The Taste of a Woman Read online

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  The Taste of a Woman

  Rigel Madsong

  Publisher Information

  Digital edition converted and published by

  Andrews UK Limited 2013

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2013 Rigel Madsong

  The right of Rigel Madsong to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead and is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, electronically copied, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent.

  My Uncooked Biscuit

  During the seventh year of my self-imposed exile as an expatriate living in Florence, Italy my penis died. Basically, it turned into the Pillsbury Dough Boy and flopped around down there like an uncooked biscuit.

  It was the year Oscar passed away back in New York. His wife, Sheila, wrote me with details of the celebration. As he lay dying she invited several women to the house and they all piled into his bed, laughing, wrestling, groping in a sex-crazed, drunken free-for-all during which Oscar was played like an Aeolian Harp. His dying had given him more of life than life itself and Sheila was proud of her excellent work. Oscar died like a king.

  I had always admired Sheila but from a distance, the kind of private admiration stilled by protocol but creating, nonetheless, that quality of buzz and flow that circulated around inside and when suppressed, as it must be in polite company, caused damage to vital organs. She was always sexy. She wore the right perfume, the right jewelry. She would show up in her mini skirts and tank tops, her tight breasts pointing out at the world, radiating their unspoken invitations. Being around her required self-control and lots of idle conversation.

  It was the same year Gina left me. I met Gina over the acupuncture table. Painting canvases all day had put a cramp behind my right shoulder blade that wouldn’t go away. A buddy in the class who suffered a similar malady recommended her.

  She was lithe and fair, not at all the Italian/Mediterranean gene pool so common to the local populace. Some Nordic had crept into her genetic past and left all the best qualities: long waist, low tight hips, small subtle breasts which hid seductively under her loose fitting shifts, bobbing there like private knowledge. Hair straight and silken, flowing like waterfalls cascading to the middle of her back.

  She knew the body well. What I mean is, she had the kind of knowledge one cannot acquire, knowledge in excess of any competency that training might produce, for her placement of needles married with her attitude of submissive wisdom worked magic. She knew before you did what your problem was.

  She had a boyfriend at the time, a Muslim fellow from North Africa who worked in an auto repair shop and preferred his cultural brethren to any of the local population, including, it seemed, Gina, a choice, given the effect her unmistakable charms had on me, I could not fathom.

  By the time of my second visit she had separated herself from him - something about shouting and hitting - and she was hold up in a small apartment on the other side of the cathedral. She consented to a cup of coffee.

  I was in the presence of a goddess as I walked beside her on Via Palazzuoio. Instinctively recognizing her wish to shun attention to her beauty, I never mentioned it. It was a lucky choice for that gesture seemed to provide a refuge for her amid the aggressive locals who whistled and tried to pinch as she passed by.

  Over coffee I discovered she had also come to Florence as an art student, was enrolled in the same class I was in but earlier, dropping out when a combination of tight finances and loss of inspiration compelled her to fall back upon an old talent of hers, healing.

  Art opened up a wide universe of common loves for us, her passions now activated and swirling about the room, rose to a peak over the mention of Giotto and Rubens. She could talk for hours about the way Italian art depicted the beauty of the female body.

  To be talking about beauty and the female body with a beautiful woman was in itself a beautiful thing. I could mention the rotund sculpture-like shadings on the canvasses of Rubens, the muscular definition of Michelangelo and feel the thrill she was feeling - a shared high legitimized by our love of art.

  It was a quick beginning. She was separating herself from the memory of a bad relationship. I was hungry living in a vacuum created by my last debacle, a short little affair with a short little French girl who loved to paint large penises on large canvasses. Sex with her was like walking through fog, natural, dispassionate, something I could never quite possess.

  Gina came to my apartment and never left, even when the news came that her ex was killed in a freak auto accident on a mountain road leading into the Tuscan valleys. But she grew silent, withdrawn. I couldn’t read her as well as when she was more open. She was a stolen woman, a woman I had taken from a dead man.

  She inhabited my spaces, the narrow bedroom with its narrow window out onto Via Montebello. Her presence was pressed into my walls, my corridors, even in the flowing gesture of my hand placing pigment on the canvass she was there.

  When my penis died I thought of myself also dying, slowly, from the loins inward. Why was this happening? Nothing was wrong with my external life: a pursuit of art I loved and a Nordic princess in my bed. What could be going on inside? I asked a classmate, a psychiatrist from San Francisco who wanted to go from being the perennial receptacle of human angst to the producer of its best representative on canvass. Looking at his art was like peering into a torture chamber with no doorway to the outside world.

  “It was conflict,” he said.

  “I have no conflict,” I said.

  “If not in the relationship, then with your past.”

  I grew up in Queens. Where should I start. Conflict was everywhere from my father’s dispassionate occupation of the household like some ghost of Christmas past to my brother’s membership in a secret organization which seemed always about to overthrow some oppressive authority and which was constantly in trouble with the cops. My mother meanwhile, yammering, jabbering, seemingly out of touch with everything.

