Ode to Lata (32 page)

That was when, in the elongated seconds that my irritation pulsed in my throat, his arm coasted around me on the sofa and he leaned over to very slowly run his warm tongue under the nook of my ear lobe.  I felt the breath escape from me in an unguarded shudder.  My head arched slowly back and up against his face, my glass balancing delicately in my hands.  His mouth foraged farther into the slope of my neck, into intimate valleys long forgotten and neglected, his moist tongue gliding upon every gaping pore of my thirsty skin, bringing to them a long awaited recompense.  These were the tender, embittered parts of my body that went untouched at the Vortex.  Here were the secret, silent erogenous zones privy only to those who knew to look deeper.

I wondered as Bill, breaking into a tension-releasing guffaw, carried me with mock gallantness into the bedroom, which of us felt more vulnerable? 

Him for having unmasked himself?  Or me, for being the one-time recipient of what would remain unparalleled?  For knowing more than I should about a one-night stand only to dismiss it all the morning after?  

We bathed in the amber glow cast by candles masted on wrought-iron candelabras.  In shadows and light our bodies entwined further until I felt disembodied – my limbs were no longer mine, my lips were now his.  There were not two bodies rising and dipping within sheets, but one strangely formed, multilimbed creature jousting away in space, performing an ancient dance, a primitive ritual to indemnify itself from everything that had pained it in the past.  We vacillated from astounding tenderness to fervor, extracting from one other emotional nuances that even the most intimate of lovers sometimes forbear.  I drifted in and out of consciousness.  Every once in a while the music playing in the living room would waft into my awareness, and then again I would be carried away into a wave of sensation that would remove me from everything that didn’t emanate directly from Bill.  He understood, like the elixirs veining through me, the ebb and flow of my body, the properties of my dance.  How to lift me over him when I began to arch backward and my head sunk into the pillows.  When to gently brush the hair away from my face and look into eyes to imprint his image in them before kissing me.  For the irretrievable hours we shared that night, Bill made me feel completely understood beyond the agency of words, in spite of the fact that the path to being understood had always been prescribed through ages of conversing.  But then Richard and I had spoken too much.  Probed much too deep.  And neither one of us had ever been able to find or provide such fulfillment for one other.

Perhaps, I was to think later, it was part of Bill’s expertise to make me feel this way.  His presumptuous warning against falling in love with him didn’t come out of nowhere.  Perhaps his impassioned and well-synchronized performance was meant to make me feel like he had this rare, unspoken insight into me.  Perhaps he had known, from the moment that I had stood breathlessly in front of him on that street, what I’d needed and how to provide it.

After all, the man made love for a living.

ARTIFICIAL MOONLIGHT

I leaned sideways against the wall of my bedroom, looking out my window onto deserted streets, the homes that fostered their resting dwellers and, above them, the sky that would soon be filled with predawn light.  I thought about
parorie
, the early morning time of prayer at the mosque; the taste of hot Kenyan coffee steeped in cream, its aroma in my nose; the warmth of the cup in my hands.  I thought of that mosque in Mombasa, so far away, where I’d petitioned for months by waking at four every morning and praying until dawn so God would grant me passage to Los Angeles.  I thought of Mummy, who continued that devotion for the safekeeping of that dream.

The streetlight’s glow filtered through the iron grill on my window, bore through the slats of vertical blinds, bathing my naked body.  They gave the illusion of being sent from a source far more heavenly than the lampposts standing guard.  In my ears, I heard the
muezzin’s
call to prayer from atop a distant minaret, the docking toot of ships approaching the island’s harbor, and dawn’s silence embracing them: the triumvirate of coming dawn.  I was back in Mombasa again and I felt a profound peace in my heart.  I imagined, suspending all reality, that in these hours, everybody else in the world was either asleep or giving thanks to God.

It had been a long time since I’d had someone in my bed.  Just the two of us.  Without Adrian to share him.  It had been a long time since I’d had anyone, in fact, who hadn’t been with Adrian sooner or later, if not at the same time.  That’s when I remembered John.  He had been one of the first men Adrian and I had brought home together.  Even as friends, we’d behaved more like lovers that had been together a long time and made a pact to share a third person every now and then just to keep the relationship invigorated.  Both John and Bill had tattoos.  Maybe that’s why, from the countless others we’d lured back, he was the one that came to mind.  John with the N/A carved on his left shoulder.  John, who’d been in the military and had been reminded of Paris because of the incense I’d burnt and who’d fucked me vengefully and who I’d refused to look at when he was leaving.  How would things have turned out if I hadn’t acted like such a bitch that morning?  If I’d turned around from laying on my stomach and acknowledged him as he’d prepared to leave and maybe even smiled at him for fucking me?  Would he really have recoiled at catching a good look at me in daylight?  Maybe we’d have seen each other again. How would it have turned out, for that matter, with any of those other innumerable men that had spent themselves in this room, on this bed, had I behaved and, ultimately, felt differently?

I heard the rustling of sheets, a faint creaking of springs, and then Bill was standing behind me.  Together we looked out, the light framing our naked bodies like a benediction from an approbating God.  I felt his arms encircle me from around my waist, his skin moving against my skin, and then he pulled me back against him, the hard ridges of his body kissing against my back.

“Artificial moonlight,” I said.

He rested his chin on my shoulder, his facing sharing in its soft glow with mine.  “Much more reliable.  Now I know your secret.”

I moaned softly and touched his cheek.  “Why’d you have to go and do that?  Now I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you.”

“You can do with me as you wish.  You’ve mesmerized me.”

Mesmerized you?
You, who warned me that I would be left devastated? 
I turned my face to the side and kissed his eye.  “It was something else, wasn’t it?  I wish we could just stay here.  Just like this.”

