Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

“Quin?”

  The voice has me nodding like a somnambulist. She steps forward. Her hands, I notice, are remnants of a past glory.

  “I’m Felicity.”

  Drowning in the last tone, I clasp her wrist with all the wisdom of a dead man.

  FELICITY

  He drove me back to his house. I remember pulling up outside and trying not to be disappointed. The house was a decrepit terrace with faded curtains drawn across the windows. We didn’t say anything, we didn’t need to. There are those rare moments when one just knows.

  Suddenly I’m frightened. Here I am, standing in this dingy room with its leather couch and second-hand rug, in front of this tall, dark, young man. A total stranger. Maybe it’s menopause, a flash of hormonal madness. In an instant my survival instinct shakes itself awake. I turn to leave, but then he moves, and nothing else matters.

  He puts on a Shirley Bassey record and asks me to sing. I’m so nervous I think I’m going to throw up.

  I haven’t sung in years. I used to sing when I was in my early twenties, in a jazz club. That’s when I met Adrian, my husband. Safe, secure, predictable. He’s so—dry. He just doesn’t excite me anymore. Actually I wonder whether he ever excited me.

  Sing, Quin keeps telling me. What have I got to lose? My marriage? My dignity? Adrian would kill me if he could see me now.

  I open my mouth and surprise myself with a perfect C. It fills the room like light. He closes his eyes. There’s an ecstasy about him as he breathes the music through his skin, his very cells.

  QUIN

  She’s singing my life, in tempo, underscoring it with the sadness, the loneliness, the great unspoken epic. I can’t stop my body from moving. I am transported beyond the mundane. She is singing up all my dreams. All my forgotten memories. Even with my eyes closed, I can see the color of each tone: red shooting through yellow, black clashing into purple. I don’t need to touch her, I could come now, just from the pitch of her voice sliding up and down the octaves.

  “Keep singing,” I whisper, “keep singing.” I move behind her. My hands creep around her and begin to undo her high-collared blouse, button by button. Her breasts spill forward, pushed up by the bra, femininity under wraps. My long fingers reach for her nipples. Her breath falls short, but she keeps on singing.

  I kneel before her, her breasts open to the air, the rest of her body covered by her long velvet dress. I cup her breasts and squeeze them together. I am a maestro. There is nothing hesitant as I take a nipple into my mouth, sucking hard, biting the blood to the surface.

  We topple to the ground. She keeps her face averted, her eyes staring upward as she thrills along with the bass line. My mouth caresses her entire body. She will not look at me. She seems far away, her focus carried away by her magnificent voice. To me it feels as if the range and resonance of her voice is fusing with the extraordinary breasts that tumble to either side of her belly. I can feel her voice vibrating through her skin. The scale of her is operatic, her taste salty and Wagnerian, her smell, her sweat, the texture of her skin, an immeasurable wealth of orchestration.

  “Quin, take me, take me…”

  I lift my hand from between her thighs, her profile barely visible through her thick black bush.

  “Keep singing.”

  I feel her welling up under my tongue, as she thrusts, out of control, like a bird flapping madly in a cage. I keep her pinned by my mouth, playing her like an instrument. She crouches, her skin shiny, lit by the valves, her lips pulled back like some majestic creature, a sphinx, an olive-skinned Madonna. She is singing the scales of an octave. She is close to screaming, but her breath comes in perfect pitch—middle C, D, E, F sharp. The carpet grates under her knees as, oblivious, she arches in a final climactic spasm. She traverses two full octaves in one glorious shriek.

  The sound of her coming rips through the back of my head in streams of pure color as I ejaculate all over the rug. It is like John Cage in a thunderstorm, like wind through a forest. I’ve never heard an orgasm like it. All my fears, all my doubts evaporate for three glorious minutes. And I, Quin, know then why I had been put on earth.

  That night I made love to her four times. By the third time, I knew I had to get those notes down before they evaporated forever. I keep a tape recorder behind the couch, ready to record the odd inspired moment.

