“She bled to death, poor thing, never had a chance. Alberto grieved for months. See, he loved her. He would have had her. Child and all.”
“So he said, after the event. Men are like that, afterward.”
Leonie. I had dreamt through her eyes. My womb had become hers. I went back into the house clutching Mrs. Harris’s paprika, my stomach heaving.
Adrian was waiting for me, naked with just the bath towel wrapped around his waist. He held the dripping bath soap in his right hand. “What’s the meaning of this?” He held out the yellow cube. Long black pubic hairs were stuck to it.
“They’re not mine.”
“I can see that.”
“Adrian, I haven’t got a lover.”
“Then how did they get there?”
“I don’t know!” He swung back into the bathroom and slammed the door. The mirror in the lounge room rattled with the crash.
I gazed into the pot of stew, and shook in the paprika. It descended like red snow, settling onto the thick bubbling gravy. Leonie Mantilli must have been at least four months pregnant. A pain shot across the front of my womb, making me fall against the stove.
Adrian is silent over the meal. He picks through the casserole like he is picking over a corpse. I want to tell him about the Mantillis, I want to tell him about the first time I saw someone from the other side. But as I form sentences in my mind I falter. Adrian is a fact man, he can only deal with reality. He puts his fork down.
“It’s the same man who used my razor, isn’t it?”
“Adrian, I am not having an affair.”
“Was he over here when I went to Canberra? Is that your little arrangement?”
“Please believe me, I am not having an affair!”
“Then how do you explain the hair and the grease!?”
“What grease?”
“I found some kind of disgusting pomade all over my comb, and it certainly wasn’t mine. Or have you taken to using Brylcreem recently?”
“Look, this is going to sound really stupid…” I ventured.
“Try me.”
“It’s a ghost. I think this house is haunted.”
“That is pathetic, Jodie. Surely you can come up with a better story than that!”
He storms out, his plate crashing down to the floor as he leaves. I sit staring into my glass of wine. It looks so cool and calm in there, if only I could just dive in. Outside there is the sound of his car starting up. I don’t want to be left alone. I don’t want to be left alone in this house.
I sit naked on the edge of the bed. I tell myself my name is Jodie. I run my hands through my hair, my shoulder-length blond hair. I trace the planes of my face, feeling the bridge of my short nose which disappears into the full curves of my cheeks. I press the palms of my hands against my breasts, feeling their weight, feeling them sitting high on my chest. I clutch at my abdomen. I know that my womb is empty.
Something moves in the shadows. I freeze. Only my eyes shift, peering into the dark recesses. A man stands by the bedroom door. He is short and dark, his eyes a warm brown in the greenish shadow, his hair a shining helmet. He is in his late thirties, and is wearing an old-fashioned suit with a crisp white shirt peering above a waistcoat. He is holding a battered leather suitcase in one hand and a Trilby hat in the other. He winks at me, a languid batting of the eyelid, then smiles, the arch of white teeth splitting his tanned face.
I swing around. Adrian stands there looking sheepish. “I drove around for hours before I realized I had no place else to go.”
I hug him. His body, resistant, eventually softens against mine. His hands creep up to my breasts. We fall onto the bed. Frantically I pull his shirt free and undo his trousers. I bury my face in the fur of his testicles, his penis, still soft, rolls across my cheeks. He smells fantastic. I take him into my mouth, feeling him grow hard. He pulls me up to his lips and we kiss. His tongue traces the inside of my lips. He sucks my tongue as if I am the man and he is the woman.
My ankles are resting on his shoulders as he holds my calves and pushes my legs even farther apart. He plunges into me. I feel my whole body rotating around the swollen head of his cock, savoring every grain of his skin as he slowly slides in and out. Someone is sucking on my clit. I crane my neck to see if Adrian is touching me, but his hands are firmly around my ankles. I gasp—a tongue is slowly caressing the tip and then sucking hard on the tiny shaft. I am delirious with pleasure. It isn’t rational; nothing is touching me there, and yet I can feel a man’s breath blowing across my hips, his lips over me, as Adrian’s cock gains rhythm. Paroxyms of bliss tear through my belly. I am coming, contracting wildly. The scream of my orgasm breaks out from my throat, and it echoes in the dark.
