I don’t know what she saw, but I started to hallucinate pretty badly. Either the pills, or I had really started to fade, myself – I don’t know. I was in the kitchen, full and real and solid, looking out my window. The sun was bright, so bright that I had to close my eyes against the brightness – but for some reason it reached right through my eyelids and right into my brain. I realized then that it couldn’t be the sun – for at least the obvious reason that sun never came in that window, anyway.
No tunnel, no saints (or sinners, either), just that bright light. I felt myself start to come apart, like the flesh I had always talked about, thought about in my trances, was starting to unravel and decompose around me, leaving just the lightweight fragment of Roger Corn left. It wasn’t a pull or an enticement, it was just a direction that I was walking myself to.
Jasmine. Somewhere I thought that, and reached back into my apartment for her, but I couldn’t seem to find her. I looked in the bedroom, the bathroom (I looked so silly lying there in the tub, mouth hanging open), the living room, all the closets, the kitchen . . . everywhere. No Jasmine. Not even her ghost.
Then that sound. Her sound. Cheap bells on her toes and a smile on her face. I found her masturbating in the bedroom, chubby legs wide and open, finger dancing on her clit. Typical. I smiled and took her hand and pulled her towards me, into me –
– and then pushed her away, into the brightness.
The cops and firemen busted down my bathroom door about that time. I don’t remember much after save the sound of their tools smashing my interior door to cheap splinters. I probably don’t want to remember being naked in front of all those macho public servants, having a tube run down my throat and having all that guck and pills poured out. Rosie had come through, with perfect timing.
No repercussions, no real ones at any rate: what’s another botched suicide, after all. At least I had accomplished something with this one: a spectral repercussion.
She’s gone. You’d expect that. Gone wherever magical little Deadheads go when they OD. She’s with Janis now, with Morrison and Lennon – in a place where the seventies never happened and where everyone gets along.
And, yeah, I hear those damned happy bells now and again.
Two of Cups
Elizabeth Margery
The first time I saw Esmee she was reading Tarot in the square in front of a soaring brick and stone church. What I would come to know as French, African, and Spanish blood was blended in her dark luminous eyes, high cheekbones, and queenly posture. Dressed like a younger, hipper incarnation of Marie Laveau in a long ruffled skirt and tignon, she laughed and chatted with the tourists.
She shuffled and dealt like a pro, slim golden fingers bridging the oversize pasteboards with ease. I watched from the shade of a flowering tree as she told the future for a few bucks a pop, her patter in Creole-spiced tones as sweet and slow as honey. She noticed me, too. Her inquisitive glance felt real as a touch on my skin, even as she assured a stout, perspiring woman of opportunities on the horizon. When the woman hauled herself to her feet, Esmee beckoned to me, smiling.
I hesitated. Not because of the cards, though some of Papa’s congregation would consider them a risk to my immortal soul. Papa would disapprove mightily as well, though from distaste for the mystical rather than belief in its dangers. I hesitated , because of the danger to my heart, the danger of making a fool of myself. What could it hurt? I asked myself as I stepped out into the sun.
“What’choo name, cher?” she asked.
“Kristina.” I sat on the rim of the fountain.
“From up north? Me, I’m Esmee.” She’d set what looked like a large TV tray covered with a black velvet cloth next to the curb of the fountain. Only room for a three card spread – past, present, future – because, she explained shrugging, “les flics” sometimes looked the other way, and sometimes not.
“Gypsy laws,” she said darkly.
And sure enough, as soon as she laid out my cards a cop strolled into the square. Her eyebrows rose, but I’d barely gotten a glimpse at the bright colors and archaic forms before he headed towards us. Esmee bundled the cards into the cloth and folded the table. We scurried into a nearby café; half in real urgency, half in smothered giggles.
From the shelter of the area defined by awnings, ropes, and potted plants, she gave an impudent smile to the cop. He cocked thumb and finger at her like a gun, smiled sourly and walked on.
“Private property,” she explained with satisfaction.
