Baby Geisha

by Trinie Dalton

  Joanne had nothing better to do than to watch. While at first she felt trapped in an exposed way, like a pinned beetle, she moved her shoulders in small circles, easing her tense muscles, then leaned against the wall, slipping her pen and steno pad into her pocket. She mentally noted the demure noise of hammocks swaying, and implored herself to write this down later, still unable to capitulate to the benign setting. Acquiescence was not in Joanne’s vocabulary; she had never considered the idea that when one can’t move, there are still ways out. Forced to sit with her feelings of captivity and helplessness, she managed to locate a certain comfort in her lack of options. Nothing was happening here. She had to get this piece done and she was safe in a hut, surrounded by sloths. She was not lost in the jungle being tracked by a jaguar. What really, she asked herself, is so bad? Her feeling of ensnarement shifted slightly to make room for a flash of controlled relaxation, as if Joanne was muffled in a womb. Nothing was okay. She could write about that nothing, later on, if she had to. Impatience was the snag, not the sloth torpor. This was her introduction to calm.

  Nancy entered the room and handed Joanne a sloth. “Hold him tight,” she said. “And don’t rub his fur the wrong way.”

  This sloth was really friendly. He smiled at Joanne, as she noticed how his coat went backwards, up his arms instead of towards his fingers. She stroked his bristly, matted hair from his hand to his shoulder.

  “That’s his camouflage,” said the nurse. “It makes him look like moss. Sloths actually grow moss in their coats. They’re living ecosystems.”

  Joanne wanted to be an ecosystem. A couple weeks prior, VV and Dena had coerced Joanne into running nude, save for snow boots, while howling through a quiet neighborhood park during a Manhattan blizzard, and Joanne had been surprised at how much she liked it. They weren’t arrested, and at least if it hadn’t produced in her a sensation of placidity, it took her mind off of work. It had been too cold and too fast to think of deadlines, and Joanne never would have done it, or loved it, without her sisters.

  The sloth hugged Joanne, and gave her a quick, dry lick on her neck.

  “He likes you,” Nancy said. “He’ll sleep with you now, if you want.”

  Sleeping with a sloth, huh? Joanne thought. A burrito hammock awaited her. She felt awkward bedding down with a sloth on top of her, but couldn’t wait to get to know this sloth better. He buried his eyes by leaning his head face down on her chest, then looked up for contact. Hoisting him over her shoulder like Santa’s toy sack, she plopped down in the hammock and let the animal sprawl across her torso.

  Joanne couldn’t tell if the sloth was awake or asleep; he was in some in between state. Time grew prehistoric, reverting into a previous eon. These sloths were living in some type of minus time, exuding a rejuvenating lethargy. Joanne was not worried, right now, about her sisters or about tomorrow. The sloth expected nothing from her, and gave nothing in return, gave a great and beautiful kind of protracted nothing, one that Joanne wanted to wrap herself in like a fur coat. Swamped in sloth, Joanne inhaled and noticed he smelled like old piano and white cheddar popcorn.

  JACKPOT (I)

  We’d checked in to the hotel for a grand international gathering, and had each found on our beds silver lamé bikinis or speedos alongside big bottles of whiskey and tequila. Pillow mints were for rejects. The hotel was on a private beach where yachts coasted in and out of the inlet, and people wore clothing that implied nudity. The other ladies had packed entire suitcases of lingerie. I’d packed a mere pair per day.

  Liquor bottles lined the jacuzzi’s edge in the rooftop suite reserved for the birthday boy we were there to party with. I took shots whenever the jets switched on. In the far corner, two Euro boys groped each other to decide whose balls were softer.

  “So soft!”

  “No, yours are soft!”

  I tuned out the balls, taking note of the men’s lightheartedness instead. One guy floated over the other and made baby waves. I went with it. A sex bath is cool with me. In my corner, a skinny Swiss friend sold me on milk & oil baths. One quart of milk, a drizzle of olive oil, optional honey. Definitely adding honey. Apparently every Alpine boy grows up taking luxurious baths. No wonder their nuts are supple. I pictured him in lederhosen pouring buckets of milk over himself. His forearm was flocked with peach fuzz like a reindeer antler.

