Slow Hand (20 page)

Her hand snug and secure in his, she followed him away from the throng and through a maze of alleys and courtyards. The smell of food and spilled alcohol gave way to that of the flowered vines that tumbled down from balconies and clung to the crumbling walls. The modern world seemed far away, and it was easy to pretend he really was a pirate, perhaps Jean Laffite himself, newly arrived from the bayous to dispose of his booty. They would drink the most expensive port in the city to celebrate his luck, and he would give her a ruby necklace that had been intended for a Spanish noblewoman’s neck. All her companion needed was a sword at his side to look the part completely.

Finally, he unlocked a door and led her down a cool dark hall and up some stairs. His room gave no more clues to his identity than his appearance; only a pair of blue jeans tossed over a chair marred its spartan neatness, and only a cuckoo clock on the wall gave it any character. The windows, bright and barely draped with white gauze that the cool breeze alternately puffed up and sucked out, looked out onto a shady courtyard.

Josephine was suddenly aware of the absence of the din. She heard no laughing, no bottles clanking, no dogs barking, only a small fountain tinkling water, and a faraway phonograph playing a scratchy record, the voice barely discernible as a twangy Cajun French, and her host’s breath in her ear, warm and tickly. The contrast between his warmth as he held her and the cool of the air playing around her legs and rising between them made her shiver. The sudden chill of her underwear made her realize that she was dripping wet already, just standing in his arms.

They kissed, gingerly, masks bumping. She reached up to take her mask off, but he stayed her hand. He backed her onto the sofa and bent over her when she sat. She opened her mouth
in anticipation of his kiss, but his mouth landed instead on her mask. His teeth gently plucked a feather from her mask and traced its outline on her face. He encircled her face with downy caresses, finally brushing the corner of her mouth over and over. When the wind blew that feather away, he pulled out another one, this time running it over and in her ear so very softly that she only knew she really felt it by the increased rasping of her breath. Again, the wind took his feather, and this time he pulled out two and stroked her neck and chest with them, down to the edge of her dress.

Finally, there were no more feathers in the mask. He looked at the feathers over her breasts and smiled. Kneeling in front of her, he leaned forward ever so slowly and grasped a feather—and her nipple—with his teeth. He took his time plucking some feathers, chewing more than pulling, the soft fabric bunching and twisting under his teeth, gentling their points and spreading the caress over her whole breast with his every movement.

Kneeling, he no longer needed his hands to support his weight, and he used them instead to unbutton the top button of her dress and to bury his face there with his feathers. He unbuttoned another button, then another, and spread the bodice wide. Pulling the points of the fabric taut away from her breasts, he circled one breast with the feathers, spiraling in tighter and tighter circles until the feathers were concentrated on her nipple. He stroked her nipple around and around with the fuzzy stubs until she clenched his hair in her fists and wrapped her legs around his waist.

Pulling free of her, he continued unbuttoning her dress. Finally, he had her exposed from neck to knee, and he gently tugged at her underwear until it, too, was at her knees. Spitting out his mouthful of feathers, he pulled some longer, stiffer ones from her dress and slowly worked his way down her abdomen. Then his head was between her legs and he was stroking her with the feathers. Every so often, he would paint slow, warm, wet lines down the inside her thighs, then return to the source of the moisture. An occasional feather fell from his mask, grazing her stomach before being tossed by the wind onto her arm
or face. Finally, she was sobbing and bucking, and he buried his fingers in her as she came.

After a minute, she was able to loosen her fingers from his hair, and she pulled his shirt off. His skin was tan and taut over his muscles, and the curly hairs waved slightly in the breeze. An appendicitis scar—or perhaps a souvenir of a duel—peeked from under his pants. She picked up several feathers from the floor and slowly traced the white line with one, pausing to loosen his pants to follow the scar to its source.

Quickly but gracefully he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his pants, jumping a little when his bare feet stepped on a feather. Josephine’s breath quickened as she looked at him, and it pleased her to hear him struggling to master the raggedness of his own breathing. She ran the handful of feathers slowly and deliberately down the inside of his thigh and calf, up the other leg, then back down again. The barbs of the feathers snagged in the hairs of his legs and resisted her pull. Trying not to tickle him, she carefully drew the feathers between and around his toes. Now it was his turn to clutch at her hair.

Twining her arms and legs around him, enveloping him, Josephine closed her eyes. Suspended from him, she felt as if she were bobbing weightless in the ocean. His thrusts would push her one way, then the sofa cushions would gently bounce her back in the opposite direction, and soon she lost all sense of time and gravity, knowing only the movement and the blackness. Finally he collapsed on her, and in the stillness she felt her awareness of her body return to her. He stroked her hair gently and whispered things she couldn’t hear.

They both jumped when the cuckoo clock signaled the hour. He sighed and leaned back on his heels. “Your niece will be waiting for you,” he said, and he carefully and slowly buttoned all the buttons on her dress and adjusted her mask straight on her face before putting his own clothes on. “I’ll take you back where I found you.”

Josephine was not at the lamppost long before she saw Susan. As they got closer, Josephine saw that all the children had lemonade, and Susan was sucking on one herself and holding
out another to her. Condensation dripped down the side and splattered on the sidewalk.

“Sorry, we got separated,” Susan said. As Josephine reached for her drink, Susan noticed her left hand.

“Aunt Jo, you’ve lost your wedding ring!” she exclaimed.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it right here in my purse.” Josephine reached inside for her ring, hesitated, then slipped it on.

Susan now had gotten a good look at Josephine, and she eyed Josephine’s denuded mask and dress. Josephine resisted the urge to check whether her buttons were evenly buttoned. Finally, Susan said, “I hope you didn’t just stand here the whole time.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Josephine replied.

