Tana Dabra listened to Adam’s every word. But that night with him, in the bush in the highlands of Ethiopia, when he had taken her sexually for the first time, kept nudging her memory. He had been her first man. She felt he had taught her wonders and pleasures of the flesh she had never dreamed possible, that had thrilled her beyond anything she could have imagined. He had opened for her a heterosexual world of sensual ecstasy where she practiced other kinds of power over men than money, politics, and intelligence. Even as he spoke now, she wanted him as she had had him then and subsequently in Khartoum, Cairo, and Damascus.
Now she would have him in Paris. She took his wrist in her hand and looked at his watch, then into this eyes.
In a voice tinged with passion, she said, “We have a few hours before lunchtime and the next act of my extravagant charade, and my launch into the big wide world as the other side of myself.” She leaned over Adam and pressed the button set into the armrest next to him. The glass window that divided the front from the backseat of the silver-gray Rolls slid away. “Avenue Montaigne. The Plaza-Athénée,” she ordered. As she reached to press the button to raise the window once more, Adam took her hand in his, saying to the chauffeur, “That will do just fine, Roberts.” Then he pressed the button and kissed her hand with lips she sensed were eager with anticipation. They gazed into each other’s eyes and she recognized that look of lust that dominates, that blinds one to anything but the desire for copulation. Tana Dabra savored that look she was able to draw from men’s eyes.
Adam grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her face toward his. He was intoxicated by her sensuality and pressed his cheek to hers, his lips to her forehead. The feel of her skin sparked a kind of wildness in his lust for this incredibly elegant, yet feral and primitive female. He kissed the bridge, then the tip of her nose, then each cheek, relishing the taste of her sweet dark flesh. He placed his lips upon hers and nibbled and sucked on them until they parted and he found her tongue. Slowly he released her from the kiss and removed her hands which had sought his throbbing penis and kissed the palm of one and then the other. Placing them together he held them firmly.
“Have there been many men? Do you have a great deal of sex?” he asked, looking away from her out the window in an attempt to distance himself from his desire for her until they reached their destination and some privacy. And yet not wanting to let go of the lust he was feeling for her.
“Yes, many.”
“What kind of men do you choose? What kind of sex do you have? Do you love any of them?”
Tana Dabra’s heart was pounding. She felt a moistness that Adam had elicited from her, and she, too, felt the need
to diffuse her lust until they were alone. But it was difficult because she thrilled to those feelings. She looked away and out the window as he did. They began to cross the Pont de la Concorde.
“I love Paris. I have always loved Paris. I am always dazzled by it. I was here for a short time this spring. The chestnut trees were in full bloom along the avenues. The luscious large green leaves and the clusters of blossoms looked like upside-down, flowering ice-cream cones. They weighed down the boughs of the trees. They were lovely. Floating up and down in the faint, warm breeze.
“There had been flowers springing up everywhere in bloom along the city streets. Boxes of them in front of shop windows; urns bubbling over with them; vendors with baskets full of carnations, tulips, freesia, and mimosa. Oh, how the French love mimosa!
“The French women seemed to bloom just like the flowers. Hundreds of French women walking about the streets like animated lilacs, roses on the march, daffodils chattering to narcissi. Ah, Paris touched by spring! There’s no other city like it in the world. Well, everyone feels that way about it. But it’s still true.
“It was early spring, when the newly bedded flowers are heavy with scent, radiating renewal. The Parisians seemed more elegant and pompous, full of themselves, just like the season.
“I loved it. Just as I always had from the first time I had seen it since many years before. Paris has always been good to me. I have grown up in so many ways here. But there was always something in me that wanted to attack the French, Paris, and springtime in Paris especially. I was always looking for clichés to knock it, to make it less than it is. But they never undid its spell. It has always been more than you can say about it.
“All Paris seemed delectable, the many boxes, urns, hanging baskets full of daffodils and tulips which swayed with the breeze. I saw them as delicious delicacies and wanted to gobble them up like wonderful Parisian chocolates, exquisite éclairs, and sticky marrons glacés. I thought to myself, maybe that’s love in the air.