He lies with his back to me, curled up against the hollow of my belly. I am staring out at the wall, my mind skipping backward and forward in waves.
I remember the figure I saw against the sky that morning with Robin in the mountains.
I see red streaming down my thighs. I see a bathtub full of blood.
My lover stirs. “Leonie, sono a casa.”
And I find myself replying, “Sí, Alberto, sí.”
ICE CREAM
The long old-fashioned bus gleams a steel gray in the sunshine as it waits outside the redbrick gates of the school. Cicadas echo shrilly in the summer afternoon. The fifties fender painted scarlet and blue runs the whole length of the bus. Above the grid of the radiator sits a tiny statue of a silver ballerina. Tinkerbell, the little girls call her. One side of the bus is opened up to display the tubs of ice cream sitting just out of arm’s reach.
Above the advertisements for double-chocolate whips, vanilla scoops with raspberry, and choc-and-nut supremes is a hand-painted sign embellished with dancing clowns and luminous red balloons: Jerome’s homemade ice cream, the finest in Illinois. Underneath, visible through the two windows flanking the open hatch is Jerome himself, busy filling up huge plastic containers of ice cream, ready for the three o’clock rush.
Jerome lifts the large silver trowel and digs it into the freezer of ice cream. It sinks with a crunch. He, cooled by the air lifting up from the open freezer, transfers the ice cream into the plastic container sitting just below the counter. His arms, muscular and tanned, strain against his thin cotton T-shirt as he lifts the heavy scoop. His neck, strong and sculpted, rises up from the swelling curves of his shoulders. His chest hair etches a black wispy pattern between the cushions of his breasts and over his white T-shirt. Beads of sweat hang suspended, momentarily arrested by the gusts of frozen air. Bent sideways in concentration, Jerome reveals small ears set closely against his skull. The translucent perimeters are flushed deep red with the heat. If you traveled across from his ears, you would find yourself walking up the steep incline of his cheekbones. Two jutting mountains, delicate in strength, perhaps betraying some past Mongolian ancestry. They swoop and dip across the breadth of his face. Set below heavy black eyebrows, his large and oval eyes switch from blue to green depending on the light. Today they are a definite sea-green—swirls of light around jet-black pupils that bleed into the green like oil on the ocean.
His nose flares out from under the eyebrows, widening slightly at the bridge then streaking down to a defined point. The tip is divided into a subtle cleft, a sublime reference to a lower, more pronounced beauty.
His mouth is a dark red gash that splits the angular planes of his face into a rude asymmetrical beauty. His lower lip is fuller than the upper. It swells out, almost threatening to burst open like a fig. The upper lip is narrow and lies in elegant submission against the decadence of its companion.
A droplet of ice cream melts and runs down the edge of his lower lip before dripping onto the floor. A second earlier, Jerome had licked his finger. The finger he had plunged suddenly into the ice cream and brought up to his chaotic mouth. As if on cue, there is the screech of brakes as a car pulls up behind the bus. Jerome’s hands tighten imperceptibly around the handle of the silver scoop. He doesn’t need to
crane his head out of the glass hatch to see who it is. He steadies himself for a moment against the wooden paneling that lines the interior of the bus. He is fighting his heart that has betrayed him with its sudden acceleration. His penis, which until now has been lying curled against the warmth of his thigh beneath the heavy jeans, thickens. The head, a sleek helmet of velvet flesh, stirs against the rough material.
Jerome stares down at the container of ice cream, at the streaks of raspberry jam swirling through the thick yellow cream like strata of rock. He is reminded of flesh, of the webbing of busy veins carrying life from brain to heart beneath pale skin. There is the slam of a car door, the distant hooting of a horn as another car approaches. In a nearby street a mower starts up.
Jerome looks up at the large clock hanging over the cartons of sugar cones. Two fifteen. He loosens his belt. Another car pulls up on the opposite curb behind the bus. Jerome opens the bar fridge set up on the wall. He plunges his hand into a bucket of ice and delicately pulls out something between his fore- and index fingers that flashes for a moment in the light. It is a large silver ring, too large for a finger, too small for a wrist. He holds it up to his eye. The silver encircles the green. Like this, he has the eye of a bird of prey. Like this, he imagines he can see beyond the bus.
