by Sharon
The gardenia had fallen against the curve of her neck, the new-cream whiteness tangled in the dark snare of her curls, its scent surrounding her like the aroma of pleasure. He freed the blossom with gentle, unsteady fingers, withdrew a petal, and used it to caress her cheek while he kissed her, then drew it slowly over the dampness of her barely opened mouth. The petal had a tantalizing softness, subtle in texture, like sensitive flesh.
Ever so slowly he began to pluck the petals and drop them on her skin. They made the lightest erotic blows, cool, napless velvet against hot, love-ready flesh; little love pats on the delicate plane of her shoulders, the palm side of her wrists, the vale between her breasts. Petals struck the outer swell of her breasts, skittering on the surface of her skin, and she couldn't keep still; she felt the stammer of her heartbeat all over her body. She closed her eyes. Weightless as pollen, one petal, then another, hit her erect and aching nipples and brought the shock of a sharper ache low in her, and it took her to anguished delight.
His voice also was a caress. She heard him murmur, "Everywhere the petals touch you, I'm going to kiss." And his mouth just touched a spot on her shoulder, so delicious and light that she shivered. Passion made a rich rushing sound in her head, like the whistle of a hard wind through many leaves. And his light, rapid breathing, his own whispered passion words, were heart-catching accents.
It was more than she could bear. She hardly knew what she was doing when his mouth reached her breasts and traced a halo of kisses edging them, then the island of rose that surrounded her nipple; and she was arching herself up, wanting his mouth, hearing herself whisper his name, and his tongue made a slow, stroking circle where his lips had been, creating a warmth that cooled instantly from his breath. His mouth closed around her nipple with the most exquisite pressure, giving her chills.
Her thoughts were a restless blur. She hardly understood when he let the petals fall in a line down her stomach, a petal and a kiss upon her toes, her ankles, strewn over her legs; but when the gardenia petals fell with their brushing, damp-skin texture on her inner thighs and between, she came up on her elbows, her eyes wide with shaky-hot uncertainty.
"Alan? What will you do?"
His lips returned to hers, his kiss soft as the powder on a moth's wing. "I want to love you with my mouth," he said gently. "There's nothing to fear. It's the same as when I kiss you… only one more way to give you pleasure, and I love you, Susan, I love you so dearly… You're too delicious, too delicious…" His voice was nothing more than a ragged whisper, his kiss setting fire to her senses as he slid lower on her body. His hair stroked over the tips of her breasts, caressed her navel, and his arms were warm and strong on her thighs, his hands gentle, as they'd been on the flower, making her wild.
His mouth discovered her, tender and urgent on her just-washed skin, and her heart was pounding, her body feeling loose and hot as her head fell back onto the cushion.
"You're so soft, Susan, soft as dawn..." His tongue made a slight eddying circle on her, and she dug her head back, gasping, her breath chaotic. "Being close to you… touching you is… the sweetest thing, the very sweetest…" His hands were gliding over her thighs, under her bottom, moving her hips so she was caressed by the silk beneath her. His ragged words were like honey poured on her skin, soothing her, exciting her. "Each touch has life… like the strokes of a brush painting. When the brush meets paper… the stroke awakens. It's called kititsu.…" His cheek caressed the tender inner skin of her thigh. He slid upward to draw lightly on the tip of each breast. "Then… sohitsu… the brush is sent on its journey…" His lips touched low on her stomach. "And shuhitsu… the brush leaves the paper; the line melts back into the eternity that brought it…"
He lowered his mouth to her and her veins became channels of flame, feeding fire to the inside ache, and a pulse began to beat there, spreading back the fever, filling her head with the white heat of rapture. She couldn't stop herself; she was frenzied as the north wind, working her hands in and out of his hair, pressing herself upward, opening herself more to him. She whimpered and he slid his fingers inside her, deep inside, and she couldn't tell his dampness from her own. His breath came in continual shivers.
Trusting and helpless, she felt him lift and turn her, exposing the milky softness of her nape, to put his mouth there and kiss her again and again, his lips caressing her flesh, his arms around her, his hands filling themselves with her breasts, pulling her back full length against him, stroking her breasts to the feverish rhythm of his kiss. And with him tight and hot against her back, the hard lines of bone and muscle and burning skin there, his hands moved downward to caress her until her breath came as sobs and she cried out, "Please, please, please…" and he turned her on her back and filled her slowly with the goodness of him.
She saw him like a vision above her. Lamplight had given his skin the tint of pale amber, desire had left a mark like a child's sunburn over his nose and cheeks, and his enraptured eyes had a smile that made them a densely saturated blue-green, the color of an Easter egg patiently left to sit in dye. He looked so young, she would have smiled, but could not, because he said, "I adore you… adore you…" and put the palm of his hand on her far down and pressed, and she felt nothing but burning enchantment…
Later she lay enclosed in his arms in a wondrous state of peace, tasting his breath in her mouth, feeling his hands cherishing her body. He kissed her just over her heart, and said, "Back in Wisconsin, before we became lovers, I didn't want to sleep at night. I didn't want to dream you were with me and wake to the pain of an empty bed."
