by Rafi Zabor
"You sly boots!" the Bear persisted anyway, still laughing. "You had this planned from the beginning!"
"Not so exactly as that," Iris told him, "although certainly I did have it in mind, as a possibility, an option. Don't act so surprised, Bear. I was looking out for your welfare too. And what have j/ow been doing these past few weeks? What's been occupying your mind? Have you been comparing metric pat-
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terns in Shakespeare and CharUe Parker? Writing a monograph on the time-lessness of real identity in Proust? You weren't born yesterday, so stop trying to act as if you were. It doesn't suit you."
It was awkward and unplanned this time too, but he said it anyway: "I feel Hke I was born just a little while ago tonight, right here in this bed, with you." And it had much the same melting effect his similar remark had had the first time—it occurred to him that Iris could be kind of sappy sometimes; yeah. Bear, and what about you?—and almost before he knew it, they were at it again.
This time Iris took the initiative, and the Bear was amused to watch her place her small hands on his big shoulders and push him onto his back. Okay, he laughed, let himself be pushed and took a fine defight in watching her small pink form climb aboard him and polymorphously explore his relatively more gigantic body: she pushed hands into him, thrust her face into his chestfar where it was softest and pushed against its grain, embraced him now on this side, now on that, grasped with arms, legs, face, mouth, Hps, whatever she could use. After a few minutes of this. Iris kissed his throat deeply, as if she could consume it, reared up panting astride his stomach, and looked him in the eye. She looked pretty wild.
"O my America?" he asked her, and laughed.
For some reason this made her laugh too. "My newfound land," she agreed, and stuck her face, still laughing, into his chest.
And fell to exploring him again. The Bear was able, during the course of these explorations, to appreciate, nay, luxuriate in the particular beauties of her form, but what touched him most deeply was the innocent abandon with which she moved on him. The Bear had been lusted over by women before but, it seemed to him, he had never been actively loved. He had not been kissed or caressed with so completely expressed a sexuality before, but there was nothing, even as she took his balls in her mouth—one at a time, of^ course—and held them there a moment, he would call lascivious in Iris' unguarded hungers, nothing abased by detachment from her entire essential self. There had been women wild for him, but none who had received him so simply.
She relented for a moment and lay on him breathing hard. Poor little lungs, he thought, beating in so delicate a chest. But what had she been in their tanka-moment? She had been nothing less than hohest materia prima, certainly the most beautiful such he'd ever seen. How dare you condescend to her in any regard! In any case, the Bear decided that it must be his turn. He kissed her mouth, he nuzzled the bared delicacy of her throat and shoulders and passed to an appreciation of her breasts, which were not large but
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were not especially small either: like every part of her they seemed a detailed expression of more deeply organized and beautiful inscriptions and designs. Each detail of her was as finely turned and crafted as the familiar graces of her face, had been the beneficiary of some infallible and affectionate regard. He loved her breasts' pink aureolas and their attentive nipples with their flattened tops, in which his tongue was able to detect further, probably invisible configurations of the script that had written her. Calligraphy? You bet. Iris seemed to delight in the fi-esh textual discoveries he was making amid her least details. Certainly she was audible on the subject, responding with gasps and cante jondo to each fresh subtlety of his reading of her, although once again he had to be careful of the roughness of his tongue for fear of hurting her, a thing he hoped never ever to do. As he kissed and nuzzled and sucked at her nipples, and contemplated her crooning responses with his ears and the intellective entirety of his mouth, his pleasure was not even slightly diminished by the slight striations his eyes detected at the tops of her breasts, traces left behind by her two daughters' passage; neither was he shocked to notice three whorls the size of nickels on the outer curve of her right breast, where a line of cysts must have been surgically excised some time before.
