Madame Mirabou's School of Love

by Barbara Samuel

  I tumbled backward, and he kissed my face, my chin, my jaw. His hands were in my hair, and his lips moved all along my neck, a heated thrust of moist tongue making a trail down my throat, along the wing of collarbone, down lower to breasts spilling up into the neckline of my dress. He opened his mouth there, hot and hungry, and suckled in a way that made me ache for him to do it lower. I made a soft noise, pulled his head up to my mouth, and he plunged in with a furious hunger that lost none of its skill. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “Let me take off your dress.”

  “Yes.”

  In his bedroom, he said, “Wait one moment,” and he lit a fat pillar candle. The flame was just enough to illuminate without making me feel too exposed. I reached for his shirt buttons, and he stood there and simply allowed me to unbutton them, to skim off his shirt, and put my hands on his skin. Rounds of shoulder, warm-colored flesh over his chest, scatters of hair between very dark nipples. I swayed forward and kissed his chest, his nipples, my hands on his waist, his arms, his back.

  “My turn,” he said quietly, and turned me around so he could unzip my dress.

  Before it fell, however, I said, “Wait,” and I shimmied out of my panty hose. “Too awkward.”

  “You’re right.” His nostrils flared as he skimmed the dress from my shoulders, revealing a strapless black bra that served up my breasts like sweets in black lace. He raised his hands to the lace, rubbed his thumbs over my nipples, slowly peeled the lace away. “More beautiful than I imagined,” he said, and there was a satisfyingly raw note to his voice.

  And in that second, I found myself filling the moment entirely, living it, knowing as it happened that I would remember it always. Niraj, with his bare shoulders and beautiful head, lifting my breasts with reverence in his palms, cupping them together and touching his thumbs to the tips, rubbing them into furious points, his face glazed with the pleasure it gave him. And then the sight of his mouth, full and hot, taking that aroused point all the way into his mouth.

  I moaned.

  And we stripped out of the rest of our clothes, kissing wetly, rubbing our skin together, arms and chests, thighs and feet. We stood naked in his bedroom in the light of a single candle and kissed and kissed and tasted and touched until we were both nearly mad with it.

  And then, something in me woke up and screamed: You are naked with a complete stranger!

  One minute we were kissing, and I felt his thighs against mine, and his belly, and his arms on my naked back. I was lost in the pleasure and comfort of being skin to skin, feeling that after such a long dry spell. Our bodies meshed, just right, skin and arms and legs and lips, and then, as if someone poured water over me, it was suddenly not okay. Maybe he did something a little alien or new in some small way that made me remember—

  Hey! I’m naked! He is seeing all of me. All the middle-aged skin, the not-so-perky lift of my breasts, the dimpling of my thighs. Oh, god. What am I doing?

  And it struck me—no one else had seen me naked in close to twenty years. Only Daniel, who had then judged my nakedness unworthy.

  Panic rose in my throat. I tried to remember that this was Niraj, whom I’d been aching to have naked, be naked with. I liked the feeling of him. His hands were in my hair, tight and fierce, and his breath smelled of fennel and sugar. I kissed him again.

  He raised his head, cupped my face. “What is it?”

  I stepped back suddenly. Abruptly. I was naked except for my panties. Niraj wore nothing at all, which had seemed perfectly normal and even quite fantastic a second before, but that slight difference, that ten inches between us, made it all seem . . . if not tawdry, at least embarrassing.

  I raised my arms over my breasts. “I don’t know.” I could feel my hair brushing my naked shoulders and it was at once sensual and a reminder of how uncovered I was. “I don’t know,” I whispered again.

  His expression fluidly moved through a dozen emotions— dismay and hunger and regret and finally steadied on patience. “All right.” He lifted his hands toward me, but I couldn’t seem to meet them, and he dropped them, and I ducked my head in absolute mortification.

