“I’m India,” she said, extending her hand elegantly.
He did not stop at kissing her hand, but pulled her to him, brushing her cheek, her neck, with his lips. A slight exhalation escaped her mouth, and she knew he smelled that too: cognac, India’s drink. She glanced up to find the bartender looking over his newspaper at her. She closed her eyes, sensually. When she opened them again, he had returned to his paper…out of boredom, embarrassment, desire, masculinity...
“India and Angela.” His whisper was hot in her ear. “They don’t even sound like they mix. India has a delicious flavor, like the odor of her body, but Angela…”
“Angela stinks of soap and hand lotion.”
“The bartender, I noticed, stinks of soap and hand lotion. Maybe we should put the two together.”
She thought how bizarre that would be, forcing Angela to let the bored, embarrassed, lustful bartender inside. How fitting for Angela, who was all of those things and didn’t even know it.
She pushed him back, looking at him askew. “Do you know that Angela won’t even wear the perfume she sells because she doesn’t want to seem as if she’s trying to be seductive?”
He looked at his watch. “The bar closes in twenty minutes.”
She caught the barkeep looking at her again. Angela would be almost as attractive, almost India as she woke up to find him on top of her.
She raised her glass. He came lazily. She doubted that would be the case when they were in the room.
~
When no answer came after multiple knocks, India produced her card. She invited them to peruse the mini-bar while she went to see about Angela. She didn’t elaborate except to offer a shrugging comment about “that mirror fetish of hers,” after which she slipped into the bathroom, its door having been noticeably closed when they entered the room.
Inside the cubicle she stared at herself in the glass, hand absently going to the sample bottle, more like an ampule containing the elixir of her current need. She opened the bottle and touched the perfume to her slender neck, still conscious only of her face, delicate and exotic, daring in comparison to Angela’s—though when the jets from the shower washed away the accessories, they were one and the same. For the briefest second Angela’s face breached the surface, scaring her with its sudden power and will to do so, then it sank back into the watery pool of the reflective glass, leaving her on the lip of anger, sexual and dark, like the mask.
When she watched her smirk twist into a grin, she knew she was still on her game. She began to talk, first in her own sexy voice, then in the reactive, weak, almost pathetic voice that she liked to put on Angela. Again the essence of Angela momentarily bled through the veil—uninvited, though not, upon reconsideration, unwelcome. Indeed she permitted herself the amusing notion that Angela might awaken to the night’s reality prior to being summoned from her department store dreams. Relish our luscious fantasies.
Ending the dialogue with an expressive “You’ve got five minutes, Angela, then I’m sending our guest in after you,” India emerged from the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
By guest she referred to the bartender of course. His name was Dave—she knew from the meaningless banter in the elevator—but she wasn’t about to use it. At least Anton had the decency to don a handle for the night. Still, he had to be petted; he was, after all, the important and irresistible and superlative bartender. Accepting from Anton the cognac he had poured—her own addition to the mini-bar—she joined them at the table, sitting down on the bartender’s lap without asking for his permission.
She placed his hand on her breast.
“Go ahead. Caress it. It is very much like hers. Consider it a taste.”
He responded well. Both women wanted him—she could see the fantasy weaving itself in amongst the vanities dominating his features even before he clenched, rather than caressed, her breast. The pain stirred her in places already moist from the promises of the winged one who smelled sex on his victims. She thought to slap him, but figured he would pout, or worse yet, rough handle her. She suspected this would not be to Anton's liking, hence a black mark against the mixologist even before the sport began. Anton, meanwhile, was pitted against the fuckoverhaul of Angela’s world in the game of India’s desires. She thought to send Angela off, but no, Angela was always first choice.
The bartender’s hand found its way beneath her form-fitting dress, groping, pinching the nipple. She felt him grow against her right cheek.
“I’m fascinated about Angela,” Anton said, watching the movements of the bartender’s hand. “Twenty years abstinent?”
“You wouldn’t even smell the desire on her,” India said.
“Really?” he said, amused. “There is always the desire.”
“Yeah,” grunted the barkeep, groping, pinching, rising.
India appreciated the idiotic quality of the bartender; the simpler they were, the more damage to Angela’s big, glass, mannequin-dressed windows.
There was a sound, enough to turn heads towards the bathroom, which was only a wall’s distance from the corridor, whence the noise had no doubt come. India played on it, rising to her feet, much to the discomfort of the bartender, unsure whether to seize her or seize himself. She went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her again.
“Angela!” she exclaimed, all shock. She quickly slipped out of her shoes, then her dress, then her stockings. She viewed herself naked in the mirror. The side of her right breast was red. “Angela,” she said again, softly this time, touching the spot. She washed her face, put her hair in a pineapple, peed, then emerged from the cubicle unclothed.
Anton canted his head.
“We’re twins,” she said, blushing.
