She laughs again: solid yet graceful, standing firmly yet flexible. She comes forward, lowers her forehead.
He comes forward as well and lowers his forehead, and a moment later they’re locked once more in an embrace, even more passionately than before: like they’re sinking into each other, like the meaning of the distressing information they’ve exchanged has dissolved their contours, along with the space that separates them.
They stroke each other’s faces, their fingers trace the curves of their foreheads, the lines of their noses, of their ears: they pass over them again and again, as if moved by a need to register the data flowing through their fingers toward a more internal, more ancient memory. They separate briefly and come back together again, kiss again; they sway back and forth in their warm and liquid natures, move back a few inches to look at each other, then resume painting each other’s faces with their fingers, annihilate the distance once more, kiss each other once more.
Then his hands are under her sweater, and hers under his shirt; but with a need to touch everywhere, so different from the more targeted search for sensitive points that occurs with Aileen. So different, too, from every other embrace before Aileen, though he’s not really able to think about it now. Here, it’s as if each touch is felt by the one touching and the one touched in the same way; as if there’s no separation, as if their two parts are rejoined in a whole, containing polar opposites. There’s an incredible degree of innocence in every single one of their gestures: of noncalculation, nonintention. And despite what they now know about each other, they throw caution to the wind: they continue activating cascades of sensations, letting themselves be carried beyond. They breathe into each other’s mouths, ears, bite each other’s earlobes, kiss the tips of each other’s noses; they gaze at each other from a few inches away and then from no distance at all, their features losing their contours and regaining them, then losing them anew.
It’s strange, because he’s aware that even one false move could ruin everything, yet he gives in completely to the wave that’s passing back and forth between them. He makes no effort whatsoever to imagine where this embrace might lead; it seems to him that the embrace in itself contains all its reasons. It’s not a point of departure, but a point of arrival; and it contains the shadow of latent pain that could become acute at any moment, just as easily as their features go from unfocused to crystal clear at the slightest step back. Try as he might to remain light, he feels a heaviness grow with each exchange, a danger that continues to increase, that frightens and thrills him, counseling him to lie still and pushing him to act.
Then they’re on the wooden steps of the staircase, and it isn’t clear how they’ve come to be there, or how their intentions and movements can be so perfectly coordinated. The only thing for sure is the undeniable need for contact running through them, the convulsive grasping, the continuous transfusion, the feeling and gazing at and breathing into each other without interruption.
They’re halfway up the stairs; they’re upstairs, where it’s colder, even though the metal pipe of the stove burns the hand he places on it; they’re in the middle of the room and they continue to kiss and hold each other; they’re on the bed and still they kiss, rubbing against each other with the strangest blend of urgency and calm, precision and vagueness.
Shards of thought flash through his mind intermittently: What does she like? What doesn’t she like? Are there limits? What are they? Luckily, he doesn’t have a goal to reach: he’s more than happy to continue kissing and caressing her like he’s doing now, moving back slightly every now and then to distinguish her features, tracing the lines of her eyebrows with his fingers again, moving closer again. But now she slides a hand under his shirt, passing it over his stomach and descending still farther, with lightness and determination. And there’s a language in her breathing, in the movements of her tongue. Despite their closeness, it’s now nearly impossible to tell who is responsible for a specific movement, which movements are the cause of which sensations; the relationship between cause and effect seems to fluctuate continuously.
And yet at a certain point, they’ve thrown off the final pieces of shaped and sewn fabric they each had on, both naked under the comforter, warm between the still-cold sheets, clasped tightly to each other, chest to chest, stomach to stomach, legs to legs. Suddenly he too has slid his fingers over her belly, and farther down, down, down over her smooth skin and slipping inside the warmest place, hidden like a secret they both know well, pausing there and lingering in the damp that becomes wet as she presses against him in rhythmic vibration. And then at a certain point he rolls on top of her and kisses her and kisses her again and slips inside her, with infinite caution, in the surprising and moaning and gasping and rubbing closeness that doesn’t die out but instead continues to feed itself on the beats of their hearts. Suddenly it seems to him like everything that matters and makes sense is here, now: in this moment that continues to expand, in this fusion of contours, in this convulsive exchange of breaths, exchange of skins.
He’s able to think about it only fleetingly, but for all the combinations of bodies and desires he’s experienced in the past, he doesn’t ever remember feeling this sense of completion, this naturalness, this harmony, this trading of proportions, forms, images. And he doesn’t ever remember being involved with a female being he knows so much about, question for question, answer for answer, in every shade of color, in every curve, in every fold. Not one element of this stupefying proximity raises obstacles or creates difficulties, there’s no discordance, no dissonance: it’s like a game for ecstatic and unruly children, or adults extremely aware of the miraculous rarity of what’s occurring, absurdly mindless of the seriousness of the consequences.
TWENTY-NINE
A PART OF HER continues to register difference of shape and consistency compared to Viviane: of weight, proportions, anatomical parts, to be sure. But it’s a part that shrinks with every movement and every breath, until it virtually dissolves into the combination of filled and empty space that makes possible a physical invasion that strangely doesn’t feel like a seizure but is surely a form of possession, even if encouraged, even if compensated by an envelopment that in turn is a form of possession.
