Quiver (15 page)

The woman knows. The woman knows she has a choice. She could stand up and press the button and descend from the bus. Or she could stay sitting there opposite him, pinned into the sticky seat. The air congealing between them until it threatens to fall from the ceiling in thick white strings of risk, of fear, of expectation. Or she could lean across and, kneeling, open his flesh to her hand. Her hot cunt. Her empty mouth. I am now, not then or tomorrow. But now. And I will take what I want now and this gesture will stay crystallized. Inevitable, fatal, standing outside of time.

The moment threatens to pass stretching thin, the smell of his sweat and aftershave under the tobacco sweeping across as the bus door opens. She feels dizzy. Her pupils dilate and her lips swell. Beneath her skirt her cunt grows wet as if he has touched her. Their eyes are talking, they are saying, Let me peel back your skin, and I will make you scream, tear you a little. I will hold your legs between my thick thighs and squeeze until it is bone on bone, flesh on flesh and we are animal again. Promise. I want to drink you inside, swallow you whole so that your flesh fills me right through to the hip bone. I want you to fill every orifice. Get inside me, under my skin, under my pumping heart.

Silence talks. She stands and turns. The seam of her fishnet tights halves her vulva, secretly sticky. She reaches up, conscious of the circumference of her body, stretching just a little bit further to let him know. As if he needs telling.

Behind her she feels the air shift as he stands. She dare not run for fear he will use sound, break the smell that tugs, the blind clenching of cock and cunt. Please, she prays, stay without history, without pathos, without darling darling do you love me, so that I can think again with my skin. The man stays silent. He stands and presses the button for the next stop.

They both step off the bus, his footsteps echoing behind her, slightly to her left. In her heart there are four empty chambers and two sets of heart strings. Fear dries her mouth. She is listening for trust in his step so that the pictures in her head fit with the hiss of the summer rain hitting the pavement. He is right behind her. He is with her all the way. They walk toward the concert hall.

Inside, her husband lifts his baton and the harpist runs her long fingers down three octaves.

Around them, invisible spirits swirl and seep into the cortex but these two pause for a second. They are standing outside the large windows of the concert hall. Inside is all gilt and warm red leather. Music is audible. It floats out in cold streams like the air-conditioning.

She steps inside and he follows, shadowing her along the leather-lined corridors. Her hand trails for a moment across the padded stretched skin. It makes her think of large square cows, and how much grass they’d have to eat to cover a concert hall. Under her hand she thinks she can feel the audience breathing through the leather. There are attendants standing at the entry of the foyer selling programs. Her husband, hair dyed, twenty years younger, smiles from the cover. He is a vain man. A successful, handsome man.

The program booth is situated under a strange painting. It catches her eye. Semiabstract, with great swirling arcs of red,
it seems to represent two women making love. Their pose reminds her of early Chinese erotica. It has the same naive joy. She stops and buys a program, and the young attendant smiles at her as she hands her the change.

“The concert’s already started, Mrs. Pope, but I’m sure you’d be able to watch from the listening room.” She smiles again. The woman wonders if the attendant has slept with her husband. The young man stands facing a framed photo, an image of Mr. Pope, his eyes bright and slightly salacious, hair elegantly ruffled in a thin attempt to look casual, the gap between nose and upper lip betraying a Romanian heritage.

She watches him look at the photo of her husband. He gazes up at the image, his weight poised forward. He turns and smiles at her and carefully raises his hand in exactly the same gesture, in a parody without malice.

She is amused and suddenly she is older, in control. She takes his hand and leads him down the corridor.

She has this image in her head from when she grew up. When she traveled on the subway with her grandmother she would stare at the large colorful posters pasted on the opposite walls of the platform. There was one particular poster: an advertisement for Clarks shoes with two little children, Hansel and Gretel, walking down a path leading into a huge dark green forest.

