Lying In Bed (26 page)

“If you won’t let me up, I’m leaving something for you down here. Please call me,” he said, and then I heard the click of the intercom shutting off.

I went to the window and watched the street below. I wasn’t going to go down there if he was waiting for me. I really didn’t want to see him again. So I waited until, twenty or thirty seconds later, I saw him emerge from the building. He stood there for a few more seconds. The wind blowing in his hair. His hands by his side. Still and not moving.

Should I go down?

No.

There was nothing I could do. No way to explain. As much as I wanted to, I knew the right thing was to let him go back to his loft and his bronze figures and his relationship with Vivienne who he loved. I had to remember that. Despite our night together and his kindness to me and his odd way of knowing what I was thinking from reading my face. He was already involved with a woman. He cared enough about her to hire me to further his seduction of her. Despite his iron will and adherence to principles, he’d been willing to lie to her to make her happy. Pretending to write the stories, paying for them, because he knew how much they would please her.

Then I realized I was mimicking his stance. Standing exactly the way he stood, six floors below me. My hands clenched by my sides. I rooted my feet to the floor.

I had forbidden myself to move for fear I would go down there after all.

Finally he turned right and walked off.

Still, I watched. He had reached the corner. The light was red.

If I hurried, if I ran downstairs and out into the street I might be able to get to him before he disappeared into the night.

What was I thinking?

I wasn’t even dressed.

My oversize white shirt had splotches of paint on it, there was newsprint glued to the right hand sleeve and sparkle on the left corner. I was barefoot.

The light changed. I leaned against the window and rested my forehead on the glass. He was getting smaller. In a few seconds I’d lose sight of him and then I’d never see him again. I certainly wouldn’t write any more letters for Vivienne.

Would they ever tell each other that they had hired someone else? Would they figure out that they’d both hired me? Would it even matter, or would they love each other all the more for having gone to so much trouble to seduce the other with fantasies? Would they sit up in bed at night and drink wine and laugh over the utter silliness of what they’d done? And of how stupid I’d been to not have realized what was happening?

The scene was clear – the bed, the tangled sheets, the sound of the music on the stereo, the empty wine glasses on the nightstands, the smells of their lovemaking– I could even see Vivienne lying back on pale green pillows, leaning on him – I could see it all except I couldn’t see him. Couldn’t imagine Gideon laughing over what had happened. Couldn’t picture him kissing her, holding her, couldn’t see his hands on her bare breasts, his long legs intertwined in hers.

The street below was empty now. The night glowed silver. But it wasn’t lunar light. It was a false brightness from the street lamps. My stories had been equally as misleading. They were imitations of lust. They implied passion. But they were fakes.

I pulled on a pair of black leggings, stepped into black ballet slippers. My hair was coming out of its ponytail and I had glitter and leaves on my face, hands, and shirt, but it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t see anyone downstairs in the vestibule.

I didn’t look inside the shopping bag until I had it back up in my apartment.

On top was a sheet of paper torn out of a notebook, in the middle were three lines, scrawled in pencil. The kind of soft lead that artists use to sketch with. The letters had smeared a little where the side of his hand must have moved over them.

Marlowe -

It would be a shame to let all this go to waste.

Gideon

I reached out and touched the letters with my forefinger. My only letter from Gideon. The only words he’d ever written me, after all the words I’d written for him.

The tears started then and I stood in the living room, holding onto the bag, hugging it to my chest as if it were a living person. I wasn’t crying for what I’d lost, but because I finally understood that I’d been writing those stories to Gideon. They were how
I
felt. Not how I imagined someone else felt. I was telling him what
I
wanted us to do, how I wanted us to be together.

Hugging the bag, I slipped down to the floor. Holding on as if I were afraid to let go of it. For a few more minutes, I cried, hard choking sobs that only made me feel worse. And then I looked inside and my crying turned hard and silent.

It was so hard to deal with what the bag meant. So difficult not to interpret why he had done this.