  “God, Niraj, I’m really sorry.” To make it even worse, I found tears welling up in my eyes, and not the sort that could be hidden by ducking my head, either, but flowing like a river right over my cheeks. Keeping one arm around my breasts, which were really not all that coverable with one forearm, I shakily raised a hand to my face, trying to hide the sudden tears. I didn’t know him well enough to fall apart with him. “I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry.”

  He disappeared for a minute, and I stood there trying to pull myself together, and he returned with something he wrapped around my shoulders. It was soft cotton and smelled richly of him. A robe. He put it around my shoulders and pulled me into him, and I was still struggling so hard to avoid having hysterics, I could barely speak. My hands were shaking violently. He stroked my hair. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s really not. I should be more sophisticated than this.”

  His fingers wove over my scalp, over the edge of my ear. I leaned into his chest, my forehead pressed into the hollow of his throat. “Should you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know anything about anything. I woke up one day in somebody else’s life and she forgot to leave the rules on what I’m supposed to be doing with it, and none of the old rules make sense, and this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “That would be frightening.”

  “It is.” My voice sounded thin and violet, the talcum voice of a six-year-old.

  As if he heard that as well, he said, “Shall I make us a cup of hot chocolate?”

  I raised my head. “I don’t think chocolate will ease my terror enough to get me to sleep with you tonight. Would you rather I just went home?”

  He touched my jaw. “I would still like to make you some chocolate. If you wish to go, that’s all right, too.”

  That brought a fresh wash of tears, pouring out of my eyes like someone had poured a bucket on my head. “Yes, chocolate. I’m going to wash my face.”

  He kissed my forehead. “I will be downstairs. Take your time.”

  I raised my arms and hugged him. It was only then that I realized he’d not bothered to cover his own nakedness, and I was filled with a swift, biting regret. What was I doing? Turning this man away?

  Gently, he disengaged. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  I fled to the bathroom.

  18

  Nikki’s perfume journal

  SCENT OF HOURS

  Time: 4 A.M.

  Date: February 2, 1991

  Bottle: a small, squareish, milk-colored bottle

  Elements: stale breath, breast milk, oranges, cloves, sweat, baby lotion, peaches

  Notes: nursing my daughter in the middle of the night.

  Feb 4

  Maybe orange flower, cloves, peach, musk to suggest that middle-of-the-night feeling. What for the sweetness of milk, of adoration? Vanilla? Jasmine?

  Feb 22

  Result: A floral with peach notes, and the slight muskiness of the middle of the night and baby sweetness. The scent of my daughter.

  I came down the stairs, reassembled in my sexy black dress, which now felt like the costume of a foolish young girl. The house was very quiet. I noticed things on my way down that I had not seen before—a collection of black-and-white photos of elephants along the stairs, a whimsical-looking stuffed bear sitting beside the computer, an empty glass on the desk. He was neat but not fussy. Warm, but not too over the top.

  In the living room, I paused, a swelling feeling of dismay in my chest that protested the very idea of having to go in there and face him. A huge part of me wanted to just slip out the front door, walk in my stocking feet down to someplace along the main drag and call a cab.

  But that would be awful, a terrible way to treat a man who had been very patient with me.

  Still, I stood there, m
y shoes dangling from my fingers. In the kitchen, Niraj clinked cutlery against a dish. On the mantel was an elephant god with four arms, looking happy and prosperous, and something about his face cheered me. I touched a knee, took a breath.

  “That is Ganesha,” Niraj said from the threshold. “He is most beloved, the god of new beginnings.”

  “No wonder he looks so happy,” I said.

  His gaze was steady. “Yes.” Gently, he reached for my hand, lifted my fingers to his mouth, drew me into the kitchen. “I made chocolate.”

  The table was set with a fat white teapot and cups to match, and tiny silver spoons on patchwork place mats colored pink and green, magenta and blue, all woven with gold thread. A heady scent of chocolate and cinnamon filled the room, and I sat down with my hands in my lap. “I’m really sorry, Niraj. I feel very embarrassed.”

  “No apology is necessary,” he said, and poured a cup of the chocolate. Steam rose from it. He nudged the dish toward me and said, “Now, there is a perfume.”

