Inventing Memory (18 page)

"Love root, silk thread, crotch and vine," someone whispers in my
ear. A tongue licks at my earlobe, but I can't see whose it is. I smell
burning sugar wafting up from my panties.

I follow to the top of the house under the dusty skylight, and there is
a loft filled with half-naked women, beautiful women (though they are
masked in black silk dominoes—some beaded, some painted and trimmed
with lace—as if for a Venetian masque), but they wear little else. Only
those golden-heeled phallic shoes—literally fuck-me pumps—and garter
belts with black and gold mesh stockings. Some have pierced navel jewels
or navel rings.

As my eyes gradually adjust to the dim light, I see that standing
against the wall, there are burly men wearing tights cut out at the crotch
to show their erections—for which they have obviously been chosen. The
white men wear black tights and the Negroes white tights, and each of
them carries aloft a sort of spear, topped with a golden prick—erect,
larger than life, and pointing heavenward as the shoes of the women
point earthward.

The thrumming of the bass becomes louder. The tuberose smell intensifies. There is a pungent, heated smell of slippery sex—or is it mangoes
and patchouli? Clementines and musk? Vanilla and burnt sugar brought
to a boil in my cunt?

And now I am gently restrained by two of the prick-heeled women
and eased out of my cornflower-blue cashmere twinset, my white pointy
bra, until I stand there wearing only my black toreador pants and my
black Capezio ballerina flats.

Zip zip zipppppp—they unzip the toreador pants, under which I am
wearing white cotton panties whose damp crotch smells of musk and
mangoes and burnt sugar and is caked and clotted with a mangoey goo.
One girl insinuates a finger there, touches my clit and crotch, then licks
it greedily, while another lingers at my waist to lick the reddish place
where the zipper has pinched my flesh; another girl is flicking my right
nipple with her tongue.

My twinset is suddenly flung in the air so that the pullover catches
on the spear point and the cardigan falls to the floor. My ballet flats and
white anklets are removed, as are my white cotton panties, embellished
at the crotch with a telltale snail trail of sweet slime, still wet, glistening
for all to see my shame.

Then I am laid at length on a silken quilt and my legs are bound in
white satin ribbon and held apart by two beautiful cock-heeled girls.

They suck my toes excruciatingly, while other girls bind my wrists
with white satin ribbons, attaching these to golden finial-pricks, which
suddenly grow up from the floor in four preordained places.

Now I am masked. My mask, unlike theirs, has no eyeholes. I am
blind. Only touch and smell and hearing enter the mysterious orifices
in my body. I feel gentle, teasing fingers holding my labia apart and a
tongue thrumming on my clit and a wet finger exploring my depths. I
am full of honey and aching with desire.

I hear the faint clatter of dice on the floor and men urging each other
on with bets. They are betting for me. The girls giggle and tickle me with
tongues and fingers. I try to wait but am afraid I am going to come. And
then suddenly my cunt is filled with a cock so big it takes my breath
away.

I cannot see to whom it belongs, but I can feel his wet breath and
smell his sweat and feel his knotted muscles and his weight on me. He
holds still inside me, making me want to move with fury, but watchers
at my ribboned hands and feet will not let me.

"Still, still," they murmur, "hold still."

The cock slides in and out until I am almost beside myself with desire—then it disappears.

"Ohh," I moan in disappointment, writhing on the quilt. Then suddenly another smell, another weight, another cock, and girls touching
my labia and one inserting her greased pinkie into my ass, moving cunningly around. When at last I come, I am not sure with whom or
whether the prick is spear or flesh—and I do not care.

Later I find myself in a round pink marble bathtub with one of the
prick-heeled girls, now barefoot.

"We've been watching you," she says. "You'll do. You'll more than
do, in fact."

"Where do I get those shoes?" I ask.

"They must be
earned,"
she says, "like Girl Scout badges. Just remember: Your fantasies are the most precious thing you have."

There you have it, Vermeer. I expect no less from you when next we
meet in New York.

In heat,

Salome

LETTER FROM SALOME LEVITSKY TO

MARCO ALBERTI, MAY 1952

Caro Marco,

The night we met, I knew we were destined to change each other's
lives, but I didn't know how. Now I know. You are my soul mate, the
other half of me, the half that makes music, the music of the spheres.

Do you remember when we sat in the White Horse all night, wanting
to make love but holding back? I was filled with delicious longing but
too afraid to express it. You were also. Then I was called to Stockbridge
to see my poor sick husband. While I was there, I visited the grave of my
other father—I will tell you all about him one day—and I had a dream
that revealed my past to me. In the dream, I knew Sim Coppley was my
real father.

Let me tell you about it: I am holding him in bed. He is too weak even
to sit, and he looks half mummified. I am feeding him ice water through
a bent glass straw immersed in a tall glass tumbler of frigid water.
Suddenly I realize that the glass is broken at its rim, and I turn the
tumbler around, looking for a place that is not broken. I keep turning
the tumbler around and around, desperate for Sim not to know I have
brought him abroken glass, but I cannot find an unbroken part to face
toward his wizened mouth.

"Salome," he mutters in his cracked voice. "Salome."

"What, Father?" I ask. (In the dream, I am aware that I am unable
to call him "Papa." That name belongs to Levitsky.)

"Call me 'Papa' once before I die," he pleads.

And I look at his withered face, brown and wrinkled like a shrunken
head.

"Papa," I say, as I never did in life. "Papa."

He dies in my arms with such a peaceful expression that I wake up
feeling whole and healed.

You make me feel that way too, as if my entire life is settled because
you have come into it. I long to really learn how to "sit." I feel we have
only just begun.

I love you, my soul, my own.

