Burn

by Michael Perkins

  It was cold outside, so I poured us glasses of Mount Gay rum and sank into her overstuffed down sofa. I looked idly around her dark living room for new acquisitions. Her own taste chez Midge was for tasteful landscapes, mostly nineteenth-century American. Her big pre-war apartment was crammed with art, mementoes, framed photos, and books. It said the person who lives here has a history; that she is an intelligent woman of a certain age. She is a success. She lives alone.

  I slipped into thoughts of Rose. Her loft was spare, made for fresh starts. Was that what I wanted? I didn’t know. That’s why I had come to Midge.

  After our night together Rose told me she had some things to do. She’d call me. I remembered how often I’d said that to women.

  A lamp blazed up next to me. “Lost in a dream, Nicky boy?” Midge said. My eyebrows snapped. She was wearing a clingy green chenille dress she’d pulled up over her hips. She wore the garter belt I’d bought her, and dark stockings with a pattern in them. Her abdomen was tanned, but her crotch was white, and shaved.

  “As you can see, I’m torn between going out to dinner and fucking you, you rat.”

  “Why can’t we do both?”

  She grinned. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her hair was loose over her shoulders. She was wearing the new shade of burnt orange lipstick teenage rock stars wore, and it looked good.

  I reached for her and she stepped back. She planted her hands on her waist, arms akimbo, fingers holding the dress up like a curtain that’s about to come down. I winked and leered appropriately.

  “You are cute, Nicky. But first we talk.”

  “Can’t it wait, Midge?”

  “Is it hard, Nicky?” She was teasing, trying to keep things light, but I heard the undertone. I knew her.

  “You want to see how hard?” I tugged at my zipper, fixing my eyes on her dark blonde bush, the small patch she hadn’t shaved.

  “I can wait.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in six weeks.”

  “Working,” I answered evasively, not knowing where to start.

  “You’re always working, but you used to get horny once in awhile. Could it be that what a little bird has chirped in my ear is true? Is there someone else?”

  “Come on, Midge.”

  But she was capable of reading my mind, and she wasn’t happy. She sank into an easy chair opposite me, skirt in her lap. Eyes closed, she pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Why, I think I see her, Nicky. She is young, isn’t she? And she’s got a funny name.” She opened her eyes to see what effect her sarcasm might have.

  On the spot, I told her about Rose Selavy. She listened with wet doe eyes. I was hurting her, but who else did I have to talk to?

  I revealed Rose’s famous name, emphasizing her precocity. But I made the mistake—we shared everything—of telling her about Rose burning her pubic hair. She winced.

  “She should be spanked—but not by you,” she added quickly. “She’s a dangerous child.” She waved dismissively, a grand dame’s gesture.

  “Maybe. Or maybe she’s an old soul. Anyway, I can’t take my eyes off her. There’s something I’ve never seen before. . . .”

  “What, young girls? You’ve seen your share.”

  “Come on, Midge, tell me what you think.”

  “That can wait. So can dinner. Let’s go to bed. I think I need some reassurance.”

  I knelt before her and buried my face between her legs, which was always like coming home. It wasn’t long before she was soupy, but I sensed her resistance.

  She pulled my hair and I looked up at her. She was aroused despite herself. “I don’t want to drip on the chair. Let’s go into the bedroom, Nicky.” Urgency made her voice raspy.

  She wanted to protect the furniture. I thought Rose would have pissed on it if she was hot enough.

  I stood and pulled her up, as if for a dance. “Turn around, first. You know I like to see your ass.”

  She knew what I wanted. Hadn’t we trained each other? I unzipped and pulled out a fine upstanding. Garter belt and stockings always worked for me; primitive yes, but effective.

  Reluctantly, she turned, and there it was, a high round white ass like those on Greek marble statuary I’d patted in museums. I had drawn it a dozen times and smacked it a thousand, and never got tired of looking at it. She knew the power that part of her anatomy held over me. She liked to tease me in public by walking in front of me and wiggling provocatively, so I’d bulge for her and she could giggle.

