The Whore
Paul Dyer
© 2011 by Paul Dyer
Smashwords Edition
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Mid thirties, scruffy, a rhapsody in blond, moth-eaten blond beard shadowing his sharp, narrow jaw—Justus Fawley bundled himself into a trench and took to the unusually cold streets of Hollywood at roughly two in the morning. At that time of night, when a city as sick and sacred as Los Angeles, opened its sewers, mangy kittens and rats in sequins crawled up into the neon light of faux-day, and the painter in Justus saw vices and demons acquire names the sun usually swept into raucous anonymity.
You could never know the loveliness of a whore if she’d already ceased to be a woman.
At Sunset and Gower, he spotted her near a busstop, a brew of smelly colors and incongruent fabrics, pushing a shoppingcart back and forth and walking in place.
Bag ladies weren’t really homeless. They were human tortoises.
The truly homeless carried nothing.
You could always tell the ones who’d sold themselves, once upon a time, because despite the sudden accumulation of decaying property around them, they still carried themselves as if they had something to sell. Just the way you could tell which of the whores had once had bit-parts in movies, or even recurring roles on defunct shows, because they always made an attempt to speak very clearly, as if they’d never stopped auditioning. Whatever poison had blown up their noses or pierced their blood, the hope for better diction still rode palpably high in their sad eyes.
Justus had sold eleven Madonnas to date, going back twelve years. Men and women everywhere were still hungry for purity.
Every Madonna had a story and the most horrifying were the tales of those who’d tried to stay pure.
After he stopped near her, lingered for a few moments, as if with an unspeakable proposal, “Are you a priest,” she finally asked, not really looking at him, nodding her head, walking in place, allegorizing about all she could of what the rest of her kind did standing perfectly still or lying in doorways. “Cause you look like a priest, clean and sacred. Remind me of when I used to be a nun—“
“You were a nun?”
Justus berated himself inwardly, almost at once, for the glee that leaked into his tone.
“Maria Assumpta—“
“That your name? Maria?”
“I’m nobody’s fucking whore,” she screamed at him, so people in cars turned to look.
He didn’t care. You couldn’t care and still paint.
“He hasn’t yet forgiven me, you know.”
“The priest?”
“Fuck the priests,” her voice rose again, and some kids in their early twenties from a car going the other way cackled and craned their sorry necks. “You know about the church. You know what the church is all about.” He was ashamed of how surprised he was that she spoke college English. It was easy to forget, viewing them as the verminous refuse of high civilization, that each one of them had begun somewhere, had known people, touched lives, moved on, fallen—possibly loved and been loved, if they were lucky. At thirtysix, he wasn’t that lucky. Despite all his cool connexions, it was only the street, the whores and bag-ladies whose garrulous tragedies he could render into speechless color and line, that switched his oxygen back on again. “Oh yes, dearie, the church’s one big goddamn industry, one edifice without holes. Imporous piety. You need a sponge to handle the tears. You better have a quicker picker-upper, Father—”
“—I told you I’m not—”
“—if you’re going to pretend you know about suffering. You ever notice how the Bible gives no attention to a broken heart?”
Now that he’d got her going, it wouldn’t be easy to get her to stop. They usually had to talk themselves out, at least temporarily, before he could make his proposition.
“No, dearie, the Bible’s only about material poverty, about poor widows and orphans, makes absolute sense the rich people of this land thump it night and day. If you ask me, the Bible’s all about the body, clothing and healing and feeding it, no wonder all the priests are obsessed with sex. Yes, dearie. No wonder. But if you look closely—do you believe in Christ?”
“Well,” he flubbed it, not wanting her to stop, because their stories were what set the tone of each painting, “I’m more spiritual than religious—”
“In other words, you want to do what the fuck you want, to hell with God and community. Delude yourself into thinking you’re so goddamn pious into the bargain, don’t you, dearie? Sweet deal. Pick the vices first and then tailor the beliefs to fit them. Where’s God, dearie? How far down the list of what you want and what works for you? Fucked up world. How’re you different from some motherfucking corporate asshole who burns up villages to make a buck?”
“Well—for one thing—I don’t burn up villages.”
