Slow Hand (21 page)

“Tu ne comprends rien,”
the man smiles. She releases him. He directs her to the bed.

“Yes, this I still understand,” she says.

He hovers above her. Her arms encircle him. She feels the metal of his belt buckle against her lips.

“Non”
He pulls away, gets down on his knees and watches her, observes her face, the two lines in her forehead that mean she is tired, the slightly open mouth. He holds her ankles in his hands and slowly moves them apart.

“Il fail chaud ce soir,’
she says and lies back on the bed. Slowly, everything is slowly, he undoes the six straps of her sandals. He pulls the straps tight and then loose. Six times on one foot. Six times on the other foot. He glimpses the golden brown pubic hair beneath her skirt.

She sits up and sweeps her hair to the top of her head and then tilts the head back. He studies her carefully, intently, her forehead, nose, chin, throat. She lets her hair fall and then says again,
“Il fait chaud.”
She asks him to bring—what is the word?—her pocketbook. “Where?” She flexes her dazzling body.
“Là,”
she points, and he crawls to it on all fours.

From her bag she takes a small round box of hairpins which she hands to him. She turns so that she is facing the wall. He pulls the hair to the top of her head as he has watched her do and attempts to fasten it there. Long curling tendrils escape his every effort, and he sighs.

“Do not give up so easily,” she says.

“Comment?”

She unbuttons her blouse and neatly folds it. Then her brassiere. It opens in the front, the back shaped vaguely like a heart. Her breasts, released from the elastic and bone and lace, swell.

She sings the birthday song, softly, off-key. “Today is my birthday,” she says. Though it is not true.

He sees that the edges of her ears are red and that she has a slight heat rash along the back of her neck. Alternately he feels tender, then hostile, then indifferent toward her.

She raises her arms to check her hair, and he takes this opportunity to place his nose under her arm, breathing deeply. He runs his mouth along the slightly roughened skin of the American, cleanly shaven. He bites her, but gently. She wants him to bite her harder, hurt her somehow—make her feel something. But he won’t.

She takes a small mirror from the leather bag and fingers
the curls he has fashioned with the hairpins, approving of the job he has done. “Perhaps you are
un coiffeur,”
she says, laughing. He moves his mouth to her rose nipple. She observes him in the mirror, a ravenous and fragile child. When she has had enough she nudges him away with her elbow. He goes around her back over to the other breast, and it is the same thing. She watches him and then brushes him away tenderly with one white wing. She turns to face him. She tries to tie his hair in a ponytail.

“Non,”
he says.

“Mais, il fait chaud.”
She tries again.

“Non.”

Slowly, she unbuttons his shirt, she counts each button: un,
deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept.
“You are like a child.” She outlines the rib cage with her mouth, presses where she imagines the heart to be.

She unfastens the familiar belt now and slips his penis from his pants. It has a life of its own. It is at a particularly lovely angle from his body, she thinks.
“L’explorateur,”
she calls it.

Pushing her down, he pins her hands to the bed. He is more erect now, harder. He straddles her, kneeling, putting his knees under her arms. He raises himself, slowly above her so that he is just out of her reach. Her tongue is barely able to graze his underside and then not. He sways rocking back and forth, back and forth. She struggles to get free. She tries to raise herself on an elbow.
“Non.”
He watches her. She struggles to meet him. She is so wet. “Let me go,” she says.

“Non.”

“I want you.”

“Non.”

“Please.”

“Speak French.” And with that he releases her hands, leans back, and thrusts himself into her mouth. There’s a funny dipping motion. It’s getting hard to describe this anymore. It’s getting more and more difficult. He takes himself out of her mouth and with one hand pulls her skirt up around her waist and begins to touch her gently. He smiles and shakes his head at
her wetness. His long hair hangs over her.
“Tu es comme un petit cheval,”
she says.

