A Broad at the ‘Sinema’

 

 
                                    Foreign, brusque whispers

                                    Plotting arousal disguise

                                    Shifting creamy thighs.

 

 

 

 

Poem “A Broad at the ‘Sinema’” © 2012 Chantale Rêve   All Rights Reserved

 

 

Graphic created by  Graham Coupe

© Graham Coupe

Link to image:  http://www.neoncity.co.uk

Conquest on Île de la Cité

 

 

Lapping like the Seine

At her bank, a gargoyle stokes

Fossilized lava.

 

 

 

© 2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

Naisa’s Nocturne

Sunrise signaled a time for rejuvenation, a chance to renew oneself or correct an injustice, but not for Naisa M. Gibbs.  Wailing as if she wanted the world to hear, she thrust her head forward into a downy pillow, her teardrops moistening it and staining the tousled satin sheets.  Seven hours earlier, her one-night stand had surrendered to her syncopated caresses.  Bewitching moonlight had found their frenzied movements, entwined limbs, delirious faces. After much illuminated kissing, licking, squirming, sucking, wriggling, wrestling and banging, they had shuddered so violently in unison against the backdrop of a Sade ballad’s saxophonic strains.  Their passion ignited with such force that the canopy eventually collapsed from its frame.

Now, Naisa’s pussy lay open like an oozing wound, her lover’s cum a crude, abstract painting on splayed thighs.  He had abandoned her moments before a murder of crows began cawing their majestic existence on the courtyard’s rusty gates.  Not one goodbye from him.  She missed him and knew that listening to a little Sade would distract her from emotional alienation, so she emerged from the bed to play the CD in her boombox.

She meant to select the song, “Is It a Crime?” but the British chanteuse was singing the first stanza of track six:  “Mr. Wrong.”  While Naisa executed a lethargic port de bras en route to the bed, the ballad’s bass line disguised an intruder’s footsteps in the front corridor.  She dragged herself around the lopsided bed collecting the soiled sheets, laughing at how lust had placed its frame in disrepair.  Drowsy, she was oblivious to the willowy figure cloaked in black that was skulking toward the shadowy bedroom.

Then she heard a low-pitch warning, almost a whisper:  “Turn around, you Créole bitch.”  Unlike countless chaînés tournes she had executed in years past, this time, when she swiveled her head, she became quite disoriented.  It was too late to run or hide.  One of her last sensations would be the metallic aura of a gun blast and salty, sanguineous wine trickling from her maraschino lips.

***

Cicadas emitted their shrill sounds on a typical August afternoon like festive maracas shaking from tree branches.   The cacophony was a signal that the hottest day of the summer had arrived and that the insects’ demise grew near.  Fending off the sun’s blazing assault with a bare arm, Naisa was a vampire trying to escape. It was 3 p.m.  Oh, how I love sleeping in, she thought.  But the solar searchlights peeking through her grime-caked blinds had found her.  Her black silk negligee lay rippled at the end of her rickety bed.  A couple of stretches until her puffy nipples tingled with renewed life, and she would be ready to face another mateless Saturday.

Pantherlike, she padded across the plush burgundy carpet to the full-length mirror.  Glancing back at her was a stranger who possessed frown lines and large, almond-shaped eyes accompanied by dark circles that required daily concealer.  Her onetime animated, pendulous breasts were aching to be ogled, fondled, cupped and sucked instead of squeezed on an annual basis between the icy cold vise of a mammography machine.

What she needed was an affirmation for the moment, so she opened her dusty armoire and programmed the CD component of her boombox to play Katy Perry’s “Fireworks.” She was about to close the armoire when she spotted George Benson’s greatest-hits CD. She reached back into the dark corner to retrieve the jewel case, but after opening it, she was stunned to find it empty. Hmpf, I really could go for “Turn Your Love Around,” she said inwardly. But when Katy’s peppy voice distracted her, she didn’t give Benson another thought.

Using a bottle of bath gel as a microphone, she sang along with the music and sashayed to the bathtub to scrub away random lust’s residue.  A sticky reminder of a sensuous dream. Several hours later, she was wearing concealer that restored her face to Beyoncé’s bronze brilliance and a bra that created the illusion her tits could defy gravity. After shaking her ass in mirrored profile, she dropped it hotter than she had done on the dance floor in her thirties. Although her hamstrings were a bit sore, she was a fierce forty-one-years-young and ready to test the meat market.

Naisa may have been one lacefront shade blonder than Beyoncé, but she wasn’t “crazy in love.” Just horny. Meat that she fantasized about was sausages. Links of various girths and links hung in the Dockers and denims of men cruising up and down Van Def Avenue, the main shopping strip, and in the Speedos of ubiquitous cyclists.  However, Wilcom Mall was the address of the hottest action.  Along the railing that circled above the mall’s escalators, vultures in men’s clothing lurked just for a glimpse of cleavage.  Of course, Naisa purposely wore a blouse with an eye-popping décolletage.

On this steamy afternoon Naisa’s choice for browsing was Champ’s Music & Electronics Palace on the top floor of the Wilcom Mall.  Instead of taking the elevator, she rode the escalator with her legs spread as if she were a drug mule getting frisked by a narc.  Beneath a black velveteen micromini skirt, her ample bottom was in full view to a stocky man standing so closely behind her that he could have been her Siamese fraternal twin.

“Hey, baybeh.  Are you for real?” the predator asked.

“Yeah,” Naisa replied without turning around.  Then, borrowing young people’s vernacular, she asked, “Do ya feel meh?”

The stranger fondled her soccerball-sized glutes with one hand while keeping the other hand on his expanding erection.  His crotch was about to pop like a pan of Jiffy popcorn left on the burner too long.  She imagined her fellow perv’s mind swirling with lewd images of his masochistic prey.  What genius, she thought of the mall architect, designing such a steep escalator for down and dirty deeds.  “As if,” she said quietly, or so she thought.

“Nuh-unh, brown sugah,” the man said.  “You don’t need no ass lift, hot thang.”

“Look, just keep on jugglin’ my buns like a short-order clown,” she barbed.  Naisa still refused to sneak a peek behind her.

“Oh, girl, I could play witcho pretty brown roundness allllll day,” he teased.  “Just say the word, and I’ll be spinnin’ yo’ ass like a atlas tonight.  Where yo’ globe stop, we could pretend I’m butt-fuckin’ you in dat cuntry.  Whatchu say ’bout dat, girl?” he asked.

“I say shut your grill, boy, and make mama shake it up inside,” she replied.  “Our date’s over when you or I get off … this escalator.”

“Sho nuff, baybeh,” he agreed, caressing somewhere between Ghana and Brazil.

Indeed, the ride to the complex’s upper levels  allowed enough time for the adventurous to consummate quick encounters.  Though, there were no awe-inspiring vistas such as the ones her ex-boss pointed out as they rode the cable car up the Schilthorn to Piz Gloria restaurant.  That was several hours before he rammed her inside a chalet that practically kissed the sky — while her skis were still attached.

As if the Muzak programmer was conspiring with her Cajun charmer, Naisa heard George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” slowly spiraling through the speakers like whipped cream swirling in a mug of Alpine hot cocoa.  Unlike the original, which cranked up the heat from the start, the rhythms dragged so much that it was as if the musicians were on barbituates.  Hmmm, I miss Georgy boy’s edginess, she pondered, but I can work with this.

And the stranger behind her watched her work it.  His hands wandered and fondled as though they belonged to someone else. Weak at the knees and her mind a blur, Naisa was surrendering to each felonious butt squeeze from behind.  Like the vixen she pretended not to be when working beneath tax attorneys at Letch, Rasquale & Fallis, P.C., there on the mall’s ascending escalator she gyrated to the song’s sinuous keyboard melody and roofied-stripper beat.  She could feel her pretend man’s clumsy fingers pulling at the elastic on either side of the crotch on her high-cut briefs and his steamy labored breaths flushing her flexing cheeks. Each time he snapped the rubber against her tender skin, droplets of her secretions popped out on skin and bone. Once he slid his hand away, she heard him slurp and suck on what she only could imagine were his fingers and knuckles. Mmmm … He sounded like a ravenous diner finishing off a barbecued pig’s foot and had the moves to whet a wanton woman’s appetite. She was immersed in naughty bestial thoughts when a warm breeze fluttered across the tops of her thighs and her skirt bounced on his hands caressing around hips, tummy and ass. Gasping, she felt and heard his middle digit slipping into her sopping pussy. Awww, fuck you, too, she thought.

Absorbed in pleasure like her cotton crotch was in her sex juice, she was unaware that her private parts were now on full display to other people on the escalator.  She found it strange that not one person expressed shock or disgust.  Quite to the contrary.  Both men and women were doing their versatile versions of lyrics to The Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.”

Naisa’s transient lover removed his diddling finger and tasted her essence.  “Aaahhh … aaahhh,” was all she heard.

She tugged on her stiff, prickly nipples and lifted her left leg on the next higher step to give her anonymous lover an easier angle from which to grope her cunt.  Realizing that his investigation was far from over, she glanced over her left shoulder to size up her private dick.  The man, too.

Mystery lover gave his turgid member a few rough yanks like it was one of those bayou gators that he and his buddies wrestled.  Then he inserted his saliva-slick thumb into her asshole.  “Owww,” she said, but her utterance sounded like a meow, which made him swivel deeper.  She shot back an annoyed look, but he didn’t care that she was wincing in pain. Her head was spinning like a barber’s pole.  She didn’t get as dizzy while pole dancing at De Baise, a gentlemen’s club where she moonlighted during the law office’s slow season.

If the Muzak had not been playing so loudly in the mall, others in the vicinity of the lascivious pair may have heard their whimpers and moans.  Luckily for Naisa, their encounter ended when her temporary lover hopped off, limping, at the fourth-floor food court.  His last words were “Damn if I could guzzle a keg of beer and wolf down some dutty rice.”

Her last thought, concerning him, was that she wanted to covet the washboard from his zydeco band and scrub her drawers with it.

Naisa was so lightheaded that she rethought shopping at Champ’s, but in minutes she was stepping through the revolving door and into the thumping drum and bass sounds of a rap instrumental.  Never was she more at home.  Browsing a bargain bin in the contemporary-jazz section, she felt someone’s eyes burning a hole in her light-blue blouse and turned in profile.

“Naisa Marie?  Naisa Marie Gibbs?!” Stu, the store’s manager, shouted.  He squeezed out of an aisle, eliciting a “thank you, Jesus” from a bespectacled, middle-aged woman whom he had cornered over by the gospel CDs. As the woman, whose voluptuousness approximated Jenifer Lewis’, resumed rediscovering her religion, her predator kept on testing his lung-power for Naisa’s benefit: ”Wooooo-wee!”  Come on over heah, jeune fille!”

Listen to him, soundin’ like Buckwheat Zydeco done possessed Joe Tex in the middle of ”I Gotcha.”  At first she wouldn’t budge from the bin, so Stu waddled her way.

Gaaaadamn! she cursed to herself.   Watching his beer belly bounce a yard ahead of him, she extended her thong-sandaled foot, hoping he would stop short.  He didn’t.

“Mmmmm, it sho muss be chilly in heah,” he said with eyes sharp like lasers warming her nipples before they could poke twin holes in her flimsy blouse.  He was like a debauched giant, pressing his tummy toward her chin’s cleft as if his outie were trying to fuck it.

It figures, she continued musing.  The one night that I don’t hand wash my one good bra, this asshole wants to play Superman.  Mutha –

“Fuckin’ funny how time flies, ain’t it, Stu?  Seems we were just having cocktails, like, yesterday,” she said, feigning interest.

“Mo’ like two monfs ago,” he replied with a grin that left his unkempt goatee jutting out like a hairy erection.

His pervy smile also left a salacious impression on her, especially when he completed his greeting with a peck on her cheek and a poke of her ass.  Possessing firsthand knowledge of her sexual proclivities, he sniffed around her and suggested she freshen up in the employee lavatory.  Offering to stand guard at its entrance had its benefits, such as peeking in on Naisa washing her bush.

When she returned to the sales floor and, again, to a mouthful of yellowing teeth, the blues song “After Midnight” was echoing throughout the eclectic store.  He was about to push up on her when she made like The Supremes in “Stop! In the Name of Love” and said, “You know, Stu, I think I’m going to cut this visit short and check out some live blues.  How about you come with me, hunh?”

“Sorry, ma babymama’s comin’ over tonight.  Besides,” he said, “I’m already pertty close to losin’ child suppote as ilz.”  To that she raised her hands in surrender, happy that her bluff worked, and bid Stu good night.

***

Dusk settled into the bricks and mortar of the low-level buildings at the center of town.  Wearing a barely there micromini skirt on a breezy evening made hailing a gypsy cab to the other side of town an easy task.  The distance to Goode’s Bar would have cost anyone else about twelve dollars, but Naisa’s ride was free.

When she winked at the driver of a slowly passing sedan, the man, who was of Middle Eastern descent, did a double take and then jammed the brakes as if trying to avoid skidding on roadkill. She batted her weary eyes and gave him the address of her destination.

“Hop in, miss,” he said, eyeing her hiney in his rearview mirror as she squeezed into the car.

“Thanks, honeh,” she flirted.

“No, baby.  Thank you,” he said.

His car was fragrant with jasmine incense, the backseat musty from an assortment of semen stains.  Cruising through Skeet City, he had found his mark.  Both she and he knew the name of this game.  After parking on the first desolate block available, he cranked up the volume on his Arabic-language music station, peered briefly into the mirror above his dashboard and found her smiling back at him.  Minutes later, he joined his passenger behind a jammed bulletproof window.

Dissonant, trancelike music from surrounding speakers induced a high. The driver’s breath and clothes reeked of pot, but Naisa didn’t care. His light khakis were bulging at the crotch; her lips were swelling in anticipation. Having unhooked her bra, and another man, she peeled off her pastel-blue blouse. Like her prey, she was panting from lust as much from the taxi’s interior heat.

When her sheik mounted her, his perspiration dripped onto her face.  For a moment, she fantasized that they were about to fuck atop a camel in the middle of the Sahara Desert.  He gazed lewdly at her heaving breasts before deciding to paw at them.  Her cupping his lumpy nutsack made him gasp, so he returned the favor by licking and sucking her thick nipples.  She came in a spurt, her cries mixing with the Arabic singer’s vocals and her natural lube leaking onto the taxi’s worn vinyl upholstery.

Had two drunken men not stumbled near the sedan, looking for a spot to relieve themselves, Naisa would have allowed her driver to penetrate her, but she didn’t want to find herself servicing three cocks until daylight.  So after the man finished fingering her cunt, she pulled her nipple from his lips and told him that she would pass on Goode’s Bar, known for its heady blues, but she asked him to take her a few blocks away to a joint about which Stu and other transient lovers had raved.

Inside Star Café, Curtis St. John, a corporate shirt who moonlighted on Friday and Saturday nights, was in the midst of singing two sets of jazz and R&B covers.  “Curt,” as he was known by the predominantly female members of the audience, crooned and gyrated through George Benson’s rendition of “Lady Blue.”  Little did he know that he was hypnotizing only one woman: Naisa.

By the time Curt belted out the song’s crescendo, he already had been baptized in his own perspiration.  Meanwhile, Naisa was experiencing an out-of-body experience.  Although, like the ice floating in her fuzzy navel, she was both solid and liquid.  Passion danced between Curt’s notes and her flushed ears, from his gently swaying hips to her rigorous grinding ass.

“Blu-u-u-u-e!”  his melismatic voice sang.

“Bravoooo!” Naisa yelled over the other adoring females’ voices. She winked at him. He blew a kiss. Mmmm, you’re all mine now, said her sparkling eyes.

Upon Curt’s bow in the soft blue spotlight, Naisa slid off her slippery bar stool. She left behind a clear but slimy reminder of her existence on the worn leather seat.  When he saw Naisa slink her way toward the exit, Curt jumped off the stage but he didn’t get far. He slipped on his own sweat in an area where, during his rendition of Usher’s “Climax,” he had leaned the mic toward a buxom Queen Latifah look-alike and grabbed her long-stemmed red rose before she could yank him down from the stage.

“Lady!” he called out after Naisa. “Wait! Don’t you want my autograph?”

“Yeah, huh-huh. Dat yella gal wantcho autograph all right,” quipped Delton Malveau, Star Café’s manager. “You ready to dip yo’ quill in that ink, son?” he asked with the inflection of a warning rather than a dare.

“Nah, that’s just those Créole ladies’ way of flirtin’ with fine, pure-Sub-Saharan African brothas like me,” Curt replied, laughing his way toward the café’s St-Jacques Street exit.

Bloated from his mistress Angélique’s cooking but quick on his feet, Delton injected Astrud Gilberto’s “Stay” into the sound system.  Eardrum-perforating, percolating percussion followed Curt outside and into an adjacent alley, where he found his randy fan clutching a wire fence behind her.

Although she had just flirted with him, Naisa suddenly feared Curt’s sexual heat.  Boxed in an erotic playground of her spontaneous invention, she glanced left and right for an escape route. Nowhere to hide either. There wasn’t a monkey bar in sight; only the metal between Curt’s thighs. Her mind was seesawing between lust and flight.  If only she had listened to her Rollerblading girlfriend’s enticements to join her gym, she would have scaled the fence and hailed a cab home.

Now she was face to face with her object of desire. As she stepped closer, she swore she could smell his testosterone from the beads of perspiration pooling above his coarse chest fuzz. He tiptoed toward her like a ballet dancer, then pounced on her like a cat. At his wordless urging, her arms were outstretched above her head. When his tongue found the pulsing in her neck, her heart started beating faster than the rhythms behind Astrud. He pressed his hardness against her tummy, and the arching of her back accidentally fed him her tits.

“Ooohhh, baybeh,” he said, breaking off into moans as he sucked a puffy nipple through the thin blue fabric. By the time he had coaxed her other dark nipple out of the blouse and clamped on, he was fighting the impulse to unzip and fuck. Instead, he licked her salty perspiration from her stretchmarked cleavage up to her lips. As she smiled in her beguiling way, his tongue explored laugh lines that were long out of practice.

