Elliot Mabeuse (18 page)

We skipped down the stairs and out into the street and I took her across to Long Viet, which is this tiny hole-in-the-wall place I've always dreamed of taking a girl to, pitch black on the inside and as wide as a closet with tiny portholes for windows and lit only

by the blue neon sign. It had a ridiculously narrow mirrored bar in the back like a sliver of glass that made the whole place feel like an aquarium.

Down on the street we ran into Jimmy again, this time with Uncle Stanley, a little, round-headed, sloe-eyed guy I didn't know very well, and Ricky Sun, who I did know and liked. Ricky'd been in the poetry course I'd taught at Lakeview College, which was just a few blocks down, and was a funny kid with bleached blond hair combed into a sculptural brush that gave him an unfortunate resemblance to Beavis or Butthead. It was unfortunate because I think Ricky did it intentionally out of the mistaken belief that people thought Beavis and Butthead were cool, which they did, but not in the way Ricky thought.

"Conner, Conner, it's an honor!"

The other thing about Ricky is he wrote poetry by lifting strings of words out of the rhyming dictionary.

I smiled. "You guys still around?"

"Where we supposed to go?" Ricky smiled. "Tell us, do you know?"

Emma stepped out where they could see her and the boys, taken by surprise, stood up a bit taller and gave her polite little bows. I introduced her around and they all shook hands, and I was touched to see this sweet formality and Jimmy's showing off as he told the others, "Oh, we've already met, haven't we, Emma?"

I gave her my arm as we crossed the street and she took it. I hadn't felt so fucking proud in years. As I pushed open the door of Long Viet, I looked back across

the street and saw Jimmy and Uncle Stanley smiling at me, their heads almost touching, and Ricky Sun with eyes wide, giving me both thumbs up.

* * * *

It was time for us to talk and there were things I wanted to tell her, very important things, but they were all confused and only half clear and I'd really hoped for better than that. For someone of my age and for where I thought I'd be in life by now in terms of maturity and in terms of knowing my own mind, I'd really hoped I'd have better than what I did, this confused mess of half-baked ideas and half-formed thoughts and emotions.

And sitting there in that dark and intimate restaurant with Emma right across from me, waiting for me to say something, it seemed impossible for me to find a place to start, or a way to begin, and so we sat and we ordered these lovely drinks in red glasses they serve, and ordered food and chatted about this and that and I never did say what I really should have said.

But what I really should have said was this:

I'm a writer, Emma, and a bad poet, and I'll never have the money your David does. I don't know what I've gotten myself into here. I started an affair with you because I wanted your body. I wanted to fuck you and do terrible things to you and I thought that's all I wanted. Now I seem to have fallen in love with you and I don't understand how and I don't know what to do about it.

I don't even know you very well, and I'm almost afraid to know you better. Maybe I love you because I don't know you. Maybe if I knew what you were really like and what

you wanted out of life and what you think is important, I wouldn't care for you at all and that would be the end of this. You're a lot younger than me and we see things differently. Things matter a lot more to you—material things—and I gave up on those a long time ago, probably because I know I'll never have them, but also because I think I found something more important in my writing.

I don’t talk about this much because I feel silly when I do, but when I write, I feel like the most important man in the world, because when I write, I give meaning to things. I create significance, and I create meaning, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important in the long run than life and death.

You're sitting here with me now, and we were just up at my flat and I was holding you and making you come in my arms, and what does all this mean? We're both here now telling ourselves stories, trying to find the one we like best to describe what's going on. Are we just playing with each other sexually? Are we in love? You're wondering if I'm just using you, if I think you're just a whore. I'm wondering if I'm just some cheap thrill you know you can string along and then dump before you settle down with your boyfriend. We're writing this story, Emma. Everyone's a writer. We all write our own lives and the lives of those around us. It's just that I do it all the time and I think about how I do it more than most people. I do it large. I'm aware of it.

There are stories within stories within stories, Emma. We live in a sea of stories and meanings and symbols. When I first fucked you in that cold empty lecture hall, don’t you think I knew what it meant? The echoing emptiness of that auditorium, a place where students gather to learn from a teacher, your aloneness in the dark as I touched

you, as you wordlessly begged to be touched? It was cold in there and dark. It was hard. I wasn't kind. Do you know why it had such an effect on you?

When I chased you down in that rainy park and took you in the mud like an animal, do you know what that meant? How you were burning to be free yet needed to be captured and ridden to the ground and fucked in that field in the rain and the grass and the mud with no pretense and no apology and nothing but raw animal passion? I nailed you to the dirt with my cock, Emma. Pulled your hair back ‘til the rain was in your face and rode you like a bitch. It was just what you wanted, wasn't it?

Do you see, Emma? This is what I can give you. This is why I brought you here.

Because tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, I'm going to take you around the city and I'm going to show you other stories, magical stories, impossible stories and unbelievable stories, and I'm going to show you how they connect to you and to what you feel and how they reach deep and connect us to unimaginable things.

Unimaginable things—the emeralds in the gem room at the Field Museum, the Gods of ancient Egypt, the opium dens of colonial China, the Kabalistic Tree of Life, the gold of the Incas in Pizarro's treasure Ships, the magic of the Italian renaissance, the Italian beef sandwiches of Taylor street and the swaying of the willows by Diversey Harbor. They're all linked by erotic imagination and the power of poetry and that's no small stuff. That's the very fire and chains of love right there, Emma, and I'm offering to give it to you. I'm offering to lay all of this at your feet, to bring it to you, bathe you in it.

We'll live in it, because that's what I can give to you, Emma. Do you understand?

