Fiji nibbled her lip. “A color-free world can be a beautiful place,” she said, ignoring the questions. “That’s the way an achromat learns to think.” She felt Dem’s eyes on her face as if they were fingers. Of course he couldn’t breach her glasses. It would be up to her when and where to reveal the secret of her beautiful green eyes. Surely he knew it was bad first-date form to probe a “Trusting Couple” match on the nature of an imperfection. She would never ask about his heart trouble or his “distinctive” birthmarks. It was enough that these left him insecure enough to seek empathy in a “Trusting Couples” partner.
“Trusting Couples, Inc.” had been a godsend. Fiji’s need for sex—and for the taste of color she’d come to associate with it—now dominated her life. Her matches, she knew, expected her to squint like a mole when she removed her glasses, or ogle them with bug-eyes she got from straining to see colors. They needed her flaw to match their lisps or left-ear-deafness, their gluten allergies or eczema-flaked elbows. But the moment Fiji shed her glasses, not long after she’d joined her dates in bed, and they measured their inadequacies against her startling eyes, they were lost. Fiji used them up and tossed them away. So far, there had been no second dates.
Then, each morning after her night’s partner scurried out of her apartment, freshly humiliated by his twitching, scratching, or stuttering, Fiji would leave her bed and visit the roll-top desk in her walk-in closet. Black Yin would curl on her lap or bat at the hem of her robe while she withdrew her treasures from hidden drawers and cubbies: a purple, teardrop-shaped Christmas ornament; a square of wrapping paper as blue as the sky she never allowed herself to see; a postcard of Van Gogh’s “Sunflower”; a kaleidoscope—its shifting splendor stole her breath.
Having indulged her thirst for color, Fiji next flipped through a thin pad she called her “miracle book”— her collection of Ishihara tests. Colored bubbles swam across every page, but revealed nothing—a sobering pleasure. After sex, after her “color fix,” there was nothing to expect but the “original and unfettered” reality she had created for herself. Fiji would replace her treasures, don her glasses, and re-enter her achromatopsic world.
“I thought maybe you took your name from the Fiji Mermaid,” Dem said, eyes bright. “That would make sense, don’t you think?”
“What’s the ‘Fiji Mermaid’?” Fiji pictured Disney’s Ariel—did she have green eyes? She couldn’t remember.
“P.T. Barnum exhibited it at his circus sideshow. Along with the midgets and pinheads and the bearded lady. He’d stitched the head and body of a little mummified monkey to the tail of a fish, and claimed it was a real mermaid. I’ve seen pictures of the nasty little thing! The head is shriveled, and it’s got deep, empty eye sockets—”
“Stop!” Fiji waved her hand, frowning with disgust. What she was imagining had to be even worse than the real mermaid. “You think I’d name myself after something from a freakshow?”
Dem shrugged, not quite apologetically. “I thought, since we were talking about lying, and, since the Fiji Mermaid was a hoax . . .” He paused. “I’m sorry,” he half-smiled—he was handsome, Fiji couldn’t help note, above average even for a “Trusting Couples” match. “I guess it doesn’t make any sense. Fiji Mermaid.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’m just talking about myself.”
“Let’s change the subject,” Fiji suggested. “What else did you lie about besides being a sitcom baby?”
Fiji definitely had too much to drink. On the cab ride back to her apartment, she found herself dizzied by Dem’s stale cologne and the onions on his breath as he leaned against her, pointing through her window at everything that glowed in the city night. Clearly tipsy himself, he was trying to teach Fiji what “color” was, in spite of “Trusting Couples” decorum.
“What’s that?” he asked about the traffic light they waited at.
“Red,” Fiji said. “But that’s easy—we’re stopped, and I know red is on top.”
“Okay—what about those lights around the window of that restaurant—Le Bon Appetit—the little ones that look like candles—the blue ones—oops!”
“Blue!” Fiji giggled. Dem would want to kiss her soon. What imperfections qualified him for “Trusting Couples” again? Heart trouble—and strange, “private” birthmarks? Fiji pictured an army of black ants circling a bloated penis. She belched, tasting stale wine and salmon, excused herself, and pressed her cheek against the cool glass beside her.
Dem peered out the rear window. “What color’s the Empire State Building?” Fiji craned her neck for a look and let her head fall on his shoulder. The skyscraper’s red-lit top burned through her dark glasses.