Salome

NOTEBOOK

16 May 1952

Never have I dreamed so richly. I wake up at night in my pristine white bed, my floor lined with tatami mats, the dawn coming up behind the shoji screens, and I hug myself for the pure pleasure of being alive. Then I scribble down my dreams in the notebook I keep for the purpose.

This strange combination of Marco and Robin thrills (and fulfills) me more than I can easily express. My analyst, the inscrutable Dr. Zuboff, says it's because I had two fathers, and I need two men to feel whole. But who is
who
? Is Marco Sim or Levitsky? Is Robin Levitsky or Sim?

I have to confess that Robin's forgeries excite me. Forgers are even more romantic than jewel thieves. They demonstrate the foolishness of attributions. They mock the money paid for provenance and famous names. Robin is a gifted rogue, and gifted rogues have always had my heart—or other parts.

Yesterday he said: "In the sixteenth century in Italy, forging antiquities was considered an art form in itself, at least by Vasari. Forgeries tell you what a society desires. In Rome they wanted Grecian antiquities. In the Renaissance, they wanted Roman antiquities. Today collectors want Vermeer and Rembrandt. Modern
schmearers
they can get
anywhere
. Who is to say my works are not variations on themes rather than forgeries? Haven't artists always imitated each other? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Who's to say what differentiates a forgery from an
hommage
?"

"But you sign
their
names to them, not your own. That's an attempt to deceive!"

"Not at all," says Robin. "Suppose I painted in the style of my time—Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell.
That
would be an attempt to deceive. But painting in the style of ages past? Not a deception. I fully recognize that in 1952 anyone who painted like Vermeer would be mocked, so as self-protection—and to get my work to the collectors who crave it—I have to
call
myself Vermeer. The times are out of joint, not I. The times call for those in love with figurative painting to lie, deceive, dissemble. So I sign 'Vermeer' or even 'Rembrandt' and use old canvases and antique stretchers and bake the paint in an oven for good measure. But I only do it for my
paintings—
so they may survive. They are my children after all."

And with that he grabbed me, began to caress my breasts through my clothing, insinuated a swift hand under my Claire McCardell dress, and began to stroke me through my damp underwear.

"When you write about me," he said, "and you
will
write about me, don't say I was an art forger; say I was an artist. Because I
am
an artist, your artist, an artist of essences, musk, mounts of Venus and all the treasures to be found within."

He pulls off my panties, smells the wet crotch with an ecstatic inhalation, and throws me back on the bed, my skirt above my head. I struggle to kick off my Capezio ballerina flats. He looks long and lovingly at my wet vagina, saying, "a flower, a jungle flower," as he caresses one lip and then the other, tweaks my clitoris with his tongue, and lifts his head to declaim rapturously: "Someday I will paint this jungle flower, this Venus mantrap, but first I will subdue it." And he plunges into me with his iron stalk, touching my womb again and again until I weep tears of joy. He cannot stop until he has made me come three times and I am quivering from my thighs to my toes and I plead for a rest, a breather, saying, "Come, come, my love." At last he ejaculates, shuddering and growling, making the noises of a seal baying at the Arctic moon.

"My slippery seal," I say, "my salty sweetheart, my kingdom of the three slipperies."

"What is the Kingdom of the Three Slipperies?" he asks.

"
This
," I say, as his soft cock curls out of me and I harvest his copious come from my vagina and smear it on my cheeks, my lips, my tongue. "This is the kingdom of which you are king."

"The Three Slipperies…hmmm," he says. "Let's make it four."

After our debauch at the Chelsea, we skip our usual meal and take a taxi up to the Metropolitan Museum, "to admire the forgeries," says Robin.

First he shows me the huge terra-cotta warrior sculptures that are labeled "Etruscan" but which he claims were made by an Italian family who flourished near Todi in Umbria at the turn of the century.

"If you wanted 'Etruscan' you came to them—clever little
vantzes
. And
everyone
wanted 'Etruscan' in those days. The British Museum has an 'Etruscan' chariot that I would bet comes from the same family. A dealer in Orvieto by the name of Fuschini was notorious for producing 'Etruscan' antiquities at the drop of a lira note. Terra-cotta's not my expertise, but I admire a fellow artist when I see one. Such skill! Look at the fierce features, the bellicose stance—you want 'Etruscan,' you got 'Etruscan.'"

Then he took me to see Egyptian fakes, Flemish fakes, Greek fakes—particularly among the Athenian black-figured vases.

"See this supposed sixth-century B.C. lekythos? Not at all hard to make in a modern kiln. The tricky part is oxidizing the ground to red, first covering the figures with a thick mixture of special clay so
they
don't oxidize in the kiln. I had a sculpture teacher in Italy who supported his family with 'ancient' black-figured vases. Forgeries are
always
the key to what we crave, what we lust for. They say more about the
collectors
than the forgers."

As we walked through the museum, I had that deliciously loose-limbed feeling of a woman who has been loved to distraction, then set out in the world again, thighs aching and crotch dripping. I felt that everyone could smell sex on me—the white-haired Helen Hokinson matrons in their sensible laced-up ghillies, the museum guards, the sketching art students…. It made me defiant, bold, raucous. Robin and I laughed together over our assorted intimacies. We had just come from bed. We were wise to the world's hypocrisies.

It had already been late when we arrived at the museum—three or so—and when the closing bell rang at five, we were simply ravenous. We went to Schrafft's on Madison Avenue, delighting in the prissy lacecollared Irish waitresses, who—we sincerely hoped—smelled sex, rulebreaking, and defiance on our skins as we ate our crustless sandwiches and drank our prim cups of English tea. We finished with those terribly
restrained
ice cream sundaes they have at Schrafft's.