The Taste of a Woman Page 5

  Cottonwood

  I am the maker

  of children

  of light.

  They will want

  to leave me.

  In time

  I will give them

  to the wind.

  Whatever else it was doing the writing was making her better. She would never be the same but she didn’t want to return to her former self. That would mean giving up the transformation Rudolpho had made for her.

  We recover, she thought, but are not of one piece any more. Yet, in the midst of the sorrow that had dropped heavy into her air-tight realm she’d found a way to keep him in this world.

  She was claiming his language.

  Asian Girl

  “What you need is an Asian Girl,” she said.

  It began with sadness. Cosmic sadness, he thought, in the sense that he couldn’t tell which loss it was that triggered it. Nor could he identify the feeling at first. It was his body that knew. The body always knows. And it was telling him in no uncertain terms that things were not as they should be. That was before the hospital and the oxygen.

  She saw it, that sadness, lurking behind his eyes, visible beyond the crush of pneumonia that dulled the spark usually shining there, slamming him, hollow-eyed, in a hospital bed. Nurses do that. Pick up stuff like that. Taught to observe, pay attention. But this wasn’t part of a job. It was a people thing. She was interested in him.

  Afternoons, she would set aside her nursing a while, draw the curtain and sit on the edge of his bed talking quietly. He looked forward to these little visits that felt like sunlight. He asked her to lunch when he was discharged. She brought a camera and sneaked a picture of him feeding a squirrel. He knew the picture meant something to her.

  It meant danger for him but he allowed the photograph because she made the sadness go away. Once it left he could look at it as if he stepped back from a painting to see how the details fit together. She made it far enough away that he could think what made it in the first place, why it was there, inside him.

  The way he talked she could tell there was trouble at home - anger, frustration. Maybe her calling as a nurse made her want to heal that part of him too, the part out of reach for antibiotics and oxygen.

  Bonsai maple in the kitchen window. Ravel’s Bolero. On the front walk he was a young boy ignited by the spark of danger. She wore a muslin dress. Nothing underneath. He could sense the separateness of her thighs under the table.

  It was a lie that had so much going for it, it didn’t feel like lying. For he was learning that joy exists in certain deceits.

  He puzzled how some women give themselves for love, some for the hope of it, others to assuage the need.

  Tired of guessing he gave up, overrun, as he was, by pleasure. Beads of water on her breasts. He watched her wipe them away. She knew everything she needed to know to forgive it all in advance. He just knew he’d stopped thinking.

  That first lunch was tense with anticipation. She did not resist his kiss and drew him quickly to her bed. He undressed her with the care of a first epiphany.

  “Nice breasts,” he said.

  “They work,” she said.

  Was it anxiety that made him slow to get hard when she took him in her mouth? She took him out. She massaged him with her thumbs.

  “It’s marvelous,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A penis, don’t you think? It’s the most amazing organ.”

  Or maybe it was the paralysis of guilt. She took him back in her mouth half hard. When he didn’t come soon she stopped sucking. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  He rolled her on her back and entered her without a word. And soon was pushing deeper and deeper inside her, feeling the feeling that told him he was getting ready to get ready to move to the precipice of coming... it was then, when that groove clicked in, that he could relax and let the anxiety drift from him, away from them both outside the room... and not wanting to think too much about her, which might shut down his roadway to orgasm, he concentrated upon himself and exploded inside her.

  She was happy.

  They made love many times in many different ways: under the table where they had lunch, in the bathtub, among the clothes in the closet. That was when she said what she said. Which was, “What you need is an Asian lover.”

  It puzzled and thrilled him, possibly at the same time. No woman had ever said he needed to fuck anyone other than they themselves, especially right after they’d made love. Amazing generosity, he thought. This is the attitude I’ve missed all my life. I’ve grown cold thinking it probably didn’t exist. He was reluctant to agree to her prompt right away so as not to discount the value of the secret life they’d manufactured where no space to manufacture really existed. It was fragile like that.

  But he did ask why she said such a thing.

  “They’re supposed to be good at lovemaking,” she said. “Subservient, innovative. Might be good for you.”

  She talked about the first time she made love. How she was seventeen and it was her yoga teacher who said it wouldn’t hurt. He lied. But it was better after that and a few times later she actually enjoyed it.

  She talked about how one of her lovers wanted to ass fuck. She made him wear a condom. “Once you do that you never go back to the vagina. Isn’t that true?”

  He didn’t know. But agreed anyway so as to appear knowledgeable. She nodded with that quality of admiration women sometimes give when they want to look up to a man even though he doesn’t deserve it. That was part of what was good between them. He might not love her in the sense of “forever after” but he was discovering a lost continent-sized ability of a woman to take care of a man. He could get used to that.

  Would he have thought of an Asian woman for himself? Nah. But now she mentioned it, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “Maybe you could find one,” he said one day.

  “One what?”

