Little Deaths, page 3
For in truth, Mica was as arid of sensuality as her famous sire had been profligate. A petite, skittish woman, she had her father’s dark and sultry looks, but little in the way of charm. Her lovely features often tensed into a countenance of jittery unease, her most characteristic expression being the wary, hyper-attentiveness of one who, as a child, has been told too often and too dourly to be careful.
Abstract concepts more than objects of the senses gave her pleasure. Words and language, their structure and sound, the solidness and predictability of grammar held their own mysterious allure, the sweet trill of a Spanish ‘r’, the deft cadence of a finely wrought line of iambic pentameter.
Yet here she was, owner of an art collection depicting every type of fleshly pleasure and perversion, the value of which guaranteed that she need never work again.
Mica could no more imagine a life of leisure than one of unbridled concupiscence. How would she fill her days? With whom would she talk, if not to her colleagues at the foreign language institute?
As it was, she’d been hard-pressed to arrange time off from the Coral Gables Language School where she now worked (an extension of the one in Madrid, catering primarily to well-heeled South Americans with more money than time to invest in learning English). She planned to stay at Meadow Farm only long enough to inventory the sculptures on the premises and make arrangements for the bulk of them to be auctioned off at Sotheby’s.
As seemed appropriate for one who barely knew the former owner, Mica chose to sleep in one of the guest rooms. There were two sculptures here—on the dresser, a pair of male hands, onyx and ivory, clasped in a veiny,’ knuckled grip of anguish or desire, and, by the wall, a pair of lovers on a pedestal embracing in androgynous delight. And throughout the house, other works: a woman flagellating a lover with her long hair, a young girl copulating with a goat, a Medusa’s head with dreadlocks made of phalluses.
Mica couldn’t help but wonder how her life might have been changed if the creator of this art had been a part of it.
‘I understand why you left Mother. But why did you leave me?’
She had sat stiffly in the tall, deeply upholstered chair of the Squires’ Club at the Hotel Jefferson in Richmond. It was one of the last bastions of flourishing sexism that still existed in the late ’80s. As her father’s guest, Mica had been allowed into the visitors’ dining room, the only area of the private club where women, like exotic but potentially dangerous animals, were allowed to be displayed by their male handlers.
‘Your mother wasn’t inclined to give me visiting rights.’
‘What about your rights? You could have taken her to court. You could have fought for custody. You didn’t even try.’
‘You’re right. I let you down. I just couldn’t imagine myself as a good father. I wanted to love you, but I didn’t know how.’
The black waiter had brought their cocktails—white wine for Erasmus, a martini for Mica. Her first. She was trying to appear sophisticated in this stuffy place with her legendary father.
But oh, it was so difficult, because the little girl inside Mica knew only that she had been abandoned, wanted only to cry and beat her fists upon the linen tablecloth and puke up gin and bitterness on the Oriental carpet.
‘I’m sorry. That answer isn’t good enough.’ She’d been amazed at her outspokenness with this stranger, but the fact that his eyes, his mouth were hers made it easier. How often had she spoken to the mirror, evaluating her looks, her job, her personality, and said, ‘I’m sorry, but that isn’t good enough.’
Her father’s hands rested on the table, large and pale as the folded wings of some enormous moth. They were clenching and unclenching, straining at each other, like two lovers clasped in violent embrace.
She had sipped her martini, let its delicious fire sear her inhibitions until her self-control hung by threads.
‘Do you know what it was like growing up alone with Mother? Because I looked so much like you, she hated me. She virtually imprisoned me in the house. “Mica, Mica, come out and play,” the kids used to call from the front yard, and Mother’d go out on the porch and run them off. “Mica doesn’t play,” she told them. “Mica studies.” You were a coward to leave me with that woman. You could have fought for me, but you didn’t have the guts.’
‘I won’t be spoken to like this,’ her father said. He got up and bolted from the table. She thought he’d gone to the men’s room. It was some time before she realized he’d left the Club, after signing for the bill on his way out. She was yet again abandoned.