“They aren’t your fucking villages in the first place, to burn or spare. But aren’t we so pious, dearie?”
He was ashamed he couldn’t grant her enough status and dignity to find her tirade offensive. She’d never once looked at him, so he found relief in believing, possibly, that she wasn’t speaking to him but through him to the world that usually passed her mutely by. He was less a person to her than a representative ear. All speech is confession. Every verbal bridge to another mind is merely a subtextual bid for absolution. She needed Justus to believe in her God, the God who’d clearly done her wrong, so that she could ordain him, confess to him, and, in doing so, transgress her own moral indolence long enough to give her barriers meaning.
“—and so He had to die,” she was nattering on, walking in place, from a habit she’d probably developed to keep warm or to give herself the illusion of motion in a stillborn world, “because I’m sure He loved Mary Magdalene, and John—yes romantically, in case you’re wondering—and yes he had to’ve been bisexual—”
“Are we talking about—whom I think—?”
“Squeamish now? When’d you throw Him out of your life, anyway?”
“No. Not squeamish. Go on.”
“What do you want?”
“Not sure I know what you mean—”
She turned her face to him, and the gleaming black eyes opened doors to him he never knew lingered in the city night, “Some of them tell you I used to do certain things for money, certain things some of the other girls didn’t do?”
He shrugged, immobile in her gaze. Her irises were like gleaming black stones with a multitude of facets only the iridescent night allowed them to disclose. Despite the tattered pink-and-yellow woolen beanie—which must’ve been truly hideous even in its prime—the filthy black hair that was partly relaxed, waxy-yellow in the streetlights, partly all dull and frizzy, despite a faint scar above her left eye, she was a remarkably beautiful woman. She looked to be roughly his own age, but her filthy skin and the premature aging which life on the street had wrought could easily’ve conspired to deceive him. Her eyes were younger, but not by much. They bore their own reverberant cargo of unappeased experience. Most people would not’ve seen it. But Justus saw it, and he was already weaving around her the swift redemptions of color and callous shame.
“I don’t get tied up,” she said, “no matter what you pay me,” turning her head away from him once more.
“How long’s it been?”
“Just because I lost my bicycle,” she said—
He laughed at that.
“You could walk a block that way and get some young thing who’s about one clean dress and one final squirt of perfume away from where I’m at. But you wanna know something? My throat can handle just about any size as good as my—”
“That so? Well, I’m not worried. I’m nice and average.”
“That is nice. I figure I had the biggest one there ever was, once upon a time, and average sounds like sunsets and ice-cream.”
It struck him then, at the ripe old age of thirtysix, how deeply mendacious the world of courtship really was, how carefully designed to shoulder every load of bull and vanity.
“Tired of the mansion,” he said, “you return to the gatehouse.”
“Dearie,” she said, “his wasn’t a mansion, it was a whole goddamn island unto itself. You had to see it to believe Aphrodite would hand them out that large to emotional midgets.”
Suddenly, because she’d likened him to sunsets and ice-cream, he wanted her to rhapsodize about him some day, to some other john, and he wanted this uniquely horse-hung monster from her past to be the villainous pivot of her downward spiral.
“Is he the reason you’re on the street?”
“None of your goddamn business,” she yelled into his face, her mouth making a full confession of its scattered rotting teeth and lethal reek. “You don’t believe in God, so you can’t believe in history, so what the fuck difference does it make how I got here? I’m here. And you’re probably up there in the hills. And are we gonna to do the side-by-side or what?”
He stared at her. She turned her head and spat. She leaned into her shopping cart of decaying possessions and pushed on, as if his unbelief, his trite audacity, had propelled her out of stasis, and would probably someday, if the system finally worked, sweep her off the street.
“Five hundred,” he said.
She stopped, about fifty feet away. She did not turn away from her cart to face him but turned it all the way about as if making some grandiose detour on her way to death.
She bellowed at him, “You kidding me?”
He shook his head.