  I’ll always remember it. Felicity was on her front, lips pressed against the carpet, pouting, pushed forward. She was breathing in short gasps. There was a pillow under her belly so her ass jutted up, the two pale orbs spread, her pussy glistening under the hair. Both of us were animal now. We existed beyond skin. No album notes, nothing to drag us into identity, just the heat and the smell and the sex.

  I looked back over my shoulder and pressed the record button with my left toe. She never noticed a thing.

  MACK

  I still can’t believe it. Like this chick, this housewife, spends one night with the Wolf, and that’s it, bang! Her whole universe, microscopic though it may be, is upended. She goes home, packs two suitcases and a trunk full of stuffed toys, hires a taxi and leaves a note scrawled in crayon for her husband of ten years. She was on a mission, I tell you. I know these women. A man’s persona is ultimately his most private territory. So what does this witch go and do? She treads all over Quin, invading his very soul.

  First it was the shoes. For ten years Quin had been wearing the same pair of tennis shoes. Footwear, he believed, should remain utilitarian, not decorative. An admirable sentiment, if not a bit dated, but I respected it anyway.

  Two months after moving in, that bitch had him wearing brogues, for Christ’s sake. I caught him tiptoeing down the corridor, shoes in hand, blisters all over his feet. I figured she must be some chick, I mean this guy had had the best of them, you know, models, dancers, the usual band molls. For Quin to take up shoes she had to have something special.

  “Quin, what’s this chick got on you?”

  He nods slowly in that reptilian way of his and says, “Music.”

  That’s all, like a guru or some enlightened mystic. He had us all fooled. Speaking as an old fool, I know.

  Next thing he’s coming to work in a suit, as if this is the eighties or something. Listen, I’ve got nothing against the corporate, especially corporate money—it keeps the drugs rolling in. But I like to keep suits in the conference room, not the studios. A tie at two a.m. makes the bands nervous.

  Besides, it made Quin look like an exotic spider of the toxic variety—not a great look. So I ask him to leave the suit at home. He agrees but tells me that he’s got no control, the needle runs haywire when she opens her mouth. Pure sound, he tells me—like he doesn’t even hear the words, just the tone of her voice.

  Great, I think. He’s finally cracked and we have an album to record by December. I’m telling you, at this point in history my ponytail is going gray.

  Like I thought, she worked her alchemy on him. She moved in, washed the curtains, sorted out the wardrobe and even weeded the concrete courtyard, for Christ’s sake. Gone were the seventies relics, the stashes of joint butts, torn beanbags, used guitar picks.

  She threw out four hundred copies of Stereosound, Audiophile and LA Ears.

  She dismantled his workbench and insisted that it be reassembled in the back shed.

  She even scrubbed the walls. The place lost that comfortable nicotine-yellow hue. It made me edgy just walking in. It was so white you felt like donning shades. Not the domain of a nocturnal creature like Quin. Like luxury is not an issue here, unless you count the luxury of sinking into a worn leather couch, comfortably caved in from many a stoned drummer sinking his fat ass down into the upholstery.

  Even the ceiling didn’t escape the brutality of her scrubbing brush. Edwardian, Quin tells me, staring up at the exposed plaster swirls, as if he ever fucking cared before. Edwardian! I’m telling you, I felt like hanging garlic around my neck in case it was catching. Funny thing is, I never actually met her at the house. Quin used to take me around
only when she was out. Not that I’m suggesting he was scared of her or anything. Just getting the various harmonics of his life in tune. Cautious bastard, I thought, you know how women can just throw your life into disarray. Especially if you’re one of the great unwashed, unmarried brethren. You know, secretly I think I did want it to work. Like there might be hope for us all.

  Then she did something that even I found hard to forgive. He’d given her access to the lounge room. The sacred listening site. Fatal mistake. I mean the shrine of sound was in there, stacked up on four milk crates, valves gleaming, turntable balancing on oxygen-free wires. Quin’s very sanctum. His inner ear. See, women think that anything that’s not to do with them, or that’s not income-generating, is just a hobby. They don’t understand or appreciate the nuances of obsession, especially when it comes to inanimate objects. Like record players. Quin told me he caught her standing over the machine, eyes gleaming like an insane lighthouse, duster at the ready. He nearly freaked, but then she turns around and says, “But how was I to know?”, her voice alone sending him into a crippling paradox of lust and forgiveness.

