As he’d recently written to Blanche, second to her, Phil was the person who knew him best. Ian had known him longer, but not as deeply. There were a few reasons for this, he had written. In some ways he and Ian were rivals. Ian was the more gifted artist. And as a result Fire’s father had paid him more attention, seemed to encourage him more, and to have higher expectations; that was one reason why he and his father had begun to drift apart. Also, Ian had lived apart from Fire during crucial periods of his life, had not traveled with him on many important journeys and waited with him at crucial junctures. During college and the years immediately following, they had mostly written, and in fact had lived together only as adults in Lisbon—only for about two and a half years. He’d lived with Phil for five. And Phil had seen him through his artistic breakthrough and triumph, and had watched over him during all of Blanche … Although Phil couldn’t offer any meaningful advice as Fire tried to unravel himself from the memory of Blanche after she’d left him for her husband that very last time, his support was unfailing.
“So when are we going to have a drink, then?” Phil asked when he’d finished telling Fire about his tour.
“Maybe next week,” he replied, getting out of bed now, as he heard the urge crunching up the stairs to the landing and stopping at his door.
“Well, you know I’m going to New York on Monday, don’t you?”
“No, I didn’t. What for?”
“An audition for the New York Philharmonic. Keep your fingers crossed. Hopefully I’ll get hired so I can stop living hand to mouth. By the way, has Courtney spoken to you about the rent?”
“No.”
“I’m two months behind, but I’ve got some money coming in. I’ll catch up in the autumn. By then a number of things should have straightened out.”
“Hey, man,” Fire told him. “Come on, Phil, how often did I have my rent that first year when we lived together? Pay it when you have it. Otherwise don’t worry about it. If you want something to worry about, worry about your audition. You need a place to stay over there?”
“I’ll be staying with Ian.”
“Are you sure he knows this?” Fire asked. “He didn’t mention anything to me. I’d double-check with him if I were you. Plus you know his situation … it’s up to you, really. I played it safe and stayed in a hotel.”
“Well money’s a bit tight at the moment, and I’ll only be there for a few days. I guess I could manage it if I had to. The audition is what really matters to me. I just have to do what I need to do to get through it. I need this one bad, man. If I don’t get it, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Fire was up now, pulling on his jeans and heading down the stairs without shirt or shoes. Phil trailed behind him.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“To paint.”
“Shit, you haven’t done that in years.”
“And you should see the stuff I’m doing. It’ll blow your mind. It’s blowing mine.”
“D’you know what I see when I look at this one?” Phil said, biting his lower lip as he picked up one of what were now over a hundred and fifty canvases.
“No,” Fire said, working furiously, wondering if this interpretation would be as classic as the last.
“I see a bird, right … flying through a forest … but like the forest is burning up … that’s what all this red messy-looking stuff is here.” He pointed to something that Fire didn’t recognize as anything. “But the bird is flying through these flames—”
“Phil,” Fire asked as he mixed some yellow, “so how come the bird isn’t getting burnt?”
“Well, cause it’s not real flames. It’s only a picture, and the bird knows that.”
“So it’s a real bird, then, flying through a picture?”
“Right. Oh, come on, Fire, it can be anything you want it to be. That’s what I want it to be.”
Fire began to hack away with the yellow, slicing through a layer of green.
“So, Phil, why would you want to see this particular scenario—a bird flying through fake flames?”
“Well,” Phil began, picking up another piece, “I was watching this program on television about a brushfire and there were all these little birds that died. And I began to think of a way to help animals in fires. And so I started thinking that maybe Du Pont or one of those companies could make a spray that would make animals fireproof. Y’know, something that you could spread like insecticide … I really can’t explain how it would work. But I think it’s worth looking into—”
“Right, but where does the fake picture come in?”
“So what? You believe that everything in life is real? How do you know we’re not dreaming this right now? Someone asked me that the other day and I couldn’t answer.”
Fire looked at Phil, looked at the work in progress, and looked back at Phil and began to laugh. “Because,” he said, “it would be a fucking nightmare.”
“Maybe we’re onto something,” Phil said. “What did Freud say about dreams? I know you probably know.”
Fire spent about thirty minutes trying to explain Freud to him, then gave up after Phil began adding his own theories to anything that didn’t make sense to him. The good thing, though, was that talking had somehow made the urge go away.
While Phil locked up the shed, Fire walked to a shaded spot by the back fence and sat on a bench beneath the apple trees, which were heavy with leaves and fruit.
“There might be something in that whole dream thing, you know,” Phil said, as he sat next to him. “What have you been dreaming about?”
He couldn’t remember. Not just what he dreamed. He couldn’t remember dreaming.
“Well, what are you not dreaming about, then?”
“I know you’re trying to be helpful, Phil, but maybe this is one of those things that will work itself out over time.”
“I think I’m onto something though. Okay, name five things that you’re not dreaming about.”