  I bent my head into it, smiling. “It is.” I raised my head and met his eyes. “Thank you, Niraj.”

  “You are quite welcome.”

  “I haven’t met anyone like you.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You have not.” He passed me a plate of nutty brown bread covered with jam. “Now we will forget it all and eat something soothing and sweet, and I will drive you home.”

  I wanted to make it all right, to talk it around to some place of normality, to ask if he thought I was really wounded, and if that was going to make him crazy. The sentences ran through my mind, all noise and bluster, little girls trying to trumpet themselves into more importance to hide their terror.

  Instead, I decided to just accept the moment, my own flawed self, the fact that sometimes things were just not perfect. “All right.”

  It was one-thirty when I closed the door to my apartment. I flipped on the light in the kitchen, and my bravado collapsed in the grim greenish fluorescent light.

  Niraj had driven me home and kissed me lightly before I got out of the car, but I felt his reserve. It made me want to cry, that I’d wrecked things with a guy who had genuine potential.

  But maybe I didn’t care about potential. Maybe it was just too hard to start over at this age, hard enough to keep myself together without adding a man into the mix. On the counter were the carnations he’d brought, and I bent my head into them, breathing in the spicy deliciousness. Carnations are so common, but the absolute is very expensive, and mostly people use a substitute of black pepper and ylang ylang.

  This was the real thing. It did not comfort me. It only drew a line under the strangeness of this life I was living, where I did things like go to Happy Hour and come in from a date at one-thirty in the morning.

  I stared with loathing at the space around me. All the beigeness, the khaki and white, nothing out of place, nothing to offend or jar. Why had I rented it?

  Throwing my keys on the counter, I turned in a circle, taking in the heavy wooden table, the cast-off furniture, the peaches and greens I would never have chosen in a thousand years, the bare walls.

  I didn’t want this life. I had never asked for it. I liked the old one. I liked my beautiful gardens with all the roses and scented plants. I loved the graceful dimensions of the old house, the moldings and wainscoting. I loved sitting in the kitchen while brownies baked, reading a magazine or a newsletter or e-mails from my sisters as the scent of chocolate filled the house with love.

  As if someone kicked me, I doubled over and sank to the floor. It felt as if someone was slicing me open, from the base of my throat to my pubic bone, and I curled like a fetus in the middle of the plain white tile floor.

  I wanted the old life back. I didn’t want to be forty-something, trying to date and figure out where I fit in, starting over with new friends in a new life. I was lonely. I felt lost and frightened. It wasn’t an adventure, or least not the sort I wanted, or had ever desired. I didn’t want hand-me-downs and insecurity or a new lover.

  I’d loved the old life! A lot. I loved being a mom, even a despised soccer mom. I liked bake sales and going to lunch in the middle of the week. I liked consulting with my friends about what to wear for a school function, or to a neighborhood Christmas party.

  The tears that had started in Niraj’s gentle arms spilled out of me. I lay there and sobbed, hard, for a long time. It wasn’t that I wanted to. I just couldn’t do anything else. I laid on the cool kitchen floor, and sobbed in purest, deepest, wildest grief. I had loved my husband and my marriage and being a mother, and absolutely hated that I’d lost it all.

  The irony was, it was only because I’d lost everything that I felt free enough to lie in the middle of my kitchen floor, sobbing. It was this ridiculousness that finally wormed its way into my sorrow. I didn’t quite laugh, but it wasn’t exactly a frown, either.

  Wearily, my body exhausted from hard work, my spirit depleted from all the challenges, I picked myself up off the floor and went to bed to sleep for three hours before it all began again.

  I got off early on Thursday to make sure everything was ready for Giselle, and promised everyone at Annie’s I’d bring her in for breakfast Saturday morning. Annie had insisted I take Friday, Saturday, and Monday off, and promised to give me more hours next week so I could make up the time.