When she was close again, she said, at times speaking barely above a whisper and now and then darting furtive looks up and down the sidewalk but mainly at a tree that grew on the edge of an empty parkinglot nearby, “There’s a town called Sofia in the state of Pennsylvania which used to have a place in the mountains above it called Cytherea Grove. Cytherea is another name for Aphrodite and some of the locals still call it Aphrodite’s Grove. It’s a place where the goddess walks at night, except when there’s no moon. I went to find it, but someone had hacked down all the trees and torched all the stumps and you could swear, standing there in the silent moonlight, with no wind to speak of, you could still hear the trees groaning, like phantom limbs, and feel the ground under you begin to smell like a stew of all the foul and nameless things heaven once unleashed on earth to keep humans on the right path and to give us freedom, because unless there’re two absolutely opposing choices—heaven and hell—you can never be absolutely free. Dearie, I came back from Cytherea Grove and the only thing that seemed like home was the fucking street. You still got that five hundred?”
He nodded.
“I don’t get tied up.”
It seemed odd, a fallen whore, in itself an almost untenable proposition, fighting for her dignity against such a sum.
He offered to push her cart, but she refused to surrender it.
The miniature warehouse in which he lived suited his needs impeccably. Such friends as he had continually advised lodgings more appropriate for a man of his years and, in certain restricted circles of his field, his distinction—he had, after all, sold eleven paintings—but the large redbrick one-room structure standing in the middle of a garden that gave every reliable impression of the building’s being derelict, held the same talismanic hold over Justus as Freddie Mercury’s teeth had held over him. So he persisted in it, while zealously debunking all rumors of a possible Bukowski swerve.
There was the bed, a vast four-poster canopy affair, beshorn of all umbrageous fabrics, and provided in their stead with an intricate wealth of lights on long, boomlike necks, cranes, and pulleys; all looking in, like electric angels from above, with varying degrees of serene inarticulate curiosity.
Around the bed—
(She said, “You paint even when you’re sleeping?”
“We all do,” he said, “not just writers. What you do when you’re awake is take dictation from works you’ve already finished in your dreams. The ones who can do it without a translator are the ones we call geniuses.”)
—were various tables, strewn with palettes, a haphazard rainbow of pigments, scraps of paper from sketchbooks bearing the relics of charcoal prayers hurried into consciousness during the fitful watches of the night, lurid stanzas of virgins and wrythen saints, in whose nocturnal pudicity it was possible to perceive the soul of all their future technicolor incarnations, all ranged alongside the studied refuse of a man who was clearly taking a detour through the social dregs on a journey back to his own arcane purity, neither indulging a life of pretentious poverty nor weaving one of flamboyant accomplishment.
On the wall, like shrunken cyclops heads, hung seven cameras, six digital, one analog. Each strap by which the camera hung on its hook was a different color of the rainbow, all stretching left to right from violet to red, to remind him that photography made as much use of the spectrum as painting.
Justus had broken down the walls of the bathroom, so there were literally no interior divisions left inside the cube. Even the kitchen range stood against the wall to the far right with two ovens on a long counter alongside it, conventional and micro, edgy and speciously seductive against the ubiquitous red brick.
After some struggle, and his provision of a chain and lock which he kept for just such contingencies, in his line of business—she mayn’t get tied up, but it was okay for her things—they secured her cart to a hook in the wall of the small garage out back in which he stabled his Harley. He could never stand the smell of their clothes and other stuff in his apartment, and the indoor heat—it being winter, and the middle of the night—only rendered the stench more pervasive, more difficult to exorcise the following day.
“You want that blow job now?”
Since there was always the possibility in Hollywood that people would come staggering by even at this hour, and be tempted to peer in, he’d hung huge canvas curtains over the large streetward windows, red over one and blue over the other, both pretty faded by now, but which he’d used over the years as a kind of abstract journal in paint, sometimes having recorded vibrantly on them no more than a few wild strokes here and there of ocherous frustration or viridian rage, so they now resembled a vital, salacious cauldron of Chagal, Mondrian, and Pollack.
Struck by the way in which the particular haphazard colors of her tatterdemalion ensemble made her seem as if she’d stepped out of one or other of his curtains, the incarnation of some dryad that stood between him and the world, he studied her quietly, almost unaware of what he was doing, till it made her squirm.
