The Taste of a Woman Page 2

  “My boyfriend would never come here,” said the Italian.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It’s stupid. But I know he just wouldn’t. It’s not in his nature.”

  “He’d go to a football weekend, wouldn’t he?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “But not a spa weekend?”

  “Exactly.”

  The man turned his body to his right, leaning against the front wall of the sauna, moving his feet up to the bench and drawing his knees toward his chest so that his line of sight was directly upon the women.

  “What is it about men?” exclaimed the Irish girl. “They are so not into this sort of thing.”

  “Some men,” corrected the Italian.

  A silence followed in which the observer, all but invisible, examined the lovelies with rich admiration. He wondered if they could feel the touch of his eyes caressing every part of them. The Irish girl glowing with freckles and a robust, heated flesh, enriched to a crimson blush by the sauna’s insistent radiations, lacy red hair decorating her pubis with a small moist triangle. She was soft and luxurious, he thought, and girlish, and young. How amazing to be lying there without concern for anything. He was indeed the fly on the wall. Mr. Invisible at the girl’s slumber party.

  The Italian, animated, gesturing with exasperation at the blind and stupid man-behaviors of her boyfriend, was growling and laughing and mewling intermittently, the high arc of her rib cage convulsing over her flat abdomen, shaking the perfect breasts, still perfect in recumbentcy.

  Conversation turned to other things - their jobs, their mother’s disapproval, how this escape together was so absolutely necessary. Their voices dwindled into the halcyon of heated bodies, sweating, languishing...

  A question had been forming in the man’s head, silly perhaps, but maybe a (lame) way to get himself into the conversation. It was a risk. He hesitated. It was so stupid it might backfire. But how would he know if he didn’t give it a try? If he was lucky success might depend not so much upon the intelligence of his interjection but upon the beneficence of their good graces. Anyway, for sure if he didn’t speak, there would be no tomorrow.

  “If your heads were any closer together,” he said, pausing to allow time for them to focus upon his voice, “you would be sharing each other’s thoughts.”

  Then he waited in the uncomfortable silence that followed, unwilling to exaggerate the awkwardness by pressing other entreaties into this conversational vacuum. He was to live or die by what was now pulsing in their brains.

  Silence continued. He said nothing, his eyes upon their perfect bodies, which had, he noticed, not cared to shield themselves against his now clearly defined presence. A good sign, he thought.

  Silence rolled on.

  He imagined the Italian girl going over possible responses in her mind. She was the leader, that was clear. How to respond. To respond or not. At the same time the man was deciding again there was no option but to ride the bidding he’d offered.

  The sideboards creaked stretching in the heat. Aroma of cedar.

  Finally she laughed, “Never thought about it that way,” she said. “That’s really interesting.”

  They talked across distances in the manner of children tending a small fire, keeping it going to see how much it would light the room.

  He walked over to her, his nakedness approaching her nakedness, talking, one body to the other body with that same quality of ease they might find fully clothed at a church social, marveling absentmindedly about how spa experience removed them from so thoroughly from their ordinary lives. How essential that breakaway was to help them remember who they were.

  He was becoming tumid, rising slightly at the offering of her beauty. If he had to suffer the embarrassment he would do so. The risk was worth it.

  “Too bad about your boyfriend,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  He paused, weighing his next offering. “Well, if I were he,” he watched her face animate with just the hint of a smile, “I’d go wherever you wanted me to”

  She looked directly at him with her dark eyes. He saw they were moist with expectation.

  “That’s really sweet, “ she said. “I’m so glad you said that.”

  Then abruptly, she sat up and raised herself to his lips, kissing him with her mouth partly open, her tongue barely touching his. The kiss lasted long enough for his hands fall to her body, slippery with sun block and sweat, to slide gracefully over her hills and valleys. She twisted and turned herself in his moving embrace. She let him open her gently with the tips of his fingers.

  She swooned then, falling back to a sitting position on the bench, her arms still around him, her knees open. She drew him down to a kneeling position and wrapped her legs around him, drawing him into her, where all his passion rushed through his torso and surged into a hard throbbing presence deep inside her, the heat swirling their surfaces, sweat mixing, quick breaths conversing with each other, the people outside milling about aimlessly, steam rising from the baths out under the shed, the sun spinning downward toward the horizon, the possibility of discovery swelling larger by the second.

  They locked themselves into each other as the outside world clattered onward, its population inches from the midst of their passion - danger, ecstasy, the subtle brutality of lust ... and just a thin, thin door.

  That night he fucked his wife so hard her eyeballs glowed.

  Next morning, on the front porch, listening to two strangers play country music on harmonica and guitar, she with her Mimosa, he with his Bloody Mary, the cool westerly breeze pushing the temperatures down, down, down, his wife raised her hand to his arm and smiled at him, her eyes filled with knowing.