Bill said nothing.  He just held on to me and together we looked toward the light.

“When I’m finally with someone,” I said.  “This is exactly how I want to be made to feel. 
This
is how I want it to be.”

Still he remained muted.  His silence synonymous with the gnawing fear of never finding such companionship, that brand of lasting intimacy.  It was as if there was nothing he
could
say.  I preferred to think that it wasn’t for lack of what he might have been feeling.  That perhaps he too felt overwhelmed and was at a loss for words.

And then again I thought,
He did warn you, didn’t he?
He knew you’d feel this way after he was done with you.
I recalled his conceited admonishment and began to negotiate in his silence that others must have been made to feel this same way too.  But surely there was something different here?  How to explain this difference?  It was beyond words yet distinct in feeling.  A fusing of vagrant, kindred spirits.  The melting of two solitudes.  The deliverance from much loneliness.

Maybe he was just being realistic and it was better that he didn’t endorse my fantasies.  Could such rewards, after all, be expected of a single night?  Could such feelings last a month down the road?  And then his arms tightened around me just a bit more and I laid my head back on his shoulder to welcome his lips against my neck. 
That
registered as ample reciprocation.  As confirmation of a shared fantasy.

I turned around, away from the light and faced him, now drenched in it.  The shadows of tree leaves and limbs traced themselves across the chalk-white walls of my room, forming a decorative filigree behind him.  His hands clasped my hips, his thumbs stroking my ileac crest.  Again I was confounded by his beauty, wished for the hundredth time that I could take his picture. I wondered,
What is this man doing here with me?  How can I, what must I do, to keep him here?
And deeper still, I heard myself respond with some melancholy,
Nothing, Ali.  There’s nothing you can do. 
I held his face in my hands, knowing with some certainty that I wouldn’t touch or see him again.  His eyes fell from mine, registering my pain, feeling perhaps, some of his own.  Now it was he who was hiding from my gaze.

I kissed his forehead.

And then his eyes.

His nose.

And then his lips.

The way Mummy had each time she’d put me into bed at night.

With some uneasiness, I touched the mark of hatred on his shoulder, and then slowly bent down to kiss it.  Part of me balked at myself for doing this.  The other part reminded me that it was not because I endorsed his creed that I had revered his mark, but because I acknowledged the experiences that might have driven him to it.  I had found the mark on his body, the one Mummy had taught me to look for.  And then, with a desperation unbeknownst to either one of us, we made love all over again.

KISS AND TELL

The phone rang a third time, and the answering machine attended to an enraged Kitty.  “Hey, where you goin’ my car, huh?  Where you?  You late already!  We here waitin’  for already hour now!  You better on your way!”

It was past seven in the morning, and the group was calling us probably from some phone booth outside the Spa.  I pictured Kitty’s pudgy face turned beet-red as he broke into a nervous sweat and stressed into the phone.  I kissed Bill.   

“We have to go,” I said.  “They’re going to kill me!”

Reluctantly, I sat up at the edge of the bed.  With my back facing him, I tried to regain some control over myself and stared absently at the pile of crumpled clothing lying at my feet.  The struggle of having to tear myself away from him was burdensome and demanded superior effort.  Slowly, I started to select my articles from his.

Bill pressed up against my back and nuzzled at me disobediently.  “Let them wait.  Come back here to me.”

Although his touch extended no further than my neck, I felt a tingling sensation at the base of my spine.  My groin ached and, with the kind of desperation a sleeper cancels morning tasks to capture more sleep, I considered damning the whole world in order to burn into him again.  In the last couple of hours, Bill, to my amazement had come a few times.  I had not.  It wasn’t sensible not to come, when, after such a long time of searching, I had found someone like him to bring home.  Or, on those nights without a Bill, before leaving a sex club to go home.  Both instances of which I was now guilty.

I handed him his tank top, resisting looking at him.  “Another minute with you and I’ll have alienated everyone I talk to.”

For just a moment he rested his head against my back. I thought I felt his need in the pressure he applied against me, in the silence of just those few seconds, as his hair, eyes, lips mashed against my spine.  Then he grunted softly at his thought, pulled away and mercifully stopped persisting.  I pried myself off the bed and gathered the rest of our clothing from the floor.  Taking a shower was out of the question so we both dressed up, still filmed with a lingering scent of each other.  Besides, I didn’t want to wash him off my body just yet.  I felt that I wanted to carry the redolence of our sex like the remaining morsels of a meal, only to be scraped out for satiating later on.

Dressed, I went around the bed and picked up the soiled condoms that lay on the carpet.  As I walked over to the wastebasket in his corner of the room, I saw him zipping up with a resplendent grin on his face. His macho pride excited me immensely.  Because he’d relentlessly gone through those condoms, he carried the expression of someone who’d delivered what he’d promised. 
I’m going to fuck you silly
, he’d said the second time he’d entered into me and, accidentally knocking his head onto mine as he moved on top of me, broken into childlike laughter.  And he’d done just that.  Fucked me silly.  Like some heaven-sent adjuster for past deprivation.

I wiped the sliminess from the condoms on the side of my jeans, and he asked if I’d ever been tested.  Now this was different.  Shouldn’t I have been asking him that question?  I shrugged and replied that of course I had.  I asked him the same.  He nodded.

“Why do I feel like we’re having this conversation in reverse?” I said, laughing at the irony.  “First the sex and
then
the inquiries.”      

“What difference does it make, really?  These days you can’t trust what someone says, anyhow.  Just because someone claims to be negative don’t mean he isn’t shitting you.  You shouldn’t take their word for it.”

“So, why bother to ask?”

“Because I know you’ll tell the truth.”

I swallowed.

“Most people can’t be trusted,” he said, shrugging.  “Rest of the time I just presume everyone is.  That’s the safest thing to do.”