The Taste of a Woman Read online

  And their bodies responded to the connection the mind had made. She let him undress her as if she were the poem in the making, thought flowing into actions the body makes. He unbuttoned her blouse. She released the clasp. He lifted her buttocks as he drew down her shorts and outside as the other poets were boating across to the mainland the poem was making itself upstairs in the bedroom of the empty house.

  And on the dining room table, a few sheets of paper, lifted at the corner now and then by the breeze through the window, a few markings, a psalm, a love poem, the words they had made together.

  Elevator Talk

  Something there is about a tight space that freaks me out.

  Don’t know what it is but it started up right after my good friend Daniel died of a heart attack at 25. At least that what they said it was. He had tried to crawl through a storm drain and got stuck there. By the time they found him he was as cold as a fish. That was about the time I got a little fluttering in my heart that kicked in when I’d had too much coffee or too little sleep, Doctor said it was harmless but I kept thinking about Daniel in the ditch.

  Got over the heart thing, but nightmares had already started in: I’d be walking along the sidewalk and a tunnel would open up in front of me, getting smaller and smaller as I walked in. I’d wake up in a sweat and have to walk around for 20 minutes to shake the trembles out of my body.

  I know that’s why I’m so careful getting into elevators. If the door doesn’t open right away that same surge rises up and shoots out my skin to the tips of my short hairs and jangles there. The door has always opened but not before my heart stats surging like a bass in a bucket. Stays that way too, until I can kick the adrenalin out of my socks.

  To live a life at this time in the century we have to get over what would keep us down. So I climb on elevators just like everybody else but I always watch to see who will come in with me, hoping that some beautiful woman would arrive and distract me in case we get stuck. In this manner I know all the women in my building and have secretly played out with each one of them the dead-elevator-with-just-the-two-of-us-inside scenario. That one.

  Now this was the summer of rolling brownouts all over the East Coast. Gave me the willies. So before getting in to the elevator I watched the lights in the corridor. If they dimmed I’d excuse myself to the bathroom or the water fountain. I got pretty good at this but one can only be so prepared for the fickle will of a sinister universe.

  So this time, Martha came in on the 5th floor, going down. I knew Martha by sight as the tall nurse who worked in the Public Health Department office. She had shocked me once before with one of those smiles that jumps off the face to somewhere in the shrinking space between us and flares there like the Aurora Borealis. It always seemed to me that she was especially friendly, more so than expected from a New Yorker in the hallway, a shocker from someone so beautiful in her statuesque figure and long black hair.

  From time to time we spoke in passing but there was not enough in common to start up a conversation, me working in a tax office and she saving lives. Even when I trumped up a reason to go in her office, which I did once, acting like I just wanted to know what went on in there, she remained formal, formal, that is, except for that smile.

  So now here we are in this elevator which is starting to move downward when the dome light browns, lights up again, flickers then dies. Shit! The elevator dies too, somewhere between 5 and Lobby. We are stuck, no electricity and the doors won’t open. And it’s pitch fucking dark.

  “Mmmmm,” she said.

  “Mmmmm,” I said. “That’s a fine howdy-do.”

  I was concentrating on her presence in the indefinable space with me, beating back the rising fire, surge by repetitive surge.

  “I guess you’re wondering why I called this meeting,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “Funny, It wasn’t on my schedule for the day.”

  “Some of the most important meetings happen without schedule,” I said, with as steady as voice as I could muster.

  “Where are you from? ” She said. “I’ve heard that kind of voice before.”

  “Right now, somewhere in outer space trying to get back home,” I said.

  “Texas, South Carolina?”

  “Virginia, thanks kindly.”

  “I knew it.”

  We were in darkness, the kind of black space you sometimes see when down in Mammoth cave and the guide, inclined to terrorize his guests as the more sinister among them are, turns out the lights and you see nothing. Nothing. That space that doesn’t even know it is a space because it cannot see itself.

  That’s where we were. Exactly. In Mammoth cave without a match.

  I was leaning against the back corner. I didn’t know where she was.

  I decided to be strong for her, in case she needed it. Maybe that would keep me from levitating through the walls. It was time for me to say something.

  She beat me to it.

  “I don’t like the dark,” she said.

  I had several options. I could confess my weakness and commiserate. That didn’t seem productive. I could try to keep her occupied. I could tell jokes. I could scream at the top of my lungs.

  I decided on conversation.

  “Let’s talk about love affairs gone bad,” I said.

  “Why on earth, that?”

  “Well, it’s an emotional enough to divert our attention away form the snafu we’re in.”

  “Okay,” she said, and she paused a moment, “but would you hold my hand?”

  “Glad to,” I said, “if I can find it.”

  She laughed.

  I laughed.

  “How shall I find you,” I said in the sing-songy voice of a nursery rhyme.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “Let’s start out in the corners and walk toward each other. That should do it.”