  “Soft,” I said, looking down into our shady tub. Everyone was naked. My pubes waffled underwater like a black seaweed patch. I twirled my new wedding ring, then lifted it out to make sure the chlorine wasn’t discoloring its dainty gem. It was square to worry about it. These people have mass diamonds, right?

  Swissy’s boyfriend wandered over, unrobed, and climbed in. I got out, tied on some terrycloth, and headed downstairs to see my own soft new husband. This extravagant honeymoon was a gift from the birthday Godfather who was still in the hot tub.

  On our room’s balcony, Pandora was shoving ice cubes up her pussy. She was impersonating a slot machine, one where no man can hit the jackpot. I wiggled in for a good view while deep funk played. Four people huddling around a lady crotch-melting ice cubes might be criminal in silence or sleazy with techno. But funk was making the scene revolutionary. Zeus, wrapped toga-style in the crisp white top sheet he’d yanked off our bed, called Pandora’s pussy an antique clock. I guessed he meant her body was timeless and beautiful, which it was.

  “How Greek of you,” I said to Zeus. He watched two more cubes disappear then passed out on our bed.

  Hermes smoked a Capri cigarette in a monkey fur coat. He only wears exotic fur.

  My new husband, wearing a shirt and no pants, sipped a glass of wine. He needed a nickname, fast.

  “Pan, for no pants,” I said, kissing his cheek. I was impressed he was hosting an impromptu mini-party.

  Once the ice bucket was empty, Pandora twisted the cap off a bottle of JD and trickled it down her butt crack to make Crack on the Rocks. Zeus passing out mid-show had forced her to reinvent the act. I’ve known Pandora for fifteen years and she’s always a wellspring of experiments.

  “Where are we?” I asked Pan.

  Our daily life is swell, but it’s not this theatrical. He put his arm around me. In this alternate universe, Pandora was challenging someone to a competition. The bride? I just don’t think about pussies that much. Pandora wins the trophy. I’m a space virgin who occasionally bumbles onto her orgiastic planet.

  Pandora carves her initials into every place she visits. For instance, we met under a table. Many years back, I dropped a cigarette at a party, bent down, peered under the tablecloth, and there she was, shoegazing. Crawling under to join her, I asked her what she loved about foot apparel.

  “Don’t ever call it that,” she said.

  We shared a smoke and planned a Russ Meyer movie marathon. I was into boobs, I told her, since I like how the word in singular is a palindrome. I wasn’t a threat to Pandora because she only dates women who look like James Dean. After the breast talk, she left our fort, tore a lampshade off a nearby lamp, and danced around the room with a shaded head, declaring Russ the king of busts. People love her or hate her.

  The following morning, some of us ferried to the birthplace of twin gods Artemis and Apollo. On this unpopulated island, millennia-old bricks still walled in areas where people had worshipped the Goddess of the Hunt. I could smell the Artemis cult—wise women with gold bracelets coiled around their biceps, drizzling liquids on each other. These were women who kept panthers on leashes. It wasn’t Lesbos, but it was as close to Wonder Woman as I may ever get. The island was a desolate, scorched place, and it was over a hundred degrees.

  Our group separated and I strolled with Pan through a ruined city of crumbling columns, stairs, aqueducts, and statues. We stumbled upon a turquoise and mustard mosaic-tiled ballroom floor, patterned with fish swimming around a mermaid that had been danced upon two thousand years ago. I kept a cloth tied over my head, Muslim-like, to avoid sunstroke. After two hours of strolling, I verged on summer
heat hallucinations. The mermaid oracle appeared to tell me now that I’d married, I could die a happy woman.

  “Don’t take me now,” I pleaded with the heat vapors. “I finally have a husband to care for.”

  “This moment in your life is fleeting,” the oracle declared. “Beware the future.”

  This oracle was beginning to sound suspiciously like myself, the saboteur. I evaporated her by telling Pan I needed a rest. Locating a cave—three slabs wedged like Stonehenge into the hillside—Pan helped me scramble uphill and squirted water on my face. We inhaled a package of soda crackers, and Pan asked what my problem was.

