what could have become huen sao, the circling hand, but she stepped smoothly to the side and, without even moving her arm, countered. But the counter of course became her own move, which was to keep stepping, trying to lead my arm away from the center of my body and leave me unbalanced. So far, all beginner’s moves. Her baked-biscuit skin slid back and forth over her collarbone. As the pace intensified, I wondered how women got those tans. The color was delicate, never too heavy, never too light, and they had it in February and November yet they never seemed to use tanning salons. Their eyebrows always arched perfectly and their hair was never out of place.
Who are you? Blank concentration for a reply.
She was good: well balanced, smooth, knowledgeable about the connections between feet and belly, wrist and elbow and shoulder. She centered well and breathed unhurriedly.
I wanted information and stepped back, signaling a pause. “Sern chi sao?”
She merely nodded and extended both arms. Double sticky hands.
We moved faster this time, our legs bent lower, circling around the gym in jong tao, a deadly waltz. A woman’s center of gravity is generally about two inches below her navel, just where the belly rounds. No matter how fast you travel across the floor, that point should move in parallel. I was taller than her, but having one’s center of gravity higher is a disadvantage, so I moved in a lower stance. We were both sweating lightly now, and our breath came faster. Her skin felt marvelously alive beneath mine. We moved back and forth, and my belly warmed, and I knew hers warmed, too, as we revolved around the gym and each other, a planet and its satellite turning about the sun.
Time to let her know which was which, to show her I didn’t much appreciate having my wallet stolen at the scene of an arson and murder. I moved more strongly, breathed in great long gushes, as though my breath alone would move her aside. Her body sheath was dark under the arms. My belly burned hotter. She began to move just a little out of balance. I made a slow biu tze, the shooting fingers, up toward her eyes, with my left hand, and a going under hand with my right. Being out of balance, even so slightly, meant she had to either let me through or speed up to regain the advantage. To speed up meant it would become almost a sparring session.
She sped up.
Differences in skill become more apparent with speed. I harried her round and round the gym, in no hurry, enjoying testing her. She began to spar in earnest. She snapped a punch at my head, which I palmed away easily enough, then launched into a series of battle punches, hoping to drive me off balance. I centered then stepped right through her with a double circling hand—and in my head, for a split second, moved over both her wrists and dumped her on the floor—but in actuality let the moment pass.
She felt it, felt the moment when I could have thrust the heat of my belly against hers and taken it all, and now the whole character of our sparring changed. I led, she followed. It became a dance, teacher and pupil. I would ask, she would answer.
When we came to a halt, wrists still touching, in the center of that beautiful gym, her face was as smooth as butter. We bowed to each other. I waited.
“Can I buy you coffee?”
And Salome Danced
Kelley Eskridge
They’re the best part, auditions: the last chance to hold in my mind the play as it should be. The uncast actors are easiest to direct; empty stages offer no barriers. Everything is clear, uncomplicated by living people and their inability to be what is needed.
“What I need,” I say to my stage manager, “is a woman who can work on her feet.”
“Hmmm,” says Lucky helpfully. She won’t waste words on anything so obvious. Our play is Salome, subtitled Identity and Desire. Salome has to dance worth killing for.
The sense I have, in those best, sweet moments, is that I do not so much envision the play as experience it in some sort of multidimensional gestalt. I feel Salome’s pride and the terrible control of her body’s rhythms; Herod’s twitchy groin and his guilt and his unspoken love for John; John’s relentless patience, and his fear. The words of the script sometimes seize me as if bypassing vision, burrowing from page into skin, pushing blood and nerve to the bursting limit on the journey to my brain. The best theatre lives inside. I’ll spend weeks trying to feed the sensation and the bloodsurge into the actors, but…but I can’t do their job. But they can’t read my mind. And people wonder why we drink.
Lucky snorts at me when I tell her these things: if it isn’t a tech cue or a blocking note, it has nothing to do with the real play as far as she’s concerned. She doesn’t understand that for me the play is best before it is real, when it is still only mine.
“Nine sharp,” she says now. “Time to start. Some of them have already been out there long enough to turn green.” She smiles; her private joke.
>
“Let’s go,” I say, my part of the ritual; and then I have to do it, have to let go. I sit forward over the script in my usual eighth row seat; Lucky takes her clipboard and her favorite red pen, the one she’s had since Cloud Nine, up the aisle. She pushes open the lobby door and the sound of voices rolls through, cuts off. All of them out there, wanting in. I feel in my gut their tense waiting silence as Lucky calls the first actor’s name.
