The Taste of a Woman Read online

  She moved her hands back to her clit and thrusted and writhed against it, getting higher and more passionate. Presently, she reached down and with two fingers pressed the egg deep into the vagina, so far in that her whole finger was inside, pushing it to the very back recesses. She gasped at this but kept going. She repeated the motions she had done before becoming more and more excited. Then she took the second egg and began rolling it in the butter of her pubis, then pushing it inside as well. When the second egg was well inside she focused on her actions at the periphery which intensified until she was moaning and writhing and then convulsing, shaking the bed.

  She swooned. Rested. Rolled over, the eggs still inside her.

  Time passed. Rachael didn’t want to disturb but was curious.

  Trixie’s eyes popped open. “Oh. You’re wondering about the eggs?”

  “How did you know?”

  She didn’t answer, just rolled over on her back. “Watch this,” she said. She spread her legs. Her stomach began to move like a belly dancer, in waves. Her pelvis tilted and something white crowned at her entrance. Seconds later, the egg dropped out and rolled a short distance.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Not easy but we women are equipped. It’s only a matter of training,” she said as the second egg dropped out. One day I will do this with raw eggs, I swear.

  Fully impressed, Rachael sat on the bed beside her and placed her hand at Trixie’s waist, stroking her with her thumb. “Very lovely,” she said.

  Trixie rolled back to her fetal position and closed her eyes.

  “Glad you liked it,” she said. “But we’re not done.”

  Rachael

  Rachael watched her for a long time, lying on the bed, fetal position, the eggs near her tummy, entranced by the appearance of one who had just done the most intimate of performances for her. What a gift. What a feeling. She felt - what was it? - she couldn’t define it. Something like awe, respect, a drawing of her consciousness to a place very near to that of Trixie’s.

  Without thinking about it and without meeting any resistance, Rachael began to loosen the buttons on her blouse. Before she knew it she had the blouse totally undone and on the floor. It gave her a sense of freedom, standing there in the presence of someone, a trusted someone, half naked. After all, hadn’t Trixie earned the right to a protected quality of closeness.

  The bra was off and quickly thereafter all the rest of her clothing. She stood a moment enjoying the fresh touch of air on her body.

  Then she quietly navigated around the bed and slipped in behind Trixie covering her with the bed sheets, wrapping her arms around her, pulling her close.

  Trixie sighed in semi-sleep, still rocking in the orange reverie of her afterglow. Rachael brought her face alongside Trixie’s, resting cheek to ear, her hand cradling her breast.

  They rested there a while.

  Presently, Trixie roused and turned on her back, looking Rachael in the eye.

  “We’ve got to find your fetish,” she said.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “That’s right. That’s right.”

  “Where to start, that’s the question.”

  “You don’t want to try too much too fast,” Trixie said. “You want the fetish to tell you what it wants.”

  Rachael had s quizzical look on her face.

  “You know, like writing a poem. If you know how it ends before you start, what’s the fun in that?”

  Rachael laughed. “Start me up? Is that what you’re saying.”

  Trixie got a gleam in her eye. “Start you up? Yes, I think we should do exactly that.”

  “Uh oh,” said Rachael giving Trixie a sidelong look.

  Trixie ignored her and just started pushing back on Rachael’s shoulder.

  A thousand thoughts raced through Rachael’s mind. What was going to happen here? Trixie looked like she was going to attack her. What if her husband came home? It would be one thing for him to find Trixie misbehaving... but Trixie and Rachael?

  By this time Trixie had pushed Rachael over on her back, had caressed her breasts, licked her nipples and now had her hand on her cunt.

  To hell with it, thought Rachael. “Take me!” she said out loud, and brushed her cares away.

  “God you’re wet,” said Trixie, and she lifted Rachael’s wet passions to her belly button and smeared it all around. She returned to her project opening Rachael little by little, forcing her face into a wet kiss that probed her mouth deeply with her tongue.

  Rachael gave in completely. Her arms rested out to her side, her body relaxed. All the tension flowed out of her into the distant universe. She was captive to her passions.

  “You’re not so cold, young lady,” she said. “Look how you are pumping my hand. Look how you are beginning to moan. I can see the heat rising through your belly, your breasts. You, my dear, are on fire.”

  Trixie was inside her now, rubbing, sliding, twisting the willing recesses of her cunt whipping her channel into a heated kitchen of passions. She kept her hand inside her, moving her torso over Rachael’s face. With her hand behind her head she turned her face toward her, forced her up to her breast and shoved it in her open mouth.

  Rachael gagged, then sucked and slurped, hungrily, working her tongue at the bulbous tip. A rhythm of thrusts set up with Trixie’s hand below, her breast above so that Rachael rocked throughout the extremity of her body. Trixie withdrew her breast temporarily to view her position below but Rachael said, “Uh, uh,” and shook her head. Trixie smiled and forced her breast deep into Rachael’s mouth once again, rotating her shoulder against her face, spreading her mouth with more and more breast until it was almost gone, whispering, “Come, girl, come girl, let loose, let loose everything... ”

  It didn’t take long. Rachael seized and choked and grunted, arching her back, shaking the bed with her involuntary lurches and quivers.