  “Not that,” he said. “Something more fundamental. Like self-loathing from stealing other men’s girlfriends.”

  Seems I’d told him too much already.

  But then I realized he was wrong. It came as a surprise to me but I didn’t mind stealing at all. The other guy was done or was a jerk or had been put out of the picture already. Or was that just my silly rationalization? Maybe I was some kind of schmuck living inside a body that appeased itself by aspiring to paint beauty. Thinking about this my art became weird. Strange faces appeared. The psychiatrist had infected me. He was screwing with my mind. I had to stop thinking.

  Gina tried what she knew but her wisdom, whatever the source, probably told her it had little to do with her and that she couldn’t acupuncture it out of my body. Therefore, the penis remained sad.

  Gina left.

  Strangely, I didn’t try to stop her. I watched myself watching her leaving, not protesting her departure, not understanding my indifference or how I could destroy myself and not care.

  That was when Shiela’s letter came. She was coming to Florence, wanted to see my work, could she stay at my place until she got settled? Did I mind if she travelled the countryside? Would I come with her?

  Well, I knew what this was about. I could see it coming. But it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Here I was with a
flagging appendage and the sex machine was on the plane to Milano.

  My Karma was bad.

  I was going to die in Florence with a floppy dick.

  Sheila looked like a movie star in a crowd of celestial darkness at the depot. Tastefully dressed in skin tight travelling pants and close fitting knit blouse with a tailored jacket from Sacks Fifth Avenue she was a polished gem out of its showcase. The sight of her thrilled and frightened me. She was a powerhouse. How could I keep up with this?

  She wanted a drink immediately. We found a little hole in the wall near the train station and ordered Martinis. Three drinks in and I told her my problem.

  “You mean you’re not going to fuck me?” She said. The look on her face said I don’t believe a goddamned word you are saying. And by the way, whatever. I’m not paying attention.

  I ordered another round and we slinked back to my place. She took off my clothes without asking. I was a man with two consciousnesses, one, intent upon the attitude of the two inviting breasts trained upon me like bazookas and the other scared shitless.

  Didn’t matter.

  She was an expert. Somehow she knew every trick to make me rise to satisfy her. She touched, she teased, she paused increasing the terror and the anticipation. She kept me so off balance I didn’t have the focus to think about worrying. She used my like a dish towel. I was her stairs up the high mountain where she took her view from the top and told me about it in everlasting detail.

  Oscar fluttered at the back of my mind. What was he saying? I’d not been able to be there for his dying. Would I honor him by satisfying his widow? Or disgrace him? It had to be thought of as something akin to honor. Anything else would make the puppy yelp and run.

  We traveled, we drank, we ate in hideaway places where the people were friendly and the food outrageously good. Tuscany was like a slice of heaven laid out before us, ours for the taking.

  We managed to carve out our own fragile brand of contentment but I never did find out what it was that got this whole floppy dick thing started. Even so, Sheila knew how to make it serve her like an obedient Beagle. Something about her demand, her technique, her bullishness that absolutely cleaned my clock. There was not a second for neurosis, no space for the luxury of self-loathing.

  We fucked our way through the countryside, mindless, oblivious, given totally over to the pleasures of the body, never minding our problems or their sources. My own problems, whatever they were, preferred anonymity, but somehow they had the good sense to shrink back at the frontal challenge of a master.

  And my penis rose in the night, tumid and hopeful.

  Hot Springs

  He’d been watching for almost two hours, trying not to look obvious, deflecting his eyes when someone was about to catch him transfixed, moon-faced. He was hooked and he knew it - beyond hooked, he was. And it all had begun with astonishment.

  He’d come to fix what needed fixing. Their sex life, his and his lovely wife’s. It had gone blah, not that he himself thought “blah,” but when his wife, one fine evening as he was pouring over the New York Times, felt compelled to say to him, “Why don’t we have sex anymore,” rather than responding with, “But darling, we do have sex,” he was smart enough to know what he thought didn’t matter. If she thought they weren’t having sex, then they weren’t.

  So he just said, simply and sweetly, “Let’s go to Wooten Hot Springs.”

  He’d seen the ad: mineral baths, massage, fine food and wine - just the kind of thing to awaken what might think it was awake even though it was sound asleep. Maybe he had been a little casual about sex. Maybe it had become... perish the thought... mechanical. So now, he’d brought his wife to a place designed to awaken the sensate, the erotic, the fine mechanisms of the body calculated for pleasure.

  There they were, stretched out on their chez lounges, buck naked in the California sun, people of various shapes and sizes drifting around them without a stitch of clothing on them.

  He watched in mild amusement. On the steps leading down from the mineral baths was a young couple. She a little too thin, narrow-waisted, dark escutcheon, winged hip bones, tight breasts clutched high to her chest - she was probably an accountant, something linear like that - now demonstrating her calculated determination to get naked in spite of better judgment, standing like a neophyte runway model in the bright sun in front of everyone, her husband at her side nervously watching to see who was watching her.

