Lying In Bed (8 page)

I wasn’t sentimental. It was all part of a process. The low light made it easier to glide into the words.

None of it was like work. I was lucky for that. Other artists I was friendly with worked at tedious jobs in offices, or tiring stints in stores or waiting tables in restaurants. I got to fantasize other people’s lives. But it still required effort and energy – effort and energy that I had spent on Joshua, and then spent mourning him. It was a relief to finally offer it up to the letters and stories. I donated the hours that had been ours to the words. Even though they were written for strangers who paid me to turn their half-realized erotic imaginings and outpourings of passion or love into prose, they were still, in a way, intensely private.

Until that night, I’d never thought about it quite that way, but Gideon had made me see it differently. And I wasn’t sure I was happy he had. If I became self-conscious about what I was writing, I would fail. And more than not wanting to fail, I didn’t want to lose what had become a welcome escape, and had come to represent something much more complicated to me.

The process began with choosing the pen. Each was different and picking one was like the first step a woman takes when deciding what to wear to seduce someone. A black lace bra? A short rose silk teddy? A lemon yellow camisole with nothing else?

Whatever one selected would set the tone for the rest of the ceremony. And so it was with the pen.

That night I equivocated between a sleek maroon lacquer Mont Blanc, an exotic Waterman Serrisima that curved like a man’s penis, or an antique gold pen that had no barrel and had to be dipped after every few sentences. I picked the dipping pen. The deliberation it required fit the mood of what I was going to write.

The next decision was what color ink to use, like the decision to leave your hair down or pin it up and show more of the naked skin of your neck. For that evening’s story, I picked a dark velvet blue-purple, the color of bearded iris or blueberry juice.

What paper to use was like picking sheets with which to make the bed. It wasn’t only that you wanted fresh sheets when you were expecting an assignation, you knew the color and pattern would be a communication in itself. Clean pristine whites that invited a contrast to raunchy lust? Or a dense flowery pattern that inspired soft sweet romance?

The paper I put on top of my desk was a thick stock in the palest blue.

The options became even more complicated after that. Choosing the first words was like giving someone a small look across a room. Determining an evocative phrase was like giving an open mouth kiss. Shaping a sentence that would elicit a thrill was like opening for the first penetration. Or taking a lover into your mouth.

The process was a Passion play.

The pen point disappeared into the ink like a swimmer dipping into a lake of green-blue water and emerged dripping. Once the last of the ink had splashed back into the bottle, I started to write.

The car was waiting for her when she came downstairs
.

She had obeyed all of his instructions, dressing in a long, black velvet dress that he had picked out for her. It was high necked and sleeveless. But it was also backless and had a slit going up the side that reached the top of her thighs
.

He had been specific. She was to wear stockings with a garter belt. The one he had bought for her. No brassiere. No other underwear
.

It was a silly game she thought as she went from the building to the car and felt the breeze blow the dress apart and caress her skin. She shivered. It was late fall and she should have had a coat. But he’d been explicit that she not wear a coat
.

The chauffeur got out of his side of the car, came around and opened her door. He wore a pearl gray uniform and hat, white gloves, and murmured “good evening” as he held the door for her. She barely glanced at him as she anxiously climbed into the limousine, where she expected to find her lover
.

He wasn’t there and that disappointed her. She’d thought he’d been watching her come out of the building and get into the car. That had pleased her
.

No, he hadn’t watched. He wasn’t there
.

But a woman was
.

She stared at the seated woman
.

Right away, she noticed that the other woman’s arms were as bare as her own. That her neck was just as covered. But the similarities went further. Their black velvet dresses were identical. Their hair color was identical. So was the way their hair was cut. The stranger’s eyes were lined with the same smudges of eyeliner that Gaia wore. The lipstick that filled in the woman’s mouth was the same rose color Gaia used: the color of Gaia’s nipples
.

Was it also the color of this stranger’s nipples?

Even the perfume the woman wore – which was a fairly unusual scent which Gaia’s lover purchased for her from an obscure shop in Paris that made its own fragrances – was identical
.

A sharp click alerted Gaia that the driver had returned to his seat, shut his door, and pulled away from the curb
.

“Do you know where we are going?” Gaia asked the woman sitting beside her
.

She wanted to ask her other questions. Wanted to know why she was there, who she was, why she didn’t seem as surprised as Gaia was at the similarities in their appearances
.

The woman didn’t answer, but poured Gaia a flute of champagne from the bottle of Cristal that sat in a bucket of ice. After Gaia took it, the second woman drank from her own glass with the same particular mannerisms that Gaia used
.

It was mesmerizing. This was her twin. Almost identical. She wondered how far the resemblance went and her eyes inadvertently grazed the woman’s breasts. Even covered by the extravagant velvet, Gaia could see that they were almost the same size
.

The woman watched Gaia watching and smiled
.

“Do you know what is going on?” Gaia asked. Apprehensive. Nervous. Excited. She could feel the satin that lined the dress against her skin. Feel the goosebumps on her arms that had not gone away even though it had been several minutes since she’d walked from the cold night air into the warm interior of the car
.

In answer, the woman leaned forward so that she was only a few inches from Gaia’s face, so close that she could smell the musty scent that was body heat, not perfume
.

It was fascinating to look into this face that was so much like her own. Like looking into a mirror. And then the other leaned even closer and kissed Gaia on the mouth. The pressure was exquisite and the texture was luscious, like the flesh of a ripe peach. It was the softest kiss that Gaia had ever felt. Plush lips pressed against hers. A tiny delicate tongue that flicked out and very gently licked the outline of Gaia’s mouths burning the nerve endings as she went along. Stinging and smoothing. Light and penetrating
.