Three steering wheels press against soft breasts. Three mouths twitch in nervous anticipation. Three sets of labia moisten in the still minutes, the moments before movement. Jerome unzips his fly. His cock stands at right angles to his body, its engorged mauve flesh incongruous against the weight of his jeans. Jerome grasps the base with his left hand tightly, close to his balls. With his right he caresses the whole length of it, up over the head, down the shaft. Swiftly, instinctively assessing his own flesh. He bends over the plastic tub of ice cream, scoops up a handful and rubs it slowly over his hot cock. The coolness sends tendrils of pleasure up through his stomach. He rubs the ice cream up and down the shaft, the head bursting a deep scarlet through his sticky fist. With his left hand he slips the ring over the knob down to the base. The cock ring sits nestled against his pubic hair. Now he is ready. Outside three car doors slam shut.
The first woman stands by her green Ford, her eyes flicking from the back of the gray steel bus to the two other women. Her blond hair hangs in a fringe over her eyes, her nervous and thin hands bounce a small red leather purse against her hip. A silence has filled her head.
The second woman catches the first woman’s gaze and smiles back—just the merest twitch of the lips in reassurance. Sweating slightly, she pushes back her brown and wavy hair. I own this, she is thinking as she shifts the weight of her well-cushioned hips to the heel of her left shoe. I own this experience. This is my afternoon. She is wet under the armpits and between the legs. She can feel the sun burning the thin skin of her shoulders. She longs to be cool.
The third, a curvaceous Indian, stretches one arm up behind her head, revealing a luxurious bush of jet black underarm hair. She bends down and adjusts her flat leather sandals. The sun hat she’s wearing falls off and floats on a hot breeze down along the gutter, to stop at the foot of the huge tire of the bus. Its gentle floating reminds her of a holiday in India she had with her American husband, of him reaching down and catching a wreath of flowers floating down a river. She begins to walk toward the hat.
Her movement is a signal. The brunette first, followed by the blonde. They all move toward the side door of the bus. In the distance an electronic school bell indicating the last lesson goes off.
Jerome pulls the door of the hatch shut. Silently he unlatches the door. He then sits on the counter, his legs spread, his cock rising up from his fly like an aberrant purple popsicle.
The door’s rusty hinges squeak in the heat. The Indian woman glides in, confident, the light transforming the shadows on her face into a mottled blue. Then the blonde, smaller and frail-looking. She stands close to the wall, her cheeks the shade of Jerome’s deluxe vanilla, paler than cream, warmer than white. Lastly the brunette, who towers over both women, walks noisily into the cabin. The bus rocks slightly with her step. The three standing women make a triangular formation. Not a word is spoken. The Indian woman reaches into the freezer and lifts out a family-sized choc block. Tearing the silver wrapper with her teeth, she peels the foil away from the large chocolate-covered block of ice cream. She places it carefully onto the slab of white marble beside Jerome, taking a sideways glance at the others as she does so. Cold air rises off the ice cream like mist.
Her action is a sign. One woman moves behind her and shrugs off her loose silk shirt. Brown breasts tumble free, sweat glistens between her thin, coffee-colored shoulder blades. In slow synchronicity the three bodies move together. The brunette pulls down the blonde’s skirt, slipping it over her hips and letting it fall to the ground. In the same moment the Indian is unfastening the back of the brunette’s bra. White breasts bounce into view. Jerome watches silently, quivering slightly in the disturbed air. For one moment the three women are motionless, their skin pale in the filtered light, stockinged legs glittering red and green. Jerome thinks of popsicles in their garish syrups. He thinks of mermaids, of catching fish with his hands, the skin slippery and writhing in the water.
A corner of the ice cream melts away in the heat.
