The Whore

The frothing purple granules he was sowing in the water, cupping them beneath its flow, produced a quietly intoxicating effect when the skin absorbed the liquid directly.

She came through the slow-swirling, transpicuous quilt of steam, fragrantly naked, with far less of the street's aroma, the stench of sloven time, clinging to her now. A dark nymph moving through silver rain, the rich and smoldering chocolate haze of her body slowly wrought itself into the slightly plump form of an archaic negress who was, divested of society, far and away the most beautiful woman he'd ever harvested from the ruthless neon of the city's concrete heart. He stood, like a suitor from a vanished age, to receive an ingénue on the outer edge of a gaudy ballroom, and took her hand, and, with his other, touched her hair, the insoluble tangle of its perm and natural frizz, a visionary making peace with nature, a painter and photographer coming to terms with the immateriality of her soul.

"Stop that," she said.

He smiled, feeling his long-sleeved black T-shirt clinging more irksomely than before to his moist body. He stepped back and invited her to enter the foam.

"This's the ritual?"

"You make me think of Cleopatra—"

"My name's Maria," she said. "Don't make me into something grand, or you'll be disappointed, and I'm not giving you a discount. Five hundred's five hundred, signed and sealed."

"Please," he said, "get into the tub. No more talking."

"Men," she said, shaking her head.

He stripped off his T-shirt and kicked off his shoes. He stood barefoot, looking down at her as she reclined in the tub.

"I have to say," she said, "you have an amazing body for a skinny guy. I like that. You work out a lot?"

That almost offended him, until he remembered, ruthfully, thatskinnyin blackspeak had a less charitable, more widely-applicable definition than it did for whitefolks.

"I swim thirty laps at least once a day," he said. "Rep when I have time. Could we do this in silence?"

Something withering entered her look and she turned her head away very slowly. Yet, as soon as his back was turned and he was walking toward his Mac, he could feel her watching him, sitting up in the tub still, clearly eluding the water's lavender temptations, its inebriating secrets. There were certain playlists in iTunes he could choose from and he usually knew, before they were even inside, which one a particular woman would require. Halfway to his desk, he paused, and turned.

Arrived back at the tub, with her watching him all the way, head tilting slowly, "I need music," he said. "Any preferences?"

"Thanks for asking. Puccini, maybe. Or Josh Groban."

"I used Puccini three nights ago. And if you mention Mister Groban again, you'll have to leave."

"Fine by me, asshole," she made to rise, "I've got my money—"

"I'll call the cops and tell them you stole it. Who d'you think they'll believe?"

She plopped her ass back down in the foamy water, making waves that caused her breasts to heave and sway, nipples fattening.

"Shouldn't you be nicer to someone you plan to fuck?"

"Who said anything about fucking?"

"If that's not the rudest thing you've said all evening, painterman—"

She guffawed and he glanced toward the windows.

Grinning back, he asked her, very politely, if he may surprise her.

"Fine," she touched her own hair now, patting some of the foam onto it so it looked like lilac snow on coal. "Couldn't be worse than some of the other shocks I've had in my life—"

By the time he returned to her, she was reclining, her head back against the rim of the tub. And then the soprano began to singGlück, das mir verblieb—

And suddenly, from the tub, through the steam, with her head backflung, her mouth and throat opened, and the second line came out perfectly in tune, "Rück zu mir, mein treues Lieb," in a soprano so firm, sure, and oceanic it rivaled the recorded one; pulsing, and seeming to take on glittering substance in the scented, steamy air around him, while she sang the rest of the first verse, and he stood and watched, lapidified as much by Korngold's shamelessly saccharine, soul-wrenching music as by her contribution to its nocturnal harmonies.

"I forget the rest," she finally whispered, subsiding into the water, crossing her arms over her naked breasts as if the iridescent sound that had poured from her throat were too much reckless nakedness.

The aria proceeded now under the taciturn ægis of her fallen gift.

He crouched by the tub, his penis murmuring in secret, his hands painfully free of her.

She laughed, but very softly now; unjealous, like any true artist, of the homage due another; her black, upturned eyes harvesting from her past and scattering on his warm, turquoise air a thousand crystalline mysteries of invitation and rebuttal.

"What now?"

"Lie back and close your eyes," he whispered.

She did. He moved in on her, hands moving out. One lifted the bottle of coconut shampoo from the floor, squirting an opalescent pool into his other palm. Now there was the lavender and the creamy coconut in the air, borne about them in savory swirls of pearl and lilac on the abating steam. He worked the shampoo over her hair, feeling its coarseness oppose the fragrant kindness of his hands, and he wondered how he could explain to anyone who'd see the eventual painting he'd do of Maria that none of his inspiration had had anything to do with love.

