Notes on a Non-Scandal:
1. No
copyright infringement intended, no profit gained. Story is mine, so please request permission before
archiving, stealing, or doing an interpretative dance based upon it.
2. An expansion of a very
short piece written for the “even angels” livejournal community
(http://community.livejournal.com/even_angels_/). Props to
flying peanuts for the first and last lines of the first section. Refers to characters in previous stories
(specifically “Coup de Grace” and “Venezia”), so it might be a good idea to
read those stories first before proceeding here.
3. Intended as a Valentine’s
Day piece, but you know me: too much, and always too late.
Comments, feedback, fashion
advice: viviandarkbloom@hotmail.com
The Book of the Body
vivian darkbloom
“The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic
art.”
—from The History Boys, Alan Bennett
1. Mykonos, 1953
Another moment passes, slowly sculpted by her breath, each
one a stepping stone toward awakening.
The cobbled path snakes to the beach and beyond, to the coastline gently
disrupted by villas and cottages burning white against pale sand and the
translucent cool Aegean. Even now, on this overcast morning, the warmth of
stone gently blazes under her feet. Going native,
or her idea of such: Suntanned, loose hair, wrinkled clothes, barefoot.
She had been surprisingly unsurprised by waking up alone. If not for the
imprimatur of sex upon the bed, a scented still life of peaks and eddies of
bunched-up sheets, pummeled pillows, and dips in the aging mattress, she might
have thought it all a fantastic dream, courtesy of her inverted self.
But this was what happened when you loved a wanderer: The morning after was
usually a solo affair. Mouth scorched dry by the plentiful wine of the previous
night, you quietly took account of every delicious
ache and made plans to keep yourself occupied until she returned. What was for
lunch? Dinner? Would the family from Heidelberg
reappear on the beach armed with their gramophone, wooing the seagulls with
Beethoven concertos?
Where was she? No doubt scrambling over the ruins of a Byzantine church,
the very one that made her eyes light up three days ago when they arrived on
the island.
Under normal circumstances, work would be a legitimate distraction. But this
was a vacation: enforced frivolity. The rule had been no books,
and none of their attendant paraphernalia either! No lumpy tomes on
pre-Hellenistic culture, or pretentious modernist novels, or even racy
paperbacks about naughty boarding school girls. No notebooks accompanied by
ostentatious yet leaky fountain pens or humble pencil stubs. She felt grateful
for the stingy allowance of one Greek newspaper.
Was she more troubled by the absence of her lover or the absence of her
languages?
That morning she had dreamt she was a paragraph. Every motion typed a sentence.
She would stretch and with breathless length—hands on the headboard, toes
capturing the mattress edge—be a Virginia Woolf sentence, elegantly sprawling,
perfectly composed. Or in sleep’s fetal contraction she would mimic Hemingway’s
brevity. The absentminded curl of her fingers could be punctuation, perhaps a
clutch of semi-colons, and a toss of her black hair an unrepentantly bleak
little Brontë descriptor: Brooding on the beach.
Too much wine last night. She had stared at the
bed, at the meringue of sheets that remained defiantly unmade, reminding her of
a thing that before last night she had never done before—well, more
specifically, of a thing that she had only ever been on the receiving
end of. Even within the prim corridors of her own mind she found it difficult
to employ the proper terminology.
It was truly unfair to blame the wine. Blame desire, blame love, blame the
taste of that body, more an intoxicant than any liquor, blame those hands
tangled in your hair and the tongue tracing the edge of your jaw, blame that blessedly husky voice: Do you want to? Blame
curiosity. Blame that yearning to dominate, to hold onto what was easily given
and somehow never quite yours—never quite yours, because she loved exploring as
much as she loved you.
I will do anything you want.
She took to the role with confident ease. Her body knew what her mind did not,
and if she wondered what it would really be like to be a man inside a woman,
she did know what it was like to be a woman inside another woman. She always
had. The language of her body was not one she had ever easily understood, and
as a result screeds lay within her, waiting for discovery, waiting to be read.
The sun pulses under thinning clouds, teasing at breakthrough. In the midst of
spending alone a glorious day, her most beautiful pages grow distracted, and
shiver.
2. Paris, 1944
“I will give anything for a goddamn book in English.”
The old man was the third merchant to whom Janice had made
this melodramatic declaration—indeed, she thought of it as rather French-like,
resplendent with a sweeping hand gesture. Whether or not he understood, she
could not discern: He shrugged apologetically and she moved on to the next
stall.
There she found a small volume of Robert Browning,
beautifully bound in green cloth, letters stamped in enticing gilt. She hated
Browning, but she was desperate. The ambulance unit was grounded for the day.
Liberated Paris was cold, occasionally dangerous, and—not surprisingly, for
someone who did not want to be there—boring.
