Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  Edward squints in the sun, trying unsuccessfully to retain his dignity as he stumbles across the roof before disappearing onto the fire escape.

  “Who was that?”

  “My boss. How long do you think he’d been standing there?”

  “I don’t know. I was a little distracted.” He kisses her mouth and her damp nipples. She lets herself be lulled for a moment, but, remembering the look on Edward’s face, she stands up and starts pulling on her clothes.

  “Go down the fire exit, it will take you directly out onto the street.”

  “When do I see you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tonight. I will be at your house at nine, okay?” He doesn’t wait for her answer, and kisses her before disappearing through the trapdoor. She slips on her shoes and dusts the back of her skirt. A sudden silence engulfs her as a startled pigeon flaps chaotically up toward the sky. Nothing will be the same, she knows that now. Her world, the constructs she has so carefully built around herself, are now rendered irrelevant. Inside the cool, shadowy stairwell she leans against the wall and starts to laugh.

  Later that day Edward fired her, claiming that her behavior was untenable and too morally undermining for the company to sustain. Deidre suffered his hypocrisy silently. It was a well-publicized fact that he’d had regular liaisons with his secretary on the very same roof.

  Many found it inconceivable that Deidre would suddenly break out sexually like that. Muttering quietly amongst themselves, they put it down to stress or menopause. But, as the weeks passed, her absence grew like a tumor.

  Two weeks later Mischa arrived at her house carrying three cheap suitcases and four cartons of old Russian paperbacks. Deidre was amazed at the ease with which she gave up her territory: his guitar was propped up against her desk, his few toiletries balanced against her own on top of the bathroom cabinet, his old leather coat made an unnoticed entry beside her own linen jacket. Even holding his shaving brush gave her a secret thrill.

  Time took on its natural cycles. Just before dawn she would wake and watch as Mischa slept, his long lashes curled over his cheeks, the vulnerability of his hands and arms as she lay spooned around him, her hands wrapped around his soft cock.

  Three generations of his life shifted and flitted across his face. Child, boy, young man.

  She couldn’t believe that he was still in her bed, that this could happen to her so easily after all these years. She kept thinking that at any minute a disaster would occur that would destroy her rapture. If he was late she would sit by the phone terrified that he’d been killed in a car accident or detained under some immigration law he’d contravened without telling her.

  Zoe was initially incredulous that Deidre had not only managed to find a boyfriend but had then kept the relationship going. As days became weeks, the initial awe turned to envy. She kept finding fault with Mischa: he’s too young, too foreign, not ambitious enough…the litany went on. As for Mischa, he found Zoe’s attempts at flirtation distasteful and disloyal. But, ever discreet, he maintained a diplomatic silence.

  Mischa also understood the importance of seducing the mother as well as the daughter. Ethel found the young man cosmopolitan and dedicated to Deidre, and being an amateur gardener herself would try Mischa’s patience by engaging him in long soliloquies about the correct way to grow magnolias, or how to get rid of black spot on roses. She didn’t care about the age difference between them, herself being of that age where time gives you the benefit of wisdom and tolerance.

  “Happiness is so transitory, dear,” she told Deidre. “When you have it, grab it with both hands and hold on tightly.”

  Deidre would spend hours in the small walled garden that Mischa had now planted with exotic purple and magenta blossoms. Under his guidance she read the contemporary philosophers and began to explore some of the more recent theories of physics and spirituality.

  Sitting there in the shade, the roar of the traffic a distant hum, she’d fall into a reverie watching a caterpillar climbing painstakingly up the stem of a plant. She felt as if the vegetation around her was ripening, swelling in preparation for something. A seed had been sown, but what fruit it was to bear she abandoned to destiny.

  She lowers herself carefully onto the hospital trolley, already her flesh feels precious. Mischa, walking beside her, slips a small Russian doll into her hand. She opens it up, inside is a tiny pearl.

  “This will be you.”

  “It might not work.” She can’t keep the anxiety out of her voice.

  “Maybe not now, but I know it will eventually. I love you.”

