by Lily Pond
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Lily Pond
All rights reserved.
Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
Warner Books and the logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group
First eBook Edition: July 2000
ISBN: 978-0-446-55696-5
Contents
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
I. At the Center
II. From the East
III. From the West
IV. From the North
V. From the South
VI. From the Inside
VII. From the Outside
VIII. And Beyond
About The Authors
Permissions
PILLOW
700 KISSES
THE BOOK OF EROS (with Richard Russo)
YELLOW SILK (with Richard Russo)
This book is dedicated to my ever-expanding family.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a lot of people to thank, here. There is my editor at Warner Books, Amy Einhorn, and her assistant, Sandra Bark; they could not have been more wonderful to work with. My agent Amy Rennert whose belief and efforts on behalf of my various strange works couldn’t be more appreciated. There are Susan Katzenellenbogen and Diane Zold-Isenberg and Jim and Mariko and Noé Aratani-Mandiberg, my friends with long last names or high phone bills or both. There is the most dear and beautiful Robert. There is Richard Russo, without whom there would never have been YELLOW SILK books in the first place, Shelly Hébert, without whom no magazine at all, and the many, many YELLOW SILK authors and readers over the past twenty years, without whom much else. There are David Eisenmann, and Brent Martin, who help keep it together. The Fragrant Earth Sangha and Chochmat HaLev and the Albany Pool and the Albany Library, who help keep me together. There are Chris Lotts and Lee Durkee who turned me on to some of this volume’s pieces. And there’s Christine Ciavarella and Tom Adamé and Debbie Enelow and Vida and Vida and all the others who bless day by day by being there, and who teach me, as do some of the stories in this book, that love, that existence itself, always goes a little deeper, a little further, than we ever think it will or should but still is, as Amy Clampitt says, a “botched, cumbersome, much-mended, not unsatisfactory thing.”
Psalm
Each morning I wake to a hunger
not for food at my table or meaningful work
nor love for my neighbor can staunch.
Each morning a thirst that cannot be quenched
by light, by the deepest draught of water.
That I come to Him at all is through her,
who is the table who sets herself
over and over, who is a basket of fishes,
bread in the mouth,
a cool pitcher of wine
tipped
and pouring.
—Samuel Green
Lightning, your presence
from ground to sky.
No one knows what becomes of me,
when you take me so quickly.
—Rumi
I. At the Center
“This is the central bead of the only universe I know.”
The Center of the Known Universe
Pattiann Rogers
It’s exactly here—mark the moment—the tip
of my breast kissed and held
in his mouth, now the one clear grain
around which all goldfish gather to nip
and feed and fleck their fire, now
the circling ring where all river
waters descend, swelling and surging,
this tight bud in his mouth
whose petals, thin as light, I feel
as they loose themselves singly,
peel away like breath, falling
by falling, dissolve only to rise again.
By this falling I understand
how resurrection is central
to knowing.
And this moment is congruent,
the very same moment where Mother
often held Father cradled to her breast,
the same exact moment where Mary nursed
the Christ child feeding, that bud,
that mouth pulling. Astral bodies,
we remember, were drawn into orbit
around that place. By this I understand
how event gives order to matter.
Found nipple nestled in the warmth
of his nudging mouth, inside the curled
and sucking funnel of his tongue—
this is the central bead of the only
universe I know, the very pin
around which the open window, the white
sheet pushed to my knees, the house,
its dishes and doors and eaves,
the curlew calling in the fields outside,
all go whirling. It is the hub where I
in my own knowing go swinging round,
eyes closed, head above, head below.
My toes, my fingertips define
themselves properly only by measuring
their circumferences circling this axis.
God bless the small, central power
and point of this loving instant
upon which all angels, forever countless,
bore and spin and pivot, naked angels
embracing naked angels, mouths at breasts
everywhere inside the center of this moment
holding time and its great wheeling
lariat fixed and found and knowable.
Spending, excerpts
Mary Gordon
I suppose you want me to tell you what he looks like.
It’s hard for me to remember looking at him as a person whose body I didn’t know, a person I’d never seen without his clothes on. Thinking about his hair right now, what I’m focusing on is what his hair is like as I’m looking down on it when his head’s between my legs.
WE WERE WALKING UP Commercial Street in Provincetown. I’d been walking up Commercial Street for years, but this was new. Now I was walking with a man with a lot of money. He had his arm around me. No, not his arm, he had his hand on the small of my back, a little spot of warmth, delicious.
There’s something about walking down a street with a man who’s selected you, making his preference public and obvious. You don’t have to indicate anything, because he’s the one who’s sure he wants you, you’re not sure yet if you’re going to take him up on it. You’re walking as a chosen woman. You watch yourself being watched, you’re being watched by him, yet already chosen, so you don’t need to watch him at all. You can’t possibly lose. He’s watching you and you’re watching yourself. And you know there’s nothing you can do that he won’t like. Your body weighs nothing. It would be quite easy to fly up, and float away. He would watch you, flying up, floating away, not at all surprised because the whole time he’d thought you were miraculous.