Janice waved the book like a flag of surrender, a hopeless
declaration of her monolingualism. “Eh—combien?”
The bookseller, finally taking note of her customer, looked
up. “Whatever you can afford,” she
replied in the kind of rapid, accented English where the words seemed both slow
and fast at once—spoken quickly, yet reaching the ear in their own sweet time,
like the echo of a transatlantic call where the listener perfectly predicts
every stress and syllable. She was small and slender, wrapped tightly in what
once was a fashionable belted jacket that now possessed a threadbare glory, and
with the type of ripe mouth that demanded lipstick. Her eyes were dark and no
doubt held depths that Janice could not, would not imagine plumbing because
there was too much pain, too much loss accumulated in four years alone. She was
nothing like Mel and yet precisely for that reason, she could not help but remind
Janice so powerfully and completely of Mel and of that connection between them,
perhaps destroyed forever by arguments as fierce as their lovemaking had been.
Unexpectedly, the bookseller stiffened and Janice realized
that she had stared too long. The idle sport of comparison had mercilessly
returned her to square one of that inescapable intersection between the truth
of her loneliness and her desire.
And, in the wrong place and time, it was the kind of look that
could get one’s face slapped. Or worse. But not this time. The Frenchwoman nodded at the book. “I’d
take food for it.” With unmistakable intent, both her head and her voice
lowered. “Or whatever you’re willing to offer.”
Janice fumbled, caught between the boldness of acceptance
and the urge to drop the book on the wooden cart and plunge through the narrow,
book-lined street, which now taunted her as if it were an obstacle course. “I
don’t have anything with me.”
The bookseller lunged across the carrel and for a moment
Janice thought their hands would meet, but instead she tapped the cover of the
Browning book, as if sending a seduction in Morse code. “Come back later.”
It was not the first time she had slept in sheets rough and
musty, and with a woman whose name she did not know. Afterward, the food she
brought—two tins of meat, a package of crumbling biscuits—sat forlorn upon a
kitchen table and the twilight mounted within a window frame matched the
toneless color of the walls. Perhaps unwilling to spoil things with
conversation, or unsure of asking Janice to leave, the woman feigned sleep.
Janice sat up in the bed, lit a Gauloise, and watched
as an elegant distortion of smoke scrolled up the darkening wall. She thought
of Mel’s nearly indecipherable handwriting—a particularly angular loop of smoke
looked almost precisely like her capital G. I’m in love with someone, she wanted to tell this woman. It seemed bad
form, though, to say it aloud to someone you just fucked, particularly for the
sole purpose of erecting a boundary between what she had just done and the confines
of her heart. So she repeated it within the quiet of her mind, and wrote it,
indelibly and invisibly, upon the walls.
3. Venice, 1973
“Don’t you have to go?”
Go? Francesca thought. And leave the sheets that
gently lapped at her skin, the soft cradle of the pillow, the experienced hand
gliding along her back? Abandon all this, for seeing Lo straniero
senza nome—Clint
Eastwood on screen, lasciviously serenaded by an audience of stoned, giddy
whores?
So she does not move. “Do you want me to go?”
Mel does not answer. Rarely does she answer any direct question
put to her, leaving Francesca to methods of interrogation both rigorous and
rude, and steeped in dirty tricks: She demands answers while naked and
seemingly immersed in the task at hand—while teasing a breast with her mouth,
while pushing a hand between two willing thighs. The coin of knowledge, she has discovered, can
rival the lure of real money, at least under certain desperate circumstances.
Tell me where you grew up. Later, Francesca recalled
the strange thrill she had in a bookstore, finding a map of the United States
and seeing the jagged, prescription-pink state of South Carolina resting under
her finger.
Tell me about your mother and father. “I don’t
remember my mother very well—anymore. But I do remember she never liked to sit
still and she loved to sing along with the radio. My father was very tall and
very charming and very smart. I inherited the tall part from him. I’ve never
been quite convinced about the rest.”
The first person you kissed? “A boy named Jason. I
was 17, he was 18. He had invited me to his grandmother’s house for dinner.
Dessert was strawberry pie—fragole, cara. So when he kissed me
later, it tasted like that. Like strawberries. It led me to believe all sorts
of mistaken things about men.”
Tell me about the woman you won’t talk about. Melinda’s
eyes had closed at that. “You know I can’t.”
Tell me why I feel deeply for you. This one she never
asked. Feelings were an exaggeration, a fiction for those who had the luxury of
reading, a dangerous imperative that would be the first line in a story of
fantastic heartbreak.
The fingers stop their intricate gavotte upon her back. “I
have something for you.”
Francesca rolls over and already Mel, dark robe silkily billowing
with motion, is halfway across the room and retrieving something from the
hazardous stacks of papers and books that threaten a literary landslide from
the hotel desk.