“I was approaching the Lipp, where I was to have a drink with a young Greek painter I had met at a smart vernissage the night before. His paintings were interesting, but I was looking forward to him, the meeting, and the drink. As I approached the tables under the canopy I smiled to myself, wondering, ‘What do the Parisians do with all the ugly people?’ Everyone is so beautiful in Paris today. The small white marble tables were filled with the beautiful people. I just wasn’t seeing the ugly ones.
“I saw the young man sitting toward the back at a table close to the café’s huge window. He stood up and waved. His name was Minos. I was with him only five minutes when I suddenly realized I didn’t want him anymore. It had been a mistake. There was something ominous about him. He had said nothing to offend me, but there was something in the manner in which he asked me questions about myself that displeased me. He was a malcontent who kept trying to make me apologize for my looks, my sensuality, and successes I might have. I disliked him not so much for that but more because in the few minutes I was with him he made me realize that Paris, the luscious, beautiful mistress of all cities, with all its beauty and grandeur, with all its chic and cosmopolitan atmosphere, was basically, under all its perfume and cosmetics, petit bourgeois, just like the dreadful Minos. How clever of the French to trick the world, I thought, and stupid of Minos to give himself away so badly.
“I hurried through my drink, for I had promised to visit Minos’s studio and look at his work. He was handsome, vain, arrogant, and talented. He was young and cynical. He reminded me of the Greece I had known one summer, and the heat of that summer and all the Greek men I had not fucked and wished I had, of the passion to experience them that I had missed. If he had only not spoken, not opened his mouth! We walked in silence toward his studio, and I thought, ‘Maybe.’
“Once in his studio, the maybe was engulfed by an unease that continued as I looked at his paintings and managed to find the right things to say to the man about his work. He looked at me with a certain disdain. Pompous,
sure of himself and his art, he could not have cared less what I thought. He accused me of being condescending about his work. He trapped me in a corner and, with one hand leaning against the wall, he blocked me from moving. With the other he taunted me with a jab, a light slap across the face. He accused me of coming to the meeting with him for the only reason that he had sought it: a fuck. It was, of course, true. I picked up my handbag and started to walk away from him and his terrible studio. His accusations of leading him on were ringing in my ears. It appeared that turning my back on him and walking out was not the cleverest thing I could have done. He spun me around and slapped me hard on the face. I was a spoiled, rich, black African bitch. Then he started tearing my clothes off my back.
“ ‘No, don’t tear my clothes,’ I shouted at him. But he had me pinned to the floor by his weight on top of me. He pulled off my shoes and tore my tights away. He virtually raped me; he was brutal and indecent with me. He fucked me without any degree of tenderness, love, or affection. I fought him, and the harder I fought the more violent he became. Finally I understood to fight him was to prolong the agony. I was more shattered than shocked, and, even more, I was disgusted — disgusted with him for forcing sex upon me against my will, a crime that deserves some severe punishment, and disgusted with myself because I experienced a kind of sexual thrill in his savagery. It’s what men want to think women get from it. I was sickened to find it in myself, however briefly. I could understand how the violence and loathing he must have had for me excited his sexual lust. I hated him and myself. With a knife in my hand I would have killed him. No hesitation.”
Adam still held her hands, and now he raised them and kissed them. The anger in her eyes changed her entire face. It made her more hardened in her beauty, in her sexual lustiness. She was thrilling to be next to and his desire for her sharpened. He began to speak, but she stopped him. Releasing her hands she placed her fingers lightly on his lips. “Please, there’s nothing for you to say. Let me continue. Hear out my little saga,” she said.
Adam nodded.
“When he had quite finished with me,” Tana Dabra continued, “I put on my shoes, leaving my torn tights behind. I straightened my dress the best I could, repaired my face, covering the tear streaks and smudged mascara. He lay naked, splashed with his own semen streaked with my blood, which he had smeared over himself so proudly. He smiled, full of himself, because he had conquered me against my will. He never rose from the floor or made any attempt to keep me from leaving the studio.
“I walked past a table with a large, heavy glass pitcher filled with water standing in the middle of it. I put my handbag down on the table and picked up the pitcher, walked over to the Greek, who had hauled himself into a club chair, with one of his legs draped over the arm. He was concentrating on his flaccid penis, playing with it, oblivious to me. With both hands around the pitcher I threw the cold water in his face. Before he could recover I rushed toward him and smashed the pitcher over his head, scooped up my handbag, and walked quickly through the door. My feet hardly touched the stairs as I fled down the four flights and into the street.