Hearing moans on the rise, he probed her hot mouth with his tongue until he was checking her gag reflex. He stopped his examination only to remark, “Nice to know how deep I can go. Uh, mama, may I?”

“Unh-hunh, you sweet brown thang. You betta let meh have a taste of yo’ dark-chocolate lollipop. And not just one.” she invited.

“I only got one a-dem, uh, lollipops, so … ” He watched her smile light up the semidark alley like an early sunrise.

“Not just one taste, silly,” she said, laughing. “But, hey, I wish you had two dick — not for my mouth, though. Kinda would fulfill my space alien fantasy. You know, like that Blade Runner shit.”

He could’ve done without the Harrison Ford image while sporting a raging hard-on, but “Not just one taste” — that’s all he needed to hear. Her honeyed voice resonated in his crotch, vibrating from his bulging balls through his throbbing shaft. He could smell her wetness and tried to imagine teasing her dripping orifice with only the tip of his knob.

Just then, he heard “Curt, Curt. Earth to Curt,” and leaned in to embrace Naisa tenderly. Feeling her nubbins respond, he grasped her waist firmly. He desired for his cock to express the gratitude he felt toward her.  No woman had ever reacted so strongly to any of his performances at the cafe. “I’ve never seen such a physical and emotional response to my — ” Naisa’s kiss pre-empted what Curt had wanted to add.

“ ‘Lady Blue’ is one of my favorite songs, and you sound better than Benson.  I want you now! Give it to meh!” she shrieked. And he wanted to, especially when Astrud’s voice conspired with the mojo in Naisa’s hips and put it on him.  As if through a Brazilian ocean mist, Astrud sang: Stayyyy. And we’ll make sex with music.

“Now? But, but I have to return to finish the set, or else Delton will fire me,” he lied.  “Guys like me come a dime a dozen, and I need the extra money because the ad agency isn’t paying me diddley.”

“I’m glad to know guys like you come at all,” she said, her lips curling out of a smile and into a sexy snarl. Entranced by the bossa nova, she was melting in the singer’s embrace.

There in the decrepit brick and concrete alley, Naisa stripped down to her birthday suit as if she were hitting the beach in Ipanema.  She felt her gooseflesh rise the way it had in the bathroom at Champ’s in the mall.  Curt was speechless.  Her hands warily moved up and down and across the silken fabric of his shirt, and she felt tiny shocks in her abdomen whenever her fingers made contact with his muscles.  He already had undone the top three buttons onstage at the manager’s suggestion, anything to draw a larger female audience to the café.  Now he was following a fan’s lead and ripping away a shirt that had taken three paychecks to afford, sending the buttons flying through the air and then tinkling like piano keys against the concrete.

When her glossy lips made contact with his fleshy nipple, Naisa remembered what her high priestess auntie on her mama’s side taught her at the age of eighteen. With her expert tongue, she traced his perspiration from his heaving fuzzy chest up to his chin, then his pouty lips, before heading south. When she began licking the hairline from his navel to his groin, he was moaning the way he had done during “Lady Blue.”  She eagerly undid his zipper.  Using only her thick tongue to guide his stiff cock through his fly, she teased the head and shaft, causing him to gyrate his hips. “Mmmm … Meh-likes,” she uttered, then flicked her tongue across the tearing eye.

It took all the strength he had to stop his dick from erupting into her mouth. He was regretting his latest antidote for low libido: steer testicles braised in beef bouillon and hot sauce. “Look at whatchu doin’ to me, girl. Got me standin’ here like a one-man brass band, with all this ‘bone. Blow me, baybeh. Blowww … “

Lifting her to her feet, he propped her gingerly against the brick wall.  Upon insertion, she yelped like a feline in heat.  He slid into her slowly and thrust deeply, alternately flicking his tongue between her lips and using it to simulate penetration.

Amid their moaning and groaning, they didn’t notice that one of the women from the audience was spying on their act.  When the woman was summoned inside by a friend, she accidentally let the screen door slam.  Naisa and Curt gathered their clothing and, at her suggestion, continued their liaison at her apartment.

***

How Naisa had despised the sunlight, but now it felt welcoming, its warmth brief as its brilliance began to fade to black behind her eyelids. Sunrays bounced off the small pool of blood expanding around her lifeless body.  Crimson coordinated with burgundy on the plush carpet like a Rorschach inkblot framing a still life of the human kind. Unbeknownst to Naisa, a larger pool of blood had coagulated around Curt’s body in her kitchen.  Over his face lay a pillow with a single bullet. He died without ever learning his accomplice’s name.

Back in the bedroom, the murderer seemed indifferent to neighbors’ loud knocking and muffled voices.  They were attempting to check whether Naisa was in any danger.  The intruder was in no hurry to escape and could only think:  It would take at least a half-hour for the police to arrive in this part of town.  After ambling over to the front door, the warm black gun emptied of bullets, she disguised her voice as Naisa’s to assuage their fears.

Deidre St. John headed back to the first crime scene, in the kitchen.  Weeping, she dropped the gun on the black-and-white laminate floor.  As the sounds of police sirens grew louder several stories down, she hummed softly a few bars of the song that her husband, Curt, had dedicated to her at their wedding reception only three years earlier.  Stroking his bloody forehead with clammy fingers until the ends of her long, black microweave braids were like red tips of paintbrushes, she recalled how, in front of three hundred fifty guests, her new husband had crooned “Lady Blue” solely for her.  Solely for her.

© 2005/2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

Source for bottom photo:  http://classroomclipart.com

L’Étoile

 

A mid-February day’s remaining sunlight shimmers through rain that pelts rows of naked, brown shells of horse-chestnut trees, bending them into submission down the wide promenade.   Tuesday has arrived, and she is getting cold feet.   Only the thought of reuniting with her lover for a stellar rendezvous consoles, fills, Josie with warmth like tempered chocolate in a flaky croissant pocket or like melted Gruyère stretching from her puffy lips to les croûtons bobbing up and down in brandied beef broth inside a cobalt blue ramekin de la soupe à l’oignon gratinée.

With each splash of her oversize galoshes, the gargantuan stone arch seems to march another mile from her grasp. Silver sequins of rain shimmy from the city’s erotic currents, and the welcome dampness is soaking down to her teak-brown skin. Glistening with earthy aromas like her long-distance lover’s opalescent spray, she feels rejuvenated, as if impasto textures have been applied to her previously bland canvas.

Three-fifteen. Josie’s heart is pulsating so erratically that each puddle she stamps is quaking with the threat of tsunami. Raindrops strike her triple-pierced earlobes like fingertips on piano keys in the intro to Aretha Franklin’s “Daydreaming” looped into infinity. Split-screen images of him wash over her two-track mind as she ponders his Houdiniesque disappearance and aches for his Rodin-inspired kiss.

In an hour she will count down the minutes to the moment that her passion will surge.  Like a New York Marathon champion from Kenya once again chasing the gold medal, she will feel the velocity in her pulse as she races to the finish line, too impassioned to sense the chill in the air.  Breathless, with only him on her mind, knowing that without him she cannot survive another day, she will extend her arms in victory — a winner at love — marking a new beginning for their fissured valentine.  Love might conquer time, after all.  Or, sprinting toward loverman’s extended arms, she might dash past reason only to get injured again.

One more hour of these arrhythmias and I’ll need a pacemaker or a coffin, she contemplates through the torrent as she walks down l’Avenue des Champs-Êlysées.

Sixty minutes and it will be l’heure de pointe.   Rush-hour.   Her head will be spinning faster than the impatient Citroëns and taxis whirling around the road-carved star. L’Étoile.   There, above the rumbling of a métro, a love as monumental as l’Arc de Triomphe will await.

“Meet me at l’Étoile” was his urgent command earlier that day.  And, “Je veux t’embrasser.“  Her lips puckered.  Josie hardly could wait to kiss him right back. Cupping her free ear, she tried in vain to block out the din that reverberated throughout an Internet café teetering on the corner of a crumbling street no wider than a ruler in the Marais.  Damn, she pondered, why didn’t I go with my first choice, around the corner: Frères Camembert Salon de Thé?  I would’ve had my choice of two hundred fifty kinds of tea.

No matter how she tried to fake composure, her jangling nerves betrayed her. Adding to her instability were curvaceous Gallic voices undulating around her like a microscopic harem stoking little fires in hidden, swelling places. Eyes twitching and fingers bouncing like jumping jacks off the sturdy wooden table, she worried that she had lost too much weight, that her boyfriend would not have enough to hold onto. A New Age dimension of insecurity had crept into her self-image, but her and Bene’s frequent webcams were only partly to blame. She needed to make a sensual impression on the primitive part of his brain, the same area involved in the unconscious process of reproductive selection, even though his children could never have her eyes.

Bene was a Frenchman, but he was of Senegalese extraction, and he loved what Josie termed “fatback chat,” such as: “My man takes me to all-you-can-eat buffets because he wants me to keep that junk in my trunk. And I like how he be packin’ in the front, especially when he pushes up on me mornin’ and night.” Whenever she would ask him whether he was attracted to tall, slender Wolof women from his original country of origin, he would quip, “But you are not Senegalese.”

When she would beseech him with, “Where am I from?” he would deepen his tenor to a baritone and answer: “Venus.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When Bene first began courting Josie, while he was staying in Downtown Manhattan, she appreciated his attentive behavior but undervalued the authenticity of his actions. Her other mistakes were that she slung around her independence like a shield and clashed with him over cultural issues. Accustomed to setups, a/k/a blind dates, and hookups, she sometimes would wonder, Is this man for real?

What she knew with certainty was that he made her blush every time he spoke French to her. Putting a gender-bending spin on the lead characters of “The Addams Family,” she was Gómez to his Morticia. That retro-television allusion was totally lost on Bene. Exasperated by his indifference to something she considered hilarious and subversively sensual, she burned several DVDs of “The Addams Family” reruns from cable television.

On the same Saturday that he had viewed the programs, he e-mailed her late that night (her early Sunday morning) and attached a photo that sent her into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.  The image showed him wearing a long, tan skirt over his head and black shades over the fabric. “‘Cousin It’ freaked me out, Josie,” he wrote her.   As funny as his comment was, she could not shake the question:  To whom did that tan skirt belong?

They had met in the States, in the art section of the Borders bookstore at World Trade Center, in the fall of 1998. Their physical attraction was mutual.  Instantaneous. At the time, they were in their late twenties. While she was eking out a living as a high-school teacher in inner-city Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, he was attending art school to learn formal oil painting techniques and working part time as a waiter in the Theater District.

Bene was rooming with a fellow painter and countryman named Jacques in Battery Park City in the latter’s permanent U.S. condo. Jacques had been born into wealth.   Old Parisian money.   Through Jacques’ tight circle of friends and some of their business colleagues, Bene started to garner significant attention on the Parisian art scene and — after studying at the Sorbonne — the London, Barcelona, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Tokyo art scenes.

After their first, unofficial date at Borders’ Café Expresso, where they had continued their discussion of Picasso’s West African influences, there were many planned dates. Like any two people on severely limited time, who try to learn about each other’s worlds, inspirations and dreams, Josie and Bene crammed their personal information into one another.

It naturally followed that, by the time she was visiting him in Paris’ La Goutte d’Or in the eighteenth arrondissement during the summer of 1999, Bene was cramming something more elementally personal into her. After much discussion about leaving biological footprints, they did not wait until she was ovulating to try to start a family. No time of the month was spared. Anytime, anyplace, as Janet Jackson sang during her mewling Marilyn phase.

Josie was always ready to receive Bene’s delectable, dark dong, but she was uncertain about their gametes’ chemical compatibility. Prior to the exact moment of penetration, she visualized an army of his rapacious spermatozoa splashing through her lagoon and ramming their way to her barrier reef. Isolating her feisty egg, the salacious soldiers battled each other for immortality, their heads bulging with Bene’s DNA.

If they were doing it in the missionary position, when he busted an aquanut she would watch his eyes crossing like the frantic arms of a swimmer in peril within reach of a phalanx of lifeguards. Sexing each other face to face or doggy-style, she abandoned seductive whimpers for dissonant wails and braced for his subterranean blast of spunk.

Spiritually, it made sense to Josie to create a family with a Black African because in her family (both matrilineal and patrilineal), no genealogical documentation prior to the twentieth century existed. Bene was sympathetic toward his girlfriend’s massive identity crisis, and he agreed with her that genetics testing did not fully solve the puzzle of one’s ancestral identities. Without the full cooperation and honesty of living family members, swabbing one’s cheek only would interpret the science of one’s anthropological identity.

The next summer, they set out nearly every day from his ‘hood near the African marketplace to ride each other bareback in some of central Paris’ most unusual locations: on a narrow wooden bench on the third level of the Eiffel Tower at sunset; inside the fountain at the Jardin de Tuileries in the midst of elderly pigeon-feeders at dawn; and on the Seine’s lower quais at sunrise and sunset. The month of August saw them joining the city’s denizens for a mass exodus to points north and south, where they sucked and fucked away on the TGV.

France offered her fecund earth, luxuriant seas and faience-blue sky to two young, Black free spirits. Roaming le terroir et la mer like lovers’ hands and lips exploring one another’s flesh for the first time, Bene and Josie discovered and experimented with unmarked boundaries during baccanalian days and nights that their feverish minds promised to be eternal.  Off beaten paths, they abandoned their sturdy bicycles to enjoy a handjob and fingering by a mountain stream. They indulged in raw oysters and boning in Brittany; wet humping in view of verdant water lilies in Monet’s Giverny gardens; blending their perfumes in lavender fields in Provence; puckering up outside the princely palace in Monaco; rocking Jacques’ yacht beneath winking stars in Marseilles; and climaxing under a rainbow on Cannes sands.

Before Josie flew home for a new school season, Bene gave a pop quiz in French poetry.   She earned an “F.”   He laid her down on his balcony and thumbed her clit through dips and runs in Joni’s “Help Me.”   Mercilessly. After showering, they moved their slick, hot brown bodies to the cinnamon-toned salon. There, they briefly untangled tongues so that he could bring out family photo albums and, moments later, a gilt-edged Limoges tray of fruit.

Walking toward Josie to synth swells of a Maxwell classic — “Mellosmoothe”– throbbing from his wall-mounted sound system, Bene lifted the elegant, heirloom tray as if trying not to distract her piercing stare from the family jewels that were swinging beneath his stiff ebony staff. He stopped ten inches in front of her, leaving just enough space for her heaving, bare bosom. Spreading his long, muscular legs, he took his time sizing up her curvy, compact physique. Under his ancient spell, she could not budge a millimeter.

“Hmmm, didn’t I ‘av you wrapped around my finger sur le balcon moments ago, woman?” he grilled her. He enunciated woman in the primal way that he liked to imagine the word was intended, exhaling hard enough on the first syllable to crack a rib.

“Correction,” she quipped with a beguiling smile that would have made Eve hiss. “You twiddled several fingers inside of me a half-hour ago.”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est, er, dees tweedel?” he inquired, feigning annoyance. “Unh, Josie? Je sais mes doigts pénétraient cette chatte. But let’s not parse ‘airs, bébé.”

“Don’t kid me, Bene. You were right up on my landing strip. Not too many pubes down yonder,” she volleyed, barely able to stop herself from snickering.

“Quoi?” he asked, groping his bullish balls. His entire body shook when he laughed. Holding the tray was a lost cause; he preferred to hold her. Floating on Maxwell’s vibe, he crooned close to her ear, “I wanna rock weef youuuuu.”

“Heyyy, don’t crush me,” she said, pretending to thwart his advances. “Stop!”

“I can’t stop. Won’t stop. I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie,” he teased.

“Please don’t mix Sinatra with Maxwell,” she playfully cautioned. The neosoul singer’s falsetto voice enveloped her the way in which she wanted to embrace her lover’s behind while she sucked the length and girth of “Big Bene.”

“Kiss me, girl,” he commanded, bending toward her neck until his coarse locks brushed her shifting shoulder blades.

“Don’t pressure me, Frenchie,” she taunted, waving away his oncoming kisses in jest and pressing her full C cup tits against his flexing pecs.

The afternoon’s last burst of light poured into the room, forcing her to squint up at his handsome face. She yearned to dissolve into his eyes while melting like fondue in his embrace — but then he might settle for une bonne baise, she reasoned. As Maxwell crooned to fade, she allowed her eyes to adjust to the intrusive light until it felt warm and inviting. Clinging to his forearms, she batted his reflection into her liquid brown eyes. Then, after taking a few jaunty steps backward, she caressed her soft, glowing skin from bouncing breasts to flared hips.

Big Bene sprang farther north, and his owner nearly tripped on a scatter rug as he grasped for Josie’s supple womanliness. She smiled and stepped just out of reach. He stopped short of calling her a cockteaser, choosing to howl at her vampiness instead. She hooked onto the current groove and sang along with her man as Marvin Gaye’s layered, harmonic vocals led the way on the mix CD’s track-in-progress:  ”Come here, sexy baby. Let’s get to this. Ooh!”

Beaming a suggestive glance at her partner’s taut, dark loins, she licked her lips the way that she desired to slather his scrotum. She was experiencing déjà vu, something divine, but a more erotic paramnesia than Dionne Warwick’s before her “Psychic Friends” phase. Bene returned a sly smile, connecting with her on the same memory:

Aboard the shiny bullet train destined for la Côte d’Azur, in first class thanks to Bene’s frère Jacques, they shared a salty snack of anchovies in garlic-infused olive oil, with all the pain one could eat. Then she pivoted toward him and said, “Baby, I’m thirsty.” He promised he would order her a bottled water, “but first,” he said, “you got to free dees ‘ard cock and sweaty balls.”

Before he could utter another word, she replied that she would do anything for him. “N’importe quoi, bébé,” she snarled sensually. And just like that, she dropped to her bare knees between his legs, swaying in harmony with the locomotive’s rhythms and prying open the zipper against the expanding bulge in his white cargo capris. Turned on by her lover’s hellasexy groans for relief, she tasted the copious saliva beginning to spill out of her furnace of a mouth.

“Unh-hunh, girl. Do me, yeh,” he urged, nearly fully rousing an antediluvian, rotund Gaul seated behind them from his slumber.

Josie figured the fat fucker was pretending to sleep, but wanted to find out his M.O.  She unroped her hair from her lover’s fingers and, against his feeble protestations, slinked up to her seat like a P.I. doing an impression of a Pussycat Doll.

