by Rose, M. J.
The sound of a zipper.
The feel of cold air.
The woman had pulled Gaia’s dress down and was rubbing her hair against Gaia’s breasts, not touching them yet with fingers or lips, when suddenly Gaia thought of the driver.
It was difficult to raise her head, to force herself to pay attention to anything other than the sensations of the silken hair against bare skin and pulsing flesh against her fingers. But it bothered her. She was willing to do anything with the woman/stranger, but she couldn’t do it in the presence of the driver. She didn’t want a man seeing this. And so she looked into the rearview mirror to see if he was watching.
His eyes were there waiting for her. With a little smile playing in them. Because what she hadn’t seen before was that he was not a driver that Philip had hired for this excursion.
He was Philip.
And so when the woman’s lips moved lower, Gaia opened her legs and looked down at the top of the woman’s head, seeing herself, feeling another, and when the first wave of pleasure hit, instead of keeping it inside and swallowing the moan, she let it out. Knowing it would circle and circle the way the orgasms was circling inside of her and that the circle would include the man driving the car down into the night.
9.
Gideon came back to see me at Ephemera at the beginning of the following week. I hadn’t thought about him since we’d accidentally shared coffee and his chocolate chip cookies. I’d been working hard during the intervening days, finishing up an original short story for Vivienne Chancey, a letter for Robert Rosenthal, and several easy jobs – personalizing stories that already existed. In between, I’d done some decent work on one of own my collages, gotten up early and went running every morning and gone out to dinner with friends until late every night. I was overcrowding my days the way you stuff too many unimportant details into a conversation when you want to avoid the one thing you need to discuss. And I was tired. Not only from the hours and the constant activity, but because it was an effort to clear my stepbrother from my mind. It took constant work to fill up my days with enough activity to drive Cole back into the deep background where I didn’t need to think about him or his gallery opening or his photographs. Where I’d managed to keep him for almost two years, until I’d seen the invitation on Jeff’s desk.
“You look busy.” Gideon said from the doorway.
He was wearing black jeans and a black sweater and carrying a portfolio.
“Hi.” I must have sounded startled because he apologized for surprising me.
“No. That’s okay. I didn’t even know you were there. I didn’t hear you. You seem to have just appeared.”
“I was watching you. I couldn’t help it. You were clearly lost in what you were doing. Artists can do that, can’t they? Disappear into their own imaginations. It’s a blessing. You looked so absorbed.”
I felt a rush of recognition as if we were deeply connected and understood each other on a bone level.
Except how could that be? I didn’t know anything about him. And what he knew about me was only superficial. But nothing about the way his eyes moved - like hungry hands roaming over my body - or the way his voice sounded - as if he were revealing the most intimate secrets - seemed perfunctory or trivial.
I didn’t know what to say. “Come in,” wound up being my profound response. I was chagrined and caught off guard.
And disturbed.
He walked over to my desk and sat down, bringing with him the sound of the wind, the mixed smell of his cologne, the spring air outside and the very realistic and compelling idea that he was back because he wanted to hire me, which made me glad. I needed the work, having finished up everything in house. I lived on the money I made at Grace’s. My rent for the loft – along with everyone else’s in New York City – is too high. The supplies I use in my own artwork are expensive. It all adds up.
But more than that. I needed something new to distract me from my stepbrother.
“I was finishing up a job. Do you want some water? Or tea? Afraid we don’t make good coffee here. We can’t compete with Dean & Dulcua.”
“Nothing. I’m fine” he said and he smiled as he leaned forward in the chair, moving out of the light cast by the overhead lamps.
“I’d like to see what you’re working on, though.”
“I’m sorry, no.” I moved the collage to a shelf behind me. “It’s for a client. And that makes it confidential.”
“Oh. I thought it was one of your own collages. That’s what I want to see.”
“I don’t work on them here.”
There was a beat. He continued looking at me. As if he were trying to figure something out. And then he said: “What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t say anything was wrong.”
“No,” he looked confused for a moment. Trying to figure out for himself why he’d asked me that. “You didn’t. It occurred to me as you were speaking that you were unhappy somehow about your own work.”
I was. The collage I was working on at home was going well but it was deeply personal and painful. But I wasn’t going to tell that to Gideon Brown.
Ignoring his invitation to comment I said: “It’s nice of you to ask about my work but I’m sure that’s not why you’re here. How can I help you?”
His eyebrows arched knowingly, implying he understood exactly why I’d changed the subject and was willing to humor me for a while but also warning me that he might not always be so obliging. That bewildered me, having such a strong sense of what his thoughts were when he was a stranger to me. To have such a strong sense of anyone’s thoughts was unusual to me.
“Have you read a lot of erotica?” he asked, with his voice at a slightly deeper register.
I hadn’t expected this. “No,” I said after thinking about it for a few moments.
“No Anais Nin? Henry Miller? Not even Pauline Reage?”
I shook my head again.
“How about D.H. Lawrence?”
