Thump. Thump.
Even in the dimness, her outline was easy to discern crawling out from under the bed. The long cut of the luminescent dress created an ungovernable bundle, while the bodice was left unzipped. She straddled him on the bed with a brush of sooty thighs, letting the folds of tulle and satin unfurl in a puff; a pungent sweetness wafted off her body. He did not delay but reached under the liner to rub the cinders deeper into her skin, like vine charcoal into vellum paper.
Her hip crests were latches, releasing her upper body as a swinging hinge. The melding lines of her dark face fanned in all directions, even as they converged on his eye in a fountain of thick, gummy lashes.
Dewy kisses daubed his cheek, and she inquired with unanticipated girlishness, “Do you think I’m pretty?”
Her eyelids were sewn shut in a swoon—in a mask; yet he felt design coursing through her dawdling head. “Yes,” he answered.
More words trickled over his neck, following the path of either a scalpel or plucked petals. “As pretty as her?”
“Prettier,” he droned.
The soapy scent on his lover’s skin was at first alkaline on his tongue, and then milky like lactose sugar. It was the attraction of a minute—a minute’s work—and then a minute to separate the corselette.
A vein in her neck was a telegraph wire. “Will you paint me?” it cooed.
Serrated breaths plumbed to find her sternum—some hard place to meet resistance.
“Will you?” she pleaded.
She surely felt his galloping heart through her palms and wrists, and then into those double-jointed arms. He glimpsed her content face atop his ladder of flesh, and knew she had her answer.
“Will you paint me, my sweet boy?”
The disproportion perceived earlier in her body was absent in the clutch. Under the distorted lens of his hungry eye, she was too teased-out to be the same object. Somewhere amid her disinclined bones and overly yielding edges, the particular gave way to the universal, leaving him to grapple with an unsparing puzzle. She might have been any woman in the dark—and for him, seduced by his own mask of anonymity, she was every woman he ever wanted.
“Well…?” she insisted.
“Yes,” he moaned. “I will paint you.”
Erica broke away and slid down to his knocking knees. Slathered like a teething ring, she asked calmly, “Condom…? I didn’t see any in the medicine cabinet.”
He floundered for air. “—but!”
“This is love, then?” she inquired through sultrier veils.
Every muscle and sinew in his body was torqued to crack bone—the silky parchment of last minute paperwork funneled into his ears without complaint. He was emphatic. “Yes!”
“Tell me what’s in your heart,” she implored in a cooler tone.
Aiden felt himself falling through a hangman’s door, and into an altogether darker reason. He catapulted off the bed to arrest his descent, clasping Erica by her elbows and spinning her onto her back in a seamless move of binding wills.
“Say it!” she whimpered.
Pushing her down into her crackling finery, his lover’s head was abruptly under the hoisted gown and banging erratically against the headboard. Aiden felt the deception already unraveling as he chased after it. He endeavored to concentrate the girl like acid under him—endeavored to dissolve his body into hers and—with it—irretrievably, his omnipresent mind.
Erica croaked under the crimped tent, but her cloaked pantomime was quickly out of step with the words.
“I— kn-w— y-u- l—ve- m— tho-gh it -s –n-t— e—sy - f—r - y—u - t- s—y…” injected the answering machine.
A pencil of light passed through the keyhole and penetrated the interior of their camera obscura. It found no surface of a wall, yet dispersed by other means. Photons fanned through a filigree of threads to form an arabesque. Surely this was the embroidered lens in the dress—but from whence came the light?
The sharpened beam—a flashlight—passed down the doorjamb and splintered. Marbleized swirls of tulle, like wisps of smoke, spread to the four corners of the room. It intruded like stage lighting from another play.
A knock to the door resonated sympathetically with the slamming headboard. “Hello?” cried a man’s voice from the landing. “Hello in there!”
The machine, sticking to the script, tuned up its reply. “B—t - y—u h-ve – g-ven — m— th- - CHILD — - wh-ch— n- hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—hh-hhh—h- - -”
The final knock on the door coincided with the final thrust of the headboard—
The stretched tape inside the analog recorder whirled once before dying away. “Aaaaaaaddddeeeennnn!”
Erica’s bellow overmatched it, and in dissolving every barrier, also dissolved the summoner on the landing.
What remained intact of Aiden’s body was extricated from the pouf liner—he sat up with a wobble. His brain was still connected to the end of his spine, but like so much dead weight that refused to be shaken off in the pitch of battle. The battered organ rapidly retraced neural pathways and reabsorbed its script, albeit with a touch of surreality.
The answering machine’s playback was hurriedly switched off.
“I need a cigarette,” his lover complained, emerging from hiding.
The soft edge of his pleasure turned brittle.
Erica stroked his perspiring back, feeling his skin clinch under her unctuous caress. A sticky wad of chewing gum was pulled from the headboard and plopped back into her mouth. “I wish I had a cigarette,” she again lamented.
His words were clipped. “Someone was pounding on the door. Didn’t you hear him?”
Erica, knitting her brows and clapping her teeth, at first disbelieved him, but then yelped with delayed realization. “I hope it wasn’t my boss!” Her moist finger scampered down her lover’s forearm to stab in the general direction of the bureau. “The suitcase!”
Aiden leapt to his rubbery legs. He opened the lid of the case to pull out a jumble of under-things.
