Butterfly Skin (34 page)

LARISA AND I ARE SITTING IN THE COFFEE INN. AS SHE
hung her short coat on the hook behind her, I spotted the way she ran her palm over the smooth fur that is every shade of gray.

When we first met many years ago, she was wearing a fur jacket then too, artificial blue fur, jeans and an orange sweater with a diagonal zip. If you unfastened it, you could take out one breast and kiss it, but I didn’t discover that until much later.

Larisa is three years older than me: that’s a big difference when you’re seventeen and you’ve just finished school. I was still a virgin, but that was normal: in those days everyone started later – although maybe that’s just the way it seems to me. Larisa was my friend Yegor’s big sister, and we were celebrating the New Year at his dacha. She was with a young guy from the faculty of law at the university, and after midnight they went off upstairs, saying they were tired. We exchanged glances, giggling, as if to say: we know what they’ve gone off to do.

We were wrong. I was convinced of that six months later.

The girl I had been dating since school told me she had decided to keep her virginity until she got married, and I was so furious I told her to get lost. We said goodbye in a cold park in spring, she hugged me and pressed her body against me and in farewell I stuck my tongue as far down her throat as I possibly could, as if compensating in this way for the penetration that had been denied to me. She sobbed and went limp in my arms and I was aroused because she seemed so submissive. It occurred to me that I liked this kind of behavior and if she always acted like that, I wouldn’t mind carrying on seeing her. But when I asked for the last time if she would let me have it or not, she repeated “no” through her tears. I turned and walked away, feeling my prick tearing apart the material of my cheap jeans. I was seventeen and a half and still a virgin and so I decided: no more girls my own age. It was summer, and I went to Yegor’s dacha again, after learning that Larisa would be there and she had just quarreled with her law student.

It was only later I found out that she quarreled with him because she had decided to keep her virginity until her wedding. Let me say straight away that she succeeded.

Larisa had dark hair and big eyes, a round mouth and heavy breasts.
Tits twenty-five pounds apiece
, as they used to say in the days of my youth. Since then I have weighed women’s breasts a couple of times for the sake of amusement: seven and a half pounds was the absolute record. Larisa’s would have been about six pounds. She was a good kisser and she probably gave me some of the finest blow jobs of my life. But then perhaps I was still too young and I didn’t need very much. Before she took me in her mouth, she always removed her spectacles and handed them to me – I started putting them in my pocket after I almost crushed them in my fist as I came, my orgasms were so strong then. I can see it now, Larisa’s blue-black hair fluttering like seaweed under the water as she swayed to and fro on her knees in front of me.

Since then her hair has turned platinum and it looks like a wig. She no longer wears spectacles and her gray eyes have acquired an unnatural greenish tinge, no doubt from contact lenses. Sitting in the Coffee Inn, I try to see this well-dressed, middle-aged woman as the girl I used to kiss on benches in summer and in hallways during the winter. I had to walk up the stairs to the very top floor, sit her on the windowsill, unbutton the artificial blue fur jacket and open the slanting zip fastener, then fumble to find the fastening of her bra as quickly as possible. Larisa always used to say:
Don’t, what if somebody sees
, but as soon as I pressed my lips against her large brown nipple, she started breathing deeply and running her hands through my hair.

I used to have long hair back then. I used to dream of being a rock star, I used to listen to Yegor Letov, Nick Rock’n’Roll, the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop. Larisa had graduated from a special English school, and a couple of times when I pestered her for translations she pulled a sour face and said the words were nothing but obscenities and she didn’t like that kind of thing. She really didn’t like obscenities, and her taste in rock and roll went no further than Queen, Aguzarova and Aquarium.

She probably likes Zemfira and Tori Amos now, although I think maybe it’s okay for well-groomed ladies approaching forty to like Eminem, or even the band Leningrad. It’s kind of awkward to ask, she might think I’m hinting that fifteen years ago my obscene musical tastes were more advanced than hers.

Fifteen years ago we sometimes used to go out to the dacha, where we would strip naked and spend hours at a time kissing on the divan that we had opened out, or simply on the floor. We were insatiable because we were young and we still had our virginity.