They’re hard on everyone, auditions. Actors bare their throats. Directors make instinctive leaps of faith about what an actor could or might or must do in this or that role, with this or that partner. It’s kaleidoscopic, religious, it’s violent and subjective. It’s like soldiers fighting each other just to see who gets to go to war. Everyone gets bloody, right from the start.
Forty minutes before a late lunch break, when my blood sugar is at its lowest point, Lucky comes back with the next resumé and headshot and the first raised eyebrow of the day. The eyebrow, the snort, the flared nostril, the slight nod, are Lucky’s only comments on actors. They are minimal and emphatic.
Behind her walks John the Baptist. He calls himself Joe Something-or-other, but he’s John straight out of my head. Dark red hair. The kind of body that muscles up long and compact, strong and lean. He moves well, confident but controlled. When he’s on stage, he even stands like a goddamn prophet. And his eyes are John’s eyes: deep blue like deep sea. He wears baggy khaki trousers, a loose, untucked white shirt, high-top sneakers, a Greek fisherman’s cap. His voice is clear, a half-tone lighter than many people expect in a man: perfect.
The monologue is good, too. Lucky shifts in her seat next to me. We exchange a look, and I see that her pupils are wide.
“Is he worth dancing for, then?”
She squirms, all the answer I really need. I look at the resumé again. Joe Sand. He stands calmly on stage. Then he moves very slightly, a shifting of weight, a leaning in toward Lucky. While he does it, he looks right at her, watching her eyes for that uncontrollable pupil response. He smiles. Then he tries it with me. Aha, I think, surprise, little actor.
“Callbacks are Tuesday and Wednesday nights,” I say neutrally. “We’ll let you know.”
He steps off the stage. He is half in shadow when he asks, “Do you have Salome yet?”
“No precasting,” Lucky says.
“I know someone you’d like,” he says, and even though I can’t quite see him I know he is talking to me. Without the visual cue of his face, the voice has become transgendered, the body shape ambiguous.
“Any more at home like you, Joe?” I must really need my lunch.
“Whatever you need,” he says, and moves past me, past Lucky, up the aisle. Suddenly, I’m ravenously hungry. Four more actors between me and the break, and I know already that I won’t remember any of them longer than it takes for Lucky to close the doors behind them.
The next day is better. By late afternoon I have seen quite a few good actors, men and women, and Lucky has started a callback list.
“How many left?” I ask, coming back from the bathroom, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand and my waist with the other. I need a good stretch, some sweaty muscle-heating exercise, a hot bath. I need Salome.
Lucky is frowning at a paper in her hand. “Why is Joe Sand on this list?”
“God, Lucky, I want him for callbacks, that’s why.”
“No, this sheet is today’s auditions.”
I read over her shoulder. Jo Sand. “Dunno. Let’s go on to the next one, maybe we can actually get back on schedule.”
When I next hear Lucky’s voice, after she has been up to the lobby to bring in the next actor, I know that something is terribly wrong.
“Mars…Mars….”
By this time I have stood and turned and I can see for myself what she is not able to tell me.
“Jo Sand,” I say.
“Hello again,” she says. The voice is the same; she is the same, and utterly different. She wears the white shirt tucked into the khaki pants this time, pulled softly across her breasts. Soft black shoes, like slippers, that make no noise when she moves. No cap today, that red hair thick, brilliant above the planes of her face. Her eyes are Salome’s eyes: deep blue like deep desire. She is as I imagined her. When she leans slightly toward me, she watches my eyes and then smiles. Her smell goes straight up my nose and punches into some ancient place deep in my brain.
We stand like that for a long moment, the three of us. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have the right words for conversation with the surreal except when it’s inside my head.
I don’t know what to do when it walks down my aisle and shows me its teeth.
“I want you to see that I can be versatile,” Jo says.
The air in our small circle has become warm and sticky. My eyes feel slightly crossed, my mind is slipping gears. I won’t ask, I will not ask…. It’s as if I were trying to bring her into focus through 3-D glasses; trying to make two separate images overlay. It makes me seasick. I wonder if Lucky is having the same trouble, and then I see that she has simply removed herself in some internal way. She doesn’t see Jo look at me with those primary eyes.
But I see: and suddenly I feel wild, electric, that direct-brain connection that makes my nerves stand straight under my skin. Be careful what you ask for, Mars. “I don’t guess you really need to do another monologue,” I tell her. Lucky is still slack-jawed with shock.
Jo smiles again.
Someone else is talking with my voice. “Lucky will schedule you for callbacks.” Beside me, Lucky jerks at the sound of her name. Jo turns to her. Her focus is complete. Her whole body says, I am waiting. I want her on stage. I want to see her like that, waiting for John’s head on a platter.