  Smiling, he disappears for a second as they enter the clinic through separate doors. As the attendants slip her onto the bed, Mischa reappears in a green hospital gown and picks up a stethoscope lying on the small operating table beside the bed. He puts the earpieces into her ears and places the end over his heart.

  “You see? My heart runs with yours…”

  She laughs, the accidental poetry of his grammar still making her melt.

  “Hearts don’t run, they race.”

  “Race? We are lovers not athletes.”

  “Mischa, I’m scared.”

  He kisses her.

  “Don’t be.”

  The nurse starts to pull the screens around and Deidre reaches for Mischa’s hand. Her heart is, indeed, running. She gazes up at the ceiling with its fluorescent light, blinking slightly.

  Mischa squeezes her hand. “You OK?” he whispers.

  She smiles up at him. Any minute now the surgeon will inject the fertilized eggs into her womb.

  “I’m trying to visualize what she’ll look like.”

  “It could be a boy.”

  “It could.”

  Mischa leans down and kisses her. Suddenly she wants to cry.

  THE LISTENING ROOM

  I have always found the concept of hell vaguely exciting, a sort of pornographic Bosch scenario, devils with weasel heads and huge phalluses impaling pale golden maidens, buttocks parted, hands bound ruthlessly behind…

  Looking up from her book, she crosses her legs. She feels herself becoming moist. Outside the bus, the lights of the city sail past. It’s a summer night, the kind of heat that excites, making everything seem possible.

  She is still young. She sits there, book in lap, feeling the perimeters of her body under the tight satin dress, the underwire of her bra pushing up her breasts. Sweat runs between the tight material and her waist. She shifts her weight, peeling one buttock from the plastic seat. Everything vibrating under her skin. She looks back down at the book, a deconstruction of sexuality, a birthday present from him.

  As I play back the images I become both the taken and the taker.

  PORN TALK: HER

  He pushes me against the door, his hard cock pressing against me through his trousers. He pulls up my skirt, thrusting his hand down my underpants and finding the tip of my clit. Gently, he teases it until it is big enough to pull at between his fingers. I fall moaning against the wall.

  PORN TALK: HIM

  She runs her tongue along the underside of my cock. I push back her lips with my fingers; her mouth is soft, sucking. She takes me into her, sucking deeply, her tongue a ring of fire. I’m gonna explode, her hot wet pussy lies spread on the pillow. I find her clit. As I suck, it grows like a little cock. She thrashes about, losing control as I ram deeper and deeper into her throat.

  As she reads she is being watched. She glances up; two men are sitting opposite her. Their eyes have hope. The briefcase at her feet falls to the floor as the bus lurches around the corner. Quickly she rights it. If only they knew, the people on the bus, if only they knew what was inside.

  There is a schism in me, between the erotic and the intimate. One, by definition, negates the other. For me the pursuit of sensuality for its own sake without the confines of emotional expectation or history is a freeing of the libido, standing outside of marriage, conception, emotional obligation. The subject becomes object. Object is
the ascetic, the visual moment, no past, no future, just the moment of orgasm. This is not exclusively male territory. The encounter is, by its very nature, transitory.

  She relates to these words, her own domesticity crushing down on her. A chosen oppression. A misguided impulse to appear as others. Impossible. Truth, like Nature, always finds a way through the cement.

  Last night I dreamt about a gorilla, a large, sad primate. He was standing in the middle of the lounge room. His bulk was impressive and he knew it. Over seven foot in height with shaggy fur that hung down to the carpet. He had been chasing me all around the house. My family, that is my mother, brother and sister, who is always eight years old in my dreams, hid behind the couch terrified. His cage sat on the lawn outside the house. The cage door swung open in the breeze. He stood in the middle of the lounge room, opened his arms and began to reason with me in a deep melodious voice.

  “What harm can I do you, little girl? All I want to do to you is hug you, wrap you up in my long smelly arms. Come here, just a little further, just a little further…” I walked bravely to the center of the room and began to argue sexual politics with him.

