Affection
Page 17
I thought about him all afternoon as the food was cooking. I took off Jessica’s wafty girly music and played old David Bowie as I stirred the sauce. A vegetable lasagne, easy to transport to my picnic spot in the vacant block across the street. It would stay hot wrapped in a tea towel, and if the boy didn’t turn up I could take it all back home and offer it to her. We could dine on it for several nights.
It all fit into the one basket: two plates, the cutlery, the food, the wine, and two dozen candles. There was a bit of work in setting the candles in their paper bags. I had to clear away long grass, chip packets, an abandoned shopping trolley. It looked quite pretty when it was done, the picnic blanket in the center of a flickering glow. I had put on an evening gown and heels. Away from Jessica and Mary and our extravagant evenings together, I felt vaguely like I was in drag. The heels sank into the loose earth when I walked and there were insects. I checked my watch and poured myself a glass of wine. He was late. He wouldn’t be coming. He was late. I had decided that I should eat my portion anyway and watch the stars. A picnic for one in a vacant lot. I had brought a book and I would read by candlelight.
I was therefore surprised to see him, dressed in a suit. The remarkably comic bow tie should have been a warning for me but I thought he looked quite beautiful. He loomed above me, looking at the world of candlelight that I had created, and had a good laugh. He told me I was completely mad; I poured him a glass of wine.
We picnicked, and then we threw the blanket on top of the dirty plates and kicked dust onto the candles, watching the scraps of paper bag catch fire and drift up toward the sky. The air was alight with hope and there was laughter and holding hands as we headed back across the street.
Jessica met us at the door; I had forgotten my key and Jessica opened the door in her nightgown. She looked like an angel with her perfect body and her halo of brushed blond hair, and I realized, suddenly, that he would want to sleep with her.
I felt him shift and he let my hand slip away. His whole body turned toward her as if she were the fireplace on a cold night. My fingers caught chill and I rubbed them against my thigh to warm them.
Bad to worse.
There is a kind of man who will not use a condom, a generation of boys just a little older than myself who were unmoved by the vision of the grim reaper. We lay naked beside each other. The condom was a little flaccid thing, drooping between my fingers, until, exhausted by negotiation, I let him slip inside me, skin on skin, for just a moment. I lay beneath him with my knees drawn up to my chest and my toes pressing against his nipples and all the joy had gone out of the thing. I pushed him away with my feet. There was the wet sound of our parting. I nestled down to finish the job with my mouth and he told me he liked the idea that I could suck his penis when it was ripe with the taste of my own juices—which, of course, he had not tasted.
“You’re a lesbian aren’t you? Or bisexual? ”
Someone had told him about Jessica. This was all about Jessica.
“So tell me about your roommate,” he said.
I pulled away from his long hairless body. A perfect body and a golden mane fanning out on the red satin pillow.
“Are you interested in my roommate?”
“I’m just asking,” he said and I watched his perfect penis bounce excitedly at the mention of her.
I eased away.
“She’s beautiful,” I told him and he agreed. “She’s still awake,” I said. “You could go talk to her, she’ll probably make you a cup of tea.”
He was climbing into his suit pants, pushing his erection down under the belt, dragging his collared shirt up and over his head. He stood on my futon, disheveled and beautiful.
“You want a cup of tea?”
I shook my head.
He left the door open as if he was expecting to be back. I closed it, locked it, and lay back on the bed. I thought about the little sparks of burning paper bag floating up into the night sky. There was something underneath me. I scratched up a wormy withered condom. I pulled it back like a slingshot and snapped it up toward the pressed metal ceiling. It arced up, not quite managing to hit the roof, and fell, limp, to the bed beside me.
ON THE TABLE
And then there was the boyfriend’s brother.
“Jessica says you will sleep with me if I ask,” he said, lounging in my bedroom doorway. All grinning teeth.
Jessica says.
I shrugged and slept with him. A quick, disinterested fuck. When it was over I lay there thinking about her body, wishing he would leave my bed so that I could masturbate in private.
In the morning there she was eating breakfast. A mountain of food, I wondered how she could eat so much and remain so willowy. I watched her flick her long pale hair over her shoulder and I was jealous and desirous all at once. He watched her, too. He was her boyfriend’s brother and I could see that this was irrelevant to him.
“I fucked your friend,” he said to her. Those teeth bothered me. I couldn’t bear them, all spit and sparkle.
She smiled at us as if she approved, and I love-hated her completely.
“Don’t you believe me?” he asked her, even though it was clear that she did.
“You told me she’d have sex with me and so she did.” I was invisible. It was all about them. I watched her smouldering glance burn through the rich fall of her hair. I wondered when he would leap across the table, pushing aside the chairs and the vase of wilted flowers that I had bought for her and the bowl of cereal and my body, all those items superfluous to the purpose of their conversation. I wondered how long until I saw him kiss her horribly wonderful mouth.