Three years of continuous petting – that’s serious experience. I became a virtuoso in the art of bringing a girl to orgasm without penetrating deep into her vagina: I think I probably have Larisa to thank for being considered a good lover – with her large nipples and gentle hands and those especially sensitive spots between her shoulder blades and just above her buttocks, where her tail would have grown if she had been one of those animals that are used to make fur jackets for well-groomed ladies approaching forty.

We drink coffee. Larisa tells me about how she flew to London for Christmas and watched the last part of
Lord of the Rings
in English. We used to love that book, although now all I remember is the part where the dead faces gaze up out of the depths of the frozen swamp. And of course, I remember that sinister charm and the oppressive gaze that starts seeking you out just as soon as you put the ring on your finger. A feeling only too familiar to me now.

We put on our rings and lived together for three years. I guess we were just about the only couple in my circle who didn’t get married because the girl was knocked up. My grandmother died and Larisa and I started living in our own apartment. I was already trying to
make money
and I used my first earnings to buy a VCR and a Japanese TV. We put them in the bedroom and every evening we used to lie in bed, watching video cassettes borrowed from friends or bought from the street traders. A three-hour cassette could usually hold two movies and if the first one was good the impetus of our interest usually carried us through the second one as well.

While we were hugging and squeezing each other in hallways and licking each other for hours at the dacha, I was certain that when the moment came and we made love
properly
, a miracle would happen. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Larisa seemed to me like an excellent lover and now, ten years and dozens of women later, I can say that she really was, but there was still something wrong. We came together, sticky with sweat; I kissed her heavy breasts with the big nipples, she gripped my ear lobe between her lips and ran her always impeccable nails lightly along my thigh – and yet throughout the years of our life as a family I wanted to ask: is that all there is? Is this what they write books and make movies about? Is this what millions of teenagers all round the world dream about?

Larisa has been married for eight years now. I don’t know if she loves her husband when she runs her nails across his thigh, if he knows the especially sensitive spot between her shoulder blades and how to kiss her palm to make her come. It’s kind of awkward to ask about that, although I guess I really am curious.

Her husband earns a pretty good income, but even so I meet her every month to hand over an envelope with money in it: I love my son very much and I want to be a good father. It’s eight years now since I last saw him.

Sometimes we used to make love in front of the TV. It didn’t necessarily have to be porn, sometimes it was romances, action movies or even comedies. I remember we laughed like lunatics at
Airplane!
, at one point even forgetting that I was still inside her. I think we even tried making love to Ridley Scott and James Cameron’s popular action movies of the time, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigourney Weaver.

The best orgasm Larisa gave me was while we were watching some horror B-movie. A group of girl scouts, with the regulation huge tits – twenty-five pounds apiece – was trying to escape from a group of psychos armed with all sorts of weapons for butchering flesh, up to and including the chainsaw immortalized by Tobe Hooper.

(By the way, the original for Leatherface in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
was the same Ed Gein who inspired Hitchcock and Harris. I’ve read a lot about him: the man had a sense of beauty, a necklace of women’s nipples really is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.)

Larisa wasn’t particularly fond of movies like that – she wasn’t even afraid of them, just completely indifferent to what was going on. I guess she thought all these bloody stories about girls being butchered while they were still alive had nothing to do with her life, or maybe in her world, which was already artificial even then, these stories looked like an unacceptable intrusion of reality. Whatever, I don’t know. Anyway, she was sitting on me with her back to the screen, moving up and down rhythmically. I was holding her heavy breasts in my hands and following the action on the screen over her shoulder. A second-string female character, obviously destined to be butchered, a blonde with hair the same color that Larisa is dyed now, was gazing around as she wandered through the woods where her two girlfriends had just been killed. In the regulation style for movies like this, she was wearing a highly revealing swimsuit, and I moved in time with Larisa as she rose and fell and waited for the blonde to get her throat cut. Suddenly a hand grabbed the girl’s platinum hair and I saw a huge machete descend on her breasts.

