After three beers himself, Orlando couldn’t help it: he began to hum Londonderry Air. Making the words up on the spot, the revised London Derrière began spilling out. She might have socked him in the jaw, but instead she laughed, delighted. She dragged him onto the dance floor and gyrated, her back against him. This time he could not hide his eager gear shift behind a bent steering wheel. They hooked together like a tow-hitch and its load. He wrote her a new song on each anniversary of their crash. Do the Locomotive With Me. Fanny Fandango. Mother Goose Your Caboose. Let’s Cause a Rumpus. The songs were for her only, hymns performed during private services to her body. But on their fifth anniversary, she didn’t want a song. She wanted a three-word sentence.
He admired the way she dressed – or didn’t. Not attired in a flowery potato-sack to hide her figure or a blouse tight on the boobs to distract from the rest of her. No obvious and generally futile attempt to disguise the fact that she wore a jeans size in double digits, twice her blouse size. “Vertical stripes aren’t going to fucking fool anybody,” she said, not that she cared to. She wore bright, bold colours and patterns, and snug fits. Not tight or restrictive, but contoured to her shape. Mostly, though, Isabella went naked, stripping with relief as soon as the front door closed behind her.
Isabella didn’t need convincing or wooing to bend over for him. After cocktails, she took him to her house without asking where he wanted to go. Bedroom curtains open, Isabella offered herself like one of those monkeys on the Discovery Channel. He approached the twin celestial planets that orbited around her fiery core with reverential hands. Just as he had once caressed Jimi Hendrix’s left-handed guitar, the curves so like Isabella’s; as he had stroked the Buddha’s belly in China; as he had held his first erection in wonder and terror. He spread her cheeks apart. He broke Lent. He lost his cock in her cosmic folds, a tiny spaceship careening through her vortex. The puckered crater of her asshole winked up at him from between her double moons.
With the lights blazing, he got to watch his fingers digging into her hips, circles of white spreading from his grip. It was like denting a tender peach, or watching the impression of his foot haloing out on wet sand. He seized that jiggling ass to hang on, like a roller coaster handle, wanting to bruise it with the force of his grip. He reached around to lolling breasts and thighs spread just right for easy access to the magic spot so many men, apparently, ignored. Why? It was so easy. He’d seen the way women worked over his dick, with mouth, hand, or body. Jesus, making him come took effort. But he could just lay back, one arm under his head, and move a single finger. Even a pinkie. Even a goddamn toe positioned just right, though it tended to cramp up on him if she took awhile – and Isabella was never one to hurry. Yeah, sometimes it was an afterthought – face it, he could be as quick and eager as the next guy, he was no god – but the gesture was one they sure appreciated.
Orlando carefully kept one of his fingers uncalloused. His love digit, Isabella christened it. All it takes is one, his first girlfriend had taught him, a piece of knowledge that had served him better than anything he’d learned in college. Keep it clean and well-trimmed, she’d said, and that way you can put it just about anywhere. Later, after he’d picked up the steel-string and welts of protective skin cropped up all over his hands, he left one fingertip smooth. Only good for picking his nose, he told his vapid-eyed music students. It hampered complicated riffs, but the sacrifice was worth it.
Like the perfect lyric, Isabella continued to surprise him. Unlike the girdle-ish contraptions he found other women trapped in, Isabella wore thong underwear – when she wore any at all. She claimed panties wouldn’t fit her, other than the suffocating type she had no interest in wearing. Instead of plucking at elastic that climbed uncomfortably, she let it all hang out. Her undies were no more than a swatch of fabric that cupped her mons, and a string that nestled where Orlando wished his tongue could take up permanent residence.
Isabella let him watch her shower, the soap disappearing between the cleavage of her thighs. She bathed belly-down in the oversized tub she’d remodelled the house around, her ass mounds looking like twin atolls rising out of the bubbly deep. Amelia Earhart’s plane could vanish in that landscape. Isabella declared she would never need a tattoo, since Orlando’s ass hickeys permanently decorated her. He couldn’t help nibbling his devotion, a taking of the sacrament. As soon as one love bite faded, he replaced it with another. She backed up to mirrors, contorting impossibly as she tried to find Rorschach meaning in their patterns.
On the rare occasions when Orlando refused to be distracted from practising by her undulating waves of desire, Isabella practised naked yoga in his line of vision. Her wide-hulled boat continually capsized during the balancing poses. His will power couldn’t surmount such a tidal effect, and before she’d toppled over a third time, he gave in to temptation and righted her with his sturdy mast.
He’d been surprised when she’d packed his things a month ago. (There was no question as to who would stay, as he could never ask her to give up the bathtub.) She abdicated the throne he’d constructed beneath her. Left him a country-less peasant, an expatriate wandering through the pages of disappointing swimsuit issues. All because of one word. One stupid word. What a tragic irony, fit for an opera, that his song lyrics had wooed Isabella to him, but his silence in response to her demand had driven her away.
Dumping him looked good on her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her once he’d spotted her precariously perched on a barstool. He wanted to metamorphose into that stool. She looked like she’d swallowed the goddess she always sprinkled into casual conversation. She looked powerful. She looked like trouble. Dressed to kill in a red Empire-waist dress that cinched her bodice but flared out at the hips and fell past her knees, she looked like the Great Pyramid. Not one of the Egyptian queens mummified inside, no, but a live monument pulsing with desert sunlight, stretching to the sky yet rooted on earth, radiating heat.
Isabella always looked damned hot walking away. Trailing behind her at the mall or the market, admiring her bouncing globes, Orlando often felt he would have been a better student with such visual aids.
But Isabella looked even better coming towards him.
“Isabella.” He spread his hands when she approached him after the last song. She needn’t have waited so politely – she was an audience of one.
“You’re an asshole,” she said in her irresistible accent.
“I know.” He would do or say anything tonight to get her back.
“No, you don’t. I’m going to make you feel the meaning of asshole. So that next time you’ll think twice before using it on someone else.”
“Hey, I did not shit on you.”
“No, because you’re emotionally constipated.” She seemed surprised by her own wit.
He spied the crack in her slammed door, the thin moment where he could sneak in and make her forget her anger. “Can I use that in a song?”
“Always a joke. Always your music.” She hung on to her resentment, levering herself against the other side of the door, her side of the argument. “Always detachment. Reserve. Calculation. Tonight I’m breaking your barrier. Drop your pants, asshole.” But she lifted her skirt, exposing herself to the waist.
“Jesus.” His mouth dropped open, not his 501s. Instead of damp and minuscule panties, curlicues of wiry hair escaping along the creases of her hip, Isabella had sprouted a penis. It seemed as if their entire courtship had been a build-up to the lyrical surprise of the pink and white swirled cock springing from beneath her uplifted dress. Strapped on with a complicated series of belts and buckles, the cock appeared lifelike in shape, if not in colour. The straps looked damned uncomfortable, cutting into her generous flesh. He admired her ease with the contraption. Most women of her build wouldn’t be caught dead in a bikini, much less this get-up. Her thong was proving entirely inadequate to the task of restraining the hungry beast.