Loving Women (29 page)

She turned a knob on the gas stove and moved a fat iron pot over the low flame.

“Made some gumbo for you last night,” she said. “Thought you might be hungry for some good home cookin’, after all that Navy stuff. Gumbo’s always best the second night.”

She looked at me awkwardly, and that relieved me; she was probably feeling as clumsy in her way as I was in mine. Then she excused herself and went into the bathroom. I stood there, waiting, uncertain; all I could hear was the rain drumming on the roof—a steady, lulling sound that was mixed with the drowsy odor of the flowers. I ran my hands through my hair, trying to make it stand up (I see that boy now, hair pasted to his skull, dripping, without
sideburns or a beard, entering for the first time this special world). She came back from the bathroom and motioned me into a chair. Then she went to the small refrigerator and took out lettuce, onions, and tomatoes and started making a salad, her hands quick and strong, pulling the lettuce leaves apart, slicing the tomatoes, adding oil, vinegar, salt. She popped two slices of whole-wheat bread into a toaster. Her hands never stopped moving, and she talked briskly, even nervously (thus relaxing me more), now tossing the salad, then stirring the gumbo, while I looked at her bare feet.

She was smaller than I had first thought, and she had wide feet. I felt vaguely aroused by the padding sound they made on the linoleum floor. She fired questions at me, quickly, breathlessly, making me talk. She wanted to know where I went to school and what my parents were like and the names of my brothers; she was sorry about my mother. She seemed pleased that I was brought up a Catholic (“They sure do have beautiful music …”). She ladled the gumbo into white bowls, and the aroma was pungent, strong, thick with crab and shrimp and rice, and she pushed the toast down into the toaster and brought the salad to me on a plate, then did the same for herself. I waited until she sat down facing me and then began to eat in a greedy way. “Don’t use salt, child,” she said. “Everything’s salted. And besides, I noticed you use too much salt anyway.”

She had been watching and found a flaw;
you use too much salt anyway
. I’d never thought about salt before; I just used it, on eggs and meat and salad. I slowed down, glancing at her, trying to match her movements; I didn’t know much about what was then called etiquette. At home, it didn’t matter how I used knives and forks; in the Navy they had too many other rules and regulations to inflict upon us first. So I decided to follow her lead. I watched the way she ate the gumbo. I didn’t touch the salt. Somehow a faint odor of her perfume got mixed in with the fragrance of the soup, and the trailer turned all female and closed and lovely, the flower scents filling the air too and the rain hammering at the roof. She wanted to know about New York, and whether there really was a chance there for everybody to make good. I tried to answer, tried to sound casual; I didn’t tell her that I’d only been to two Broadway plays in my life, that Brooklyn was different from Manhattan, and that I didn’t know what chance anybody had to make good, since it hadn’t happened to anyone I knew. Including me. Instead, I started talking
about the Paramount and the Metropolitan Museum and Lindy’s and Toots Shor’s, places I’d read about in Walter Winchell’s column in the
Mirror
or heard about on the radio. She listened to my vaguely fraudulent answers and asked more questions, and all the time I was thinking about what would happen if she posed for me, and when I should begin the session by taking the drawing pad out of its wrapper. I wanted the meal to last for hours so I wouldn’t have to deal with the next move and its astonishments.

“I guess New York has just about everything you’d ever want to see,” I heard myself saying. “Everything.”

“Well, not
everything
,” she said. “I’d like to see the pyramids in Egypt.”

“Yeah?”

“Wouldn’t you?” she said. “Imagine what it would be like to see where they found King Tut and all his treasures. See the Spinx.” That’s how she said it: The Spinx. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “You know, I’d like to see
all
the Seven Wonders of the World.
All of them
!” She paused. “I guess that’s pretty far-fetched. But I saw them in an encyclopedia once, all the Seven Wonders, and I couldn’t even name them now. But I could read up on them again, make a list, and even if I never saw them, I sure would like to dream about them …”

Do I see the boy relaxing at last? Michael Devlin has eaten, he is full, he has avoided all additional use of salt. And listening to her he thinks:
She isn’t that much older that I am, is she?
There she was in the trailer, talking
straight
to me, not performing on some date, not angling for some extravagant trip to a prom, certainly not trying to look like a movie star. She pushed her chair back, relaxed, crossed one leg over another, lit a cigarette.

