Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (27 page)

“Did you get my message?” Jo says to me the next evening, when she finally catches me alone in the wings during a break from rehearsal. She has been watching me all night. Lucky won't talk to her.

“I'm not in the script.”

“Everybody's in the script.”

“Look, I don't get involved with actors. It's too complicated, it's messy. I don't do it.”

“Make an exception.”

Lucky comes up behind Jo. Whatever the look is on my face, it gets a scowl from her. “Break's over,” she says succinctly, turning away from us even before the words are completely out, halfway across the stage before I think to try to keep her with me.

“Let's get back to work, Jo.”

“Make a fucking exception.”

I don't like being pushed by actors, and there's something else, too, but I don't want to think about it now, I just want Jo off my back, so I give her the director voice, the vocal whip. “Save it for the stage, princess. You want to impress me, get out there and do your fucking job.”

She doesn't answer; her silence makes a cold, high-altitude circle around us. When she moves, it's like a snake uncoiling, and then her hand is around my wrist. She's strong. When I look down, I see that her hand is changing: the bones thicken under the flesh, the muscles rearrange themselves subtly, and it's Joe's hand on Jo's arm, Joe's hand on mine. “Don't make me angry, Mars,” and the voice is genderless and buzzes like a snake. There is no one here to help me, I can't see Lucky, I'm all alone with this hindbrain thing that wants to come out
and play with me. Jo's smile is by now almost too big for her face. Just another actor, I think crazily, they're all monsters anyway.

“What are you?” I am shaking.

“Whatever you need, Mars. Whatever you need. Every director's dream. At the moment, I'm Salome, right down to the bone. I'm what you asked for.”

“I didn't ask for this. I don't want this.”

“You wanted Salome, and now you've got her. The power, the sex, the hunger, the need, the wanting, it's all here.”

“It's a play. It's just…it's a play, for chrissake.”

“It's real for you.” That hand is still locked around my wrist; the other hand, the soft small hand, reaches up to the center of my chest where my heart tries to skitter away from her touch. “I saw it, that first audition. I came to play John the Baptist, I saw the way Lucky looked at me, and I was going to give her something to remember…but your wanting was so strong, so complex. It's delicious, Mars. It tastes like spice and wine and sweat. The play in your head is more real to you than anything, isn't it, more real than your days of bright sun, your friends, your office transactions. I'm going to bring it right to you, into your world, into your life. I'll give you Salome. On stage, off stage, there doesn't have to be any difference. Isn't that what making love is, giving someone what they really want?”

She's still smiling that awful smile and I can't tell whether she is talking about love because she really means it or because she knows it makes my stomach turn over. Or maybe both.

“Get out of here. Out of here, right now.” I am shaking.

“You don't mean that, sweet. If you did, I'd already be gone.”

“I'll cancel the show.”

She doesn't answer: she looks at me and then,
phht,
I am seeing the stage from the audience perspective, watching

Herod and Herodias quarrel and cry and struggle to protect their love, watching John's patient fear as Herod's resolve slips away: watching Salome dance. When she dances, she brings us all with her, the whole audience living inside her skin for those moments. We all whirl and reach and bend, we all promise, we all twist away. We all tempt. We all rage. We stuff ourselves down Herod's throat until he chokes on us. And then we are all suddenly back in our own bodies and we roar until our throats hurt and our voices rasp. All the things that I have felt about this play, she will make them feel. What I am will be in them. What I have inside me will bring them to their feet and leave them full and aching. Oh god, it makes me weep, and then I am back with her, she still holds me with that monster hand and all I can do is cry with wanting so badly what she can give me.

Her eyes are too wide, too round, too pleased. “Oh,” she says, still gently, “It's okay. You'll enjoy most of it, I promise.” And she's gone, sauntering onstage, calling out something to Lance, and her upstage hand is still too big, still wrong. She lets it caress her thigh once before she turns it back into the Jo hand. I've never seen anything more obscene. I have to take a minute to dry my eyes, cool my face. I feel a small, hollow place somewhere deep, as if Jo reached inside and found something she liked enough to take for herself. She's there now, just onstage, ready to dance, that small piece of me humming in her veins. How much more richness do I have within me? How long will it take to eat me, bit by bit? She raises her arms now and smiles, already tasting. Already well fed.

My name is Jack. I like to surprise people. To name the bird by its song.

 

Several weeks ago, Helen and I listened through the fine, spring green skin of a tent as wild ponies thundered by in the dark, screaming as they swerved into the cold bay. I could smell salt, their thick soaked coats. I was lying with my eyes open, staring, wondering how the tent protected our skulls from being crushed beneath the herd's hooves.

 

We were on vacation. Our first.

Here in New York, where we live, I run a sex club for women. It's my job to create a space in which women can fulfill fantasies they don't even know they have. Which is sometimes difficult to distinguish from simply creating their fantasies for them.

 

You'd be surprised by how many there are of these. Women who don't know they have fantasies.

 

I like my job, and I work at it. It's the skill I've learned in order to survive. That's the nature of jobs, after all.

 

If this were the 1940s, you could call me a gigolo. It's a term toward which I have a distinct inclination and affection.

 

But I don't want to tell you about fantasies. Or how I fulfill them.

 

I want to tell you about the ghost crab.

Helen didn't stir when I unzipped the tent, the zipper as icy and difficult to manipulate as my own sex-stiffened fingers. Her back was embedded in the damp floor, her lumpy silhouette engraved there by these fingers: fingers that had pushed into her over and over, scorching; fingers without ears to hear her cries or eyes to see her try to dig herself deeper into the dirt. I felt ungainly as I extricated myself from our shell, stumbling into my boots as I crossed the thick dewy weeds.