She would stand on the edge of the train platform and look into the poster. It seemed as if the path stretched into a sinister, leafy infinity. The thought that the two children would walk together in this manner with no destiny in sight induced a breathlessness in her, a suffocation. It was this disembodiment she felt now, as if she was looking down at herself and this unfamiliar young man. The deliberation involved in
being the leader, acting upon one’s fantasies. A decision has been made.

They reach a small red door set into the wall of the auditorium. The music playing within is audible and vibrates beneath their feet. The brass section reaches a crescendo and she can see the exact stance of her husband, both hands jerking up in that curious half-knowing, half-abandoned impulse which music, like electricity, induces in him. His face will be wildly out of control, revealing a sensuality he has never been able to express. The trumpets stop and the string section begins a low wailing. When she first saw him like this she knew that she loved him.

Mr. and Mrs. Pope have been married for eighteen months. He is the only man she knows who does not ultimately bore her, and in the moments that her interest lapses all she has to do is watch him raise his baton. She is the only woman he knows who can spontaneously orgasm to Mahler. Her favorite is the
Resurrection
.

She reaches into her briefcase and pulls out a small gold key. She unlocks the door.

Gently he pushes her in from behind, and she stumbles into the darkened room. The sound of the music is near-deafening. He places his hands over her breasts, caressing the orbs, pulling at the nipples. They harden beneath the satin. She pushes the door shut with her foot.

The room is small, set into the left wall of the auditorium facing the stage. Ordinarily it is used for the recording of concerts by the BBC. The proximity of the stage and the acoustics incurred by such geography make this possible. It is twelve feet long and four feet wide with wood paneling. Two large windows open directly onto the auditorium and face the stage. The room is about twenty feet away from the front of the stage, thus enabling a complete panoramic view of both conductor and orchestra. Because of its darkened walls and the manner in which the windows are set slightly above and into the walls of the auditorium, both audience and performers are oblivious to the existence of the room unless otherwise informed.

It was Mr. Pope who initially encouraged his wife to use it as a kind of private listening room. At this very moment he is thinking about her sitting alone, her head tilted to one side, watching him. The thought of her watching him increases his tumescence. He is a performer by nature, some might say it was imprinted on his DNA. He only becomes sexually excited when he knows he is being watched. Too many easy conquests have left him jaded and satiated, an affliction that has intensified with middle age. Each new seduction is the only way he can reach out, touch the persona they are selling to the public. Not his private self, he left that on a train fleeing Romania somewhere in the mid-fifties. To know himself he needs to be told about himself, preferably from the lips of young girls. Otherwise after each concert tour his sense of identity spirals down into a void without meaning.

Mr. Pope raises his baton and the cellist begins the second movement. Mrs. Pope pushes the young man away from her. She gestures for him to keep quiet. Slowly, from within her briefcase, she pulls out a black net corset and two highly polished Italian patent-leather pumps. She bends over, and the man begins rolling her skirt above her hips. She stands and pushes her skirt back down. He moves across the darkened room and leans into the window. Just then the conductor raises his arms and with a wild flailing sweeps the orchestra into
the second movement. She slips on the corset under her dress, a quarter-cup black number. The cups cut under her breasts, as if a man is holding them up and squeezing them.

She begins rolling down her fishnet tights. They catch slightly on her toenails. She turns to the young man.

His head is nodding in time with the music. He leans against the wide shelf of the window, beyond which she can see her husband vacillate with the music. At that instance she can see through the young man’s eyes. She knows what stirs him beneath his trousers. It is the proximity of the audience just outside the window. The smell of the collective animal, the French perfume, the sweat, the secret undersmells that whisper. It fills the room. They are her captive audience, blind to her presence yet so close that if she wanted to she could throw her lingerie and it would fall, perhaps dangle, across their faces.

On stage, the fourth violinist studies a twist of blond hair. It curls teasingly on the neck of the cellist sitting in front of him. The fourth violinist, barely nineteen and still a virgin, wonders what the hair would taste like. He imagines salty. He imagines running his fingers up the smooth nape then plunging his fingers into the soft mass of hair. Taking a handful he would push her head down, push her soft pliant mouth down to his cock and…the third violinist nudges him hard in the ribs. He is late with his note by twenty seconds.