“Ah,” he said. “It’s a game.”
“What do you mean?” India heard Angela in her voice, then retreating again, like radio interference.
“I mean there is the smell of sex on you too—Angela.”
India did not know how to answer, so she didn’t. She sat in the bartender’s lap, whimpering, pining, widening her legs. Anton moved his chair nearer to her, leaning close as he asked, “So where is India now?”
She was a doe in the lights of an automobile, transfixed by him. The suspicion was odd on him, unworthy of his smooth, his cool.
The bartender, unable to contain himself any longer, suddenly grabbed her around the waist, surging to his feet. Anton got out of his way, but the table did not, India crying out in pain as her elbow caught its edge. The bartender threw her to the bed, pinning her down as he worked his pants undone. She resisted halfheartedly, watching with increasing interest as his zipper came down and the surprisingly impressive fullness of him sprang greedily from its containment. She heard Angela catch air, she heard Angela recalling a face in the mirror that was and was not her own, she heard Angela sniff at the mingled odors of smoke and perfume and sweat, every morning’s fume as she woke from perverted dreams. She saw the aggressor through Angela’s eyes, followed almost instantaneously by Angela’s refusal to acknowledge him. She felt Angela withdraw, cursed her for the prude, coward, nun, and daughter of her mother that she was.
As she spread her legs to him, moistly seizing his organ with her own as she accepted him eagerly into her shared body, she saw the shape of the winged one rising up behind him, a distorted silhouette beyond the frame of her starting, nameless lover. Anton’s mouth opened almost in unison with that of her driving adolescent, whose fit was bringing Angela back to the surface again, crucifix, soap, douche…all in hand. Come on, Angie, she thought. Come up into the fuck with me.
The bartender was perspiring already from the task of keeping up his jackhammer pace. India didn’t care. She didn’t need it slow from him; his simple, clumsy inability to control himself
was aphrodisiac. It was the sort of thing Angela would call disgusting, brute and savage, animal. God, wasn’t it so. His size was factoring in, massaging her most sensitive places without relent, denying her the simplest breath.
It was she who suffered the inability now, the inability to make a berth for Angela, the inability to delay her own orgasm until Angela had accepted that this was a gift to her, the inability to cry a warning about what came.
“Ah, the aroma, delectable aroma of sex. How it strokes the appetite!” issued Anton, one great claw raised, razors long and keen.
She wanted to demand of him an explanation. How had she been led to this frenzy of the body? This abandon? But she knew it was as much Angela’s question as her own as she gave forth like a fountain, in harmony with her nameless lover, who spewed it all over the room, the hot red fluid of his body. Back and forth again, with a speed and ferocity that put the bartender’s aggressions to shame, the winged one slashed him to tatters and ribbons.
With a last lurch of the upper torso, a richly dark rivulet spilled from the bartender’s mouth and he fell sideways to the sheets, leaving Angela gaping up at the beast that had been Anton.
“You reek of it!” snarled the beast, saliva from its grinning mouth.
Her breathing was labored, fierce, as she stared up in wondrous terror.
“Sex!” it spat.
She shook her head back and forth, a silent, terrified proclamation of innocence.
India broke the membrane, belching, “Not Angela! No! If it’s the sex or the smell of sex that attracts you—”
“That feeds me!”
“Angela can’t be what you’re looking for. It isn’t hers. She doesn’t partake of the fruits I do.” It came out of the shaft of a well, the shaft through which India was falling.
The beast glared down at the woman, nostrils twitching. With a long, keen talon it scraped moisture from her neck, sniffed it, now her belly, sniffed again, now between her legs.
“It has the scent…” it said. “And yet…” It glared again. “What is your name?!”
“Angela,” she said feebly.
It frowned down at her, muttered something about abstinence, decades, then fretted off in the direction of the door. At the bathroom it paused, sniffing. It vanished for a moment, then reemerged with the vial of perfume.
Tossing the bottle at Angela, it said: “Hides the stink of abstinence.”
A Dirge for the Temporal
When the ramshackle caravan rolled past, Yvette thought little of it. Faces stared out of the side windows of the campers, wild black hair surrounding various expressions. She had never encountered Gypsies, living as she did in the mountains, but she knew they wandered southern France. She found the experience mildly interesting, as she did the experience of people in general.
The last was a trailer, an ancient affair swaying past the narrow area where she had pulled off. As her gaze followed its sluggish progress up the grade, the curtains in the rear of its rounded silver body suddenly came open and a man’s face appeared. His eyes found her, and as a result so did a momentary shudder, for they very closely resembled the round transfixing orbs of one of her instructors. Of course he could not be one of her instructors; they never appeared in human form.