“Phil, don’t you realize that any five things will do?”
“Okay then, name five.”
“Why? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Okay then, so name four.”
Fire began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
“Okay then, three.”
“Phil, stop … please.” He was laughing hysterically now.
Nan came out to her window and shook her head at them.
“Okay, name two.”
“I can’t think right now.”
“Okay, name one then. Name one thing that you haven’t been dreaming about because you’re scared of dreaming about it.”
And Fire heard himself say, “Sylvia.”
Then suddenly, as if seized by a falcon, his soul was picked up, yanked up, ripped from his body and taken way into the sky, above the clouds, across the time-and-space divide, and he saw their affair laid out on a timeline, and witnessed the moment when he decided to protect his feelings by trying to forget. As soon as he’d written her that goodbye letter, he saw, he had willed her memory away, putting to use that psychic muscle that adolescent girls often use to will away their periods because they’re afraid of becoming women.
Now, sitting on the bench beneath the apple trees, smelling the unctuous aroma of the fallen fruit, he lived again the feeling that washed his body when she appeared at the door in her sarong … barefoot … molasses dribbling over her toes. Oh, he thought, as the hairs on his body curled over and began to massage his skin, I miss her so. I want her now. I want her here with me, on this bench, so that I can cradle my head in her lap and have her talk to me, about anything, in any language, even if it’s one that I don’t understand. He began to inhale the smell of her hair, which was strange because there had been no memory of it until now, as he thought of holding her and rocking her in the back of the cab. As he thought about this her sweat began to bead his lips like dew. When he had actually kissed her, he hadn’t smelled or tasted anything. Now he was getting a kind of scent like … or was it?
Each time he tried to name it, it caught a breeze and flew away.
That afternoon, Fire went to the London Graphics Center in Covent Garden and bought some supplies. He stayed up working into the night.
When Phil left for New York, he carried with him a very special gift.
Phil called Sylvia as soon as he checked into the Fulton Inn. He’d taken Fire’s advice and decided not to stay with Ian.
“Hello, Umbra magazine. How may I help you?”
“Good morning. May I speak to one Sylvia Lucas, please?”
“One moment.”
“Sylvia Lucas speaking.”
“Hello, Sylvia, my name is Philip Llewellyn,” he said, remembering the script that he’d been given. “I’m over here from England for a bit and I’ve got a little parcel for you from a famous blues singer by the name of Muddy Waters. When do you suppose we could meet up so I can give it to you?”
There was silence on the line.
“Are you there?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s … awfully nice of him. Oh … I didn’t think that he remembered me. Oh, wow … I don’t know what to say. Aah … that’s a really nice of him thing to do. Oh, sorry, that didn’t make much sense, did it? I’m a little disoriented today. What’s your schedule like, Phil? How soon can we meet?”
“Well, I’ve got some auditions coming up, and, to tell the truth, I’m not terribly familiar with New York. It’s my first time. Maybe if I told you where I am staying, you could arrange to meet me sometime.”
“Okay, Phil, where are you?”
They made arrangements to meet that evening.
The sun was low across the tops of the trees in Prospect Park when Sylvia entered the lobby of the Fulton Inn with a bouquet of cut flowers, hoping that it had really been Fire who called—wishing, as her heart rolled around like a child demanding to be born, that Phil was simply a character that Fire had assumed to make this surprise even more special, and that he would step out from behind one of these columns and smile at her now. Any minute.
This would not happen though. She asked the concierge for Phil and was told that he was out.
“Did he leave a package for anyone?”
She was handed a small burlap sack containing a box wrapped in corrugated brown paper, topped with a sisal bow.
Flushed with curiosity and excitement, Sylvia kept peeking into the bag on the way home, happy not so much that he had sent her a gift, as that he had remembered her.
As soon as she got in, she sat on the bed and opened the box, finding inside a handmade book, twenty-four pages of heavy-gauge paper bound with needle and embroidery thread. Affixed to the cover was a dried rose. Inside was a series of warmly impressionistic streetscapes languorously rendered in ink and gouache—all unified by the presence of a woman in whose form she recognized a bit of herself.
There was a poem done in calligraphy on the inside back cover. Her middle turned to liquid when she read it. She had to lie down. Flopping backward into the pillows she imagined herself as a skydiver—freefalling through the clouds, too thrilled by the feeling of weightlessness to think about hitting the ground.
PERSON
“He.” I say “he” to construct the fiction of this thing. I can now call it love and riddle his passions with old clichés. He sees her in strange cities, her body poised in orange light, and he paints her onto canvases, constant orgasms, admissions that she haunts him always. “Him,” I say, not “me”—it is all fiction.
—Fire
She wrote to him that night.
August—, 19—
Dear Fire,
I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the time we met. Thank you so much for your package. I received it today, and I was thrilled out of my mind.
When I met you my life wasn’t perfect, but I’d grown accustomed to its routine. I apologize for being so apprehensive with you, but I’m sure you can understand why.
