Kink

by Kink- Stories (retail) (epub)

  She tugged again, and I yelped at the pain. She rubbed my scalp soothingly and then opened a drawer behind her. With a whisper, she looped a scarf over my wrist, binding it to the arm of the chair.

  “Maxa—”

  “The soldiers come”—she bound the other arm—“and tie Bess—that’s her name, Bess—to her bedpost, and place a musket between her breasts.” When she lifts the scissors into the air, I struggle against the bonds, but it feels perfunctory. I know what is going to happen.

  “She knows that they are plotting to kill her lover as soon as he returns, so she finds the trigger of the gun,” Maxa said. “ ‘Then her finger moved in the moonlight’—”

  The first cut was crisp and terrible.

  “ ‘Her musket shattered the moonlight’—”

  Another.

  “ ‘Shattered her breast in the moonlight’—”

  Again.

  “ ‘And warned him—with her death.’ ”

  I hadn’t realized how much my scalp had been aching until so much of me was gone. My hair ended in a jagged horizon at my chin. “I look like an urchin,” I said.

  “I should leave you like this,” she said to my reflection.

  I believed that she would, but then she laughed. “I’m not finished.” She pulled the chair sideways and sat directly across from me, bringing the blade close to my face. Every dry snip sounded like a mouse setting off a trap. Dozens of snips, dozens of mice scuttling to their doom.

  “So she died for her lover,” I said.

  “He dies for her, too,” she said. “At the end. He’s shot down on the road.”

  With the weight lifted, my hair gathered up into the curl I hadn’t seen since I was a girl. She oiled it a little, then brought a hot iron to the ends, curling them under. After, she pasted curls to my forehead with petroleum jelly. “Spit curls,” she said. “One for every man you’ve kissed.”

  “I haven’t—”

  “Shh.”

  “Maxa,” I said, “are you still upset about the fortune-teller?”

  She shook her head as she dragged her finger down her tongue, sharpening the curl by my ear to a point. “No,” she said. “You’re not a mulâtresse. That was my mistake. The reading was similarly in error.”

  I stared at the tapestry behind her head—some Eastern cloth tacked into the wall; a tableau of tigers and elephants.

  “What are you?” she said. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What sort of an answer is that? You must know.”

  “My mother was a teacher,” I said. “My father died when I was young.”

  A bobby pin scraped my skull, and I flinched. Maxa looked slightly deflated, but then she busied herself at her vanity. She lifted up one of her bottles and poured out a spoonful. I opened my mouth obediently, like a child, and the liquid was bitter. I asked her what it was, and she did not reply. The powder puff huffed over my face, and I coughed. I felt a warmth gathering in my belly; the air softened. Maxa had been chewing on fennel seed; her breath was sweet.

  “What country did your mother travel to, to teach the heathens?”

  I closed my eyes, as if trying to remember, even though I knew I did not. “A warm place,” I said. “She was sent back after the war.”

  “What do you remember, of the warm place?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Trees.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Bess. What kind of trees?”

  I tried to imagine them, but as soon as one appeared in my mind’s eye I saw my mother, laughing, bending down for me, and I felt my mouth tremble.

  “Oh, oh, oh, now,” she said. “Never mind. Now is not the time. You have to be still.”

  I clenched my anus and felt my organs settle in me. She drew on my face, and it felt like she was drawing forever, like she was tracing my whole self because I’d faded into myself. Like I’d become a smooth dome of skin and she needed to put back what had vanished.

  She lifted her gilded hand mirror and inverted it before me.

  I did not recognize myself. My skin was pale as death, paler even, and the cupid’s bow of my lips pouted unnaturally. My eyes were smudged dark as if I’d been struck twice. I felt old. Not old as Maxa, nor old as my mother before the illness took her, but old enough to have seen all of time in its infinite cycles, looping over and over again.

  She unbound my arms and tossed the scarves back into a drawer. I lifted them and rubbed at the marks.