She groaned softly, moved in the water, so the sound of it, lavishing her body, wove aquatic echoes into the lilt and heave of music, the celesta's coy chimes, the pulse of yearning strings. Her body began to open under the water like a dark flower his hands, strong as her voice, would sculpt, even if only for a little while, out of vagrancy and loveless nonentity—so he prided himself—into fugitive outlines, misty riddles, of touch and meaning.

His hands, thick with soap, deeply redolent of jasmine, moved over her dark flesh, washing the city from her, the encrustations of memory, all the anonymous waste and glory and sadness which only night in Los Angeles shored against the delicate membranes of a life, to make her his—if only for a little while—and then to make her more than his, the beloved of any man who looked into the swirls of color that would achieve, on his canvas, above his crudely possessive signature, her virgin deity.

His hands cupped and fondled her breasts, delighting in their weight and slackness, their obstinate naturalness of flow and fall, thumbs eager on her swelling nipples, strumming, off her hidden ribs, lucid chords of quick desire that made her softly giggle.

Her hair was all coconut essence now, so he touched his cheek to it, as one hand continued to toy with one nipple, coaxing it to full erection, his lungs yearning to suck on it as if he were drowning and her breasts were hovering pillows of chocolate air.

Moving over the swell of her belly, his other hand nudged aside the folds of flesh around her navel to give one finger probing entrance. She shook against him, sighed again, and he felt it was real somehow. He wanted her to cum, but felt that his inviting her to do so, to allow herself to do so, would've been ill-mannered. He was never ill-mannered with them. His hands moved to find the abundance of hair over her crotch, the water having nested it like a submarine lair.

"Why," she breathed—

He shushed her, lips moving against her ear.

"—why didn't you get some real hooker, thinner," she shook in the water, "all dolled up—"

He shushed her again, index and middle fingers of his venturing hand finding her submerged vagina and slowly massaging, through the wet thatching of stubborn seaweed hair, its firm purple lips, measuring their length, savoring their redoubtable schoolgirl willfulness; feeling them move like small electric eels against his palm as he gripped the whole assembly of bold spongy flesh, feeling her wince and quiver, a moment before he slipped a finger into her.

The back of her head smacked his chin, stunning him.

No wonder men felt this as a kind of submersion, the deliquescence of identity.

"I want you," he whispered in her ear. "I want you so much—"

She tried to laugh, but, as his finger found and very gently stroked her clitoris, the laugh swerved and crashed, and broke itself against a stuttering gasp into a million phonemes of preorgasmic light.

"Don't worry," he said, letting his throat vibrate warmly against her cheek so his words seemed to possess some momentary substance, before they dissipated, like meanings and oaths, into the air, "it's only cheesy if there's an audience." He breathed in deeply. "I'm so fucking hard right now—"

"I want to see," she said.

"I don't," he said, "not yet. I do tantric yoga, too, so I have no trouble—"

This time he eased off on her, under the water, so the laugh broke free and trembled like a listless genie in his brain.

Then sweeping back his clammy shaggy hair from his forehead, he brought his other hand back to her body, a finger deftly tantalizing her clitoris, moving in on it, circling it, rewriting the whorls and eddies of flesh around it as often as they defied stable inscription beneath his wordless hands. He inhaled the artifice of perfumes, lavender and coconut and jasmine, the quiet rage of shades. He almost cradled her against his body as if he were trying to reassemble her life's untimely fragments into a woman he could love and marry and make respectable through the unspeakable force of his masculine will and vision. If only for awhile. Before the frame he gave her faded into reason, and nature made a casual mockery of his strenuous truth.

Now her strong, plump thighs snapped together with a powerful clap to confine his hand between them, as she rocked forward against his fingers, sloshing water upto and over the tub's wet rim.

"Slowly," he whispered in her ear, "slowly," but she was impervious, hunching her body forward, escaping the desperate compassion of his circling arm to grind his strong fingers deeper into her, gasping as their skillful tips eased off—and then on—her swelling clitoris, in uneven rhythm, her vulva a tulip of frantic nerves.

He reached as far back as he could and clicked on the camera above the bathtub. It began to record her face, just her face, because one day the images would cast up, on the fringe of his consciousness, like Jonah on the shores of Nineveh, the vision he'd spent most of his life seeking of a woman's secret relapse into virginity in the wash of orgasm, and he would become like her then, wandering the streets of Los Angeles in sackcloth and ashes, repenting all the terrified zealous formulas of the male sex.