We sat at a small wrought-iron table, her paraphernalia stowed beside us. The waiter brought café filtres without being asked. We sipped and smiled a little self-consciously, my sundress and sandals making a strange contrast to her voluminous garments.
“Would he really have arrested you?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not.” She flashed a gamine grin at me, square white teeth gleaming. “For sure, he’d hassle me, run me off. Me, I don’t feel like running today.”
“I thought that was all part of the local charm. Jazz, ghosts, voodoo?”
“In theory” – she pronounced it “tee-o-ry” – “but not in practice. If you don’t have a license or work for a shop, they treat you like a panhandler. If you do, you don’t make any money.”
“What about my fortune?” I wondered if she remembered the cards, if she’d read it here.
“Pfft, that’s easy,” she said, winking. “Same as mine, when I read my cards first thing this morning: ‘you have been lonely, but you will meet a beautiful stranger. Your life will change.’”
I caught my breath, unsure whether she meant what I thought or not. Unsure what I wanted her to mean. I was afraid it was wishful thinking on my part, though her slow smile and dark gaze seemed to indicate otherwise. For years, I’d been taking my holidays in exotic cities, hoping for excitement. Perhaps, just perhaps, that excitement had finally arrived.
“So, how much do I owe you?” I asked, reaching for my handbag to cover my confusion.
“For you, nothing.” She shrugged; a delicious gesture that caused her off-the-shoulder blouse to shift distractingly. “We’ll share it, yes?”
“Are you sure? Don’t I have to cross your palm with silver to make it come true?”
“Not much silver in American money these days. Cross Etienne’s palm instead. Get the tip? Come, walk with me, cher.” Esmee dropped a couple of tattered dollars on the table and I hastily scattered a handful of change. The maitre d’, a very dark man with dreadlocks, kissed his fingers to her and smiled.
Outside, she slipped her hand through my arm as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Our strides matched nicely, shoulders brushing as we strolled out of the sun-struck square and down a tree-lined avenue. At home, I would have felt self-conscious. At home, I would have had good reason – Pastor Nilsen’s librarian daughter. Here I enjoyed the glances we garnered: a lovely darker woman in the garb of the last century and a tall, blonde woman in aggressively modern tourist attire.
We talked. She was actually a student at the local college, slowly putting herself through evening classes. Not an actual refugee from another time, she told fortunes, did other things. Like gumbo, she said, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
“Can you make a living?” I asked, though truthfully her gypsy existence sounded like heaven. I’d had enough stability to last a lifetime.
“Not bad during the season,” she said cheerfully. “More fun than waiting tables, washing dishes, yes?”
More fun than shelving books and collecting quarters, too. I asked, “Do you believe in the Tarot?”
“But, of course! We make our own futures, you know, but we make them of the past and the present. It’s all there.”
“What if you see a bad future for someone?”
“Mmm, bad fortunes are bad for business. Like a sundial, I only count bright hours. I might warn, you know? Don’t travel next week? Like that, but the other, no. People come here for pleasure, to leave sorrow at home.”
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I suppose I thought Esmee was looking for a new place to set up. I didn’t realize I was walking her home until we arrived at the door.
“Come up?”
My footsteps and breath stuttered to a stop, color scalded my cheeks. “Don’t you need to . . . work?”
“Too hot for the tourists now. They’ll be back in the evening,” Esmee said, stopping one step up. “I’m not wrong about you, cher, am I?”
I almost asked, wrong about what? I didn’t, couldn’t. “No,” I whispered, “not wrong.”
“Then come up.”
Up, indeed. Three floors up, but at least it gave an excuse for my flushed face and pounding heart. Her apartment was small, a bed-sitting room decorated in nouveau-hippie: India-print fabrics and squashy pillows. The room smelled of curry and incense. The single window had no real curtain. It probably didn’t need one with its view of rooftops and tree crowns, but she’d hung a beaded curtain of rainbow-colored plastic. The slanting afternoon light threw drops of jeweled brightness on the dusty floor. She kicked off her slippers with a sigh of pleasure.
“Sit down. I’ll get some wine.”