Having allowed him his moment’s examination, she wrenched him back to them from his silent separateness. “What the fuck you looking at? The merchandize won’t look much better in this light than it did on the street, so if you want to pretend I’m a princess, Mister Photographer—under some trick of light—“
The inspiration abruptly dying, “There’s one more ritual,” he said, “I always do with my models.“
“Models? You didn’t say anything about modeling. That’ll be extra.”
“Don’t be silly. Get undressed.”
“What’d you just say?”
Gently smiling, “I asked you,” he backed away, gesturing grandly to her with one arm, “to get undressed.”
“Before that?”
With a small histrionic frown, “O, don’t be silly,” he chided her, turning away, taking off his coat, “I’d never repeat something like that,” draping it over a battered Victorian armchair that stood between a good old-fashioned hearth and an ivory-inlaid oaken endtable on which lay a rare, green, leatherback edition of Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower.
She cackled. He was grateful the windows behind his curtains sat snug in their frames.
He threw another log on the flames, lit two candles in their sconces on the wall, turned on a dim blue light, which dispensed its glow from a corner of the ceiling.
He walked over to the bathroom area—a vast ceramic clawfoot tub with sapphire trim under a an ornate gold shower rig in the wall—and began to run a bath.
Clumsily unlayering herself, an Aphroditic onion, “I get it,” she said, “you want me to get in bed with you and you want to make sure I’m—“
“There’s some mouthwash and toothpaste above the sink, also a new toothbrush. Start there.”
For a few moments he heard nothing behind him and stood and turned at last to see her topless, with one wrist bent back and resting on her hip; wearing only a long, muddy-yellow woolen scarf and filthy sweatpants which he was sure were no longer the color they’d started out being. Her breasts were large, but not overly large, the size of each areola in proportion to each breast as ideal as anything can be which will always, in order to remain beautiful, elude mathematics. Her nipples, well warmed, were shy nubs that promised, even muffled, wonders of distension and flavor. Catching his eyes on her breasts, she pulled the scarf over them, each side, in a gesture that was odd, to say the least.
“Can I ask you something personal,” she said, as if to deflect attention from her own quick modesty.
With vehement humility, “I already told you my dick’s not very large,” he said, as if, now that she knew that, she’d have to die, “how much more personal—“
“That’s not personal. All you gotta do to tell me that is get naked and let the big-guy show me how much he wants me all on his own. Personal’s when you talk. And men—well—men never talk, do they?”
As if in illustration of this, he shrugged, with a taut smile, becoming a little uncomfortable with her for the first time since he’d made contact; something, he suddenly realized, which was new, certainly, to these encounters, and more startling to him now, since she was partly naked and he was clothed, she the baglady and he the well-off guy with the skidsy-chic pad. Yet unwilling to let her have the last word on it, “Granted,” he finally said, “but some of us at least paint,” turning back to re-immerse his hand in the slow-warming water filling the tub. “Go wash out your mouth.”
“Maybe I don’t kiss,” she said, speaking above the torpid susurrus of water.
“And maybe I’d just like to sample,” he turned and spoke to her over his shoulder, eyes averted, “those sensational oral skills that other guy trained you for.”
“That so, dearie?”
He first heard and then smelled her get totally naked, looking up from the water only when he saw her wide naked ass hovering by the sink, glowing like wet chocolate in the fierce baptismal steam he was stirring up. There were other elements of hygiene she’d have to take care of, at least preliminarily, on her own, for which he always kept one of those flowery bottles, freshly shorn of its box, by the sink, on a wooden pedestal, with a clean towel folded up near it.
They always came from somewhere. This wasn’t India where girls were literally born on the streets. Maria, like all the others, had grown up with the amenities, had known the norm and fallen from it, either because of some heartless man, whose wondrous phallus was merely incidental to the tragedy, or, quite possibly, if you believed her charming tale, because of the sphingid mysteries of Cytherea Grove.
“Front and back,” he called out to her.
“The backdoor’s not open, either,” she yelled.
“Don’t worry,” he said, surprised, again, for the first time, at how little the preambulary crudeness of this, while he didn’t exactly get off on it, repulsed him. What, he wondered, did men and women do before the basics had involved such elaborate measures of hygiene for both sexes? Had men always been more idealistic that way and had their calamitous visions, in a kind of numbing and verbless despair too great for their lexicons, eventually precipitated rape; it being impossible, when faced with some ancient, savage female’s unwashed and natural womanhood, to write her a sonnet?