“Où vas-tu, J — ?” Bene received a dose of shut-it.

“Shhh,” she told him, French-tipped forefinger to burgundy matte lips. “You’ll see.”

Despite the adventurousness of her promise, he rolled and then shut his eyes.  “You owe me big time, Josie. When we reach ‘Le Yaca,’ I will not let you leave la chambre for forty-eight hours.”

“Hmm, I’ve heard of sex tourism, but sex terrorism?  In St-Tropez?” she joked. “I shudder to think what you have planned for our stay in Èze, with all those cliffs and narrow, winding medieval paths.”

“Take it easy, ‘oney.  Or should I say ‘E-z-e.’”  It was his turn to tease.

“One more corny joke and zero fellatio for you, monsieur,” she said, raising a dark, feathered brow. She crawled closer to him. A few inches further and she was peering between his dreads at her suspect.  Sleeping Beast.

Without staccato strings to warn her, one blink brought her mascaraed eye to fluttering eye with the imposter.  Upon further investigation, she discovered another eye was open — the one drooling on a flushed cockhead bursting from ruddy, calloused fingers. Turning from sleuth to slut in a Provençal minute, she batted her Mod-thick, navy-blue eyelashes at him.

With a smile as dirty as his broken fingernails, he greeted, “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” sounding like a wounded, old Pamplona bull staggering past the victorious toreador toward the blurry exit gate. He had digital speed, though, jacking off his gnarled, veiny shaft. Then his lusty vocalisms began: “Ohhh … Ohhh … “

Cutting her eyes away from a pair baggier than Jean Reno’s, she ogled his onanistic action with such intensity that her dark blue lashes started twitching like tiny, restless tarantulas. Repulsed and aroused, she ached to sting him.

“Ohhh, ma chère!” the man exclaimed as the train’s robust whistle warned a hot-rodder not to attempt outrunning the gate.  Or, put another way, to tempt fate.  ”Grrrrr,” he groaned in the direction of Josie’s stare. And softer still, “Mmmmmm … “

Sunlight found the sex detective squinting, but she refocused her eyesight to take in orderly rows of lavender plants praise-dancing in a gentle summer wind.  Lavender fields of Provence meant the TGV’s terminus, in St-Raphaël, was near.  The natural floral fragrance wafted into their stylish rail car, penetrated her pores and compelled her to disrobe between richly upholstered seats.

Her lethargic suspect appeared oblivious to the dazzling landscapes whizzing backward, flapping his spent dick against his hairy potbelly to the train’s rhythm.  Afraid that she might give Bene a mixed message, Josie tried to compensate for lost time and leaned down for a hot kiss.  He may have had a head for soccer, but his nimble hands captured her softly tumbling breasts. Raccoon eyes sealed shut, she could feel his dark orbs studying her face while she tasted his probing tongue.

After a brief excursion to paradise nestled in his arms, she slithered her nude bod down to the floor while he grunted his approval and closed his slanted eyes.  Gazing up at his striking face, she whispered, “Ouvre les yeux.”

“Pourquoi?” he asked, playing dumb.

“I want you to watch me pleasing you.  And,” she added, kneading his inner thighs, “you’ve been such a patient man.”

“Oui, Josie. You’re always worth the wait,” he told his wily lover as her dense tits’ rigid tips tingled the prickly flesh up and down his tight legs.

Excitement trickled from her thick areolae to her dewy, protruding clit. Staving off an involuntary orgasm to focus on her beau’s earlier command, she kissed her way up his bare calves.  He possessed the tibulas of a champion cyclist, except that his lance had more stamina without the effects of steroids.  As she continued pressing her pillowy lips into her man’s muscular legs, she heard la bête reviving his deformed cock.  Snickering, she was delighted both to have and to be an audience.

Just then, Bene piped up: “C’mon, Josie. Get to licken ma nuts. I want to ‘ose you, ‘oney … Aaahhh … “

She knew he wasn’t playing around when he referred to his erect penis as a “hose.”  She didn’t care that he omitted the “h.”  His African cock was a formidable tool.  When Bene was living in New York City, his big dick was partly responsible for her quickly using up sick days — time spent home because sitting at a teacher’s desk drew an intimate kind of pain.  On his part, he occasionally suffered wrist sprain.  Gradually it dawned on her why he sometimes needed extensive breaks between paintings. Long breaks for long strokes.

When the blue-striped silver locomotive emerged from a tunnel that was carved into a craggy mountain, it took a curve before building to speeds of one hundred seventy-five to two hundred miles per hour.  It seemed, to the young exhibitionists, to fly above sleepy villages of pastel houses and sprawling vineyards. Bene and Josie were always down for a supersonic adventure, so she clung to his strong thighs while propping herself on sturdy knees until her buttocks were hugging her heels.  Such a position was a prerequisite for public cock sucking in the manner that her boyfriend preferred.

Clearing her throat so she could swallow without gagging was the sound effect that had him choking his meat inches from her face. “Oh yeh – c’est ça. Oh, fuuuuuk,” Bene tried to whisper, but his burning passion could not be silenced.  ”I’m, I’m, ahhhh … I’m going to spray you weet ma love.”

Blistering with desire, Josie felt her pussy leaking juice onto the railcar’s vibrating floor like the drip-drip-drip of gasoline from a high-mileaged car.  If any of the passengers had breached the non-smoking policy and allowed a cigarette to roll into her pooling fluids, the entire passenger car would have been set ablaze.

She moaned on his generous frenulum.  “Mmmmm … mmmmm … “

Experiencing one delicious tremor after another, Bene inhaled deeply, looked down at her bobbing head of locks and asked her, “Didn’t I say to lick ma nuts, woman?”  She knew it wasn’t a question, but a command.

Drool escaped from her mouth as she tried to smile her acknowledgment.   They both knew how much she loved slobbing his knob, but she had to take a six-second break to remark: “You are such a tease.” Then, once her jaws were realigned, she continued pleasing Big Bene.

“Yeahhhh, c’est çaaaa,” Bene said, his voice riding pleasure waves.   Mais, pas d’autres questions, petite amie.” Switching pelvic gears, he began drilling his girlfriend’s steamy mouth with dick.  Halfway out his pants, he was feeding her need with head.  While one hand fondled her chunky nipples, the other rubbed his pulsating, purplish-black head on her wagging, hot-pink tongue.  Hearing her uneven moans singe the edges of his dreadlocks like flames searing moist banana leaves drove him to prod his sex against her gums and along the lining of her cheeks.

Determined to cleanse his scrotum of perspiration, she reached out to give his boys a gentle squeeze. Then she lunged forward to circle the tip of her warm tongue over the cool coils.

Behind the busy duo, the lubricious stranger was ruddy-faced and close to foaming at the mouth. Sprawled over two semen-stained seats, he was straining for a second set of eruptions. To her surprise he asked, wheezing, “Young lady, won’t you give yerr bon-papa an ‘and?”

“Putain!  If you don’t shut the ’ell up!” Bene addressed the older man in an attempt to thwart any obstacles to his own climax, especially the voice and smell of a spasming man.

“Don’t get upset, bébé,” Josie cooed, caressing her lover’s balls while the old bull behind them profusely apologized.

“J’en ai assez de lui,” he returned.   She agreed with him, having had enough of le voyeur, too.

“Mon amant fougueux, lève-tu ici,” he ordered her, pointing to his succulent lips.  She obeyed, inching her way up until their quarter wedges made a whole and, on her ascent, trailing cum along his legs and thighs.

When his nether zone began to tingle in the absence of her tongue, he commanded her to “reviens à ce que tu faisais.”  She did not need him to repeat it; she slithered back down on all fours to the sticky floor like a traveling courtesan.

As the sleek train raced toward The Riviera, Josie flexed her French-tipped fingers and toes as she enjoyed pleasing her man. Pausing only to sweep back her locks, she bathed her boyfriend’s dangling sac while his dark brown rump rocked to and fro in the cushy seat.  Contemplating how he next might do her, if he could resist dozing off under the spell of a speeding train, revved up her libido.  There would be plenty of time for reflection as they strolled pebbly Mediterranean beaches, read each other poetry in courtyard gardens and smooched beneath swaying palm trees.However, balancing love and lust in the present, and zooming on wheels through space and time, she wanted action.

Josie licked Bene’s balls clean until he wailed softly in Wolof — and the portly voyeur joined him in a tenor duet as he skeeted on his dining tray. Her front teeth nearly nicked her honey’s nuts when she started laughing at the horny harmony.  Finally, she had earned some bottled water.  Still, with the ochre cliffs and turquoise sea of la Côte d’Azur drawing the train closer like a giant magnet, she desired to drink of Bene’s ocean.

While other first-class passengers, including their obnoxious neighbor, snored and farted around them, she blew Bene.  His mind, too. Not long after she gulped down his semen, it was her turn to receive. Gravity shifting from the rapid train and a darting tongue, she sat upright but soon acquiesced to squirming in liquids that soaked down to the plush seating. Far outpacing the train’s engine were whirling sensations from her uterus, down her channel and out to her engorged labia and distended clit.

By the time the Mediterranean sun dipped closer to scalded mountaintops, Bene’s bloated lips were enveloping most of his woman’s extraordinary vulva and she was hallucinating auras flashing around country cows that grazed several feet from the tracks.

“Mmmm … Lèche ma chatte!” she commanded him.

When his jaws went from sore to numb, he doffed his cargo capris, flung off his braided-leather sandals and switched to pumping his girl’s pussy while she gyrated in his lap to French raps on his iPod.  He was only slightly annoyed that she was listening to music but figured she needed to get in as much French as possible.  She did.  His invasive cock spoke volumes, but his entreaties were muted.  Once he unplugged the earphones, he turned her chin to suck some tongue until she struggled to catch her breath.  Their long, wet kiss had her moaning into his throat.  Slowing down his upward thrusts, he asked if she was okay and she smiled her satisfaction.

“Just don’t stop fucking me, baby,” she said tremulously, moments later.

“Pas problème,” he lustily agreed.

“Jamais!“

“Never, Josie.”

“Promise?”

“Oui, je promets.  Aaahhh … Toujours.”

“Oh, Bene, I trust you.  Just fuck me.  Baise-moi!“

“Plus dur, ma femme sexy?“

“Yeah, harder, baby.  Slay me with your grande bite noir!”

From her luscious mouth Bene heard “bite” rise several octaves just as a pair of chestnut-brown horses trotted parallel to the steel tracks and whinnied their “bon voyage” in silence. With her bare back still turned to him, he wrapped his strong, safe arms around her tighter.  Switching to their own, ritualistic drumbeat, they began slapping privates more insistently. Their heads spun in a carnal vortex as if they were carousel horses interlocked in ecstasy.  As Josie galloped on Bene’s wood toward orgasm, spurring his athletic legs with her pumiced heels, she listened to his telltale gasps behind her.  Puffs of his torrid breath wafted through drenched locks that he had parted at her nape.  Every time he exhaled, she was transported to le désert de Lompoul du Sénégal, where she imagined that God was fanning her as she performed a rain dance.

“J’arrive!” she cried from the peak of an orange sand dune.

“Uhmmm, moi aussi!“  He was coming too.

Riding the rails through the South of France, the ardent lovers were at home in one another’s intimate embrace.  Like rainbow-colored European Bee-eaters trilling and performing air maneuvers above green-carpeted mountains, Bene and Josie were making music and gliding on magical currents.  Inspired by her beauty and fantasizing that she was his captive, Bene grew more inspired by the minute.  As did his cock, though by the second.  Soon his consciousness expanded and his dick hardened to bone inside her cave.  Soon their voices converged to dulcet tones.

When the southerly train chugged along a stretch of recently repaired track, their genitals smacked together deliciously to its rugged rhythm.  Framed by the wide window, the lovers remained glued to each other and gazed with glazed-over eyes at the natural landscapes that had bewitched generations of resident, nomadic and mad painters.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Mmmm … Des fraises ou tu?” Bene charmed her in the salon. “I don’t know what to eat first, ma chérie,” he said, grinning and pointing a long, dark digit down at her dripping pussy as he cut a dirty-dance figure on his approach.

Mesmerized, if not hypnotized, by the obsidian twin pendulums between his sculptured thighs, she salivated while drinking in his chiseled sight. “Let me do you first, baby,” she said, giving him her Princely best.   ”Pulleeeze!”

But with Marvin in his ears and seeping from his pores, he took the upper hand, even if it was long-stroking his dick in that moment.  “I want to take you over zere,” he cajoled. Feeling the sting of his girlfriend’s glare, he switched to a tender tone:   “Viens ici, Josie.”

“Oui, oui, mon amour,” she complied, taking his warm hand as he led her trembling body back to the large, burgundy shag rug in the shape of Mamma Africa.

Bene’s smile reached his eyes, which trailed his lover’s serpentine descent. He walked a short distance to fetch the cold tray of fruit, then dropped down to his knees to join her. Balancing the tray, he displayed a waiter’s poise, something on which she commented until he swerved a remark her way: “Oh non, mademoiselle. I plan to service you in a manner that shall satiate all hunger and all thirst.”

Once he lay parallel to his Black Venus, with only the fancy tray of berries heaped upon crushed ice between their scorching nude bodies, Josie sucked her swollen bottom lip in anticipation. In her restless, horny mind, her thick tongue mirrored her engorged clit’s glans. Scribbling over her erotic imagining, she wagged a forefinger to the cyan, reptilian fertility goddess that she had conjured up, warning: “Gurrrl, this’d better not be a fuckin’ mirage.”

Between nibbles of her neck and chilled strawberries, Bene explained that the key to his daily contentment was knowing who he was through stories and documents that his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins shared with him. Josie half-listened to him, but succumbed to Will, as in Downing, whose calypso flava on the remake of “You Sure Love to Ball” elevated her libido to a plane that she had never thought attainable. Bene, ever the expert programmer, exceeded in guiding her there. He was teasing the tip of her nose, a cheek and her eager lips with a plump berry. Every now and then he paused his narrative to lick the tart red juice off her tongue, from the corners of her mouth, and out of deep labial crevices until moans grew to shouts that were anything but pious.

Midsong, Bene tossed aside his cherished family photos to focus on the exquisite pleasure in which he and Josie were submerged like awestruck scubadivers. Not only love-lust but wetness was all around: the suggestion of oceanside lust in the uptempo song, melting ice — pink like her favorite bubbly — in the dainty Limoges tray, and viscous strawberry nectar that blended with her own from her navel to her feet and up her calves and thighs to her beachball-sized butt. Downing’s ecstatic baritone, the liberating percussions, effervescent guitar chords, Bene’s suckling and licking (hers, too, when the six became nine), and all the splashing fruit juices were almost too much for her ears to bear. Where aural sex and oral sex converged, Bene was a server like no other.

Memory served her well, too. Back in the States, before their nerve-wracking separation, Bene had been masterful at pleasurably torturing her aroused body and mind. After neighbors — hers and his — could not distinguish between her screams of passion and a crime victim’s shrieks of terror, they began calling the cops. Josie would curse herself for screening videos of 9 1/2 Weeks and In the Realm of the Senses for him much too soon after they had met at the bookstore.

Now here she lay in his eighteenth-district flat, surrendering her fears as he made her limp body ache through a third dimension of foreplay. French-style. He was teasing her reawakened, firm, ripe cherry with the conical end of a succulent strawberry. Although his stiff cock pulsated from his groin until it gonged throughout his being like petrified wood, he was a patient man. However, a minute man he was not. Through discipline inherited from his forefathers and occasional studies in tantric sex, he had learned how to stretch his and Josie’s lovemaking from the dinner bell to the breakfast chime — in Paris time.

Once he finished linking the branches of his family tree and had his girlfriend writhing in her own lubrication, he guided her to a black Italian leather sofa across the spacious living room. Weak with unresolved desire, she had struggled to raise herself from the rug, much less walk. Her boyfriend clasped her waist, helping her waddle over to the sofa.

Resuming the squishy action from the burgundy shag rug, Bene’s brawny hands stroked and wandered among his lady’s extraordinary, turgid labial folds. As her inner waves intensified, she responded in an oceanic song that fluctuated between sorrow and mirth. Instinctively, primally, he knew when to dive into her deep.

Before he could mount her feverish, red-splotched body, there was a tantalizing change of pace in the background: Leon Ware’s seductive voice lilting over a sensuous Brazilian rhythm and a persistent acoustic guitar riff. Despite Josie’s flustered state and his pressure cooker of a penis, the lyrics to and mood of “Let Go” reminded Bene that cherished love, with its inextricable, healthy obsessions and perpetual rewards, is harder to come by than sex. Josie intuited that, too, as she arranged herself into the lotus position. She didn’t remain seated for long.

After ruminating over the abstract values of love the way critics and curators mulled over his canvases, Bene surrendered to the masculine surge of sex. Palm to crown, he stood before Josie as she bound her locks with a Scrunchie.  When their eyes met, she invited him to “ride me toward dusk.”  He lifted her and set  Leaning over his paramour’s soft back, he conquered her slowly. As he climbed her spasming walls, he coaxed, “Cum for me” while Ware whispered, “Let go.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Despite Josie and Bene’s deepening love and affection, and their numerous discussions about her cultural and metaphysical reasons for desiring children with him, her reproductive system had a mind of its own. He tested again. She tested again. The answer kept coming back like a huge forefinger pointing at her, not at him. They contacted holistic doctors through her insurance plan; Candomblé faith healers through her Black Brazilian stepmother’s Bahia-by-way-of-Newark network; a Marseilles-based Senegalese shaman; traditional clergy in New York City and Paris; and French and American fertility specialists through Bene’s guardian angel, Jacques.

Finally, when a New York urologist reconfirmed Bene’s fertility, saying, “Mr. Ngewale, you could repopulate the entire Western Hemisphere,” the young man aborted his art school studies in time for the wine harvest in the hilltop village of Montmartre. He jetted back to France, leaving Josie in the dark. Frequent fornication and insomnia followed — respectively, his in Paris and hers in New York. A year of estrangement ensued.