  The dress Maxa had bought for me was oddly square—the style, yes, but beneath it my body’s elements were subsumed. My new face now sat atop a neutered body, a body as soft and sexless as an infant’s. I shivered. Maxa produced a mink coat and put it on me. The hairs grazed my skin, and I had the uncanny sensation that a living thing was slung over my shoulders, breathing intimately against me.

  Marcel came in without knocking, and he bent to the floor to gather the leavings from the haircut. He rasped it between his fingers with an expression of disgust before dropping it to the floor.

  Then we were down in the street, and Marcel was opening a door, and a cab whisked us down the street. The car bobbed and weaved and jolted over the cobblestones like we were small, and we were running and I could not tell if we were the escaping prey or the fox pursuing it.

  * * *

  Years before we arrived there, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées had been the site of a terrible riot. I was a young girl, but the stories reached my ears anyway: how Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring alongside a ballet performance set in pagan Russia had set the audience to madness. They barked like dogs and climbed on their seats; I even heard that one of them tried to burn the theater to the ground. As we approached the façade, Maxa murmured something to Marcel, and he laughed raucously.

  Inside, we took our seats, Maxa between us. The stage grew dark. From the ceiling, a platform descended, and as it landed on the stage, I saw a woman, a negress, sprawled on a bright mirror. When she looked up, I felt like she was staring directly at me. Her hair was slicked tightly against her head, and the outline of her body gleamed like light on a river. When she stood, a set of long, pink feathers concealed her breasts and between her legs; she was otherwise nude. The music opened as a shimmer and then went wild; in the same way, the dancer began to jerk and turn as though seized with madness. She seemed multiplied, three women dancing as one. And as she quaked, she sang. Her voice began low and wide and wooden and then lifted to the ceiling, bright and wire-thin. Between, it warbled as beautifully as any songbird. I felt something light up inside me like a candle knocked against a curtain.

  “The Black Pearl,” Maxa whispered in my ear. “Josephine Baker. They say she has a pet cheetah with a diamond collar.”

  Around us, the audience leaned closer with every breath. They had, I thought, the same hunger as the Guignoleurs, though they didn’t know it.

  “Do you ever dream of singing and dancing, Maxa?” I asked.

  The smile that came to her lips faded so quickly it was as if I’d imagined it. “I only know how to scream,” she said. Marcel placed his hand on her thigh. “And that’s all anyone wants from me.”

  * * *

  Marcel knew a nightclub and hailed a cab for all of us.

  I had never seen so many different people in the same space. Parisians pulsed together, closer than I had ever seen in the streets. Marcel vanished and brought back two fluted glasses.

  “What is this?” I asked over the music.

  “Just drink it,” he said, turning away and gesturing to a man who seemed to know him.

  “Maxa?”

  “Le soixante-quinze,” she said.

  “Why is it called that?” I asked.

  The drink lurched as a man stumbled into my body, and then clutched the fat of my face in his large hands. He leaned in, inches from me. “Because it is like being shot with a field gun!” he howled before Maxa pushed him away. Even as he stumbled into the crowd, I could see his
glistening mouth and yellowing teeth, smell his rank breath. I closed my eyes and drank.

  The drink bubbled in my mouth, an unexpected explosion of botanical sweetness. I drained it to the bottom, and Maxa handed me hers and gestured for more. Marcel lifted his own glass toward the jazzmen in the front and laughed raucously. He fumbled beneath Maxa’s skirt, and I looked away.

  One young woman, a negress with high cheekbones, danced with a white girl I’d seen in the Grand-Guignol many times. They held each other close, kissed each other’s wrists, moved as if the room were empty. The familiarity between them made me ache. Maxa followed my gaze.

  “Tomorrow they may pass each other in the street, and it’ll be like they never met,” she said softly into my ear. “That’s always how it goes.”

  “But they have what they want,” I said. “Even just for a night.”

  “Well,” she said. “One of them, at least.”

  We returned to the apartment in the earliest hours of the morning. Maxa gave me a glass of sherry, and I stared at it for a moment before crawling onto the divan and falling asleep. I heard her set it down on the nightstand, and the murmur of their voices.

