Lunch

by Karen Moline

  “No,” he says, “let me do it. Don’t move.” He takes her arms and binds them with the cords on the bed, but she doesn’t protest, not this time, no, she wants him to, wants him to do anything as long as he hurries back to her and makes that maddening ache go away.

  His fingers, his mouth, his tongue on her, her back arching, involuntarily, her arms straining against the bed, her skin alive, screaming to be touched, her head lolling from side to side, her breathing hoarse.

  He has never been so gentle with her before, so patient, so generous. It is so easy, to succumb.

  “Don’t go,” she says, “don’t leave me.”

  “I won’t,” he says, even as he pulls away, only slightly, teasing.

  “Come back,” she says, gasping, “I want you to come back.”

  “I’m here,” he says. “Tell me, tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want.”

  “Kiss me,” she says, “just kiss me.”

  “Like this?” he asks, pecking her on the cheek.

  “No. More.”

  “Like this?”

  “More.”

  He will kiss her, again, over and over, he will leave her breathless, delirious, he will stop only to do it again, until the desire is quenched in her, and the frenzy stills.

  It is worth everything, to hear her beg.

  OLIVIA QUIETLY gets dressed, yanks up her boots, runs a brush through her hair, puts on her lipstick. Her sure, sweet, capable artist’s hands are trembling.

  “When?” he says. “I’ve got to shoot all day tomorrow. The day after.”

  “I can’t.” She buttons her coat. “I’m going away for a few days.”

  There is a long pause. “Going where?”

  “Cairo.”

  “Why?” He sees her face. “Oh.” He is still playing nice, he will be nice, he will let her go, flushed and satiated, glowing with sex, her lips swollen from his kisses, what a perfect mood for parting, if indeed she must go. Let her, he has work to do. Revenge will come later, it can wait. For now he is thankful in an odd selfish way that he has not bruised her, perhaps that’s what she was afraid of, unwittingly, when she came in, her steadfast self-­loathing such divine aphrodisiac. He still smells it on her, lingering, she will sit soaking in the bath, scrubbing her skin, washing it away, desperately grateful there are no divulging, telltale signs imprinted on her body, the stigmata of duplicity, to compound her contrition.

  Calmly, Nick lights a cigarette. “Is that what you wanted to tell me when you came in?” She wants him to react, he feels it and he ignores her, she wants him furious, because anger she can try to understand, although no one can quite divine the deeply hidden depths of Nick’s wrath. Except me.

  “Partly.”

  “I see.” He exhales, small, flawless circles. She waves them away. “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, have fun. I’ll miss you.”

  “I know.”

  “Kiss me goodbye.”

  She shakes her head no.

  He smiles at her, and shrugs. “Then you owe me a kiss.”

  “Bye,” she says, frustrated yet grateful for the reprieve, and is flying down the stairs.

  NICK IS staring at the ceiling, still blowing smoke rings, when I come in.

  “I’m fucked, M,” he says. He starts laughing, the unimaginable pleasure of her pleading demands lingering in his mind, his body languid, lying on the bed, naked, her scent on the sheets, a whiff of the scented oil escaping as he turns to me, the essence of Olivia, the Elixir of Life. His eyes are glowing more fiercely than his cigarette. “Can you believe the little bitch is leaving? Not after this.”

  “Probably because of this.”

  “Do you know,” he says, needing to talk, the postcoital conversation almost as vital to him in this exultant state of physical awareness as the cigarette, “when I’m touching her, when I’m inside her, I’m so—­I don’t know how to say it—­aware, of her, so intensely alive, feeling the texture of her skin, her flesh underneath me, every bit of her body, goose bumps, a bruise, purple, or fading to green, that I put there—­I must have, I don’t remember—­and all I want to do is give to her, give something back that I know I’m taking, making her feel exactly what I’m feeling.”

  “Which might be hard to do when she’s strapped to the bed.”

  He doesn’t even hear me, lost in his soliloquy.