After the new semester began, a war in which hijacked commercial jets were used as missiles was waged on U.S. soil for the first time, and New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. were hit. When the attacked Twin Towers crumbled, the death toll continued to rise. Café Expresso came tumbling down, too. Post-9/11 angst was heavy in the air. In the period of worldwide healing that extended into 2002, Bene called Josie and apologized for abandoning her. By January’s end, her luggage was packed. By the second week of February, she had landed back in Paris for good.

Their intimate reconnection had been delayed by government red tape — a failed attempt at obtaining a green card — and last-minute fears on the North American side of the Atlantic. Leaving her biological loved ones had been emotionally difficult, but making a major life change as an expat in France so that she could be with someone she had chosen to love (and vice versa) was crucial. She thanked God and her high-school English teachers for advising her to major in English in college, with a minor in education. Ironically, she had planned to defy them, somewhat, minoring in French literature. However, she exceeded their expectations, though probably not her Creator’s, by earning a master of science with a thesis on educating multicultural children in inner cities amid power structures’ socioeconomic and psychological abandonment.

Several suburban Paris schools vied for her appointment not only for her academic credentials, but also for her well-documented expertise in handling sensitive issues among students from Black and Brown families in New York City’s poorest urban neighborhoods. A work visa expedited to her address was reason to celebrate with her teacher friends at Les Halles down on John Street after work, but only after she had e-mailed her man.

Swirling her Cognac in an impossibly clean snifter, she cursed the vast time zone difference. While her friends gossiped about which colleagues were taking turns sleeping with Principal McDonough, Josie eyed her Citizen wristwatch. In Paris, it’s a stroke after midnight, she mused. Sigh. Je veux s’embrasser. She longed to kiss her lover.

Her blabbering co-workers ignored her moist eyes, the downward shift in mood to what her Brazilian stepmother, Cara, referred to as triste. Contours of the classic Jobim song “Triste” softly bounced throughout the resto’s intimate space, transforming the delicate clinking of silverware against china into epicureans’ percussive delight. Black teardrops told a Maybelline lie as Jobim’s shrugging melancholia emoted what Josie could not translate from Portuguese lyrics.

Meanwhile, the educators’ dialogue at the dinner table was turning tawdrier by the minute, pushing Josie further into her thoughts. I’d trade eating a steak entrée in a fancy Manhattan restaurant for serving Bene my ‘gina for dessert in his bed — our bed. Visualizing his hunger for her after more than a year of estrangement, she rewound the long-distance fantasy to the part where she closed her eyes as he eased her misted body down to the center of the bed:

His alternate ladling and spreading of her cheeks cued her eyes to blink open and for her generous genitals to invite his elongated tongue to wiggle against their engorged, scalloped lips. He liked telling her that her vulva was “scuba-duba-duuuuu!” Inspired, she broke into song, babbling, “Chabba-dabba-da, chabba-dabba-da” while he hummed organ notes on her clit — a perversion of Un Homme et Une Femme‘s iconic theme song that would have mortified its composer, Francis Lai.

Bobbing up for air, Bene waxed poetic and clarified that Josie’s feminine parts were “a treasure worth diving for” and “the ninth wonder of the world.” “Bien sûr, après le miracle huitième:  ma bite,” he added with a grin that exposed firm gums that were almost as dark as his nine-inch, wonder-filled dick.

Following some nasal laughter and double entendres between them, Josie tried to have the last word: “Ah, but the sea can be heard from my equipment.”

“Yeh, I can hear la mer, but you cannot — unless you’ve been training as a contortionist in Québec weef le Cirque du Soleil,” he quipped.

In the present, Ella’s undulating voice had the classy downtown bistro under her chordal spell with “April in Paris,” followed by “A Place for Lovers.” Sigh. Josie pushed away her china plate of partially devoured steak au poivre, sautéed Swiss chard, and garlic mash. “But not that,” she politely protested when the server tried to clear her near-empty snifter from the group’s cluttered table. “I definitely plan on finishing that.” Draining her glass of Cognac, she slurped and gurgled, to her three work friends’ intoxicated snorts and giggles.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Oui, at 17:00. À tout à l’heure,” she remembers replying to Bene back in the Internet café. There, her smile attracted a North African fellow with bed hair and a five o’clock shadow to match. Faster than sugar lumps in un café noir, her confidence began dissolving under his intense stare and unspoken innuendo. It had not occurred to her before that she was possessed by Colette’s ghost. Leaving behind her oyster crocheted cloque hat, she dashed into the drizzle. Upon her emergence from the métro exit across from l’Opera Garnier, the light rain had transformed into a winter shower.

Now, Josie’s thoughts turn to Bene, not that they can keep her dry:

At roughly 4:30 p.m., he will hop off the ligne número six and execute a jump shot against the orange “Correspondance” sign dangling high above the subway platform — something that he used to do to impress her, a Black American in Paris for the first time. Like Gene Kelly’s painter awaiting his Muse/love — salesgirl Leslie Caron — by the Seine, Bene’s heart will be thumping in anticipation of drinking in her sight. Later, with bedsprings creaking from their unleashed fervor, he will thrust between her brown-butter thighs for the first time in a very long time.

Soon, a saxman will wet wine-brown lips resembling her lover’s, wrap them around the mouthpiece and flex his mahogany fingers on brassy valves until he channels Coltrane amid soaring, scattering, shiny euro coins. To the musical accompaniment, her statuesque Senegalese-French paramour will take giant steps, with the energy of a winning player at a chessboard, from the lower platform of the subway station to the horizontal escalator.

Now time would always be on Josie and Bene’s side, the same side of a treacherous ocean. Starting at 5 p.m., no longer would they need to do the arithmetic to decide how late or early to phone or webcam one another. She is hoping that, while she is primping in a mirror in the iconic center of Paris, he will be traversing the ground above la gare at l’Étoile – breezy la Place Charles de Gaulle – bumping and brushing past commuters as if they were boules.  With only her on his mind, he would be committed to embracing her at the designated time.

Crossing the Avenue des Champs-Êlysées, Josie feels exposed.   Vulnerable.   Money she could have spent on an umbrella is saved for lunch and snacks as she weaves her way through the city’s disparate arrondissements to meet her man. Raising the collar of her six-year-old Jones New York trenchcoat to cover her ears and the edges of her dense, dark-brown locks, she runs against the wet wind.   As heavy as her coat feels on her petite frame, she remains undaunted by Nature’s petty storm.  This challenge to her destiny and his holds the promise of love’s reward.

Through the assaulting downpour, Josie’s rational self whispers for her to seek temporary refuge:  À gauche — une pâtisserie.   To the left, a pastry shop. Peering through a diagonal curtain, she narrowly misses getting flattened like a crêpe by a cyclist rehearsing early for Le Tour de France.  After a minute’s hesitation she ducks inside the shop, spots a tiny faux-antique table and, like a prima ballerina, executes un grand jeté en avant to claim it.

Un café crême to her right, un pain au chocolat front and center, and arousal top to bottom, she is caught up in a daydream:

He will chase her in and out of the Arc de Triomphe like a black stallion pursuing a brown mare, rendering her breathless. With eight inches on her — not only heightwise — he will press her back against the smooth stone and lift her until they are chin to chin. Indifferent to passing strangers and to the wind whipping their coats open, he will kiss away the words from her beseeching lips.

Aiding her torso’s gradual descent to his strong chest, he will suck pinches of flesh in a reddened trail from her neck to her cleavage.   On trembly legs he will support her with a colossal hand in the small of her arched back and lower her moist, quivering cunt onto his petrified cock once and again until their unbridled movements chisel fault lines into the monument.

Cued by their reunited joy, a symphony of grotesque moans, a flock of pigeons will line up with Hitchcockian precision atop the arch.   As they take flight in formation into the purple expanse, their flapping wings in silhouette will evoke mobile découpage.   The rainstorm will seem a distant memory drowning out sorrows from two lovers’ previous lifetimes.

That luscious preview distracts Josie from the surrounding, intellectual fracas.   A half-hour into her second cup of coffee, she is flicking away any doubts about a rekindled romance as if they were stray embers from a freshly lighted cigarette twiddling in a scruffy poet’s slender fingers while he argues socialist politics with his dapper, older companion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A gentle nudge startles Josie awake from a corner table at a cybercafé on Lower Broadway.  Not one nasal note, not one interjection of “Bon,” “Oui,” “Donc” or “Alors,” is uttered among the rainbow tribe of customers.  Merde, she curses inaudibly.  The annoyed café manager sent over a twentysomething barista to do her dirty work.  “No sleeping allowed,” the younger woman scowled at Josie.

No, this definitely isn’t Paris, Josie reminds herself.  Neither the manager nor the barista could guess that she was one sista that needed a siesta, not simply a nap.   After hours of e-mailing a slew of résumés and cover letters from her laptop in pursuit of university-level teaching positions, she had dozed off and her unconscious mind had hurtled her back through time into la joie de vivre of finite yesterdays.  Pensive, she glances down and reminds herself that the catalyst that she needs to bulldoze her toward the future is within her.

Although that permanent job is elusive for now, her mind is ripe for Proustian inspiration.  Her problem, regarding the latter, is that she cannot honor remembrances of flings past because her memory reels are stuck at Bene — Ousebene Ngewale — with whom she experienced her first fully reciprocated, mutually exclusive relationship.

Outside the Internet café twenty minutes later, rain is decending in metallic sheets, but Josie is staying put because there is no lover waiting for her despite the fact that it is Valentine’s Day. No reason to risk injury, she reasons.

“Loneliness is an old, faithful pal,” a now-retired teacher, Curtis, once told her after she had found him with a palmful of damp Kleenex and attempted to comfort him.   Two weeks prior, his wife of forty-five years, Judy, had succumbed to pneumonia after a long, undisclosed illness.   He blew his lungs out into a used tissue and said, “But I’ll say this, Josie.   It’s the grief nagging your spirit in those mundane moments, hectoring you in hyperconscious dimensions of solitude, that can wear out its welcome.”

Fatigued, Josephine B. Ngewale looks away from the weather-beaten window and stares down into her stagnant coffee.  She swirls the murky liquid in the recycled-paper cup like she had shaken the snifter of Cognac in Les Halles restaurant  a decade prior.  To her chagrin, no coffee, not even the frothy caramel-infused concoction that she cannot afford, is potent enough to wash down the misery of perpetual grief past the lump in her throat.

Thunder crackles over the Wall Street area as working stiffs seem to huddle together up and down Lower Broadway. It is no tickertape parade for baseball or hockey heroes.  A uniform sea of black, corporate drones appear to gather as if at a cemetery for a stormy burial. Making their way to or from ten-dollar lunches, they’re stomping on graves tracing back to the distant and recent past: the African Burial Ground and the Ground Zero of 9/11.

Taking deep breaths, Josie tries to stave off a familiar claustrophobic feeling but can hear the hinges of her coffin creaking again. Then she breaks free of the satin lining, rubs the blood back into her petrified hands and remembers: When she and Bene first dated, they used to excavate New York City’s buried Black secrets while shaking loose the noisy bones of skeletons in their own closets. Once reunited in Paris they chatted beneath Provençal-made blankets about the Twin Towers graveyard of splintered bones struggling to reach out for the warmth and comfort of the living, of mosaics of teeth chattering out messages of agony interrupted and love everlasting.

Then an idea jolts Josie like the lightning threatening to burst through the window.   Or maybe it’s the phantom second shot of espresso that her shadow self requested.   She meditates on the notion of returning to Paris:  I must return home.  For good.  Pour de bon.   That’s what Bene would’ve wanted me to do with the inheritance.  Et Bérénice …

Absentmindedly caressing the eighteenth-century, diamond-studded sapphire ring that her late husband bequeathed to her, Josie ruminates on a morbid theme:  I’m a widow.  Une veuve.  I’m widowed.   Bene’s widow.  Sa veuve.  Veuf.  A widow.  Widow.   

Three months ago, at the reading of Bene’s last will and testament in a fusty law office on the Right Bank of Paris, Josie learned that the ornate ring had been passed down through the matriarchal line of son pauvre mari.   Rumors about its links to French royalty notwithstanding, her heirloom ring, which Bene intended to gift her upon their tenth wedding anniversary, was appraised by a jeweler acquaintance of Jacques’ and found to be worth a fortune.   Still, she vowed to herself never to hock it.

He’s there, in Paris.  Bene, my Dakar star.  Waiting for me in Père Lachaise, she contemplates while the ambient song “Without You” swells from the cybercafé’s powerful speakers.  But Bérénice …

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One idyllic September afternoon, when Josie was enjoying a scheduled day off for her birthday, Bene phoned her from JAAAAACQUES — the Marais art gallery owned and managed by Jacques’ partner, Raul. Exhilarated, Bene explained between exclamations in French and Wolof that his longtime friend Jacques had just informed him that his oil portrait of her — Josephine, La Nuit — had just been sold for the asking price of a quarter of a million dollars.

“Wow, Bene!   Congrats, darling!”

“Meet me at l’Étoile, bébé.  Dees calls for a double celebration.”

“Well, you already gave me my birthday present when you woke me up this morning.   Matter of fact, I don’t think my legs are strong enough to carry me beyond our front door.”

“Always de kidder,” he said, laughing. “See you soon, Josie.   Je t’aime, mon ange.”

“I love you more, mon chéri.”

She wanted to express more, but Bene had released the call prematurely.

Josie had never showered so quickly.   Not until she was inside a taxi did she notice her mismatched leather walking shoes.   One black, one navy blue.   When the taxi reached l’Étoile, she spotted Bene’s bike immediately, then his branchlike dreads.   One moment he was singing falsetto along with Usher in David Guetta’s “Without You,” holding up his iPod like John Cusack raising his boombox in Say Anything.   The next moment he was insisting that his wife remain on the sidewalk outside the métro station, telling her, “No, Josie.   I’ll come across to get you.”

Watching Bene smiling on his wheeled approach, she was so elated that she executed a Leslie Caron spin in her mismatched shoes.   Her “airplane” arms cut the soft breeze that flowed from swaying branches of colossal horse-chestnut trees on the Champs-Êlysées.   Midway through a second revolution she heard wheels screeching, the chaotic flapping of wings and — a horrifying, agonized masculine scream.   Her heart’s syncopated rhythms sent her stumbling in the direction of discordant horns in a vehicular orchestra.

Jazz hands blurred into three pairs.  Her tan phalanges sliced the sky into murky blue hues.  Not yet, the big G.R. whispered into her rugged, shallow breath on the inhale.  Not yet, girlfriend, the gaunt, black-ponytailed entity repeated, arcing his surreally long finger above her head and pointing it across the street toward l’Étoile.

Upon glimpsing her husband’s immobile body and his mangled bike beneath the front of a delivery truck, Josie emitted a series of abrupt shrieks that brought the sparse, oncoming traffic around l’Étoile to a halt.   Surrounded by feathered creatures bouncing on a trapeze of air, she collapsed.   The curious flock of pigeons circling the accident scene and squawking appeared to ignore her and mourn one of their own.   A fallen gray bird subtly bounced with a death twitch, finally resting on Bene’s sneakerless left foot.

Revived by the inky stench of pigeon droppings just inches away from her face, Josie crawled up on her knees.   She rocked back and forth, too traumatized to utter a further sound.   One of the flock waddled closer to her than any pigeon had ever ventured in the absence of food crumbs.   Drivers abandoned their vehicles, some scratching their heads beneath caps and others offering the new widow supportive words, bottled water and jackets to ward off shock.

In less than twenty minutes, flics joined two ambulances in a deceptively mellow procession of sirens that blared their way toward the tragedy at the Arc de Triomphe.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Usher’s voice is weaving in and out of sonic wonder, haunting her but also reminding her of a paragliding daredevil in a state of ecstasy who shifts his body to help the apparatus maneuver between mountains.   “Without youuuuuuuu … “   Wide-eyed, Josie conjures up Bene continuously looping around her on his prized bicycle, his nimbus bathing her in pure light as if transforming her into son étoile privée on Earth.

The music vanishes.   Threading fingers through her thick locks, Josie allows herself a moment of Zen-inspired serenity.   She minimizes the window of job postings, then maximizes a blank Word page.   A hand flies to her bosom when she sees a message rippling across the screen:  Tu as mon cœr.

“And you have mine, Bene,” she mouths a reply, her trembling forefinger tracing the letters of his supernal valentine.

Several relaxed minutes later her hands are caressing her tummy over the ecru jumper she recently acquired at a Salvation Army thrift shop, her fingers pausing at her distended navel’s outline.  This will be for you, sweet Bérénice, she reflects.  You are my ultimate Paris love story:  “PariSoul.”

Then, thoughts turning again to her eternal lover, she charges the keyboard like an avant-garde jazz pianist and her mind spins back to Paris, where hues of periwinkle, powder blue, marigold, rose, violet, fuschia, wine, navy blue and velvet black swathed her and Bene in love for nine years of tranquil mornings, blissful afternoons and sublime nights.

fin

© 2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

Source for top photo (l’Arc de Triomphe at Place Charles de Gaulle, with la Tour Eiffel in the distance):  http://en.wikipedia.org

Source of TGV photo:  http://www.raileurope.com

The Last Resort

 

LaVonda had been throwing back drinks for so many hours on the casino floor that the cocktail waitresses were changing shifts.  Not a clock was in sight, and cell phones were unreliable inside the towers.  Her watch, usually her one connection to reality, conspired against her, its gold-tone hands paused indefinitely at three o’clock.  So much for the valililidddittty of street vendors hawking Ann Klein knockoffs … Swiss movement my ass, she murmured, slurring through her slushy brain.  Three in the morning or in the afternoon — it didn’t matter.  She was a slave to the slots and to her faucet of a bladder.  With players lighting up in full defiance of the non-smoking law, she was a reel-spinning, wrist-flicking risk-taker.  Imbibing thirty-proof per cup — as in plastic, because glasses were too classy for New Jersey’s casinos — she was one match away from combustibility.

Despite her drunken stupor, she was oddly aware of her cosmetic state.  The more that the invisible hands of time wore on, the more mascara she curled onto her camel-like eyelashes, using the chrome of the slot machine as a mirror.  She preferred such a warped reflection than the split image staring back at her from a cracked compact mirror:  her estranged sister Tawana’s bridal shower favor.  The broken, heart-shaped, sterling silver mirror also was a reminder of complicity in her future brother-in-law’s last fling, when he had given his groomsmen the slip at his bachelor party at Leroy’s Lounge and met her in the alley.