  I woke up to hear the sound of Marcel’s open palm on Maxa’s skin. With every crack, I imagined where his hand was going—her face, her buttocks—and when I turned my face ever so slightly I saw he was hitting glistening cunt. At every beat, she gasped and writhed, and tears leaked to her pillow. I closed my eyes, but the musk of her hung in the air, and I could not make myself leave the room, even in sleep.

  * * *

  On a warm evening in May, Maxa invited me to take a walk with her. We drifted away from Saint-Georges, down past the Théâtre Mogador. She held my arm with an uncanny intimacy, as if we had been friends since childhood.

  “I have seen you write,” she said. “Have you ever considered writing a play?”

  “I’ve never written a play,” I said. “I enjoy your performances, but I don’t know if I could write anything that could rise to them.”

  “It isn’t about that,” she said. “It’s a pairing of power, not a transfer of it. The actress and the authoress meet in the middle.”

  I picked up my skirts to avoid a pile of horseshit.

  “You know,” she said, “I like that you still wear this old-fashioned thing. I bet you still wear a corset, too.” I flushed.

  “I only wear it because I can’t afford anything new,” I said. She pulled me around another pile of dung, and when I was clear of it—but could still hear the buzzing of flies—she did not remove her hand but ran it along the line of my shoulder. I shuddered with the familiarity of it.

  Then we were at the Seine, past Champs-Élysées, and I blinked at the river, which had come up so suddenly. It flowed with an aggressive swiftness, and I suspected that if there’d been light in the sky, the motion would have made me dizzy.

  “Have you ever noticed how the buildings become less crowded as you get closer to the water?” Maxa asked me. “It’s like the teeth of a young girl as she ages into an old woman. One day she has too many, and eventually she will have too few, a mouth of glistening gums.”

  We began to walk over a bridge. Halfway through, Maxa turned to look out to the water. I did as well. The river unspooled before us like a line of spilled ink making its way across a table. Along the shore, we saw something moving in the shadows.

  “When I was a girl,” she said, “a mad dog bit the neighbor’s child. The dog was shot dead, but the girl became ill. My mother and I went to visit her, and in her bed she saw me and began to scream. She howled and kicked and acted mad herself, as if she would have rather torn through the walls with her bare hands than be in the room for one more moment with me.”

  She fell silent, and I worried a chip of stone that had been resting on the railing. She did not say anything else, and after a few minutes we continued walking.

  When we reached the Nymphs at the center of the bridge, Maxa turned my body toward her. The stone railing was cold against my back. She bent my torso backward over it and wrapped her hand lazily around my throat, like a sleepy man clutching his member to piss. Behind me, the black river was a starless sky, and the sky a star-filled river, and she pulled up my skirt and stroked my sex with her fingers. I hung there like a strung-up game bird, blood vacillating between my legs and my head, until I felt a swell like the air before a storm. My abdomen spasmed, and the more I trembled the more firm her grip became, and somewhere in the space between darkness and darkness my cells expanded outward and I bore down against her hand as if my muscle wished to vacate my skin.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you.”

  She pulled me upright and drew my shaking body against her breast. Then she kissed me as if extracting snake venom from a wound.

  Back in her room, she removed her stockings and pulled her skirt to her waist. I went to her with my mouth, but she pulled my face toward hers and slipped my fingers inside. She circled my fingers, all muscle and fold, drew me in, and I moaned into her collarbone. It felt like I was pushing into a closed fist.

  “Write me a play, Bess,” she said, panting and pushing against me. “Write the filthiest, foulest, most tremendous play, and we will put it on.”

  That night, I dreamt that I was spread-eagle on a ceramic platter larger than my body, glossy and white as the moon. In the sky, a blazing star grew larger and larger, coming toward both of us. Maxa sat down before me, and began to swallow me like a python, and I was gripped by the muscle of her until she’d taken me in entirely. The air grew white and hot, and even as we were unmade, I was coming. When I woke up, nude and draped at Maxa’s feet, I knew the play that had to be written.