  I smacked one firm cheek and then the other, again and again, until the globes were red and she was moaning with an urgency so familiar I laughed out loud. She answered with a raunchy snicker.

  I asked the ritual question to tease her. “How much do you want it? Tell me how much.” Her inner thighs were sticky.

  “Let’s go in the bedroom, please.” She was really raspy now.

  “In a minute. I want to look some more. Wiggle your ass.”

  She was obedient. She shook it for me. “You like it, Nicky?”

  “You know I do.” She bent over so I could see her slit.

  I stretched over her back like a vampire and played with her large hanging breasts. Her nipples were sensitive, and I knew she liked to have them pinched. (She always complained that her lovers—except for me—didn’t play with her breasts.)

  Usually what happened next in our scenario was that I would enter her from behind and lock into her body so we were one.

  But I added a new ingredient: “Talk to me. Tell me what it was like to fuck Damien.”

  Silence. Like her, I knew—or guessed—things.

  “How did you know about that?”

  Manfred Damien was one of her German artists, young, blonde, and muscular, always smiling at some secret only he knew. The first time I met him, I saw the two of them in bed together.

  “When you’re a star, everybody watches you—and they talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk now. I can’t.”

  “You did fuck him, though?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Please, Nicky.”

  I broke contact with her, and she collapsed into the chair. Her voice was muffled against the cushion. “I sucked him off.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all he would let me do.”

  “Robbing the cradle, aren’t you?”

  “He’s thirty-two.”

  “Doesn’t look a day over twenty.” I shook my head, mimicking her response to my story about Rose.

  “Was it good?”

  “Yumm. You bet.” She whistled between her teeth.

  “Show me.”

  “Show you what?”

  “How you did him.”

  “Won’t you please come in the bedroom?”

  “Afterward. Was he standing up or sitting down? Were you naked?”

  “He kept his clothes on. I pulled up my top, just like a teenager.”

  “Show me.”

  She pulled her dress down and smoothed it over her reddened buttocks before kneeling before me, and swallowing my penis. My balls tickled her chin.

  “Show me,” I insisted again, trying to feel something.

  She mumbled around my flesh and pulled back. “He was like an eager kid. One, two, three. . . .”

  “Come on, let’s go in the bedroom.”

  On her four poster bed I made love to her long and hard. She came, and I waited, and brought her climax on again; but I was seeing Rose, seeing the red between her legs, even as I kissed Midge, and allowed myself release.

  We didn’t go out to dinner. Midge whipped up snacks and we picnicked on her bed. The heavy curtains over her tall windows closed out the night city.

  We talked about love for the first time in years. We agreed way back that we didn’t know what the word meant, so it was best to avoid it. If it came up because of a romantic weepy film we’d walked out on, we reversed its l
etters, and said “evoL” in unison. We didn’t say making love, we said fucking. Our skepticism was a form of frankly acknowledged fear that bonded us.

  Now here I was, bringing up evoL.

  “I’ve never seen you this way, Nicky.” She’d put on a caftan and sat cross-legged on the bed, spreading brie on crackers that flaked onto the mussed-up sheets. Her eyes glistened with concern for my emotional and mental health.

  “What do you think?” I persisted.

  “I think you’re a bastard for asking me.”

  “You know I’m a bastard. Who else am I going to ask?”

  She just nodded and looked down at her hands holding the knife and the brie. “It’s playing with fire without a stick. I should know. Dealing with Manfred is like trying to scoop up mercury.”

  “I want to paint her. I dream about it.”

  “You want to fuck her. That’s what you dream about.”

  “She’s got this light around her. . . .” I offered, but it was no use. You can only talk about evoL by exaggerating.

  “You’re lying to yourself, Nicholas.”

  “Maybe that’s what I’ll find out.”