“Why do I tell you this tale? Because that incident was a turning point in my life. I had dropped my guard and allowed a man to choose me, and it was the first and last time I allowed that. I don’t intend that to happen ever again. Fame, fortune, whatever we have designed for my new life and my future, in my sex life I will be master, as I always have been since that night you taught me how to make love and enjoy sex and outrageous lust.”
Tana Dabra reached out and caressed Adam’s cheek. Then putting her long slender hands on either side of his face, she held it as she parted her lips and kissed him. It was a kiss filled with urgency and need, with a passion that was not to be extinguished. The kiss sealed an unspoken bond of lust between them.
They entered the restaurant and were fussed over at once. While they were being shown to Adam’s favorite table, Tana Dabra turned around and touched Adam’s arm.
She looked into his eyes and smiled, then whispered, “Thank you for an exquisite last interlude, Adam. And now we begin our charade. If I am lucky, it may turn into a reality and a new life.”
Every eye was drawn to the couple. Where else in the room was there the beauty and elegance of the ebony-skinned woman ashimmer in black silk? So tall and slim, she moved more with the rhythm of a gazelle in a slow walk than of the fashion model she was about to become.
Seated, she remarked, “I could eat much more than a model ought to.” But she cast a casual enough glance down the menu.
Adam carefully removed it from her hands and asked. “What did you mean exactly by ‘an exquisite last interlude?’”
She gazed into his eyes. There was little to be read in hers now. Lust had faded from them, seemingly satisfied by the recent interval of caressing and closeness. Only calm shone in them, an incredible stoic silence that gave nothing away, that was in its own special nothingness so magnetic and seductive.
“Just that, Adam. In Africa, you’re mine. Nothing, no one stands between us. Those secret sexual trysts in the wild burn in me like a fire, as I know they do in you as well. And they always will. But, here in the west, you’re not mine. You belong to your wife. I saw that in your eyes as you looked at her the night of the gala. There was the same lust that you feel for me, but there was more. Something that was never there in your eyes for me. Something I have never known. I believe it was love. I would rather have you totally in Africa, than to have bits of you in the West. Now, please, can we order, and get on with this charade that both of us need to maintain?”
Adam wanted to say that it didn’t have to be that way. But how could he when he knew it did? There were other things he wanted to say to Tana Dabra but could not. She had preempted him, found for both of them more savoir faire and honesty than he could have done. So, out of respect for what they had together, all he said was, “Is
there something special you would like to have for lunch? Or would you allow me to order for both of us?”
They were gazing into each other’s eyes. Rekindled flickers of lust in them warmed Adam and Tana Dabra and made them grateful that understanding was there, that words were superfluous. Their eyes confirmed everything.
Tana Dabra gestured with a hand that the ordering of their meal was his prerogative. She watched Adam and studied his face as he spoke with the maitre d’ about their meal. Kir Royals arrived, and he broke off ordering their food to raise his glass in a toast. “To your corner of Africa,
your
summons, and
our
joys in the wild … under the whitest of moons.” They touched glasses and drank, the champagne and cassis a celebration of blends, his genuine toast awakening something in her heart. They smiled, and he returned to the menu and continued selecting their feast.
Nothing could distract her from his face, the sound of his voice, not even the lordly elegance of this famous restaurant which had flourished in the eighteenth century around the gardens of the Palais-Royal. It had continued undiminished in grandeur during the revolution despite the food shortages that had forced the ordinary people of Paris to go hungry. In those days long ago men and women had dined there on foie gras, woodcocks, quail gratiné, sweetbreads, and truffle-stuffed hens. They had quaffed sauternes and champagne the day Marie Antoinette’s head had fallen by the guillotine. Tana Dabra couldn’t be distracted by the present either. The restaurant was full now of chic men and women dressed in
haute couture
and bejeweled by Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels. It was not that she was oblivious to her surroundings or the hovering waiters and the attentive sommelier. She simply wasn’t distracted by them.