Tonight, six years later, Mica sat on the floor of the living room, drinking a Diet Coke in deference to her ulcer, as she opened the letter from her father and began to read:
‘You were a beautiful baby who grew up to be a beautiful woman. But even had you been quite plain, still I wouldn’t have felt safe being your father. Touching you, perhaps combing out your hair, giving you a bath—the mere thought of such things filled me with dread.
‘People are not culpable for feelings, Mica, only for acting on them. I never trusted myself not to act.
‘You say it was painful growing up with your mother. But how much do you know of my childhood? My own father was an alcoholic who died when I was eight. Soon after, my mother began what I suppose a romance novelist might call a descent into madness, but what, in her case, was more a solidifying into stone. She seldom spoke or answered if I spoke to her, or acknowledged my presence in any way. Yet she continued to prepare meals, to do the housework, to keep up appearances.
‘For one period of over a year, she never spoke to me. I was a child ghost, haunting her life, and she tried to exorcize me in every way she could.
‘Except at night. At night, she would come to my bed, silent and furtive as a ghost herself, and lie with me. She’d spoon herself around my back and nestle her face against my neck. I can still remember the feathery wisps of her hair, her dry, cool lips, her soft hands cupping and massaging me in ways that I both longed for and loathed.
‘I tried to comfort her, begged her to talk to me. As I got older, sometimes I yelled at her. I even struck her once, seeking some response. I got none. She was a wraith mother, haunting my bed, my dreams, invisible in daylight.
‘Occasionally, in a pique, I’d lock her out of my room and find her sleeping on the floor the next morning, curled up against the door. My heart would break—whether for her anguish or my own loneliness I never knew, and I would let her in.
‘Later, when I’d grown up and my mother was living in a rest home, she grew talkative and even prone to chatter, babbling on about my carefree childhood. I asked her why she had come to my bed for all those years. She said, “Your skin was hungry. I had to feed it.”
‘Of course, I realize it was my mother’s skin which hungered, and yet, all those years of silence and invisibility, years when my only nurturing came from her indecent touches, has created in reality what at the time existed only in her own unstable mind.
‘For my skin is hungry all the time. I sometimes think that hunger is what’s killing me, the cancer being only the physical manifestation of insatiable need. In a life devoted to pleasures of the flesh, I am never touched.
‘I feel ashamed for running away at our last meeting. You were right. I am a coward, and I regret now making no place for you in my life. I tried, though, in the only way I knew how. Your likeness, along with my own, is part of “The Family Reuniting”. I regret I didn’t have the courage to show it to you while I was still alive.’
Mica put the letter down and stared across the room into the foyer, where she could see enough of the statue there to make her want to look away.
Her own face somewhere in that abomination? Was she supposed to find this flattering? Could her father have possibly imagined she shared his obsession with these so-called ‘pleasures’ of the flesh?
For Mica could not imagine falling victim to the kind of thralldom of which her father wrote. Sex, for her, had always seemed a mechanical, rather unwholesome chore. As a teenager, her rare efforts at self-pleasuring had seemed distasteful, an embarrassing, unnecessary bother that, in adulthood, she was happy to forego. Her few lovers had touched neither heart nor flesh in any memorable way, and while she did not especially desire men, she could not conceive of making love with women. As for more than one partner at a time, think of the sweat, the grunting weight, the sheer effort and offensiveness!
Still, she spent some time that evening, without success, examining ‘The Family’ for a face that bore some likeness to her father’s or her own.
The next day, Mica contacted a noted art dealer who’d attended her father’s funeral. He promised to make arrangements for the larger pieces to be shipped to New York for auctioning. Then she set about inventorying the house, determining which of the sculptures she’d retain for investment purposes.
With every trip upstairs or down, Mica had to pass ‘The Family’. Since the sculpture occupied the centre of the foyer, it could be viewed from any direction, each time offering a slightly different perspective. Mica still could not find a recognizable face, although she paused frequently to look. The bearded man embracing the old woman, were his features those of Mica’s father? The woman whose face was turned away, did she bear Mica’s likeness?
