ABIMAGIQUE
She’s the girl with the Halloween hair. The Morticia Addams Cut, dyed jet black, with asymmetrical streaks of orange. She’s twenty-four, twenty-five. A child-woman, you imagine, who dotes on books about famous poisoners and has several of the more painful piercings. Typical Goth material. But once you get past the hair, the vintage dress, the pearl ring shaped like a bulbous spider, the tattoos on the backs of her hands (a vampire’s skull, a human heart), and the extreme make-up, you notice that her face has a maternal sensuality and softness that seem too unguarded to be part of the modern world.
Most weekdays she has lunch at this little teriyaki place just off the Ave on 45th, in the University District of Seattle. She usually sits at a table where Bill Gates once ate, an occasion memorialized by a framed Polaroid of the great man on the wall above it, and she always orders the Number Three (Veggie Special) and a bottle of water, and reads while she eats (trade paperbacks as a rule), except when it’s raining—then she stares out the window, absently forking up bites of food. This suggests she might be native to the region, because people born in the Pacific Northwest don’t generally view the rain as depressing; they’re more likely to accept it as a comforting veil drawn across the world, one that encourages contemplation.
No one hits on her, and that surprises you. Some guys are doubtless put off by her personal style (which you suspect is less a statement of cultural disaffection than a disguise), and some will assume she’s a ball-buster and that any approach could trigger a barrage of insult. Yet others wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. She’s a beautiful woman—no, a lovely woman; lovely being a word more evocative of her antique quality. Her breasts, always displayed to advantage, are large and milky white, zoftig, like the breasts of models painted by Titian and Raphael, and the remainder of her body conforms to this unfashionable standard of voluptuousness. There must be a special atmosphere around her, you think. An envelope of force that keeps her space inviolate. One way or the other, you understand she’s not a girl who can be easily acquired. You can’t just walk up to her and say, Mind if I sit here?, or, If you’re going to break my heart, do it now, because later it’ll be too painful, or, Didn’t I see you at the Crocodile Club last Saturday?, and talk about the cool bands you’ve both seen and then ask for her number, and by then you’ll have gone past the need for conversation (it’s really more of an animal preliminary), and you’ll either wind up in bed together or you won’t. Though you desire the same thing that guys who use such uninspired openings desire, you recognize that if you are going to reach that night, that bed, you’ll first have to desire everything about her. You’ll have to fall in love, succumb to her, so when you introduce yourself, employing no greater wit than that typically employed by anyone else your age, your introduction will be supported by a depth of emotion, a weight of knowledge, and by then you will have discovered that conversation is rarely a trivial matter for her—a moral conviction underlies her words—and you’ll have learned she works with the handicapped as a massage therapist and lives alone in a frame house on a fir-lined street in Fremont, and that her eyes are green as bottle glass under strong sunlight, and that she’s called Abi, which is short for Abimagique.
Of course no one would name their daughter Abimagique. It’s a self-chosen name, a name that, when you first heard it, caused you to harbor derisive thoughts, to imagine her the victim of some Wiccan delusion, and this appears to be more-or-less the case. On the walls of her house hang classic representations of the angels; Tibetan and Native American masks; curious constructions of dried vegetable matter and silk ribbon; ankhs, crosses, backwards 7s, and other symbols less readily identifiable. Long strings of beads—silver and amber, topaz and lapis lazuli—drape the bedroom mirror, carving reflections into slices; herbal sachets that yield peculiar odors are strewn everywhere; scraps of paper bearing inscriptions hand-inked in a Tolkienesque script are tucked beneath pillows, in the backs of drawers, under potted plants, inside tins and jars, many of these featuring a backwards 7. After you’ve been friends with her for a month (you’ve insinuated yourself into her life as a client, seeking treatment for back problems you suffered in an automobile accident years before), you realize that these arcana don’t announce her character, they merely reflect it; they’re natural expressions, like sprays of foliage from a central trunk. When she talks about God, gods, spirits, ghosts, miracles, monsters, the magic of animals, of plants, the circles of Hell, the potency of angels, the entirety of the mystic landscape she inhabits, she expresses herself neither defensively nor assertively, but with a calm certainty that inspires you to argument. You want to debunk her beliefs not because you’re such a huge fan of empirical truth or because you’re so locked in to your science-geek grad-school thing, but rather because a vague male reason demands it. She refuses to argue, she merely submits there may be some things you’re not yet aware of, and that’s not something you can argue, though you try.
Just past the turn of the year, you become lovers. Rain falls intermittently and the firs enclosing Abi’s house lend the pewter light a greenish undersea opacity in which her skin glows. You discover a backwards 7 tattooed on the inside of her right thigh, close to her sex; you trace the blue ink with a finger, puzzle over it a moment, then make gentle play with her genital piercing. She tells you that she loves you, but her tone is oddly dispassionate and, once you’re inside her, though you experience the ferocity of desire, your feelings seem muted by a tranquil energy you recognize as uniquely hers, as if you’ve penetrated that protective envelope you sensed, that atmosphere, and now it surrounds you. You’re lulled, cradled by her acceptance. It’s like you’re adrift on the undulations of a tide, not moved by female sinew and bone. But the instant before you come, she breaks the languid rhythm of your lovemaking; she places her hands on the small of your back and presses down hard with her fingertips, manipulating the nerves and muscles there. Electricity snaps along your spine, heat floods your brain. You cry out from spasms of sensation so violent, they take you to the brink of unconsciousness. Once you recover, you ask with a degree of anger (because it hurt), but with a greater degree of wonderment (because you’ve never experienced such an intricate orgasm), what the hell was it that she did to you?
“It’s a massage technique,” she says. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”
You start to say “no”—you’re accustomed to having more control in bed than, in retrospect, it appears you had, and you’re annoyed. “I would have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more if you hadn’t sprung it on me,” you tell her.