She bends her knees, throwing him off balance, and he topples in mock defeat. “Do not give up,” she says, “so easily.” Parting her legs, muttering in French, he enters her, and she is laughing and asking, “What are you saying?” He covers her mouth with his hand.

He moves his hand down to her throat as he thrusts harder and harder. “You’re choking me,” she says. “You’re choking me.” Then nothing. And I would like to help her, but I can’t.

The black book falls to the floor, and she looks up terrified.
“Non.
It has no meaning,” he says in English.

He sits up, and he is deep inside her, and he is now swearing and sweating, and asking for something. She doesn’t know what. She tells him, she keeps telling him what she wants. What she needs. She wants to be on top now.

“Speak French.”

She finds a way to say it.

“Bon.”

He watches as slowly the strands of her hair escape the pins with the violence of her motions. She takes his small surrender and rides—somewhere far away, with him.
“Tu es comme un petit cheval.”

Her dazzling body falls forward onto him. She covers him with a veil of hair and tears. She is afraid. She wants something that doesn’t change. Something permanent.

She’ll never go far enough.

He turns her over and with an eerie precision. Takes one foot and then the other and places them on his shoulders. He holds her ankles and steers her so that her head is touching the floor. Off the edge of the bed, beheaded as she is, only a torso now, he drives into her with new ferocity.

She tries to speak, but it is useless.

“My God,” he says in English, laughing.

She curls into herself on the floor. He looks at her from the bed. Her body divides into two perfect shapes: the back, the buttocks.

She seems to be floating.

I go over to them and pick up hairpins from the floor, the drenched bed. I examine the black book.

“Look,” I say to him. “She is dreaming her way home.”

Idious Buguise, tike Barbara Gowdy and Carole Maso, finds herself writing about watching and being watched. And presented with this frustrated and harrowingly articulate narrator, we recognize her as something of a passive-aggressive voyeuse who does, in fact, realize that the act of simply opening her psyche, even to a silent shrink, might be a way of letting in some light. At the same time, one will surely have split seconds of uneasy identification with such a character—a woman who is clamorously certain that much that is owed her is being denied.

E
very day I sit down in this artsy-fartsy, really-not-very-comfortable raffia palm chair, and you sit behind that glass and metal hi-tech desk. I talk and you listen with your eyes closed or staring out the window, and I wonder what you can see that I can’t see. I talk about sex, and you shift position. I stare at you, and you squirm a bit. Are you excited when I talk about sex and sticky cunts and throbbing penises, or do you just pretend I’m reading you some trashy-fiction subplot and not rambling on about the real-life thoughts in my own flesh
and blood brain? And how many of these words are really my thoughts, and how many of them are just some soft-core porn I’m inventing as a game to excite you? Do you know which is which? This can’t possibly be therapeutic. I don’t even tell you my dreams. I just make it up as I go along, and you, with your shoes on the desk, never looking at me, suck up the money, day after day.

Ramble time!

Today, on the way here I sat next to a man on the Number 12 bus, and he had the most beautiful hands. No rings, no hair. No hangnails or torn cuticles. And, of course, those hands reminded me of the imaginary fingers I carry with me all the time.

Oh, my God. It really wasn’t so very long ago, you know—three, three and a half years ago he left me for her. I bet they do it in every room in their house. Yeah. I know it’s a long time without sex. But what the fuck do you expect me to do? I can’t go out and sell myself. I can’t go up to just anyone—or even a special someone—and say “put your arms around me, your lips on mine, and play softly with my crotch.” I mean that just isn’t done anymore. At least I can’t do it.