She answered, "I wanted to dream you. It was the only way I could be with you without blame. Once I dreamed I was the moon and shone on your bed."
His arms brought her so close. "Everything I feel for you, I would never have dared to dream."
In the morning, sitting on the veranda, having breakfast amid flowers and sparkling crystal and linen napkins, she leaned her chin on the heel of her hand, looked him directly in the eyes, and said, "I've never heard of this before, this loving of people with the mouth. Is it a common English way?" She watched him choke on his orange juice. "Maybe it accounts for why the English seem to have such a small number of children."
And then, at his expression, she burst into laughter and punched his arm.
Chapter 24
She hadn't been able to tell him about her last hours with her people. He'd asked; she'd evaded. He waited.
On the second morning following their marriage, she was a long time joining him for breakfast. He found her in the room where she dressed. She was facing herself in the wall of mirrors, fully clothed. But she held another dress against her—the Amish one in which she had come to him. Her face was rapt, tense, and pensive, and he realized she was looking, not at herself, but at the dress.
Then understanding came, like a weight landing on him. She wanted to see one of her own kind, someone Amish, even a chimera. She had no photographs, no drawings… And the quality that had seemed pensive to him was a loneliness so vast, so bewildered that it formed a frost layer under his skin.
Their lines of sight made sudden troubled contact in the bright mirror.
"Homesick, Susan?"
"This is my home now."
"You had another one before. It's all right. You don't have to pretend." He smiled. "Would you like to fly back for a visit? You can, you know. As often as you'd like."
"No!" Her eyes filled with horror, shocking him. Then in a strained tone, she said, "I've been banned, you see." She paused; a long, terrible pause. "Well, they had to. There was nothing else they could do. I had been with you and I was not contrite."
"Susan, isn't there some way our marriage would rectify—"
"No. In our marriage, in coming to live in the world, I've cut myself away. I no longer live in ordnung. There is no rectifying. For church members to associate with me would bring on them a ban also. It would be impossible to visit. How could I cause my parents the pain of avoiding me? It makes your so
ul feel like it's being cut in two parts. And my friend Fanny, she's stubborn—she won't turn her back on me. What would happen to her if she were banned, too, with her own husband shunning her, not even being able to have marital relations with her? And Daniel is angry already; he could become bitter. Even now. he won't join the church. He might become estranged from it completely, and some of the younger ones with him."
The hurried, impassioned words seemed torn from her throat. She looked at the dress in her hands. "I can never go back."
He came to hold her from behind, holding tight, his face nestled in her hair, and spoke softly. "Did you come with me to spare them?"
Her answer was spoken even more softly. "I came with you because a life without you would be like a life spent shut in darkness."
Wilde wondered why ancient philosophers had seated love in the heart. He felt it in the marrow of his bones.
He remembered back to the day after Susan told him she had been banned from her community. He had bought Rachel's book, and read it as if it were a doctrine, trying to understand. She had written: "We are an optimistic family. When bad things happen, we are less prepared than most. We anticipate sunny days."
He saw it in Susan. Even now she lived with grace. If her ease of manner was only on the surface, he tried not to mine beneath it often. He couldn't bring himself to claw at her defenses. When he did urge her to tell him how she felt, she said she was content. If she'd told him anything else, he might not have been able to bear it.
The days were to savor… Susan wearing a Halston, sitting in the living room and talking to Dash on the phone, shouting, because she thought that was the only way he could hear her… Susan sitting on the marble counter of the kitchen, opening a package as if it were the most complicated thing on earth, saying, "I've never had a boughten cookie before"… Susan kneeling in prayer beside the bed, something he'd never known an adult to do. He had to control a flame of panic that he'd brought her into a place where she would always be different.
But then, the difference was so delicious. He took her to sign papers at Katelyn's office, and when they stopped in the lobby to meet one of his friends, he saw Susan staring mesmerized at the elevators. Alone with him, she said, "Where do the people disappear?"
"Which people?"
"The people who go into that little room in the wall and vanish before the doors open again." A second elevator opened and disgorged a couple. She looked startled. "How long have they been inside the wall?"
He couldn't stand it. He pulled her into the elevator, and when the door closed them in together, he kissed her buccaneer-style—he couldn't help himself.
Emerging breathless from the kiss, she said, "If that's what these rooms are for, it's no wonder people can't wait to get inside them."
That was one of the things she'd learned about Alan. Whatever she did, he thought it was great. On her second day, she sat by the pool while he was on the phone, dangling her legs in the water, and a violently buzzing machine attacked her. It looked like a robot. There wasn't time to think, so she grabbed up the long-handled net used to pick leaves from the pool water and tried to fend off the machine. It rushed past the net, cackling angrily, and she followed it along the poolside, beating it to pieces. Alan arrived in time to watch it wheeze and expire, and explained that it was a pool cleaner set on a timer.
"I thought it was a robot," she said.
"You make me so happy," was his reply.