There amid the trashcans, Tawana’s Damon flung LaVonda’s satin purse to the concrete, made a tutu of her peasant skirt and screwed her silly against a brick wall.  Guided by the burning head of his stiff penis, he crammed his pre-wedding jitters into his future sister-in-law’s aloe-moist vagina.  He pounded her like pestle to mortar, and she thrusted back at him, until lightning intruded upon them and thunderclaps disguised their grotesque utterances.

That transgression with Damon had happened six years ago.  Tawana was working on her second broken marriage and carrying her fourth child by the time LaVonda was slurping and slinging back mixed drinks at The Palm, which was her favorite casino resort.  A fan of a particular penny-slot game there, she was ten spins away from rubbing on tiger balm as she tried to hold out for the next big-bonus round.  On a previous trip, a mere $50 investment translated into a $275 win, but the allure of the casino wasn’t the chance of winning a jackpot; it was the escape from mindless conformity in corporate America.  Unlike in Las Vegas, LaVonda found Atlantic City’s casino resorts to be less discretionary.  Be they business types, ‘burbanites, bohos or bums, all patrons were welcome, as long as they had plenty of cash — theirs or others’ — to lose.

When anyone asked LaVonda what she could do without, she answered, “Pannies.”  When anyone asked her what she couldn’t do without, she replied, “Pennies.”  God was farthest from her consciousness.  Her denomination was the mighty cent.  Gambling was her religion.  The endless drinks served to addicted players were like communion wine.   Years had flown by since the time the regulars at the casino — men, women, trannies and TVs among them — had nicknamed her “Angel.”  Drinking H₂O used to sting her throat; now it had the effect of holy water sprinkled upon a demon.

In her luckier days, when the RNG – random number generator — hadn’t been set in the house’s favor as frequently, she’d often hit the jackpot.  In those brighter days, her quivering and shrieking of “Oh my God!” amid a succession of clanging bells was the closest she had come to the holy experience of a multiple orgasm.  She didn’t count the times when she was an older teen at church and a dyke-cum-deaconess would sit beside her, cloying open her oyster, then diddling the pearl, during the Reverend Hosea Fillandring’s ninety-minute sermon.  How LaVonda’s tummy cramped and her wet pantyhose clung to trembling thighs!

Her moaning would go undetected through all the “Mmm-hmms” and “Wehhhls” from the amen corner.  Strummed to high notes by the dewy-digited deaconess, she’d fall out, screaming like the Holy Ghost had seized her body.  A church nurse was always on the spot in more ways than one.  When LaVonda learned that the church nurses were in on the ambidextrous deaconess’s orgasm hustle, she ceased going to church altogether.

If she had one regret about her decision to ditch church, surely it was that her maternal grandmother, Yorindah Therèse, was turning in her grave back in what survived of their family’s small tract of land in the South Carolina Sea Islands.  Down in Atlantic City, strolling on the beach and making peace with seagulls and egrets after the vultures had stripped her pockets to the seams, LaVonda felt closest to her Grandmama Yorindah’s restless spirit.  She would toss her oblong head back, release any burdens, and allow the salt water that splashed upon the shore to spray her face as so much salt water had cleansed her grandmother’s and her ancestors’ while they toiled in the rice marshes.  She wondered what was more sinful:  her choice to turn her back on organized religion or real estate developers’ rape of her foreparents’ land to build golf resorts and other commercial hideaways.

Although the Atlantic City strip was far from the Lowcountry where the Gullahs reigned, there on the beach, in the shadow of the casinos, LaVonda would reach deeply into her memory for the caressing of Grandmama Yorindah’s weeping willow hair brushing her cheek and neck as she bent down to kiss her sweet potato pie tittuh midway between a crab soup lunch and a red rice and barbecued-chicken supper.  Such fragrant memories kept Grandmama Yorindah alive in her mind, though some of her folks believed the rumor that the pillow-breasted old woman with a West African tongue and Irish winks for eyes never was buried at all.

After three years of celibacy, LaVonda began worshiping the phallus.  She made up for lost time, spending many nights on her back and on her knees.  One time when she was feeling especially daring, and limber, she took on twin Italian brothers on a chaise lounge.  The syncopated sucking and fucking brought out the soprano in her — even though she was an alto — and attracted unwanted attention from folks who had drifted away from their tropical drinks on sand-coated wooden tables.  When the pair got caught with their bananas in each end of LaVonda, they lost their jobs as cabana boys and resorted to male prostitution in Cape May.

Most boyfriends, however, were hit or miss when it came to her spot.  For them, she was the dating jackpot.  Although she was pleased with the generous tip each offered, eventually she’d hear the dreaded word: “Deuces.”  After using her for room and dining comps, they found other fillies to ride.  By the age of 35, most of her ex-boyfriends had coined her “the penny slut of Harlem” yet held onto her mobile number for phone bones.

One particular, former beau was an ornery Scottish dude with freckles and a carrot-orange crewcut, who had been discharged dishonorably from the Marines.  When he moved from Central Harlem to Hell central, a/k/a North Philadelphia, he adopted the ritual of using his free night and weekend minutes to recite Revolutionary poems as foreplay.  In an inspired bit of role play, he repeatedly would call her his “Crispus Attucks bitch” before releasing the phone and shooting blanks in her ear.  She dubbed him “the Minuteman” and always faked orgasm near the end of their phone sex by screaming, “A Brit sees me cumming!  A Brit sees me cumming!”

When phone and cyberfucks began gnawing on her nerves like a hangnail sucked during a footjob, she needed a warm body.  She turned the knob to the door that led to the realm of one-night stands.  Depending on these mutual serial monogamists’ occupations and adventurousness, she carried on with them at not-so-dimly lighted restaurants, on highway shoulders, on airplanes, at construction sites, in the fitting rooms of high-end men’s stores, in trailers at on-location filming, in railway station restrooms, in parking lots, and at cemeteries – anywhere but in a bed in her apartment or in a hotel.  These activities kept her physically fit but bereft of love, and she knew that it was her own fault.

A slew of failed romances left her feeling lonely as Valentine’s Day approached.  Bad enough that Mondays were dismal; she didn’t want to endure a workday filled with hand-delivered bouquets of tall-stemmed roses and boxes of chocolate-dipped strawberries.  She couldn’t allow herself to imagine the mind-blowing sex that many of her co-workers would be experiencing on the weekend leading up to Valentine’s Monday, especially knowing they would be bragging and smirking — if not lying — about the “real reasons” for their bad backs and cakewalk-like gaits until Presidents’ Day.

Thus, she planned a quick getaway via Amtrak from New York City to Atlantic City, which the past ten years of her life spent gambling taught her was more pleasant than a ride on one of the fleet of casino buses from Port Authority Bus Terminal.  The storied bus ride from 42nd Street (formerly the land of hookers, pimps, drug addicts and runaways) to the Atlantic City strip (still the land of hookers, pimps, drug addicts and runaways) was a test of nerves of steel.  The most expensive Bose headset couldn’t block out the cacophonic mobile-phone conversations in seven distinctly New York City languages on those buses:  Jamaican patois, Trini patois, Tagalog, Puerto Rican Spanish, Dominican Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Haitian Creole, Hindu, Urdu, Italianegro English and, the oddest of them all:  Nouveau-Middle-English-Southern-Black Melanglish (not that Ebonics ain’t a good word, ‘cos “where you be” ain’t technically incorrect, dependin’ on deh century you be livin’ in).

Add to the compressed international orchestra — like a Zap Mama CD played backwards — the aromatic blend of multi-ethnic cuisine and the rustling of paper bags, thrashing of aluminum foil and popping of plastic storage made for a three-plus-hour bus ride that was stinkier, noisier and more nauseating than the all-nude dance sequences of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company that LaVonda had allowed her publicist-friend, Yesenia, to talk her into seeing from the front row at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in the early 1990s.

Happily stirring her latest concoction on the second floor of The Palm, she stretched her legs against the carpeted platform beneath the slot machine from her chair-cum-barstool.  She recalled how painless it had been to purchase her round-trip Amtrak tickets in advance and retrieve them from the kiosk at Penn Station in Manhattan.  An extra perk was receiving a free buttered soft pretzel and complimentary cheese sauce from the young female vendor whose older brother used to play trombone between LaVonda’s legs when they were both in band back in the days when dime bags gave high school a special meaning and Mary Jane wasn’t just the name of a girl, a peanut butter candy or a T-strap shoe.

* * *

The trip to Atlantic City was breezy except for the hour-long stopover in Philly, which always made her say “Damn, damn, damn!” aloud as she pulled her upright suitcase onto the narrow escalator that ascended into the ornate hell which comprises 30th Street Station.  “Fuck Witness,” she uttered to a sixtysomething female passenger four people ahead of her who was yammering to her cacklemate about the on-location scenes in the Harrison Ford film.

Outside of “I beg your paaahdon,” the bespectacled, blue-haired woman, who was a dead ringer for Kathy Bates, was lost for words.  Instead of facing forward, she was looking back at LaVonda and, upon exiting the escalator, lost her footing and one of her peacock-blue, sequined mules.  The shoe hurtled through the high-ceilinged space of the rail station about two yards before clocking a Red Cap, who was handing out government cheese sandwiches  to fifteen homeless people on his lunch break.  They were seeking refuge in the shadow of “The Angel,” Philadelphian shorthand for “Angel of the Resurrection,” the bronze Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial at the station’s 29th Street entrance.

Oblivious of the archangel Michael’s magnificence, LaVonda dropped her belongings and grabbed as many of the scattered, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that her airbrushed-taloned hands could hold.  In midflight, she glared in disbelief as her loquacious nemesis stepped over the concussed railroad worker to retrieve her gaudy shoe while not missing a beat in chattering psychobabble about the memorial’s metaphoric significance in Witness.  LaVonda had no use for metaphors and art.  Neither did she have any regard for blue-haired, spider-veined women, the very kind who refused to remove their tushes from slot machines as if they owned them.

For LaVonda, the only positive points about the landmark rail station were that it provided a train to transport her to “A.C.” — the affectionate term for New Jersey’s inferior version of Sin City — and it offered a fabulous food court.  After filling up on calories at either of two buffets, including Delilah’s, or at Cosi, McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts, passengers could stroll the dangerously elegant promenades to relieve themselves in high-ceilinged restrooms situated as far away from police officers as possible. 

The time that LaVonda had spent bending down at such a sharp angle scooping up sandwiches offered a razor-tongued, hirsute woman manning the information booth a panoramic view of clenching ebony ass accentuated by a leopard-print thong tangled in a rainforest of black pubic hair.  The mistress of information, who was a closeted viewer of upskirt porn and of mating scenes on National Geographic programs, was so caught up in the free jungle floor show that she abandoned an argument to which she had been subjecting an Atlantic City-bound, honeymooning couple.

A leopard of a different pattern of spots, the woman leaped into a futile fantasy of her stainless-steel-padded vulva rubbing against lush vegetation until their erotic friction burned away the thong.   The neglected hetero couple cleared their throats as she withdrew a glistening hand from inside her navy blue pants, retracted her fangs and scratched her chin hairs.  After fanning the flames in her mind, she left behind smoke — an S.O.S. with no chance of libidinous rescue.  Feigning disgust, the couple walked off in a huff and then headed straight for one of many dark corners for an interstate, semipublic quickie.

LaVonda was oblivious of having turned on the information officer’s feline heat, but she was aware of the purposefulness of the restrooms at Philly’s 30th Street Station.  Often in the past she had turned knobs, on the impossibly white sinks and on the anonymously erect shafts — of various colors — in the immense bathrooms.  It was easier for her to slip into the men’s room rather than the ladies’ room because of the long-practiced, sacred code of brotherhood to which horniness is the only requirement.   As she gobbled the first of her ill-gotten cheese sandwiches, she engrossed herself in the memory of her favorite stall, which she called No. 69.

Copyright © 2011 By Chantale Reve

All Rights Reserved

 

 

Above is an excerpt from my ebook The Last Resort, which is published in full on Smashwords.com.  Copies of The Last Resort are available for purchase at:  http://smashwords.com.  Thank you for your support!

Photo:  “Angel of the Resurrection,” Walter Hancock’s Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station

Photo Credit:  Chantale Reve

Port Wine & Pink Lace

Back when flashing panties on a subway car or bus was still a safe turn-on, I would feel a fluttering in my pelvis and a tingling from my spine to my pink petals at the mere thought of enticing a comfortably older man into spying on my slick vulva.  I liked watching him angle his head so that he could see my natural lube oozing from the darkness beneath my bunched skirt out onto my butterscotch thigh.

Those were the days when I could wear stockings without the fear of their elastic top bands rolling down to my knees.  I could sit across from the geezer and not worry whether he was an undercover vice cop.  My seating preference back then used to depend on whether there was a tangerine or marigold seat directly ahead of an older gent – one not elderly enough to bring out my Elektra complex, but one not so young that he could be arrested for sipping my favorite beverage:  Port wine.

Those days, I’d hike up my plaid skirt subtly the way I first had done in Sister Anabel’s class when João saw my “Wednesday” panties, the ones with pink lace on the hem.  If it weren’t for my mother’s addiction to buying frilly, days-of-the-week panties, poor João would’ve kept on getting demerits for missing remedial-math class.  Luckily, those panty days weren’t only lettered; they were numbered.  Unfortunately, so were my mother’s.

 

+ + +

Camila da Costa died with her eyes wide-open after suffering a stroke in childbirth. I was seven.  Confused.  Abandoned.  In much later years, I would hear the heartbreaking story over goblets of Port wine.  The baby girl was my half-sister, a secret that revealed itself when the priest at Our Lady María, Father Paulo, was performing communion and Desidéria, at age seven, looked up into eyes that shined like hers.  My dad, Jeremiah – but nicknamed “Hambone” – knew the deal in an instant.

The Catholic priest was leading a double life of piety and impropriety.  Not all the burnt offerings, dripping candles, rhythmic chants, and sacrificed goats and roosters of Candomblé, the religion that my maternal grandmother practiced, could keep the family curse – um amor proibido – from manifesting in the next generation.

Twenty years after my sister’s birth, she was bragging to me on the phone about an on-line dalliance that led to blind-date, truck-bed fucking which resulted in a kid with fucked-up chromosomes.  Until she was waddling into her last trimester, I had teased her for days, saying:  “Desi, you’ve got a Carmen Electra complex.”

Desidéria was as quick on her feet as she was lithe on her back.  “At least I don’t talk in my sleep, moaning out, ‘Ohhh, sí, sí, sí, Papai … ooohhh.  Ooohhh, fuck me again!’” was her comeback.  She would turn so giddy that I thought she would go into labor and eject her inbred bastard, with the shit she was full of, all over my handwoven, oatmeal carpet.

I talked a lot of shit, too, but I was envious of my half-sister and nowhere near as emotionally secure as she.  So it wasn’t surprising that I smarted whenever she acted as if screwing one’s father out of ignorance was more acceptable than unconsciously uttering affection disguised as lust in um país dos sonhos.  Dreamland was always more sensual when diffused amid twinkling stars over Brazil, especially whenever Orion morphed into Djavan and beckoned me to grind with him to “Esquinas.”

After Mamãe’s death, my Bacardi-afflicted father couldn’t handle the strain.  I thought he was going to be the new constellation of my universe until he separated Desi and me.  The day he shared the news with us, I threw a tantrum and ripped to pieces the crown I’d created in class by painstakingly applying gold stars with mucilage to purple construction paper with Sister Anabel’s assistance.  I tossed up the shreds of his crown, and they fluttered and dispersed like confetti.

Impaired gold stars sparkled with the intact ones on Papai’s scuffed, coal-black shoes.  Making maracas of my tiny shoulders, he glared down at me and scolded, “Yella gal, you is a rebel!”  As he shook me, my eyes flooded with tears and through them his angry face flickered, lessening my terror but not my sadness.  When he stomped away from me, the fragments of light remaining in my eyes faded into darkness.

Papai kept infant Desi for himself, and when she was tall enough to reach the faucets on the kitchen sink and the knobs on the top loading washing machine, he groomed her into a surrogate wife.  He had her cleaning the house, cooking, and washing and ironing clothes.   She had soft, feminine ways like Mamãe and was just as naïve.  Malleable.  Gullible.  It was painful to visit my dad and sister by that time – emotionally so in his case, because he had abandoned me; physically in her case because I would get a crick in my neck trying to talk with her while she was on her hands and knees.

Years later, when my younger sister got impregnated with Father Paulo’s seed, my dad hauled ass back to Mobile, Alabama, where he had lived before his visiting big-city cousins snatched him up at the age of fifteen and planted him in Brooklyn.  There in the inner city, dense with its concrete buildings instead of bluestem palms and slithering with criminals instead of copperheads, he lived with an overprotective paternal aunt named Creola.

Aunt Creola had both the complexion and endurance of those cast iron skillets that cooked everything – from crispy-ridged cornbread to fried okra – to perfection.  The way I heard it in between sips of Port wine, my great-aunt repeatedly would sting her palms on Papai’s hide whenever he tried to pull that man-of-the-house “boullsheeeyiiit” on her.  Switches and belts were out of the question, for she believed in a hands-on, ancestral branding.

When her hands turned arthritic, his aunt hired a home health aide named Camila.  It wasn’t long before the witty, voluptuous, young woman with black spiral curls put a romantic spell on my earthy, leather-skinned dad.  Before her physical decline, Aunt Creola may have been the one responsible for teaching him the virtues of leading a disciplined life.  However, as the story goes, he learned how to love within my mother’s warm embrace and over heaping plates of feijoada – black beans slathered in garlic-infused pork grease over a bed of white rice.

Following Mamãe’s death, my father passed on enrolling me in the second grade at a dilapidated Catholic school – Holy Sisters of the Rosary – in East New York.  Instead, I got whisked off across the Hudson River to dodge bullets in Newark, New Jersey.  Punishment for being a rebel, I figured.  To my delight, I was micromanaged into indecisiveness, living with my domineering maternal grandmother:  Vovó Gracília.