“Also blue,” she sighed.
“Correct! Amazing—who doesn’t see her colors—or are you just a lucky guesser?”
So Dem was toying with her—let him. When she got him in bed, when he saw her eyes, he’d see who was toying with whom. Fiji played along. “I sense the colors,” she said. They passed a Saks Fifth Avenue window display—headless mannequins posed in a violet haze. “That display window’s lit in yellow,” she declared.
“Ennnh!” Dem buzzed. “Nope! It’s green. Green as envy—a dangerous, dangerous color!”
“Yellowish-green, maybe?” Fiji feigned innocence—Dem was such a fool!
“Nope—as green as the White House lawn on Easter Sunday.” Suddenly, his gaze dropped to Fiji. Could he see himself in her glasses, or was the cab too dark? “What am I doing?” he asked. “Listen—I’m sorry.”
“You mean the window was yellow?”
“No, it was green. But I shouldn’t be making fun. It’s against the rules. It’s not nice.” Dem snuggled closer to her and lifted an arm over her shoulder. “Forgive me, little acrobat?”
“Achro-mat,” Fiji corrected. Her head had cleared—she was alert and turned on. If Dem wanted to kiss her, she was ready.
They kissed in the cab and in the elevator on the way up to Fiji’s apartment. At her door, Dem pressed into her back while she dug in her bag for her key. Inside, she touched a wall switch, and a lamp in the corner of the living room flared weakly, like a dying ember.
“I keep it dark. Sorry.” A shadow darted from behind the sofa and ran down the hall. “Yin!” Fiji called. “That’s my little Yin.”
“But you said you were ‘Yang-less,’ right?” Dem looked around the room, and Fiji followed the whites of his eyes.
“Yep,” she said. “Yin’s enough. I wonder if being Yang-less affects my balance. Something to drink?”
Dem touched her shoulder and she pivoted to him, lifting a hand to his cheek. He glared down at her—he was definitely trying to penetrate her glasses. Of course he wondered what secrets they hid. He declined the drink offer.
“Here’s one of my islands,” Fiji said, gesturing at a framed photograph of a palm tree on a beach.
“I remember about them—all of your pictures are black and white.”
Safe at home, Fiji found an explanation: “They give my visitors a glimpse of my world.”
While Dem waited for her on the bed, Fiji stepped into her bathroom, where she removed her blouse, skirt, and underwear and tugged on a thigh-length kimono. She looked in the mirror, tossed her hair, and, for the first time in hours, lifted off her glasses. Her eyes winced from the brightness after being hidden all day. But look how they expanded like fresh butterfly wings! Aroused by the twin stabs of green, Fiji licked her lips. How would Dem handle the revelation? Like all the others, of course. But when she replaced her glasses, the sudden darkness stalled her. She steadied herself and caught her shadowed reflection. She shivered. Fiji Mermaid, the blank eyes in the mirror proclaimed: Liar. She shut the bathroom light. No mirror. No reflection. Not a lie, Fiji corrected—a choice.
Dem lay naked, half-p
ropped against a pillow. Fiji measured him from the doorway with a long look. She dimmed the track lights above her headboard—just a bit— because he would expect her to. They’d help highlight her eyes when the time came. She mounted the bed and crept toward him on all fours, as her cat Yin might have done. She kissed him. Was he still trying to see through her glasses? Wait, she thought, not yet, Big Fish. She pushed herself back and kissed his hairless chest. Heart trouble. Would there be a scar? Nothing but wisps of hair. She licked one of his nipples, then the other, and his chest rose and fell with his sigh. And the birthmarks? She lowered herself further, looking up at him with a pouty smile.
“Mm-hmm,” he murmured, grinning. “‘Trusting Couples.’”
“Trysting couples,” Fiji said. “Shh.” Her face hovered over his waist. Trysting cripple, she thought, you’re mine!
And there were Dem’s birthmarks, spread from hip to hip, a constellation of them above and below the cock stiffening in her hand. Hundreds of black dots swarmed across his torso, separating it from his legs like an embroidered belt. Fiji blinked—her dark lenses obscured what might have been a pattern—the marks were like nothing she’d ever seen. She’d study them quickly when she freed her eyes.
