by Rose, M. J.
I took a sip of coffee, then spoke. “The woman who had the job before me had quit and while Grace looked for a replacement she asked me to fill in. It was easy enough. There were a few dozen letters and stories already written, I only had to insert names and places and little facts to make them personal, and then decorate them. I never intended to stay on. And I never thought I’d start writing originals letters or stories. I’d never written seriously but…” I stopped. Why was I telling him my life story? I shrugged. “It is good money and selling collages isn’t.”
“Not the whole story, is it?”
Typically clients spent most of their time looking through my samples. Generally they are either giddy or giggly or slightly embarrassed. Usually happy and excited. They almost never asked me about myself or why I had my job.
I played with some of the crumbs on the marble, rolling them around under my fingertips, buying time, trying to figure out if I had to answer him or not and finally deciding I didn’t.
When he realized I wasn’t going to respond he changed the subject.
“Who owns the letters and stories that are originals?”
“The client does.”
“They can’t show up in your sample book?”
“No.”
The woman across from me picked up her empty plate, lifted her knapsack off the seat next to her, and left.
“And your boyfriend – or husband – what does he think about you writing love letters to strangers?”
“That’s not what I’m doing - the letters aren’t from me. I help clients figure out what they want to write. What kind of fantasies they want me to create. There’s a long questionnaire to fill out that gives me a lot of information and insight.”
“But the ideas are yours.”
“No. I’m just the translator for people’s emotions.”
“They’re your thoughts written down in your voice.”
“They aren’t my thoughts. That isn’t my voice.”
“I read them. It’s your voice. Has to be. Unless you ask each client to describe what it feels like to touch someone, kiss them, make love to them. You don’t do you?” He didn’t wait for my answer; he knew this, too. “When you write, aren’t you feeling your own heat? Isn’t that what you’re transferring to the page?”
Something was buzzing under the top layer of my skin again. I reached up and touched my glasses. Almost as if I was making sure the screen that kept people at a distance was still in place.
“You’re the seductress even if you are hiding behind some stranger’s signature.”
I couldn’t tell if he’d accused me or complimented me. And I was even less certain why it mattered. All I knew was that listening to him was like being buffeted by a storm, not sure how far you’ve been thrown off your course until the wind finally dies down. Then realizing you do know: you’re lost.
“The letters aren’t personal to me. They are anything but. I don’t give them half as much though as you’re giving them. I’m not describing what it feels like for me to kiss someone, or touch someone or make love to them. You’re making a lot of incorrect assumptions.”
“You’re angry?”
“Of course I am.”
“Capturing an emotion. Violent or passionate. Isn’t that the goal of an artist?”
I took another sip of what was left of my coffee. He had me all mixed up. So it had been a compliment. “I’m not making art. The stories are just a job.”
“Right,” he said, making it completely clear that having upset me pleased him in some way. “While I waited for you the other day, after you walked out of your office, I read a few more of the letters.”
I felt my cheeks get hot wondering which ones. Using my forefinger, I pressed down on one chocolate chip that was left on the plate and brought it to my mouth, letting it liquefy and savoring its intense flavor.
Before I figured out how to respond, he said: “Since what’s in the letters isn’t what you feel, but what your clients feel, your clients are all, amazingly, very sensitive and sensual and able to communicate with you awfully well.” His voice was complicated, the way the chocolate was both sweet and a little bitter at the same time. So mixed in with the sarcasm, I heard the shadow of his disbelief and concern for me.
I’d never wondered before if the people who read the sample letters thought that the fantasies, emotions, and feelings I described belonged to me. I had assumed everyone knew they were fictive dreams created to satisfy my clients’ needs, to express their emotions and desires. Why didn’t Gideon understand that? Why was he judging me against the words and trying to fit make us fit together?
“Okay,” he said, his word ending the exchange. “You’re a modern day Cyrano. Only without the nose. Have I got it right now?”
Finally, I laughed.
“What do you charge?” His seemed resigned, as if he hadn’t been sure before and then once he’d made the connection between what I did and Edmund Rostand’s 19th century play something had been settled for him.
“Fifty dollars to customize an existing letter or story to–”
“Originals,” he interrupted.
“Four hundred and fifty dollars. A hundred less if the customer only wants the words and not the collage.”
“Any discount for more than one?”
“No, sorry.”
“Accommodating, aren’t you?”
“It takes me the same amount of time no matter how many letters someone wants. Each is original.”
I wasn’t doing my best selling job. Clearly I was ambivalent about him hiring me. He was too present. Too intense. Besides, I was having a hard time believing that he wanted to hire me. He seemed too self-possessed to ask anyone to write a word for him.
He stood. “Thanks for answering all my questions. It’s all very interesting.”
“No problem.”
“I’ve got an appointment that I’m going to be late for. So I’m sorry but I’m going to run.”
“Thanks for the cookie.”
He smiled and shook his head, making it clear the thanks weren’t necessary. “I might want to hire you,” he added.