Gracília Eugênia María da Costa Abreu de Ferro was an immigrant born in Salvador, Bahia – a steel-pad-abrasive woman descended from African slaves snatched and traded from Angola and the Congo.  She hated my dad as surely as Xangô gave her thunderclaps for heartbeats.  Soon after arriving in the United States, she clamped onto the cultural grapevine to find the addresses of local botánicas.  She wanted to be sure they were stocked with enough candles, devotional figures, rosary beads and other religious symbols and products to help her beseech the orishas.  She wanted assurance that Camila, her only daughter, would marry a Brazilian of African descent who was fluent in Portuguese as well as in Candomblé rituals.  Her desire failed to become reality.

When a white scarf wasn’t fastened to my vovó’s head, her hair struck an avant-garde, steel pose.  The old woman’s only sweet side was her love of custard tarts, or uma pastel de nata.  She would bring them in fresh from the Brothers Menezes Bakery located down the tiny hill and around the bend, her breath perfumed with rose petals and her body reeking of recently evacuated black-bean gas.  She would lean her stinky cleavage into my nose while serving a tart.  When the sugar high would wear off, I wanted to make like a capoeirista and cartwheel back into my father’s arms.

Like my Portuguese and Italian classmates in the Ironbound section of Newark, who from a young age were served wine with dinner at the family table, I often enjoyed espresso with Vovó Gracília on school mornings.  Sitting in her green-and-white kitchen, she would sing to a samba throbbing from a cassette player, the tape unraveling with every pluck of the berimbau.  I, seated across from her in my Catholic school uniform, would be stirring demitasse spoonfuls of childhood dreams into my espresso – uma bica.

“Como é essa?” she’d ask in midlyric, her pointy nails tapping out the samba rhythm on the oak tabletop.

“É muito deliciosa,” I’d answer with a caffeinated smile.  “Obrigada, Vovó.”

By my early twenties and her late sixties, she occasionally would bring home sweet rolls from the same Portuguese-owned bakery.  In contrast to her huge posterior, which could rival that of any samba school’s spinning baiana at Brazilian Carnaval, her ebony fingers were remarkably delicate.  As she pulled apart the dense roll, my mouth would water.  I’d marvel at the pale-yellow bread’s elasticity and think about the brawny knuckles that had kneaded the dough.  Passing a fleshy section of roll to me, she’d explain the magic of yeast like a sultry TV chef.  She was like an African Brazilian Nigella Lawson but with as much cleavage in the front as at the back.

 

+ + +

 

After experiencing menarche at age thirteen, Vovó Gracília started warning me about “the branco.”  The two of us  even took a special trip to Bahia, where not only was I the guest of honor at a special rite of passage ceremony, but also my grandmother blessed me with a special potion containing my virgin blood to protect me from any brancos I might encounter in the United States. Half the time I paid my stern grandmother no mind.  If I was PMS-ing, though, I’d get foolishly brave and tell her, “You’ve let that Candomblé go to your white-scarved head.”  Usually on the night of such a comment on my part, I wouldn’t get a spanking.  Instead, something far more frightening would happen:  I’d find my hairbrush missing a prayerful of wiry brown curls.

She tried to scare me with stories of the Portuguese’s atrocities against Africans, and not only incidents in the days of Columbus, but omitted stories about voluntary interracial relations in “Bras-EE-u.”  Rough and nasal – that’s how her pronunciation of her beloved country sounded to my ears. I knew how to raise her ire – cautiously.  I would stand at some distance from her bovine authority and point to any of the framed photographs of her late husband, the São Paulo businessman Senhor de Ferro.  She would try to escape my wordless indictment only to find me leaping like a gazelle to her side and taking her hand.  She would twist the other way and try to bury her face in the crook of her elbow.  All the while I would remark, my eyebrows punctuating what her smile underlined, about her late husband’s buttermilk complexion and waterproof hair. In fact, she displayed so many photos of my Vovó Vicente, who was considered a pardo by Brazil’s racial classification, that I could watch him aging before my eyes as I sauntered from one room to another.

When I grew older and my bottom began expanding like yeast in a bowl, undoubtedly from my incremental overconsumption of custard tarts and sweet rolls, it no longer surprised me that the only portraits of my grandfather sporting jet black hair above sparkling eyes were propped up on the bureau, dresser and night table in my grandmother’s bedroom.  There, on certain mornings, I used to spot a stray battery or two near her brass bed while the cilia in my nostrils swayed upon contact with pungent remnants of randy recollections wafting through my grandparents’ sacred space.

 

+ + +

 

One underground commute not long ago, in a rear subway car of the tarnished-silver variety, I came face to face with my own temptation.  A branco transplanted in the state of New Jersey.  He was a middle-aged guy with the build of Portuguese fishermen who, by my grandmother’s account, used to pat big-bottomed Brazilian girls like her the way a fish vendor would tap the catch after it was slung on the scale.

My subterranean branco, who had barbells for shoulders, sauntered into the coach just seconds before the door shut.  I couldn’t blame him for seizing the moment.  It was the 4:05.  The last train before the rush hour, or “the squeeze,” so named for the crowd as well as the itinerant hands that disappeared into it.

I should’ve known something was amiss when the stocky man snubbed a suit who had tried to make small conversation and room in a prized corner.  Insulted, the corporate android shot out of the doors when they opened unexpectedly as if to rescue passengers too xenophobic to withstand “the squeeze.”

The broad-shouldered newcomer claimed the corner, from which he could assess the rest of us passengers, which totaled three.  I had been watching the man’s stealthy movements, and when he swiveled his head my way, he caught me checking him out.  I tried to avert my eyes, but they were drawn into his gaze like the tide rushing toward the dunes at sunset.

Two commuters seated on either side of me must’ve gotten a whiff of our pheromones because they departed the subway car upon hearing, “Last chance to board the 4:05 out of World Trade.”  He and I were now alone.  The doors shut for good, or bad.  Then we heard the conductor practically croon over the sound system:  “Ladies and gentlemen:  This train will be going express to Newark-Penn Station.  That’s right.  I said express.”

 

 

© 2010-2011 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

 

* * * * *

 

Above is an excerpt from my ebook Port Wine & Pink Lace, which is published in full on Smashwords.com.  Copies are available for purchase at http://smashwords.com.  Thank you for your support!

To those readers who offered encouragement and criticism, both privately and publicly:  I appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts with me.  To all of my readers:  Thank you for reading “Port Wine & Pink Lace” and other works of art that I developed on Negrotica.  You all give me extra inspiration, and that’s always a great thing.  Muito obrigada!

St. Thomas

 

Misted by sea air,

His lips tickle like palm fronds,

Then burn into me.

 

Copyright © 2010 By Chantale Reve

Dalí in the Skies

 

 

I psyched myself out for this seven-hour plane ride to Madrid. My five-page article last year in Allons! magazine, on sex tourism in Paris, had caught the eye of a prominent travel books publisher – a bruiser with Olivier Martínez eyes and a Javier Bardem smile.  I learned via our virtual tryst that the head of Azul Books shared my love for the films of Buñuel, the art of Dalí and the acquired taste for amontillado sherry. 

In my last e-mail to the Spaniard, I’d been effusive about writing for Azul and asked if he thought I was a real comer, to which he replied that I had incorrectly conjugated the verb comer.  My apology was answered with winking text detailing, in Hemingway fashion (think A Moveable Feast), how he planned to whisk me off to Majorca and eat me out between body shots of that expensive sherry.  Obviously my enthusiasm about being published abroad had been lost in translation.  Now I’m becoming anxious about landing  a contract with Azul, not to mention taxiing into Madrid.

Turbulence puts the fear of God in me, and if the meteorologist on that Spanish-news program on cable had her ears to His mouth, thunderstorms are pending in the capital city.  Momentarily I pretend that I’m carrying an umbrella in my briefcase and that I didn’t hear “una posibilidad de una noventa por ciento de lluvia” in the mid-November forecast for Madrid.

I don’t care what’s on the menu up here because I already can taste the tapas, which will be free after all the cañas I’ll line up at the bar this afternoon.  I’ll need all the liquid sustenance I can muster in preparation for a hectic Spanglish check-in and a “randy”-vous doubling as a business meeting with the Azul publisher this evening.

Anticipation of a tapas orgy in Madrid has me strolling the Iberia Air aisle with one hundred percent confidence and a wide-lipped smile like Nina Simone’s.  At five feet two inches, though, I’m dwarfed by the tall businessmen ahead of me, so it’s a struggle to spot my section.  Indeed, I have gotten lucky – much luckier than Azul’s head in his surreal, Buñuelesque dreams starring little old moi – because I nab a window seat.  The other two seats are empty, thanks to two would-be passengers who probably are relieving each other in a loo at Kennedy Airport in lieu of boarding this flight.  I toss my monogrammed briefcase and tweed swing coat into the spacious overhead compartment and stretch out in style.

“Yo no soy Señor Valencia García y Fernández.  Yo soy una mujer,” I say twenty minutes later to a haughty flight attendant before she pivots on stilettos, puzzled and undoubtedly dizzy.  After the necessary announcements and precautions from both captain and flight attendant – and an hour waiting for tardy passengers – we are primed for takeoff.  Hmmm, still no sign of my section mates, I ponder.

I size up the creative possibilities of this much legroom, freedom and semi-privacy.  As soon as the airplane is safely among the clouds, I begin fantasizing about a short story that I could tap out on my laptop:  an absurd tale about Gaudí returning to Barcelona, but reincarnated as a thirtysomething woman artist who’s pissed off at the way La Sagrada Familia has just been completed.

A chill seizes my extremities, and I abruptly dismiss the story idea.  My thoughts turn to Señor Valencia García y Fernández, whoever he is.  Maybe he isn’t the guy I’d imagined rubbing one out or receiving head in a men’s stall, after all.  I’m aware of the frequency of these toilet sex encounters because, long ago, I was married to an airline employee – a member of the hypersexual ground service crew.  His version of foreplay was regaling me with true stories about quid pro quo sex for access to Europe-bound luggage, female flight attendants initiating gangbang layovers, and an onanistic male flight attendant hitting three octaves while loosening a toilet seat off its hinges.

To my dismay, the detailed narrative about the screaming wanker was a firsthand account.  My secondhand memory of the event is evidence of the baggage I still carry concerning the failure of my first marriage, though it solved the mystery of an inordinate amount of gay porn I used to see in his video library when we were just dating.

The timing of this recall, however, is pertinent.  Listening to other passengers muttering obscenities under their breath about this delayed Iberia Air flight, I understand how so many people reach their destinations extremely late – and with tampered or burglarized luggage.  I wonder, almost out loud:  Glad I left my only pair of Louboutins at home.

I should be one to talk about the poor soul with the glistening boner back at the airport, the guy with a surname as long as the trail of brave, red-kerchiefed hombres who run with the bulls in Pamplona, for I nearly missed the flight myself.  I’d been searching for my favorite pantyhose, to no avail.  I found a pair of silk stockings instead.  My heavy thighs made the effort far from hasty, but the friction from twisting and turning left the crotch of my thong damp.

Now here I sit, only six more hours to go, and my thighs are exposed to the frigid air on the plane.  After buzzing an Iberia flight attendant for assistance, it takes her some time to sashay over.  I request a blanket and another eternity later get to cover my legs with a navy-blue number that depresses me suddenly.  Though not enduringly, as will the rain forecasted for Madrid this afternoon.   The air hostess says only first-class passengers receive blankets.  When I raise my skimpy, wool, pleated gray skirt to reveal a zebra-print thong hugging my voluptuous hips, she licks her lips and disappears through the curtain.

Within minutes I have not one, but two blankets, yet I’m still freezing under the chilly stare of the air slut.  I’m annoyed by her presence but my clit betrays me and pops out, pressing against the zebra thong’s soft and, now, wet cotton.  I can’t wait for mealtime, so my hands venture beneath the blanket to find a sweet snack.  My ebony fingers dab around in my dampness for what feels like hours but amounts to minutes.  My clit is so swollen that it feels as if it’s going to burst through my navel.  Imagining its deep flush sends the blood rising to my face, creating the impression that I’ve delicately applied rouge.

I need to take the edge off a bit, so I caress my mound upward and outward, indirectly contacting my clit.  Soft moans escape my throat. Inevitably my digits find their way to the throbbing bud before it returns to its protective sheath.  As after a delicious meal, I lick my fingers clean.  The flight attendant watches with parted lips as I repeat, but in slo-mo.  Just for fun, I ask her for a napkin and deliberately brush the back of her hand with my talons.  To see her knees go wobbly and her figure dash in the direction of the kitchen is worth the seduction, judging by how much wetter my thong has become.  I peek under the blanket to get a whiff of my pussy.  Hands dawdling between my thighs again, I drift to sleep.  But not for long.

How could I have known that a tall man seated one row back was spying on me while my eyes were either glazed-over or closed?  He ambles over to my seat and clears his throat.  Leaning down while grasping the seatback, he whispers that he was stroking his stiff dick beneath his own double layer of blankets.  I’m concerned that he’s aware I’m tapping my foot, but when I turn to meet his gaze, I’m startled that it’s fixated on my pouty lips.  While I was immersed in my own erotic heaven, he says, he watched me suck pearls of cum from beneath my airbrushed, acrylic fingernails.

An image invades my consciousness of him shooting his baby batter on the seat ahead of him.  The violence of that thought stirs the wetness in my nether junction, and I find myself shifting slightly under the blankets upon the man’s hesitant pat on my thigh.  Is that a groan? I inwardly inquire.  I dismiss the primal sound as a pre-orgasmic hallucination.

Taking the empty seat beside me, the dark-haired stranger rolls his calloused palm over my knee.  No words are spoken as his furry hands dawdle between my thighs.  My arched back tacitly permits him to reach behind to grope my asscheeks.  Instinctively I part my thighs, just a fraction to trap his hand.  At first he feigns struggle, but the caressing of my behind weakens my defenses, and soon his hand is free to roam again. 

When his fondling and my wiggling cause the blankets to fall away, my soaked zebra thong exposes an erection between the stripes.  He traces a forefinger along the outline of my bulging clit, which makes me flinch, so he slips the thong to the side and paws my thatched mound.  What I ask of him next – to write naughty messages on my thighs — turns out to be a poor effort to procrastinate from the inevitable:  digital penetration.  There’s something crude about fingering; it’s void of the soul-sharing that can happen during intercourse, even between casual lovers.

Like a Houdini illusion, the stranger’s fingers disappear into my cunt and my soaked thong emerges from his jacket sleeve.  Bedazzled, I reach out to grab my panties only to see them vanish.  Defeated, I fall back onto my seat, which shifts into a reclining position on its own.  At this angle, I can splay my legs as widely as a circus acrobat, giving his middle and index fingers a deeper plunge.  Unlike under the Big Top, though, I have no safety net.

To my surprise, his nosy digits begin to thicken upon each thrust into my moist hole; elongate with every teasing of flexing walls.  Playing Pinocchio in my pussy, he has me wondering about all the lies a man can whisper into a woman’s ear and forget by the time he cums.  More evasive than invasive, I muse.

My consciousness flickers back to the moment, and I feel the intensity of his fingering and how wantonly he’s tapping my clit.  He says he loves the feel of my juices and cream, that my nether parts are like a sweet shop in the friendly, azure skies. 

Copyright © 2010 By Chantale Reve

Above is an excerpt from my ebook Dalí in the Skies, which is published in full on Smashwords.com.  Copies of Dalí in the Skies are available for purchase at http://smashwords.com.  Thank you for your support!

Stiletto Blues

 

I’m tripping tonight on a neural loop,

Hiccups in my short-fusing memory

That I can’t for the life of me

Repent, ignore, rewrite or undo.

 

Wandering the seedy end of rue Plaisir-ouest

Nails scraping the brick exterior of trendy Club Marseilles,

I’m skulking in and out of dark, damp storied alleyways,

Destined for a dead end that leads me straight to you.

 

Whispers off centuries-old cobblestone wet

From sadistic pelting rains disguise

Swishing of black-fishnet-trapped thighs

And stilettoed steps stalked by a diligent duo.

 

You rise amid trash cans like a feral cat,

Hunched back casting a menacing shadow,

While a blind saxman by the bulging river blows

Away his pain with Formaldehyde-liver blues.

 

Beneath the ancient and indifferent glow

Of a sea-green Art Nouveau street lamp,

You tick-tock-watch me turn acrobatic tramp

Contorting like a yoga ho till my orifices get used.

 

Shaft brushing balls, cheeks clapping, syncopate into the night

As knobby cocks thrust ass to pussy curbside in St-Germain.

Repeated cries for mercy waver twixt pleasure and pain

From foreign fingers, lips and teeth marking my flesh on cue.

 

Erotic frisson deafening me to twin rumblings against pink walls,

Geysers shooting up my canals after dogged double penetration

Within prurient proximity of your emotional alienation,

I shudder on a gutter as you jack off from your vicarious screw.

 

Drained of tri-cum and guilty tears emptying into the Seine,

Wrapping the remnants of my conscience ’round a new mind-set,

I’m reflecting on how a repression-liberating orgy shall remain

A constant battle against conformity, flogging me with feathery regret.

 

 

Copyright © 2010 By Chantale Reve

A Raven on the Panahuoca River

Lourdes Hernández’s only desire that Wednesday morning had been to photograph squawking birds at the park and the celeste sky above it.  Three days later she pondered, How have I come to this?  Turning away from the whodunit on her forty-inch LCD television, she caught her dreary image in a Rococo mirror.  She was baggy-eyed, emotionally drained and nearly as tattered as her vintage sofa of dusty rose — a relic from a Massachusetts estate sale that she had acquired four years before meeting Miguel at Nouveau Romantic party just outside Thanostown.  Like her dilapidated soul, the sofa was heavy with the burden of unfinished past lives.

Unlike her first ex, the settee was still a part of her life after she gained an additional thirty pounds that couldn’t be attributed to baby weight.  Lourdes remained childless despite an inexhaustible supply of estrogen and ample hips that Miguel loved to grip during their intimate acrobatics.  Besides her repressed memory, the brocade-upholstered sofa was the only other entity that carried the secret of her body mass index and the erotic backstories for loose springs, nuts and bolts.