And I had discovered I could hold my own with her in conversation. She was older than I was, but I was sure there were things I knew that she didn’t. I couldn’t name the Seven Wonders of the World either, but I felt as she talked about them that I was sitting with someone my own age, the two of us in awe at the unknowable mysteries of the world. She got up and made coffee and then I started feeling nervous again. She cleared the table, laid her cigarette in an ashtray and ran hot water over the dishes, her face very concentrated. She dried her hands on a dish towel and waited a long moment, her back to me, staring into the sink. Then she took a deep breath, exhaled, turned to me and smiled.

“Well, I guess I’d better get ready for the posing,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and reached for the package. “I have my stuff.” Panicking. “But you know, if you’re too tired or something, you don’t—”

“I never done something like this in my life before,” she said quietly. She turned and looked around the small crowded trailer, at the couchlike bed at the far end. “That’s why I want to do it.”

“Look,” I said nervously, “if you don’t want to—”

“You’re more nervous than I am, ain’t you, child?”

“Well, no, I just—”

“You ever done this before? The truth …”

“No.”

“Then I guess we both better go ahead, huh?”

She turned then, padding on her wide bare feet into the bedroom area. She closed the drapes behind her. I took out the pad and chalks and laid them on top of the counter that separated the dining area from the sleeping quarters. I had to dry my hands on my trousers. The rain hammered down and the air felt wetter and thicker. I thought:
We’re using all the oxygen, we should open a window
. Better:
We should leave. We might smother. I can do this some other time. Suppose I can’t draw her? I could freeze, could lose what I think I can do, could botch it, could be exposed as a fraud. Before I even got to really know her
, she could find me out.
I certainly couldn’t draw her the way Miles could. But then, what
does
she look like? If I. If she. What if
.

The curtain parted. She stepped out in an oversized man’s shirt. Her hair was wild and electric. She looked at me and her face darkened into a blush. She covered one foot with the other, and suddenly seemed very young.

“What do you want me to do?” she murmured.

“Well, maybe—why don’t you just sit there on the couch, and I’ll move this stool over here, and—You want your cigarettes?”

“No, I don’t want to smoke while I’m—how’s this?”

She sat on the couch bed, and pulled a couple of pillows up beside her and leaned one arm on them.

“Great, yeah, that’s it, nice and relaxed.”

“Should I take this off?”

Cool
, said Michael Devlin to himself.
You’ve gotta be cool. Like Doagie Hogan, like Canyon or Sawyer, like Charlie Parker. It’s like drawing bottles or fruit or a mountain
. And answered, staring at the chalk, its blackness on his thumb and forefinger: “If you want.”

She unbuttoned the shirt and wiggled out of the sleeves and let
it fall behind her.
There it is, skin and tits, flesh and nipples and hair, her body before me
. She crossed her arms over her breasts for a moment, almost instinctively. Then she lifted one leg and let the other dangle off the edge of the bed and shrugged her shoulders as if loosening her muscles. “There,” she said.
No panties bra garter-belts girdles no slip no dress no trousers just her before me in this small tight place and the rain and the flowers too
. “That should be okay.”

I stopped breathing. I didn’t want to exhale, to let her hear me reacting to her nakedness, her lush woman’s body. O Catholic boy: as if it were all right to take pleasure as long as it was not expressed. This was no boyish angular body like that of the girls at home (touched smelled brushed against but never feasted upon), or the body of a fashion model in some magazine, with all her bones sticking out.
Womenflesh
. I started to draw almost frantically, blocking in the ripe breasts, the strong lean shoulders, trying to get the taut skin stretched properly across her belly. Her breasts and hips were much lighter than the rest of her body. Except, of course, for her nipples. Face skin and back skin and leg skin and arm skin had been glazed by the sun. But now I was seeing clearly what I’d only glimpsed that night on the beach: the lighter skin, the indoor skin. She had a thick mat of jet-black curly pubic hair, curlier than the hair on her head, glistening in the light as if it were wet.
Look boy look at her pussy her box her snatch her cunt
. I was trying desperately to keep from getting an erection. Seven heads, I told my hand. Get the head right and the proportions will follow. Don’t make a big deal out of her breasts or she’ll think you’re obsessed with them.
Jesus Christ her tits right here right there
. Those full round breasts, with their dark-brown nipples. Get the legs right. Make it right. Make it beautiful. The arc of her instep. The long curving neck.