It’s small, rectangular, flat, wrapped in brown paper. Definitely not a dildo. But a book?
One of those fantastic old bound volumes carrying the heady
scent of leather, the seductive undertow of dead languages? What in hell
would she do with something like that? Even more importantly, Francesca wonders
as she fondles the parcel, why does she want something like that? “Such exquisite wrapping!”
As only a retired professor can, Mel smiles indulgently. “Showing off your English again.”
“You do the same in Italian,” Francesca retorts and, for
good measure, throws in a contraction, something which she usually avoids
because she fears her tongue will not leap over that peculiar floating apostrophe:
“Don’t you?”
“Touché.”
She peels away the brown paper. It is a simple blank cahier,
with lined pages and a ribbed, elastic enclosure that promised to hold tightly
whatever words that may be entrusted to it. It’s the kind of black notebook she
sees in use among many skinny, bespectacled café habitués, the ones who drink
and smoke and talk too much. The ones who could not afford a
minute of her company. “An empty book.” To reflect my empty mind?
Mel seems amused at her visible and puzzled disappointment. “For you to write in.”
Her face tingles with the burn of self-consciousness. “And
why would I want to do that?”
“You’re always scribbling away on those pieces of paper you
keep in your pockets. So I thought you might benefit from a proper writing
journal.”
“Oh.” You notice me. This prompts elated anguish.
“But—if you don’t like it, or if you have no real use for
it—“ Mel makes a teasing reach for it.
“No.” She clutches the journal to her bare chest, as if it
were really going to be taken away. “I want it.”
Mel permits a smile to cross her features. Twice in one day,
Francesca thinks, even though this one is small, spectral—a ghost of a smile
for a ghost of a woman. “Good.”
Imagining herself in a kind of freefall, Francesca keeps the
black notebook against her as she tumbles back onto her stomach. The slick cover warms against her skin as she
presses her face deep into the pillow, smothering the dangerous feeling that
tightens her throat. The inscription upon her body begins anew, and she submits
to fingers upon flesh, bone against sinew, to a language that, in its state of partial
comprehension and consummate allure, is maddening.
4. Cambridge, 1947
This room, this house, this Indian summer,
this woman. More specifically,
this beautiful woman who had somehow alchemized the dreary task of organizing
their combined libraries (including the sizable one she had inherited from her
scholar father) into a kind of sacred erotic act. Whether human or book, spines
fit sublimely snug into Mel’s palm—that very morning, the heel of her hand had pressed
deep into Janice’s back, I can feel your bones, she had said in a voice
that marveled and with a touch unraveling into reverence, and then Janice had
realized that no one had ever touched her quite like this, as if truly wanting nothing
more than to get under her skin.
Now, in the study, Mel sifted through pages tissue-thin or
frayed and stiff, and with every touch and caress she recalled the provenance
attached to every book—Janice could read it plainly upon her relaxed face—the
gifts, the impulsive purchases, the ones borrowed and never returned, the ones
she loved when younger, the ones her father loved, the ones mocked and marked
in the margins by the ruthless academic tag team of Pappas pere
and fille.
“We don’t need three copies of Suetonius,
do we?”
Acutely aware of her uselessness in this endeavor, Janice
languished sweatily on the sofa. If her damp shirt were
not marrying itself to the leather material, it was at the very least in the
act of a fevered proposal. “I’m not sure
we even need one.”
“Indeed we do. A professor needs a proper library, Dr.
Covington.”
“But I plan on being a very improper professor. Given what
we did here last week—”
“We can’t ever do that again.”
Her forcefulness both surprised and disappointed Janice. “No?”
“Not on the desk, I mean,” Mel amended.
“Oh.” Relieved, Janice wondered how sturdy the dining room
table was.
“Because the whole time I kept thinking my father would be
spinning in his grave, knowing what I was doing on his desk.”
“I dunno. I think he’d be happy to
see you get good use out of it.”
Mel laughed. “You’re terrible.” She knelt before the open
foot locker where Janice’s books had been moldering for several years—and where
Janice would have been quite content to keep them—and pulled out a particularly
warped, water-damaged clothbound edition of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.
Her mouth curdled. “Good thing you didn’t fall in love with a librarian. This
would be grounds for separation.”
“Oh Christ, toss that,” Janice groaned. As it was placed in
the disappointingly small “to go” pile, her eyelids fluttered shut.
“I didn’t know you liked Browning.”
“I don’t.” It slipped out before Janice realized it. She opened
her eyes, sat up, and stared at the slender, green-gold book that Mel held.
