It's hard to know what to do, to sell you body or to admire the buttons on your dress, to kiss a bald man with a spotted tie or to sleep with him. The dome of San Marco was in the background, and we were discussing very serious things, like money, criss-crossing each other's path, when V with the checkered skirt came up and saved me and we left in the convertible, through the arch, around one side of the traffic circle, and towards inevitable sex.
V would sometimes make me feel guilty when I was having sex, but I knew she had no judgment, because she hadn't had sex with a man in 3 months, and was barely scraping by. The broker called down from his window and I went up, through the barred doors, and into his messy room (who knows how many he'd kissed there). I put my handbag down on the table and felt the breeze come up my legs on the balcony. He had a new suit and a square-edged tie but it didn't make me any more interested. When we fucked, I mostly did it for myself. I would stare at the curly-cue metal grating on his bed-stand and think of V. She had a tight ____ and even when the broker was banging me roughly I thought of her. V was a blonde with a thing for Armenians. She liked to walk in galleries to pick up foreign men, but inevitably left alone because she would scare them off, or vice-versa. She was more intimidating to men than she thought. Meanwhile, I was kissing the broker in the after-sex and thinking about the arch of V's heel.
The broker was taking us together to an island, for an adventure with a number of other game couples. The broker smelled like pussy and V said so under her breath on the car ride out. The dog (a chihuahua) smelled it too, and curled up with him while he slept on the boat. The broker was a big lug of testosterone, a human ball sack who needed sex like food and water, else he got irritable. Now, in the hours after sex, he was careless with his language, a little too crass even for V and me. I undressed and prepared to swim, leaping out into the wake of the boat in my new swimsuit with a trompe l'oeil flower over my pussy. The boat coaxed alongside as I swam, meandering among the craggy rocks of the island. The boys were going polefish diving while another couple had sex and tea in the downstairs living room. I began to feel more and more alone swimming; people refused to pay attention to me it seemed unless there was a crisis or a sexual encounter so I faked a shark attack, saying that it had grazed my bottom.
As I toweled down with V downstairs, I realized that it was probably wrong of me to have sex with V because she had only slept with a couple of men and I had taken advantage of her the first time. She was getting older, I noticed. Her breasts were changing shape, though still attractive to me. I would never grow old, my pussy would never change shape, my hair would always be lush, my skin firm, supple, clear. The boys would age; the broker, he already had the skin of a seaman, and his penis was wilted and scarred.
V dressed in a throw. It was a big puzzle, V. What did she want? Would she settle down with me and be my mistress? The broker could be counted on for nothing but money and forgettable sex. I hope V never has to sleep with him. I've told her how scummy he is, but that might not matter. You can have all the knowledge in the world about a man, and still sleep with him despite that, for the words that he wields, the power and authority that comes with money and of being of the dominant sex. He might not know a plum from a passion fruit, but it doesn't matter, he has the touch that tells you he knows his way around a woman, and that makes the two of you familiar, comfortable, and it is better to be with someone than to be alone, even if he will never care for you or even fuck you the way that V can. And he will want to talk about his problems, and how he says he can't find a good girl, even to your face, and you know you should leave and then he will creep right in back of you and nuzzle in your ass and you will lose your train of thought and still be angry but not even know why. Men are like that, a Bermuda triangle of deception. The weather turned from sunny to cloudy, the sea got rough, and I went for a walk on the craggy island. Someone was having sex somewhere, maybe V, with one of the men on the boat. I could feel it with my feet on the rocks.
That was why I had to leave. The broker slept with V already, I knew it. I could see it in the fold of his ass when she was around. Sex was all around us, where we least expect it. I can't believe V never told me. But what does it matter, it was just the broker, like a hat that you try on, except it was a man punishing your pelvis, you're holding onto the back of his hair, knotting your legs together, trying not to look at him in the eye and just think about V, about holding V's hair. He might not have even bothered to remove his tie with her. Just pulled up her dress, pulled himself out of his pants, and went to work, incarnating something that was meant to be forgotten.
They looked in the castle, they looked on the rocks, in the inlets, through the great stone faces, in their heels and black dresses, among the sea foam and stalactites and sea urchins. They looked pathetically, despondently, at the coming storm, the clouds tunneling forward as if they were generating their own wake. The broker tossed a boulder down the side of a cliff face. V thought she heard my voice, but it was one of the other women. The wind was really picking up.
The broker stepped out of nothingness, out of his swimsuit now. There were five of them, without V, and they didn't have a buoy for a brain between them, just a couple of straw hats and a short coat. V would stay, looking for me, even if it meant leaving the five others. This was about something more than just me, or the contrast of men and women and nature. They broke into the fisherman's hut, and by the bee-stung lips of V, things got awfully formulaic. The professor pulled a couple of stray hairs across his bald spot. The broker looked startled at a cross on the wall. The fisherman returned and pointed out dead beauties that had drowned on his little spit of land, and also where he kept his hard bread. The broker turned his back on V, and V in return did the same. She took off her coat, alternatively cold and warm, like a current running in a stream.
V slept, then awoke dreaming of sleeping with the broker. Her shoulders were bare, and the professor was sleeping in a chair upright. She took off her nightie, wrapped a blanket around her, and took a peek at the dawn. She knew I was out there, not dead or tossed up ashore among the crags and reeds.