  Now he realized that with the upcoming utterance of the words “Asian girl” he was about to risk disruption, a shift in the rudder of their relationship, permanently, perhaps sapping the energy from it - the easy access, the automatic acceptance of almost anything - loosing all they’d put together. But didn’t she suggest it in the first place? If she was even half serious it was an invitation not to be denied.

  “An Asian girl,” he said out loud. And then to offset the attention drawn to him, he added, “Like you said.”

  There followed a frozen silence in which he was instantly worried he had made damage. Atomic bomb damage. He almost jumped to reverse himself. But he remembered this was not his usual judgmental environment but one of rare permission his Nurse-lover had created for him. So he let it ride. He wanted to test the limit of these relaxed perimeters.

  Her face had no expression for a long, elastic moment, When he didn’t flinch she simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “Might be fun.”

  Next time he came to lunch there was an Asian girl sitting at the table. Conversation was surprisingly easy. There was laughter. Some kind of club-like atmosphere was in place so that each accepted the other without the usual arduous breaking of formality. Trust offered, therefore respect.

  Lunch was turkey sandwiches, rye bread, spicy mustard, lettuce, tomato, a sesame cucumber salad and fresh-squeezed lemonade. Three cookies on a clean white plate. Anyone watching might have thought family.

  He reached to touch the face of the Asian girl. She dropped her eyes. He lifted her chin. “Watch this,” he said, but before his touch left her he pressed his thumb gently against her lips. They were soft as miniature pillows, painted brilliant red, an inviting stickiness that rubbed onto his thumb a little patch of color.

  He took the color and pressed it to Nurse-Lover’s cheek, painting a smudge of rose there, then drew her to him and kissed
her, gently. Her lips moved with his but she remained poised as if taking a small break from eating, her fork still in hand.

  He turned to the Asian girl. She was misty eyed. He turned back to Nurse-lover, his hands still holding her face. He drew her closer and kissed her again, his hand drifting down now, down her neck teasing at the rim of the offering, opening the envelope further, testing how far it would go, down the graceful arc to the shoulder, down, down to the place her heart beats, to her breast. She dropped her fork and placed her hands upon his head, stroking his hair as he squeezed her breast, rising and falling between his fingers.

  Asian girl was biting her lip. “Come here,” he commanded and she rose and kneeled at his side, hands clasped in front of her, head bowed.

  He lifted her chin again. “Watch,” he said, then turned and slipped his hand under Nurse-lover’s blouse and lifted her breast into the V shaped opening between lapels. He took Asian girl’s hand and kissed it, moving it slowly to the hovering space over the pink nipple. He moved his mouth close to the nipple and blew on it, making it quiver. Nurse-lover took a quick breath and sighed.

  He moved Asian girl’s hand back and forth over the breezy space between breast and fingers closing the gap until just her fingertips grazed the upturned nipple. Then he pushed her hand deep into the pillowing breast, turned Asian girl’s face toward his own and licked the sticky redness from her lips.

  Asian girl kept her hand on Nurse-lover’s breast as she became more and more pliant to his kisses, opening her mouth breathing Eastern spices and musk into his. He lost himself in the shrinking distance between cultures, the overlapping shorelines, ancestors remembering forgotten friendships. Her waist was tiny as he pulled her to him, letting his hand slip down to the tight round boyish bulge of her hips.

  He turned to Nurse-lover, bringing Asian girl’s redness to her lips, smearing it all over her, from lips and tongue to the vermillion border where the face begins its ascent to the cheeks stretching color and mucus over the arch of her high French cheeks. She groaned, raising her chest against the hand and fingers that blessed her, thrusting herself into the palm with little jolts.

  He had guessed that Asian girl’s breasts would be small, infantile as he assumed most were. He was astonished to realize they were not, rather like small oranges, rounded, placed high. He wanted them now and brought his unoccupied hand directly to them. She gasped and moaned and intensified her kissing of his neck. He freed his lips from Nurse-lover in time to see his hand pop into Asian girl’s kimono-like blouse and wrap around a very tight breast. With his other arm he lifted her until he was facing directly the newly exposed breast which he took between his lips rubbing his tongue over and over against the rising nipple.

  Left hand free, he slipped along the thigh of Nurse-lover up to the space between swan necks bent willingly to the side, a stimulus which made her rise quickly and taking both of their hands pulled them to her bed.

  They undressed Asian girl where she stood by the bed. They ran their hands over her body.

  Her turn. To undress them both. She chose Nurse lover first kissing each new part she revealed. When she undressed him she took a bottle of sweet smelling oil from her tote and rubbed it over his penis until is shined. She pushed him to the bed and straddled him from behind, clutching his member between the soles of her feet, rubbing them back and forth until he was trembling all over. Nurse lover took him in her mouth while Asian girl rubbed her folds with oil. Nurse lover took Asian girl by the hair and turned her around and pushed the penis into her from behind.

  They frolicked and played and prodded and responded and swooned without restraint until eventually, oiled and exhausted, they fell in a heap on the bed.