  Audiences are supposed to be quiet, and listen. Especially me. I can watch Olivia, he wants me there to watch her most ultimate moments laid bare to Nick’s inexorability, but I am forbidden to intrude. Look, but do not touch. Those are the rules. Until now, they were unassailable.

  “It’s like I am moving outside of my own body, moving within it, it is me, mine, yet I’m removed, so I can watch myself,” he is saying. “I can’t get enough of that feeling. I’ll never get enough of it.”

  “You mean she won’t let you.”

  “No, not like that. I can remember, literally, controlling the motion, Olivia was on top of me so I could see her face above, her eyes were closed, and I was saying to myself, not imagining it, but knowing it to be true, that I will never again feel this close to death.” His voice is rapturous. “I was feeling her, Olivia, on top of me, inching up and down, inch by fraction of an inch, with so little margin of error, a membrane away from death.”

  Disbelief that Nick has himself found the words to articulate these shared secrets so precisely is etched on my face, but he doesn’t see me, lying on his back, lounging into the pillows, his eyes narrowed by memory and smoke, small, flawless circles floating up to the ceiling. He doesn’t see me, because I don’t matter.

  It hits me with a tiny jolt, realizing how little he cares. I push the thought away. I don’t want to think, watching them is too exhausting. I only want to disappear, I only want to sleep.

  “And you know,” Nick is saying, “I didn’t want it to be so intense. Not at first. But now, between her and this damn movie, it’s better than any drug.”

  “The Elixir of Life.”

  “Yes,” he says, laughing again. “The fucking Elixir of Life. It was perfect. Where the hell did you find it?”

  I shrug. I don’t remember.

  “What am I going to do?” he says, stubbing out his cigarette and throwing on his clothes. “We’ve got to think of something. A nice welcoming party at the airport, perhaps.”

  “What do you really want to do?”

  “Make her come home, of course. When I can’t have her I only want to hurt her for leaving me, and when I do have her I only want to make her beg me to stop. So it’s simple. She tells the Frog bastard she’s really sorry it won’t work out and comes with me.”

  “Simple.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “What if it’s the other way around?”

  “It won’t be.”

  How convenient to have a memory so selective, erasable like chalk after a few blissful hours of lunch. The truth is too painful to confront, too painful to deny. It isn’t love, I want to say to him, not what you want, not what she knows to be love.

  He who has loved nothing, who, I thought, had like myself no heart to give, only the Pinocchio heart beating mercilessly in the same entrenched rhythms, wooden and yearning, beating unaware, blinded by the dazzling light of pain beaten into us so early, with such brutality, that he would never see the possibility of surrender.

  This time he is on his own. I can no longer help him.

  His world has been reduced to a room perfumed with the essence of Olivia.

  Chapter 14

  I am standing guard.

  The wardrobe mistress was glad to oblige, anything for Nick, so happy to be of ser­vice for the costume party he says he’s going to, thank you very much indeed for thinking we could help, thank you even more for the payo
ff I swiftly palmed to her. Money does buy freedom, don’t believe anyone who says it doesn’t. Enough of it also buys silence.

  So does my face.

  The chauffeur uniform suits me, much better than Nick’s dishwater-­blah janitor’s jumpsuit. The large peaked hat and the Ray-­Bans cast a deliberate shadow over my face, and I am not stared at quite as much as usual. Twin rows of gold buttons run down my chest. Olivia Morgan is written in smooth black block letters on my sign.

  Her face when she sees me, coming out of customs, a stunned, tenuous grin of nervous bewilderment. She looks ravishing, like a woman who’s just been endlessly fucking the man she loves, relaxed, calm, lost in thought, until she recognizes me. I realize that except for those two lunches and the one time I took her home, I’ve never seen her outside her studio or the flat, moving purposeful, apart from Nick, apart from us, herself, her needs not ours in her own daily world.

  “What are you doing here?” she says, confused, coming up to me. “How on earth did you know I’d be on this plane?”

  An explanation is not really necessary. A few quick phone calls, the usual payola. Simple.

  “Never mind,” she mutters. “Let me guess.”