  Maybe. As we talked I studied Midge without lying to myself. I saw the wrinkles of good living around her eyes and mouth, the way her flesh hung, worn and loose. Loose. She was loose, and Rose was tight.

  6

  SHOW ME!

  BELIEVE ME WHEN I say that it wasn’t the sex with Rose that drew me to her, not at first. It was her originality that truly aroused me—the feelings of surprise I associated with youth. I’d never met anyone remotely like her, except perhaps for an earlier version of myself I thought I’d buried in a dark place inside.

  She was a shock wave, a storm warning. It was exciting to feel anticipation again. The future beckoned.

  But I could only see her on her terms, and she was gone from the city for weeks at a time. Frustrated by her absences, I isolated myself in my studio and avoided going out in daylight. I set self-portraiture aside and hired young nude models, painting them surrounded by snakes and birds of prey in landscapes of poisonous greens and yellows. I dreamed in those colors.

  I slept with a model who was a year younger than Rose. She had bad tattoos and parked her gum in an ashtray when I entered her from behind.

  Work or sex, nothing satisfied. I avoided Midge, who consoled herself thirstily with her young Germans. My insomnia grew worse. Lying awake at night I alternated between premonitory feelings of excitement and dread—as if I sensed that I might be headed over the edge.

  When Rose called, I pretended to have been so absorbed in my work that I’d barely noticed her absence. She didn’t even pretend to believe me.

  “Miss me?”

  “I counted the hours.”

  “Want to see me?”

  I asked her if she would sit for a portrait.

  Silence. I heard her humming as she considered this. She giggled.

  “I guess it’s about time. I’ll dress up for you.”

  While I waited for her I moved nervously around my studio picking things up. It was a mess—a huge space packed with layer on layer of my work and life, the accretions, rough drafts, and detritus of a career that stretched back to the sixties. (If anyone cared to look, he’d probably find the dessicated corpses of a few gallery owners and art reviewers pressed flat like silverfish between canvases I hadn’t looked at since soup cans were in style.)

  It was a lot of baggage. Rose traveled light, but I had a lot to carry. It made me anxious.

  I watched the expression on her face as she studied my untidy warehouse of images. She went to one of the self-portraits I hadn’t turned to the wall and studied it, hands jammed in her coat pockets.

  “If you’re this hard on yourself, what will you do to me?”

  I laughed, but it came out like a cough. “I know something about myself. I know almost nothing about you, except what I see in front of me.”

  I lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She exhaled and narrowed her eyes against the blue smoke. “Okay” she said, shrugging out of her coat. She was naked except for a pair of white Jockey shorts snug over her round ass. Her small breasts poked forth like horns of flesh with puffy reddish tips.

  Christ, she was beautiful.

  I wanted to jump her, growling, my teeth in her nape.

  But her exhibitionism was her tease. Mine was to pretend that I was a restrained professional, capable of keeping my cool. Distance, for both of us, was arousing.

  She asked me to turn the heat up as high as it would go, and sat shivering on a high stool while I sketched her. I asked about her childhood, her family, and her work, and she talked freely. I guess I’d passed another test.

  “Oh, it was insane—just insane. But it was interesting. I was never bored. I could say certain experiences fucked me up, but I think I was born fucked up. It’s in the genes.”

  I took off my shirt. It was getting warm, and we were both perspiring. I noticed that the tight seam of her Jockey shorts was in her sex, exposing a spot on her inner thigh I longed to kiss. I forced myself to look into her eyes. They were a cold emerald.

  “Have you always been this hot for art?” I could tell that at first she thought I was referring to the ambient temperature, but then she got it, and blushed. Surprise. A delicate pink flushed her features.

  “I told you, it was in the genes. I masturbated to reproductions of Bosch paintings. I love museums. I’d run off from my parents and rub against the statues. I was molested in the Prado. I thought it was great. Art gets me hot. But hell, you know I’m weird.”

  Sweat was dripping on my drawing pad, so I set it aside and went to my easel I had prepared for her, but now I felt uncertain. Erotic desire was trumping artistic intentionality.