Her mind had successfully buried the incident surrounding
her acquisition of the book, and had even gone so far as to spin out several
convincing, believable plot lines involving its perceived loss—left in a café
or on a bench near the Tuileries, given it to one of
the other drivers, tossed it into the Seine—but here it was again, in all its
unforeseeable stupidity, glaringly out of place and time. At odd intervals over
the years, she had wondered what happened to the woman, thought of her stiff,
trembling body, her awkward caresses, her unconvincing compliments: You’re
very handsome. Was she happy, and no longer lonely? Was she even
alive?
Mel raised an eyebrow. “A gift?”
I thought I would never see you again. “You could—say that.” If only because it made me realize how much I really love you, and how no one could make me feel the way you do.
As excuses, they were worthless. The truth was usually like
that.
“Well.” Mel touched the bridge of her glasses. “I like
Browning.” She gave the book a thoughtful glance before consigning it to the
poetry shelf. As if performing a magic trick, her hand passed elegantly across
murky cloth spines as she aligned the Browning against the other books. And then
she met Janice’s look with a smile simultaneously kind and serious, as
befitting someone intent on acceptance no matter the act or the consequences,
and generous in the difficult art of forgiveness.
It took no more than two bold, long steps for Janice to
reject the sofa, cross the room, and surrender to an embrace. The v-neck of
Mel’s blouse formed a luscious snare hinting at the mysterious intoxicant of
her scent, her skin. From this source Janice indulged in a deep draft and instantly
felt as if she’d downed a dozen blazing shots of bourbon—and while her legs
wavered, it was only because they were tangled with a pair much longer than her
own. Mel’s mouth, hot and insistent, found hers and with a delighted shiver she
opened her mouth wider, welcoming the exploration that followed. Frenzy
subverted intention by creating a panicked taskmaster—Mel was attempting to
unbutton her shirt while unbuckling her belt—while they staggered away from the
desk and toward the desk’s companion, an broad old leather chair which, Janice
hoped, did not share the desk’s verboten status, but probably did. Regardless,
they tumbled into it and she found herself neatly straddling Mel’s lap and
anticipating the hand that successfully breached both belt and trouser buttons.
The important things would come later. Only under the
complete cover of night did she feel safe enough to say things like I love
you, to savor the words in her mouth, to taste their reverberation as they
unfurled into darkness—to see and feel nothing beyond that, and to give nothing
but the purity of words and their intent to a woman who loved language.
5. South Carolina, 1933
The backyard spilled down the incline at such a precipitous angle
that it appeared the land was running away from the civilization implicit in the
large, domineering house— until it was finally truncated by a dirt road that
had seen a history of horses, carriages, wagons. Runaway slaves had also
traveled this same road, limned in moonlight and running northbound—or so she
had been solemnly told by the family maids, cooks, grooms, and stablemen. Now
it served largely as a shortcut to and from the high school.
From the vantage point of the back porch she watched the
occasional laggard walking home from the school, and she felt an absurd sense
of superiority: for she was already at home, had drunk an entire glass of sweet
iced tea, and was studying even though she was officially a week ahead of
everyone in history and geometry and math and everything else and light years
ahead of them all in Latin. Mel looked up from The Elements of Structural
Botany. No one was on the road now, except for one girl.
She had never paid much attention to the girl before. Her
name was Carol Ann and she was relatively new in town—her family was from Beaufort.
Practically an entire year had passed without them saying much to one another
beyond cordial hellos and drawling how-are-yous. And
now it was late spring, blossoms bedded on the ground, and that girl Mel had
barely spoken to all year long was now loping down the path from the school,
alone, with the sun etching gold into every darkened shade of her dirty blonde
hair and her bare arms swinging with a loose-limbed grace and slowing, for a
barely imperceptible moment, as she turned toward Mel and waved with neighborly
vigor.
For whenever I look at you even briefly
I can no longer say a single thing
In her father’s library, there were secret compartments of
books discerned to be too dangerous and too adult, still, for her youthful
tastes. She found them months ago, including the Loeb Lyra
Graeca and, contained between its green cover,
the slender treasure of Sappho’s verses.
In the turmoil of reading them, she was not exclusively undone
by the poet’s objects of affection, but by the rule of passion that governed
every word. She waited for passion. Every day, when she would witness Ruthlee desperately seize the arm of her boyfriend, or the
fiery, slavish intensity of girls gathered around Mr. Maines,
the English teacher, or Jason’s bright, adoring gaze aimed squarely at her, she
waited.
But within the sharpened shadows of a late spring afternoon,
on a dirt road where a beautiful girl walked alone, she waited no longer; the
knowledge she craved was finally hers. A delicate flame runs beneath my skin,
the ancient poet had written, and now she knew exactly how that felt. And yet she
could find no other words to describe the feeling, or to say, even to herself, what it made her. It would take years to build the
vocabulary of love and desire and to discard much of the shame she would feel
as a result, but now, for the first moment in her life, she burned.