His eyes remained on her until the trailer disappeared around a bend, then she was alone again, the face already forgotten. She returned to the edge of the shoulder, looking down into the gorge. It wasn’t the same picture it had been when she’d gotten here. She stood for some minutes peering down at the strange tableau before returning to her car. She clicked on the radio, poised not for the music that was so hard to get in the Alpine pass, but for the whispered praises of her instructors.
Basking in them, she started back up the slope in the direction of home.
~
Another mild surprise awaited her when she arrived, a half-hour later, at her beloved village of St. Luc. The caravan had stopped at the campground across the road from her house, and several of its members stood around, drinking wine and waiting. As she pulled into her drive, one of the men crossed the road. She stepped out of her car to find herself looking at the set of eyes from the trailer.
The effect was different now, making him just another face. Darkly handsome, granted, but just another face. He seemed to think considerably more of hers, but that merely bored her. Once, it would have mattered. Once, a dark, exotic stranger would have made her blush.
“Yes?” she asked, knowing what was coming.
Eyes never leaving her, he gestured back at the campground. “The office is open, yet no one is there. We have knocked at the doors of nearby houses, but no one answers.”
She shrugged. “They must be away.”
“Everyone? And without locking the office? A bell chimes as you walk in. The sign says open.”
Details, she thought. Who knew you were coming, after all?
She voiced, “I don’t know how I can help you. If you will excuse me, please.” She started to shut the door, but he caught her arm. She said coldly, “If you please, monsieur.”
“There is a scent about you. Your clothes, your car,” he said. He appeared to be taking it in as he spoke.
She removed his hand from her arm, slammed the car door, and strode to the entrance of her two-story stucco abode, not deigning to cast a glance back.
“What is your name?” he said after her.
At the door, key in her hand, she turned to look at him. His hair danced around his smile as he gave it his most dashing.
“My name is Yvette,” she said. “What you smell is blood, because I buried my dog today. Is there anything more you would like to know?”
“Buried…over a cliff?”
“Yes.”
“I am not fond of dogs,” he said, eyes for an instant reclaiming that familiar quality.
“You don’t even find them mildly interesting?” she asked.
He waved nonchalantly, dismissing the topic. “I have a very long name. I go by Jan.”
“Good day, Jan.” And she went in, shutting the door against dark, exotic strangers.
~
Evening called. Over the sink in the kitchen, she watched the Gypsies make fires without permission. She watched the smoke from those fires rove away in search of the June night, scattered already with stars. As she put away the soup pot, she noticed Jan’s face over the nearest of the fires, watching.
Beyond, the twenty-some people who made up the caravan moved around in the night as if it belonged to them—an easy attitude to admire. Beyond their phantom shapes, the tops of the campground’s cork trees were silhouetted against snow-capped peaks, which in turn radiantly contrasted the night. The snow whispered, even from such distances. It was in snow’s whispering embrace that she had first come into contact with them. And to think, so much accomplished already, with spring only just departing, by one pupil about the work of catching eternity’s sails as they swept by.
As the whispers of separation from the ephemeral seasons, from temporal existence, fluttered in her head, she realized the caravan was a sign—a sign of transience. The instructors hissed in the Gypsy fires, in Gypsy eyes.
A knock at the door. She looked to the fire again to find he wasn’t there, prince of travelers, face hovering over the hissing flames.
She opened it to him, and he spoke her name. Yvette, my fingers to caress your fading skin. She could see it in him; she had seen it in every man in her village, followed by the strange jealousy in the eyes of their partners, the fascination in the children, who beheld the unfolding petals of the already rotten, already lost, already dead. It was as if the children knew that the transitory lives of men begot such desires, and such consequences.
“You want to see the dog,” she said to the wildly dark figure standing there.
“I do. And more,” Jan replied.
“How much more? Do you want to see the dirt slip from between the fingers of your clenched fist? The stars retreat?” She touched his vagabond hair with her fingers. “Do you want to forget what the mouth of oblivion looks like as it closes around you?”
His smile was worldly. “You would like to get to know me then?”
“Oh, I know you. I know you for the rascal that you are. I know you for the lustful, lascivious bastard that you are.”
“Then you don’t know me,” he said. He offered his hand.
“We’ll see,” she smiled, accepting it.
~
They parked at the same spot where she had watched the caravan pass. He followed her to the shoulder’s edge, and as they looked down into the gorge, he had never touched her. The canyon was so deep, no glove box torch would have penetrated. It didn’t matter. The night was filled with stars. The tableau differed in its shadows, in the depths of those shadows, but it remained the same otherwise.
It was clearly a man sprawled on the rock, yet strangely Jan cared not for how he had gotten down there, only what his name was.
“His name?” she said. “Here is his name: the one who didn’t make it over that last lip of rock and into the deeper ravine, where he would have been concealed from view, perhaps for years.”
Jan stood at the very brink with her, hand now lightly touching her unflinching back as he asked, “Do you think you will be caught now?”
A Dirge for the Temporal Page 10