  “Why do you want to paint me?” She asked, hopping off the stool.

  “So I have you around all the time. So that when you go off, you’re still here with me.”

  “I think I like that.” She tugged the white Jockeys over her hips and let them fall. “Take off your clothes.”

  I put my brush down and unbuttoned my shirt. When I was naked she ogled my erection. We were both glistening.

  “Now you can paint me,” She was looking mischievous, a little half-smirk on her face. “As a matter of fact, I want you to paint my vagina. My cunt—I like that word better.”

  I wanted to paint it with my tongue, but I didn’t say anything. This was her game.

  She looked around, saw my old sofa, battered and stained from years of sleep and sex, and went to lie on it, propping her legs up and apart just as she had at our first meeting, like a book.

  I moved the easel, and sat on a chair in front of her. It was too low, so I replaced it with the stool. It was still wet from her, and I could smell her secretions on it.

  She had one of those sexes that’s a little open naturally—the puffy lips don’t conceal the humid pink opening.

  I asked her to use her fingers to show me.

  I painted hurriedly, dripping on the floor and myself, trying to capture, with tunnel vision, what was before me. What must have been almost an hour passed in a series of time-lapse arrangements of paint, fractured light, and flying perspiration.

  “Show me!” she demanded when I stopped. I held it up for her and she smiled. “Now you’ve got my soul.”

  She was a bad girl, all right. So hot I came in her hand, just for starters.

  7

  THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD

  I PAINTED ROSE’S cunt in an erotic frenzy. I wanted to get inside that tiny wet orifice, and in that sense I was painting not with a brush but with my penis. That’s why the painting is so alive. Studying it later, I thought it the equal of Courbet’s cunt painting, “The Origin Of The World.” We had both gone cunt-crazy, old Gustave and me.

  On the other hand, my portrait of Rose in her briefs is stiff, and tentative. I had failed to capture the light around her and her febrile lascivious abandon. Egon Schiele could have, not me
.

  But her cunt. I could stare at my painting of it and remember in aching detail what we’d done after I put my brush down, our sweaty paint-smeared bodies smacking together in a contest the goal of which was to turn each other inside out. How I’d paid homage to the origin of the world with my tongue until she clamped her thighs on my ears and screamed and I thought she might levitate.

  But we were just getting started. She was ravenous, and I kept up with her, as if what I sucked at her fountain was a transfusion of youth. When we collapsed at last, spent, it was because we’d crossed to the other side of sex. Old and young, we were one.

  “Why did you let me paint you?” I was turned away from her.

  “I collect artists—or haven’t you heard?” She mocked my seriousness, even while she kissed my back.

  “You must have quite a collection of pictures of yourself, then.”

  “But none of my cunt.”

  I knew she didn’t keep them in her bare loft, with its lone Balthus drawing. “Where are they?”

  “I burned them.”

  I believed her, and it chilled me. The destruction of art—even work by my rivals—set off a siren inside, and flashing lights.

  “You won’t burn this one.”

  “It’s not finished yet. You said so yourself.”

  We looked at each other. Was she bluffing? We were gambling for high stakes, but I thought I had the advantage. I could see that she had nothing up her sleeve but my heart.

  8

  A NEW COMPANION

  SHE LET ME paint her every day for a week. She showed up erratically, at odd hours, but she showed up. I didn’t care—I couldn’t sleep. I waited for her and worked on rendering the light I saw around her. Then she didn’t come for three days, and I gave up. The portrait was better, but there was no magic in it.

  I looked in the mirror one morning and saw a red-eyed, wrinkled monomaniac. No wonder she stayed away. Even I couldn’t stand looking at myself. Transformation was in order. I went out and signed up at a nearby gym. I got a new hair cut, and had my thinning hair colored to hide the gray. I paid more attention to my health. Getting old had never bothered me before I met Rose, but now the aging process made me more keenly aware of loss.