  She cried. She shook. She grunted like a samurai. Her breathing peaked, almost wheezed, then slowed.

  She breathed deeply and loudly.

  And collapsed.

  After a while she opened her eyes and looked at Trixie.

  She held her in her gaze a long time, not speaking. Then finally she said, “I think you are my fetish.”

  Trixie laughed out loud. “Right,” she said. “And all I need to do now is make myself really, really small, perch at your bedside, maybe sitting right there under your lamp so that when your husband comes on to you, you can singe him with that fire of yours.”

  Rachael chuckled. She sighed. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Rubbed her face. Then she paused. Her eyes lit with recognition. “Hold on a minute,” she said. The idea that was assembling inside was reading across her face. “Stay right there.” She rose from the bed.

  Trixie stopped her half way to the door.

  “What do you want?” Rachael said.

  “I’d like to see the girl I just fucked,” she said.

  Rachael stood with her back to her laughing softly, arms stretched out to her side.

  Trixie traced her classic shape with her eyes, the wide shoulders, sleek ribs, deep cut to the narrows of her waist flaring out over her hips down to her tapering thighs.

  Rachael turned and faced her.

  Her midnight black hair streamed down over her shoulders to the top of her breasts which hung gracefully like oranges in a sling. She had a little pooch to her belly that reminded Trixie of those painted by Peter Paul Rubens, the black triangle of her mossy escutcheon above her sex looking like a cutout pasted to her crotch.

  “Lovely,” she said. “Now go do whatever you’re going to do, but you come right back to me.”

  Rachael turned. Was gone. Then right back.

  Dangling by one arm at her side was a rag doll, wide blue eyes,
generic smile, gingham dress, yellow pigtails.

  Rachael was grinning ear to ear.

  Trixie laughed and nodded her head.

  Rachel placed the doll under the bedside lamp. Looked at it longingly. Straightened its rangy hair.

  “That will do,” said Trixie. “That will do very well.”

  Spirits in the Stone

  He knew when to show up.

  She would be the one to open the store, the youngest member of the staff, the one who would have the least seniority, the one who would be relegated to early morning hours when only a few customers came to shop. That was when he’d found her there before, stopping by after an early breakfast with “Wild Bill” his inventor friend, ruminating over a few ideas to make them both rich.

  She was on the phone. Her eyes flashed from under the bend the head makes when turned down into the curl of conversation. He glanced and turned away, moving his attention to the sculpture, silent where they stood on pedestals throughout the store, patient as trees.

  If he were younger and less wise, a beautiful woman could have made him stare too long. Gage your response by theirs, he reminded himself. Not too much too soon.

  “Oh hello,” she said. It was a cheery and enthusiastic hello, a voice laced with a slight air of recognition, a voice that sounded too full of youth to have room for the calculated distance of age and experience. “Can I help you with anything?” She paused as if measuring him, reading him. “Or maybe you already know your way around,” she said.

  Her tonality was unabashed and warm. Pretty, probably about 23 or 24, just out of college, he guessed, full of naïveté, innocent enough to show automatic respect those older than she.

  She walked with him through the store, inviting him to touch the statues, talking about the wonderful feeling she got from the smooth, sculpted detail the artist put there, as if something spiritual rested within the stone.

  “Do you feel it,” she said.

  She had actually said the word spiritual, not, he thought, in the California way which asserted that everything was righteous, and which to him lacked credibility, but with full confidence and respect. He liked that. And the courage, or was it lack of cynicism, it took to talk that way.

  “That must be Gopito.” He said nodding in the direction of a bold sculpture across the room - sweeping hair, head tucked under with chin on neck, serpentine twist of spine... .

  “I see you know your artists,” she said.

  “We have three of his,” he said, “all created at that point in his career when he was in that magical transition from representational to something wilder, more abstract,” he paused to think for a moment, “maybe you could say, spiritual.”

  Now he had used the term. He felt a curious relief doing so, as if by her invitation he had been given permission to expose his own sense of reverence, covered over by a little too much experience in the outside world.

  He was conscious he had used the word we. Never any use to disguise your real place in the world, he thought. If a woman was going to be attracted to you she would be attracted whether you were married or not. And she always felt a little safer if you were. Curious how that works. He’d grown weary backtracking, making corrections to the misperceptions he created in the misguided belief that you had to be available in order to strike chemistry with a woman.

  “We also have a Kwechete and a Musikiwa,” he said.

  “Wow!”

  They were standing at another Gopito, an arcing, sweeping curtain of stone ending in a rounded seed-like spiral expressing an internal transition from body to spirit. “Lost in Spiral Time,” the card said. She touched the head and rounded her fingers over the top and down its fluted sides. His hand followed hers.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “Yeah. Love the stone, and how it almost glows. And these colorations are all by accident.”