  Man, did he have it bad.

  QUIN

  How long? Six months. From Sydney’s winter to the beginning of Sydney’s summer. Six months of audio paradise.

  During the day I walked around in a trance, the sound of her orgasm still echoing in my ears from the night before. It was the nearest thing I’d ever experienced to happiness. I felt myself softening under the continual stream of beautiful cadences, harmonics, arias and extended solo notes. They threaded through the house like glistening spider webs. I mean, Jesus, I became poetic. Religious even.

  One morning in the bath, I decided that if God had a sound it would be the sound of Felicity’s orgasm. I’m telling you, I would have married this woman.

  MACK

  We had a Christmas booze-up that year, the usual orgiastic affair with the odd overdose in the back toilet. I can remember that one vividly because that was the only time I got to meet Felicity.

  By now Quin had actually stopped smoking. He even told a client off for swearing—a heavy-metal singer renowned for the tattoo on his penis bearing the legend TIGER LOVES TAIL. Tiger was not amused.

  Neither was I. I mean, this was business. OK, the guy could hum a perfect A, but I couldn’t have him alienating my clients. But sentiment is a powerful thing. Besides, there weren’t that many guys I could listen to Patti Smith with. So I decided to give him another six-month trial before firing him. That was between me and my karma.

  So I’m sitting there, can of beer in one hand, joint in another, a gorgeous blonde number on my lap, listening to this really cute female country and western singer giving a feminist reading of Christmas—a deconstruction that cast the Virgin Mary as the true Messiah, Jesus Christ as the parasitic male invader and the Holy Spirit as an amorphous death wish. And I’m kinda focusing on this high concept of cunt worship. The blond babe is wriggling nicely at every mention of Christ, and the dope is cool, very cool. At that moment, Quin walks in with his mother.

  At least I thought it was his mother, I mean what’s a guy to assume when he sees his best mate with a short, comfortably stacked female around forty-five? So I’m leaping up, stashing the dope, brushing the coke off my beard, getting ready to give Mum a kiss on the cheek, when Quin says, “Mack, meet Felicity.”

  Mack, meet Felicity!

  I’m struck dumb for a solid five minutes, and then this creature, this harridan that has destroyed my best friend’s life, opens her mouth and says in the sweetest, juiciest pitch I’ve ever heard, “Mack, you’re famous around our house.”

  And I find myself looking around for a six-foot black siren with melon breasts and a wasp waist, until she whispers again in saccharine tones, “Surely Quin’s told you about me?”

  Her magical voice still suspended in the air, I realized then that Quin was a marked man, possibly the new Messiah, lost to the cause. He will die for his ears. Like I said, it was great cocaine.

  Three weeks later I’m locking up the studio. You know, pacing down the corridors, switching off lights, pulling shut the padded door.

  Down the end I can see the lights still on in Quin’s studio. Night owl, I’m thinking, and a little part of me starts hoping that perhaps he’s reverting back to the lovable neurotic insomniac he once was, in his torn leather jacket and matted dreadlocks, emerging like a phoenix. You get these thoughts late at night in the studio. Maybe it’s just turning forty-three, who knows.

  So I walk in and there he is, bent over the desk like a possessed shaman, headphones engulfing his narrow head.

  “How’s it going?” I ask, but he’s gone, twitching to a barely audible sound track. It’s the final mix of Taunting Tongues. I check the needles on the dials; none are over. Quin’s the ultimate acrobat when it comes to balancing sound. It is then that I notice the cassette. I lift it up and am just deciphering Quin’s black scrawl when he snatches it out of my hand. Quickly, really quickly—and I thought he was lost to the music.

  “C’mon,” I say, “what’s this? The unreleased final Elvis track? Michael having sex with his monkey?”

  Quin says nothing. He just sits on that cassette, man, slams the headphones back on and points me out of there. Six months, I’m thinking to myself. Like I own that joint.

