Butterfly Skin

by Sergey Kuznetsov

  And there you are standing at her entrance and wondering what to do now, since you gave this address instead of your own, but you’re not thinking about where to find a car, and what lie you’ll tell to Oxana this time, when she doesn’t really believe your last lie anyway, but about how, now that you’ve already come here, this is your chance to change your fate. And you mutter it to yourself – change my fate, change my fate – almost the same way you repeated that mantra several weeks ago – kseniakseniakseniaIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou – a mantra that no longer holds any promises of salvation, the shroud of anguish enveloping you simply becomes even denser, like the snow covering over anyone who decides to sit down in the middle of the night in a dirty Moscow snowdrift. And now you try to remember where the windows of her apartment are, what you could see when you stood at the window of her room and Ksenia remained lying there, stretched out on her back, so thin and touching with her legs shamelessly spread to reveal the mons pubis into which, it seems, you will never again introduce your jade wand or your sexual organ, or whatever you would have called it if you needed to use words to call it anything. And now, with your head thrown back, breathing in the frosty Moscow air, you see that both of Ksenia’s windows are lit up, like a double lodestar, and then you realize that it is fate or, rather, a chance to change your fate – change my fate, change my fate – and, of course, you have to pay for a chance like this, but right now you are willing to pay any price, and I can tell you that’s right, because, because no price will be too much for you. After all, if you, Alexei Rokotov, the husband of your wife Oxana and the father of two children, who have collected young lovers the same way your latest hero probably collects the lips and nipples that he cuts off, and more successful journalists collect photographs of the places where they’ve been or the autographs of the celebrities they have spoken to, well then, if you’re standing here long after midnight facing the door of the woman who for the last month has been making it absolutely clear that she has absolutely no need of either your jade wand or your sexual organ, well then, since you’re already here, go up, why don’t you, and pay any price finally to put an end to this?

  What could you have seen up there? Ksenia, bound hand and foot, covered with cooling wax – very convenient, despite the searing pain, melted wax leaves no marks on skin – or she could be lacerated by a lash or a whip, thrashed with a riding crop or swatted with a paddle. While you and she were putting the site together, you saw photographs of worse things than that: at least, whatever game Ksenia might indulge in, her eyes are still in place, and her nipples, although they’re painful after the clamps (almost a hundred dollars in a specialized sex shop, this BDSM business is an expensive indulgence!) anyway, her nipples have not yet been added to anyone’s collection, her lips, all three pairs, have not lost their ability to dilate with blood and function normally, her arms and legs are still whole, look, one hand is hammering at the keyboard and Ksenia is nibbling on the other one nervously, savoring her own astringent taste on the fingers. So don’t be afraid, go up and ring the doorbell.

  Ksenia gets up and looks through the spy hole. “What’s happened?” she asks in a voice more alarmed than annoyed.

  “Can I come in?” you ask in a very quiet voice, because on the threshold of Ksenia’s apartment your courage has suddenly deserted you, together with your hopes of a miraculous change in your fate.

  “Wait, I’ll just put something on,” says Ksenia, and at that point you could really have turned round and gone away, because even ex-lovers are not too embarrassed by being naked in front of each other, if they still remember that they were once lovers.

  And now you stand there in the middle of the hallway, little Ksenia with no makeup, with a shirt over her naked body and old jeans, and Alexei Rokotov, the successful failure, that is, a man who has managed to turn even the major success of his life into failure. “What’s happened?” Ksenia repeats, puzzled.

  “I love you,” you say and Ksenia sighs, completely at a loss, not knowing what to do with this man who is years older than her, the father of two children, the husband of his wife Oxana, whom she has never seen, except in photos in an online vacation album. She sighs again and wants to say something like: Oh, come on, you just imagined it or: Listen, maybe you don’t really? – but then she looks him in the face and realizes that no, he didn’t imagine it and yes, he does. So, she looks him in the face, reaches out her hand and strokes his cheek with her palm and then says:

  “I’m sorry. I’ve fallen in love with another man” – and this answer is so unexpected even to her that she falls silent and carries on standing there as Alexei turns round and goes out without saying anything, out to the frosty Moscow air, the powdered snow spiraling across the ground, the car going his way that instantly appears. And there’s Alexei sitting on the front seat, not saying a word to the driver, or Oxana, who is getting closer, or Ksenia, who is getting further away, sitting there genuinely silent, sitting there understanding that you can’t scrape your fate off the palm of your hand, you can’t burn it out with a red-hot iron, you can’t take it off like a leather glove – and that’s why being unfaithful to your fate is as impossible as being unfaithful to your wife. And as he thinks about this, Ksenia’s image on his retina fades a little bit, although Ksenia is still standing there in the hallway of the apartment that he has just left, still holding her hand up in the air and repeating to herself: I’ve fallen in love with another man, as if she is trying out the taste of words that are new to her.