He loved these breasts of hers, these assertive softnesses that seemed the signature of an immeasurate tenderness hidden behind the world but expressing itself here in full. Were they only evolutionary somethings or a pure improvisation on the part of beauty, done for love? Should all animals be adorned with them, or would they present a problem in the wild? The Bear couldn't say for sure, but he knew where his sympathies lay, and lapped, and looned.
After sating himself on these breasts—entirely marvelous things whatever their provenance, he would have wanted the world to understand—the Bear passed lower to nuzzle the twin harps of her ribs, the sweet concavity of her belly flowing downstream fi*om their arch, and then, as he moved lower and opened her legs, he had to tell her again to be careful of the roughness of his tongue and not push against it when he took her. When, nosing his way through a negligible tuft of fur, he tasted her—pink as the incurve of abalone shell, but warmed by her juices that tasted only mildly of the sea—it was the most delicious and accommodating thing imaginable. He used the length of his tongue to taste her entirely, and she cried out above him in what he flattered himself was the full devastation of ultimate shipwreck. She reached down to caress his wide head, pressing his headfur in an appealing syncopation of swirls. The Bear stayed with her through what might have been two or three climaxes, and when she pushed off from the top of his head and pulled away toward the head of the bed, he returned topside to kiss her face.
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the changed features of which were suffused by a flush he had not seen there or on any face before. Neither had she or anyone else ever kissed him with quite such abandon, sucking her own taste from his tongue so wildly one might have thought it gave her life. Although, as even the Bear had to admit, this interpretation was almost certainly one of the delusions of vanity.
But then Iris was moving down along his body—chest then belly then into the crux of his groin—and when she bent to what his passion ultimately had to say for itself, for all the shocking pink of his presentation the unself-consciousness of her abandon persisted. When her head lowered to his cock, it was as if to sip dew from a leaf at dawn or nectar from a blossom; or she was like Psyche, or whoever the White Rock soda-sprite was on her granite perch, bending to drink from her own reflection in the stream of being. When finally she took his, um, throbbing bearhood in, her mouth felt marvelous, her parted lips caressing him and the slightly beaded roughness of her tongue drawing back and forth along his length conveyed a previously unimagined pleasure to him with great simplicity. Every thing she did was beautiful, everything she did was one more example of the infinite treasure implicit within her finite form. Everything she did, even though he was blown away by the directness of its sexual expression, seemed uncannily, how to put it, pure.
He pulled away when he felt drawn too precipitously near climax, and when, after a short pause, he pulled her small body up to him, turned her with her help onto her back, positioned himself carefully above her and moved to the slightly lesser pleasure but infinitely greater communion of the regular act—her breaking gasp as he entered again, an expression, it seemed to him, of astonished devastation—they were better practiced and coordinated this time, though still a trifle clumsy here and there, and if no separable mystical revelation ensued, the experience of nearly continuous beauty that was their lovemaking was enough. It lasted a long sweet time of which each moment had its particular pleasure. The Bear vacillated, or swung dreamily across an arc, between near-mystical states of self-extinction and greedy pornographic rapture.
He experienced amazement at every detail of her beauty, and if, as the tantric episode had shown him, her physical form, like his own, was a veil conceal
ing greater realities upon which they also, however evanescently, allowed themselves to be projected, for the given moment he was contented with the permissible parameters of the representation. Oh yes, he was thoroughly taken in.
When they were done and the bed hadn't collapsed beneath their last convulsions, the room was quiet again and they lay awhile, rather extrava-
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gantly, even ostentatiously draped in the lineaments of gratified desire. After awhile Iris got up and left: the room, came back a few moments later with a couple of towels.
"A mess, huh?" said the Bear.
"Quite."
He watched her bend over the bed and wipe it down, then was surprised when, leaning in with a clean towel she had cooled with water, she wiped him dry on his pubic bone, his retracted sex and balls and between his thighs, all very simply and unselfconsciously done. Thoroughly too, he thought. She did a nice job of it, yes.