What an odd thing it is, this business of looking and being looked at. Being looked at is a bit like being tasted. It doesn’t have to feel like being eaten up, so that there’s nothing left of you. How can it be, though, that something is being taken from you—your manifestation—yet the consumption adds something? I have been added to by being looked at by men. Also subtracted from.
But he was taking nothing from me. I felt, as I walked by, that every time he looked at me I was getting wonderfully larger. But at the same time, my bones were being emptied of their fatigue, their heaviness. I was tall, but l
ight, like a bird, without a bird’s unsubstantialness. What kind of creature was I? Perhaps I wasn’t a creature at all. Perhaps I was a great ship. Instead of two breasts, I had a prow. I was at sail. No obstacles. And in between my legs, occasionally, just a thrum, a little thrill, a little rolling joist from navel to knees.
We went to a place by the water, for dancing. You had to have your hand stamped by the bouncer; I wondered how hard it would be to wash off the image of a hammer and nails. The music was pulsing and unmelodic, and every song went on for about ten minutes.
“Do you like this music?” he said.
I told him I thought it was dreadful.
He asked me what kind of music I liked to dance to.
“Motown,” I said. “Sixties soul.”
“Just a minute,” he said, and then disappeared into a back room where you could see the disc jockey through plate glass.
I watched B look at some kind of list, then hand the disc jockey money. Just as he came out of the little room, the disc jockey announced over his mike: “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have a very special treat for you. Tonight at the Hammer and Nails is Soul Night.”
Some people, younger people, groaned. But a lot of people clapped. And in a second, Martha and the Vandellas were blasting out “Heat Wave.” Then Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” Then Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”
I asked him if he knew Marvin Gaye had been shot by his father. They were having a fight over a hundred dollars’ worth of insurance.
He told me he knew.
Neither of us wanted to talk anymore. We wanted to dance. He was the kind of partner I’d always longed for, he was really a good dancer, but not a showoff about it. And he didn’t bend his knees too much, or wave his arms around. He understood there had to be a limited range of motion, that all the exuberance in the world could happen within that range. I’d never been involved with anyone who could dance. Who could dance as well as I could.
I was almost afraid to meet his eyes. What we were doing was so much about sex, so clearly a pantomime of sex, that I couldn’t begin to pretend it was anything different. I had to understand that I was giving in. I had to understand the exhilaration, and the danger and the loss. I had to look right into his eyes and relinquish something. I had to say: “All right, yes, all right.” I had to move my hips knowing exactly what I meant, let my shoulders relax not as a completed gesture but a prelude, acknowledge that my breasts weren’t bouncing for nothing. I’d danced before as a kind of free-play, danced by myself whomever I was dancing with, danced to express abandon, not attachment, giving the message: Look at me, not to desire me, but to admire my moves, as you’d admire a basketball player on a court. Now it was a different kind of court. I wasn’t being judged, but a sentence was being passed down. It was exciting in that way, like the silence before a sentence.
Then I just wanted to let everything go. I looked at his lips. They were very full, a bit reddish. I saw that he had a heavy beard, he was the kind of man who probably should have shaved twice a day, and I was wondering if it would chafe. I let my eyes fall to his crotch, which revealed, unfortunately, nothing. I let him put his arms around me and bring me close. Our hips ground together, like the kind of teenagers I at least had never been. Scandalous people: she’d get pregnant, he’d have to work in a gas station the rest of his life. Of course they would, you couldn’t dance like this and not have a life of disaster. Dancing with him like this I was a girl with no prospects. Just the prospect of being taken home and being fucked.
But I was too old now to lose anything by it. I almost certainly couldn’t even get pregnant anymore. One of the things we could both count on was that we were past many things that once might have been at stake.
Johnny Mathis was singing “Misty.” I knew there was a movie called Play Misty for Me, about some woman stalking Clint Eastwood, before he became middle-aged and sensitive, but I didn’t feel like thinking about it. I wanted to think about that insinuating sax. We kissed as we danced; we were scandalous, or we should have been, except that no one was looking at us, no one cared. He had his hands right on the base of my spine and was pressing me against him and we moved in slow circles that felt like a whirlpool. I let myself be taken up in it, or down.
I guess we were a little tight, but just a little. Or he probably wasn’t at all. A vodka tonic, two glasses of wine, had loosed my pelvic hinge. When the music stopped, I could just float beside him, let him lead me to the car. I figured I would leave my car in the driveway of Louisa’s gallery. I’d get it in the morning, I said to myself.
“How much did you give the disc jockey?” I said, as he paid the parking lot attendant.
“Five hundred.”
“Jesus,” I said, “I live on that for two weeks.”
“Did you enjoy yourself?” he said.
“Of course.”
“Then you might think of shutting up about how much it cost.”
He had his hand on my knee and was moving it up between my legs. We’d danced so hard that my skirt was damp, my legs were sweaty, and between them was a swamp. But he didn’t go that far. Traveling up and down, a five-inch path beginning with my knee.