  “Minerals?”

  “Yes. But how they are placed on the final sculpture is what makes them so remarkable.”

  Their hands swept to the center and touched each other but did not immediately withdraw.

  He turned to the Romano next door, traced the flat stylized face with the backs of his fingers. She came and stood next to him. “Mother and child,” she said.

  “Common theme, he said. That, and lovers lost in Rufaro.”

  “Rufaro. The ecstasy that makes their world the only world.”

  “Yes.”

  She leaned a little his direction and turned her eyes slightly away, as if glazed in thought about that state of adoration where nothing else matters. He was conscious of her breathing. He noticed the white lace of her blouse between the sharp black v of her lapels. It bent open a little as she turned. Little events like that were no accident, he concluded. A woman always knows where her body is, how much can be seen... and who is doing the seeing.

  He moved his eyes back to her face in the moment just before she began to speak. A momentary belief flashed through him that she had waited for the moment.

  “That’s why I love working in this store,” she said.

  “Daily temptation?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How to resist taking everything home. I’d be bankrupt by now.”

  “I don’t have any at home.”

  “Any?”

  “No. I just enjoy them here. But talking to you has made me decide to buy a piece I’ve been admiring. I want it for a friend.”

  She walked over to a drawer and pulled out a small sculpted head of a young woman. “Pretty, isn’t she?”

  A shiver shot through him at the thought of a woman describing the beauty of another woman.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m going to put it aside right now.”

  It was time for him to go to work. The moment would soon be out of reach. “Sweet,” he said, “to be thinking of someone else.” He reached to her back and rubbed his hand up and down her spine. Then pulled her to him, tight against his side. She pushed her head unexpectedly into the little hollow between his chin and chest and held it there.

  “Let’s touch the stones while holding on to each other,” he said.

  They walked with arms around each other’s waists to a sculpture of a woman carrying her baby on her back. They touched her all over. He took a deep breath. She murmured. They moved to the Kudzu family clustering together in an interlocking network of repeating patterns and pressed their fingers through the holes in the stone tracing the supple necks, the large ears, the sweep of back flowing down to exaggerated haunches.

  They moved to “Spirit Transforming” and felt the space around it filled with energy pushing out from it, pressing their hands slowly into the center, a globus spheroid spinning out wings, wings like dresses flowing. The surface was cool to touch, smooth, reassuring to the palm of the hand, paused over rounded skin. He took her hand and drew it to the crevice between transforming spirit and its unfolding wings, curling her fingers into the groove, tracing its extent of its reach around the circumference of the spirit in the place where it was struggling to free itself from itself.

  Their hands moved separate now but together in parallel motion as if the stone dictated movements of the body attempting to transcend. Their hands touched and he closed his hand over hers. Her knees buckled and she almost swooned. He caught her and pulled her to him. She relaxed in his arms.

  There was a little room at the back of the store, a curtain pulled to the side and a space where she prepared the sculptures and packaged them for shipping. He took her there, still holding her, and pulled the curtain closed. He turned her up against the high, bench-like shelf and pressed against her. She lifted her face to him and he kissed her, gently at first, then with licking motions, wetting her lips and chin. “You are my favorite sculpture in all the store,” he said.

 
“Do I compare? she asked.

  “Let me count the ways,” he said.

  He stroked her face with the backs of his fingers then took her hand and placed it on her own face. “Feel this,” he said. “This is the radiance of the stone coming forth,” he said. He moved his hands to her shoulders and held them, stroking with his thumb. “This is the graceful arc of wings to lift you.”

  He was still pressing her against the table with his pelvis against hers but leaning back a little at the shoulders as he did so, looking at her. “There are no words for this,” he said, sliding his hands to her breasts.

  She looked down at his hands on her. “It is beautiful,” she said, “how touch and sculpture come together.”

  They jumped into a kiss. She was mewling softly, he sliding up her dress, keeping it elevated in the grasp of their torsos, pressed together. His hands defined the rounded arc of her muscular bottom, slipping under the panty line, dropping the delicate silkiness to her knees.

  When he entered her it was a surprise that wasn’t surprising at all, so far away from the day beginning as it did, yet part of the list of things most desired in the unconscious even as the day began in inertia as it often does, as if only the perfect sequence of art and attraction and willingness could do magic like this.

  He moved in and out of her, standing there, pressed against the bench where the sculptures arrive and depart, surrounded by the forms looking on, the forms they had touched together, spirits rising silently, silently... applauding.

  Ovid and The Darwinian Matter of Survival

  “The blink is the sign of a woman who knows she’s being looked at,” he said.

  He looked up at me as if from under the brim of an imaginary hat and folded his hands on the table between us.

  “Neither good nor bad,” he said. “Just means she’s decided not to return your stare.”

  I was still recovering from this first volley from a man I didn’t know and hadn’t asked and who made me think I should not have pulled up to the bar next to.