“I’m so sorry. What she die of?”
“Oh, a bad case of sadness. She overdosed on sleeping pills. Her long-time lover announced that he was going back to Rome for a younger woman he had met while on business. She never wanted to get out of bed again.”
“Oh God, Anna. I’m so, so sorry.” He widened his eyes and shook his head.
“Thanks,” I shot back as if he had just passed me the salt shaker. “I’m OK, don’t worry.”
I concentrated on carefully taking out my pack of smokes from my bag and lighting a cigarette. I inhaled and exhaled dramatically; it was a necessary release. He placed his hand on my right thigh. He didn’t squeeze or press. He just rested it ever so lightly. His long fingers splayed open like a starfish.
As he rested his limb on mine, I noticed what a feminine wrist he had, despite the generous layer of fur encasing it. It was the first time he had placed a hand on my body, other than to tap me on my arm, guiding me away from an oncoming waitress back at the Red Pony.
I had to explain how I got to that point from the mere mention of that book, even though his heart was coming out of his eyeballs with sympathy. I began telling David about the whole experience with a certain peace I hadn’t felt in years. His whole being was an open receptacle to my feelings.
“After my mother’s suicide I hadn’t been able to read for pleasure, something I relied on since childhood to block out the world or my parents’ high voltage fights. I showed up to the office a few days after the funeral and dived into my work as usual. It saved me. I had just recently broken off a seven-year relationship, and I hardly saw any of my friends.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. It was one of those brutally cold New York winters,” I ex plained. “I would sit on my couch curled up in a blanket desperately trying to escape into another world.”
“You mean, through books, yes?”
“Exactly. But it wouldn’t work. I would start to read the sentences and a voice in my head would interrupt telling me I wasn’t reading. The words . . . I couldn’t absorb them; they couldn’t get through all the other noise in my head. I lived in a kind of panic that I would never be able to enjoy reading again. But this book broke through. It took me out of myself for once. Its words spoke a simple truth, and I could follow their trail. The pain of these abandoned little boys in the book finally allowed me to privately mourn my mother’s vanishing from this earth. I mean, those little boys just wanted their mom mies. And I could understand that.”
“I couldn’t put it down myself,” David said. “That journalist really took you there, all those sordid details about eating out of garbage dumps to survive.”
“I
know
; it’s just terrible,” I added.
I felt self-conscious again. I took another sip of whiskey, and my hand trembled as I brought it up to my mouth. I knew I was acting strangely, telling him about my mother and about not having slept with a man for a while. This isn’t what you’re supposed to do when you first meet someone, especially an accomplished author whom you’re writing about.
I let out a nervous guffaw.
“God! Doesn’t talking about death just kill a mood?”
He gave me a smile more warm and generous than any I’d ever received. “I’m not uncomfortable talking about it, Anna. Go on.”
“You’re probably regretting ever having mentioned that book or saying yes to me interviewing you. See what you did! You unleashed my inner monster.” I was back to flirting shamelessly.
“She’s a wonderful little monster,” he matched, responding quickly.
“Oh yeah?” I thought for second, then went for it. You only live once. I wanted the air, the light around him. “You want to see where I live?”
“I’d love that. But on one condition.” He grabbed my thigh and gave me a serious look. “We need to get some slices of New York City pizza first. My little monster of a stomach is growling.”
He slid out of the booth and excused himself to go to the bath room. I looked around the room to see if anyone was looking. No one was. I pocketed a darling little red ashtray that the barman had just placed on our table.
It would complement the other souvenirs I had accumulated over the years, little mementos from places where something memorable had happened.
The Lower East Side at midnight bustled with street action from every living, breathing walk of life. And something about its energy must have gotten under David’s skin, making him stop short in the middle of the street.
Without warning, he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the darkness of lonely Eldridge Street.
“What are you doing?” I asked even though I knew.
“Déjame,
just let me,” he said like a boy who wanted to stay up later than his bedtime. He took my two hands and raised them over my head, pushed them up against the rough red bricks of the tenement building I had my back on. I was his prisoner as he breathed on my face, slowed himself down to smell me, and pressed his wet mouth on to mine.