But her glasses stayed on. “Kiss!” Dem commanded, and Fiji dipped to the marks like a thirsty doe. She kissed. His skin tasted like a spice she couldn’t place, and her eyes closed. She saw the colors of her secret treasures, and she felt them, too—Van Gogh’s sunflower yellow, the ornament’s purple, the wrapping paper’s blue—it was as if she were tumbling inside her kaleidoscope. A shadow flitted—Fiji gasped, remembering her intent. Lips still on flesh, she fumbled at her face.
“No—” the voice above her growled, and she froze. “Leave them on!” Fiji steadied the glasses and peeked upward, but couldn’t see past the frames. “Keep them on!” Dem repeated. And she complied, because there seemed no other choice. His hand—had Fiji known it was so huge?—gripped her skull, and she was sure he felt the colors exploding in her head. Had her tongue smeared one of the marks? She couldn’t tell. She might have tasted ink.
Fiji, spent, sore in unaccustomed places, woke to painful sunlight. Hours earlier, in the gray pre-dawn, she’d been aware of Dem’s body close to hers. But now the sun—it had been years since she’d lifted her bedroom shades. Blood tingled in her cheeks as she recalled the evening’s progress—had Dem really POV-ed her with his smartphone? She pawed her night table for her dark glasses, but couldn’t find them. Then she realized she was alone.
“Dem?” She sat up and repeated his name. She rose, snatched the kimono from the floor, and yanked it on. She padded on bare feet into the living room—the shades were lifted there, too, and blades of light glanced from the pictures on the walls. Across the bright room Fiji made out Yin, a humped silhouette on the back of the sofa. “Dem?” she called again, but the bathroom and kitchen were empty.
Her limbs like lead, her head as empty as a papier-mache globe, Fiji slouched back to her bedroom, where she jerked down the shades and sank onto her bed. The night’s sex wafted from her sheets. Her glasses had to be somewhere in the tangles—soon she’d pat them out. After a few moments, her gaze wandered to her closet—and she groaned. Her desk was open, its top rolled back. Colors spilled across it—her treasures had been exposed! With a cry she scrambled from her bed and rushed to them.
Her purple teardrop ornament, the sunflower postcard, the sky blue wrapping paper, the kaleidoscope—all had been removed from their cubbyholes and left on the desk’s writing surface. And there were her dark glasses, set before the eyepiece of the kaleidoscope, as if they were peering into it. And her pad of Ishihara tests—a business card stuck from it, which Fiji withdrew. “Demetrius Witkowski,” it read, “Quality Control Investigator, Trusting Couples, Inc.” The telephone number was underlined.
Fiji opened the tablet and snorted. Numbers! 29…58…84. She flipped and flipped—digits rose from each test like hungry fish: 86…19…4…! By the last page she’d solved the miracle—the numbers had been drawn in with a highlighter. She clutched the collection to her chest, took a deep breath, then held it out at arm’s length as if she were looking in a hand mirror. Dare she trust the digits? Couldn’t Dem have written them over random bubbles, like some kind of cruel graffiti? Lying, like he did with the colors during the cab ride.
Fiji re-examined the card: “Quality Control Investigator.” So she’d been the subject of an investigation—but hadn’t her trust been violated? Maybe she had humiliated her “Trusting Couples” matches with her misrepresented eyes, but Dem’s birthmarks were obviously faked, and without a doubt he had a perfectly healthy heart. Still, why had he underlined his phone number? Fiji turned the card over and found two words she’d missed, printed in green: FIJI MERMAID. That hideous, stitched-together hoax! What had Dem meant? Had he written that as an indictment? A signature? Yet it felt like . . . a Valentine.
“Dem!” Fiji whimpered, “Demmy…” If she called his number, what did she stand to lose?
Lactophilia
Dahlia attended the exhibit, “The Scandalous Family,” because her artist friend had contributed an installation celebrating her surrogate pregnancy. As she stood with Kirkland before his work, the casting agent peeked at her cell phone—though the due date was a week away, Dahlia’s doctor had hinted that the young woman contracted to bear her child had appeared “suspiciously ripe” at her last examination; Dahlia might become a mother at any moment.
Half of Kirkland’s installation was a black and white film displayed on a gallery wall: a pair of silhouettes set on railroad tracks in a desert. The first shadow figure crouched on all fours like a dog. The second figure—long-legged and spike heeled, Barbie-breasted and obviously pregnant—towered over the first and brandished a whip. Chains cuffed both figures to the rails.