“Oh, yes, you would!” said Susan. Then she looked at Josephine’s mask again with puzzlement and pulled a small blue souvenir from Josephine’s hair. “I’ve been thinking that maybe you should stay down here with us forever. There’s no sense in you going back to an empty house and all that snow.”

“That sounds pretty drastic,” said Josephine.

“Desperate measures for desperate times,” said Susan.

Josephine sucked on her straw as she considered Susan’s offer. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I doubt I’ll stay.” Contemplating another stray blue feather, she paused. “But who knows? Anything may happen.”

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

If there existed a world atlas of sensuality, France would occupy at least a continent, and it is probably true that this story by Carole Maso, which unfolds with such purposeful indolence, would lose a great deal were it set, say, in Indiana. Another point, wittily made here, is that language really is just a different mode of touching and that words, whether familiar or teasingly strange to the ear, can be an important element of fore-play.

A
woman, x, and a man, y, plan to meet at the prearranged coordinate, z, a fountain on the Place Antony Mars in the south of France, in some late afternoon in summer at the end of the twentieth century.

Both walk slowly, inevitably to z, embracing their common fate and now as they stop and turn, each other. Y, a man with
cheveux longs,
clearly French, kisses x twice on the cheeks. It is as if he has stepped out of some unmade film of the dead Truffaut.
She looks to be German or Scandinavian, possibly English or American and is wearing a Chinese hat. The sun is very bright, so bright in fact that sometimes one or the other, and sometimes both, seem to disappear in it. He circles her slowly. She sits stationary at a white plastic table, the kind that have become
“la mode”
in France in the last few years. He circles the fountain, the periphery of z, slowly, looking at her with some exasperation.

“Il fail chaud,”
he says.

“Non, il fait beau.”

“Il fait chaud.”

“Such bright, white light.”

“Oui, la lumière.
Speak French.”

“Oui, la lumière. “

She conjugates
vouloir. Vouloir
is to want.

She watches him appear and disappear, appear, disappear.

“This reminds me of another savage and beautiful afternoon.”

“Encore?”

“In the savage and beautiful afternoon we tried to speak. You said: ‘Where do you live?’ I said: ‘New York.’ It was a time when I was still hoping you might save me.”

“Oui,”
he says,
“comme, un prince charmant, sur son cheval blanc.”
He laughs.

She claps her hands. “Are you ready?
Vous-êtes prêt?
Are you ready now?”

She stands up.
“La première position,”
she says and arranges his arms and legs into the first position of ballet. He’s so beautiful.

“La deuxième. “

He holds the position for a moment and then breaks it.

“You thought I could save you,” he says. “You wrote it in that notebook.

“La troisième. Parfait!”
He holds the pose.

“Already, you knew there was nothing I could do for you.” He moves away.

“I asked: ‘Where do you live?’ You said: ‘Near the cemetery.’
I asked: ‘Where were you born?’ You said: ‘The most beautiful coast in the world.’”

“No one understands why you have come to my country,” he says.”
“‘L’étrangère,’
they all say.”

She cries. “But I remember the beautiful forever of the perfect afternoon. The beauty by the fountain. And
les cheveux longs.”

“La femme qui pleure,”
he says.
“Chante avec moi.”
He begins in English the song she has taught him.

“I was already trembling then,” she says.

“Crying.”

“Yes, for joy. In grief.”

“‘J’ai peur,’
you said.”

“Yes. Already that first day there was
une chamber blanche …
a black and white film.
Un ange.”

You were expecting maybe a miracle.” He smiles.

There is a close-up of the young Frenchman. A profile. And then the slow motion turn of his head. A panoramic gaze.

“You are an angel,” she says.

He laughs. Takes her Chinese hat.

She takes it back.

“She remembers the dazzling, the catastrophic afternoon.”

He tries to remember that first day. “Already,” he says, “you knew you were doomed.”

“Stop,” she says, running her finger down his arm, his chest. She skims the beautiful surface of his skin.

“La derniè re position,”
she says.

“Non,”
he says,
“pas encore.”

He offers his hand, and she steps into the gesture.

“I love you,” she says, entering the illusion like almost everyone.

He shakes his head. “It is only a dream,” he says. “A lie. I thought you were different.”

He takes her hand and holds it under the rushing, brilliant stream of water and then releases it, and they stand like that.

She in her Chinese hat.

He with his
cheveux longs.

Not touching, not saying one word.

Unaccountably there is a dizzying movement of the camera, and they are suddenly seen from high above. The camera hovers. Something else hovers. It is, we see, one of the beautiful angels of France. The angel weeps. It begins to rain.

“I thought you said it never rained in summer.”

He laughs.

It is night now. They turn and walk toward the cemetery. He guides her up the steep stairway placing the palm of his left hand on her back. He moves the other arm around her waist and presses the palm of the right hand against her heart. He applies the smallest pressure to her chest and whispers
“arrête. “

“Stop,”
he says, in a heavily accented French.

“Ouvrez la porte,”
she says, giggling. The man opens the door.

In the room there is a bed, a lamp, a black book next to the bed. A strange white light shines through the window. Light the cemetery gives. It reminds her slightly of night in the great illuminated city. “Home,” she says, but of course that is not it.

She thinks of her city—silent now, very dark. Inconceivably tragic. She can’t imagine.

“J’ai peur,”
the woman says to the man, digging her fingers into his upper arm and doing a quick little pirouette so that now she suddenly faces him. There is terror in the eyes of the woman who stands on tiptoe and searches his face for some sort of explanation.
“Je ne comprends pas,”
she says.