  * * *

  “It’s ready,” I said to her the first day in September. Around us, the cast gathered for rehearsal. Maxa took my face in her hands and kissed me, long and slow.

  “Wonderful,” she said, her mouth twisting up into a smile. “I crave the experience of reading it next to you. Wait for me after tonight’s performance, and we will read it together.”

  That night, I let myself in and sat on her bed, the play resting on my lap. The show had recently ended, and when enough time had passed for Maxa to change, I expected to hear her footsteps on the stairs, but there was nothing. Athéna chewed on a butcher’s bone in the corner, but after a while she ambled up to the bed and laid her silky head on my lap, on top of the pages. As the hours wore on, my back became stiff, and I drifted into shallow half dreams until my wilting body woke me with a jerk.

  Well past midnight, I heard voices on the stairs—Maxa’s sotto, Marcel’s reedy as a girl’s. When the door opened, I saw Maxa’s surprise soften into remembrance. They were both drunk; a haze of anise surrounded them. Athéna growled lightly at Marcel.

  “Your little dog is here,” he slurred at her, and I realized he did not mean Athéna. He walked up to me and grabbed my knee through my skirts. “Will you service us both? Or are you as useless a hole as you are an attendant?”

  “Marcel,” Maxa said. He turned and grabbed her wrist.

  “What, my love?” he sang, his voice shot through with threat. Athéna barked, a ridge of fur raised along the back of her neck.

  She twitched and twisted her arm away but said nothing else. Marcel looked at me again, and while arousal was in there, somewhere, it was mostly anger. He kissed Maxa gently on the cheek. She did not look at him.

  “Good night, my queen,” he said, and left.

  Maxa stood there in the darkness of the room. I could not see her face. I thought of a doll I’d had as a child, a faceless doll my mother told me had come from my grandmother. A young girl who lived nearby drew a face on my doll in charcoal, and after that I would not touch her.

  “Bess,” Maxa said finally. I stood there, the pages tight in my arms. She tried to take them; after pulling hard, I relented. She sat on the bed and flipped through them, reading with the kind of sustained focus I normally only saw on the stage. When she arrived at t
he climax, her eyes glittered. “Oh, Bess,” she said. “Bess, my Bess.”

  I got down on my knees, but she drew me up and laid me on the bed. “I am so sorry,” she said, stroking my hair. “I am sorry for Marcel. He’s a slug and a bore, and you’re like lightning that turns sand to glass.” She rubbed her thumb over my pulse.

  “Why do you stay with him?” I asked.

  “You’re so young, Bess.” She lifted my skirt with a rustle and leaned her mouth into my ear. “You simply don’t understand. The world is terrifying for women. For us.”

  She began to massage my sex with her thumb, and when my body acquiesced she slipped inside. Her thrusts were saturated with need, as if her hand were a cock. I whimpered and felt myself curl around her, and she sealed her free palm over my face. “Bess, Bess, my little Bess,” she whispered. “Do you want to go to Greece with me?” Her hand did not move from my mouth. “We could leave this theater and take a train to Thessaloniki. We could tell people we’re cousins and no one will pry. We can have goats and sheep and plant garlic and never have to labor outside our own walls.”

  I felt pleasure from far away, like a horse cresting the horizon. The door to her flat rattled loudly, and Marcel’s slurred voice drifted in from behind it.

  “Maxa,” he said. “Maxa, come with me.”

  My back arched, and she pressed her hand against my mouth. The sound that had nearly escaped moved back and forth between my cunt and my head, with no release.

  “I come to you, my king,” she chirruped bright as a bird, and then whispered in my ear, “I will check the train schedule, I promise.” She slipped her hand out of me, whisked her coat around her body, and was gone.

  When the door shut, the sound that had been staggering through my body came out in a ragged sob. The candle on the table guttered, even though there was no wind.

  * * *

  The troupe gathered and read the play together, and when it was over a pall of silence descended onto the room.