“Mars, what…?” Lucky swallows, tries again. She speaks without looking at the woman standing next to her. “Do you want…oh, shit. What part are you reading this person for in callbacks, goddamnit anyway.” I haven’t seen her this confused since her mother’s boyfriend made a pass at her years ago, one Thanksgiving, his hand hidden behind the turkey platter at the buffet. Confusion makes Lucky fragile and brings her close to tears.
Jo looks at me, still waiting. Yesterday I saw John the Baptist: I remember how he made Lucky’s eyebrow quirk and I can imagine the rehearsals; how he might sit close to her, bring her coffee, volunteer to help her set props. She’d be a wreck in one week and useless in two. And today how easy it is to see Salome, who waits so well and moves with such purpose. I should send this Jo away, but I won’t: I need a predator for Salome; I can’t do a play about desire without someone who knows about the taste of blood.
“Wear a skirt,” I say to Jo. “I’ll need to see you dance.” Lucky closes her eyes.
Somehow we manage the rest of the auditions, make the first cut, organize the callback list. There are very few actors I want to see again. When we meet for callbacks, I bring them all in and sit them in a clump at the rear of the house, where I can see them when I want to and ignore them otherwise. But always I am conscious of Jo. I read her with the actors that I think will work best in other roles. She is flexible, adapting herself to their different styles, giving them what they need to make the scene work. She’s responsive to direction. She listens well. I can’t find anything wrong with her.
Then it is time for the dance. There are three women that I want to see, and I put them all on stage together. “Salome’s dance is the most important scene in the play. It’s a crisis point for every character. Everyone has something essential invested in it. It has to carry a lot of weight.”
“What are you looking for?” one of the women asks. She has long dark hair and good arms.
“Power,” I answer, and beside her Jo’s head comes up like a pointing dog’s, her nostrils flared with some rich scent. I pretend not to see. “Her dance is about power over feelings and lives. There’s more, but power’s the foundation, and that’s what I need to see.”
The woman who asked nods her head and looks dow
n, chewing the skin off her upper lip. I turn away to give them a moment for this new information to sink in; looking out into the house, I see the other actors sitting forward in their seats, and I know they are wondering who it will be, and whether they could work with her, and what they would do in her place.
I turn back. “I want you all to dance together up here. Use the space any way you like. Take a minute to warm up and start whenever you’re ready.”
I can see the moment that they realize, ohmigod no music, how can we dance without, goddamn all directors anyway. But I want to see their interpretation of power, not music. If they don’t have it in them to dance silent in front of strangers, if they can’t compete, if they can’t pull all my attention and keep it, then they can’t give me what I need. Salome wouldn’t hesitate.
The dark-haired woman shrugs, stretches her arms out and down toward her toes. The third woman slowly begins to rock her hips; her arms rise swaying in the cliché of eastern emerald-in-the-navel bellydance. She moves as if embarrassed, and I don’t blame her. The dark-haired woman stalls for another moment and then launches into a jerky jazz step with a strangely syncopated beat. I can almost hear her humming her favorite song under her breath; her head tilts up and to the right and she moves in her own world, to her own sound. That’s not right, either. I realize that I’m hoping one of them will be what I need, so that I do not have to see Jo dance.
And where is Jo? There, at stage right, watching the other two women, comfortable in her stillness. Then she slides gradually into motion, steps slowly across the stage and stops three feet from the bellydancer, whose stumbling rhythm slows and then breaks as Jo stands, still, watching. Jo looks her straight in the eye, and just as the other woman begins to drop her gaze, Jo suddenly whirls, throwing herself around so quickly that for an instant it’s as if her head is facing the opposite direction from her body. It is a nauseating moment, and it’s followed by a total body shrug, a shaking off, that is both contemptuous and intently erotic. Now she is facing the house, facing the other actors, facing Lucky, facing me: now she shows us what she can do. Her dance says this is what I am, that you can never be; see my body move as it will never move with yours. She stoops for an imaginary platter, and from the triumph in her step I begin to see the bloody prize. The curve of her arm shows me the filmed eye and the lolling tongue; the movement of her breast and belly describe for me the wreckage of the neck, its trailing cords; her feet draw pictures in the splashed gore as she swirls and turns and snaps her arm out like a discus thrower, tossing the invisible trophy straight at me. When I realize that I have raised a hand to catch it, I know that I have to have her, no matter what she is. Have to have her for the play. Have to have her.
Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica Page 19