It was so much easier in the sixties. I wasn’t obsessed with checking out hands and fingers and trying to mentally place them on my crotch. Back then everyone just sort of melted into everyone else, and there was no threat of herpes, pregnancy, or AIDS. Herpes wasn’t even considered. We all took the pill. And HIV was unknown. We did it everywhere, in every imaginable position. Oral sex, gentle sex, harsh sex. Hammocks, floors, bathtubs! And I loved all of it. The kissing and touching and sucking and fucking, and I never demanded anything, and I did everything, and I was lost in a decade of dope and sticky bed sheets for hours at a time. And the person I was then really did love it and walked around with a buzz in her crotch for any guy who’d play games with her. Fingerfucking was only something you did on the way to losing your virginity. It wasn’t the prize at the end of the day. What I want now is the good old-fashioned lying in the back seat of his parents’ car, crotches touching, hands everywhere soft and stroking, and just learning
how to touch and please. All that adolescence, innocence, and steamy windows: I don’t want to grow old. I don’t want to die.

Did you have orgies in the sixties? Or were you just getting paid to hear about the orgies? Why do I even bother to ask you questions? You never answer me. You know sometimes I hate you. ’Cause I’m having problems with my fantasies and you have such a store of other people’s, you could so easily point me in the most satisfying and orgasmic way with some of those stories, and you don’t. I must be a masochist, continuing to come here.

Okay, so I have to accept the present and stop living in the past. I’m almost fifty, divorced with three grown-up kids, and I can’t stop the aging process. You’ve told me that. That’s the one thing you have actually said. Words do flow from your mouth. What you haven’t said is that I’m also sagging, have crow’s feet around my eyes, look haggard, and probably should consider hormone replacement therapy.

I know. I’m not that girl anymore. I’m a woman now with different needs and wants and not very generous and not very caring and sharing and certainly not a child of the sixties any more. I’m divorced, bitter, distanced from and jealous of my spring-chicken kids, unable to talk to my friends, and I want to have a sweep-me-off-my-feet-affair. But I don’t want to give. I’m a “gimme girl” of the eighties—gimme this, gimme that! And now it’s the nineties, and I want to be satisfied. I mean really satisfied. You know what I mean. I-don’t-want-it-to-end-satisfaction! Is that so terrible?

I’m so useless I can’t even masturbate. I’ve tried, but the rhythm isn’t right. I just can’t seem to get the right mixture of fantasy, motion, stroking, and wetness. It all gets so dry and useless. And anyway I don’t want to do the work. I want it done to me.

Before getting on the bus today I walked past the sex shops in Soho and saw all these gadgets for “quick, self-contained, easy, safe sex.” How do people use them? And how could they possibly be any better than human flesh—even my own? Nope. I can’t use gadgets. I want flesh. Masturbation isn’t really for
me, anyway. Are you a wanker? Do you do it? Do you rub your penis hard and rough until it explodes? Or do you do it softly and let it all dribble out? Do you wipe it right up with a wad of Kleenex? Or do you not do it ’cause you think it’s all too sticky and smelly and you don’t want to deal with it. And, in your secret mind, do you call it juice, or cum, or spermatozoa? Well, what do you call it? You’re squirming again. Who’s weirder? Me talking like this and paying you, or you getting paid to listen to it all?

Sometimes I think about the guy across the street. And I can see myself lying naked with him. But these thoughts are sterile: they get me nowhere. I can’t see him sticking his penis in me or getting sweaty. He’s got the kind of skin that doesn’t sweat. It probably doesn’t even tingle. As usual, I’ve probably picked the wrong man for a fantasy. We are always lying naked side by side in the grass behind a bush. There is no moaning or grunting, just soft stroking and lots of deep kisses with some spit dribbling out—okay—so the kisses get a bit too wet! He plays genteelly with my breasts, and I seem to spend most of my time with my eyelids half closed in a state of ecstasy. But it isn’t real. And anyway I don’t really have such excitable nipples. My husband used to talk about an old girlfriend who had whistling tits. He’d only to look at them, and they’d stand up and whistle “God Save the Queen.” Mine just sort of roll back along my middle-aged flabby sides and wait for my crotch to wake up and sing an Otis Redding song. This guy—he’s got nice hands. Not great hands, but okay hands. I think if they were just a bit better, I’d be more satisfied with my neighborly fantasies.