  40

  LARISA AND I ARE SITTING IN THE COFFEE INN. AS SHE hung her short coat on the hook behind her, I spotted the way she ran her palm over the smooth fur that is every shade of gray.

  When we first met many years ago, she was wearing a fur jacket then too, artificial blue fur, jeans and an orange sweater with a diagonal zip. If you unfastened it, you could take out one breast and kiss it, but I didn’t discover that until much later.

  Larisa is three years older than me: that’s a big difference when you’re seventeen and you’ve just finished school. I was still a virgin, but that was normal: in those days everyone started later – although maybe that’s just the way it seems to me. Larisa was my friend Yegor’s big sister, and we were celebrating the New Year at his dacha. She was with a young guy from the faculty of law at the university, and after midnight they went off upstairs, saying they were tired. We exchanged glances, giggling, as if to say: we know what they’ve gone off to do.

  We were wrong. I was convinced of that six months later.

  The girl I had been dating since school told me she had decided to keep her virginity until she got married, and I was so furious I told her to get lost. We said goodbye in a cold park in spring, she hugged me and pressed her body against me and in farewell I stuck my tongue as far down her throat as I possibly could, as if compensating in this way for the penetration that had been denied to me. She sobbed and went limp in my arms and I was aroused because she seemed so submissive. It occurred to me that I liked this kind of behavior and if she always acted like that, I wouldn’t mind carrying on seeing her. But when I asked for the last time if she would let me have it or not, she repeated “no” through her tears. I turned and walked away, feeling my prick tearing apart the material of my cheap jeans. I was seventeen and a half and still a virgin and so I decided: no more girls my own age. It was summer, and I went to Yegor’s dacha again, after learning that Larisa would be there and she had just quarreled with her law student.

  It was only later I found out that she quarreled with him because she had decided to keep her virginity until her wedding. Let me say straight away that she succeeded.

  Larisa had dark hair and big eyes, a round mouth and heavy breasts. Tits twenty-five pounds apiece, as they used to say in the days of my youth. Since then I have weighed women’s breasts a couple of times for the sake of amusement: seven and a half pounds was the absolute record. Larisa’s would have been about six pounds. She was a good kisser and she probably gave
me some of the finest blow jobs of my life. But then perhaps I was still too young and I didn’t need very much. Before she took me in her mouth, she always removed her spectacles and handed them to me – I started putting them in my pocket after I almost crushed them in my fist as I came, my orgasms were so strong then. I can see it now, Larisa’s blue-black hair fluttering like seaweed under the water as she swayed to and fro on her knees in front of me.

  Since then her hair has turned platinum and it looks like a wig. She no longer wears spectacles and her gray eyes have acquired an unnatural greenish tinge, no doubt from contact lenses. Sitting in the Coffee Inn, I try to see this well-dressed, middle-aged woman as the girl I used to kiss on benches in summer and in hallways during the winter. I had to walk up the stairs to the very top floor, sit her on the windowsill, unbutton the artificial blue fur jacket and open the slanting zip fastener, then fumble to find the fastening of her bra as quickly as possible. Larisa always used to say: Don’t, what if somebody sees, but as soon as I pressed my lips against her large brown nipple, she started breathing deeply and running her hands through my hair.

  I used to have long hair back then. I used to dream of being a rock star, I used to listen to Yegor Letov, Nick Rock’n’Roll, the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop. Larisa had graduated from a special English school, and a couple of times when I pestered her for translations she pulled a sour face and said the words were nothing but obscenities and she didn’t like that kind of thing. She really didn’t like obscenities, and her taste in rock and roll went no further than Queen, Aguzarova and Aquarium.