She couldn’t have chosen a worse time to put on extra pounds:  the occasion of her bestie’s wedding.  With the regal affair looming less than a week ahead, and the bride-to-be’s “feeling fab” status updates clogging her in-box as they had for the past six months, Lourdes found herself growing more insecure than at any other time in her life — save the period immediately following Miguel’s breakup with her.  Thirteen years after he and his ghastly entourage of hooded drapery and Argentan rope jewelry had swooped down on her threadbare existence, she had lost an unconsciously waged competition to the Icelandic harlot in Miguel’s alternative band, Mausoleum.

As claustrophobia brought on by her girl’s approaching wedding deadline of the twenty-second of September increased in its intensity, Lourdes was beginning to doubt that she could be anyone’s maid of honor, especially when Giovanna had been acting like a royal pain in the arse since her engagement the previous year.  She couldn’t believe that her heretofore vulgar friend now was expecting her to assume the manners of a noblewoman.  I should’ve suspected something when she’d rush me off the phone to watch reruns of “Last of the Summer Wine,” Lourdes thought. As the reality of Giovanna’s post-wedding relocation to Downtown San Diego closed in on her, she imagined her two-bedroom apartment shrinking to a linen closet’s proportions unbefitting a lady-in-waiting.

The One for whom Lourdes had waited had no chance of returning after a six-year absence.  She didn’t believe in backtracking, and receiving Miguel’s epistolary dumping was no exception.  He had ditched her via an e-mail that ended, “Until we meet again, on the other side of madness.”  For an added touch of the occult, she had conjured up her immortal beloved impersonating Vincent Price’s fiendish laughter at the end of “Thriller.”

Raven hair in disarray, she tried to flip the frown in her reflection but gave up when the corners of her mouth began hurting.  Perhaps we should keep this lonely interlude to ourselves, she advised her telepathic, sedentary twin.  Since Wednesday’s incident, she had been experiencing a different degree of pain.  As panic set in that Giovanna’s bridal shower was less than three hours away, her fraying nerves were threatening to snap.  Her unraveled spirit, like threads of an antique silk dress, seemed beyond repair.

Suddenly, her image smiled derisively back at her.  She grabbed her Hopi kachina doll and aimed it at the looking glass but had a change of heart when she recalled the last segment of Trilogy of Terror.  More importantly, she recollected that Miguel had held her spellbound as he recounted how he obtained the colorful kachina:  On a snow-dusted road back from Sedona one Christmas, he had traded a Limoges enamel vial of semen for the doll.  He also had frozen his red rocks off inside his broken-down Buick.

Somewhere in present-day Arizona, Lourdes contemplated with a devilish smile, his spitfire spawn were penning hellish lyrics and burning their guitars among resilient cacti. She hadn’t been thinking that way, though, when he was spinning his tall tale that winter because he claimed that the doll’s presence under his belt from Sedona to Thanostown kept his memory of her close to his heart.

“So y’always wear your heart close to your dick?” she had gibed, melting him into a sexy smile that revealed overlapping, protruding, off-white front teeth which she found distinctive and adorable.

“What can I say, babe,” he had replied, brushing his feathery ebony mane against her flushed cheek and tracing her Luna mount with a stubby black-lacquered fingernail.  “I was missin’ you so much that I was heavy-hearted.”

Their suggestive conversation, and the unbridled cosmic sex that followed, were still fresh in her mind.  But the only visitations from the self-proclaimed “erotic sorcerer” occurred in wet dreams, such as the extended vignette from which she reluctantly had awakened during nap time. Fact was, the virile Miguel De Los Cuervos was nowhere to be found. Having subscribed to all the major social media networks in a desperate attempt to locate him, she was practically moonlighting as a detective.

Since her lover vanished, Lourdes had fornicated with only one guy:  a Viagra-toting pharmaceutical salesman named Willie, who couldn’t resist sampling the merchandise.  His near-fatal heart attack on their second date — in her cherry wood sleigh bed — convinced her to take a vow of celibacy for good.  And to swear off blue M&Ms forever.  She just didn’t think five years would lead to a gray wasteland at the aqueous edges of Thanostown.  As she re-evaluated her vows like a nun with an aversion to blue-dyed candies, she reminisced about her true ex until her black eyeliner was bleeding into her crow’s feet.

The ornate mirror reflected one stark truth:  She was morphing into one of the Goth anti-heroines of songs in which her former boyfriend once raged as Mausoleum’s frontman. Often she used to chant his name in the audience, rationalizing away the stench of the band’s sweat showers and flatulence bombs in nightclubs that were conversions from rat-infested dungeons.

In the six years that had ticked by since Miguel brought her to kaleidoscopic orgasms within his black-rose-tatted chokeholds, since his Apadravya piercing crowned her his queen on their royal velvet throne, she had buried the spoken-word poet only to give birth to the nature photographer. Three days earlier, digital camera at the ready, she had been on her way to a artistic breakthrough.  Poised behind the lens, she had been eager to skew a rotten world from positive angles. Then something went awry.

Mulling over what transpired in the park, repeating the playback, she sniffled into her slate sweatshirt sleeve. For the moment, she couldn’t care less who was nursing a gunshot wound on the two-hour Saturday evening mystery movie on television.  She also couldn’t abate her sobbing any more than she could stop the Iguazu Falls.  But she didn’t need to fly on standby to South America to push herself over the edge.

After obsessing for three whole days about the knife she had sunk in someone’s back, she had carved a new continent on which she was destined to be eternally alienated.  She huffed. Screw Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ’66 with their “Mundo Hermoso,” she mused.  For me, it’s population one. Lourdes gave the mirror a stay of execution and dragged herself away from the chilly rec room.

In her frou-frou bedroom, she plopped on the sleigh bed and yanked open a nightstand drawer.  Rummaging through an assortment of goods yielded a reward:  her emergency reserve of Godiva truffles.  Careful to avoid splinters from the drawer’s unfinished wood, she found a morsel of self-respect.  Next she needed to summon up the moxie to phone her best friend in order to apologize for being unfashionably late to her bridal shower.  Unless everyone was late, the big event would’ve begun at half past six.  After all, Giovanna had selected her old pal from Sunken Meadows High over her younger half-sister, Fiamma — whom she adored — to serve as maid of honor.

A marathon crying spell had launched fifteen minutes into breakfast, making her milk salty and her Corn Pops soggy. Lourdes was left with partially congested sinuses, but by the time she absentmindedly went through half the bankrupting box of bonbons, her taste buds and composure returned.  She scratched an armpit and sank her teeth into one more Champagne-filled chocolate, then speed-dialed Giovanna’s wireless number.  While she waited for a connection, she wondered if a chiseled exotic dancer was straddling the bachelorette at the Nevoc Country Club, which was sprawled among the mountains above Thanostown.  She hoped that forgiveness would come easy if the well-paid and -endowed stripper was helping Giovanna soak her panties until the silver studs spelling out Vincenzo & Giovanna Forevuh rusted away.  Otherwise, Lourdes was going to require cosmetic surgery after breaking the news to her BFF that, worse than being late, she wasn’t planning to attend her shower at all.

She was about to hang up by the fourth ring when Giovanna answered, popping gum as usual.  Probably Doublemint, Lourdes guessed.  Upon hearing the bride-to-be’s terse greeting, she swallowed one more ounce of chocolate bliss and began her tearful account …

* * *

Her first mistake was skipping work that Wednesday, calling in sick when in reality she had become exasperated with the morbid realm of inanimate objects.  She hadn’t earned her bachelor of science degree to end up a security guard at Thanostown’s three hundred thirty-year-old natural-history museum.  Standing on her feet all day was easy; being surrounded by glassed-in stiff carcasses was creepy.  There was a limited script on which to rely when conversing with visitors, as the museum frowned on “unnecessary fraternization.”  Stuffed zebras and monkeys couldn’t converse with her or share their opinions about the immense world outside.  She desired to be surrounded by life, laughter and what she called the sensual swells of the Panahuoca River.

By the river lay a park.  Eden Park.  Regardless of the season, its grounds attracted lovers and the lovelorn, athletes and intellectuals.  Usually, she would scope out the park, jog its perimeter thrice, and then stop by the Jamerican Juice Doctor for an all-natural pomegranate punch.  However, this wasn’t a typical Wednesday, or “hump day.”  Rather, this was a day of liberation by design.  To celebrate her sense of renewal, she fancied compiling a digital scrapbook of photos documenting her excursion.  With her goal in mind, she reached for the drawer of one of her twin nightstands and fumbled with its brass handle, which slightly dangled from the escutcheon.

After fidgeting among three years’ worth of EterniReady lithium triple-A batteries for nearly as long, she finally found her Canon Mark III.  In her imagination she was an optimist, storing her EOS digital SLR camera bedside with sealed-in-package blindfolds, anal beads and a neon-pink feather that she should’ve used to dust the eclectic furniture in her spacious apartment.  Before the demise of her and Miguel’s gothic romance, if a burglar had stumbled upon the deep drawer, he or she would’ve assumed that the apartment’s occupant had stock in the company which was a head above the rest in producing the thoroughbred of condoms.  However, because of rubbers’ shelf life, for the second time in five years she had discarded only one twelve-pack of the lubricated, ribbed variety.  Before she closed the drawer, her eyes crinkled as she remembered one of Miguel’s wicked jokes as they snuggled in the afterglow of his Dracula-inspired bedroom:  something about the coup de grace of casual sex, a ripped condom and glue.

Within an hour she was dressed in rufous sweats and a roomy white T-shirt reading BITE ME in 78-point black Impact font — a June birthday gift from the vivacious, tenacious Giovanna.  Or Vanna for short.  Since she was none too eager to show her belly rolls to passers-by, Lourdes allowed the tee to flow over her pants, which hugged her honeydew melon-sized glutes.  Turning away from the lengthwise mirror in the hallway, she muttered, “Camera, check.  Smart disc, check. Batteries, check.”  A full exhale later, she sprinted past the sunny kitchen to unlatch the chain on her door.  The cordless phone ringing by the pantry froze her midstep.

Figuring it could only be Giovanna begging her to recite an affirmation for the day — anything to distract her from her wedding a week away — Lourdes dashed out the door and left for Eden Park.  Already she was feeling guilty but her new day of freedom could wait no longer.  Her lively gait drew a smile from an elderly widowed neighbor, Mrs. Gertrude Simmons, who attempted to shout but managed to rasp:  “Enjoy this fine, fine day, young lady.  And,” lowering her trifocals, she added, “beware of strangers.”

I’m not that young anymore, Lourdes thought to herself.  She ambled over to the curb, gave herself a once-over starting from her tangerine-and-white kicks and ending at the gravity-afflicted breasts that she tried to ignore were squeezed together inside her sports bra.  “Fuck it,” she said, not caring if anyone heard her.  Shrugging off a shadow of despair, she reflected:  After all, I am in the autumn of my life.  Just when she was feeling confident, a nubile twentysomething jogged inches from her shoulder, causing her bouncy blonde pony to flaggellate Lourdes’ tan face. “Puta!” she yelled out, feeling rosy splotches rise up in her cheeks, but she was wasting her breath on the plugged-in, iPod-entranced Aphrodite.

* * *

Stepping onto the pier at the western end of Eden Park, Lourdes was pensive.  The park offered picturesque panoramic views and sinuous paths.  Beyond a wide curve facing Tituba’s Island in the direction of a red gazebo, one couldn’t know what awaited. Heeding Mrs. Simmons’ warning, she remained vigilant.  She scrutinized her surroundings and strained her eyes to inspect the far reaches of the pink-brick promenade, which circled a vast Italian-style garden on both sides of the acid-rain-washed gazebo.

Keeping pace with a male pigeon puffing up and showing his true colors – fuschia – to a reluctant mate, she leaned into a mid-September breeze billowing from the Panahuoca River.  Pausing, she shut her eyes to allow the fantasy of cool air currents dancing through her thermally straightened jet-black hair, which tickled her lumbar spine.  She imagined the small wind blowing around the pier flowing upward.  Smiling, she observed receptive trees chattering with crispy leaves.

Fall was her fickle lover, often leaving her chilly.  “How I long for spring!” she wanted to exclaim.  Springtime offered many chances to reach out to caress supple, green leaves and to reflect on distant youth.  In contrast, autumn reminded her of how quickly she was approaching the winter of her life.  Despite nature’s beautiful symmetry in red, gold, wine and orange, the crêpe leaves descending upon the pavement sounded thuds to her ears.  Before depression could grip her spirit, Lourdes sipped from citrus-flavored water that splashed around in her trusty squeeze bottle.  “Ahhhh,” she said, aware of her breath and the tranquillity of her surroundings.  She removed her camera from the messenger bag that Miguel had gifted her during their penultimate year as a couple.

Barn swallows and seagulls waddling closer to the steel railing appeared to pose for her, when actually they were loitering in search of food.  She didn’t care about their intention; only that she co-existed with them in those moments over the pier.  Allowing nature to guide her camera, she pointed with purpose: straight ahead to a swallow hopping over seams in the pier, obliquely to a seagull pecking at its side, then upward to a periwinkle sky threatening afternoon rain.  She fancied Thoreau as her Muse and Eden Park as her Walden Pond.

So occupied was her mind that she failed to notice a fellow pedestrian strolling behind her.  After he waltzed in front of her, eliciting a gasp, he said, “Sorry, doll.”  Oozing Philip Bosco’s charm but possessing Robert Loggia’s craggy voice and snow-white hair, he bowed like a gent in a Belle Epoque ballroom and asked permission to snap her photo.

“Uh, noooowuh,” she declined in her passive, little-girl’s voice.  But the seventy-ish man was persistent.  He figured that he could persuade her differently.  “Call me ‘Pops,’”  he insisted.

“Hola, Pops,” Lourdes said, reclaiming her natural vocal timbre, which was a sultry and coquettish combo, if Jennifer López’s voice could be superimposed on Dania Ramírez’s. “I’m nobody special.  Why don’t you bother some other girl, hunh?”

“Don’t sell yourself short, dear,” he advised her.

“I’m not for sale,” she cracked.  What she felt, though, was fear.

“You misunderstand,” he returned.  He paused, then leaned his five-foot-nine frame toward her and formed a church with facing palms.

Apprehensive that he was a charming thief, she tucked the camera in her bag and moved what was supposed to be an idyllic photo shoot to a temporary file within her consciousness.

Pops eyed her movements and then danced around her, and his intentions, again.  “I would’ve framed your essence, if you had let me.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, trying not to peer into his bewitching brown eyes.  “Besides, no one gets to touch my camera but I.”

The suave, senescent stranger desired to touch her.  Though fighting temptation, he nevertheless was enjoying the flirtation. He was the Cabernet to her must.  Oh, she has so much to learn, he assured himself.  It delighted him that he had closed in on her like a late-summer gust off a bend in the Panahuoca River.  Now his body was betraying him with insidious reactions:  Palpitations increased, and his emerging erection filled out any creases in his crotch.  He allowed his eyes to fall on every curve that the soft breeze winding around her tee and sweats revealed there on the pier. 

“You can trust me,” he kept repeating as he tapped his loafered foot on the pink pavement.  Watching as her pupils returned to a state of relaxation, he moved in for the thrill.

Lourdes had heard various acquaintances relate stories of faith about ordinary people disguised as angels and thus began to lighten up and just observe the man.  What can this ol’ geezer possibly do anyway? she asked herself.

Within minutes she was seated with the gray-bearded drifter on a park bench, disclosing to him various events of the past decade. As a tear traced her cheek during one memory of the cad who downed so many male-enhancement pills that at times he could’ve been a fourth member of The Blue Man Group, her mysterious companion reached up with a monogrammed handkerchief to blot her face dry.  Snuffling, she tried to make out the two embroidered, maroon letters as the cloth touched the tip of her nose, but when her eyes crossed, she abandoned the effort.

Deep inside she was at ease with the stranger, who on second impression seemed a gentle soul.  From time to time she glanced over at the ominous river, meditating on how it overflowed with broken dreams and romances.  Seated to her right side and hanging off the park bench a tad, the man traded his own stories of love and loss with her raw tales about Miguel. Although no one was passing by them at the moment, she lowered her voice to a whisper as she recounted how, toward the end of their relationship, her ex once shared with her his dream of taking her slowly in the real-life Blue Lagoon.

“As he thrusted in and out of my channel from above,” she revealed to Pops, “all that I could focus on were his glossy dark brown eyes and remote smile in the natural light of my double-hung bedroom windows, not my pleasure and our bliss.”

“I bet your lover was doubly hung,” he interrupted, then erupted into laughter.

“Cool it, Pops.  It was a prophetic moment between us.  That asshole,” she said, trying not to laugh.  “And you know, the funny thing is:  Despite how exquisite it felt with him banging me like that, I started thinking that he was fantasizing about pounding his Björk doppelgänger bitch.”

“Oh, are they engaged now?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” she said, “but I sure disengaged his cock that  morning.”

Pops scooted closer to her on the bench.  As sensitive in body as in mind, she absorbed his thermal heat.  She started fanning her face, but he pushed down her hand with his.  “My turn,” he spoke.

“Sure,” she said.  Perhaps she was uncertain about his motives, but she no longer was jumpy.  He had hooked and reeled her in like a fish that had strayed far from its school into the alluring Panahuoca River.

Noon closed in as Pops captured Lourdes’ heart as intimately as her camera had framed the birds.  She wished that Miguel had possessed his genuineness, especially when the man confided in her a story about a series of trysts “in the old country” with a homemaker who specialized in kneading dough with her massive breasts.   “Never since then have I tasted bread that delectable,” he remarked, guffawing and slapping his left knee so hard that Lourdes felt the vibration travel to her clit.

“How long did the affair last?” she asked, crossing her legs to stave off the excitement.  She could feel a drizzle heading down a warm thigh.  While he stared up into the portentous sky, she wondered, What I’d give right now for a tryst.  An appointment.  A rendezvous.  Now that I’ve opened myself to a random stranger, I feel that I’ve signed a pact with the Devil.  An antitryst.

“When la balena went into a baking frenzy at the expense of her husband’s dinner,” Pops said, “he turned so suspicious that he quit his job as a fisherman in la Marina di Pisciotta.”