Instead he reached for me and lifted me and put me up on the table for display. He was going to fuck me on the table in front of her. I wasn’t certain what my reaction should be. I watched as she paused, placed the spoon back into the bowl. She pushed breakfast to one side and watched us with that half-lidded bored expression she had perfected. She wanted to watch him fucking me on the table. She wanted to watch me being fucked. I wanted her to watch me.
I peeled my shirt off because I wanted her to see my breasts. I bent and suckled on my own breasts because I wanted her mouth there. I was modeling behavior. I hoped that this scene would be repeated without her boyfriend’s brother. I wanted her all for myself again.
He was clumsy with my clothing, scratching my thighs with overlong fingernails as he wrestled my panties down. He lifted one of my legs and pointed to my vagina. She looked. I felt her eyes on me, sharper than his finger as he pushed it inside. She was looking at his one finger, two, then three, disappearing inside my body and I wished it was her fingers. I would tolerate her ridiculously manicured nails, I would enjoy the little nips of her talons, tearing at my flesh. I wanted to be this open for her and when he pushed me around and spread my knees for her to see the slightly parted labia, I hoped that she would lean over and look more closely. She didn’t.
He turned me back around and plucked one of my condoms from his pocket. He had planned this; he had taken it when he was dressing. He had stood in the shower and thought up the idea of fucking me in front of her.
He fucked me on the table, the brother of her boyfriend, and I was barely even present. It was about him and it was about her, and it was about his brother and whatever had passed between them over the years.
He came before I was ready and it was finished. She pulled her bowl of cereal toward her and continued to eat without a word.
I was suddenly shy. I hadn’t had an orgasm. I wanted to be bold enough to turn toward her and show her how my climax might be achieved with a slight fluttering of her fingertip. I wanted to but I didn’t. I was suddenly self-conscious as I slid off the table and pulled my pants back on.
Later, in the shower, I barely needed to touch myself. There was the smell of her shampoo on the walls and the slipperiness of her highly scented soap beneath my feet. There was her razor on the soap dish and she had stood naked under the same scald of water. I had to hold the wall with
shaking fingertips to stop myself from falling. I heard her little breathy bird-voice in the kitchen, asking some question of the brother of her boyfriend. Have you seen the milk? Do you want another cup of coffee ? My clitoris tugged toward the sound of her voice. I held the open cap of her shampoo close to my face and fell a second time, silently sliding to the floor of the shower and placing a hand over the wild race of my heart.
He stayed with us for a week and she orchestrated a nice dance for the three of us. Four of us, because her boyfriend was there with us, too, even though he was physically away at a retreat. She didn’t want him to go on the retreat where he would talk about universal consciousness and have sex with other women and extricate himself from her grasp just a little bit. So in her boyfriend’s absence there was her boyfriend’s brother. I could see the appeal. So many complications and her at the center of it all, with her hands clean and smelling of sweet bath oils. She had a way of making things happen without even touching them.
That day in her bedroom was a surprise. She liked to watch him with me. I let him touch me in front of her because she wanted it. He had crazy eyes and talked with her for hours in phrases from the Living Game. They talked about mantras and affirmations and choosing your disease to teach you universal lessons. I wondered whether a child born with HIV was choosing her own death to learn some kind of lesson. They looked at me blankly, and I knew I would never make sense in their shared game of life. I stopped talking and I started to just watch without listening.
She settled down onto her pillow, lifting the golden mane of hair into her delicate fingers, leaning on her palm and watching. She wanted to watch us. We knew this and he unzipped my skirt and showed my body to her and entered it quickly, all of this for her. She did nothing. She did everything. We heard her little murmurs, the only sign of her pleasure, just a breathy cooing that encouraged us.
I’m not sure who touched her first, but somehow our fingers were slick with her. I remember lifting the damp white cotton of her pants and then I was inside her, he was inside her. Our fingers had fused and they worked in the same rhythm that his hips had found. Her lover’s brother, her female lover, and her at the juicy apex of it all.
I remember her orgasm as a soft tightening around our fingers, a sucking fish that hauled my whole body through her. She barely moved, but I bucked uncontrollably against his pelvic bone, rubbing and pushing as if I might tear through his body and into hers.
The boy rolled away and I wanted him to disappear, to leave us, me still reaching inside her, my fingers shaking and flexing and reaching, as if cracking the salty shell of an oyster and peeling back the flesh to find a pearl.
LOSING OUR JOBS
They told us to close the café early and I knew what was coming.
The atmosphere was funereal.
“Closing for refurbishment,” they said and I felt my throat tightening. This was the end of it. All my workmates were my friends now. All the customers were ex-lovers or potential lovers or people I could wave to in the street.
“It’s not about your work,” they told us. “It’s about profitability.”
They let us go and we were never to come back. I knew that they did this so that we would not be tempted to lift packets of coffee or bottles of spirits on the way out.
We walked back from the city together and it struck me that we would not be able to afford next week’s rent. I felt my face get hotter, and then wetter. Jessica wasn’t crying. I wondered why I was crying when she wasn’t. I would be handing in my thesis in a couple of months and the Austudy was almost over, and not nearly enough to cover the rent. I wondered about food.