I chose a cushion and slipped my sandals off. My sundress wasn’t long enough to make sitting on the floor easy. I finally settled for curling my legs to one side. Esmee, returning with two lovely but mismatched stemmed glasses, sank gracefully to sit cross-legged, her skirts billowing around her. She lifted her glass and held it until I copied her. “Bon chance!”
“Good luck?” I sipped. It tasted like chablis, but I’m not sure I could have told the difference between champagne and turpentine at that moment.
“To good fortune,” she corrected. “The good fortune that brings us together.”
The atmosphere in her room was suddenly so thick that I could have written my name in the air with my finger. No, not my name – “I Want You,” in large letters. I’d dreamed, if not of this, then of a hundred variations of it for years. But in those fantasies I hadn’t been paralyzed, staring like a fool, afraid to trust my luck.
Esmee took the glass from my fingers, placing it and her own on the floor beside her. She caught my wrist and turned my palm up.
“Do you read palms, too?” I asked, then felt like an idiot when she dropped a kiss into my palm.
I had never been so conscious of the size and shape and structure of another’s hand. Her fingers were shorter, her palm broader, but size for size, very like my own. Callused and strong, but so different from a man’s. When she leaned towards me, I met her halfway, drawn like iron to a magnet.
That first kiss was like a sixty-second faint with my eyes open. Her full lips were warm and lush, tasting faintly of wine. Our lips clung, as though my flesh was loathe to part from hers. The second kiss was even better, deeper. Her tongue was small and quick and pointed like my own, a pas de deux instead of a duel. She touched the planes of my face, tracing eyelids, cheekbones, and the curve of my jaw delicately, reading me in Braille.
“I’ve never done this before,” I whispered against her cheek. “Been with a woman, I mean.”
“But you wanted to, didn’t you?” Her tongue traced the inner curve of my ear and I shivered when I felt her breath against the moisture.
“Oh, yes.”
“Don’ worry. Like fallin’ off a log, cher. It’s easy.”
God, yes, it was easy. Like falling off a log, like falling off a cliff, like falling in love. Easy and total and irretrievable. Whatever I’d suspected in the past, I knew for certain now. I reached out and caught her shoulders, warm and solid beneath the ruffled blouse. A simple push bared her breasts, the garment catching at her elbows for moment before she slipped her arms free.
She reached for me on another kiss, canting her head to fit more perfectly as she groped for the zipper on my sundress. The slur of my zipper underscored the inhale and exhale of our breathing. Her laughter against my mouth as she fumbled for the fastening of my bra went to my head more than supermarket wine could ever do.
“Stand up,” Esmee said urgently and I did, dizzy and unsure of my footing amongst the pillows. She shimmied out of her blouse and long skirt in one gesture, nothing beneath them. I undressed quickly and didn’t worry about whether she thought my hips too wide, my breasts too small. All my attention was on her.
She was perfect – smooth café au lait skin over a solid, close-coupled frame, curly dark hair cropped close to her elegantly shaped skull. Her nipples were generous and dark.
“Like Hershey’s Kisses,” I said, touching one with reverent fingers. The tip hardened.
“And yours like raspberries, all pebbled up. A pretty good combination, cher, raspberries and chocolate.” Esmee bent and drew my nipple into her lips. We were of a height so when she straightened, our breasts nuzzled together, firm and soft. “Come here, sugar.”
She drew me towards the bed: several mattresses stacked together, her coverlet a patchwork of velvets and satins all in shades of maroon. Her tawny skin was marvelous against it, and I wondered if she’d chosen it for that reason. I wondered other things, too. I wondered what she’d feel like under me, on top of me. What she’d taste like.
“Don’t look so worried, bébé. I’ll teach you.” She laughed then, and patted the bed. “I almost said, ‘I won’t eat you,’ but of course, that’s not true! At least I hope not.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “I want to go first. Eat you, I mean.”
“Soixante-neuf is nice,” she said. “You know, sixty-nine?”