She and the broker met with the clouded skyline in the distance, the wind whipping her face. I could have been hiding anywhere among the rocks, they said, looking solemn, preparing to give up on me. The fisherman and the broker traded words, bisecting the horizon. And through it all, the proceedings of the search, the helicopters, the police, the armed navy men, all I could think of was how horribly boring it was to be alive, how being alive was no consolation because the permanency of death was the only quick good thing that could be counted on, more reliable than sex. Yes, to be dead among the rocks was all I wanted, and if I had not gotten it done then and there, it would have happened sometime for me, like a flight that you miss that ends up crashing, but your flight eventually crashes too, at some point, whether you are putting your hair in curlers and you electrocute yourself, of you slit your throat rather than sleep with you girlfriend's husband. A thousand refusals. V was teetering and tottering on her feet, fairly shook up by my disappearance. The outline of her big blonde hair against the rocks and the skyline, I wanted to tell her that it was all a lie, that I hadn't jumped to my death on purpose, that I had known how close to come to the edge, but then went a little further and lost my balance, and figured that you or the broker would be there to save me, but now this, this catastrophe that actually was my aching desire, to rid myself of the circularity of my life, to blame it on a little fisherman boy that hadn't actually pushed me because I wouldn't sleep with him, or even give him a kiss. The broker knew why I did it. Because I was bored, tired, tired, so tired of being the center of attention because I didn't know any other way. Did I kill myself because he slept with V? Or because V slept with him, because he was able to find out about the arch of her foot? The broker had a long shadow following him, and he wanted to replace me now with V. He told her they were still searching for me. She tried to be interested, to care, but by now, a day or two later, the shock had already worn off and she was just back to being V, flighty, vapid, stunning, and troubling. She and the broker were quite cross with other, about whose fault it was, and how they could get from here back to sex, even if the sex had not been that good, it was a connection that they had had and now they had nothing, less than nothing now that I was dead. V was quite emotional about it, and the broker couldn't convince her otherwise, so he would follow her wherever her emotion led the two of them. The broker was already dead, he had already given his heart to one dead girl, and now he was going to try to penetrate V's mind with what remained of his emotion for me, to pierce her heart with the prosthesis of our affair. The complication for V was that she couldn't tell the broker that she had fucked me more times that he had, and that made things complicated. All around them, things reminded them of their connections to me, as if I was the top node, the queen bee of a hive of reality that disseminated from the time point at which I had died. V was beginning to transfer her lust for me to the broker, letting down block by mental block. And then, just when the broker thought that he was about to get in her pussy, she rejected the transference, and pushed him off the train at a country station.
The broker hadn't learned anything about women from the whole ordeal. V went back to her old life with her mother and rich friends, smoking cigarettes, and watching the sordid sex lives of those in her circle, humoring writers, and trying not to think about me. But in that veil of ignorance, a little thought crept up. Something the broker had said, about there not being enough time for any of us. She saw her girlfriends going with younger men, boys some of them. Was she aging? she thought. Was she any less beautiful than at nineteen? The broker had blinded her with compliments. Was he right, or did he want something else? Where was he now? I could go with younger men, V thought. I could wear a skimpy dress, and still pull it off. She looked at her image, and saw a color-blocked Cezanne, or an abstract Picasso, with three heads and too-large breasts, with the rotundity of the Red Queen, lips too big, neck too long, and too much pubic hair. Eyes glaring, she dressed. It doesn't matter, she thought, the broker will be back for me.
The broker and V didn't have much to do now but fuck. There was no longer any trace of me in their minds. It was almost mechanical. They were in the car, and crossed a number of bridges, and began to build something together, something that would last, they hoped, longer than either of their affairs with me. It was lonely and tentative starting anew, but they whitewashed the past, and found it harder to tap into their memories of me. V could scarcely remember the things we would do together. All there was for her now, she felt, was the broker. The broker, coming out of the darkness, illuminating her life, teaching her about her past, creating a revisionist history of their sexuality, tolling the bell of her orgasm, putting his mental machinery about me to work on V, her ears, her face, her eyes, her lips, her hair. It felt so good, in that moment, an orgasm like a truck backing up through her pelvis, the sleep afterwards the first real sleep that she'd had since before the island.
He left her after that, coldly, mechanically, sterilizing the wound he had opened up with an abrupt turn. He tried to say otherwise, but she knew it was over. A cup of coffee, V? Shall we get married? The broker liked architecture in a bourgeois way. He saw V as a great work of art. The broker had been trained to admire, to practice his bourgeois affectations, and that included those on innocents such as V. He had an agility to his charms and seductions that V could never replicate or counter. All she had was that hair, and the art that she emulated. Her art, his artifice, they were quite a couple, but without me to mediate the two, they were selling themselves just enough rope to stitch a spider's web. There is no ecstasy of the spider, only automatic relations upon a vibrating surface, an auto-catalytic process of orgasm, she in a housemaid's dress, he in his suit, a voluptuousness of a bell continuously ringing, flowers always abloom, no outside to the act of euphoria, their shadows refracted through a mirror and blotting out the sun. He didn't stay for coffee, and left her on the tile floor.
He was inside V's mind now, they were both inside the prison house, the labyrinth where casual lovers go to perish, where they refuse to be seen with commonplace people, where shadows of death are cast across their backs without the slightest hint of recognition. Everyone knew V's dirty secret, that she's been banging her dead best girlfriend's lover. I can barely feel V's heartbeat now, so faint it is. Where are your principles now, V? She attempted to act out the broker's fantasies, to be alluring and sexy, never knowing that what attracted him to her was her innocence, his desire to defile her. V took off her shirt self-consciously and he ignored the cue, instead petting her face and tucking her into bed like a child.
Hidden from V was the fact that the broker had already cheated on her. She could not sleep. The anxiety was too great. She had become the sexualized object that he wanted, but her desires were out of his control. She searched for him among the genealogy of their past just as she had searched for me on that island, fruitlessly. Instead of a dead body washed up to shore, she saw a sad middle-aged man kissing a prostitute on a hotel sofa. As the broker cried (is there anything more pathetic?), V saw the stain I had left on him, and this moved her to place five fingers on his head, to accept him and her debasement in the face of infinitude.
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