  I was feeling too quiet to explain that the oracle was undermining my romantic moment. Crushing silence was my only weapon against sexier women who might try to usurp my treasured love, sexier women who were only sharing my honeymoon because Pan and I had rolled our honeymoon and this birthday celebration into one fat spliff. I’d always presumed myself above Pandora’s lowbrow challenges. The atavistic female struggle was already kicking in. I was excited that I had a husband to defend, but I didn’t want to pander to the woman who loosed evil on the world.

  “Where were the lion fights?” I asked Pan, gazing down at an amphitheater. Downhill to the right stood a gargantuan foot left from a colossus who had been one of the world’s seven ancient wonders. This was my idea of a turn-on: a cave with a view of a hand-carved stone foot. Forget spying designer shoes from under a table. I wanted to have sex right here, a million more times than I had wanted it after the Ice Capades. Pan and I were desert lions. The sheer age of this place made it sexier than a boutique hotel room.

  “Lions!” Pan said, pointing down to a row of stone cats, silently roaring at the sun.

  “They look alive,” I said.

  Back on flat ground, Pan showed me the case of painted glass eyes that had fallen out of the lion heads next to us. These were balls I could get into. Arranged in rows, they gave off mysterious airs. If an island’s history is deeper than mine, I thought, how can I leave an impression? Centuries of tragedy and scandal had boiled down to a vitrine of painted marbles.

  I spotted Pandora’s shoes from across the field: bright yellow rubber open-toed heels with ankle straps. Her magenta hot pants were tacky. I recalled our wedding, where as our maid of honor Pandora came disguised as a karate black belt—there are more photographs of Pandora karate chopping guests than of Pan and I combined.

  I consider my best friend a sister, which means I don’t always like her. She’s related to me because we share qualities. Pandora is my mirror; she shows me things I hate about myself. How would I know what to fix if she didn’t go everywhere with me to point out my flaws? The night we met, of course, I questioned wanting a friend who dances around wearing a lampshade. When I said, N-O, I knew I needed her. I want to believe that one can never be too free, and that I just need more training. But too much free spirit can make those around you uptight, as they pick up the slack.

  When I met Pan, Pandora and I were roommates and she was dating one of her James Dean girls. This one had a short ash brown pompadour, wore a leather jacket, and spoke a hushed Marilyn Monroe/Elvis dialect. Jimmy Four, I called her, never hung out much; she’d just come in and head straight into Pandora’s bedroom. Daily, I could hear them doing it through the thin wall that separated our rooms. Since Pandora was a drummer she showed me all the drumsticks and maracas they used as dildos. I even got a demonstration of why this egg-shaped shaker was Pandora’s favorite masturbation tool.

  “It makes you feel like a mother bird,” she said.

  This was one of the few times I piped up and said, “Way too much information, dude.”

  “What, you don’t jerk off?” Pandora asked.

  “Well, yeah, but…”

  “Go tie your apron on and bake some pies, prudie,” Pandora said. Pie baking was our generic wholesome activity.

  Pandora stuck out her tongue, marched into her bedroom, and slammed the door. She banged out Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” on her drum kit, then after a silence her and James started moaning and grunting. It was at this moment that I decided I wanted my own James, who wouldn’t lurk around waiting to be poked with the drumsticks Pandora had just jammed out Classic Rock beats with.

  At sunset, the beach was for the no-tan-line crowd. I wore a more substantial black bikini bottom because my ass looked like a Mylar balloon in the silver lamé. Some ladies were coffee colored—one Corsican woman had beautiful tan lines on her neck from where her long hair for years had covered her skin. I was splotchy bronze like hash browns. But I liked how my teeth glowed an especially attractive white compared to their usual tea-stained yellow.

  Pan sipped tin cups of white wine from the taverna, and in between drinks he swam out for rock diving. I snorkeled away in the salty, curative sea. Underwater, green spiky anemones and purple crabs coated boulders. A spotted squid disappeared in a puff of sand as soon as I realized what it was. I imagined he had returned home—to a ruined Pandora statue, her heels stabbing the seafloor like prehistoric anchors colonized by seahorses. The seahorses’ prehensile tails curled and uncurled as they navigated marble stilettos overgrown with burgundy sea plants. I love seahorses!