  QUIN

  From beyond the headphones I can barely hear Mack’s footsteps fading. Gone. Left alone. At last. I turn toward the mixing desk. It gleams in the dark. It is my control panel. My cockpit. In here I have the agility of a Harrier fighter. I spin, thin and powerful as my fingers dart from one track to another. In here I am master of the universe.

  I love this desk. It’s the oldest in the studio, conceived of long before digital audio technology. Hidden somewhere behind that gleaming panel are a few glowing valves. I can feel them through the metal. Comforting beacons of rationality, promising real sound, not some computerized semblance of noise. Mack thinks the desk is haunted by the ghost of an audio engineer, electrocuted while mixing an acid-rock band in the late sixties. I don’t care. He was probably a great guy. He must have been, if he loved my desk.

  I control all.

  In goes the cassette. Black and streamlined, it slots in perfectly. Machine sex, an intercourse of microchip and plastic. The sound of Felicity’s climax belts out from the huge speakers, reverberating around the padded walls. She sounds like a choir of vibrating harps. I stop the tape, rewind and play again.

  I lay the track down on one channel, then play it back an octave higher and at twice the speed. The result is a rap, celestial but erotic.

  Now for the strings. Carefully pushing the controls, slower, slower, I weave the sounds together, pulling up the cello. It will play behind the climax, its low, wailing tone threading through the descent. At that speed the pleasure translates as anguish. I plait the cello over the original track, creating a Greek chorus of wailing strings and human voice. Then I overlay the descent, high-speed version. I breathe a short prayer before playing it back—a prayer to instinct, to the intuitive ear, the only gift I have. It works. It is a carnal cantata. Felicity’s orgasm is the eye of the storm, the tracks above and below it echoing and roaring like furious winds.

  I grow hard. I am dictator. Conductor to a whole quartet of dewy-eyed, panting mezzo-sopranos, aggressive contraltos and one acquiescing falsetto.

  I close my eyes and reach for the drum machine.

  Nothing is sacrosanct. So I had the cassette, so I changed it. Maybe I wanted to play God. We all need to at some time in our lives. I was innocent. Like Einstein, I just wanted to improve on nature.

  MACK

  The next morning I come in around six. Something’s bugging me about the way the speakers sound in studio two. So I’m stumbling down the corridor, hungover, with my jeans dragged over my pajamas, smelly teeth and bare feet. Times like this I wish I was married. I check into studio two, switch the lights on and activate the desk. I glance in the direction of Quin’s
studio.

  I’m peering through my bloodshot retinas and what do I see—Quin, head slumped over the controls. Apparently lifeless. Listen, if you’ve handled as many overdoses as I have you go into automatic pilot. In a flash I’m in there, pulling Quin’s head back by the hair, contemplating the risks of mouth-to-mouth, when the bastard wakes up with a scream. I nearly pass out with shock.

  “Don’t do that again, you hear me!”

  “Do what?”

  “Play dead like that!”

  “I was sleeping, for Christ’s sake!”

  You know, sometimes these encounters are fated. Like at that moment I felt there was some kind of weird acid flashback. Like I said, at times like this I wish I was married.

  As for Quin, he was the walking dead. He just grabbed his cassette and stumbled out into the morning, his shades wrapped around that white face of his. And something goes stop him, keep him here. But I don’t do it. I don’t act on my instinct.

  FELICITY

  He lies face down, fully clothed. One arm is wrapped across his eyes, the other hangs off the edge of the bed. His hand twitches spasmodically and forms a fist in his sleep.

  I am crouched on a chair watching him. It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I’ve been watching him like this for hours. My face is stiff, I can feel my mouth tighten with fury. I’ve been up all night.

  He’s been making love to a younger woman. The woman of my fears. Of soft young skin. The girl I can’t be for him. Younger, foreign, who has his silence, his distance. The deception squeezes my heart. It stops me from breathing.

  Anger has removed me from my body and made me into a different woman.

  I move silently across the floor. I have license to do anything. I gently lift his arm away from his face. He smiles in his sleep.

  Traitor, serpent, betrayer.

  I will not be treated like this. His face is soft with sex, a half-smile twitches as he dreams.

  QUIN