  “I like it,” I said.

  I groped my way in to the back corner. I assumed she was doing the same.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “Ready,”

  “One. Two Three.” And we started walking.

  Something unexpected happened. I assumed she would have started in the front corner at the other side of the elevator and was anticipating a head on collision but no, she started at the back corner so when we met in the center we knocked each other over.

  We laughed long and hard, from our places, somewhere suspended between floors, crumpled upon an invisible tin can bottom.

  “I’ll crawl to you,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t like men who crawl.”

  “Come to think of it, I don’t like crawling much myself.”

  “But I liked that,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Colliding like that. Let’s do it again.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but lets get organized.”

  “Spoil sport.”

  “Okay, not too organized, then.”

  “That’s better. But that might not be as much fun.”

  “A little variety, maybe. If we don’t like it we can go back to charging from opposite sides of this bread box like battering rams gone ballistic.”

  “You’re crazy. But crazy sounds right just about now.”

  “Always a good use for insanity. Anyhow, get yourself to the front corner of the elevator and I will take the opposite back corner and let’s try this again.”

  “Aye, Aye, Sir!”

  “One two seven,” I said.

  “Cheater!”

  “Okay, okay. One Two Three.” And then I came out into the center, this time with my arms wide open so when we hit I grabbed on her with a tight embrace. She closed her arms around me and squeezed really tight.

  “Don’t turn loose,” she said.

 
“I hadn’t thought I would,” I said.

  She chuckled.

  Her cheek was pressed against mine. I could feel the entire length of her body, her delicate shoulders, the sponginess of her breasts, the narrow waist, the ram’s horns of her pelvic bones pressed into mine.

  She pecked a little kiss just under my ear. I moved my hands from completely wrapped around the hour glass of her to holding onto her waist side to side, stroking my hands up to the base of her bra and down to the flair of her hips. Up and down, up and down. It was all tactile, it was. I had to imagine the image of her the way I’d seen it before the lights went out. But I had to admit, feeling her this way had its advantages and it sure rounded out the concept.

  Her kissing increased so I pulled back and planted one right on her open mouth. She moaned lowly and her knees buckled but she righted herself and stood on her tiptoes working her mouth against mine. My hands fell to her hips which I cradled against me with a right strong amount of force.

  I was about to ask her if we should make love but there was a strong current going that I did not want to disrupt. Besides, rising such an idea to the voice subjected it to all the social pressures we put upon speaking - you can’t say this, you can’t use certain words, you must be politically correct - whereas, if I kept my mouth shut and just left it to the body, things were going to have a rosy future.

  She pulled back from the kiss, speaking and kissing and speaking and kissing in an interrupted staccato tone. “Fuck me... with my clothes... on,” she said. “that way... if the lights... come on... we can walk right out.”

  She moaned. I slid her dress up to her waist, reached around and rubbed her on top of her panties, then pulled them out of the way, off to one side.

  “You are so wet,” I said.

  “Shut up and do it,” she said.

  I placed a finger inside her as she unzipped me and I slid in her so deep I crashed her against the elevator wall. She lifted her legs around me and I began pumping hard.

  I wanted her to come first. She needed it in order to wash away her fears so I slowed to a deliberate pace and massaged as I pumped. Soon her body stiffened, her breath went tight and she froze in the arch of the big Roman Candle.

  There was a moment when I paused to extend the tension, moving just enough to keep her from falling back. Her muscles seized, then she jerked, and choked and coughed and contracted against my unit inside her... and then I went out of control.

  It was a long brownout.

  It was one of those grid things, we learned later, in which one cell fails and it goes like gangbusters through the neighborhood until all the dominoes fall in a heap. Takes a long time to stand them all up again.

  So long, in fact, that we had to fill the time fucking standing up, lying down, against the wall, in the corner, standing from behind, kneeling. It took every bit of energy we had. There was none left for anxiety.

  In the end the lights did come on. The elevator did start lurching then moving on a smooth path to its destination. We walked out to see firemen, the police, T.V. reporters with microphones and bright lights. “Tell us... ” they said, and we just kept on walking.

  Out the door we released our hands and turned to go our separate ways.

  I held her vision a moment. “Do you want to know my name?” I said.

  She looked back at me and seemed to be thinking for a long time. Then she flashed one of those smiles I could not have seen in the dark but exploded at me now with such force I could never forget it.

  “Lets not spoil it,” she said.

  Charlene

  So my friend said to me, “You’ll never guess what happened.”

  Knowing him, my answer couldn’t come close. “Surprise me,” I said.

  “I have a girlfriend.”

  Now that was not a surprise. Roger, single, 63, old Hippie from the Haight-Ashbury days, full of life... he was always around good looking women.

  “No surprise,” I said.

  “You haven’t heard the rest,” he said.