No, he decided, feeling a twinge of that despair himself, there could be no linguistic system that effectively exceeded nature, and so the real men were the bums who fell in love with the unvarnished vaginas of the street.
The frothing purple granules he was sowing in the water, cupping them beneath its flow, produced a quietly intoxicating effect when the skin absorbed the liquid directly.
She came through the slow-swirling, transpicuous quilt of steam, fragrantly naked, with far less of the street’s aroma, the stench of sloven time, clinging to her now. A dark nymph moving through silver rain, the rich and smoldering chocolate haze of her body slowly wrought itself into the slightly plump form of an archaic negress who was, divested of society, far and away the most beautiful woman he’d ever harvested from the ruthless neon of the city’s concrete heart. He stood, like a suitor from a vanished age, to receive an ingénue on the outer edge of a gaudy ballroom, and took her hand, and, with his other, touched her hair, the insoluble tangle of its perm and natural frizz, a visionary making peace with nature, a painter and photographer coming to terms with the immateriality of her soul.
“Stop that,” she said.
He smiled, feeling his long-sleeved black T-shirt clinging more irksomely than before to his moist body. He stepped back and invited her to enter the foam.
“This’s the ritual?”
“You make me think of Cleopatra—”
“My name’s Maria,” she said. “Don’t make me into something grand, or you’ll be disappointed, and I’m not giving you a discount. Five hundred’s five hundred, signed and sealed.”
“Please,” he said, “get into the tub. No more talking.”
“Men,” she said, shaking her head.
He stripped off his T-shirt and kicked off his shoes. He stood barefoot, looking down at her as she reclined in the tub.
“I have to say,” she said, “you have an amazing body for a skinny guy. I like that. You work out a lot?”
That almost offended him, until he remembered, ruthfully, that skinny in blackspeak had a less charitable, more widely-applicable definition than it did for whitefolks.
“I swim thirty laps at least once a day,” he said. “Rep when I have time. Could we do this in silence?”
Something withering entered her look and she turned her head away very slowly. Yet, as soon as his back was turned and he was walking toward his Mac, he could feel her watching him, sitting up in the tub still, clearly eluding the water’s lavender temptations, its inebriating secrets. There were certain playlists in iTunes he could choose from and he usually knew, before they were even inside, which one a particular woman would require. Halfway to his desk, he paused, and turned.
Arrived back at the tub, with her watching him all the way, head tilting slowly, “I need music,” he said. “Any preferences?”
“Thanks for asking. Puccini, maybe. Or Josh Groban.”
“I used Puccini three nights ago. And if you mention Mister Groban again, you’ll have to leave.”
“Fine by me, asshole,” she made to rise, “I’ve got my money—“
“I’ll call the cops and tell them you stole it. Who d’you think they’ll believe?”
She plopped her ass back down in the foamy water, making waves that caused her breasts to heave and sway, nipples fattening.
“Shouldn’t you be nicer to someone you plan to fuck?”
“Who said anything about fucking?”
“If that’s not the rudest thing you’ve said all evening, painterman—”
She guffawed and he glanced toward the windows.
Grinning back, he asked her, very politely, if he may surprise her.
“Fine,” she touched her own hair now, patting some of the foam onto it so it looked like lilac snow on coal. “Couldn’t be worse than some of the other shocks I’ve had in my life—”
By the time he returned to her, she was reclining, her head back against the rim of the tub. And then the soprano began to sing Glück, das mir verblieb—
And suddenly, from the tub, through the steam, with her head backflung, her mouth and throat opened, and the second line came out perfectly in tune, “Rück zu mir, mein treues Lieb,” in a soprano so firm, sure, and oceanic it rivaled the recorded one; pulsing, and seeming to take on glittering substance in the scented, steamy air around him, while she sang the rest of the first verse, and he stood and watched, lapidified as much by Korngold’s shamelessly saccharine, soul-wrenching music as by her contribution to its nocturnal harmonies.
“I forget the rest,” she finally whispered, subsiding into the water, crossing her arms over her naked breasts as if the iridescent sound that had poured from her throat were too much reckless nakedness.
