by David Martin
“These ‘dates’ are always disastrous,” Claire continues, “and usually they end after a very quick dinner, I’m dropped off at my apartment before eleven. But on a rare occasion my escort will figure, well, if he got stuck with the weird sister maybe at least he can knock off a quick piece of ass. I may be invisible but men are transparent. So after our quick dinner he takes me home and asks if he can come up for a drink and as soon as we’re in the door he has his hands on me and you know what I tell him? I say let’s hurry up and get to bed because it’s been a long time since I’ve screwed anyone, what with my herpes always acting up and then that darn old positive HIV test — got a rubber?”
This strikes Lyon as funny but his laugh suddenly dies when he remembers that the sex he and Claire have had has been decidedly unsafe.
Claire tells him he has nothing to worry about. “I’m one of the few twenty-six-year-old women you’ll ever meet who can count on the fingers of one hand the number of sexual partners she’s had.”
“Does that include the thumb?”
“You’re number four, John — do you want to hear about the first three?”
“No.”
“Back to my date then. After my little announcement he of course changes his mind about having sex with me and begins making his way toward the door, suddenly remembering work he was supposed to do that night, appointments he has for very early the next morning, remembering he had promised he would call his mother before midnight, remembering he forgot to feed his dog. You wouldn’t believe the excuses they come up with. But, see, I won’t let him leave. I keep talking, long rambling stories about my students, dragging out a photo album from my fieldwork, suggesting we listen to a ninety-minute audio tape I made of an old hoodoo woman living just outside of New Orleans, telling him about my eleventh birthday party, listing all the guests who attended, describing the presents I got.”
Claire is smiling, enjoying the memory of this. “I call it the ruby slipper syndrome. The poor guy is so desperate to leave, to disappear from my presence, that he wishes he was wearing ruby slippers he could tap together three times for immediate transportation home. And then finally when I tire of tormenting him I say well it’s getting kind of late, maybe you should leave now — and he runs for the door. And guess what? I never see or hear from him again. Ever. I have made him disappear.”
Lyon can believe it, can easily imagine Claire tormenting her dates. “Tomorrow morning,” he tells her, “I’m tapping my ruby slippers three times and transporting myself back to New York.”
She doesn’t comment.
“Will you come back with me?”
“I wish I had kept my baby,” she says softly, speaking more to herself than to Lyon. “At the time it seemed like such a disaster, being pregnant by a man I loved but who was married to someone else, I had to get an abortion. Now I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby. What I hadn’t counted on, I just never dreamed I would end up alone.”
This hits Lyon hard. “End up? For chrissakes, Claire, you’re only twenty-six, you haven’t ended up in any way yet. You want to talk about ending up, try being fifty years old and having no one, no family of your own, no real friends, no …” And here he has to fight against crying. How can it be you go all your life being hard and dry inside and end up like this, weeping at the slightest provocation?
She turns to him. “John?”
“I could’ve gotten married but I always kept women at a distance, kept everyone at a distance because I … I don’t know. Because I was selfish, I had my well-ordered, well-financed life organized just the way I wanted it — why mess things up, why take a chance on getting hurt or altering my schedule to accommodate someone else, eating because someone else is hungry or going out when I wanted to stay in or … I had one friend, one good, close friend, and when Tommy died this spring, that’s when I ended up alone.”
Claire doesn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to play one-upsmanship on which one of us is the more miserable but, really, Claire, you’re only twenty-six, you have plenty of time to get married and have babies.”
“Men don’t want to marry invisible women.”
I’d marry you, Lyon thinks — but he doesn’t tell this to Claire. Instead he lies there feeling sorry for himself and then feeling like an asshole for engaging in self-pity when in fact his life has been easy, charmed, and any trouble he’s had, any heartache, has been of his own making. “You should’ve known me before the breakdown,” he tells Claire. “I never whimpered back then. I was never a whiner. I never …” He turns and sees that she has closed her eyes.