What could she do but be happy too? The pain of exile would heal. The sense of being cut in parts, the longing for other smiles and faces, would fade. She'd get used to it. She was determined. But, oh, boy, what a place it was, a sunny, hazy, jangly town. The air had a taste to it like licking a metal pole on a park swing on a cold day. Everywhere there were cities, blending one into the other without country in between. She never knew where she was—it looked so much the same everywhere. The highways didn't take you anywhere, just back inside more city, like being trapped in an endless maze. Watching the cars made her dizzy; they went on and on by the thousand, no two alike. They seemed to be taking over the place. The noise they made awed her. Though Alan lived in what was considered a quiet area, she could hear the vibrations at all hours, even in the dead of night—an undertonal hum, as though the city were a great engine that couldn't sleep. But she'd get used to it. David had a word for what she was. Crazy in love, he said—and she liked that. She was crazy in love with Alan.
Alan began to work on postproduction of the film, pulling it from the ungainly alloy of rough assembly through editing and mixing—tedious, obsessive work. He dispatched permanently the love scene that had been filmed with a double to make Susan appear nude, watching it with satisfaction as it wound off the reel and coiled on the floor. He couldn't recall now the squalid ethics that he'd used to justify doing that to her. The person he'd been then was a fading nightmare.
Other projects occupied his days, the ghosts of past and future. The effects people for his next picture were trying to unload a werewolf on him that looked like a schnauzer. The "improved" version reminded him of Benji. In a couple of months, one of his previous films would be opening; there were discussions about advertising and distribution and talk about sending him to do promotion in Europe.
He had to force himself to remember that he'd once been challenged by these repetitive minutiae, for now he wanted only to get back to Susan, estranged in a technological and cultural puzzle, so unwary and vulnerable that it terrified him.
He'd read about people who claimed to have spent years in the entertainment industry without seeing drugs used. He didn't doubt it. In a world of infinite possibilities, anything was possible. It had been otherwise for him. The circles he traveled in were fast, wealthy, corrupt with privilege, thrilled with beauty and status, aggressively street-smart, and not wise. He knew where the recreation got heavy and what to avoid with Susan, and in the beginning he thought that would be enough. A month went by, two months, and he knew it would not.
What had been only amusing in the past—the level of illusion here, the trivial snobbery, the bitchiness—became increasingly ludicrous to him. Susan had an indifferent way of looking at someone's thirty-thousand-dollar Cartier bracelet that made it seem like a sideshow trinket. Poised, not shy with his friends, she was still uneasy in the eager, unstable relationships that made up the procession of his social contacts.
The sadness and badness began to filter through to her, the elegant coldness and unfettered interest in self, the men and women who bought land they never visited and bore children they never saw, and who anesthetized themselves, with drugs and drink and serial affairs, against the lives they discarded.
One of his ex-lovers encountered Susan at a party and tried to let her know about the long-dead relationship with innuendo and smiles. Susan came home quiet and sat on the garden steps. He went and sat just behind her, closing her in his arms, drawing her back between his legs.
"I've never felt for another woman what I feel for you," he said.
A long pause followed. She tucked her head back against the hollow of his shoulder. He thought she was considering his words, but when she spoke, it was to say, "Did you know that Ann Cutler had a ear accident on the way to the party? Someone ran into her bumper from behind. She wasn't hurt, only shaken. You didn't see it, but when she came in, she said, 'I'm a wreck. Does anyone have a Valium?' Three, no, I think four people did. People seem to take a lot of pills here." Then, "My grandmother used to have a pill she took for her eyes, so they wouldn't get dry. There doesn't seem to be any harm in it."
Thinking back months later, he couldn't remember what he'd answered, something minor, the way he'd respond to a commonplace. He only remembered his relief that she seemed to have missed the other, uglier hurt.
For months he didn't see that it was failing. Her curiosity and resilience, her droll mood swings, the way she'd been raised not to make complaints: These things disguised the truth.
She never could quite adjust to hi
s long work hours. Farm hours were long, too, but the family remained close, a field or two apart, meeting for three meals, the stretch of work broken by frequent intervals of visiting. There was a kind of solidarity in the way they shared caring for the farm together, not vanishing into the separate cells of mysterious lives and goals removed from one another.
She was disconcerted by his household, too. Everything was done by others, a cleaning crew that swept through in two hours, a staff to cook and shop, caterers to bring van loads of food if they entertained. She was at a loss to know how to contribute.
She could have done a film. He began looking for a vehicle for her, one they could work on together. Friends were sending scripts. He was committed to two projects first, so it would be awhile. But she didn't seem in any hurry at all to pursue a career. Career was hazy to her. She hadn't grown up thinking about men and women having careers. Any way one looked at it, it would be a major undertaking for her to rethink the entire course of her life.
She thought sometimes about writing to Rachel, but in the end she didn't. "I should wait for her to write to me," she would say. "With Rachel, it's better to wait until she comes to you."
Afternoons of tennis or shopping were more leisure time than she was comfortably able to digest. Instead she read fiction, nonfiction, anything; taught Amish games to the children of neighbors he hardly knew he had, letting them play with the lop-eared rabbit Luke had given him in the spring. She volunteered her time in one of L.A.'s vast public gardens, making her own circle of friendships there. She worked in their own garden also, pursuing her own exotic drifts of imagination. Three college-age men worked part time under his head gardener, and all three fell completely and obviously in love with Susan.