Here was our chance to rise, to overcome the heavy gravity of re spectable, dignified social interaction. We took our time exploring each other’s mouths, opening them slightly, then pulling back and beginning again, deeper and deeper the next time in, for anyone who cared to watch. I remember opening my eyes and seeing his closed so sweetly, tasting the booze and cigarettes on our saliva, smelling the cheese. All the pores on his naked face reeked of the slice of pizza we inhaled walking and giggling on the way to my place. On my ex, Jonathan’s, face I had hated the smell of cheese, but on David it was delicious. Like a sampling of his body’s baser smells to come.
We raced up the five endless flights to my apartment and panted like porno stars from severe shortness of breath. Fucking cigarettes! Still insanely aroused at just listening to his heavy breathing, I fum bled placing the key into the hole.
Once we were inside, I flicked on the dozen little lamps in my place, and David found his way into my bedroom. That’s where all my books were, in disorganized piles all over the floor. I had never bothered to get bookshelves or nightstands, so my books became my flat surfaces for glasses and candles. Now he was sizing me up, like all book people do, by what I had or didn’t have in my collection. I usually never felt self-conscious about the process but with him, I felt instantly exposed.
I took my time and slowly walked into the bedroom. He was sit ting on the edge of my bed reading
Death in Venice.
He didn’t ac knowledge me. Looking very studious, he was either ignoring me or enthralled with the passage he was reading.
I sat next to him and stared at his perfect Roman profile, and then I leaned into him and kissed his neck. He continued to read without looking up at me, and I kissed it again.
“Can’t you see I’m reading?” he said, without looking at me. The sides of his mouth twitched with abstained laughter.
“Uh-huh. I can see that.”
I got on my knees and unbuttoned his shirt. I placed my hands on the centre of his chest and massaged that hair I had so admired ear lier. His skin was sticky from a night’s worth of sweat. Without saying a word, I pulled at his left sleeve. He threw his shoulder back and held the book out with his right hand. He did the same in reverse when I was ready for the right sleeve.
Shoulders hunched over, legs spread apart, he continued to read, as I sat kneeling on the Persian rug in front of him, taking him in. He was thin but perfectly T-shaped. Bigger on top, narrower towards the waist. His trail of dark body hair mimicked his shape and thickened in the belly area. As I stared at his torso I could sense him eyeing me over the edge of the book.
He was waiting for me. I leaned forward and kissed his stomach gently. Through the hairs, his skin smelled of sweet milk. Like the sticky remnants of a summer day’s ice-cream cone on some sweet child’s cheeks. I licked the area around his belly button. Now I tasted salt. He twitched and grunted softly. Then I inserted my tongue right into it, his inny, and he pushed me away from him. His face morphed from shock to lust in a millisecond.
“Take off that dress,” he said, indignant.
“No.” I said. “You.”
His face bore no expression.
He lifted my dress up over my head in one smooth movement. And I was left in a pair of Gap yellow underwear. Not even the thong kind. I forgot I was wearing them.
“Are those boys’ underwear?”
I shook my head no.
“Turn around,” he said, still sitting on the edge of my bed. He lowered my underwear and sat silently looking at me.
Then he grabbed my hips and pulled me closer to him, sticking his tongue right into the crack of my ass. No man had ever gone there first.
I could hear him unbuckling his belt, unzipping his fly. Then he stuck his fingers into my sex and turned me around.
His long, thin cock was sticking out of his jeans, waiting. “Sit down.”
I lowered myself on to him.
He broke through pubic hair, tissue, blood vessels, pride, sadness, desire, me.
Then, there wasn’t any room left for air in my lungs. I came pools on to his dark-blue jeans.
My cigarettes called. I left him lying on my bed with one hand behind his head, the other resting on his stomach, smiling big as he caught his breath. His limp dick twitched as it rested outside his open zipper.
“Bring me one too,” he said. “And that little red ashtray you stole tonight.”
Later, when I had been lying there awake watching him snore, his hands clasped over his chest, like my mother in her black beaded dress the day of the funeral, I imagined his life back in Barcelona.