“Yes, but I consider that literature.”
“Nabokov’s Lolita?”
“Yes. But again–”
He interrupted. “Some people called what they wrote porn. Banned them for years. I would have thought you’d have read Nin, at least. Didn’t you need to study some of the greats?”
“Because of the stories I write?” That was stupid. Why else? “Mr. Brown, I’m not a student of erotica. So I can’t defend it or even tell you if it’s what I’m doing. I don’t even think of myself as a real writer. I’m an artist. I’m only doing this until I can get a gallery for my collages. Or until Grace finds someone better and faster at this than me. All I do is talk to my clients and write what they would if they could.
“Gideon,” he said.
I didn’t understand at first and it must have showed on my face.
“Call me Gideon. Mr. Brown sounds much too formal for what I’m here to talk to you about.” He was still looking right into my eyes. The entire time he’d been sitting there he’d never glanced away once. I tried to meet his gaze even though it was disconcerting. People usually looked right at each other, didn’t they? It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before. Obviously there was something different about the way he kept his eyes on me.
“How closely will you work with a client?” His eyes narrowed a little with the question, the way men’s eyes do when they move in to kiss you. He was leaning in close enough so that I could smell him again: that woody, forest-dark scent. His voice even lower than it had been before, as if he were asking me how I wanted him to touch me and where. But that wasn’t what he was talking about. The undercurrent had to be my imagination. I was manufacturing it. Looking for it. And I didn’t know why.
There was nothing about him that explained my interest. I didn’t know what he did for a living and so it wasn’t his job that had me curious. His looks were familiar to me because of the painting in the Metropolitan but that was a coincidence that didn’t have any meaning. He hadn’t revealed anything about himself
that should have connected us and made me feel as if we were moving together, doing a secret dance.
But that was exactly how I felt.
“A client can be as involved as he or she wants to be,” I said, wondering how many subtexts there were to the conversation.
“Orchestrate what each letter is about?”
“You mean, give me ideas and direction?”
He nodded.
“Yes, of course you can do that. In fact, it’s easier for me if someone has ideas.”
He ran his fingers through the hair that had fallen forward on his forehead, and the movement made me aware that I was playing with a pen. I put it down and the metal clinked on the desktop. The noise filled the silence of the last few seconds.
“I’d like to send a few short stories to the woman I’m seeing. She’s travelling. She won’t expect this from me, but it should please her.”
Of course, he would be with someone. Why else would he have been interested in Lady Chatterley’s Letters in the first place? Why had I been certain that he was, like I was, alone at his core?
So much for my intuition.
This wasn’t the first time I’d read someone wrong. Usually it didn’t have serious consequences. Once it had. I should be better at not trying to guess.
I didn’t have the gift that Grace has of intuiting things about people. I wasn’t subtle and I missed other people’s subtleties. Who you are informs what you understand about the people you know or meet. I’d be better off using my perception like a reverse barometer - if I sense something I should automatically assume the opposite.
His hands were on my desk, fingers splayed on the polished surface.
This simple thing, his flesh on the same slab of wood that I worked on every day, felt like an invasion. I wanted to move his hands away. Regain what was mine.
I could still hear his damn voice reading my words. It had been like him shooting an X-ray of my psyche.
Why did he provoke such a strong reaction in me?
Movies did that. Paintings hanging in the museum did that. So did music. Terrible news on television. Stupidity aroused me. The extremes of great beauty and creativity and the horrible, irrational, or cruel.
But men who I met onsight - without knowing them - never do that to me.
Except he had.
Part II
“A letter does not blush.”
–Marcus Tulluis Cicero - 106 - 43 BC
10.
The ocean roared. The sky was gray and there were rain clouds gathering.
“Why did you want to start with sound?” I asked Gideon as we walked side by side on the beach.
“Because it seemed like the most difficult sense to create an erotic story about,” he laughed.
“You have a perverse thing for challenges?”
“You have a perverse thing for questions?”
“Questions lead to answers. The most complicated part of writing a letter or a story for a client is getting inside his head so that I can make it personal.”
“Then I haven’t been very helpful, have I?”
“Not very.”
“That make us equally difficult.”
Gideon and I had taken off our shoes at the top of the wooden staircase that led down to the beach and had been strolling for about ten minutes.
My friend, Tina, and her husband, Jim, lived in Manhattan and only used their house over the weekends. She’d told me that of course I could use her beach. She’d even reminded me of where the key to the front door was in case we needed to use the bathroom or the kitchen.
There were other beaches closer to New York City but I’d wanted to go someplace I felt comfortable. The assignment had me nervous enough. I didn’t know what it was going to be like to come up with a scenario for a story in tandem with a client.
The beach hadn’t been my first idea.
Gideon had officially offered me the job over the phone two days after he’d come back to see me at Ephemera and we’d worked out the details of what he wanted: five stories that he would rewrite in his own hand, without any collage work from me. One a week until his lover came home. Each of the stories was to focus on one of the senses, beginning with sound, and he’d like to start as soon as possible. Then he’d asked if I could give him some ideas in a day or two, suggesting possible story lines and locations where we might place the first story.