I’d written three stories out of the five that Gideon had commissioned - Sound, Sight and Smell. Taste was supposed to be next. We had planned on going on a food shopping spree, we’d even made a list of all the foods we’d buy and then talked about how we’d bring them back to his studio and find a story in the flavors and textures.

He’d remembered everything.

In the bag was a mix of exotic fruits: lychee nuts in their hard, prickly, outer shells, a cellophane bag of fat, dried apricots, two pomegranates, and a box of pale yellow raspberries.

There were two cheeses, both soft to my touch: a small wheel of Brillat Savarin and a wedge of St. Andre.

The two loaves of bread beneath them emanated rich, yeasty smell; the walnut raisin was as heavy as the French baguette was light.

The writing on the small jar of honey was in French and proclaimed it was from Provence and contained lavender. I opened it, bent over, and breathed in.

You could smell the sunshine and fields of flowers.

There was a container of olives glistening in rich oil. Another of pistachio nuts, out of their shell, bright green and inviting – sprinkled with cayenne pepper.

Inside a pastry box was a chocolate mousse tart covered with whipped cream and chocolate shavings.

A bottle of champagne.

And when I thought I’d emptied the bag of everything, I found, wrapped in shiny gold foil, like a last present almost forgotten, a thin bar of expensive dark chocolate.

Sad and miserable, I sat down on the floor with all the food. Touching it. Leaning over, sniffing at it like a feral cat, starved and lost, coming upon a treasure trove of possibilities. Suddenly I was hungry, desperately hungry.

I ripped off pieces of the walnut bread and dipped it into the honey, not caring that the sticky sweetness got all over my fingers. I didn’t bother to get a knife but used a crust of the baguette to break into the St. Andre, scooping up too much of the rich, creamy cheese to fit in my mouth all at once. It didn’t matter. I licked it off the bread, like the cat would, lapping it, feeling its silky texture on my tongue, scooping up more, not eating the bread at all now, only using it as a utensil. Then, I picked out the soft inner middle of the baguette and dipped it in the oil the olives came in. More of the walnut bread with more of the honey. Now more of the soft bread with the St. Andre. Was anything richer?

Still not satiated, I tore at the rough outsides of a lychee nut with my fingers and popped the juicy fruit into my mouth working the flesh off it with my teeth, my salivary glands exploding. The texture of the opalescent fruit was smooth and wet and lush until I had eaten it all and was left with a smooth polished pit that was hard as wood.

I smashed the raspberries on my tongue. One after another. After another.

Still hungry, I tore the paper off the chocolate and broke off too big a piece. After the fruit, the chocolate was bitter. I tasted coffee and burnt beans. I sucked on slivers of it, letting it dissolve in my mouth, thick and rich. As dense as fog. As black as the middle of the night. As overwhelming as being caught in a storm.

I was still hungry. Still unfilled. I ate more of the bread and honey and then I peeled away the papery cover of the pomegranate.

The juice stained my fingers as I picked out the small seeds covered with the clear jewel-like scarlet sweetness. But there was a dryness to the taste of the fruit, too. And if I worked each cluster too much, my mouth puckered from the ugly taste of the seeds.

I pulled apart more of the pomegranate, peeling away the inner membrane that kept the sections separate. I stuffed another handful of seeds into my mouth. The juice dripped. By now my chin was stained the color of the fruit. So were my fingers.

How would this food have led to an erotic story? How would I turn all the tastes and textures into a seduction?

I couldn’t see anything beyond my gluttonous orgy. A woman alone devouring food, salt and sweet and thick and rich and dark and fruity. Trying to satiate herself with flavors because she couldn’t have what she wanted: the man she’d met. She wanted his mouth, not raspberries. His fingers, not bread. His lips, not cheese. And his cock, not champagne.

It was nothing I would ever be able to sell.

I looked down and saw my shirt was stained with ruby splatters. It looked like I was bleeding.

I stood and tore it off.

What would we have done with all this food? Even though it didn’t matter anymore, even though I’d never write this story for Gideon, my imagination refused to obey my logic, and I searched for the key to how to turn the experience from gluttony to seduction.

