I almost laughed. I stopped myself. I hadn’t described them. In ancient times, I’d have gone to him, confessed all, been laid out naked before an altar, and flogged to get the devil out of me. Now, this.
Into his hand, I put the money I’d brought (for the orphans), and went away. My head was buzzing. I had an incoherent memory of that lipstick-girl on the balcony, and of the Girls my father had seduced.
Was it so simple? Was it even possible now? I’d never felt anything for a woman. But then, I’d felt nothing for a man, either, or for any human thing, save myself. And him.
The evening was gathering in golden polluted clouds on the city. I stood on the steps of the church, staring at the lines of hooting traffic, the flying birds, the glassy towers that touched the sky.
I was frightened, wasn’t I? Even ecstasy had become fearful to me. I was in thrall to an incestuous ghost. And going to a priest, had I been given a solution?
Standing there, I felt helpless. And I laughed out loud at the hopeless mathematical equation which, as always, I couldn’t solve at all.
Two days later, I saw Meraida. Her name has a structure like my mother’s, but I only became aware of that much later. I’d left my smart office, ignoring the face of my errand-boy assistant, and gone out personally for aspirin. Then walked into a café to swallow them with coffee.
She was sitting at a table, alone. She wore a white short sleeveless dress that revealed a flawless, almost Martian, tan. Her hair was blue-black and gleamed like silk, falling to her waist, but so thick it was combed straight back without a parting. When she leaned forward to drink her cordial through a straw, I saw the honey tops of her breasts. Maybe I was looking for it, but I had a reaction. Very slight, but definite. I put down my cup and imagined cupping instead one of those full high girl breasts, naked in my hand. The response was immediate. It was as if I’d only been holding it back all these years, the way a celibate is supposed to.
Presently I got up, went over, and sat down at her table. She looked up without affront or dismay. I was used to women gazing at me. She had a triangular, small-boned face, slanting eyes of a hazel that matched her tan. She’d used no make-up, needed none, only a crimson lip gloss that looked as if she’d wet her mouth with strawberries.
“You’re wonderful,” I said. I’d never bothered to learn any technique for women. What they wanted, after all, seemed fairly obvious.
She blinked. Her lashes were black and silky as little wings. “So are you.”
“That’s a very good start,” I said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Yes, all right. I like these.”
We sat and talked all afternoon. (Mostly about her, I made sure of that.) She was an art student, but she didn’t mind missing her classes for me. I let her know, without quite saying, the walk of life I came from. She could see for herself the suit and shirt and shoes and watch, the Escurier gold ring. I had money all over me. But I think she’d have settled for me anyway, even if I’d come in off a road gang.
I could tell she thought we’d go somewhere almost at once, and she was willing. Young women are now so free. But naturally that wasn’t what I required. So we walked in the public gardens, and sat by the fountain. About five, I called in to my partners, and stressed I was laid low by a migraine. Then I took Meraida for drinks and an early dinner.
She ate a lot, but very nicely, and drank a reasonable amount. I told her she should have topaz and amber in her ears, to match her eyes, and she laughed and said she’d never had a man talk to her the way I did, I was too accomplished, and she ought to go at once. So then I took her hand and said I was falling in love with her.
For a moment she looked quite frightened, and then her face turned into a child’s at birthday time. She couldn’t believe her luck. This handsome, if slightly unbalanced, rich young man, besotted with her as no doubt others more humble had been, trustingly telling her so.
“But you don’t know me,” she said.
“I’ve always known you,” I said. (Dialogue is easy, if one keep one’s head and has read a few novels.)
“No, but I mean, I mean, my father’s a truck driver.”
“So what?” All the better. In this city, he’d consent quicker to almost anything.
“You seem so serious about this.”
“I am.”
“If we make love,” she observed, skeptical, “then you’ll cool off.”
“You don’t understand. I think I want to spend my life with you.”
“There’s no need to lie.”
“I’m not lying, Meraida.” And I almost wasn’t.
