And yet, although she felt close to him, although she volunteered to his control, she missed his presence, she didn’t want just the phantom within her, she didn’t want just the imaginings, she wanted him to look at her that way again. Elisa wanted nothing more in the world than for Joseph to come to her and consume her.
* * *
“Elisa, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’re happy,” Captain Vincent said, wrapping his thick arm over her naked shoulder and caressing her thigh with his hand. She was straddling his leg, her body lying half on top of his, her head against his chest. They had just enjoyed Sunday afternoon intercourse after a failed attempt at a friendly stroll, Vincent watching her haunches move underneath of her skirt and finding himself incapable of continuing. She had never said no to him. “Elisa? Are you awake?”
She remained motionless beside him and he couldn’t see her face, but she was awake, she just wasn’t with him in the room. She was with Joseph. When Vincent had stopped, Elisa and Joseph had continued. She was still experiencing it and she hadn’t heard Vincent calling to her.
It was late and Elisa had drawn a bath for herself. She slowly stripped off her clothing and poured in a concoction that made bubbles in the water. The water was hot; she tested it with her toe and slowly immersed her foot, was able to stand it and placed the other foot in the water. Then, she squatted down and inched her backside into the water, finally sitting down. She closed her eyes and focused on him. She heard it, she was sure she heard it. Arthur wouldn’t dare though, not with Vincent nearby. She heard it again. It was the sound of someone moving across her floor. Elisa knew which boards made noises and what noise they each made and she heard the creak of the board just outside the bathroom door. Elisa got out of the water immediately and grabbed a towel. She wrapped it around her body, covering her chest and midsection. She knew someone was just outside the door. Her hair was still wet, dripping water down her back. She moved towards the door. She listened. He had not moved. She touched the doorknob. He had to be right there. She turned the knob and flung the door open.
The hall was empty. There was no one there. Elisa tiptoed towards the front room, waiting for Arthur to jump out from behind something or attack her from around the corner. But her apartment was empty. She checked the front door and it was locked. She had been hearing things. She laughed at herself and moved back towards her bath. Vincent was breathing heavily in her bedroom. His large nude body spread eagle on top of the covers.
Elisa went back into the bathroom and removed the towel. That was when she saw him standing there. She pulled the towel towards her body. He had been behind the door. He was there, just as she’d dreamed about. He was looking at her again. She could feel him entering her. She stared back at him in awe. Vincent was asleep just ten feet away. She came to her senses and motioned to him that Vincent was there. He nodded and his grin didn’t change. She held the towel up to her chin. He didn’t look away from her face. She didn’t know what to do.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. Joseph reached forward and touched the bare skin of her shoulder like he was inspecting fine fabric. She tried to push him away with one hand and keep the towel in front of her with the other as his fingers slid over her chest. She let the towel drop slightly. “We can’t…” she whispered heavily, “…there’s…” He continued to stare in her eyes. She felt him returning inside. “No, we can’t.” The door was still open slightly. Her pleading murmurs could wake him up.
Joseph leaned forward and kissed her bicep. He laid his head against her arm, his cheek against her elbow. His hand skimmed over her throat, her neck, her sternum. She pressed herself against him, clenching. The soggy towel dropped. Elisa put her arms around him. He laid his head in the lectern of her shoulder. She pressed eagerly. He picked her up with one quick movement and laid her down on the bathmat. Elisa shimmied, trying to be as quiet as possible. Joseph loomed over her, her fresh nudity just below him, her wet skin allowing her to slip out of his grasp, for him to have trouble holding her in place, she squirmed underneath of him, without making a sound. She didn’t even dare whisper. He was holding her down and caressing her. She was threatening him and kissing him passionately. He plunged into her and she whelped like a kicked dog, arched her back and came. He pressed himself against her entirely; she relaxed, exhausted, incapable of fighting any longer, electricity quivering up her body, causing her to bury her face in the floor to muffle her squeals. She came again, bellowing out a noise that could only be described like a death rattle. She wasn’t in the bathroom, her skin against the shag and the linoleum, she wasn’t sure where she had been because she’d never been there before. But it was a place where every pore ached, where the slightest touch caused streams of her personal juice to pour out, where her areolas puckered like lips around a lemon and her nipples felt like they were going to split open.
“Elisa, wake up honey. Wake up, you’re having a bad dream.”
* * *
Debonair, to his great discomfort, the atheist doorman observed.
“The historical record, does it not, contains those annals of excrement? A great author on a great authority. A psychoanalytical engine taking the assault of blooming fields, ruptured by familial doubts, as one sees throughout his life.”
The specter entered with a quick step forward, avoiding, of course, the cracks of which he had, for so many years, used to save his unknown mother’s back, although it can be known, for he was well aware, like a child stomping on a garrison of black ants, that he had, at one point, whilst sitting on his cot in the attic of the hospital, where he was exiled like a persecuted scientist or artist, slammed his heel, dripping with the protection of sticks, against a spider web arching crack in oblique defiance, in anger, in pain, in abandonment. Then, with a step back, unconcerned or unaware of the grinning doorman, who assisted our prophet, without acknowledging him, towards a row of seats in the back of the ornate hall.
“Precisely,” said the voice as if it was only for loafing, “the star struck incompetent modernist who tarries near the ledges of reality. One always bows to those pure verdicts of Nabakov. The honest diagnosis of the stage.”
With no signals, not for Joseph anyway, the bald scholar with the serpent’s lips, lingered near the prickling ears and departed.
“Master Warhol,” the phantom snickered, “was living his fifteen minutes until the day he died.”
“Have any of you found valiant students,” Sir Peter Smorgasbord requested with aged indifference, “to pen The Rainbow at your ceremonies? The Trials of Zoroaster it has been called.”