  I decided to wait for his next offering with a little twinge of skepticism.

  “You don’t know how young she is,” he said.

  “Oh, so what is she, 26?”

  “No, no, 24,” he said, clearly proud of the 2 year difference.

  “Jesus, Roger. You’re going to kill yourself.”

  “Not as long as I have Viagra.”

  “So that’s a difference of . . “

  “39 years,” he said. “I know. It’s huge.”

  I raised a eyebrow.

  “Okay,” he said, “but she’s intelligent, very wise... and gorgeous beyond belief. Jesus, man, she just came back from a photo shoot for some magazine cover she landed.”

  “So why did she hook up with an old fart like you?”

  Secretly, I knew some of the reasons. It always seemed to me that girls matured faster than men, socially, I mean. Their male peers are going around still being kids: fast cars, football, beer, a little short on that elusive quality, responsibility. Women start thinking about that little time clock tick ticking down inside of them and get captured by a strong nesting instinct. Not the men. In order to get mature conversation with grounded men girls have to skip a generation or two.

  “I don’t know, man. It just happened. I’m pretty excited about it and I have to tell you I haven’t had so much fun in years and years and years.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “Loving your success, you bastard.”

  But I was thinking. I remembered visiting my friend Wilson one day when he was about 50. He was selling his Rolls Royce to buy a Steinway grand and I wanted to see it. He was sitting at the breakfast table in his apartment with a cup of coffee. We sat and talked for maybe ten minutes before I saw a woman sitting at a small table against the wall. Right there in his apartment. She was in her late twenties, fair skinned, conservatively dressed but I could see that if she let her hair down she would be beautiful. It was strange. She acted like we weren’t there, like she wasn’t there. Her eyes were down to a little black book she was writing in and they never looked up. She was enduring the time I was there without existing, as if in suspension, she was. And the strangest thing to me is that Wilson did not introduce us. Did not even acknowledge she was there even though he knew I’d seen her. Our conversation was in one circle of the universe, she was in another. What I knew from this was that they shared a clandestine connection that was not intended to last nor had the respectability to enter polite conversations, an arrangement both of them, apparently, agreed upon. She was a passing stranger, sharing favors for favors given. She would be gone next time I came around.

  Was his girl like that girl?

  “How did you meet her?” I asked.

  “It was the strangest thing. Four months ago I went on line to one of these social network dating service things and without putting up a picture or anything, I just put in a paragraph about myself and that was it.” He waved his hands dismissively. “Then I thought no more about it.”

  “Then one day I get this call. ‘I saw your entry,’ she said, ‘and I think we should meet.’ So I said something like maybe we should meet for coffee. ‘No.’ she said. ‘Tell me where you live and I’ll come to your house.’”

  My eyebrow went up again.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But she’s terrific. She’s loving. She’s smart. She must have read something in that paragraph I put up that made her have a sense of trust.”

  “Or spur her to act with reckless abandon,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re not assuming she acts that way all the time?”

  He ignored my comment. “We have had the most interesting conversations. She grew up in a dysfunctional family but somehow turned out fantastic. Here. I’ll show you p
ictures.”

  He pulled out his I Phone, flipped a few pages. Up came this image of a blond teenager looking our from under a large sombrero on a pristine beach. “We just got back from Hawaii,” he said.

  “Hot,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “I mean the girl,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know.” He showed more. Definitely the model type. Young looking, full figure, sweet disposition.

  He saw me gawking. “She told me she just woke up one day when she was 13 and there she was, all this figure and everything.”

  “Springing fully formed from the brow... ”

  “... of the god of the universe.”

  We laughed. “She’s going back to college to finish up a degree in psychology,” he said. “But she’s been a constant companion and I’ve never had more fun in my life.”

  “Glad for that,” I said. And I was glad, and maybe cautiously envious, but also a little worried.

  The Charlene song popped in my head, the one about subtle whoring, the travel, the money, the clothes, the movement through high societies all for a little sex.

  Oh, I’ve been to Niece and the Isle of Greece while I’ve sipped champagne on a yacht

  I’ve moved like Harlow in Monte Carlo and showed ‘em what I’ve got

  I’ve been undressed by kings and I’ve seen some things that a woman ain’t supposed to see

  I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me...

  I’ve spent my life exploring the subtle whoring that costs too much to be free

  Well, maybe a lot of sex. I suppose if you think of it that way and as long as it’s good for you it’s not such a bad deal for the other side either. Both having fun. Both giving something to the magic of the transaction.

  Expanding horizons. Yes.

  I looked at my friend. I could see behind him the shadow of his recent and long lasting struggle with mononucleosis. That was in his not so distant past. I could see his difficult divorce, the alienation of his son, the ups and downs of his business adventures. He was as animated and vibrant as I had ever seen him. Who was I to judge his situation?