He follows the conductor’s baton as it spirals slowly up into the air. His eye is caught by something set into the wall.

W
HAT THE
F
OURTH
V
IOLINIST
S
EES

He sees the pale face of a beautiful man, not much older than himself, who sits watching in the window of the listening
room. There is something odd about the slightly disjointed way the beautiful man nods his head to the music.

Two white breasts seem to float toward the young man. A woman, older, her hair loose, torso poured into a corset, pushes her breasts toward his face. He takes one fully into his mouth. The fourth violinist sees the long nipple disappearing into the young man’s full lips. In and out. In and out. Again the fourth violinist misses his cue.

W
HAT
M
RS
. P
OPE
F
EELS

Teeth around the nipple teasing slightly, biting, circling with his tongue as the nipple hardens, then slowly sucking. Quicker, quicker. He takes the other breast, pulling harder, rolling the nipple between his two fingers. He plays my body, he plays my breasts. He is a sex child. I am a mother with a cunt. Red threads run from my nipple to my navel, a lattice of pleasure. I want him to touch my sex. I move forward but he holds me at a distance. He knows what he’s doing and he’s in no hurry.

W
HAT THE
S
ILENT
Y
OUNG
M
AN
F
EELS

Skin. Skin you can press your fingers into, sinking, sinking. Skin like sweet warm milk. The blue veins run like water just below the surface. Breasts that run in a perfect semicircle below the nipple, large, unmistakable. Her raised areola tastes like plums. Bruised plums with a slight tang of sea salt. I want her to take me like a young siren, Medusa lashed to the deck. And all around the churning sea.

W
HAT THE
H
USBAND
I
S
T
HINKING

Why do you want to know? It doesn’t matter what I think. I am just a bit player, a construct of Katherine’s. That’s her name, Katherine Pope née Handsworth. I stand here and I am not entirely conscious. Musical instinct drives me. I hear the notes before they are played. I am orchestrating the moment before it manifests. This makes me the dictator. The puppet master with a hundred invisible strings attached to the lips and instruments of the orchestra in front of me. This power is tremendously exciting. The responsibility involved is also terrifying. I can feel the audience breathing at the back of my neck. They inhale as one. Their breath travels in languid rivulets that accelerate with the music. As the master I feel as if I am choreographing one enormous collective orgasm…or perhaps a series of little climaxes that lead to a kind of death. The kind of death that sears the top of the brain as the whole orchestra concludes in a concoction of violent color, leaving you floating somewhere near the chandeliers.

The kind of death that occurs in the silence between the last note and rapturous applause. The last heartbeat.

Notation: Climax. Beat. Silence. Beat. Applause.

I like to think I specifically cater for the women in the audience. For the older blue-rinse set, the gentler, slower ascent is kinder on bodies familiar with touch.

For the younger frisky members (and God knows the numbers are dwindling) I direct the triumphant heroics of the brass section. For the men I leave the space between the notes, they can draw their own conclusions.

You tell me my wife is in the audience. I know that already, I feel it. There is a symbiosis between even warring couples.
Comprenez-vous?
Not that I don’t love my wife. It’s just that she is so different. For her life is still dramatic. The pathos she generates throws everything up into a sharper focus. That’s why I love her, she wakes me up. And there’s only two things that wake me up. Fellatio and Mozart.

W
HAT THE
F
OURTH
V
IOLINIST
S
EES

He lifts her up and pulls her onto his lap. The fourth violinist falters for a moment as the woman clutches at the man’s cock. Even in the shadows he can see the length and thickness clearly, a thick conquering phallus that makes a frail silhouette of the rest of the body. The man’s profile is Bacchus, Priapus, Jack of the Beanstalk. She drops to her knees. Her breasts pour over his glans, he plunges into the cleavage.