  Pandora didn’t flinch when I described this vision of her, ruined and swarmed with seahorses, back on the beach. She continued sipping her ouzo in silver lamé, a silk sunhat, and Chanel sunglasses. I plopped down next to her.

  “You’re all wet!” Pandora said, dipping her fingers in ouzo and flicking them at me.

  “There’s a giant underwater statue of you out there,” I said.

  “Where?” Pandora asked.

  I pointed one cove over.

  “Pan’s still there,” I lied. “We followed a squid to a sunken statue of you wearing stilettos and surrounded by seahorses.”

  “Stilettos?” Pandora asked, intrigued.

  “Size fifties,” I said.

  “5-0,” Pandora said in awe. “But seahorses?”

  “What’s wrong with seahorses?”

  “Are they even animals?” she asked.

  “They lay eggs,” I said. “And the males carry and deliver the babies. Want to go see?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s nasty.”

  Pandora’s definition of nasty is often different from mine.

  “Half the reason I traveled here was to see seahorses,” I said.

  For a second, I thought she was boring. I had the edge. As far as she knew, I had seen the seahorses. She was such a debutante, coming halfway around the world to sit around and drink. But then, I flew out to see seahorses, which is equally weird. Where was Pan, with his brilliant rationality, when I needed to sort this out? Or would he have refused to dig me out of the competitive pit I was lowering myself into?

  I have a Seahorse bookshelf in my living room library. I guarantee Pandora has a Sex Toys section. She has her glamour, and I have mine—in my black suit, fins, mask, and snorkel, I looked like a marine biologist. That’s seductive in my book. We love different things, but each a lot. Pandora worships her pussy, and I am vaguely devoted to things that symbolize a pussy—caves, pregnant seahorses. So maybe I’m too removed. At least I’m not a man-eater.

  “Swim out there with me,” I said.

  Pandora finished her ouzo, set her hat and sunglasses down, and borrowed a mask.

  There were no waves, only a sheet of transparent blue forming the horizon. Pandora’s silver bikini was reflecting sunbeams off of it. It could have been a lighthouse beacon for lost boaters, but instead it attracted a school of metallic, shimmering orange guppies. To them, Pandora was the Mothership, the O.G.: Original Guppy. The school followed Pandora as we swam around the point, where I hoped there would be seahorses, preferably surrounding a sunken statue wearing high heels. Pandora reminded me of the mosaic mermaid.

  “Look at the fish,” I called, pointing down. Pandora put her mask on and looked at her feet.

  “Those aren’t guppies,” Pandora said, coming back up. We
looked again. The fish had pencil-tip-sized razor-sharp teeth. Pandora started kicking them away. We came up and ripped our masks off.

  “They’re man-eaters,” I said, half-joking. “It’s a new breed.”

  “Do they bite?” Pandora asked, drawing her legs up towards her stomach. She only asks me for information when she’s scared, which proves she trusts me. The fish did look capable of gnawing us.

  “They don’t bite,” I lied, staying a cool fifteen feet away. Instead of paddling away, Pandora let her legs down and took her fins off, to test a nibble. I pulled my mask on and went under to watch. Though legs always look like things that attach to other things, they’re peculiarly isolated. I watched this underwater man-eater documentary wishing Pan could see. The soundtrack was snorkel breathing. Pandora’s undulating knees were the coral reef. Fish circled her calves, trying to nudge their lips onto her, with no luck. She said their teeth felt bristly, but weren’t cutting. The guppies eventually took off, but the suspense was way better than seeing seahorses.

  Pandora is 100% woman, and that’s probably why she confuses me. Paddling there, watching her, I invented recipes for us. Pandora is part man-eater, part coral reef, part drumstick. I am part books, part caves, part marine biologist. I was glad I’d shared my honeymoon with her. Watching Pandora do tricks ultimately makes me love her more. Like the two men obsessed with balls, Pandora reaches out. Treading water, I knew I’d be a good wife if I could be half as brave as my girlfriend, even if she has stuck a wider diversity of objects up her crotch.