I thought about this half-brother, Sergi Canetti. I wondered if Sergi was gay. Did David consider himself bisexual? Did it just hap pen once?
I got up to go to the bathroom, closed the door, then placed my hands over the cold edges of the sink and pressed my face up to the mirror for a reality check. The whites around my brown eyes were bloodshot and smudges of faded black eyeliner streaked the tops of my cheekbones. My lips were chapped and redder than usual. My classmates had called me “Bubble Lips” when I was a girl, but now those bubbles were extra puffy from an entire night of David’s love nibbles. “I love your mouth. I love your lips,” he’d said to me as I sucked his cock before we went at it again. He made me feel beautiful, alive again. I laughed at myself in the mirror, gave myself a wink. The man I had stared at so intently in an author’s photo was now snoring loudly in my bed.
We decided that David should move in after our third date. We couldn’t be without each other, and his time in New York would dwindle away fast.
When he first brought all his things over from the dingy little studio he was renting in midtown Manhattan, I was taken aback by how light the man travelled. For a four-month scholarship trip he had brought his laptop, two dress shirts, two T-shirts, one V-neck wool sweater, two pairs of shoes, a pair of dress slacks, a pair of jeans (which I had soiled) and a black blazer. The pairs of underwear and socks he had brought (less than a week’s worth) he hand-washed daily in the nude and hung out neatly on the circular metallic ring around my shower to dry.
The only things that weighed him down were the seven books he intended to read or use as references for his writing. We hardly socialized or saw anyone for that first month and a half. Though I liked to blame our antisocialness on David’s less-than-perfect English, I really just wanted him all to myself.
David was a social animal by nature. His mother had told him that as a child he opened his arms for everyone to hold him. He made her nervous, thinking he’d embrace a stranger
con malas intenciones
one day. Unlike most of the misanthropic writers and editors I had come to know and sympathize with over the years, David genuinely liked people.
As time went on, I got used to losing him and his attention at those publishing-world events he did eventually want to go to. In conversation, his whole being was absorbed in the plight of other people’s pain, just like he had become absorbed in mine. He was a charismatic empath, and both women and men alike were taken with his boyish charm. Most hadn’t heard of his work, but they pretended they had when I introduced him as one of Spain’s current avant-garde.
He would perk people up like wilting flowers. I even found my self feeling jealous during a genteel dinner party given by a power editor at Random House. Dressed in a low-cut, very transparent blouse, Elaine Williams was just recently divorced. She had allowed her six-year-old daughter Chloe to play with the adults, and both wouldn’t stop flirting with David. While Elaine told him all about her horrendous break-up, the girl kept lifting up her frilly dress like a little whore trying to get his attention.
He pinched Chloe’s little stomach and turned back up to Elaine’s big batting eyes as she continued telling him about her loneliness. Yes, I’m ashamed to say, I felt like strangling mother and child right there.
I studied him with other people: complete strangers, new acquaintances, good friends of mine, it didn’t matter. I knew his look so well, because it was the way he looked at me that first night, and thereafter, and I fell in love with him for it. I felt safe and special in that tolerant gaze of his. When he shared it with others, I began to grow resentful.
But he was all mine at home. David worked methodically on his novel while I checked into the office every day and counted the hours until I could rush home and have him again. He inspired me to kick-start my second novel, despite my first’s disastrous reviews, and for the first time in years I felt confident and creative again. I wanted to write screenplays with him, edit anthologies, and co-edit another literary journal with him. I was mad with creative energy.
One beautiful fall morning, David invited me to go live with him in Spain. After that, coming home to him in the evenings involved a whole new mindset of possibilities for a future together.
When Sergi Canetti entered our lives, he shook our very foundation. I came home at around seven the night it happened, the time I usually arrived. I’d been thinking about David the whole way home. When I walked in, I immediately stripped in the vestibule, knowing he would follow my lead. We met naked in the centre of my living room, under the low-hanging antique chandelier with small ivory roses I took from my mother’s apartment. With all our body parts saluting the other at attention, we wrestled over who would suck the other first. I won the fight, and I kneeled before him in haughty victory.