I know that you’re probably wondering, then, why I seemed so friendly toward you when you and Claire came by that Sunday. It was because when you called my number earlier that afternoon, looking for Claire, you were concerned that I wasn’t sounding well without knowing who I was. And that told me that you are kind to people period—not just to the ones in whom you have a romantic interest. And that small act, that display of basic goodness, elevated you in my estimation.
You may prove yourself to be other than I believe you to be. Maybe you are not bad, but ordinary, like most people, who give to get. And as I survey my own life I realize that at times I have accepted this social currency as being valid, and have traded in it myself.
I don’t know much about you, Fire. As a matter of fact, I don’t know you at all. But when I met you something happened inside of me, and (since you were allowed to be trite in your letter I should have a chance too) a spark was lit. And every time I’ve been in touch with you, it has grown brighter.
I’m about to say things, Fire, that I don’t want to say, so let me go. Things about needing your nipple so bad right now. Things about touching myself the first night that I met you and falling asleep with you on my mind.
My Jamaican guy—Grace Jones won’t mind if I bite a piece of hers.
—Sylvia
Her letter arrived on one of his days off and he immediately called her. He was lounging in bed in yellow boxers, his head propped up against a pillow, a glass of water on the nightstand. A soccer player, Fire had a strong body that suggested torque rather than horsepower. He had a hard, wide chest. A dense middle. And long, sturdy legs that matched his arms.
With each spin of the dial ripples of excitement washed through his body. The excitement, however, was no longer simply romantic. There was a strong undercurrent of eroticism that was threatening to drag him out to sea and drown him. For the first time he experienced the sensuousness of the rotary dial, the slipping of his fingers into the holes, the tight fit, the twisting around, the arcing groan of the spinback. It was ten in the morning for her, three P.M. for him.
“Hello,” Sylvia said when she came on the line, “how are you?”
“Fine, and yourself?”
“Good, thank you.”
“I have your letter here,” he said, “and I’d just like you to know that it’s nice to know that you think I’m nice.”
“But you are.”
“You’re at work, right? I can’t remember where I called you.”
“Yes, I’m at work. What are you doing?”
“I’m in bed,” he replied.
“Lucky you.”
“Not really … I’m alone.”
“I was alone in my bed last night, but you don’t hear me complaining,” she said.
He closed his eyes and pictured her lying next to him … in her sarong … with a smooth leg thrown over his … a warm hand on his chest … moist lips foraging along the back of his neck.
“What’s your bed like?” he asked, catching her off guard.
“It’s a bed … rectangular … mattress … box spring … sheets,” she replied, slipping through a fissure, falling into his groove.
“Are you in bed right now?” There was a wetness beneath her. She paused awhile to enjoy it.
“Yes,” she replied.
Her legs were falling open.
“Are you alone?”
“No.”
“Who is there with you?” he asked.
“You.”
“And what am I doing?”
She closed her eyes.
“You’re lying beside me and rubbing my belly.”
“Do you like the way I’m rubbing it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re gentle, and …”
“And?”
“… you have this way of making your strokes stray into the waist of my underwear and up against my breast.”
She slipped a hand beneath her skirt.
“And you like that?” he asked.
“Yes … Fire … I do.�
�
“I’m using my lips now, to do what my hand was doing before. Which do you prefer?”
“Your lips.”
“Okay, I’ll use my lips then. But what should I do with my hands?”
“Caress my breasts.”
“With both of them?”
“No. Use one to caress my breasts and use the other one to play with me.”
“Where should I play with you?”
“Inside my underwear.”
“My hand is there now, inside your underwear. It’s very wet here. And warm.”
“I know,” she replied, “you have made it that way. Play with me.”
Her fingers eased the silk away. And her flesh gave way to her softest touch like mud on the floor of a still lagoon.
“What should I play with?” he asked.
“You know what to play with.”
“How do you know that I know?”
“You know.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Don’t make me say it,” she said. She was breathing heavily and her voice was trembling. “Don’t make me tell you to play with my clit and finger-fu … manipulate me inside with your fingers.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m fingering myself as I’m talking to you and I want to come so badly. But someone could come through this door any minute.”
Fire felt a coolness near his waist, and looked down to see his cock growing toward his chest from the moist heat inside his boxers. He held it. It was hard and brown like a length of renta yam. At the top, in a nick, a custard-colored sap spilled out in soft eruptions.
“So if you want to come, then come. I’ll hug you.”
“Don’t hug me … make love to me.”
“Fast or slow?” he asked, rolling over on his belly.
“Slow at first,” she said. “Put it a little way in then pull it out, so I can savor the size of the head. Tease me with it.”
“There you go.”
“Yessss.”
“Like that?”
“Yessss. Now push it deeper.” She had two fingers inside her now.
“Like this?”
“Yessss. Stroke me deep.”
Waiting in Vain Page 11