  A little time went by.

  The two women appeared to be asleep or to have elevated their spirits to another realm. He was considering the sequence of events that had lead them there and wondered if alteration in any of the elements along the way would have veered the course in some completely different direction. Possibilities were endless.

  As impermanent things are lived more intensely knowing they will not last, so his sadness returned to him. But different now, as if its noxious properties had drifted away, as if the honey of their shared company had dissolved in the milk of the small cosmos they built around them. Rare, he thought, the openness that allowed the three of them to be who they could never have been anywhere else in their lives, each sadness borne within the vessel of a lived intimacy, risen from fantasy into being where it could now return as a perpetual reality in the hidden offices of memory.

  The women were sleeping, side by side, face down. He reached over and stroked their asses lined up like swans nesting upon a linen pond. He watched the way the light illuminated the undulations, bringing a texture of softness that could have forgiven almost anything.

  He would remember that image, that most of all, its unspeakable beauty, the completion it made for him in the covenant that sex had made for all three of them, blessing even their silly, complicated lives.

  The Fetish Chronicles

  Brunch with Trixie

  “What you need is a fetish,” Trixie said, and then she took a long draught from her coffee cup.

  Rachael felt a quiver go through her body and was immediately puzzled by the feeling. She didn’t know what a fetish was, aside from what she imagined having heard the word here and there. How did this even come up? Oh yeah. Their husbands were at work, breakfast dishes cleared, Trixie dropped by to return the lasagna pan and stayed for coffee. In that accident of intimacy topics too reticent to speak for themselves managed to come up, topics that would otherwise shy into the little darknesses that insinuate themselves between the events of the day.

  Yet in this forest clearing, this little protectorate of privacy, Rachael found herself musing out loud about the decline in her sexual pleasures. She even heard herself use the word boring. Astonishing she said that. That’s when Trixie said the word fetish.

  “You must educate me,” said Rachael.

  “You don’t know about fetishes?”

  “I might need a little help.”

  “With pleasure.”

  Rachael felt that tingle again, this time it seemed to migrate downward through her body. She closed her eyes briefly, allowed it to spend itself, and then turned her attention to the lesson she was about to receive.

  “Turns out, I’m a member of a fetish club,” she said.

  “Oh Jesus. An expert.”

  Trixie laughed. “So, let’s start with definitions,” she said. “A fetish, in the usual sense of the word, is an object that has magical powers or has become the residence of a powerful spirit. I like that definition because it ramps up the meaning of fetish as we use the term. The fetish we’re talking about is an object, not part of the body, that is capable of producing potent erotic feelings.”

  Rachael nodded. She furrowed her brow.

  “I like combining the two meanings,” Trixie said. “More power that way.”

  “Interesting,” Rachael said, “and a little scary.”

  “Nonsense. How can you revitalize without the help of some powerful spirit?”

  “Well, if you put it that way... “

  “So listen up. I’ll tell you about my Fetish Club.”

  “Oh my god!”

  “Ready for this? Here we go.”

  Both took swallows of coffee and leaned back for the story was sure to be birthed from some other world.

  “So my friends and I were talking and it turns out each of us was interested in getting a fetish. How did that happen? Just like you we were bored with sex and instead of hiring out as a call girl or having some stupid love affair that would turn sour we landed on this idea. Then we decided to share our experiences. There is something about a group of fine looking women sitting around talking about their sexual experiences.
Fetching, really fetching. So once the ball started rolling, boy howdy! did the stories unfold.”

  “Tell me.”

  Trixie looked at Rachael with a knowing smile. She had captured her undivided attention.

  “Each of us has a fetish now. They’re all different. And we use them in different ways. It’s quite interesting and says a lot about our personalities, our sensitivities, our weaknesses. For example, Carole has a Coke Bottle fetish. Not Pepsi, not root beer - nothing will do but Coca-Cola. Empty. Cold. She even refrigerates it.”

  Trixie stopped and looked over at Rachael.

  “And what kind of coke bottle would you guess she uses.”

  Rachel looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Mexican, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s sexier.” Trixie paused and shifted a wry smile to something more contemplative.

  “For god’s sake don’t stop there,’ Rachael said.

  “We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well,” she continued. “I mean, really well. We describe how we use our fetishes. It’s really very exciting.”

  Rachael caught herself puffing little short breaths. She noticed and slowed down. “Details, Trixie, details.”

  “Okay, lets take Carole and her fetish. She lifts the bottle out of the fridge very delicately, almost with reverence. She gives it a name which she changes from time to time. Currently it’s Frank. So then she takes Frank and wraps her hands around his coldness, letting it seep into her body little by little. She takes the bottle up to the V in her lapel and pushes the mouth down between her breasts and slides it up and down, rotating it and twisting it to the side, lifting each breast from underneath, flipping the nipple inside the bra with the tip of the bottle, all that coldness settling in to her skin.”

  The tingling returned to Rachael, this time, no doubt as to its location.