  She probably likes Zemfira and Tori Amos now, although I think maybe it’s okay for well-groomed ladies approaching forty to like Eminem, or even the band Leningrad. It’s kind of awkward to ask, she might think I’m hinting that fifteen years ago my obscene musical tastes were more advanced than hers.

  Fifteen years ago we sometimes used to go out to the dacha, where we would strip naked and spend hours at a time kissing on the divan that we had opened out, or simply on the floor. We were insatiable because we were young and we still had our virginity.

  Three years of continuous petting – that’s serious experience. I became a virtuoso in the art of bringing a girl to orgasm without penetrating deep into her vagina: I think I probably have Larisa to thank for being considered a good lover – with her large nipples and gentle hands and those especially sensitive spots between her shoulder blades and just above her buttocks, where her tail would have grown if she had been one of those animals that are used to make fur jackets for well-groomed ladies approaching forty.

  We drink coffee. Larisa tells me about how she flew to London for Christmas and watched the last part of Lord of the Rings in English. We used to love that book, although now all I remember is the part where the dead faces gaze up out of the depths of the frozen swamp. And of course, I remember that sinister charm and the oppressive gaze that starts seeking you out just as soon as you put the ring on your finger. A feeling only too familiar to me now.

  We put on our rings and lived together for three years. I guess we were just about the only couple in my circle who didn’t get married because the girl was knocked up. My grandmother died and Larisa and I started living in our own apartment. I was already trying to make money and I used my first earnings to buy a VCR and a Japanese TV. We put them in the bedroom and every evening we used to lie in bed, watching video cassettes borrowed from friends or bought from the street traders. A three-hour cassette could usually hold two movies and if the first one was good the impetus of our interest usually carried us through the second one as well.

  While we were hugging and squeezing each other in hallways and licking each other for hours at the dacha, I was certain that when the moment came and we made love properly, a miracle would happen. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Larisa seemed to me like an excellent lover and now, ten years and dozens of women later, I can say that she really was, but there was still something wrong. We came together, sticky with sweat; I kissed her heavy breasts with the big nipples, she gripped my ear lobe between her lips and ran her always impeccable nails lightly along my thigh – and yet throughout the years of our life as a family I wanted to ask: is that all there is? Is this what they write books and make movies about? Is this what millions of teenagers all round the world dream about?

  Larisa has been married for eight years now. I don’t know if she loves her husband when she runs her nails across his thigh, if he knows the especially sensitive spot between her shoulder blades and how to kiss her palm to make her come. It’s kind of awkward to ask about that, although I guess I really am curious.

  Her husband earns a pretty good income, but even so I meet her every month to hand over an envelope with money in it: I love my son very much and I want to be a good father. It’s eight years now since I last saw him.

  Sometimes we used to make love in front of the TV. It didn’t necessarily have to be porn, sometimes it was romances, action movies or even comedies. I remember we laughed like lunatics at Airplane!, at one point even forgetting that I was still inside her. I think we even tried making love to Ridley Scott and James Cameron’s popular action movies of the time, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigourney Weaver.

  The best orgasm Larisa gave me was while we were watching some horror B-movie. A group of girl scouts, with the regulation huge tits – twenty-five pounds apiece – was trying to escape from a group of psychos armed with all sorts of weapons for butchering flesh, up to and including the chainsaw immortalized by Tobe Hooper.

  (By the way, the original for Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the same Ed Gein who inspired Hitchcock and Harris. I’ve read a lot about him: the man had a sense of beauty, a necklace of women’s nipples really is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.)

  Larisa wasn’t particularly fond of movies like that – she wasn’t even afraid of them, just completely indifferent to what was going on. I guess she thought all these bloody stories about girls being butchered while they were still alive had nothing to do with her life, or maybe in her world, which was already artificial even then, these stories looked like an unacceptable intrusion of reality. Whatever, I don’t know. Anyway, she was sitting on me with her back to the screen, moving up and down rhythmically. I was holding her heavy breasts in my hands and following the action on the screen over her shoulder. A second-string female character, obviously destined to be butchered, a blonde with hair the same color that Larisa is dyed now, was gazing around as she wandered through the woods where her two girlfriends had just been killed. In the regulation style for movies like this, she was wearing a highly revealing swimsuit, and I moved in time with Larisa as she rose and fell and waited for the blonde to get her throat cut. Suddenly a hand grabbed the girl’s platinum hair and I saw a huge machete descend on her breasts.