  Jive

  Angling down to Strangertown my shoes clip clap on pavement like bop and beep twins snappin’ their fingers at each other and I dive into this dive where the cool cats play all night long, rain or fog, and I run into the sound of a lyricist, man, a lyricist on the ivories - you know, the kind who can do melody and make it all natural. Inspired! He caught me up short so I pulled a chair, ordered my favorite smash-face and got into his groove. You see... I’m a bass man and I know more than Jack about this kind of music, like when somebody’s jes’ foolin’ and when they are really riding a groove... and this cat was in a groove of his own making, a groove like I hadn’t heard anywhere before.

  He was doin’ the one-man, you know, the lonesome, and I was thinking he could use a bass man when this chick gets up and wanders over to the piano and puts her hand on the wood and stares at him all sweet like. So I think this is a score for him but then she starts singing like a goddamned nightingale and it was so sweet I just about lost it right there. I had to dip my hand in solid water chunks and slap my face back into the world we live in and then I started hearing bass lines. Counterpoint to the sweet melody. Roots and fifths and passing tones to the cord structure this cat was grooving,’ major sevenths, and augmented ninths, Jesus! he even threw in a sharp-5, flat-5 resolving dominant to tonic and I was fingering notes in the air.

  I didn’t think anybody would notice but the maestro did. He watched me move my hand and like he was hearing my riff without the vibe being made so he jerked his head between beat three and four and I stood up.

  I didn’t have my axe in my pocket, not being large enough or small enough, but I caught the rays from an upright standing in the corner chilling for the next set and without asking I took that lovely piece of love and began clicking in the groove.

  Like it was a little slice of heaven, man. Like it was that we had met somewhere before we met and all this was recapitulation in real time. We finished the tune, “Kind of Blue,” it was, and he started right in to “Autumn in New York.” I mean without taking a breath or nothing. She winked approval at me but nothing from him. Nothin’. What I knew by him not saying
anything was that he was cool with me. So I kept playing.

  Well Zephaniah, turns out, doesn’t say much even when he’s talkin.’ Found that out. At the end of the set he just pushed a card in my hand with an address for the next gig. Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. Shit.

  What had I stepped in? That was the big time and I just rode right in on my notes and my stupidity. He didn’t even know if I was a serial killer or something,’ a closet murderer disguised as a bass player.

  It was winter. All you had to dodge in San Francisco in winter was an occasional rainstorm. Maybe some wind. Maybe fog. But Donner Pass killed off a bunch of dudes if I’m not mistaken. Anyway we went there in his Toyota van, my bass, his keyboard and me in the back. Zep and Josie up front like they was parents or something.

  Come to find out it was snowing up there. I guess nobody read the weather report. I mean really storming, streaks of snow sliding sideways against the windows. Come time to put on the chains and Zep stormed out of the car like a fuckin Samurai warrior.

  What I didn’t know about him was that he had a temper. Love the man for his temper. But I just about wet my pants laughing. Here he was in the blinding snow, down his back under the car with the dirty, muddy, ice dropping on his priceless hands and directly he stands up, screams something unintelligible and starts banging the side of the car with the chain. By the time I got out to see what the fuck was going on the whole side of the car was dented in like a semi rolled by two inches inside the paint job.

  I stood there. He stood there.

  “Oops,” he said.

  Chain control was standing right beside us all the time. I paid the 20 bucks and we went on.

  Harrah’s was way cool. They treated us like the royalty we weren’t but liked a lot anyway and we had room service and gambling chits and a stage with a lot of drunk people out to have a good time and get laid screaming their fuckin’ heads off in front of us. In spite of their altered state of mind, they did have good taste. Educated freaks.

  Zep was in orbit. There wasn’t a note on that damn keyboard he didn’t hit and each and every one he touched with a purpose in mind. His brain must have been short circuiting like a powerhouse in a rainstorm because one time I could swear I saw smoke coming off his head.

  It was like getting to a place you’d been going to all your life, musically, I mean. For when we hit the groove, wow, comets started zizzing through the air.

  Big applause, standing ovation. After all the hand shakes we sat in the bar, each with our preferred poison ordered and paid for by some well-wisher. It was an easy drunk. More than that, the success of the music lifted us to that place where you think you might accomplish most anything, looking around for unfinished business.

  Zep downed his drink and left.

  That left Josie and me by our lonesome.

  “What’s with him?” I asked her.

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out all along. I’ve been singing with him over two years now but never had much success knowing anything about him but his music.”

  “I mean, not a word from him and we just busted balls out there.”

  “I know,” she said. “He’s a genius” - she paused to stir her Cosmo - “but not long on social graces.”

  “More than that,” I said. She looked a little misty-eyed so I just said, “Whatever.”

  We talked about tunes we liked, performers we thought were good enough to listen to, places we’d played. Then we come back around to Zep.

  “I always thought you two were a couple,” I said.

  “Naw,” she said, then laughed kind of funny. “I don’t know him at all.” She played with a twist of lemon on the table, rolled it in her fingers, flipped it away. “I always thought that the only way I would ever know anything about him was to seduce him.”

