by Anna Tambour
I cocked an eyebrow, curious but not sold.
"Nothing disturbs one," he purred in a surprisingly tea and toast "English," of Mrs. Percival's small and luxurious lodging house, five minutes' walk from the British Museum. "No hail fellow well met, no banging bedstead in the next room. A haven of unfriendliness in a cloud of softness."
I was planning to seriously think it over when he said: "You won't have anyone to bother you at all," and he winked, with the comic leer of the knowingly repulsive man.
"Sold," I laughed.
This has always been a problem, with my looks. On campus I can hardly get any work done at all if anyone knows I'm in my office, and in the library—forget it. In a big lonely city, it is even worse. I have always had a problem with women, especially since I love them.
So I picked Mrs. Percival's as the base for my research. My learned colleague and best friend—the crowd averse and immensely unattractive Assistant Professor Adrian T. Gissing confided it to me as "a privilege for only the select few"—urged me to it in fact, and recommended me. Only the recommended would be allowed to stay, he told me, even though the place cost enough that you would think it was money Mrs. Percival was after. But it was nothing as vulgar as that.
"Tone, dear boy," Adrian mocked her, though he was my reference. "She only likes those with taste and quiet. But then ..." he explained, "she's almost motherly. So comfortable, and your meals will be brought to your room, so you won't have the excuse of going out in public to find a bite."
He was subtle in his own way, by what he didn't say. But he knew as well as I, that if I didn't get this work done, there would be no tenure for me.
~
"Ah, Doctor ... dear boy," Mrs. Percival murmured approvingly as she met me at the door, her few little clucks of welcome as soft and muffled as everything else in this unnamed Victorian townhouse. Her jewelry fit the place—a plaited hair bracelet, and on her fingers, no rings at all.
And Adrian was right. It was quieter than a chrysalis, and softer than the inside of a cocoon.
Even the sharpness of street smells and common perfumes must have been deemed vulgar by this gentle lady. As I bent to my bags, I sniffed more purposely. The space was suffused with a soft scent quite different to the cliché rose potpourri I had expected. It reminded me of something almost human ... almonds. Warm almonds.
My head was bent as I was writing my name in her book when I felt my hair sharply tugged. "Very acceptable, Adrian," she murmured.
I looked in her eyes, and she demurred with the hint of a smile. "Sometimes Adrian is inclined to embroider the truth," she said. "I just had to check."
Adrian? But looking at her now, I saw that there was in the middle of her face, a nose with a distinct cleft to it.
Was she ... but she turned away quickly, and was suddenly as impenetrable as the silence of the place.
"Remember," she said, her head bent over some smoothly opened drawer. "No disturbances, and we will have a lovely stay, won't we?"
And she placed my key on the green baize counter, and sat with her back to me, pointedly absorbed in an old book with deckled pages.
I took my bags up in the old fashioned cage lift, Mrs. Percival not offering help. It was refreshing to be treated just that little bit offhand.
I found my room halfway down the hall—a room that a woman might possibly have exited as she walked away from me toward the stairs.
Maybe it is reflexive, but I stopped to look.
Magnificently lordotic—she had a seahorse's back. One that demanded lacing, or at the very least, a hundred jet buttons marching from the nape of her milk-tinted neck down to the deep dishing curve at her waist, arching at the swell at her coccyx.
Hair with the natural curl of small children, no individual curls as such, but more of a cloud begging the sun to light from behind. It was an aureole around her head.
Her ankles in sheer silk, echoed the curves of her back.
I was just putting the key to the door, and missing it, when she turned around, and the key shoved into the hole up to the hilt.
"'xcuse," she said, her breath landing on my cheek. "I seem to have dropped an earring."
And with that she bypassed me into the room and pulled the door closed behind her.
My bags were beside me in the hall. She carried only a feedbag-type handbag. I heard her moving things about, drawers opening, the bed ruffled, and it sounded like being remade.
Then faintly, a tinkle of water, and a toilet flush.
The door opened. She smiled with a confidence I'd never seen.
"Found," she said, patting her left ear, where a diamond stud winked. Her ears were pierced.
"Glad to be of service," I said, smiling back but she had turned already.
Her back said goodbye. Incredible.
She was hard to believe. I suddenly hated what I was here for.
Work.
She had closed the door behind her. I crammed the key in the lock again and shoved myself into the room that like all the others in this hotel for loners, was a comfortable-looking single.
One week's work would do it, I had calculated. Beyond that, I couldn't afford to stay in London. This place was my indulgence, so I shut my mind to imagination. If I took the time to think of seahorse backs, I would never get my mind to work.
I dumped one bag by the door, and threw the other on the bed so I could unpack my corduroy pants, already creased, a button-down shirt for each day, etc. I had the handful of underpants and socks clutched to shove in the top drawer, but when I opened it, there was already something there, and it wasn't a phone book or a bible.
In the middle front of the drawer there was one stocking, very fine and semi-sheer, white with a pattern of flitting doves, and a back seam from heel to I couldn't see. It was half rolled in the crouch of a stocking that's just been taken off the foot.