Too distracting for the first time, I thought and besides, if I couldn’t do this or couldn’t do it right, I didn’t want to owe her. Failure seemed highly unlikely. I’d never felt this sure about a first time with any boy. But still. I shook my head. “Please?”
“Sure.” Esmee lay back, spreading herself before me like a landscape of gently rolling hills and wooded valleys. Her generosity made me catch my breath. I kissed her mouth, her throat, and feasted on her breasts. It wasn’t imagination; she smelled and tasted of cocoa-butter.
She had a racing stripe, a line of darker pigment that ran from below her navel to her sex, like an arrow showing the way. Goosebumps rose on her belly as I ran my tongue down that stripe. Heart thumping, I settled between her legs. I lost my concentration for a moment, distracted by the contrast between Esmee’s honey-colored thighs and my pale freckled hands; the contrast between my fantasies and the reality in my arms, inches from my lips. Uncertainty stilled me. “I want this to be good for you.”
“It will be. You got an advantage, girl. Just think ’bout what you like and do it. It’ll be fine.” She touched my hair. “You’ll be fine.”
I kissed the hollow of her hip on each side and rubbed my lips and nose across the crinkly black nest of pubic hair. She smelled like me but also different, salt and musk but warm, like a tropical sea and also flowers. What sort of flowers bloomed on tropic isles?
I parted her outer lips and marveled at her. In theory, I knew how a woman is made – how I was made – but this was different. I’d always thought of women as being all neatly tucked up inside, not bobbing absurdly out in front like men. Caring for and even pleasuring myself had never challenged that notion, but her sex was a structure more subtle and complex than I expected.
Her inner lips were a baroque fantasy, ruffled like an orchid and richly pink. Ah, yes, orchids! Her vagina was a mysterious well of deeper hue, her clitoris prominent. She caught her breath as I gently slipped the hood back to expose the tiny inner knot, then released a long sigh as I touched it with the very tip of my tongue.
The first taste led to a deeper kiss and it was like having oral sex for the first time ever, not just the first time with a woman. The act for its own sake, not as a way station on the road to something else, but an end in itself, and a thing of mutual pleasure. Her every shift and sigh fed back to me.
Her musk grew stronger, her thighs dewed with perspiration as they tensed and relaxed, and her sighs became murmurs of pleasure and then moans
. Time spun away from me. I came back to myself to find her clitoris fluttering like a tiny live creature between my lips. When her cries told me “too much” I set it free and dropped my forehead to rest against the arch of her pubic bone, breathing hard into the hollow formed by her outspread legs, filling my lungs with her scent. Though aroused, I felt no desire to move. I could have lived in the canyon of her thighs forever.
Esmee plucked at my shoulder. I crawled up the length of her body slowly and collapsed against her. The planes of our bodies meshed like drowsy serpents – my shoulder under her arm, my cheek against her bosom, the swell of her hip into the narrow of my waist. “Cher, if you never done that before, you got natural talent you been pure-dee wasting.”
She scooted down till she could kiss me. The taste of her lips through the taste of her sex made me reel. Sweet tangle of lips and tongues, sweet mingling of perfumes, sweet mixture of desire.
“First time ever,” I whispered, still feeling solemn, “but not the last.”
“Dieu, I hope not. So what you think ’bout eating pussy?” she asked and kissed my temple.
“It’s wonderful, and – I don’t know – it’s so easy. I thought it would be harder, the first time.”
She laughed, a rich caramel laugh, that I felt as much as heard. “Well, why would it be hard?” she asked with perfect logic. “Hard’s for men, not for us. Your turn now, bébé.”
She sat up, leaned over, and kissed me, lips as soft as rose petals. She slipped one finger into me, gathering my fluids so her touch slid silkily over my clitoris with just the right pressure. When my hips rose to her hand, she flung one leg over my thigh and rubbed her sex against it, rough hair and hot, wet labia riding me. We rocked together, drinking each other’s sighs and whispers, until I shuddered to climax.
We lay twined together, her soft, damp weight a precious burden until she shifted and propped herself on an elbow. She touched a finger to the end of my nose and frowned in mock sternness.
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