  She sees Nick, then, leaning against the wall near the restroom, mop in hand, and stifles a laugh at the fake beard glued to his cheeks and the cap pulled low to hide his famous face from curious eyes, a mock ID tag dangling from the breast pocket of his uniform.

  So much for security in airports.

  She sees him, then, leaning against the wall in the same pose as when she’d painted him a lifetime ago, leaning still and watching, waiting, and she stares back in perplexed astonishment, torn between indecision and desire, too stunned by the shock of his presence to be furious that he’s dared find her here, so soon after, when she’s defenseless.

  Run, I want to say, run back onto the plane, fly away, fly to Cairo or wherever he is this week, run quick, find a taxi, lock your door, don’t look back.

  “Go on,” is what I hear myself saying. I wonder if she will forgive me for saying it, but I tell myself she won’t even remember that we spoke. “The coast is clear.”

  Indeed it was, but even if the restroom had been filled with drunken soccer hooligans Nick would have stood there, lounging, patient, mop in hand, because he is waiting for Olivia to come back to him, his eyes liquid with lust, moving only to stroke her cheek, tender, gentle as she draws close, telling her softly, oh so softly, that he was going mad without her.

  Olivia places a palm over the fingers caressing her cheek, and without her noticing I take her bags. In a flash the light in Nick’s eyes deepens and he grabs her tight, twists her off-­balance as he hauls her inside and quickly into the stall we’d prepared, the handicapped one because it is larger, an out-­of-­order sign taped to it, and slides the lock behind him. So quick she couldn’t have articulated a word of protest, for he’d performed this variation on a theme so many times the motions were seamless to him, practiced and easy, and that was half the joy of it. He is kissing her so deep she can barely breathe, forcing her to kiss him back, his mouth delirious on hers, murmuring her name, over and over, one hand in her hair, pushing her back up against the back wall, one hand moving down between her legs, parting them, her head spinning, her legs melting, liquid, but it is too much, he is too strong. This is what she feared from him the last time, the last perfect lunchtime when he made her swoon, this is the fury she knew he was hiding under glib goodbyes and flawless circled smoke rings.

  She does not want him here, he has no right to trap her like this, catching her unaware, the feel of Olivier still lingering on her skin, she does not want Nick to touch it so, not now, not like this.

  She is beginning to struggle against him, to try to pull her mouth away, and that is all he needs, the intoxication of extorted surrender, and he leans all his weight against her, into the cold tiles of the stall, forcing her mouth to stay open to his longing.

  “You owe me a kiss,” he says, “you owe me,” pushing her hands rudely into the handcuffs that she hadn’t seen already dangling from the pipe, put there hours before, when we arrived and changed into our uniforms. Pushing down her panties like a flutter of silken toilet paper. Pushing down his black jeans and into her with such force that her smothered scream nearly tears his hand away.

  I have brought Nick’s mop and her bags inside, and am busy washing my hands, trying to drown out the muffled sounds no listless tourist can hear but me.

  “How could you,” he says in a vicious whisper, “how could you leave me?” How she fights him, squirming, her eyes shiny with tears of rage, trying to bite the hand that imprisons her, shocked and furious at his instant transformation from sweetly tender to tyrannical, waiting for her, off-­guard, waiting to pounce on her travel-­weary confusion, waiting for her when she hasn’t the strength to push him away, even if she truly wanted to.

  And then he is kissing her again, biting her lips, biting the tears away, pushing her harder up against the wall, her legs around his waist. He knows her limits, and she hates him for it. He knows what she likes, he knows just how far to go and when to withdraw, he knows how to melt her anger so she can no longer fight him off, and she succumbs.

  I TIMED it. Seven minutes. Enough time to sit in a trendy restaurant, eat the olive from a martini, scan the menu, and order osso buco.

  Enough time to suck out the marrow.

  Enough time to say a few prayers, and light a candle for your soul.