When we left the restaurant, again she expected I would take her at once to a hotel. But I stood her on a darkened avenue, and put my hand behind her head and felt her silky hair, and kissed her slowly, the way he had taught me. And again, that shivering burning upsurge. But I let her go.
“Don’t you want—”
“Not yet. You see, I’m sure. But how could you be? We’ll wait a while. Get to know each other better.”
She was so disappointed, she glared at me, then smoothed her face. “I think you’re playing a game.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow at eight, before you leave for college.”
She shrugged, trying to be brave. “I won’t expect it. It was a lovely evening.”
I caught her to me again, swept her literally off her feet, and kissed her, tasting wine and brandy and her own clean mouth. Of course, she let me touch her breasts, fleetingly. Unlike the politician’s daughter, Meraida could feel me hard as a stone, pressing into her belly.
She refused a taxi, and I could sense her looking back at me as we walked away from each other. I did not look back.
In the morning, at eight, I called her. She picked up the receiver after half a second. She was breathless.
“Is it you, Hilton?”
For a week, I courted her. I myself wanted to be sure, and I wanted her to be desperate. By the second outing, under the night-black trees of the gardens, I had my hand inside her low-cut black dress. My urgency reassured me, as did hers. He had taught me such a great deal, that she writhed and nearly reached a climax in my arms. She begged me, almost tearful. Couldn’t we go somewhere? But I denied her. Not yet. Oh no.
It was more than cunning. (And cowardice, too, let’s not forget that; I was, with human beings, a virgin.) I’d thought long and searchingly about some luxurious hotel. Champagne, orchids, possessing Meraida on a milk-white bed, her screams piercing the golden chandelier filament in the ceiling. I’d thought about it as I shifted in the upright chair, the armchair, striving for a little sleep. For I never now used my bed. (And imagined him invisibly coiled there, imagined what he’d do to me if he got hold of me, until, once or twice, between the memory of my ghost-brother and the new fantasies of a living girl, I haphazardly came anyway.) I’d decided, the hotel test wasn’t a fair one. It was true, he might not be able to attempt me in some other place … or he might. But in the family houses, the city house, the pillared house by the sea, there he was certain, and there he must be driven off by my woman’s presence.
What he would do, what would occur, I had no idea. But he had never been with me when others were. And he had never had any competition, saving that one time on the balcony when I was twelve, which hadn’t counted.
My father was going to New York. He would be gone a month. I’d take Meraida to the sea house. She’d love it. We’d swim and eat exotic meals. In the afternoons, we’d walk the hills and the town or lie on the beach. At night—only at night—we’d go into my bedroom, spread ourselves out on my bed, and commence the athletics of desire.
Obviously, once I’d told her we were going there, once she’d said yes—it took her three seconds, this time—I began to suffer a little gnawing worry. I was totally inexperienced with women, and no amount of antics elsewhere, or even those clever novels, could teach me everything. I was partly afraid of proving myself to be a fool. But then she was so primed, so willing, she’d do
half the work for me. My body was fine, I was fit. She wanted me, and I, to my continued, amazed, smug reassurance wanted her.
It might happen she’d pall, or we’d tire of each other, or she might fret for the marriage I’d never be allowed to offer. But then I could wave, or buy, her off. My father, the veteran, would know exactly how to handle it. Conversely, if I wanted to be safe from him, I would continue with Meraida until another, better, proposition came my way. And maybe, seeing how gorgeous she was, this would last forever. Some women didn’t mind the role of mistress, especially not when cared for. It wasn’t that I loved her. And yet I felt, if she were to save me, I might come to. I wanted to be saved. I was afraid of him, by now. Afraid of all the feverish joys I’d had with him. It wasn’t that I believed in the soul, or in Hell, or divine punishment—nothing like that. It seemed to me he’d taken something from me, not only normal live sex, but a normal life of any kind. God knew what I might have been if I hadn’t been possessed by my dead and deathly twin. He’d had no life, he’d pushed and pulled me away from my own. In the chairs now I had nightmares. He was looming over me, seen in dreams as never before, a gray mass like a colossal amoeba. He was poking bits of himself into every crack and hole, and laughing in a soundless, seething way as I submerged, not in ecstasy, but drowning.