Gaia didn’t fight the kiss even though it was unexpected. It was too interesting. So this is what it would be like to kiss myself, she thought. But it was more than that and she knew it. This was something she’d wanted for so long. Dreamt about for even longer. She knew why there was another woman there
.

Her lover was giving her this gift. This fulfillment of her fantasy
.

One late afternoon, sipping heavy and sweet rum punches on the beach in South Miami, she and her lover lay on chaises and told each other one sexual secret apiece. She told him before him she had preferred to make herself come because so few men really understood her timing
.

And when you played with yourself, he’d asked, What did you think about? Who did you fantasize about?

Honestly? She’d asked because she’d never told anyone
.

He’d laughed and nodded. And she’d told him that she didn’t think about anyone, she watched herself in the mirror. That she liked how her own face thickened the closer she got to coming. That she liked to pull up her hand and look at it in the mirror, slicked with her own wetness. That seeing it, made the throbbing inside of her increase
.

She had told him, when he talked to her about how she made herself come, that she played a game fantasizing that she made love to herself, and here she was. Facing herself in the car
.

Now, what would it be like to reach out and touch her own breasts and feel between her own legs?

She wondered
.

And wondered too if she would have the courage to do it? To take the offering he had made and take it as far as she could
.

But she didn’t have to decide. Because the woman facing her picked up Gaia’s hands and pressed them to her breasts and then moved them into the slit in her dress and then she left Gaia’s hands there and moved her own hands between Gaia’s legs and began to stroke her, softly, gently raking her fingernails over Gaia’s skin raising tiny goosebumps in excitement
.

Meanwhile the woman kissed her again. Moving from her mouth down along her jawbone to her neck. Gaia was feeling the wet lips and the hands fluttering between her legs and feeling the fur and moist heat on her own fingertips as she explored her twin
.

The woman’s tongue flicked down the side of Gaia’s neck in a teasing motion like a butterfly alighting and then taking off and then coming back for more nectar
.

The sound of a zipper
.

The feel of cold air
.

The woman had pulled Gaia’s dress down and was rubbing her hair against Gaia’s breasts, not touching them yet with fingers or lips, when suddenly Gaia thought of the driver
.

It was difficult to raise her head, to force herself to pay attention to anything other than the sensations of the silken hair against bare skin and pulsing flesh against her fingers. But it bothered her. She was willing to do anything with the woman/stranger, but she couldn’t do it in the presence of the driver. She didn’t want a man seeing this. And so she looked into the rearview mirror to see if he was watching
.

His eyes were there waiting for her. With a little smile playing in them. Because what she hadn’t seen before was that he was not a driver that Philip had hired for this excursion
.

He was Philip
.

And so when the woman’s lips moved lower, Gaia opened her legs and looked down at the top of the woman’s head, seeing herself, feeling another, and when the first wave of pleasure hit, instead of keeping it inside and swallowing the moan, she let it out. Knowing it would circle and circle the way the orgasms was circling inside of her and that the circle would include the man driving the car down into the night
.

Gideon came back
to see me at Ephemera at the beginning of the following week. I hadn’t thought about him since we’d accidentally shared coffee and his chocolate chip cookies. I’d been working hard during the intervening days, finishing up an original short story for Vivienne Chancey, a letter for Robert Rosenthal, and several easy jobs – personalizing stories that already existed. In between, I’d done some decent work on one of own my collages, gotten up early and went running every morning and gone out to dinner with friends until late every night. I was overcrowding my days the way you stuff too many unimportant details into a conversation when you want to avoid the one thing you need to discuss. And I was tired. Not only from the hours and the constant activity, but because it was an effort to clear my stepbrother from my mind. It took constant work to fill up my days with enough activity to drive Cole back into the deep background where I didn’t need to think about him or his gallery opening or his photographs. Where I’d managed to keep him for almost two years, until I’d seen the invitation on Jeff’s desk.

“You look busy.” Gideon said from the doorway.

He was wearing black jeans and a black sweater and carrying a portfolio.

“Hi.” I must have sounded startled because he apologized for surprising me.

“No. That’s okay. I didn’t even know you were there. I didn’t hear you. You seem to have just appeared.”

“I was watching you. I couldn’t help it. You were clearly lost in what you were doing. Artists can do that, can’t they? Disappear into their own imaginations. It’s a blessing. You looked so absorbed.”

I felt a rush of recognition as if we were deeply connected and understood each other on a bone level.

Except how could that be? I didn’t know anything about him. And what he knew about me was only superficial. But nothing about the way his eyes moved - like hungry hands roaming over my body - or the way his voice sounded - as if he were revealing the most intimate secrets - seemed perfunctory or trivial.

I didn’t know what to say. “Come in,” wound up being my profound response. I was chagrined and caught off guard.

And disturbed.

He walked over to my desk and sat down, bringing with him the sound of the wind, the mixed smell of his cologne, the spring air outside and the very realistic and compelling idea that he was back because he wanted to hire me, which made me glad. I needed the work, having finished up everything in house. I lived on the money I made at Grace’s. My rent for the loft – along with everyone else’s in New York City – is too high. The supplies I use in my own artwork are expensive. It all adds up.

But more than that. I needed something new to distract me from my stepbrother.

“I was finishing up a job. Do you want some water? Or tea? Afraid we don’t make good coffee here. We can’t compete with Dean & Dulcua.”

“Nothing. I’m fine” he said and he smiled as he leaned forward in the chair, moving out of the light cast by the overhead lamps.

“I’d like to see what you’re working on, though.”

“I’m sorry, no.” I moved the collage to a shelf behind me. “It’s for a client. And that makes it confidential.”

“Oh. I thought it was one of your own collages. That’s what I want to see.”

“I don’t work on them here.”