He overflowed with stories, yet the one that had Lourdes transfixed involved his own wife, who had lost her libido somewhere amid his last confessions of adultery and eventually divorced him.  To make matters worse, Pops said, he hadn’t seen his daughter in decades because his ex-wife had turned her against him.  He clutched his heart at the end of the sentence, where he explained how “the absence of sex can be compared to death.”  Lourdes sympathized with her newfound acquaintance’s grief, absentmindedly patting his left hand.  He, in turn, slowly lifted her hand with his right one and planted a peck on her reddened knuckles.  She smiled, assuming his anachronistic gallantry would end there.  To her surprise, he was only beginning.  Over five decades of loving and losing, he had learned all the artful manners of seduction.

Leaning back, he unbuttoned his black cotton shirt and then folded it on the bench’s arm.  Then he slithered so close to her torso, wrapping his leathery arms around it, that she trembled from the shock of full-on human embrace.  As he licked between her stubby fingers, she couldn’t fight the involuntary right-toe curls inside her soft white tennis sock.  Her uneven sighs coaxed him into kissing the palm of one hand, then the other.  Her moans mingling with murmurs of rustling leaves sent a surge of lust through his brain right down to his scrotum.  She felt his hands over her breasts, on top of the T-shirt, but cupping her generous flesh there nonetheless.  When she tossed her head back against his shoulder, he didn’t lose time lifting her shirt to taste what fought to escape the sports bra.  Feeling his steamy mouth enveloping her right tit, she gasped and kicked his shin, which had the unintended effect of him biting where he desired to suck.

“Mi dispiace amore mio,” he apologized, hardly pausing from making love to her.

“Te perdono, señor,” her voice lilted toward his flushed ear.

The May-December lovers’ sensual movements went barely noticed as if there were some kind of park etiquette for observing extreme public displays of affection.  This ol’ dude’s got no hangups over PDE — public displays of erections, she thought whimsically as the elderly man’s road-mapped hands rediscovered secret crevices that were hers alone to cherish.  Never before had she exhibited odd leg movements outside of playing a sordid version of Twister or fighting to free herself of Miguel’s labyrinthine ropes and chains.  Just as uninhibited as their caresses was their laughter.  But Pops’ ambidextrous fondling had a way of reminding her that his levity cloaked a serious brand of lasciviousness.  Ohhhhh, Miguel, she sighed within as Pops continued to rub and diddle her feverish parts.

Through the undulating mist from the Panahuoca River, she heard the man’s moist whispers, such as “I desire to tickle your ears.  Close your eyes.”  She kept both eyes open, however. Not being able to see his tongue tip wriggle along her pinna titillated her.  His thick, fuzzy pink organ reminded her of how the cilia of a lime green caterpillar felt after it had tumbled from a dangling tree branch and then crawled along her auricle during her Girl Scout troop’s nature walk in the Adirondacks.  She was twelve then.  Now she was forty-three but no less confused.  As the serpentine stranger convinced her more and more that he was no angel after all, Lourdes split into her emotional and rational selves — one trying to convince her to follow his wisdom, the other urging her to worm her way out of his lubricious embrace.

Lourdes suggested they amble over to the red gazebo, surprising herself at the same time that she was enabling an absolute stranger’s outdoor fetish.  Pops’ tongue invaded her mouth while his restless fingers slipped beneath her sweatpants’ waistband.  Her brain shut down momentarily, lengthening seconds into an excruciating eternity.  When her bag slid off her lap, carrying with it Miguel’s ethereal presence, it was replaced by rising and falling knuckles that resembled tiny, orange, grotesque heads sucking at her cunt lips.  On the sturdy park bench of peeling green paint, she enjoyed his fingering of her vulva, and stroking and kissing on her clavicle and neck, which felt like the bodywork of two men. A supernatural ménage à trois.

Like Miguel, Pops knew how to tantalize her to convulsive effects by never directly rubbing her clit.  Squirming against him in the breezy harbor, she felt his shifting position and, to her surprise, his generous member poking sizable dimples in her fleshy thighs. Between lapping of river waves against the pier’s shafts and naughty encouragements rolling from the man’s Southern Italian tongue, her labia were throbbing above her pelvic floor like a reddish pink octopus trapped in a viscous sea.  He unscrambled her spell and found her magic spot. Ignoring her warbled protests, he pinned down her leg with his knee.  When the first of several lightning bolts hit her, she nearly blew out his eardrums and could’ve summoned Yemaya from the depths of the Panahuoca River.

Lourdes couldn’t believe pleasure could be so random and yet bring her so close to the truth of who she was as a woman. Moments later, she also couldn’t understand how she could ponder metaphysics while scraping her knees against the brick pavement, masturbating and orally stimulating a man old enough to be her father.  Light-years away from Miguel, she was really engaged in the action at hand.  Replacing Pops’ prick with her ex’s, she lost track of time and her sanity during the act of irrumatio.  Her aging Casanova knew intuitively that she was using him as a tool, and he couldn’t be happier.  She indulged in deep-throating him while he grabbed a palmful of dark tresses to modulate her rhythms till they were evoking the hypnotic percussion of Cuban son.  Her plump breasts, which he had freed from her sports bra, were sore from banging against the bench’s edge. Such was the intensity of her pleasuring.  Each time the wily stranger groaned, the wet spots on her sweatpants multiplied.  Her mind spun with the anticipation of how he would reciprocate, if his pre-climax verbal meanderings about not underestimating a septuagenarian were genuine.

At some point between tonguing the stranger’s sweaty scrotum and slobbering over his near-purple, erect frenulum and shaft, she heard him yammering about an upcoming wedding. She sucked harder at his manhood, but her paramour was losing his erection, to her dismay. If only Lourdes hadn’t asked him if he wanted to talk about it — but she did and he seemed to speak in slow motion as he complained about the enormous cost of his daughter’s wedding.  She switched back to giving him a handjob and intensified each stroke while talking filthy in Spanish.  When his rigid cock was, again, begging for relief in her warm mouth, he resumed chattering about his “goddamned daughter, Giovanna.”  He was banging her tonsils as he said it.  At the exact moment that her face registered surprise, he came.

Daaaamn, I’m glad I got mine.  I guess the only way he’s going downtown now is to shoot over by the bar on his way home, she contemplated.  I must’ve lost a helluva lot of weight sucking his dick because I thought that it wasn’t over “till the fat lady sings.”

After Pops’ orgasm finished wracking his wrinkled body, his lips widened into a smile akin to Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland fame.  To Lourdes, he was no cat, but a snake, and she wished for the mongoose of a Rudyard Kipling tale.  While he shook his dick and thanked her huskily, she gave herself a reality check.  Watching him drain the shrinking head, she tasted his bitter seed on her tongue.  Disgusted, she roughly wiped his semen from her neck and breasts.  Avoiding his stare burning through her swollen nipples as she retrieved her bag, she prayed that the few, white drops of semen which she had flung from her flesh and now were pooling in the cracks of the pier wouldn’t kill the weeds and sprout into a homunculus destined to live beneath the Panahuoca River, feeding on bloated bodies of the drowned.  Or, worse, fated to live among the droopy trees in Eden Park and, upon maturity, preying on virgins sunbathing on the moist grass the following summer.

Despite her abundant body fat, she had enough adrenaline to jump to her feet.  As she gathered her belongings, giving Pops the silent treatment the entire time, she wondered:  How could I be Giovanna’s bridesmaid now?  Undeserved tears rolled down her cheeks, but this time she wouldn’t let the swinging smooth operator play Bogart to her Bergman.  Loverman was left stupified on the bench, his fly open, and his genitals exposed.

It didn’t matter that her knees were as sore as those of a pilgrim crawling up the limestone steps of some church in Southern Spain. For Lourdes, faith and love had taken a holiday as surreptitiously as she had called in sick that morning. “Hump day” in all its meanings went unfulfilled; her lusty path to liberation detoured into seedy territory.  With a tear in her eye and a cramping in her calves, she limped away from the pink promenade, waving her raven hair from her face. She abandoned the chirping birds and gray sky.  She cursed the Panahuoca River under her breath for luring her with its sensuality and the promise of rebirth from its amniotic depths evermore.

* * *

After listening in silence to her maid of honor explaining what had gone down in Eden Park three days prior, an exasperated Giovanna blew a raspberry into the phone and then snickered for a solid minute.  Lourdes was befuddled.  She had just confessed to her best friend that she had blown her father, in public.  Absorbing Giovanna’s comical reaction, all she could think was: What Mr. Buonofacci had flaunted on the park bench was far larger than a raspberry — but far more bitter.

“So’s that the only reason ya hidin’ out in the Beaumont Apartments instead of shakin’ it up wit my wedding party heah at the Nevoc Country Club?” Giovanna asked while Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” was blasting in the background amid louder perimenopausal female shouts of “Hey, hottie, c’meeere!” and “You got enough room for ten singles, handsome?!”

Lourdes was flabbergasted and aroused at the same time.  A mean shade of red.  “Shit, yeah.  How can I face you now?” she quizzed.

“Easy,” said the inebriated bride-to-be.  “Lourdie,” she slurred, “my fuckin’ dad’s a ho, and that’s accordin’ ta my ma.”

“Geez, Vanna, even though I was sucking down a throatful of his cock, I wouldn’t go that far,” Lourdes said, surprising herself that she was defending her parkside prowler.

“Oh yeah?  Hmpf.  Some nights,” Giovanna explained, “Mami caught him in the shadows, creepin’ toward my childhood room.  Seems he wasn’t gettin’ enough from his hoes, but she stopped him from touchin’ me and my older sister, Tessa, wit the threat of doin’ a Bobbitt.”

“Vanna, I didn’t know thaaaaat.  How could I have?  Shit, I’m sorry you went through all that,” Lourdes said by way of apology.

“It’s all right ’cos we both was spared the wrath of his dick.  Mami kicked his sleazy ass out,” Giovanna said.

“Wow, you were a strong person even way back when,” Lourdes praised.

“Welllll, not as strong as ya knees three days ago,” Giovanna japed.  “Anyways, you obviously needed ta getcha some — wait, ya didn’t actually screw ’Signore Pene,’ didya?”

“No, pero, I crossed a line.  Dammit, I sucked your father’s dick!  There, I said it,” Lourdes confessed.  Again.  This time, however, she started bawling.

“Save ya tears, girl.  Now we’re even,” Giovanna reasoned through the murkiness of her pickled brain.

“Vanna, how can — ”  Lourdes was interrupted by more laughter from her bestie.

“Remember when ya went away ta Broward U and didn’t bring ya ass back home until the followin’ summer?” Giovanna forced her pal to recall.

“Yeah, but I’m sure you can remember that around that time my dad and I’d been spatting more than he and his hoochie-girlfriend-of-the-month.  That bitch Quiana,” Lourdes growled.

“Unh-hunh.  Welllll, I got an update,” Giovanna informed her. “Quiana put on her fuck-me heels and stepped out on his ass, leavin’ him lonely and …”

“And?” Lourdes pressed her.

“Girlllll, I …,” Giovanna answered cautiously.

“You what?  What-what-whaaaaaat?!” Lourdes implored her.

“I fucked ya papi.  That’s what,” Giovanna shot back.

“¿Qué?  You mean César, right?  The dude we met in our junior year at Sunken Meadows, at that basketball game?” Lourdes asked, her perspiration beading on her high forehead.

“Nah, chica.  Wrong papi.  I mean Mistah Hernández,” her sotted bestie revealed.  Burp!

“Oh, hell!  My dad?!” Lourdes exclaimed.

“Uhmmm-hmmm, and he was so gooooood ta me,” Giovanna boasted.  “Whatta dilf!  Made me dress up like a fuckin’ schoolteacha.”

“That’s fucked up, Vanna.  You know how often I used to tell you back in the ninth grade that my Pops wanted me to become a teacher.  Geeeez, you were a slut back then, too!”

“Oops, ya said ‘Pops.’  Isn’t that what my dad wanted ya ta call him in the park, Lourdie?  Ooohhh, who’s the slut now,” Giovanna teased.

“Screw you,” Lourdes snapped.

“No, girl, I don’t do that yin-yin shit anymoah,” Giovanna joked.  “Besides, ya need ta save that pussy for my fatha.  He’s what ya’ll be doin’ after the rehearsal dinner next Friday.  Ho-ho-hoe!”

“That’s so low of you, Vanna,” Lourdes said.

“Not as low as ya ass was ta the ground in Eden Park, ap-par-ent-ly,” her drunken friend reminded her.  Just then, Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” surfaced in the background, and Giovanna yelled “Oh-ohhh!  Oh-ohhh!” in Lourdes’ ear, then added:  “I can just see ya scrapin’ ya knees on that pavement the way ya described ta me.”

“Shut it,” Lourdes retorted in frustration. “I may be a newbie at casual sex, but I’m no ho.”

“And droolin’ ovuh my papa’s salami,” continued Giovanna as if her friend hadn’t been speaking.  “Ha-ha-haaaaa!”  Howling, she began snorting like Sandra Bullock, then choking.

Giovanna’s callousness had Lourdes imagining that she could’ve snorted something in the company of her dicey fiancé, Vincenzo – nicknamed “Neve” – prior to leaving for her shower.  Or right there at the party. “You are fucked up, Vanna!” she cried.  “All this time, I thought you were my girl!”

“Look, I am still ya girl,” Giovanna relented, “so getcha thick ass ovuh heah ta my bridal shower.  Ya need ta get some life in ya — before my dad pumps it outta ya.”

Fuming, Lourdes disconnected her intoxicated friend.  Stripping on her way to the bathroom to take a shower, she hoped that she could cool off.  At the very least, she would try once again to cleanse Mr. Buonofacci’s film from her body, though the filthy negatives stored in her photographic memory were indelible.

* * *

Forty-five minutes after one of the most dismal telephone conversations in her life, Lourdes asked the cabdriver to pull over to the curb.  “I’ll just need a few minutes,” she assured him, “but in case I’m longer, I’ll give you a twenty for your troubles.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” he said, grinning and flashing dollar signs for pupils.

“You’re welcome, sir.  I’d pay you mo’, but I’m po’,” she replied, then chuckled halfheartedly.  She caught him trying to study her face in the mirror that he had adjusted above his dashboard, but she turned toward the window so that he couldn’t see her velvet black eyeliner running into the corners of her pouty mouth.

“Anything wrong, lady?” he inquired.

“No, it’s the streetlight glowing in my eyes,” she lied.  So fuckin’ intuitive, she cursed him silently.

The driver tipped his tweed cap, scratched his balding brown head and parallel parked outside Eden Park.  Moments later, it was a struggle for his passenger to exit the backseat, but he didn’t mind the wait.  His head seesawed as he enjoyed ogling, through the rectangular mirror, her soft breasts tumbling toward the sliding window as she stuffed the bill in the wooden groove. She was aware that he was peeping through his mirror and, in her dark mood, hoped a concussion would teach him a lesson.

Ignoring her black taffeta gown’s three-foot train, Lourdes traipsed the tree-shrouded pavement toward the railing at the park’s northern border.  Under a quarter moon but a dearth of stars, her eyes twinkled as she strolled the harbor.  When she reached a point directly across from Tituba’s Island, she bunched the sides of her dress with clammy hands.  Silver slivers of waves seemed to wink up at her, and her draped hips resisted the magnetic field as if pinned beneath a doting lover after his long, unexplained absence.  Her eyes cut a path in the Panahuoca River toward the island, where dark surf licked at the shore the way Miguel’s slender fingers often had picked the strings of his Strat in bed.

Those melodies were part of the soundtrack to their romance lifetimes ago.  Behind the dawn he would gun his motorcycle toward her place after his band’s last set. Noisier than his hog’s engine, she used to snore through a third dream as he charged through the apartment door and barked at her like a short-order cook to “wake your hot ass up!”  Then he would unsling his case, whip out the “Ripper” — Miguel’s hypocorism for his ax — and climb atop her shuddering supine bod.  She would return to sleep while he crooned a smut-laced lullaby, a blunt balanced behind his left ear.  She would awaken in a pungent haze to his dissonant groans as he snaked in and out of her — a silhouette burning into an abyss where the yawning sun couldn’t reach.

The only music in her ears at the moment, though, was the harmonious sound of rippling water.  Like a black wallflower peeled away from the flimsy security of invisibility, she vacillated at the pier’s edge.  Although barely perceptible, the structure’s gentle surrender to the river’s caress disoriented her. Gripping the railing’s top barre, she resembled a novice ballerina disguised as a Victorian time traveler.  Clinging to steel, to something real, she sensed that her soul was slow-dancing to the waves’ splashing through fluid memories of Miguel. Searching for his intense, deep-set, pinched eyes among shadows hovering over the waves’ illuminated crescents, she failed to grasp why his spirit lingered.

“Where are you?” she asked the silence. She wondered if his preference for her middle name — Esperanza — had cursed her, especially when its meaning had eluded her once he departed her life. So many unanswered questions raced through her mind, not only about her erstwhile lover’s disappearance but also about her sleazy recent encounter with the beguiling stranger. Phantom fingers, both Pops’ and Miguel’s, stroked her hair while she resigned to whiffing decomposing leaves and marine lives in the air.

There she languished. At an ageless pier from which sunburned fishermen cast out lures on lines sturdier than those of would-be romeos, and tossed back undesirables, she wondered how long she could withstand her emotional weight. Unlike Miguel, whose confidence was rooted in him like a mandrake in fertile soil, she was as fragile as a twig in a gale.  Her heart mirrored the crumpling autumn leaves behind her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of their crumbling underfoot upon a new day. A massacre in red, gold, wine and orange.

Lourdes failed to hear the taxi’s tires skidding in the distance; nor did she notice the pier swinging to the river’s deeper rhythm.  She would sway in the dank atmosphere, blending with the night, until her raven hair whipped around her body thrice. Until Miguel whispered among Djangoesque chords that he desired her now and forever: Te quiero, mi amor.  Ahora y siempre. Until she shed her mourning dress and dreamed of her gray spirit mingling with the deceptive estuary’s hypnotic waves at dawn.

© 2010-2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

 

“A Raven on the Panahuoca River” is un hommage to a writer too easily misunderstood, and a man too hastily disregarded, in his time:

 Edgar Allan Poe.