  He was probably a lawyer.

  Then there was the Marinite, 45 or so, looking way much older because of way too much sun for way too many years, her wilting bonze breasts dangling, her facial skin wrinkled from excessive actinic pleasures. Behind her a rotund man in a Panama hat and nothing but a salt-and-pepper beard which jostled like a wind sail, lax and luffing in a light breeze, earnestly saying whatever it was that was so blessed important to him but not at all to her, the sun-fried lady, who wasn’t listening at all.

  So our man, the protagonist in our story, the one with the as yet unsatisfied wife, turned in search of peacefulness and closed his eyes.

  Time passed.

  He dosed, for he woke suddenly to high-pitched giggling. He opened his eyes to see two young women, early twenties, running across the path in front of him. The darker one had to be Italian - narrow waist, tight muscular Mediterranean hips and absolutely perfect breasts, slanting down from her high ribs in a direct line to an as-yet-still-pink-and-slightly-bulbous nipple, then falling to a graceful curve back to her pulsing chest.

  The other girl, Irish - red fly-away hair fluffing out to the side, a touch of abundance in her hips and thighs, large breasts which, because she was running, needed suspension by the backs of her wrists to avoid indecently flopping about. This was the beginning. This was his astonishment, to see such stunning beauties out here amongst these naked aliens.

  The sweet ones passed his vision and disappeared.

  Well, that was worth the price of admission, he thought. How do such luscious babes arrive way out here naked and unaccompanied?

  He pondered that question as well as the one about why it was he understood so little about women as his eyes, now offered only that collage of body forms that had preceded the brief scene with the lovelies, drifted into dreariness.

  Dreary. But not closed, to remain ready for that glorious sight should it cross his path once more. He wondered: could he doze with eyes half-open? He was about to find out.

  He could. And did. Truth is, his faculties were all in play, his hearing, his half shrouded eyesight, his consciousness, even whatever it is that tells psychically when the happy blessing or the eminent disaster is about to land.

  He looked over at his wife. She was dozing, her book lifeless across her chest, glasses downward. He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again he considered he might be dreaming or dead or hallucinating some spirit ripped out of lust and delusion. Yet the warm breeze drifting over him felt too acutely physical for him to be asleep. What he saw, lying on a lounge beside him, was the Italian girl. By his side (Jesus!) and a little out front, two paces perhaps, such that his view of her face, her shoulder, her right breast was perfect, unobstructed yet undetectable arising from behind.

  A prayer of gratitude went flying to the saint who, in her perceptive wisdom, granted this gift. And he set about observing now with stealth in the style of the great Rodin about to sculpt a masterpiece, the perfection of her olive skin, the angle of her Sicilian nose, the incredible silhouette of the breast hanging - no - suspended, directly in front of him.

  He memorized every detail of that astonishing shape, recording its essence to bring her back to him when she was gone.

  She stayed a long time there, chatting with her Irish friend, her body twitching, her breast rising and falling in the humid air. Her placement perfectly in his view was so unabashed and of such obvious benefit to hi
s visual landscape that he wondered if she had planned it, had placed herself before him on purpose, sensing something about him at the deepest levels of consciousness that allowed for this uncommon generosity, to lay the power of her beauty before him as if it were an offering.

  Lucky? Yes, definitely. But also didn’t he deserve such an accident of grace? Let’s just call it a long overdue good thing coming my way.

  Fifteen minutes maybe more she remained, long enough to form an indelible imprint pressed into his grey matter that was sure to remain there ‘til the day he died. Not wanting to disturb the scene and being clever about it, he diverted his eyes to the occasional passerby and back again, avoiding the stare to make him into the distrusted voyeur.

  He was dreaming. He was not dreaming.

  Oh, shit. She was getting up. Damn. Could he formulate a legitimate reason to stop her? No. They’d not said boo to each other.

  So off the two went to the baths again. He’d be obvious if he followed them so he instead wandered to the sauna. He caught sight of the playful pair reentering the baths, steam surrounding them as they descended into the mineral darkness.

  He proceeded to his sauna.

  No one was there. He found a perch high in the corner off to the right side where he leaned against the overheated wall and rested. A slow burn moved through him penetrating to his core. He rested. How the mind swims, he thought, confronted with beauty.

  He wondered if his relationship would survive. Wondered how it was that while he wasn’t paying attention, his creativity in the art of fucking got tarnished, seriously, enough so that his sweet wife called him up on it.

  He thought of his career, stuck in the mud of regulations and ritual in the Dot Com industry. Would his dreams of early retirement be possible? He remembered his teen-age wish to be a racecar driver and reminded himself how unrealistic that was. In the middle of his musing about racecars and speedways the door opened and in rushed the two girls. They went directly to the benches opposite the door, those positioned at right angles from the corner where he was sitting. They spun around and lay down in opposite directions, the bench just long enough to accommodate them if their heads nestled side-by-side, so close that it appeared to the man that two bodies were connected to a double head, each talking to the other.