That had made me realize he wasn’t from New York, or else he would have known the city well enough to propose the locale himself.
I’d come up with the idea that we go to a symphony and suggested a story about two lovers who sit, listening to the music, watching each other and how the notes and chords lead them to a crescendo of feeling so strong they bring each other to climax only with their eyes.
I’d tried not to blush when I’d told him my idea, even though he had been on the phone and couldn’t see me. And I tried not to focus on how much the idea for the story had come out of the way I felt when Gideon looked at me – even though I knew my reaction was inappropriate and a figment of my own imagination, an imagination that was not normally focused on my own sexuality.
He hadn’t been sure about that idea, he’d said, asked me to put it on the maybe list and requested another. My second choice was about two lovers in bed. She’s sleeping. He’s listening to a CD and slowly, following the rhythms of the music, he begins to make love to her. Arousing her awake.
Gideon responded more positively but still wasn’t sold.
Finally I’d come up with a story set at the beach. I didn’t have any idea of where it would lead or what kind of fantasy might take place. Just the concept of the ocean being the sound that seduces the lover.
So of course that was the proposal Gideon said he liked the most.
The one that I had the least inspiration for.
As we walked, the sand warm on the soles of my feet, I thought about how different this was from work I’d done for other clients. At least half of my assignments had been reworking existing stories and letters that Grace kept from the five years she’d been offering Lady Chatterley’s Letters. Of those who wanted originals, I’d never met with one of them outside of my office. None had wanted to be involved to this extent - where he or she would see and feel and explore the story with me. Making Gideon’s job a challenge.
We walked by a piece of driftwood, twisted into a crescent. I stopped and picked it up. It was the sort of object I could incorporate into my next collage. I’d had the idea that while I was creating these stories for Gideon, I’d do a collage of each one for myself. Five pieces - one for each sense. Without knowing it, Gideon would be partially paying me to take an artistic journey of my own.
Maybe I’d be able to enjoy his odd assignment more if I turned it into an experiment of my own. The idea of concentrating this way on each of the senses, from an erotic point of view was compelling. Maybe enough that it would not only engage me creatively but, I hoped, distract me from Cole’s forthcoming show and center me.
It hadn’t occurred to me until we were walking on the beach, but Gideon Brown’s job had come when I needed a diversion. The closer the date of my stepbrother’s show, the more I was preoccupied with it.
I almost laughed. Even when I wasn’t thinking about Cole’s exploits, I was thinking about what to do so I wouldn’t think about them.
I spotted a piece of green sea glass, soft and smooth and frosted. A sand jewel, I’d called them growing up. Stopping, I picked it up, pocketed it, and then gazed out.
The water was a gray green with three-foot, white, foam- capped waves. Far out on the horizon was a ship, blowing it’s horn. The low note traveled to shore under the sound of the crashing surf.
If I asked Cole once more, would he reconsider? No. Of course not. What would be different about this time? I had nothing to offer him in exchange and that was the only way to get anything from Cole. Everything with him was a transaction.
Damn.
If I was going to do this job, I
had to stop thinking about Cole and start focusing on getting an idea. But wasn’t it odd how Gideon had appeared and presented me with a very real and lucrative distraction from an equally real and disturbing fact of my life?
No. It wasn’t odd. It was how shit happened. It was a coincidence.
To think anything else was to deny logic and reason. Leave it to Grace to turn ordinary circumstances into meaningful consequences of my needs becoming manifest. The fates, she would have said, were working hard to help me out.
It suddenly became all right if this job proved more difficult than most. That would make it even more distracting. For the next few weeks, I was going to be Gideon’s sensory tour guide. And he – even if he didn’t know it – was going to protect my sanity.
11.
The ship blew its horn again and Gideon and I both looked out in the same direction. The fog was rolling in. It muffled the sound and misted my skin. I sucked in a deep breath, smelling the brine. Under my feet, the sand felt damper than it had a few minutes before.
“The storm’s coming. Pretty fast, too,” he said.
“Should we go back?”
“Not yet. You haven’t been inspired yet. We are walking toward an idea. As soon as you trip over it, we’ll go back.”
The surf had turned rougher, the whitecaps rolled up higher and crashed onto the beach with more force, disturbing the shells and sand, depositing more sea debris.
A few yards ahead, I spotted a creamy pink-colored shell.
About four inches in diameter, it was round and swirled to a point like a nipple. When I turned it over, I could see a complicated, pearly, deeper pink nautilus chamber within.
I picked it up and was inspecting it when Gideon said he saw another up ahead. I followed his glance and saw that there were several more dotting the beach.
The waves kept coming closer and closer as the tide rose, and with each one that jumped the beach and deposited flotsam, more of the shining wet shells were left on the shore.