I can give you what your love
means.
Telling someone you love them is one thing but

discovering what that
means
, learning what that
feels like
, turning that into a story you
live
—that's a job for a poet, Emma.

And just where are we in all of this? In all this meaning and talk and all this thinking and explaining. Do I even have to say it? It's the one thing that's obvious, that I've been saying all along.

I've been saying it all along, the only way it can be said. Not even a writer can say it with words, because it has to be felt, and it has to be felt because it's not even an idea, it's a sensation, an emotion. A certainty, Emma, that's what it is—that sheer presence of me in you, of me against you, of me with you, melting into you, possessing you, having you, being you. It's that one certainty too important for words.

It's where we start. It's where we end.

This is what I need you to understand, Emma, more than anything, and this is what I can't even say.

When I started this I thought it was some naughty fun—a game about D/s, BDSM, whips and chains. I never knew this would happen to me, that you would open up this floodgate of emotion, break down this dam of passion. You think I'm playing games, and I almost wish that were true, but what I'm feeling is real. It's real and now I don't know how to convince you it's real – and if I can, I’m terrified I might find out it isn’t real to you.

You devastate me, Emma. You destroy me with what you give me. I'm supposed to be the master, I know, and yet you make me weak and helpless, fill me with rage and

strength, turn me into a man like I've never been before. It's sick, insane, maybe pathological, but I don’t know if I can live without it anymore.

When you give yourself to me the way you do, you take me apart and put me back together into something new and strong and clean. You empty me of my rage and anguish and take it into yourself and turn it into something beautiful. I don’t know how you do it. I've never known anyone like you.

And yet I know how it must be for you too. Maybe I'm wrong but I swear I can feel what you feel, how you seem to swell with this sweetness as if you're going to burst, your breasts and your pussy and your whole body all filled with this languorous heaviness. Forgive me Emma, but what you want then is not more sweetness and gentility but to have that pleasure pulled from you, beaten from you and taken, your body pierced and punctured, crushed and squeezed by the arms of desire, bruised by fevered kisses and punished by passion. You want to know a man wants you enough to go mad to have you, will kidnap you and tie you and spend himself upon you and batter you both to pieces in his need to possess you.

That 's how it feels, isn't it? Because that's how it feels to me, and I know when we're together like that, when it's good like that, we're feeling exactly the same thing.

Two people don't get any closer, Emma. You don't know how rare and precious it is, for that one brief instant to be you and feel your own love So that's what I know, Emma. That's all that I know. All of us live most brightly in our lover's hearts, and in mine, right now, you have a palace that shines like the sun.

I can't even make you an offer yet and I don't know what else to say. Just take what I've told you and think about it, and know you're much more to me than what you might think, and this is much more to me than a game. Much, much more.

* * * *

That's what I should have said to her at Long Viet as we ate our bowls of noodles and our barbecued pork and pot stickers and drank our tiny cups of tea. That's what I should have said, but I didn't. She looked so beautiful as she sucked up the noodles, the ends whipping around and splattering drops of broth before disappearing between her pursed lips. She laughed at the delicious suggestivity.

I didn't say anything because I was afraid she really was in it just for the sex, just sowing her wild oats before her marriage to David, and that if I bared my soul to her I'd only make a fool of myself and embarrass us both and lose whatever authority as a Dominant I already had.

But mostly I didn't say anything because I'm such a stupid man.

* * * *

From Long Viet we went right over to Dee's, one of a chain of weird discount clothing stores scattered around the city and close-in suburbs. I'd discovered Dee's before with a friend but never had an opportunity to shop there myself. They specialized in trendy cut-outs and fashion knock-off stuff, hot one day and cold the next, and ended up selling at Dee's for six dollars for a pair of pants and four for a tee shirt, eight dollars for an entire outfit. They specialized in clothes a bit too hip or with a few too many hanging threads, but every so often my friend said you could find an outrageous

bargain, and at those prices you could wear the stuff once and throw it away, which is pretty much what I had in mind.

Dee's was in an over-illuminated over-chromed mini strip mall on Broadway that also contained a blindingly bright fruit market/grocery whose stacks of grapefruits, apples and bananas extended out into the street. Everyone there wore sunglasses round the clock. They had to. The mall was frequented by a bunch of pretzel-thin hipless, breastless Asian and young Chicano girls who looked faintly green under the powerful fluorescent lights. The girls were so rail-thin they made Emma look especially voluptuous, almost meaty.

Thankfully Dee's itself wasn't so bright. Emma had no idea what we were doing there ‘til she rifled through some of the racks and saw the Lurex, velvet, Spandex, mesh, vinyl, and then looked at the price tags.

"You've got to be kidding!" she said.

Several of the pretzel girls looked up.

"I know they're kind of flashy." I leaned over a rack of iridescent tops the size of dinner napkins. "But I like flashy. Sue me. I want to buy you some clothes, Emma, my treat. I want to play sugar daddy so you can't say I never got you anything. I know this isn't the highest-end stuff in the world, but still, just for the hell of it. I've got a hundred dollars I don't want to walk out of here with. Okay? So humor me."

But Emma's face suddenly got dark and sad, and I realized I'd done something wrong.

"No, Conner. That's okay. I couldn't."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. It's just… I'd rather not. Is that all right?"

I'm very stupid when it comes to women. Vaguely I sensed something swimming around between us like a fish in the dark again—that same business about what was real and what was a game.

"No, look, Emma," I said, grasping at straws. "It's not like I'm really buying you something. These aren't really clothes. They're props. That's what they are, get it?"