The aria proceeded now under the taciturn ægis of her fallen gift.
He crouched by the tub, his penis murmuring in secret, his hands painfully free of her.
She laughed, but very softly now; unjealous, like any true artist, of the homage due another; her black, upturned eyes harvesting from her past and scattering on his warm, turquoise air a thousand crystalline mysteries of invitation and rebuttal.
“What now?”
“Lie back and close your eyes,” he whispered.
She did. He moved in on her, hands moving out. One lifted the bottle of coconut shampoo from the floor, squirting an opalescent pool into his other palm. Now there was the lavender and the creamy coconut in the air, borne about them in savory swirls of pearl and lilac on the abating steam. He worked the shampoo over her hair, feeling its coarseness oppose the fragrant kindness of his hands, and he wondered how he could explain to anyone who’d see the eventual painting he’d do of Maria that none of his inspiration had had anything to do with love.
She groaned softly, moved in the water, so the sound of it, lavishing her body, wove aquatic echoes into the lilt and heave of music, the celesta’s coy chimes, the pulse of yearning strings. Her body began to open under the water like a dark flower his hands, strong as her voice, would sculpt, even if only for a little while, out of vagrancy and loveless nonentity—so he prided himself—into fugitive outlines, misty riddles, of touch and meaning.
His hands, thick with soap, deeply redolent of jasmine, moved over her dark flesh, washing the city from her, the encrustations of memory, all the anonymous waste and glory and sadness which only night in Los Angeles shored against the delicate membranes of a life, to make her his—if only for a little while—and then to make her more than his, the beloved of any man who looked into the swirls of color that would achieve, on his canvas, above his crudely possessive signature, her virgin deity.
His hands cupped and fondled her breasts, delighting in their weight and slackness, their obstinate naturalness of flow and fall, thumbs eager on her swelling nipples, strumming, off her hidden ribs, lucid chords of quick desire that made her softly giggle.
Her hair was all coconut essence now, so he touched his cheek to it, as one hand continued to toy with one nipple, coaxing it to full erection, his lungs yearning to suck on it as if he were drowning and her breasts were hovering pillows of chocolate air.
Moving over the swell of her belly, his other hand nudged aside the folds of flesh around her navel to give one finger probing entrance. She shook against him, sighed again, and he felt it was real somehow. He wanted her to cum, but felt that his inviting her to do so, to allow herself to do so, would’ve been ill-mannered. He was never ill-mannered with them. His hands moved to find the abundance of hair over her crotch, the water having nested it like a submarine lair.
“Why,” she breathed—
He shushed her, lips moving against her ear.
“—why didn’t you get some real hooker, thinner,” she shook in the water, “all dolled up—“
He shushed her again, index and middle fingers of his venturing hand finding her submerged vagina and slowly massaging, through the wet thatching of stubborn seaweed hair, its firm purple lips, measuring their length, savoring their redoubtable schoolgirl willfulness; feeling them move like small electric eels against his palm as he gripped the whole assembly of bold spongy flesh, feeling her wince and quiver, a moment before he slipped a finger into her.
The back of her head smacked his chin, stunning him.
No wonder men felt this as a kind of submersion, the deliquescence of identity.
“I want you,” he whispered in her ear. “I want you so much—”
She tried to laugh, but, as his finger found and very gently stroked her clitoris, the laugh swerved and crashed, and broke itself against a stuttering gasp into a million phonemes of preorgasmic light.
“Don’t worry,” he said, letting his throat vibrate warmly against her cheek so his words seemed to possess some momentary substance, before they dissipated, like meanings and oaths, into the air, “it’s only cheesy if there’s an audience.” He breathed in deeply. “I’m so fucking hard right now—“
“I want to see,” she said.
“I don’t,” he said, “not yet. I do tantric yoga, too, so I have no trouble—”
This time he eased off on her, under the water, so the laugh broke free and trembled like a listless genie in his brain.