Iris tossed the towels somewhere onto the floorboards, lay down again, and leaned into him, insinuating one of her legs between his and pressing one of her breasts into one of his, in what seemed a rather practiced gesture.
She knew it, thought the Bear. She wanted it all along. I should have moved on her from the beginning. I've been such a dolt. We didn't need to wait this long.
"Do you know why this happened?" she asked him out of the room's dark blue, at the back of which a lamp still glowed beneath a spill of silk. Was it clairaudience again? The Bear couldn't tell.
"Because we wanted it to," he said, sounding fairly thick but accurate.
"Because you let me have my space," she told him. "Because you didn't try to impose yourself on me and let the right time come around on its own."
"Huh," said the corrected Bear.
"It should take me a week or two in the city to get a leave of absence from the lab and find someone to sublet the apartment."
"Huh?" said the Bear again.
"What's with all these hubs?" Iris asked him, backing off and pushing the heel of her hand against his shoulder. "You mean you don't want me to come up here and live with you?"
"Are you kidding? Of course I do. I'm just a Httle stunned."
"Stop pretending. It still doesn't suit you."
"You know what an idiot I am. When I say I'm stunned I'm stunned."
"Don't be." And here even she paused semi-awkwardly, the Bear was gratified to observe, and looked away for a moment before looking back. "You were always the one. Bear."
"Huh?"
"Stop saying that. It makes you sound so stupid. It makes me feel as if I've made a terrible mistake."
"I'm just a bit slow taking things in. Eye." As he used to call her. "I was always the one? You sure about that?"
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"I just didn't know if you'd come around."
"If I'd come around? I was always right there. I was right there waiting."
"That's what you think."
The Bear rubbed a puzzled paw across his eyes, then gave his right eye a thorough rub. "We must be talking about two different things."
"You really don't get it, do you?" Iris reached out to push his paw away and then scratch him familiarly behind his ears. He loved it. "Well, don't worry about it, honey. We wound up where we belong."
"You mean I climbed the glass mountain and did whatever silly shit I was supposed to do to win you?"
"If you have to look at it that way," Iris said a httle wearily, "yes."
"If that's what I did, I did it ass-backwards and with my eyes shut, the way I do most things."
"And very endearing it was."
"I sure hope so. Cause, me, I'm happy about this, but when you come right down to it I don't have a clue."
"Men," was all she said, and snorted twin columns of air from her nose.
"I ain't..." the Bear began the usual response, but thought better of it. "I know," he told her. "It's as if... as if we're two different species, right?"
This raised one of her eyebrows and a hip little smile. "In this case I think possibly yes," Iris said, playing with it but keeping an ironic limit on the smile.
"You mean you noticed?" the Bear said pretty broadly. "I was hoping . . . um . . . uh."
"You were hoping what?"
The Bear scratched at the side of his jaw with partly exposed claws. "I was hoping like maybe you wouldn't notice. I was hoping I could get by."
Iris shook her head. "Sorry," she said. "The fur. A giveaway."
The Bear ran his paw down her side and over the upthrust curve of her hip where it lay under the sheet. "Wow," he said quietly. "All this and comic timing too."
"Good night," Iris told him, kissed him dismissively on the snout and laid her head on the pillow.
They were quiet awhile. The Bear still wanted to talk but he could feel Iris heading in the general direction of sleep. What else had he learned to do lately? Was he a fool for beauty? Of course he was a fool for beauty. Didn't it make him a superficial kind of bear? But she's so beautiful! and beauty's such a shorthand for an incalculable host of other things.
You know, even though her hair's not red anymore still she looks quite Irish. Maybe he should get into Celtic music again, only more seriously. And
222 Rafi Zabor
by the way, he wondered in a sidebar, something that had always bothered him, what did Audrey Hepburn see in Mel Ferrer?
The Bear watched Iris' face relax, its subtle muscles letting go. Iris' body twitched a few times in his arms, first the arms and torso, then the legs, loosening the locks that held her, and then, he guessed, off to sleep.