  LATER, WE watched the video. We had experimented on the angle of the mini-­camcorder packed gently in foam in Nick’s mop bucket and started from a remote I held, following them into the men’s room, watchful and wary, just in case. We had concentrated on angles and focus for endless hours, busying our hands with preparation, anything to keep Nick’s mind from straying to thoughts of the hotel room in Cairo where Olivia was sleeping in Olivier’s arms.

  Despite our careful planning the focus was off, grainy, jerky. The video is no more real than an abstract painting, a shifting landscape of cloth, of knee, of parted thighs, of hisses and muffled moans, of enraged yearning less potent than a whisper.

  An unwitting viewer would see it and shrug, not realizing that this tape had captured the most authentic image of the fury of Nick’s passion, unleashed.

  Unseen. Uncaught. Seven minutes.

  It was all the time he needed.

  Chapter 15

  She is running in a maze, lost, the hedges growing higher against her, their branches intertwining, darkening, she is running in a tunnel, her breath hard and harsh, raggedy sobs in her ears, running away, she hears footsteps behind her, echoing, she is afraid to stop for even a second because he is following, relentless and implacable, she is running in the maze she has painted, greenly rich and lush, high hiding hedges, a forest prison of her own creation.

  She awakens with a jolt, her heart thumping, her fingers clenched around the comforter, and realizes with a shuddering sigh of relief that it was a nightmare, and it’s over. She gets up and pulls back the drapes. The stars are fading, a last gasp of dark before the sun, but she has no wish to return to bed and the horrible dreaming.

  Foolish girl, she tells herself, thinking you can ignore him, imagining you can extract a payment, so well and richly deserved, after what he did to you in the airport, how he dared touch you when your body was still glowing with Olivier, how he dared, and how much you liked it.

  She runs a bath and makes coffee, watching the sky lighten. She has not talked to him in over a week, he called her answering machine once, leaving a sober entreaty she erased immediately. There are floral tributes at her doorstep every day at lunchtime, small carefully swaddled baskets of scented blooms, lilac and night-­blooming jasmine, tiny, exquisitely wrapped golden boxes tucked among the blossoms, the first with a heavy golden link bracelet, each ensuing with a different golden charm, marvelously carved, a paintbr
ush, an easel, a miniature hyacinth in a pot, a pillow, an ormolu clock, a tiny mirror in a gilded frame.

  The last one was my idea.

  She has always accused him of playing games, and now she is no different, she realizes as she nibbles a muffin, abashed, punishing herself to spite him. How easy it is to be like Nick, a petulant spoiled child lashing back at the wanting. She knows how much he wants her, but whether the wanting is simply habit when his wishes are denied him or the genuine craving is something she cannot answer.

  Today she will resolve it, and she calls his machine to tell him she’ll be there, for lunch.

  It is still very early, and she is restless, tidying the studio, flicking through her sketchbooks until she finds one blank, smoothly expectant, and knows what she will do, throwing on her coat and bundling up against the cold.

  Her feet, this time hurrying across the park, past the dog walkers still yawning and the intrepid joggers padding past, striding up Queensway, past the glassy blank stares of ­people lining up for buses, the dull boredom of their days only beginning, up the street and around the corner, keys in hand, up the silent padded staircase, and into the flat.

  She has never been here so early in the morning, so hushed and dark, muted by the thick carpeting and the drawn drapes, she has never been here alone, without Nick waiting, sprawled on the bed, his eagerness tampered by the idle speculation of how late she will be, because she always is, only her feet acknowledging what her mind will not, knowing he is there, the guilty awareness that this must soon end seeping out of her pores and growing on her like a weight, a silent, scolding accomplice warning her to stop, warning her that he feeds delirious on her wavering fears, wearing her down, each time inching a little deeper till she can fight him off no longer, and that is when he knows he has her.

  She shakes the worries out of her head, opens the drapes to the dull gray outside, yanks off her boots, pulls one of the chairs aside, and begins to sketch. She is drawing the room, this gilded dungeon, the peonies fresh in their vase, the curved legs of the table, the heaps of pillows, the trunk at her feet, the empty expectancy an unseen creature she can feel, pressing in on her, glancing over her shoulder, curious.