It was maddening not to know, and more maddening to care.
The bodies almost did not look human. More like sleek reptiles or sheened amphibians, still moist from the sea, their mouths round and slack, remora-like as they fastened onto flesh, their hands like pale, tentacled fish.
From any one viewpoint, it was impossible to determine what act each figure was engaged in and with whom.
At the front door, for example, she could see a man with sunken, haunted eyes, collapsed atop the back of the woman (man?) beneath him, who in turn fellated the upright member of a reclining boy. From the dining room, she saw not the fellator, but a wiry husk of a woman whose breasts cascaded down to smother the upturned face of the partner underneath. From the living room the scene was worse—the man who feasted at a young boy’s groin while behind him, a woman thrust her fist wrist-deep into his rectum. Upon his face was not so much arousal as bright, blinding need, the face of a new-born animal scrabbling for the teat, or the cavernous maw of a baby raptor.
Mica stared and shuddered and tore her gaze away, always vowing not to cast a glance at the sculpture when next she passed it. Always she failed—as much as she detested the images, she was determined to find her own likeness.
It took the start of her second week at Meadow Farm and a bottle of good Bordeaux (to hell with the ulcer, she’d drink milk tomorrow) to reveal a new possibility. She could look down upon the statue from the balcony of the third floor master bedroom.
Taking her glass of wine with her, Mica was surprised and irritated to find that, although she could see the heads and backs of several figures, a number of the faces were still concealed.
What Mica did see, however, and what at once seized her imagination, was more intriguing: space. From above, it was clear that, as tightly as the statues appeared to intertwine, in reality a large cavity remained at their centre, as though carved out by the sheer centrifugal force of carnal energy.
The more Mica stared down at it, the more fascinated she became. Had her father’s skill failed him here? For surely the work required another body. An open mouth, a jutting phallus, a pair of parted labia—none of which were visible at eye level—all seemed to demand another set of orifices to maintain the erotic symmetry.
Mica sipped her wine, gazed down.
I wonder …
She leaned too far. Her own mild acrophobia caught up with her, undid her balance, and caused the balcony to tilt. Mica cried out and dug her fingers into the railing, pushing herself back. Her glass upended. Wine splattered upon the orgy. Splashed rounded buttocks and parted thighs, ran from upturned eyes like the blood Mica imagined spewing from her father’s shattered head, while his mouth twisted with a cry somewhere between agony and orgasm.
Before retiring to bed, Mica inspected the sculpture once again. Between the knees of a kneeling woman and the backside of the man who thrust his haunch into her face, she found a narrow opening.
Experimentally, she ran a hand along one figure’s rounded belly, let her other hand seize the knob of a knee. She could get her head and shoulders into the opening, thus discovering a heretofore unseen perspective of the work. A slight shift of her body, to avoid the elbows of an embracing pair, and she might be able to inch her way up penetrate the core of them. Trying to ease herself inside, she searched for her own face or her father’s peeking out like some lurid blossom from between a pair of buttocks or squeezed lewdly between copulating loins.
When the phone rang, she shuddered as though spied upon and disengaged at once. Pearlstein, inviting her to dinner …
Mica remembered the lawyer’s hands, tanned and manicured, their fashionable bronze doubtlessly purchased in a tanning parlour. She imagined his touch, the practiced skill with which he would exude warmth and self-confidence while leaving her depleted, chilled. He was in the middle of lauding some French restaurant in Alexandria when she pretended someone was at the door and ended the conversation.
That night, she dreamed of spider hordes that clicked and crabbed across the floor and swarmed inside her body. Spiders infesting her intestines, clinging to her heart, nesting by the hundreds in her womb. A thousand stings and deep, internal fire.