It’s actually very difficult to cut off a large breast with a single stroke. It takes practice – maybe the characters in the movie actually had it. But anyway, I didn’t see what happened to the blonde’s breasts – not because the camera skipped prudishly to her contorted face, but because at the moment when the machete entered the flesh I jerked spasmodically, grabbed Larisa’s breasts tight and came abundantly.

Usually I could hold out for quite a long time; Larisa didn’t like condoms and we used to practice
coitus interruptus
, so she swore, jumped off me and ran into the bathroom. I lay there on my back for a while. My heart was pounding and my body was trembling convulsively.

I guess Larisa’s probably put in a coil now or she takes the pill. Whatever, but she doesn’t have any other children, and she’s not likely to: America’s the place where businesswomen have children when they’re approaching forty. I’d like to ask her about that, but it’s kind of awkward.

When we separated I was twenty-four and she was twenty-seven, but now it seems to me that we were complete children who knew nothing of our own desires and were afraid of our own feelings. I wanted to be a rock star, she wanted to be a zoologist, like her mother. She’s ended up as a manager in a large Western firm that produces animal feed. I guess that’s zoology too.

A little less than a month later we learned that my sperm had not gone to waste: the regulation period was followed by the birth of Denis, my son conceived from a stroke of a machete that severed those breasts so similar to the breasts of his mother.

I think that now Larisa’s heavy breasts have sagged even more and the fat has probably built up on her thighs. She was always afraid of getting fat, so maybe she has liposuction, follows Dr. Volkov’s method for slimming or goes to Fitness Planet twice a week. I’d like to ask about that, but it’s kind of awkward. She’s getting old, all women get old and they try to hide it. Time deals mercilessly with their flesh that is so beautiful in its youth – they get old and covered in wrinkles, put on fat and then die. But the girls I have killed will stay young forever.

Larisa drinks her coffee and says they make good coffee in the Coffee Inn, but not as good as I once used to make. Really? I’ve already forgotten how I used to brew coffee back then. Since then I’ve become highly skilled in this art, especially with all the new kinds that have appeared. Does her new husband know how to make coffee? I’d like to ask about that, but it’s kind of awkward.

It’s hard for me meeting Larisa. Usually I just call into her office, but today she suggested getting together for lunch and I couldn’t refuse, especially since I’ve been in an excellent mood since early morning. After all, she is the woman I loved for six years – longer than any other woman in my life. I used to dream of waking up together every morning and going to sleep together every night, every month breathing in the smell of unborn children leaving her womb when their time came and then, when we started to get old, watching every day as the gray hairs sprouted through her black tresses.

I was very young and I knew nothing about myself, but that’s not so very important. I licked her body for three years, I knew every square inch of her skin and could tell if she had started menstruating the moment I caught sight of the figure in the artificial blue fur at the far end of the subway platform. Today I look at the artificial platinum hair, the too-regular teeth, the green-tinted eyes and I can’t reach the Larisa I once used to love.

Now she’s telling me that her old friend Mashka – I remember her: a skinny woman with chestnut hair and incredibly beautiful arms – almost got divorced, but she and her husband went to a marriage counselor and now they’re perfectly happy again.

We got divorced when Denis was a year old. Larisa went back to work and she was sent to Europe for a week for training. I stayed home with the child. In the evening, when he was already asleep, I used to lie in bed, masturbating. During the first year of our life together I hadn’t done this very often: the door to the shower didn’t lock, and I was frightened by the thought of my wife finding out that I wanked like a teenager. We never talked about it and I was sure she never masturbated herself. If we’d met as adults, I could easily have asked a direct question, but now it’s kind of awkward.

During Larisa’s pregnancy I rediscovered the taste for masturbation that had almost been lost since my schooldays. Early toxicosis was followed by the danger of a miscarriage and then by late toxicosis, it was a difficult birth and there was no question of sex for three months. It’s curious that it didn’t occur to either of us to recall our rich experience of petting. That night when Larisa was on her training in Europe I came quite quickly – and when I returned to reality, I heard Denis, who was standing up in his little cot, shouting: “Daddy, Daddy!”