Iris knew that the Bear thought she was sleeping, and perhaps after all she was, this state she found herself in seemed so strange, flickering in the middle distance between sleep and wake. For awhile she had slipped as gracefully as a seal in and out of the shallows of sleep, cooling herself in its waters, then tasting the freshness of the topside air, newly secure that her simple soul had found harbor on the rocky coast of this world. A sweetness moved with her. What was oddest was that at times her physical form seemed to change. At one point she was unmistakably a pale if not quite luminous sphere, veined and mottled like the, like the, what was the word, like the whatchamacalHt of an eye, hovering a foot or two above the bed, and although this too had been pleasant for awhile, the sense of radical dislocation, once her rational mind clocked it, had finally frightened her back into the familiar clash and racket of her insecure and normal body with something like a crash. She slitted her eyes open to see the Bear watching her the way he did, then she shut them again.
Iris had gone down to the Bear's bedroom earlier that night as if to be sacrificed, but also feeling that she was confiding her undefended self to her last true friend in the world. She remembered looking at herself, as if to say goodbye, in an oval mirror set above a small provincial dresser in the upstairs bedroom. Vanity had a last word to say: she fluffed her hair a bit fuller and noted that if she had lost a bit in the face over the years her shoulders were still good, her neck had retained its elegance, and, turning sideways for a last check, the jut of her breasts beneath the sheet was still satisfactory and her nipples poked with sufficient self-assertion against the press of the cloth. Aside from the probable last of her natural modesty, one reason she had wrapped herself in the sheet was that, in order to hold the sheet to her, she would have an excuse to keep her arms in place and prevent any trembling in them from being seen. On the way down the stairs—she had bound her legs too tightly and had to step carefully or risk a fall—she had felt herself confronted with so tremulous a sense of the unknown that her mix of eager and fearful anticipation had been greater, perhaps, than in her first experience of sex way back—that night on which she had allowed herself to feel confused into change on that rough parental sofa from which she could not afterward unwork the awful, undeniable stain about which, in the sequel, her mother,
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whiskey glass in hand and smiHng out one side of h
er slack mouth, had not cared very much. Iris winced at the dumb and anguished clumsiness of her early adolescence, and the unmerciful world it had left her in once the wraps were off. For most of her adult hfe, once she had learned the trick of things, Iris had moved pretty smoothly through the sexual world in what now seemed to her a rather superficial way; but at the brink of the Bear's bedroom the sense of taboo about to be broken and of her life being irreversibly changed had been nearly insupportable. She held her winding-sheet closely to her body with the press of her arms and they shook 2inyw2iy. Going down the stairs she had felt herself descending to other, unprecedented depths.
But she had gone in all the same, hadn't she.
So there. That's what you are really.
And once you got over the fear it was good.
When the Bear had taken her into his arms and then entered her, she had felt a force spreading from her core out to her by now permissibly shaking Hmbs, and it had been hke the return of water to a dry streambed. It had been beyond deUghtful to feel that newsprung water expanding its influence through her parched impoverished lands, which had so forgotten the touch of deeper life that the response of seed and the promise of blossoms felt almost completely unfamiliar—in any case memory had to work at it. When that final, deepest touch came, it was a stunning something of which she had forgotten the name and therefore no longer knew how to call to. And in the midst of it, there had been something else she couldn't quite place. Time perhaps literally stopping, or looping back on itself? Certainly a fundamental sense of massive reconnection, but to what exactly? What she wanted to beheve was that she had heard an audible Click that might have been a sufficient riposte to that other click, the first one, the dismembering one, years back. She was unable to convince herself of it. But there certainly had been an instant in which she almost could have sworn . . . what? She was a millimeter or two short. She had insufficient hands with which to seize it. It was just, it was some intolerable tantalizing increment over the rim of her consciousness. If it was anywhere at all.