“The universe will provide.”
I wanted to tell her that the universe only provided for people who looked as pretty as she did and who had rich parents they could go home to if they really needed to, but it was all petty and nasty and it was no wonder she couldn’t love me. No wonder I served as nothing but a distraction. I hunkered down into myself on that walk up the hill. I secured the hatches. I dried my tears on the night air and waved my resentment like a flag. Of course they would fire me. Of course I would have no money for rent. It was all destined to go wrong in the end.
By the time I reached the top of the hill, I was a small girl in the playground and my friends had abandoned me and they had taken my schoolbag and hidden it up in a tree but I wouldn’t be budged. I would sit tight and silent and resentful.
She opened the door and put the Cocteau Twins on the record player. She poured me a vodka and put ice in it and a little blue plastic mermaid that she settled on the rim of the glass. There was, I knew, nothing to eat in the house. A packet of lentils in the cupboard that my grandmother had sent to us. “What are we going to do?” I asked, noticing the edge of stress in my voice. Jessica lay on the couch listening to her girly music. She rolled her eyes at my concern.
“I’ll get some food. Write me a list.”
She wrote the list for me because I imagined that she would prowl the supermarket in a big coat, slipping cans and packets into the various pockets. I had seen her take things before, not often, but I had seen it. I suppose there would be some leniency if we were only stealing a loaf of bread. Okay. Bread then, but she wrote sourdough and camembert and polenta and marinated olives. She made a note for coffee and for milk and cream. Cake, she wrote, chocolate, and because she knew that it was my favorite she wrote LINDT in capital letters beside this. She created a feast of eggplant and haloumi cheese and extra virgin olive oil on the back of an envelope.
I slumped onto the couch just as she bounced out of it.
She changed into a short silk skirt, her best bra with white flowers embroidered onto it, a low-cut shirt that showed off the bouquet in the places where it rested on the delicate curve of her breast. She headed out wearing lipstick and smelling like an ornamental garden in spring. Beautiful.
She returned with a man driving a red sports car. He was attractive, dressed in a casual but expensive suit. He was rich. I could smell it on him. He was holding four shopping bags in each hand. I suppose he was not used to lifting such a weight. I noticed his fingers trembling, but it was probably because she was standing in front of him in that short skirt and an obvious lack of underwear.
Groceries. Brie, olives, a nice white box containing a proper cake from a proper baker.
Her lipstick was perfect. She hadn’t even kissed him. She didn’t kiss him goodbye. She giggled. She allowed him to leave the bags on the front step and she waved as if he were already a long way away. I suppose he was.
THE INTERVIEW
It was a train then a bus then another bus. Then, at the end of this marathon of public transport, there was a climb, all dank-sock sweat and uphill trudge. I could see the beads of moisture forming on Jessica’s forehead, bubbling up from under her makeup. Her lipstick should have been called open-wound red. Her mouth looked bloody and swollen. Vulnerable. I reached out and linked my fingers between Jessica’s and her hand was slick with sweat. Our fingers slipped away from each other. A fat drip made a slow trail down my back and I felt it nestle between my buttocks.
“Should I have worn makeup?” I asked.
Jessica shrugged. She was still gorgeous. Her hair was windmussed, ripe with body heat and perfume. I hadn’t worn perfume. I didn’t own perfume, but I could have worn some of hers. I had never thought to use her techniques of seduction, her scents and her shampoos, her blush and her berry lipsticks. There on the hill, catching my breath in the dry-roast of suburban Runcorn, I began to wonder about that.
“You look fine,” Jessica told me, by which she meant: you look sweaty and unkempt and not particularly feminine.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” Hopeful, staring up yet another hill, checking the map to see if there was an easier way around. There wasn’t. We flapped the damp fabric of our shirts. A whiff of her perfume.
“Sweaty is fine,” I told her. “Sweat is actually sexy.”
We continued to climb.
“We saw your ad in the paper,” Jessica turned on the charm, a thick dollop of it, oozing out from under those heavy eyelids. Flirtation was her weapon. She aimed it expertly at the boy. I saw him waver under the onslaught. All his Christmases standing at his front door, with me as a distraction.
“Yes indeedee,” he said. I glanced at the slight tenting of his boardshorts. “Glad you could come, ladies.” Double entendre intended.
“How does this work?” Jessica asked, eyelashes stuttering low.
I had rarely heard her speak so many complete sentences in a row. I watched her working the situation and I bit my lip. We had made a mistake. I wanted to tell him up front and get it over with. We had made a mistake.
“Well,” he was nervous. He scratched his elbow and I noticed a wide patch of scaly red where the skin was scraped raw. “After the audition, I just take bookings. Get this thing rolled out. How’s that sound?”
Audition. The word fell with a hollow thud. It was the kind of word I remembered from undergrad, a word that sounded like panic attacks and had the acrid reek of phobia. Jessica was nodding.