Put it up to my nose. It smelled like roasted almonds—and toes. It smelled like her.
My right hand, still holding the clump of underpants and socks, dropped them on the floor, so it could open the second drawer down.
A white pasteboard box, tied with a bow of blue-black hair. In the box, a golf ball resting on a cloud of blond curls. I have blond curls.
I opened the two lower drawers to find nothing there but clean wood.
The bedside table was chintz-covered but naked underneath.
The wardrobe held nothing except my clothes and a clothing brush.
My suitcase, I clamped shut and shoved by the wall. Then I stripped the bed to the bottom sheet.
At the foot, a spray of snowdrops, still damp.
I buttoned the top button of my shirt tight, and stuck the spray in there, so the flowers bent to my throat. And continued.
In a tea cup, a child's cardboard toy that when tipped, gargled out "Nonny, nonny."
I sat on the floor, on the pile of buttermilk-yellow counterpane and dawn-pink sheet, tipping the toy back and forth, "Nonny, nonny, Nonny, nonny ..." while my mind explored her body. The flowers grew warm against my neck, their tongues tickling my Adam's apple.
Crawling over to the bureau, I reached up for the stocking and the white box, and sat with my back against the drawers.
Box in my lap, open to see the golf ball heavy on the golden curls.
I pulled the stocking over my face, the toe of the foot now the crown of my head. Smelling it feeling the inside of what it must be like to feel the outside ...
My fingertips explored the insides of the cloud of curls, her curls, my curls. Our smell now mixed.
My left foot fell asleep. Outdoors, it was already dusking.
I rolled the stocking off my face, knotted it around my neck, and went to explore the bath.
In the pile of towels, a little crystal vial: Drink me.
~
I woke in a bed. There was my suitcase by the wall. It was my room at Mrs. Percival's. The light was dim, and when I turned my head to the windows the curtains were closed, but my vision was t
aken up with a back facing me.
The seahorse-curved back of Her. Sitting up on my bed, her back tightly whaleboned and laced with pink silk straps, the curve of her derriere blossomed rosy and naked into the folds of sheet.
I felt myself—naked.
Looking at her, I remembered ... nothing.
"Was it good for you?" I murmured, as this always brings an encore.
She got up and walked around the foot of the bed, bent down without bending her knees, to pick up something I couldn't see. Maybe an earring because it wasn't an article of clothing. Straightening up, she came up my side of the bed and turned away, opening and closing the door behind her, somehow in the whole movement, never showing the front of herself to me at all.
I hadn't heard her voice again, but it was her. And she went out of the room wearing nothing but those silk and whalebone stays.
My clothes were in a pile by the bed. I tore them on and ran into the hall to see the top of her head as she descended the stairs.
I wanted to yell after her. Run and stop her. But "nothing disturbs one" warned me of making a scene. It was still early as the dimness in my room showed. And the hall was so quiet you could hear the electricity in the soft, hidden lighting.
Suddenly I smiled. My reputation must have proceeded me. That Adrian! I could imagine his eagerness to hear this installment of "Tales from the Sheets." And what name would he pick for this one? With his generalist approach, so irrelevant now, but good for his inspiration, it could be anything from a maiden to a wench, to a gentlewoman wronged. I know because he'd tell me their tales.
This was after I had told him the story, though. For Adrian has no true tales of his own. How could he? His skin is volcanic, his teeth typical for a British pug, and his nose, a beautifully risen dinner roll, the kind with the cloven top.
So I shared my experiences with him. The him who then turned each one into an epic tragedy. "Why do you always have to dump them?" he asked me. "No one is even Juliet."
I knew about Juliet. And I could see how he compared my girls to the ones he described—the knight's wife who slept finally with her own son to have someone to sleep with, the sultan's concubine who got shirty about not being picked, so he had her bundled into a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. The morning noon and night beddings of the hero of the Victorian classic, "My Secret Life." I liked this anonymous hero because he was obviously attractive to women, but he knew how, the more passionate they are, the faster they stale.
How do you explain to a starving man, that after the feast, the same flesh, re-hashed, is just that? But Adrian seemed to find succor in his romances, and the stories he told me were pretty good, if you're into vales of tears. If Adrian thought he was going to change me, or that he could perhaps, vicariously share a long-lasting marriage of souls when I saw the glory of love requited, he was sorely misjudging the effect of his parablizing.
At first when he named my women, they were all Shakespearean tragic heroines, and he didn't tell me the stories till I asked him to remind me of just why he thought that particular name was relevant. Then, he started going all over the centuries. There was James Joyce's Molly Bloom—all I remember from Joyce was someone sniffing at his pocket boutonniere of a pair of used women's panties, and I only remember that because that was the only part of the book my professor seemed to remember. There were ancient Greek heroines, dumped Edwardian beauties, ultimately soiled lilies from imperial courts of China and Japan.
Adrian roams all over the world and history in his sick fascination for hard-done-by women. I would have hated taking his class, English 101. A generalist to the core, he reads everything, it seems, from the beginning of time, till about 1930, everything "modern" being "trash." Many of the tragic heroines he's blamed on me were "the bard's," a term he uses with reverence, though it embarrasses me to be in his presence when he speaks this way.