“Claire?”
He nudges her shoulder but gets no response.
“Claire!”
She’s not sleeping, she’s doing it again, feigning that deathlike state, on her back, arms at her sides, breathing so shallowly that her chest doesn’t move, face placid. Waiting — and implicit in that waiting is an offer.
“Grinding this little self-hypnotic trance routine into the ground, aren’t you?” he asks, getting no answer and then turning away from Claire, pulling the sheet to the top of his shoulder, absolutely determined not to respond to her implicit offer, not this time.
And as Lyon lies there he wonders what Claire is thinking, that he gets off on having intercourse with comatose women? Is this how she’s going to prevent him from returning to New York, offering to feed his perversity — lying there right now thinking that soon he will be parting her legs with his hands, touching tentatively to reach that place high between her black soft thighs, thinking that this supine offer is irresistible, waiting in blank repose for the perversion to be played out one more time, thinking that Lyon will soon be lowering the sheet to expose her breasts, sucking at them and then at her mouth until she comes alive hungry, Claire making sounds deep in her long black throat, a kind of growled warning, warning that once aroused her appetites are enormous, offering herself up, thinking that he has no choice now except to go after what is being offered?
No.
Not this time.
He turns onto his back and looks up at the skylight where stars are fading in favor of the moon’s rising.
“Claire?”
No answer.
“Can I just talk to you, please?”
Nothing.
This maddening act of hers so twists Lyon with frustration that he could strangle Claire, he really could — and what’s even more frustrating, damning, is that he’s got another massive hard-on.
Lyon waits, time passes, and with one hand choking his erection instead of Claire, Lyon continues waiting until he is finally borne reluctantly away by sleep.
“Tomorrow,” she whispers at some point in the dead of that night, her lips touching his ear, “I will make you invisible. Tomorrow at two in the afternoon.”
“Huh?” Lyon not quite awake, sensing that she has been talking into his ear for some time.
“Do you believe I can make you invisible, John Lyon, John Lyon?”
She is speaking in a singsong voice that to Lyon’s still half-asleep mind sounds Jamaican or vaguely French. “Tomorrow you will believe me, John Lyon, John Lyon, because tomorrow you will be invisible. Sweeter though for you to believe Claire tonight. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen but still believe.’ ”
He remains disoriented, lying on his back with Claire sitting up and leaning over him, the whites of her eyes in that black face striking him as ominous, somehow dangerous.
“I am the spirit conjured by Claire, created by the sacrifice of her life, sent here to help you do what you must do — dig up a child’s grave, John Lyon, John Lyon. Dig it up at night and no one will see us. I’ll be black, you’ll be invisible.”
“Why are you talking in an accent?” he asks her simply.
Her face still hovering over him, those big eyes staring.
“Kill him,” she whispers.
“What?”
“Kill the monster Quinndell and we won’t have to
disturb those babies in their graves.”
“Jesus,” he says, trying to roll out from under her — but Claire won’t let him escape.
“Kill him.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Serious? He raped that little girl in his examining room, fourteen years old, she wasn’t even wearing a bra yet, and he put her legs up in those stirrups —”
“I’m sorry that happened to you Claire but I’m not capable of killing anyone.”
“Not capable? You’re capable of fondling a dead woman in her coffin, quelle horreur, John Lyon, John Lyon — surely you can deliver justice to the monster Quinndell.”
“I’m not even sure he’s guilty of what your grandmother —”
Her eyes flash. “Kill him!”
“Jesus.”
“Kill him and I’ll be waiting in your bed every night the rest of your life.”
He wants to make a joke of it, asking her if that’s a threat or a promise.
But Claire won’t let up. “Kill him.”
“I can’t even successfully investigate him, much less —”
“Tomorrow I will make you invisible, then we will talk of what you can or cannot do.”