They continue on and on, in the fusion of gestures and looks, in the vibration and friction, in the quick beating of hearts and the flowing of blood, with mental images that crop up and vanish constantly, questions that take shape only to lose it immediately. At a certain point she gets scared that she’s misunderstood completely, that despite everything the game of possession might at a moment’s notice turn into a game of domination; she stops. And in the same precise moment he withdraws, as if he has read her mind, picked up on her fears. He smiles at her, and in his smile there’s an unthinkable power of reassurance; again he caresses the line of her eyebrows, the curve of her forehead. He doesn’t seem dominated by the animal obstinacy she remembers in the males she’s been with, doesn’t seem fixated on the reaching of a goal; he seems lost in her, around her, in their closeness, in what they have in common, in what differentiates them. It seems like he could easily stop right here, without getting carried away by an enslavement to instinct, without wanting to rush off toward a mechanical conclusion. She smiles back, caresses a surprisingly smooth temple, a surprisingly full shoulder, a surprisingly muscular arm; slowly but surely she abandons herself again to the current surging through her, and feels a kind of unknown yet familiar bliss expand within her.
He kisses her lips with lips that burn now, kisses her on the forehead, eyes, nose, chin, neck, breasts. He sucks on her nipple, with the biting and aspiring insistence of a hungry newborn baby, sending waves of almost painful pleasure through her body. Between them there’s a communication based on breathing that rises and falls in intensity, like a totally accurate nonverbal alphabet, like a precision scale on which to measure the reactions at every step, the repercussions, the echoes. His lips descend toward her navel, he presses on her waist, on her hips. There’
s something so profoundly familiar at the heart of this need to know each other. Where does it come from? From an unidentifiable and yet so perceptible, so extraordinarily tangible before?
He slides farther down, down over her mons Venus, down between her thighs, his tongue receiving and transmitting shivers, like a sort of ecstatic veneration of a female divinity, in which the pleasure of giving is equal to that of receiving, and in fact there seems to be almost no more distinction between giver and receiver. It’s an alternating current, in which each tremor of the provoked rises up through the tongue of the provoker and saturates him with an intoxicating pleasure that leaves and then returns. He continues to lick her, with method and patience, as if he could go on like this forever; his tongue accelerates, slows, interprets her expectations with incredible accuracy. He passes over and over again with the sweetest insistence, and she wouldn’t want to make comparisons, but the comparisons make themselves: it’s better than with Viviane, even though she had seemed infinitely better than the men before her. How is it possible that something like this is happening with a man? After deciding years ago that she didn’t like men, that she was finished with them? After being so profoundly convinced that she’d found her center with a woman? Is there something about this difference of polarities, this magnetic attraction between positive and negative? In the fact that he’s a rock star, a being that transcends the sexes because he attracts them both, consciously? In his evident, profound knowledge of women, maybe in his genuine love for the female gender? But how authentic can love really be coming from a male, a potential enemy even when, in this case, at least for the moment, he lacks aggressive intentions? Without the disruption of the unpredictable, without the surprise, without the novelty (that’s nevertheless so familiar)? Does even the latent dangerousness have a role to play in this encounter? In the way he grips her thighs, his approach at once playful and determined? In the finger he slips inside her, very delicately but without hesitation? Curving it and pressing upward as he presses down with his other hand on her stomach in just the right place, while his tongue continues gathering and provoking sensations to the rhythm of the sighs and moans she produces, without worrying at all anymore about the impressions or judgments they might arouse, without worrying about moaning or raising her voice or moving around with less and less control. How can this ancestral dance be so easy, so spontaneous? Where does the idea come from that it’s so right, unlike all the things that are so wrong in their lives, and in general?
He continues without tiring, without stopping, as she begins to feel the tension building in her feet and in her calves and rising upward like a series of small waves that gain more and more strength and seem to weaken and vanish and grow stronger and fade again and return with more determination until they become one single and continuous wave that rises and rises, maybe unstoppable now, maybe not, but yes, yes, yes, unstoppable, a wave that crashes into her and knocks her over and throws her and makes her yell from deep in her belly, deep in her throat, makes her thighs squeeze so tightly she might be hurting him, but she can’t really think about it because she’s too flung backward and dragged back forward in an undertow so slow and sweet, it makes her smile uncontrollably, immeasurably.
Here he is coming back up, in a long, sliding movement, skin on skin, heat on heat, sweat on sweat, eyes on eyes. He looks at her from very close up, smiling at her exactly like she is smiling at him. It comes naturally: she relaxes her lips, he relaxes his, she breathes, he breathes. No longer like looking into a mirror: like being inside the mirror. He pulls up the blue comforter, to cover her and cover himself; he holds her tight, caresses her face, her hair. They look at each other, lying on their sides; they keep smiling, time keeps expanding. Thoughts have fled the field, sensations taken over all the space there is. He doesn’t seem to expect anything in return for what he’s done: he doesn’t make requests, apply pressure. He seems happy that it has happened; to be close to her, to caress her slowly and smile.