He gave me a book for my birthday. "Read and learn."
He is incorrigible. Shakespeare's poetry.
But he never said, "Don't tell me your tales." He lapped them up hungrily, and mostly, transmogrified them into his tragedies, beautifully told with his actor's voice. I was a good audience, and he seemed to take satisfaction in the closest thing he got to romance in real life.
"Fie on you!" he exploded once, about one little redhead, "They're just wenches to you."
I giggled in spite of trying to maintain a serious face, because wench was a perfect description for her.
He struck his desk with his soft white palm. "Oh, why can't some pale hard-hearted wench, like Rosaline, torment you so, that you will sure run mad."
He was getting either funnier or more annoying by the moment. I cracked my knuckles. "Is that supposed to be a curse?"
He peered at me with that look that makes you wonder whether your front teeth are dotted with poppy seeds. "Doesn't anything ring a bell with you?"
"Don't you read anything that isn't a tragedy?"
"Of course."
"What?"
"Lots of things. The world of literature, you know—"
"Cut that crap, Adrian," I laughed. "What."
He took off his glasses. So corny.
"If you must know," he said. "But this is just between us."
"Of course," I assured him. He knew I wouldn't tell. I don't have anyone else to talk to.
"Barbara Cartland."'
It couldn't be.
"Another of your Elizabethans?"
He finally laughed, cocking his head in a manner that I think he meant to be debonair. "Modern trash. I thought you would know."
His superiority irks sometimes. "I told you. I don't read trash."
But all he was doing, by Shakespearizing my dates, was melodramatizing to someone to whom melodrama is as attractive as a night at the opera. Melodramatizing my leavings just makes me more determined not to get tied down by any of the neurosis of love.
There was nothing I could do for Adrian that would make him attractive. But I did try to make him relevant on campus. "You're on the outs," I warned him. "Edge yourself. Look at your students. Do they take your classes if they don't have to?"
He didn't have an answer.
"Do they read that crap other than in Cliffs Notes?" I almost asked, but I stopped myself, as this was too cruel. After all, that's how I got through, not so long ago.
As for tenure, how could he expect to get any? There was him, an old-fashioned generalist. And me. A specialist—not only that, but of the stuff people actually read. Who would you pick? Who do the students vote for with their electives? But then he must have known that. Neither of us spoke about the reality for him. A future of high school English classes, and pain at the jokes made not behind his back.
But Adrian was too far away to discuss this latest development as it progressed. I missed his incredulous look, his sad face, the tear that would roll comically down his roseated cheek at the oddest times.
It was delicious that this female was so shy that she had drugged me, so that she could wreak her will upon me. Shy and confident—how alluring, but I had heard of these hung-up English. As for this one ... If she wanted to play it that way, I would play drugged again, but I had to see her, feel her.
I went back to bed. The sheets that she sat on had her smell, and a bit of wetness. I wrapped my face in them.
Was it hours, I don't know. But when I woke again, I felt that it had been. It was time to work. But I didn't want to leave the sheets, and the memory of her back was so painful that I ran a cold bath.
There was a discrete knock at the door. I opened it to find my breakfast tray: tea, toast, a half-boiled egg.
Like a good child, I ate, then hurried out the door to my first day at research. On the way down, I stopped by the desk and there, out of the corner of my eye, she was, with her back to me, walking up the stairs. She was wearing a silk wrap so thin that I could imagine everything underneath.
I couldn't talk to her. I didn't have a line to use, especially to a woman who needed t
o drug me to have me. Tonight, I promised myself, I'd play the game, but only pretend to drink.
I worked that day, badly—and hungered. Not for food. I had never, I realized, felt hungry like this before.
That night when I ate alone in my room, I couldn't read. I couldn't think of anything but her. The room darkened, and still no knock. I went out for a walk to give her time to enter surreptitiously, since she must live here, somewhere. When I came back, I turned the room upside down looking for leavings, but there weren't any. No knock at the door, no surprise. No vial of drugged drink.
I went to sleep at midnight, bitter and hard.
She was there again in the morning, just like yesterday. I put my hand out, but she slid off the bed so fast that I couldn't touch her. "Hey!" I yelled, hurt.
That was a mistake. She ran out the door without a sound and left it hanging as open as me.
That day I couldn't work.
The next morning she was there again. By this time I knew I better not speak or touch. Not yet.
The week went by with me only waiting for that moment that I would not be asleep, when she would come to me and I would ... but I never seemed to make it. Every time I woke she was sitting in the same place, and her back looked more beautiful, and she left.
The last day came. The "research" had been a disaster. My money was gone. My bags packed, I presented the key to Mrs. Percival, but when she reached for it, I couldn't let it go.
"Yes?" she asked.
"Mrs. Percival?"
"You enjoyed your stay?" she said—a statement more than a question, apropos of something she must have seen in my face.
"Very much," though enjoyment wouldn't have properly defined this torture.
"Would you like to extend your stay?" she asked.
"Yes, but—"
Mrs. Percival stroked her hair bracelet. "We have an opening for a nice young boy as scullery."