The brunette scoops up a handful of ice cream. Bending forward, she rubs it carefully over Jerome’s engorged member. She fastens her lips over the tip and runs her tongue down the shaft. Jerome leans back, a blush spreading up from his neck and across his cheeks, toward those heavy, closed eyelids. Behind the kneeling brunette, the blonde is pressing frozen cherries against the dark flesh of her friend, whose nipples unfurl slowly as the cold red juice runs down to join the droplets of sweat that are beading on her belly. With her head leaning against the steel fridge door, her eyes hooded in pleasure, she gasps as the small blond woman slowly rotates the fruit. Jerome leans down and with his large hands lifts the brunette up over his lap. As she squats, spread and ready, the two other women ease her down onto Jerome’s cock.
A trickle of ice cream slips away from the melting choc bloc.
He moves slowly into her. Her sex is completely peeled back, her torso arched, her head, with the wavy brown hair, flung back. The two women move her things slowly up and down. Pleasure on a stick. The blonde carefully extends her right hand, her small, thin fingers pull gently at the swollen clitoris. The silence is momentarily broken by a moan. Sweat runs in rivulets between the women’s breasts as they move in time. Jerome’s cock slips in and out in the center of the room, glistening, the four bodies creating a white-and-chocolate starfish with a blinking red eye in the middle.
I am living in my skin. I think nothing, feel nothing but him entering me, each pore of his velvet skin, thinks the brunette. Each thought is a silver fish, a glint in the heat of sensation. Soon she forgets herself, she has become one huge vulva, her mind has become an enormous sphincter that pulsates with each thrust. She is coming, she is coming.
Her fluttering eyelids are another cue, her moans make her friends move in sympathy, in unison. They want to be taken. The blonde reaches for a popsicle and, falling suddenly to her knees, parts the lips of her impatient friend, flicking the small erect clitoris. With one hand she unpeels the wrapper, nudging the blue tip into the wet mouth of her swollen sex. The Indian grabs a handful of blond hair and presses the blonde’s head to her cunt, the salt of sex and the sugary syrup mix. Faster and faster, the blonde thrusts the popsicle in while her warm tongue flicks across the clitoris.
“Sugar and spice and all things nice,” the refrain runs through the Indian woman’s mind over and over. The image of a huge naked Humpty Dumpty perched on top of a chocolate wall floats before her.
I am going to explode in pleasure, she thinks, and then melt down into a sugar princess ready to be licked.
Somewhere in the back of the room the brunette comes in loud cries. The Indian woman wraps her thighs around the blonde, drawing her head right to her sex. Jerome pull
s out of the brunette and presses his cock between the buttocks of the kneeling blonde. The Indian watches the two of them, moving like a lissom dancer under water, her movements reflected in the polished steel of the fridge doors as Jerome thrusts in. She can feel the blonde’s mouth moving with Jerome’s thrusting cock, tongue oscillating. There is nothing but the sound of their panting, of them taking their prompts from each other, quicker and quicker, a measured excitement building. Close to orgasm, the blonde pulls out the popsicle and places it against the anal mouth, drawing up the Indian’s thighs so that Jerome can watch, then on cue he too pulls out of the blonde and rests his cock against the smaller, tighter passage. The blonde dips her head and thrusts the popsicle into the Indian’s ass, the same time sucking long and hard on her clitoris. Jerome rams into the blonde’s asshole. In one long shout all three orgasm and a hundred ice cream cones, shaken from their box, rain down.
Outside, Quin, driving past in his hired Mustang, notices the old-fashioned silver bus. For a moment he wonders why it shakes and, thinking nothing of it, heads downtown. A seagull perches on the edge of the steel roof. It bends its head to preen under one wing. A sudden movement within the van causes it to lose balance. It flies off in search of puddles.
TULIP
Mischa noticed Deidre long before they met. Cursed with a shyness he masked with aloofness, Mischa had hung back, hiding behind the buckets of irises as he watched his uncle serve her. There was a sadness about her that he empathized with immediately. He recognized the stillness that settled over her like a fine mist once she stopped talking. He knew where her focus went when her eyes got that faraway look.
But where he was lonely, she seemed self-contained. She fitted in with the tall buildings, the constant strobing of light that thrust her into shade and back out into day again, the speed of the pedestrians at lunch hour who rush toward their own separate destinies; oblivious. Would she ever notice him?
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