I didn’t notice what kind of car we were in. I never notice that kind of thing. We drove a while. The sky was very bright; the moon was full. We drove up a hill. I couldn’t tell where we were. I could have been in danger, but I didn’t think I was. We made a turn; he stopped the car. “We’re here,” he said.
The house was behind a hedge, and I could hear the ocean, I could smell it. He told me to wait in the car till he opened the door. He said he couldn’t stand someone watching him fumble with keys.
The house was mostly glass, and I kept hearing the phrase “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” and I thought that was a good sign for me, a sign of potential safety. Then I dwelt on the idea that the phrase was “shouldn’t throw stones” not “don’t throw stones.” From the side of the house where we stood I could only sense the ocean; I could tell that it was calm. Then I went into the house.
One wall of it, or what would have been a wall, was completely glass, so you could look right down onto the ocean. My eye followed the silver track the moon made on the black surface of the water. He stood behind me, his hand on my shoulder, and seeing that I was enjoying looking out at the water, he turned the lights off so I could have the full pleasure of the light of the moon. He asked if I wanted anything to eat or drink. I said just some cold water.
I followed him into the kitchen, completely black, except for the appliances, which were white. I became absorbed in the identity of being a thirsty person. He opened his white refrigerator and took out a pitcher made of cobalt blue glass. Ice cubes clinked against the glass and when he walked toward me, holding the pitcher, I could see shadows of lemon slices. He poured the water for me. I have never had anything so delicious. Beads of moisture collected on the cobalt skin of the pitcher. More than anything I wanted to put my cheeks, which seemed so hot, against that cool glass surface. Then I said to myself: “Why not, why not do it, this is the kind of situation in which you’re meant to do anything you want.” So I took the pitcher from him and held it against my cheeks, then moved it down toward my clavicle, and stopped at my breasts.
“Are you warm?” he asked. “Would you like a bath?”
I said I’d like it very much.
“I’ll draw it for you.”
He showed me into the bathroom. It was huge, with a stall shower the size of a servant’s room, and a movie star mirror surrounded by lights. The tiles were white and large and cool, the bath mat was white too, made of some kind of fur. Across from the sink with the fancy mirror was an enormous white bathtub. He took his shirt off and bent over to turn the water on. Then he took his jeans off. He was wearing light blue boxer shorts. He filled the tub with green salts from a clear bottle with a long, thin neck. He twirled the water with his hand and this made visible
the movement of his back muscles below the skin. His shoulders were broad, there were a few fine hairs. I thought his back was beautiful; I followed it from shoulders to waist; the inverted triangle, the lively muscles of the scapular. I knelt behind him and ran my tongue up and down his spine, lingering at every vertebra.
I didn’t want a bath. It seemed right to be sweaty. It was only my clothes that were the mistake, so wrinkly, and the way they stuck to my skin. I took off my skirt and blouse, and then my bra. I kept my green silky underpants on. I stood behind him and I pressed myself against his back. Then I sat back on my heels and he tipped me onto my back, and onto the cool tiles. They felt wonderful against my hot skin. His fingers were inside me very soon. I kept moving my hands over him, back to front, then back again, then forward. It made a nice variety, the smooth round globes, and then, after all, bringing to mind more vegetable shapes than anything, but so unvegetable in its texture, the velvet head, the bulk. I felt wrong to be so open and so empty. I splayed my legs as if I’d just been shot.
It’s always a bit of a shock, isn’t it, not to be empty when you’ve been so empty. He made his way inside. It was relief, nothing but relief to be filled up, to be touched in such a deep place you’re sure it never existed before, it only came to be at just that minute. But after a few minutes my skull grinding against the hard white tiles was uncomfortable, and I said, “Can we move inside now?”
It was so sad to be without him for the walk into the bedroom. Just a few steps, but I felt bereft. And after such a short acquaintance.
He put his head between my legs, nuzzling at first. His beard was a little rough on the insides of my thighs. Then with his lips, then his tongue, he struck fire. I had to cry out in astonishment, in gratitude at being touched in that right place. Somehow, it always makes me grateful when a man finds the right place, maybe because when I was young so many of them kept finding the wrong place, or a series of wrong places, or no place at all. That strange feeling: gratitude and hunger. My hunger was being teased. It almost felt like a punishment. I kept thinking of the word “thrum,” a cross between throb and hum. I saw a flame trying to catch; I heard it, there was something I was after, something I was trying to achieve, and there was always the danger that I’d miss it, I wouldn’t find it, or get hold of it. The terrible moment when you’re afraid you won’t, you’ll lose it, it won’t work, you won’t work, it is unworkable and you are very, very desperate. At the same time, you want to stay in this place of desperation, tantalized, arching and leaping for the fruit just out of your mouth’s reach, and yet you don’t want the arch, the leap to be quite over. You want to go on having it forever—the arch, the reach, the desperation—at the same time, you’re saying to yourself, you’re almost there, you’re almost there, you can’t possibly lose it now, keep on, keep on a bit longer, you are nearly there, I know it, don’t give up, you cannot lose it. Then suddenly you’re there.