I nodded but I was surprised. Something about him made me doubt he would.
As if he’d heard the question I hadn’t asked but only thought, he said: “I know my own talents. What you do isn’t one of them.”
As I watched him walk out of the store, noticing how his shoulders sloped and how lazy his walk was despite his having somewhere to go, I wondered about him.
How had he wound up there at the exact time I’d been there? Did he work in this neighborhood and had come for coffee himself and seen me there? Or had he gone to Ephemera, asked for me, and someone told him where I was? And who would have done that?
It could be another coincidence. Like our mirror image scars. Grace would never accept that. But that’s all it was, probably, and was just as meaningless.
Hundreds of people stopped in Dean & Deluca because they were hungry, thirsty, or curious. Why couldn’t his motives have been as innocent?
Later Grace would tell me I was denying all the obvious signs because what was happening to me was beyond my rational interpretation of how things worked. “If you can’t touch it, you didn’t think it’s real.” She said. “But kismet is real.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that,” I countered.
“Expect you to? No. But I want you to. There are reasons for things that we don’t understand, for the unexpected and the unexplained. They have their own logic, Marlowe. Just because you don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
7.
At ten o’clock that night I got undressed, putting on the dark ruby silk robe that Grace had found for me in an antique store on West Broadway. I hadn’t even noticed it but she’d spotted it hanging on a hook by a painting that had me mesmerized. Ordinarily I didn’t like vintage clothing. While I could appreciate it, the idea of wearing what someone else had once worn didn’t appeal to
me. My curiosity over who had owned it and when she’d worn it and how it had wound up for sale fifty years later was too vexing. I didn’t want my clothes to come with another woman’s history.
But the robe still had its original tag on it. For all those years it had escaped being sold. That in itself was enough of a mystery. Had it been a gift that had stayed in its box under the bed? Had it been purchased by a woman to wear on a trip that had never be taken?
I’d had it for as long as I’d been working for Grace and it had become my writing robe. I’m not superstitious. I don’t have talismans. But when I’m going to write someone else’s story, I slip into it, feel its smooth silk against my skin, shiver and then settle down at my desk, ready to take the hours when I used to sleep or watch television or read while Joshua sat beside me and give them over to strangers.
I had two rituals: I always wrote the letters and stories in my ruby robe, and I always wrote them by the light of a candle I used to keep on the bedside table. The same sandalwood candle that had lit my derailed lovemaking with Joshua.
I wasn’t sentimental. It was all part of a process. The low light made it easier to glide into the words.
None of it was like work. I was lucky for that. Other artists I was friendly with worked at tedious jobs in offices, or tiring stints in stores or waiting tables in restaurants. I got to fantasize other people’s lives. But it still required effort and energy – effort and energy that I had spent on Joshua, and then spent mourning him. It was a relief to finally offer it up to the letters and stories. I donated the hours that had been ours to the words. Even though they were written for strangers who paid me to turn their half-realized erotic imaginings and outpourings of passion or love into prose, they were still, in a way, intensely private.
Until that night, I’d never thought about it quite that way, but Gideon had made me see it differently. And I wasn’t sure I was happy he had. If I became self-conscious about what I was writing, I would fail. And more than not wanting to fail, I didn’t want to lose what had become a welcome escape, and had come to represent something much more complicated to me.
The process began with choosing the pen. Each was different and picking one was like the first step a woman takes when deciding what to wear to seduce someone. A black lace bra? A short rose silk teddy? A lemon yellow camisole with nothing else?
Whatever one selected would set the tone for the rest of the ceremony. And so it was with the pen.
That night I equivocated between a sleek maroon lacquer Mont Blanc, an exotic Waterman Serrisima that curved like a man’s penis, or an antique gold pen that had no barrel and had to be dipped after every few sentences. I picked the dipping pen. The deliberation it required fit the mood of what I was going to write.
The next decision was what color ink to use, like the decision to leave your hair down or pin it up and show more of the naked skin of your neck. For that evening’s story, I picked a dark velvet blue-purple, the color of bearded iris or blueberry juice.
What paper to use was like picking sheets with which to make the bed. It wasn’t only that you wanted fresh sheets when you were expecting an assignation, you knew the color and pattern would be a communication in itself. Clean pristine whites that invited a contrast to raunchy lust? Or a dense flowery pattern that inspired soft sweet romance?
The paper I put on top of my desk was a thick stock in the palest blue.
The options became even more complicated after that. Choosing the first words was like giving someone a small look across a room. Determining an evocative phrase was like giving an open mouth kiss. Shaping a sentence that would elicit a thrill was like opening for the first penetration. Or taking a lover into your mouth.
The process was a Passion play.
The pen point disappeared into the ink like a swimmer dipping into a lake of green-blue water and emerged dripping. Once the last of the ink had splashed back into the bottle, I started to write.
The car was waiting for her when she came downstairs.
She had obeyed all of his instructions, dressing in a long, black velvet dress that he had picked out for her. It was high necked and sleeveless. But it was also backless and had a slit going up the side that reached the top of her thighs.