  On the other side of Westminster Bridge stands the arts center, a fortress of concrete and glass, and the old river reflecting back this stark oasis. Next to it is the concert hall. Inside, a large body of people sit in the auditorium, waiting for the conductor to raise his baton. The conductor is her husband. He is fifty-two years old. Four back teeth in the lower jaw are false. He has a scar below his right nipple where he fell into a rose bush as a young boy. His penis is thick and slightly bent to the left. He is uncircumcised. At the moment he is slightly tumescent. This is because he is about to perform. The vibrations of the music play against the pleasure lobes at the back of his neck and he grows hard. But not too hard. Tumescent or not, the young woman loves her husband, all of him, and his four back teeth, but mostly she loves his smell.

  The bus stops.

  A young man comes aboard: I can see only his shoulders at first. Broad shoulders, shoulders you don’t roll off. He leans against the glass partition with his back to me. He wears a dark scarlet silk shirt, I can see the texture pushed up against the glass. Just as I can see the tapering waist; the slim hips, the outline of his buttocks pressed against the glass. The conductor sits at the other end absorbed in a comic. Apart from him we are the only people on the bus. His hands hang down by his sides, tanned hands, with long, tapering fingers. He feels in his pockets with his left hand and pulls out a key ring, a silver orb. He rolls this from one finger to another. Swiftly, deftly.

  I wonder if he is a magician.

  She wonders about his cock, the shape of it, the weight of it, the taste of it. The bulk of his body promises size. He hasn’t turned around, but he wears his body comfortably, with the confidence of attractive people. His hair is thick, Celtic-black. It falls just below the collar of his shirt. For a moment she tastes salt in her mouth.

  The man in the bus turns. His face comes into profile. With the alertness of those who are watched, he moves across and sits opposite her. She drops her eyes immediately as his gaze burns across her cheek, her breasts, her shifting legs. He sees the face of a woman, an innocence masking a terrible curiosity. A strong chin; olive skin with a faint moustache that highlights the edge of the upper lip. A fuller lower lip, her eyebrows feline. Black semicircles in a pale circle. The eyelids protrude knowingly. It is her eyes he wants to fuck. She sees the black down on the fingers of his hands. The long black hair escaping from his shirt sleeves. The jawline sweeping up from the pronounced bones in the neck. His white skin. The scarred pores that push the aquiline into animal. The blind flesh in the trousers. His tongue for a second. And the gray of his eyes that shutters like the flash gun of a camera when their eyes meet.

  The woman knows. The woman knows she has a choice. She could stand up and press the button and descend from the bus. Or she could stay sitting there opposite him, pinned into the sticky seat. The air congealing between them until it threatens to fall from the ceiling in thick white strings of risk, of fear, of expectation. Or she could lean across and, kneeling, open his flesh to her hand. Her hot cunt. Her empty mouth. I am now, not then or tomorrow. But now. And I will take what I want now and this gesture will stay crystallized. Inevitable, fatal, standing outside of time.

  The moment threatens to pass stretching thin, the smell of his sweat and aftershave under the tobacco sweeping across as the bus door opens. She feels dizzy. Her pupils dilate and her lips swell. Beneath her skirt her cunt grows wet as if he has touched her. Their eyes are talking, they are saying, Let me peel back your skin, and I will make you scream, tear you a little. I will hold your legs between my thick thighs and squeeze until it is bone on bone, flesh on flesh and we are animal again. Promise. I want to drink you inside, swallow you whole so that your flesh fills me right through to the hip bone. I want you to fill every orifice. Get inside me, under my skin, under my pumping heart.

  Silence talks. She stands and turns. The seam of her fishnet tights halves her vulva, secretly sticky. She reaches up, conscious of the circumference of her body, stretching just a little bit further to let him know. As if he needs telling.

  Behind her she feels the air shift as he stands. She dare not run for fear he will use sound, break the smell that tugs, the blind clenching of cock and cunt. Please, she prays, stay without history, without pathos, without darling darling do you love me, so that I can think again with my skin. The man stays silent. He stands and presses the button for the next stop.

