“Take off that dress,” he said, indignant.
“No.” I said. “You.”
His face bore no expression.
He lifted my dress up over my head in one smooth movement. And I was left in a pair of Gap yellow underwear. Not even the thong kind. I forgot I was wearing them.
“Are those boys’ underwear?”
I shook my head no.
“Turn around,” he said, still sitting on the edge of my bed. He lowered my underwear and sat silently looking at me.
Then he grabbed my hips and pulled me closer to him, sticking his tongue right into the crack of my ass. No man had ever gone there first.
I could hear him unbuckling his belt, unzipping his fly. Then he stuck his fingers into my sex and turned me around.
His long, thin cock was sticking out of his jeans, waiting. “Sit down.”
I lowered myself on to him.
He broke through pubic hair, tissue, blood vessels, pride, sadness, desire, me.
Then, there wasn’t any room left for air in my lungs. I came pools on to his dark-blue jeans.
My cigarettes called. I left him lying on my bed with one hand behind his head, the other resting on his stomach, smiling big as he caught his breath. His limp dick twitched as it rested outside his open zipper.
“Bring me one too,” he said. “And that little red ashtray you stole tonight.”
Later, when I had been lying there awake watching him snore, his hands clasped over his chest, like my mother in her black beaded dress the day of the funeral, I imagined his life back in Barcelona.
I thought about this half-brother, Sergi Canetti. I wondered if Sergi was gay. Did David consider himself bisexual? Did it just hap pen once?
I got up to go to the bathroom, closed the door, then placed my hands over the cold edges of the sink and pressed my face up to the mirror for a reality check. The whites around my brown eyes were bloodshot and smudges of faded black eyeliner streaked the tops of my cheekbones. My lips were chapped and redder than usual. My classmates had called me “Bubble Lips” when I was a girl, but now those bubbles were extra puffy from an entire night of David’s love nibbles. “I love your mouth. I love your lips,” he’d said to me as I sucked his cock before we went at it again. He made me feel beautiful, alive again. I laughed at myself in the mirror, gave myself a wink. The man I had stared at so intently in an author’s photo was now snoring loudly in my bed.
We decided that David should move in after our third date. We couldn’t be without each other, and his time in New York would dwindle away fast.
When he first brought all his things over from the dingy little studio he was renting in midtown Manhattan, I was taken aback by how light the man travelled. For a four-month scholarship trip he had brought his laptop, two dress shirts, two T-shirts, one V-neck wool sweater, two pairs of shoes, a pair of dress slacks, a pair of jeans (which I had soiled) and a black blazer. The pairs of underwear and socks he had brought (less than a week’s worth) he hand-washed daily in the nude and hung out neatly on the circular metallic ring around my shower to dry.
The only things that weighed him down were the seven books he intended to read or use as references for his writing. We hardly socialized or saw anyone for that first month and a half. Though I liked to blame our antisocialness on David’s less-than-perfect English, I really just wanted him all to myself.
David was a social animal by nature. His mother had told him that as a child he opened his arms for everyone to hold him. He made her nervous, thinking he’d embrace a stranger con malas intenciones one day. Unlike most of the misanthropic writers and editors I had come to know and sympathize with over the years, David genuinely liked people.
As time went on, I got used to losing him and his attention at those publishing-world events he did eventually want to go to. In conversation, his whole being was absorbed in the plight of other people’s pain, just like he had become absorbed in mine. He was a charismatic empath, and both women and men alike were taken with his boyish charm. Most hadn’t heard of his work, but they pretended they had when I introduced him as one of Spain’s current avant-garde.
He would perk people up like wilting flowers. I even found my self feeling jealous during a genteel dinner party given by a power editor at Random House. Dressed in a low-cut, very transparent blouse, Elaine Williams was just recently divorced. She had allowed her six-year-old daughter Chloe to play with the adults, and both wouldn’t stop flirting with David. While Elaine told him all about her horrendous break-up, the girl kept lifting up her frilly dress like a little whore trying to get his attention.
He pinched Chloe’s little stomach and turned back up to Elaine’s big batting eyes as she continued telling him about her loneliness. Yes, I’m ashamed to say, I felt like strangling mother and child right there.
I studied him with other people: complete strangers, new acquaintances, good friends of mine, it didn’t matter. I knew his look so well, because it was the way he looked at me that first night, and thereafter, and I fell in love with him for it. I felt safe and special in that tolerant gaze of his. When he shared it with others, I began to grow resentful.
But he was all mine at home. David worked methodically on his novel while I checked into the office every day and counted the hours until I could rush home and have him again. He inspired me to kick-start my second novel, despite my first’s disastrous reviews, and for the first time in years I felt confident and creative again. I wanted to write screenplays with him, edit anthologies, and co-edit another literary journal with him. I was mad with creative energy.
One beautiful fall morning, David invited me to go live with him in Spain. After that, coming home to him in the evenings involved a whole new mindset of possibilities for a future together.
When Sergi Canetti entered our lives, he shook our very foundation. I came home at around seven the night it happened, the time I usually arrived. I’d been thinking about David the whole way home. When I walked in, I immediately stripped in the vestibule, knowing he would follow my lead. We met naked in the centre of my living room, under the low-hanging antique chandelier with small ivory roses I took from my mother’s apartment. With all our body parts saluting the other at attention, we wrestled over who would suck the other first. I won the fight, and I kneeled before him in haughty victory.
Then he regained his power, becoming serious in order to sit me down gently on the rickety wooden chair by the kitchen window. I smoked my after-work cigarette, complaining about the idiots I worked with. He knelt at my mound, opened my lips, and suckled my clit until I felt faint. I told him to stop. He stopped his sucking and leaped up on to his feet and put on his best society lady posture. “Yes, my queen,” he said, bowing before me.
With one eyebrow raised abnormally high, he pranced around the room speaking Briticisms, his hands fluttering like butterflies, while his bright red penis pointed the way. I laughed as I studied him. He was beautiful in his girlie man sort of way, and I tackled him on to the bed. He played hard to get until I mounted him, pinned him down. I could do that; we were practically the same size.
He lay helpless beneath me, eyes closed, moaning away as I squeezed and rode his dick like I had learned to ride a horse as a wannabe child jockey at our house upstate. English style, back straight, propped up on my feet, legs bent at my sides. I’d push my self up and down, up and down. I concentrated and stared at him below me, leaning back and turning around to caress his delicate balls. They felt cool to my hands, like little plastic bags of sand to play with.