It was filthy, what had been. It wasn’t what I should have had. Who was I? What had I lost. Only Meraida and her body could reveal the state of my potential for rescue or abandonment.
And it might be, it might be, despite everything—I might not be able. From this concluding possibility, I recoiled in an icy sweat. And every sexual spasm that took me unawares, I cursed, because I needed to save up my ardor. I needed to be bursting with it, like a ripe gourd.
The sky was hot velvety blue as we were driven to the coast. She liked the chauffeur, the car, the picnic hamper, and the wine. She liked the changing landscape as the city fell away, and talked about wanting to paint it, with that one white cloud there, just posing on that stand of eucalyptus …
Inevitably, too, the house impressed her. We had a ritual tea on the terrace overlooking the palms and orange trees of the garden. It still surprised me slightly, all she could eat. I made up the balance by picking at the food. I was well and truly nervous by now. I needed a drink, but must watch that too.
We walked on the beach in the evening rosiness, and the glassy pink sea came in and laved her bare feet. She laughed and skipped like a child. But I, looking at her beauty in the gold-brown dress I’d bought her, felt old as her grandfather. What lay in store for me?
The painted dining room set her off again, and dinner—she still eating heartily, I still leaving almost everything, reaching for the wine and cognac, tasting, putting them carefully aside—passed in a sort of whirl of fuss and excitement.
It came to me finally she too might be a little nervous. After all, I’d built it up so, kept her frustrated, all on edge. And I might, for all she knew, have strange tastes. Well I had, hadn’t I?
I showered in one of the guest bathrooms while she lay in a tub of bubbles en suite to my bedroom. I looked at myself in the mirror, and saw only what I knew. Most heterosexual women would like me. There was nothing I needed to hide—physically …
Trembling with sudden fear, I sat down on the chair, and took a swig from the whiskey bottle I’d brought in. Not too big a swig, caution, for God’s sake! So much rested on this. Everything rested on it.
When I went into the bedroom, she was lying on my bed. I think some magazine or book (shades of myself), had told her to arrange herself in a provocative way. She wore a semitransparent black slip reaching to her ankles, yet slit along one thigh. It had wired-up lace cups that lifted and nearly spilled her breasts. Her hair spread everywhere. She smelled of roses and cinnamon, and, through the black silk and lace, I could see the blacker nest of her center.
The surge came. I rose, as they say, to the occasion. The relief of it almost made me yell aloud. Instead, I told her she was lovely, and crossed the floor quickly, dropping my robe as I did so. It seemed I was to be saved.
An hour later, after she had gone away into the bathroom and come back, I think after crying a little, she said, “Is it something—have I done anything—?” She was very young. Younger even than I was, in many ways, by a thousand years.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s my bloody fault. I must have drunk too much at dinner. Or I’m tired.”
We sat at either end of my bed, mulling these inanities over.
Because, of course, you guessed, didn’t you, that despite my flood of arousal, once in contact with her, once called upon to perform the supreme conjunction, my confidence and will left me, my tower fell. Flaccid and humiliated, I tolled around with her for twenty, forty minutes, allowing her to try and stimulate me back to size, kissing her with an increasingly dry unwilling mouth. Until at last we fell apart, worn out by the hopelessness of it.
No, it wasn’t nerves or booze. It was initially the bed you see. This was so obvious, and I’d never thought … the bed, the very bed where I had to have her, in order to dismiss my haunting. In that bed, in my bed, my body came alert only for him. For the feeling of his hands and his fleshy surfaces, that were identical to my own. I mean, identical. He’d taught me impeccably. I was trained. No other man, let alone woman, could provide what I needed. And Meraida was—useless.
By the time I let her go, and she me, both of us sweating, pale, sickened, I wanted only to throw myself, or her, from the window. But it wasn’t her fault.