“Right,” he says, trying to dismiss her. “Until tomorrow then.” Lyon finally rolls out from beneath her, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, sitting there with elbows on knees, his hands rubbing his puffy face.
She comes close behind him, breasts cool on his warm, sweaty back. “How much do you love me?”
He looks around the room realizing he can see colors, so bright has the room become in that skylight. He does love her. Lyon tells Claire that he does.
“Of course you love me, it’s hoodoo love, you had no choice in the matter, what I’m asking is how much?”
“A lot.”
She laughs. “Such a small answer from so large a man.”
With surprising strength Claire pulls him back into the bed, forcing Lyon onto his back and then clambering atop him, her arms and legs long and strong, giving Lyon the impression that she is a woman built for holding on, some kind of black squid, black spider — long limbed but voluptuous too, his hand reaching for one of her fat plum nipples, Claire knocking that hand away, laughing deep in her throat.
“Ask me how much I love you,” she demands.
“How much do you love me?”
“I’ll show you,” Claire says, grinning white teeth.
Yes, he thinks — show me.
“I love you enough to keep you from the grave,” she says, still speaking in her island accent, “because when your death is near I will take you away to a place like this where we can be alone, unmolested, and there I will lay you out on my kitchen table. Like this.” Claire arranges his arms by his side, pushing both of his knees flat to the bed, her long fingers brushing hair off his forehead.
“Oh I see, this time I get to play the corpse.”
“If after your death you are to be eaten, then better by me than the worms. I will begin while you’re still warm from life, eating each square inch of your pale skin, chewing patiently each white finger …” She bends over and takes the fingers of his right hand into her mouth, gnawing on them not as gently as Lyon had hoped.
“I will drink down all the blood from your vessels, draining your heart, chewing its fibrous tissue, a hard heart but it will soften in my mouth, I’ll put your bones in a grinder and sprinkle their bone dust over steaks cut from your thighs.”
Lyon watches as she turns to place her hand on one of his thighs, testing it as if for tenderness, Claire still straddling him, surprising Lyon with her impossible lightness.
“I’ll eat your eyes.” She leans down slowly, breasts hanging over his chest, touching and then flattening against him as she puts her mouth on his left eye, kissing it softly at first but then sucking and then sucking harder, Lyon actually able to feel his eyeball being suctioned, scaring him enough that he twists his head violently away from her.
But before he can protest, Claire continues her singsong litany. “Kidney pie and brain sausage and John Lyon’s sweet sweet-breads, I will eat everything until nothing is left of you, not even an eyelash, eating John Lyon until my stomach is as heavy with his meat as my womb is with his child.”
What?
“And each day during this consumption of John Lyon, rescuing you from the grave, each day I will collect what passes from my body, what remains of you after I have sucked your nourishment, and I will spread it on my garden, wasting nothing of what was once John Lyon, who is too precious to waste, spreading you on my vegetables which I also will eat until every essence of what once was you will be absorbed totally into what is me, John Lyon living on after death, residing in my cells until I die and return both of us to the ground where we will lie mouldering together forever. That’s the answer — how much I love you, John Lyon, John Lyon. More than your mother did, more than any woman ever has.”
He waits a moment and then laughs. “Well you’re right about one thing, Claire — no woman has ever said she wanted to eat me, shit me, spread me on her garden.”
She slides slowly snakelike down his body until her face is at his navel. “Like this I will eat you,” she tells him.
And he thinks, yes.
Claire sucks into her mouth a fold of his stomach flesh, biting gently at first but with an increasing pressure that soon takes away his breath, Claire clamping down until she is hurting him, then biting even harder, Lyon bolting upright and shrieking in pain, demanding for her to stop, Claire biting so hard now that her teeth actually penetrate his skin, Lyon cursing her again and again, jerking around in the bed, grabbing the sides of her head but unable to dislodge her even as he bucks his hips and yanks desperately on her hair.