He had been specific. She was to wear stockings with a garter belt. The one he had bought for her. No brassiere. No other underwear.
It was a silly game she thought as she went from the building to the car and felt the breeze blow the dress apart and caress her skin. She shivered. It was late fall and she should have had a coat. But he’d been explicit that she not wear a coat.
The chauffeur got out of his side of the car, came around and opened her door. He wore a pearl gray uniform and hat, white gloves, and murmured “good evening” as he held the door for her. She barely glanced at him as she anxiously climbed into the limousine, where she expected to find her lover.
He wasn’t there and that disappointed her. She’d thought he’d been watching her come out of the building and get into the car. That had pleased her.
No, he hadn’t watched. He wasn’t there.
But a woman was.
She stared at the seated woman.
Right away, she noticed that the other woman’s arms were as bare as her own. That her neck was just as covered. But the similarities went further. Their black velvet dresses were identical. Their hair color was identical. So was the way their hair was cut. The stranger’s eyes were lined with the same smudges of eyeliner that Gaia wore. The lipstick that filled in the woman’s mouth was the same rose color Gaia used: the color of Gaia’s nipples.
Was it also the color of this stranger’s nipples?
Even the perfume the woman wore – which was a fairly unusual scent which Gaia’s lover purchased for her from an obscure shop in Paris that made its own fragrances – was identical.
A sharp click alerted Gaia that the driver had returned to his seat, shut his door, and pulled away from the curb.
“Do you know where we are going?” Gaia asked the woman sitting beside her.
She wanted to ask her other questions. Wanted to know why she was there, who she was, why she didn’t seem as surprised as Gaia was at the similarities in their appearances.
The woman didn’t answer, but poured Gaia a flute of champagne from the bottle of Cristal that sat in a bucket of ice. After Gaia took it, the second woman drank from her own glass with the same particular mannerisms that Gaia used.
It was mesmerizing. This was her twin. Almost identical. She wondered how far the resemblance went and her eyes inadvertently grazed the woman’s breasts. Even covered by the extravagant velvet, Gaia could see that they were almost the same size.
The woman watched Gaia watching and smiled.
“Do you know what is going on?” Gaia asked. Apprehensive. Nervous. Excited. She could feel the satin that lined the dress against her skin. Feel the goosebumps on her arms that had not gone away even though it had been several minutes since she’d walked from the cold night air into the warm interior of the car.
In answer, the woman leaned forward so that she was only a few inches from Gaia’s face, so close that she could smell the musty scent that was body heat, not perfume.
It was fascinating to look into this face that was so much like her own. Like looking into a mirror. And then the other leaned even closer and kissed Gaia on the mouth. The pressure was exquisite and the texture was luscious, like the flesh of a ripe peach. It was the softest kiss that Gaia had ever felt. Plush lips pressed against hers. A tiny delicate tongue that flicked out and very gently licked the outline of Gaia’s mouths burning the nerve endings as she went along. Stinging and smoothing. Light and penetrating.
Gaia didn’t fight the kiss even though it was unexpected. It was too interesting. So this is what it would be like to kiss myself, she thought. But it was more than that and she knew it. This was something she’d wanted for so long. Dreamt about for even longer. She knew why there was another woman there.
Her lover was giving her this gift. This fulfillment of her fantasy.
One late afternoon, sipping heavy and sweet rum punches on the beach in South Miami, she and her lover lay on chaises and told each other one sexual secret apiece. She told him before him she had preferred to make herself come because so few men really understood her timing.
And when you played with yourself, he’d asked, What did you think about? Who did you fantasize about?
Honestly? She’d asked because she’d never told anyone.
He’d laughed and nodded. And she’d told him that she didn’t think about anyone, she watched herself in the mirror. That she liked how her own face thickened the closer she got to coming. That she liked to pull up her hand and look at it in the mirror, slicked with her own wetness. That seeing it, made the throbbing inside of her increase.
She had told him, when he talked to her about how she made herself come, that she played a game fantasizing that she made love to herself, and here she was. Facing herself in the car.
Now, what would it be like to reach out and touch her own breasts and feel between her own legs?
She wondered.
And wondered too if she would have the courage to do it? To take the offering he had made and take it as far as she could.
But she didn’t have to decide. Because the woman facing her picked up Gaia’s hands and pressed them to her breasts and then moved them into the slit in her dress and then she left Gaia’s hands there and moved her own hands between Gaia’s legs and began to stroke her, softly, gently raking her fingernails over Gaia’s skin raising tiny goosebumps in excitement.
Meanwhile the woman kissed her again. Moving from her mouth down along her jawbone to her neck. Gaia was feeling the wet lips and the hands fluttering between her legs and feeling the fur and moist heat on her own fingertips as she explored her twin.
The woman’s tongue flicked down the side of Gaia’s neck in a teasing motion like a butterfly alighting and then taking off and then coming back for more nectar.