I looked down at my bare chest to see the juice had not only gotten on my shirt but seeped through and left streaks on my chest. An accidental and violent design.

I picked up a few of pomegranate seeds, but instead of putting them in my mouth and sucking off their flesh, I used them like a paint brush, drawing long swaying lines down my neck and my chest adding to the pattern already there.

More fruit.

More vermilion lines around and around my breasts.

More fruit.

I continued painting.

Colorful swirling lines, down across stomach, over my thighs, all the lines leading to and ending at my sex disappearing into my thatch of hair. But I wasn’t done. There were more seeds left, full of blood.

I drew with those on my inner thighs. Big X’s. One over the other until they became a crosshatch of angry lines. My skin was covered. At least the skin outside of my body. But inside was untouched. I rubbed the seeds up and down the lips of my sex. Teasing and tickling, cruelly confusing my nerve endings into thinking someone was touching me when it was no one at all.

My stupid body didn’t know the difference.

I was wet in seconds. Primed. My cunt was waiting. For who? Gideon? That fast?

I’d been with him once and my skin and my bones were already craving him. Longing for him.

And all I gave it was fruit.

The loft was dark, the mess was all around me on the floor. Crusts of bread. An almost empty champagne bottle. Cheese rinds. Spit out and gnawed bare olive pits in a pile along with the pomegranate pits. Foil and paper ripped off of the chocolate bar.

I wasn’t focusing on the garbage. My head was full of images of Gideon. I could see his green black marble eyes and smell his cologne between my thighs. I twitched for more. Using my hand, I thought about his scarred hands and stroked faster and then slower, working out a rhythm that would have matched the rhythm of his breathing. If he were here.

I imagined his breath on my neck.

My hand did more. Rapid then slow, then hard then soft. Rapid then slow then hard then soft.

My body, stupidly, responded, stumbling over itself to get to the end of the effort, wanting for the release, thinking maybe the explosion would satiate the hunger that the food had not.

I fell deep into the fantasy that Gideon was with me, that one of his hands was gripping my buttocks, pulling me closer and closer to him, that his other hand was touching my clit while his erection thrust into and out of me in slow and easy pulls and pushes and all the while he was whispering in my ear – words that I was whispering out loud, fooling my poor ears into thinking they were listening to him.

“Marlowe, let me inside. Let me go deeper. Tell me how it feels. How it pleases you…”

And I did what he asked and told him how it felt and that his sixth sense about me was informing him well. How the way he was biting my shoulder was sending perfect shivers down my side. How the pain of his fingers, digging deep into my muscles, was making me quake. How this fucking was closer to something divine than I had ever felt.

I heard him respond then, clearly as if he really were with me at that moment. “Yes. It is. We are.”

It was hearing his voice say that – or thinking I’d heard it – that sent me crashing over the rising swell, and as I came I started to cry, realizing as my orgasm beat at my bones and boiled my blood that I was alone, that Gideon was gone. That he had never even been a possibility. And wondering, at the same time, how even the idea of him pushed me into a passion that I’d never even guessed I was capable of.

The next week
moved slowly. I watched the clock not knowing why or what I expected. I didn’t connect to anything I was doing. As requested by Grace, I’d sent out the letters to all of my clients asking them to sign the release form, wondering as I wrote out each envelope if perhaps it was time to move on. If writing other people’s letters or telling stories for them wasn’t that good an idea.

I called Jeff and asked him how many covers he thought he might be able to give me a year, told him that I wanted to get more involved. He gave me a number that would more than make up for the letters and stories. I thought about how I would tell Grace.

And then, after we’d finished talking, as I was about to say goodbye, Jeff asked if was going to Cole’s show that night.

“No.”

“I think you should. Cole’s pretty shook up over what happened between the two of you at the gallery.”

“He told you?”

“We had dinner. Marlowe, let me take you. Grace and I are going. Come with us. It’s the right thing to do. Cole wants you there. And you have to get past this.”

“I can’t.”