The girl dropped to her feet and wiggled out of the gown—its charm evaporated in an instant. The lacy straps of her bra skittered easily over stiffened follicles, though negotiations were required to latch her into her double D-cups. The snap of its fastener punctuated her imperative. “Hurry!”
While the curvaceous lover squeezed into another white frock, Aiden unblocked the door and peeked out—no one was seen on the rainy landing.
With the all-clear, Erica eased off the gas. Gum smacked with the last arduous inch of her zipper. “Each time we play this game of Russian roulette, that message deteriorates. It’s getting creepier—like she’s starting a whole new conversation with you!”
Aiden lingered over the machine: Whatever sentiment was magnetized and straitened in this billet-doux, it was, with each reenactment, that much closer to reverting to an elemental state of iron oxide and polymer.
He turned lastly to the floor to gather his clothes.
Erica reached over to unplug the antique contraption.
“By the plug!” he snapped at her. “Don’t yank it by the cord!” The curator stepped between the bungling girl and the relic, taking care to wind the cord around the machine before gently packing it away in the suitcase.
“Who is she, really?” she plumbed mockingly. “The woman I am impersonating under that dress?”
Aiden searched the dark bed skirting for socks.
Erica snatched the wedding dress with greater care, venturing sarcastically, “It should be a Lifetime movie of the week.” She was about to shove the dress into the case, but instead lifted the phone machine out of it. She debated throwing the contentious object across the room, but opted to tilt its bottom toward her lover. If there was not enough light to read the attached label, she already knew what it said. “Two dollars,” she proclaimed mutedly. “All of two dollars… The story of a man who spends all his time in thrift stores. He buys a crappy old answering machine and—lo and behold—it works. More than that, it has one message left on the tape from the previous owner.”
He interrupted, “I had the tape. I had to shop around to find a machine in which it would fit and play.”
The item was packed away with another dig. “She’s like one of those smiling photographs you find in a new wallet. She came with the machine.”
“It’s my tape,” he restated testily.
“Then who is the child? Where is the child?”
He sighed, inaudibly.
Her tone softened. “This game we play—this is just your way of getting out of your own way.”
He quietly capitulated. “I want to exorcize her.”
Erica was about to stampede over his reply, but retreated. “I just wish you would ask me my dress size before you purchase someone else’s clothes at a thrift store.”
His tone was at once plaintive—despairing. “I think about you all the time.”
“You think about me when the lights are out.”
He would not be dragged further into her fishing expedition.
“Was that machine overheating?” she ventured in an aside.
“What do you mean?”
“I smelled smoke.”
“Then you smelled it, too?”
The two shared a look—one of naked puzzlement.
The girl moved to the door. Less anxious, she turned back to see her lover still nude on the bed; his expression was one of a rebounding libido. The sight of her in the shapely skirt reestablished a little distance.
She came back to the bedside, with three-quarters of the smile she gave him before. Her nose scuffed his in a prelude to a salacious kiss, leaving his mouth stinging with red-hot Dentyne gum. He pawed at her in his judicious passive/aggressive way, and unhooked a button at her neck; a hardened morsel of encouragement was plucked out.
She studied his study, as she was always a third person in the room, but was soon tucking herself back into the inconsequential brassiere. The tightrope over their stolen bed was short. Fingers smoothed his mussed hair, and she purred to remind him, “Get dressed.”
His emotions ran in all directions in the motel room, but all overshot her by degrees. When his lips moved at hers with an aim to entice her back onto the bed, Erica fetched his briefs off the floor. Flicking them over his lap, she giggled, “Horseshoes…”
Her skin was still flushed from their exertion, but she wore the scarlet proudly when she twirled around, as if to dance. The squeaky cleaning cart was liberated from the narrow bathroom and pushed to the doorway with a grind and a glint. “The suitcase, sweetie!” she told him. “Don’t forget the suitcase!”
With her still humming on his skin, Aiden scurried into his twisted-around pants and grabbed the luggage off the bureau. Erica was already outside, but pulled up in the doorway to remind him. “The pillow case, too…”
The man doubled back to pull the cover from the wall-mounted camera. By the time he reached the landing, his lover had pushed her cart down to a utility closet to stash it away.
The black sky crashed down, first clattering loudly on the tin terrace, and then, mutedly, on the deployed nylon panels of the maid’s umbrella; the lanky man stayed close with the suitcase until they reached her car.
Climbing in, wistful Erica drew a valentine heart in condensation covering the windshield; a trickle of water zigzagged to the dashboard. Aiden stayed disconnected from her symbology, and looked past the window at the motel’s neon sign, which had blown free from a mist. His motoring companion maneuvered her way onto the highway, where rain crunched like glass under the tires. She squeezed his hand to pull his thoughts away from the bleak landscape; the tender gesture caught him off guard.
“This is love, then?” she asked one last time.
It was a reasonable question. He was forever backing into these things like a forest unseen for its trees. The lover would be fully immersed in it, in a million sundry ways, before its indispensable fact should impress his mind as a categorical imperative. Aiden lifted her knuckles to his nose and drew off the scent of antibacterial soap she was required to use for work, and in turning over her fingers, saw the ring.
She leaned over the console with a different kiss, leaving him to glance up from her lips, over the glove compartment, as something dark slammed into the grill of the car.
Chapter Thirty-one/ Back/ Contents Page
Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.