The ocean is darker today than I've ever seen it, more intent looking, Helen had said to me the evening before. We had just arrived, and before pitching camp had taken a walk across the strip of land from our bayside site to the ocean. We were
standing next to each other, not touching, gazing out from a seemingly infinite vastness of Atlantic shore and sea and sun. It seemed to stretch for miles around the edges of her so that I couldn't breathe there was so much of it, a light so huge and red it could only be hell, a hell, distant yet imminent and not entirely threatening in its presence; and in the vacuum created by my empty lungs, I felt something sucking us forward into the future.

The darkly wavering orange fingered its bloody way deeper into dusk. I raised my right hand to press the bruise just beside my temple, knowing it was the same color as the sky there, behind me, in the already-dark; a baby eggplant withered in an unforeseen, early frost. Unable to make sense of how such a mark might belong to me, I instead found myself thinking that nature raises the same questions to each of us over and over. That night my question was: Do people respond only to victims? Always sunsets and never sunrise. Several terns had wheeled and wailed as Helen and I had approached. There is no way for us to empathize with cruelty. Human cruelty has its rewards, and as such it doesn't require empathy. The same can be said of success, or of winning. It is its own reward, to do something well. Cruelty is what sets the gods apart.

The simmering scent of bayberry leaves shifted around us. I had lost myself in these thoughts, during which time, Helen had left my side and settled herself upon the shoulder of a dune where the sand retained some warmth. She gazed out past me toward where the swells had sharpened and looked like sailors saluting and curtsying, dopey white caps askew across their crewcut foreheads. Her hazel eyes. The poems she carries with her, reciting stanzas from memory beneath her breath. All the reasons that I love her.

She gets soaking wet, and then begins to hit herself.

The minute I touch her I feel it too. She's a swamp, sweaty, moldering, the kind in which you can lose your way, dizzy in the stench. The heat of decay just beneath layers of insects and leaves. Watching closely, I can see the surface shift, her pores open, peat exposed. A chemical odor rises off her like steam.

It's this, the scent, that stops me, even though she is so easy to slide into. She thrusts her hips toward my face, her wrists so thin, so much more fragile than mine as she tries to force my mouth to her gaping flooded center, but I don't allow this. In order to avoid giving her what I know she wants, to staunch the bile leaching from the back of my throat, I quickly—too quickly—thrust my hand inside her. She tears as I enter.

This is one of the ways I surprise people, including myself: who would have thought I'd be the one to lure Helen from Paris? It wasn't easy to break her family's hold. I had to go in the middle of the night, wearing my black peaked cloak, hoping my pale face would not cast too great a reflection upon the windows. They lived high above the city in the manner of falcons, in a penthouse looking across the Seine. I gagged her, grabbed her by the wrists, and pushed her down through the stairwells in front of me, thirty-six of them switchbacking left and right, her white nightshirt billowing behind her like a shroud.

I'm tall and strong; I used to be a basketball player. Once, when I was in high school, stoned on acid and Jack Daniels mixed with grape soda, I knocked out three cops who were trying to catch me.

They'd have locked me away for good, and I couldn't have that.

And all I know, even now, is that I must keep moving forward. There is nothing else I can do, with her crying and pushing against me at the same time. The blood, the tearing, her fists beating at my back, none of this matters. The only
way a ballplayer keeps going, past the nausea, when muscles become one's own worst enemy, is to focus on bringing each heavy quad forward, forcing sneaker to grab waxed floor, down and turn and stop, up, stop, up one more time, up. Up. Up and in.

I only fuck the ones I can't put my mouth to. As if to carve out a mouth that someday I will find kissable.

 

Helen awakes every morning to a chorus of demonic mothers, hunched, crippled, angry old women telling her a woman is a cunt and nothing more, and our first morning in camp was no exception. And so having unraveled myself from the tent I drew water for coffee, water I'd been sure to fetch the night before while Helen scowled at me, wanting me to ignore my errands, to take her immediately to bed. I had sat her down on the bench by the gravel pathway and explained to her about hypothermia, and bears, and giardia, and dehydration; all the common, natural things that can kill a human being outside the city. By the time the water boiled above the unearthly blue flame, a gray light had seeped through the crack between earth and sky. The ponies, the rustling spartina made me restless. I had dreamed of listening to exotic ducks in the reeds plotting revolution over the tyranny of mallards.

Out there, far from cement brick crowds, the bodies pressed and rubbing against strangers all day long, a place inside me opens in just the way the water's surface becomes luminescent green and blue as if lit from within as the sky darkens. Only the wind relentlessly working at my skin and hair, employing sand and heat and hail and thorns as its weapons, can satisfy the ferocity of my desires; my lungs expand in the complexity of such air. Out there I can sit still for hours, my haunches taut upon packed sand, rhapsodizing.

In other words, I become romantic in the Great Outdoors.

It was in this way I discovered the ghost crab.

When neither the hot sweet mush I cooked nor the black coffee nor my insistent kisses could rouse Helen, I set out by myself.

I walked. Shuffling my feet ankle deep amid oyster and horseshoe crab shells. With my binoculars I could see hotels, aqua swimming pool slides, boardwalks and a ferris wheel at the north end of the barrier island which we'd chosen to explore, a thin sandy strip cut off from the mainland by a storm in '33. Like nearly all American places, it was named for the Indians who were resident when British colonists arrived to cheat and beat them out of land and food. As I stared through the binoculars at the resort, abandoned and boarded up for the winter, I was filled with fear. A fear of myself. A fear that I, like the British, will pursue all that I love and love it with great intensity to its extinction.

A scuttling just to my left caught my attention. There was a small hole there, a channel of sliding, glistening sand.