The scene was projected from the headlamp of a perambulator-sized locomotive standing on steel tracks that ran across the gallery’s hardwood floor and joined the rails in the film. A small cradle hung from the locomotive’s headlamp, and in it a baby doll, hooded in black and swaddled in a leather diaper, rocked. The silhouettes on the tracks ignored the locomotive bearing down on them. Occasionally, the pregnant dominatrix dipped forward, threatening her partner with her whip, breasts, and belly.
Dahlia’s white wine warmed in its plastic cup, while Kirkland warned patrons passing between the locomotive and the projection to “Mind the tracks.”
“I can’t make up my mind,” he said. “Am I part of the installation? I could punch tickets like a conductor.”
Kirkland called his piece “Madonna of the Whip.” He’d fussed mildly when Dahlia had chosen the sperm of an anonymous donor over his for the in vitro fertilization of her eggs, but he’d understood. “Who would play genetic Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun?” he’d sighed, acknowledging his physical deficiencies. And Dahlia had scoured the donor-catalogue, eventually settling on the sperm of a blond, blue-eyed, rugby-playing, Shakespeare-loving medical student. The life she was casting didn’t call for a father with paternity rights.
Kirkland admired his work before turning to Dahlia. “The drama of the American family,” he said. “Look in the mirror.” But Dahlia didn’t see herself in the installation. Yes, a baby bore down on her immediate future, but the dominatrix couldn’t be her—she wasn’t pregnant with anything. And who was being whipped? Dahlia sneaked another look at her phone. No messages.
“Careful—” Kirkland touched the upper arm of a young woman wearing glasses who stumbled over the tracks, then held out his palm. “Ticket, please.”
The woman paused to take in the artist, Dahlia, and the installation. Her shadow blotted the figures on the wall into a Rorschach until Kirkland moved her out of the locomotive’s beam. After frowning at the silhouettes, she stabbed a finger across the gallery. “Those are mine.”
“Lovely,”
Kirkland said, squinting. Dahlia followed her friend’s gaze, imitating his wince as if narrowed lids were the secret to understanding art, and saw a set of four paintings. All featured flesh-pink, brown-nippled globes. Dozens of pink melons were arrayed in a leafy field in one. Nippled balls dangled amid tinsel and lights from a Christmas tree in another. In a third the pink balls lined a subway bench like plump, nude commuters. In the last and largest, a fleshy globe had been stretched flat into a map of the world, the oceans a darker pink than the land. The world map’s nipple rose like a huge chocolate kiss in the center of North America’s Continental Divide.
Kirkland nodded. “‘Motherhood.’ Same as mine. But not as subtle.”
The young woman shook her head so hard her glasses shifted and her large breasts swung. Two spots darkened the white fabric of her T-shirt. Were these spots—they looked damp—part of the exhibit?
“Subtlety is dead and buried,” she said. “We’ve cycled back to sincerity.” She caught Dahlia staring at her shirt. “I’m padless, today. Did you know most primates can lactate without pregnancy? Also lemurs and dwarf mongooses.”
Later, Dahlia and Kirkwood took their new acquaintance, Lizzie, for coffee. After a trip to the restroom, Lizzie opened her backpack and showed Dahlia a plastic breast pump and a Tupperware container of freshly expressed milk.
“I donate to the milk bank,” she said, sipping her latte. Lizzie explained that she’d just ended a long relationship. “When things started, it was all about sex. All about my breasts, mostly—he’d have squeezed, licked, and sucked for twenty-four hours a day, if he hadn’t had to go to work. And I’d have let him. But then they swelled. My nipples enlarged. One night, he drew milk, and it shocked the hell out of us. He smacked his lips and wanted to nurse. I cried. I had to be pregnant, right? But tests said no. According to the doctors, I have super excitable hormones. Pretty unusual, but not unheard of. For a while—for just a very little while—my boyfriend and I both got into it. Lactophilia. It’s a fetish thing—there are chat rooms. People have ‘adult nursing relationships.’ But I got sick of it—I’d wake up in the middle of the night short of breath from the weight of his head on my chest and the sound of him slurping. He wanted to get married. But who wants to marry a giant infant? He’d have fought our babies for his fix. Anyway, I cut him off, weaned him cold turkey, and now he’s gone.”
Women of Consequence Page 16