She thrashed awake to find her fingers thrusting deep inside herself, a ragged thumbnail scraping painfully at her swollen labia. She thought it was still night, the pain between her legs a dream, and was startled to see light outside and horrified to find, beneath her nails, dark gouts of blood where she had torn herself.
Light-headed, she got up, pulled down her nightgown, and went out into the hall. From where she stood, she could see ‘The Family’ in the entrance way below. Sunlight filtered in a bevelled window, dappled limbs and faces with shifting skeins of light. From this vantage point, she could see the opening among the figures.
She went downstairs, put water on for tea and almost started to dial Pearlstein. What harm, after all, could one dinner be? She knew she stayed too much alone, untouched and unencumbered, but empty all the same.
Then she thought of the spiders in her dream, how they had scuttled into her like avid, greedy hands, claws clicking on her bones like manicured nails. The thought of contact, even accidentally, with Pearlstein’s flesh, with any flesh, made fruity-tasting acid sear her throat.
While waiting for the tea to steep, she wandered back into the foyer where ‘The Family’ piled and pretzeled. Today they looked to her like Dachau dead she’d once seen in a history book, the naked corpses stacked high and intertwining. No wonder the idea of her likeness in their ranks revolted her as much as it obsessed.
Yet why was she unable to find a face that resembled her own even remotely? She’d studied the sculpture from every angle and still had not discovered what she sought.
The answer could be one of only two possibilities, she decided. Either the faces belonged to figures only visible from within the statue itself, or her father had been lying.
She had to know.
Her nightgown, when she tried to slide inside the gap between the figures, bunched around her. Mica hesitated only briefly—who, after all, would see?—then stripped it off. Naked, she eased herself into the narrow space among the orgiasts. She slithered around a couple embracing on their knees and squirmed past a pregnant belly to encounter, level with her face, a prodigious penis. She touched it timidly, then ran her tongue across the marble shaft. What harm, she thought—no one would ever know.
To her left, there was room to wriggle sideways and penetrate more deeply, if she used the breast of the woman nearest her for leverage. The woman lapped at someone’s rump. Mica was convinced she hadn’t seen this figure; that, from outside the orgy, the face could not be viewed. She studied it in the sun that filtered down from the skylight, full lips and small, closed eyes, a body smooth and unformed, like an enormous foetus grown to adulthood in the womb, legs coiled beneath it in a boneless pile, albino serpents mating.
Mica levered herself onto the shelf formed by the torsos of a couple fused in soixante-neuf. She rested, put her arms out. Her right hand stroked a man’s flat sternum, her left probed a gaping mouth.
How safe and cosseted she felt. Mica remembered having a playhouse in the attic as a child and how, as she grew bigger and the playhouse shrank, there came a greater sense of safety and surrender, more comforting than claustrophobic. Sometimes, too, she’d hidden there and dreamed about her rich and famous father who would come and take her away from her mother and her loneliness.
The phone.
Mica hesitated, then tried to ease her way back out. She was warm now and slightly sweaty. Her live flesh squeaked against the marble bodies.
She could not squirm free.
She relaxed, breathed deeply. Attempted it again.
Got one leg above the head of a woman kneeling, but still couldn’t push herself to freedom. Her leg hurt from the unnatural position. A cramp spasmed through the arch of her foot.
The phone stopped ringing.
The bodies seemed so close now.
Mica tried to force her hips through the narrow opening. Stone gouged her ribs, her chest. She felt like something struggling to give birth, but all she managed to push out were her screams.
As night came on, she was convinced she felt them move. Oh, they were subtle, clever, they didn’t let her catch them. But she could tell. That was how they’d trapped her in the first place, by closing ranks ever so slightly after she’d come in.
Oh, come and play, Mica, Mica. Come and play with us.
Only this time it was come inside and play and this time no one had stopped her from joining in the game.
Hours later, stiff and cold, she tried to shift her body to some new position. She could get her legs up on the shoulders of the foetus woman, but that position made her calves cramp unbearably, or she could sink down onto the phallus lolling at knee-level, crouch with it between her legs.