  They both step off the bus, his footsteps echoing behind her, slightly to her left. In her heart there are four empty chambers and two sets of heart strings. Fear dries her mouth. She is listening for trust in his step so that the pictures in her head fit with the hiss of the summer rain hitting the pavement. He is right behind her. He is with her all the way. They walk toward the concert hall.

  Inside, her husband lifts his baton and the harpist runs her long fingers down three octaves.

  Around them, invisible spirits swirl and seep into the cortex but these two pause for a second. They are standing outside the large windows of the concert hall. Inside is all gilt and warm red leather. Music is audible. It floats out in cold streams like the air-conditioning.

  She steps inside and he follows, shadowing her along the leather-lined corridors. Her hand trails for a moment across the padded stretched skin. It makes her think of large square cows, and how much grass they’d have to eat to cover a concert hall. Under her hand she thinks she can feel the audience breathing through the leather. There are attendants standing at the entry of the foyer selling programs. Her husband, hair dyed, twenty years younger, smiles from the cover. He is a vain man. A successful, handsome man.

  The program booth is situated under a strange painting. It catches her eye. Semiabstract, with great swirling arcs of red, it seems to represent two women making love. Their pose reminds her of early Chinese erotica. It has the same naive joy. She stops and buys a program, and the young attendant smiles at her as she hands her the change.

  “The concert’s already started, Mrs. Pope, but I’m sure you’d be able to watch from the listening room.” She smiles again. The woman wonders if the attendant has slept with her husband. The young man stands facing a framed photo, an image of Mr. Pope, his eyes bright and slightly salacious, hair elegantly ruffled in a thin attempt to look casual, the gap between nose and upper lip betraying a Romanian heritage.

  She watches him look at the photo of her husband. He gazes up at the image, his weight poised forward. He turns and smiles at her and carefully raises his hand in exactly the same gesture, in a parody without malice.

  She is amused and suddenly she is older, in control. She takes his hand and leads him down the corridor.

  She has this image in her head from when she grew up. When she traveled on the subway with her grandmother she would stare at the large colorful posters pasted on the opposite walls of the platform. There was o
ne particular poster: an advertisement for Clarks shoes with two little children, Hansel and Gretel, walking down a path leading into a huge dark green forest.

  She would stand on the edge of the train platform and look into the poster. It seemed as if the path stretched into a sinister, leafy infinity. The thought that the two children would walk together in this manner with no destiny in sight induced a breathlessness in her, a suffocation. It was this disembodiment she felt now, as if she was looking down at herself and this unfamiliar young man. The deliberation involved in being the leader, acting upon one’s fantasies. A decision has been made.

  They reach a small red door set into the wall of the auditorium. The music playing within is audible and vibrates beneath their feet. The brass section reaches a crescendo and she can see the exact stance of her husband, both hands jerking up in that curious half-knowing, half-abandoned impulse which music, like electricity, induces in him. His face will be wildly out of control, revealing a sensuality he has never been able to express. The trumpets stop and the string section begins a low wailing. When she first saw him like this she knew that she loved him.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pope have been married for eighteen months. He is the only man she knows who does not ultimately bore her, and in the moments that her interest lapses all she has to do is watch him raise his baton. She is the only woman he knows who can spontaneously orgasm to Mahler. Her favorite is the Resurrection.

  She reaches into her briefcase and pulls out a small gold key. She unlocks the door.

  Gently he pushes her in from behind, and she stumbles into the darkened room. The sound of the music is near-deafening. He places his hands over her breasts, caressing the orbs, pulling at the nipples. They harden beneath the satin. She pushes the door shut with her foot.

  The room is small, set into the left wall of the auditorium facing the stage. Ordinarily it is used for the recording of concerts by the BBC. The proximity of the stage and the acoustics incurred by such geography make this possible. It is twelve feet long and four feet wide with wood paneling. Two large windows open directly onto the auditorium and face the stage. The room is about twenty feet away from the front of the stage, thus enabling a complete panoramic view of both conductor and orchestra. Because of its darkened walls and the manner in which the windows are set slightly above and into the walls of the auditorium, both audience and performers are oblivious to the existence of the room unless otherwise informed.