He slaps her. Then he rears back to get better leverage and slaps her again as hard as he can on the side of her head, Claire releasing him from her teeth and looking at him with fear flashing in her eyes, Lyon slapping her a third time, full strength right across her face, knocking her away from him with such jarring violence that it looks as if he could have broken her neck.
He doesn’t care if he did, both of his hands pressed over his bloody belly wound. “What the fuck were you trying to do!”
She’s crying, holding an arm across her eyes. “Eat you.”
“That’s supposed to be a figure of speech, you spooky bitch.”
She keeps her arm up, crying as she talks. “African warriors honor enemies by eating their hearts, that’s no figure of speech, John — should lovers do any less?”
He’s never struck a woman in his life. He grasps her wrist to take her arm from her face, again seeing the deep scratches along her forearm. “I’m sorry but for chrissakes, Claire …”
“I would eat you to save you from the grave.”
“Yeah, well …” He lifts his hand from the bite wound, blood everywhere.
“If I could make you invisible tomorrow —”
“Fuck that, Claire, okay?”
She is speaking in her normal voice, the accent apparently slapped out of her, asking Lyon to humor her. “If by some miracle I could make you invisible, let’s say just for the sake of argument that in my research I discovered an ancient voodoo rite that would make you invisible, if I could do that, could really make you invisible at two tomorrow afternoon, would you dig up one of those graves for me then?”
He’s not going to respond to this kind of nonsense.
“John? If I proved I had that kind of power, the power to make you invisible, would you —”
“You just don’t know when to stop, do you?”
She begs him to answer her.
“Okay, yes, if you were really able to make me invisible I would be so goddamn impressed I’d dig up the whole fucking cemetery — happy now?”
She’s wiping her eyes with the base of her palm, smiling, telling him, “Yes, I’m happy now,” Claire kneeling beside him, lowering her face toward his genitals.
“Hey!” he
warns.
Claire smiling up at him. “Mon petit chou,” she says, flicking out that pink tongue for him to see.
Quickly reviewing his high school French, Lyon vaguely recalls some froggy endearment — my little cabbage. Oh fuck. “Now, Claire, goddamn it.” Another mindless hard-on.
She moves over to get between his legs, burrowing down low to reach it.
“I swear to God, Claire, if you …”
With both black hands she holds that demanding hardness directly in front of her face, each wide eye looking up at him from either side of Lyon’s moon-white tremulous shaft.
“So much do I love you,” she says slyly, that singsong accent returned, tongue tip tasting him, laughing as she catches Lyon’s frightened expression, her mouth opening to accommodate that first tender round inch.
“Jesus,” he says, more prayer than blasphemy. “Jesus, Claire.”
Her mouth is warm and her tongue is wet but what truly electrifies Lyon is the lingering possibility of what she might do, what the still fiery, bloody wound on his stomach proves Claire is capable of doing, Lyon watching carefully that woman crouched animal-like and black between his legs, thinking he should stop her but not stopping her, Claire a small dark bundle down there, capable of such a wicked bite.
With her fingers interlaced along his length, Claire’s mouth works the top of him as her eyes keep watching him watching her.
Then, breathtakingly, she ingests it deep into the pink-tinged blackness of her jungly mouth.
“Claire?”
He’s staying up on his elbows, the pleasure every bit as extreme as the fear, waiting for teeth.
“Claire!”
Too busy to answer, sucking him hard, making wet sloppy sounds, tongue sliding fatly up and down against his underside.
But he can’t get his mind off of her teeth. “Claire,” he says, less of a warning now than a pleading.
She slowly raises her mouth away, one thin web-strand of saliva still joining them, Claire asking Lyon how much does he love her, punctuating the pauses between words with long languid licks of tongue, with up and down movements of her black fist, which slides wet but holds tight, tongue and fist up between the first two words, “How … much,” down between the next two, “do … you,” keeping her eyes on his the entire time, “love … me,” up and, “John … Lyon,” down.