  I was predictably exhausted when I headed for the airport the next afternoon, which befuddled me even more than I was already. I’d changed clothes three times, trying to find something that looked a little less down-market than the jeans and V-neck T-shirts I’d been living in. I found my good leather clogs in the back of the closet, and they only smelled a little of house-burning-down smoke. I’d had several boxes of summer clothes in the garage when the house blew, and I tossed through them urgently, trying to find something that still fit. I couldn’t button the blouses across my expanded chest, and the pants absolutely would not zip over my tubby tummy— you would have thought the extra-hard work would have at least earned me a little weight loss!—so I abandoned them and rushed to Target, where I found a duo of sundresses that seemed momlike and at least somewhat an imitation of the old me. There were some flowered sandals on sale for ten bucks, and I threw those in, too. The whole lot cost half my precious paint-stash money, but which was more important?

  Daughter, definitely.

  At the airport, I was there a little too early, and even after I looked at all the magazines in the gift shop and paced around the whole upstairs, end to end, I still had time to burn. I felt jumpy and kept getting a strange little hitch in my throat, like I had an allergy. I went into the bathroom to put on lipstick, which I didn’t wear too often these days, but Giselle had been living in the Marin County area, had just returned from London. She also lived with a size six stepmother with breast implants—this irked me more than any other single thing, since mine are a hundred percent natural, and very pretty still, thank you—who probably knew all about designer labels.

  Of course, the bathroom lights did nothing to reassure me. The greenish tint made the circles under my eyes look like I’d taken up with zombies, and the lipstick shade looked off, and my hair had not been properly cut in quite some time, so the once-attractive messy cut was now just shaggy, and the curls were frizzy today, and it was too long, and I hoped people didn’t think I was trying to be too young.

  The worst of it was the dress, though, which had looked all right in the dressing room and now the turquoise flowers looked like something Daisy Mae would wear.

  My chest constricted so much, I could barely breathe. Was I having an asthma attack or something? I took hitching little breaths and told myself to relax. I paced out to the hallway again, and the hitch in my throat eased.

  I just kept pacing, and pulled out my cell phone. First I tried Kit, and then Roxanne, but neither was home. I thought Wanda might be too young to relate to a full-blown panic attack born of too many things changing in a person’s life.

  Then again, she had a husband in
Iraq.

  Finally, I called my mother. She answered, sounding a little weary. “Hello, Nicole.”

  “Hi, Mom, are you busy?” To my horror, my voice broke on the last two syllables, and the wretched tears were back.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I feel like an alien and I have no idea who I am, and why did I have to do this at forty-three?”

  “It sucks, sweetheart. I’m sorry. It gets easier.”

  Tears welled up in my eyes, and I had to go stand by the window to hide my face. “Do you promise?”

  “Yes. And remember, honey, the only person you have to be is yourself.”

  “But I don’t know who that is!”

  “Just be who you are today.”

  Something broke, an egg full of terror. The contents spilled away harmlessly. “Oh.”

  She chuckled. “I knew this was going to be really hard on you. Either one of your sisters would have managed better than my little homemaker.”

  “I’m at the airport. Giselle is coming for a visit. Just for the weekend, but I think it scared me. I miss her so much. I want the weekend to be good.”

  “Just be honest. Be who you are, even if that’s all mixed up.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” I wiped the tears away. “I’m sorry—I’ve been totally self-centered. How’s Bob?”

  “He’s doing very well. Much better. It was a big help to have his daughter here, and it cheered him up a lot.”

  “How is it for you?”

  “Oh, it’s fine. One thing you learn when you get to my age is that life is long. It’s hard to hold a grudge forever.”

  I smiled. “I’m glad, Mom.”

  “Cheer up, honey. Giselle loves you. You enjoy yourself this weekend.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  When I clipped the phone closed, I turned around and passengers were spilling up the ramp. And in the midst of them was my daughter, loping and lovely, her knees and elbows too prominent, her hair scraped back from her face. She was peering around people in front of her, and I knew the exact moment she caught sight of me. Her whole face burst into sunshine, and she—my dignified teenager—broke into a run. She hurled herself into my arms with a giant bear hug. “Oh, I miss you so much, Mom!”