Then sweeping back his clammy shaggy hair from his forehead, he brought his other hand back to her body, a finger deftly tantalizing her clitoris, moving in on it, circling it, rewriting the whorls and eddies of flesh around it as often as they defied stable inscription beneath his wordless hands. He inhaled the artifice of perfumes, lavender and coconut and jasmine, the quiet rage of shades. He almost cradled her against his body as if he were trying to reassemble her life’s untimely fragments into a woman he could love and marry and make respectable through the unspeakable force of his masculine will and vision. If only for awhile. Before the frame he gave her faded into reason, and nature made a casual mockery of his strenuous truth.
Now her strong, plump thighs snapped together with a powerful clap to confine his hand between them, as she rocked forward against his fingers, sloshing water upto and over the tub’s wet rim.
“Slowly,” he whispered in her ear, “slowly,” but she was impervious, hunching her body forward, escaping the desperate compassion of his circling arm to grind his strong fingers deeper into her, gasping as their skillful tips eased off—and then on—her swelling clitoris, in uneven rhythm, her vulva a tulip of frantic nerves.
He reached as far back as he could and clicked on the camera above the bathtub. It began to record her face, just her face, because one day the images would cast up, on the fringe of his consciousness, like Jonah on the shores of Nineveh, the vision he’d spent most of his life seeking of a woman’s secret relapse into virginity in the wash of orgasm, and he would become like her then, wandering the streets of Los Angeles in sackcloth and ashes, repenting all the terrified zealous formulas of the male sex.
Then he was back with her, working three fingers into her, feeling her potent rejection of them, and somehow her simultaneous feast. He wanted to be there, down there, sucking on her clitoris, tasting the sea and the pungent call of her to him, but he couldn’t risk it. And so his fingers moved like three flexile, acrobatic tongues, with the same urgency and lingual hunger for syllabic nonsense and eventual silence every heterosexual man sought in the oracular folds of a woman’s temple.
She came at the zenith of a jagged, spiraling scream, venting sounds he could never render, however wildly, into color; slamming her body back and forth in the water, sloshing it everywhere, on the floor, on him, till his pants were as wet as his torso. Her body, her livid flesh, took a shuddering road to stillness, at last, and she lay back against his shoulder, surrendering his hand. He kept it between her thighs, gently stroking the puffy rim of her vagina, as if it were the relic of an ancient wound she’d channeled from beings who’d fled the burden of form long ago.
“If you use that hand to paint,” she whispered, “you must make DaVinci look like an amateur.”
He laughed against her hair, trailing his hand, which, despite the soapy water, was perceptibly heavy with her pulpen rind, up her belly, massaging it, darting gentle strokes through her groins and over the little loop of vulval flesh buried in her thatchy mound.
He stood up, asking her to. The leaking bulge in his pants was shamefully insistent, unsubtle. She wanted to lie there a little while longer, she said, but he was determined to be inside her again, while she was still adrift, an island he wanted to conquer.
He carried her to the bed, while she oozed feverish psalms in praise of his strength, the ease with which he lifted and bore her. The moments melted together, and he was in her at last, thrusting his erection with far less finesse. Because a penis was fashioned only for that brute monomania, never to paint or write or sculpt. It accessed the feminine savagely, and most often its harddrive archived only lies, condemning the mere hands of men to make up stories of virtue and madness.
“Oh,” she groaned, thrashing about like a quadriplegic octopus, “oh, you’re so huge, your cock is so—”
“Stop that,” he hissed at her, his hips obeying him a trite second before she did.
“What?”
“I don’t have any issues. And I don’t need you to—”
“For a man who can make a woman feel so good one minute, you’re such a goddamn prude.”
“Isn’t this supposed to be about both of us? Do you hear me going on and on about how tight your twat is?”
“Well, if there’s no audience, as someone once said—“
He slammed his hand over her mouth and completed the thrust he’d suspended, thighs flexing and hips accelerating. She fought him beautifully, a match for him, but he was much stronger than she, and he could feel her giving herself to that, taking out of his calloused palm in spiteful surrender a quick bite, which made him instantly withdraw his hand.
He rocked back, sweeping her upwards to sit in his lap, so he could suck on her nipples. She took the rhythm over, after a few minutes, rocking on him, taking him deep in her and gyrating against the arched muscles of his thighs, so the wet hair over them rustled against her skin.