She stays immersed at length in the deep reverberation, in the light contact of his hands, then follows a sudden impulse, takes him by a shoulder and pushes him onto his back, with a determination that surprises her as much as him. He thinks about resisting, then lets out a sigh, closes his eyes, and lets go. She has a fervor she thought could only come with Viviane: she blocks his wrists, her lips descending over his body, doing more or less what he did to her. She sucks him as if she’s going to swallow him whole, make him a part of her, definitively annihilates any distinction. This too is quite strange: and exciting, something so simple but that activates within her a pleasure unfelt, a search for the very origins of what he feels and what he makes her feel, in the increasingly panting exchange of breaths and murmurs and moans, until he arches backward and yells like she yelled, shakes like she shook as their fluids mix and their contours melt into each other again.
Then he looks at her, across the mountains and valleys of the displaced and battered comforter. “Heeey.” He reaches out a hand, takes hers, lifting it toward the ceiling.
“Hey.” She holds his fingers tightly.
“There’s the imperfect marvel.” He’s still smiling. “The highest degree of perfection that imperfection could ever reach.”
“Yes.” She smiles again as well, because she can’t help doing so; and meanwhile her thoughts return, and the imperfection of the marvel begins to manifest itself, like a hairline crack that gradually widens across the surface of a beautiful porcelain cup, thin and fragile as an eggshell.
Nick Cruickshank turns to look at her, and though he continues to smile, his expression is changing too. “We’ve really done it now.”
Milena Migliari nods; she knows.
THIRTY
HE REALIZES HIS words were childish, completely inappropriate given the situation; but the more inappropriate they seem, the less he’s able to find any better ones. He lies next to her, caressing her hair with the same repetitive gesture. He feels like he could continue doing so indefinitely, or else be forced to stop at any moment, because there’s simply no measure to what’s happened.
It isn’t the single acts or their sequences; he’s experienced similar moments many times with varying degrees of conviction, to the point of concluding that they’re substantially senseless. On more than one occasion he’s felt dishonest, for contributing with his songs to the oft-perpetrated mystification, the scam erected by the dealers of consumption and their willing servants, with their advertisements and their romantic advice columns and their pornography and their films and their books full of prefabricated fantasies. As if the close encounter between two people attracted to one another is the guarantee of a marvel to which everyone is entitled, the equivalent of any other commodity on the market that’s endlessly available to be bought and sold. As if the marvel can be reproduced as many times as there are billions of people in the world, and isn’t actually an extraordinarily rare occurrence, extremely difficult to predict and almost impossible to preserve, a miraculous blink of an eye in an infinite succession of unpleasant or neutral moments.
So what’s just happened here? What was this exhilarating fusion, this loss of boundaries, this inexplicable impression of familiarity and reunion, this instantaneous combination of equal and opposite elements, this complete and utter naturalness? And why now, when the choices he’s made with great difficulty and after long consideration, forcing himself to overcome complex forms of resistance and obstacles, are about to come to fruition?
He gets up, collects his boxers and pants off the floor with vague gestures, puts them on. He turns to look at her, her body still immersed in the long wake of sensations that show no sign of dissipating.
She looks at him; she sits up on the edge of the bed, pulling the blanket over to cover herself. The temperature in the room seems to diminish noticeably with each passing second, along with the light coming in through the windows.
He’d like to say something, but he knows that nothing he could say would seem right, so he r
emains silent, picks up his shirt.
She gets up too: light-skinned, supple and strong, exactly as he saw and felt her earlier, a girl-woman, a warrior-philosopher, a female of both sun and moon, contemporary and ancient. She too picks her clothes up off the floor, looking at them as if surprised by their shapes, their colors, their consistency.
He motions that he’ll leave her to get dressed; he goes down the stairs with an uncertain step, his legs trembling. He puts more wood into the stove, blowing to help rekindle the fire. Then he lights the oil lamp on the table, staring fixedly at the yellow light, as dilated thoughts pass slowly and uncertainly through his head. From his jacket pocket he retrieves the corncob pipe and the bag of Wally’s weed, fills the bowl, lights up, inhales.
She comes down the staircase with cautious steps, and he only has to look at her to know that she feels exactly the same way: crash-landed on earth, unable to find the true names of things.
He hands her the pipe; it feels like he has to stretch his arm out over an incredibly vast space to reach her.
She turns it over in her hand, puts the mouthpiece to her lips, takes a hit.
They’re both quiet, their movements extremely slow. Words are suspended between them, the anticipation of gestures that continue to remain unmade; the only sounds are the breaths and crackles of the stove. Every so often they pass each other the pipe, take a hit, hold in the smoke, then softly blow it out.
“So you’re getting married tomorrow?” She looks at him, her head tilted ever so slightly.
“Looks that way.” He realizes he’s talking about it like something that doesn’t regard him, but there’s an entire sea of uncertainty between him and the event. He hands her back the pipe with another exceedingly slow gesture.
Imperfect Delight Page 23