She was looking at me calmly now, the blush off her cheeks, watching me in a fascinated way. I used the vine charcoal for all the basics: the shape, the form, a thin outline. It broke three times in my hand, too frail for my ferocious pressure. Then I switched to the blacker charcoal, making her eyes, using the side of the chalk for shading, digging in for the black hair on her head and between her legs. I smoothed out the hard edges with my fingers, smeared her legs to try to get flesh tones, and then, looking at her, and looking at the drawing, I saw there was nothing more to add. One more mark and I would botch it. I tore the drawing off the pad and laid it on the kitchen counter.

“You can change positions,” I said, trying to sound like a cool-eyed
professional. I was relieved that she didn’t ask to see the first drawing. She shifted, letting one leg fall flat, her back against the wall of the trailer now. She shivered. “Damn wall’s cold,” she said. “How’s this?” She put her head back. I could see a thin scar about three inches long under her jaw. White against her dark skin. There was another scar just above the great black V, smaller but more raw that the one on her jawbone. “Fine,” I said, but thinking that this time she was posing instead of being natural, as if remembering pinups she’d seen somewhere; still, I was afraid that if I said I didn’t like the pose, she’d take it as criticism, the way I reacted to her line about salt. Ah, the little lies … “Just swell,” I said, and she closed her eyes. I drew more carefully. She had very long lashes.

“What are you drawing now?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.

“Your neck,” I said.

She ran a hand down her neck as I was shading the same place in my drawing.

“And now?”

“Your clavicle,” I said. “You know, at the base of your neck? Goes across from shoulder to shoulder.”

She ran a single finger along the clavicle. Then paused.

She was breathing in a different way. Her eyes were still closed.

“What about now?” she whispered.

“Breasts.”

She ran her hand around her breasts, from one to the other, feeling their shape and form, caressing them as if they belonged to someone else. Then she took both nipples gently between her thumbs and forefingers. I tried to draw. Getting hard.

“And?”

“Belly.”

Her hand moved over her belly, eyes closed tight, examining the hard pads of muscle, the concave dip. And then she pressed the heel of her hand above the blackness.

“You better get over here, child.”

She guided me into the tight wet channel, the light off now, the rain pounding down, arms around my back, squeezing my cock inside her. “Don’t move,” she whispered. And squeezed again, as if wanting to remember the feel of it, its size and thickness and pulsing presence. I was afraid to move, and then she moved, pressing
against me, and I moved, six, eight times, all the way into the tight emptiness, and once more, and then exploded, shuddering, a hoarse involuntary cry coming from me, with Eden Santana holding me tight and squeezing me, and pushing hard against me until I was done. I eased away from her, feeling the fool. A crude kid who couldn’t hold it back. A boy who shot his load faster than a man ever would. But she held my head in her hands and kissed me on the mouth and whispered “You’re so big.” And told me “You’re so strong.” And kissed me again and then slipped away and went into the bathroom. Water ran. I couldn’t believe I was there. This wasn’t Dixie with her savage old eyes and hungry mouth. This was Eden Santana. Who was beautiful. And then she was back with a hot washcloth, bathing my cock and my balls, the hotness of the cloth like a second cunt. We lay there side by side for a long time, her arms around me, saying nothing, the flower smell very strong and the rain falling. And after a while she turned my head to hers and kissed me again and then I felt her hand lightly on my chest and she pinched my nipples, little stabbing pinpoints of pain, and she touched my flat belly and then my cock and I was hard again and the rain still falling. She lay on her side with one knee raised and delicately rubbed the head of my cock against the lips of her cunt, her breath coming in short quickening gasps, and then she whispered, “Now” and I was in her again and her body was convulsing and I drove into her and she moaned and I rammed harder and she groaned deeply and then her voice was rising with the rain still falling and she dug her fingers into my ass, kissing me wetly, rubbing her tongue on my face and eyes, making panting sounds and then a long high-pitched sound and still I kept going, driving away into her, her legs up high now, the wide feet flat against the low roof of the trailer and I kept going and going and going until everything in me exploded and convulsed and I could feel each part of myself bone muscle fiber blood plunging down and out of me and she screamed one last triumphant time while the rain still fell through the dark sky.