  Now the idea of Josie and sex really started me harmonizing. She was a simple girl but really quite attractive. She had a round face with a flashy smile. She was short but well proportioned. Most of all, she had a spirit that I loved coming through in the sweet tonalities of her voice. When she sang it was not the melody you heard but her soul twisting that melody into a song. Now she had brought up sex but then there was this sadness she wasn’t talking about me.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She looked up at me. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

  Jesus! An attractive woman talks about sex and then leaves the table. It’s enough to start an earthquake.

  I didn’t really know how long she would be gone, where she was going or what she was doing but I was committed to a pretty woman with a soulful voice to keep my ass on the chair. So I did. But I got really drunk. Everybody buying me drinks, me, stuck here waiting for a woman I wasn’t sure where was.

  By the time she did get back I was wasted as garbage on a barge. And just about as motionless. Well, she come up to me an put a hand on my shoulder and I would have jumped up were it not for the liquor in me so she sat down and decided to tell me everything in great detail. I mean, flesh and body and entrails kind of detail.

  “So you probably know where I went.”

  “No.”

  “Silly. I went to seduce Zep. I decided I needed to know who he was once and for all. I found him in his room, high on cocaine, and rutting around like a buck in October. I asked him what he was doing and he just said, ‘getting fucked.’”

  “It was clear to me that subtleties were wasted on him at this point so I just took off my clothes and stood there right in front of him.”

  “Jesus, god. What did he do?”

  “It was very interesting. I could tell he was interrupted from whatever it was he was doing to himself by a powerful urge that made him stand still and stare at me. I was determined so I didn’t move. This went on for a while and I finally said. Well aren’t you going to do something about it?”

  “Oh Shit!”

  “Yeah, shit. I was shocked. His eyes. Jesus, his eyes!”

  “What about them?”

  “I don’t know how to describe them. Fire, I guess. They were on fire.”

  “Didn’t that scare you?”

  She took a large swallow of her drink, then tilted her head to one side, eyes on the bottom of her glass as if that would tell her anything.

  “I came there to find out who he was and I was determined.”

  “He fucked you.”

  “He was a madman. He genatilized every part of me: under my arms, my chin, between my breasts... even my feet. It was really weird. I didn’t think I was interacting with a person at all, more like an untamed spirit of some kind occupying a human body.”

  “And when he finally came inside me I could see him.”

  She paused.

  I looked around.

  “I don’t know if you know this about women but when a man comes a woman can tell a lot about him, who he is, how he is made, what makes him the way he is... ”

  “I’m guessing you were surprised.”

  “More that that.” She looked up. “I was terrified. I saw deep inside him, his past, his traumas, lots of hurt, lots of violence.” She paused and fingered the rim of her glass. “I think that if it were not for his music he would be in jail.”

  She trembled as she said this. I could see her shaking across the table. It was like she was a little girl terrified by a nightmare that wouldn’t go away. She scared me being so scared herself.

  “I think I need your help,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “I need to come back to where I was. I can’t seem to get there by myself. Would you help me?”

  I didn’t make this mess and I wasn’t sure what she had in mind but she was a good kid so I played along. “Sure,” I said. “What do you want?”

  She looked at me a long time. It seemed she was seeing me
for the first time. “Do you mind taking seconds?” she said.

  I didn’t know what the hell she was saying for a moment. Then I kind of had an idea. In any case this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.

  “At your service,” I says.

  “Good,” she said, and took my hand.

  We walked up to her room and she opened the door. The room was clean and organized, not like the one the men occupied next door. “Let’s do it normal,” she said. “I just need to find my way back home again.”

  I took her in my arms. It was a long time she was trembling there. It kind of made me horny, her trembling like that, all vulnerable, and asking for me to...

  She was taking off my clothes. Jesus! And kissing me. Me the bass man. When is it that the bass men get this kind of stuff? And now she’s got me pretty much naked.

  “I’m really drunk,” I says.

  “Don’t worry, she says, “I’ll help you.” And she gobbles me up and pretty soon I am as stiff as a fence post but a lot more touchy feely like, you know, and, by god, we had a good time. She was smiling and giggling and I was playing with every part of her I could think of to play with and she was letting me do anything I wanted and she said that this was so much more like normal even though I was thinking this was pretty abnormal but I guess it’s all in where you’ve been. Anyway, we fucked every which way, which surprised me being so drunk and all but when it was over she was clearly done with that previous experiment and I, well I, was pretty inspired!

  We got really close after that. She said she had a boyfriend, though I never seen one, so we don’t screw regularly. But when we go on tour and she gets lonely she comes knocking on my door.

  You probably wonder how the combo is doing. Really goddamned well, I’d say. We cut an album last week, did a couple of appearances on KJAZ and we were just booked at the Both/And and at the Fillmore Auditorium. There’s talk of an East Coast tour. Give them Easterners out there some of that “West Coast Sound.”