Even without the bed … safe from the ultimate performance, in a park, or an avenue, I’d been able to deceive us both. Oh, I might say I’d try to take her on the floor, against a wall, tomorrow morning—but even there and then, even in the much-mooted hotel, it would eventually come down to this. Even without the bed. For he—he was my bed, and I was his. And without that, only so far could I go.
She and no one—but he—was my twin. She and no one—but he—was the ghost of my brother. My incubus. Death. Darkness. In the end, we put out the lights, and she had modestly drawn the curtains and the window was black, the room black, as pitch. We stretched out, not touching, and she fell asleep before I did. It was a big bed.
I thought, at least she would keep him away for this one night. But I knew then it wasn’t true, and I lay sodden and still, waiting, until I felt him put his first light finger on my spine.
Then everything came back. Everything I had tried to build with her. I resisted. I resisted for my very life. But, of course, it was as useless to fight him as it had been to attempt anyone but him.
His hands were on all of me, as it seemed, at once. Under my ears, my armpits, my groin. Stroking at my balls, and coaxing my penis, licking my lips, teasing my nipples, unbearably tickling at every sensitive juncture and plain, invading me, filling me up. I’d never gone without him so long—and also I had never known him to be so powerful, so devastating, and he bent my back like a bow, rocking me toward oblivion. As the cosmos disintegrated in my brain and I stifled my own screaming with my fists, I vaguely heard Meraida, four feet away, whimpering shrilly in her sleep.
In the morning, when I woke, dazed, debilitated as if after some fit, I heard her singing in the shower. Dismal, I lay planning how to evict her from my life. At least she was in a happy mood, absurdly had “got over it.” Maybe she expected me to be better now and that we should try again, and I’d have to be angry, make up some crime or theatrical idiocy or illness, in order to shunt her off. I was dreading it.
But when she came in, she simply stood, naked and very, very pretty, glowing in the muffled curtained morning sunlight.
I heard her say to me then, that which I heard after, several times (several times, before I truly learned and ended all such times, and went back alone into the dark), from the old and the young, the ugly and the sublime, from a couple more women, and from a few men too:
“Oh, Hilton. It was so amazing! I was half asleep, but what you did to me … I never
knew it could—like that. And the things you did! My God, oh my God! I couldn’t even see you in the dark, but you felt so good. Oh God, Hilton, I never came like that before. Never. Oh God, Hilton, you’re the most wonderful lover in all the world!”
Given to the Sea
E. L. Kemper
Blood on the sheet—a bright continent against crisp, four-hundred thread-count cotton—stopped her breath. One foot froze in the act of burrowing into her slipper.
Joe was gone already. So was the last trace of his heat on the mattress. Linda had lain with her eyes closed—her nightmare retreating on a rustle of wings, phantom bruises lifting—as Joe crept from bed, leaving the light out while he dressed for work. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about him until he came home for dinner. They would eat facing the TV, then he would go to his office and close the door. Long after she had gone to bed he would slip under the covers—a creak, a sigh, and the oblivion of sleep.
Linda ripped the sheets from the bed but the blood had soaked through to the mattress cover. Too late. She pulled off her nightgown, crammed the soiled cloth between her legs and shuffled to the bathroom.
Any type of vaginal bleeding in the second trimester of pregnancy should be reported to your physician, it said in her pregnancy bible. Not good. She decided to take comfort in what followed. Some women have spotting on and off through their pregnancy and go on to have perfectly healthy babies.
Spotting. Linda flushed the liver-coloured clots that had drifted to the bottom of the toilet bowl. Clouds of blood spiralled like DNA unfurling. Her chest tight and heavy, she turned her back as the water surged and plummeted with a rumble of pipes that echoed through the house. This was a bit more than spotting.
The flow of blood was ebbing. At least she had a stash of sanitary napkins in the back of the linen closet, behind the vacuum bags and furniture polish, out of Joe’s sight. He didn’t like to be confronted with the gross reality of womanhood. Some men were squeamish like that. The linens would have to be soaked and bleached back to a sterile blank.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 25