At some point, he stopped fucking the woman straddling his cock and began to make love to the goddess he thought she should be. Had he simply finished off as he began and kicked her out of bed and back onto the street, the emotional chasm between them could not’ve been more profound.
He lifted and lowered her back to the bed again, ejaculating as he did, so he came lying on top of her, pouring into her, spasm after brutal spasm, what felt to him like a month’s worth of abstinence. After he was done, her felt rather than heard her murmurs abate, murmurs that had begun, in the moment she felt his climax break upon them, with soothing gestures of her hands over his back, harrowingly maternal words of encouragement and comfort, as if she were the earth itself easing him through the trauma of orgasm, its vatic excesses; explaining to him, perhaps without meaning to, why men repeatedly regained their sight through orgasm only to glimpse the most heartrendingly beautiful things at each pinnacle of sex while living the rest of their lives stumbling blind.
It woke him too quickly from his lull. He remained hard inside her. He always did, once he was up, even at thirtysix, and that had always made him very popular with the ladies, that he stayed hard, or close enough to it, without chemical aid, for so much longer than a single cumshot.
He sat up, easing out of her. Looking down at the condom and the heavy sack of semen hanging off the tip, recoiling as politely as he could from her menacing solicitude in the moment and phase of his climax, all of the new painting came to him, but he would never divulge that to anyone.
Carefully unsheathing his erection, he held the condom in one hand and scrolled it back to full size. Slowly, in the remote blue light, the gold bellydance of candleflames, bidding her lie absolutely still, he unloaded the condom’s nacreous freight onto her abdomen, squeezing every last drop out of the slack latex tube, which looked, in the cyan gloom, like a candle dissolving in drops of liquid flame.
“What the fuck’re you doing?”
He almost begged her to continue lying absolutely still and silent, promising he wasn’t going to hurt her, that all this was somehow vital, that semen unlike paint would not last on exposure to air. He reached for a brush and it moved in his fluids, the pearly residue vivid against her dark skin in the blue light. Beneath the brush, he felt her heave and twist, very slowly, trying not to, stifling giggles; but he gradually became impervious to her, the living canvas, more so than a tattoo artist’s, because here was something infinitely more evanescent, like a sonnet in invisible ink whose opening stanza may fade even before its couplet argued the poem’s tidy aloofness from the passage of time.
Later he insisted on walking her back to where he’d found her.
“You’re insane,” she said.
He nodded.
“You can find a motel tonight,” he said.
She clutched the envelope of money, four Benjamins and two Grants, to her abdomen, as if the final flourish to their strange encounter had, on its own, earned it for her. The eventual death of paper cash would signal the death of blessed anonymity, of all commercial privacy.
“You’re not going to get a motel?”
“Maybe.”
Then they were back at Sunset and Gower, and she began to slip, like Cinderella into her sooty rags, back into her curbside madness.
“May’s well be a priest,” she said, “you have the same naïve ideas about wealth and women.”
“Why these tirades about priests and the church?”
“There was a time I believed that was all I’d ever talk about, all I’d ever want to talk about. Standing here in the goddamn cold and madness that was all I had left of all my choices, but the truth is no priest ever did me wrong and it’s God my beef’s with and everytime someone stops, I have to gear up to face him or her in case that’s the angel come finally to collect and take me to the place of reckoning—“
“Is that why you went to Cytherea Grove?”
“Our deal’s done. You can go home now.”
“I’d’ve asked you to stay the night, but even if you know a few Korngold arias, I can’t trust you.”
“Go,” she bellowed at him, and shoved her cart forward.
He watched her go.
“I want to see you again.”
She stopped. She turned her cart around and came back to him.
“That so, painterman?”
He nodded.
“To do what?”
“Talk.”
She laughed, too loudly, and a cruiser slackened its pace.
“Long ago,” she said, “it was that one phonecall changed my whole life.”
“Sounds a bit dramatic.”
She turned away to stare down the lackadaisical street.
“I want to see you,” he said. “Maria. Not the whore.”
She turned those mesmerizing eyes back upto his face and studied him for a few moments, almost sadly.
“Maria is the whore, painterman” she said. “Maybe even the nun. I’m just Cytherea Grove.”