Then he was back with her, working three fingers into her, feeling her potent rejection of them, and somehow her simultaneous feast. He wanted to be there, down there, sucking on her clitoris, tasting the sea and the pungent call of her to him, but he couldn't risk it. And so his fingers moved like three flexile, acrobatic tongues, with the same urgency and lingual hunger for syllabic nonsense and eventual silence every heterosexual man sought in the oracular folds of a woman's temple.

She came at the zenith of a jagged, spiraling scream, venting sounds he could never render, however wildly, into color; slamming her body back and forth in the water, sloshing it everywhere, on the floor, on him, till his pants were as wet as his torso. Her body, her livid flesh, took a shuddering road to stillness, at last, and she lay back against his shoulder, surrendering his hand. He kept it between her thighs, gently stroking the puffy rim of her vagina, as if it were the relic of an ancient wound she'd channeled from beings who'd fled the burden of form long ago.

"If you use that hand to paint," she whispered, "you must make DaVinci look like an amateur."

He laughed against her hair, trailing his hand, which, despite the soapy water, was perceptibly heavy with her pulpen rind, up her belly, massaging it, darting gentle strokes through her groins and over the little loop of vulval flesh buried in her thatchy mound.

He stood up, asking her to. The leaking bulge in his pants was shamefully insistent, unsubtle. She wanted to lie there a little while longer, she said, but he was determined to be inside her again, while she was still adrift, an island he wanted to conquer.

He carried her to the bed, while she oozed feverish psalms in praise of his strength, the ease with which he lifted and bore her. The moments melted together, and he was in her at last, thrusting his erection with far less finesse. Because a penis was fashioned only for that brute monomania, never to paint or write or sculpt. It accessed the feminine savagely, and most often its harddrive archived only lies, condemning the mere hands of men to make up stories of virtue and madness.

"Oh," she groaned, thrashing about like a quadriplegic octopus, "oh, you're so huge, your cock is so—"

"Stop that," he hissed at her, his hips obeying him a trite second before she did.

"What?"

"I don't have any issues. And I don't need you to—"

"For a man who can make a woman feel so good one minute, you're such a goddamn prude."

"Isn't this supposed to be about both of us? Do you hear me going on and on about how tight your twat is?"

"Well, if there's no audience, as someone once said—"

He slammed his hand over her mouth and completed the thrust he'd suspended, thighs flexing and hips accelerating. She fought him beautifully, a match for him, but he was much stronger than she, and he could feel her giving herself to that, taking out of his calloused palm in spiteful surrender a quick bite, which made him instantly withdraw his hand.

He rocked back, sweeping her upwards to sit in his lap, so he could suck on her nipples. She took the rhythm over, after a few minutes, rocking on him, taking him deep in her and gyrating against the arched muscles of his thighs, so the wet hair over them rustled against her skin.

At some point, he stopped fucking the woman straddling his cock and began to make love to the goddess he thought she should be. Had he simply finished off as he began and kicked her out of bed and back onto the street, the emotional chasm between them could not've been more profound.

He lifted and lowered her back to the bed again, ejaculating as he did, so he came lying on top of her, pouring into her, spasm after brutal spasm, what felt to him like a month's worth of abstinence. After he was done, her felt rather than heard her murmurs abate, murmurs that had begun, in the moment she felt his climax break upon them, with soothing gestures of her hands over his back, harrowingly maternal words of encouragement and comfort, as if she were the earth itself easing him through the trauma of orgasm, its vatic excesses; explaining to him, perhaps without meaning to, why men repeatedly regained their sight through orgasm only to glimpse the most heartrendingly beautiful things at each pinnacle of sex while living the rest of their lives stumbling blind.

It woke him too quickly from his lull. He remained hard inside her. He always did, once he was up, even at thirtysix, and that had always made him very popular with the ladies, that he stayed hard, or close enough to it, without chemical aid, for so much longer than a single cumshot.

He sat up, easing out of her. Looking down at the condom and the heavy sack of semen hanging off the tip, recoiling as politely as he could from her menacing solicitude in the moment and phase of his climax, all of the new painting came to him, but he would never divulge that to anyone.

Carefully unsheathing his erection, he held the condom in one hand and scrolled it back to full size. Slowly, in the remote blue light, the gold bellydance of candleflames, bidding her lie absolutely still, he unloaded the condom's nacreous freight onto her abdomen, squeezing every last drop out of the slack latex tube, which looked, in the cyan gloom, like a candle dissolving in drops of liquid flame.

"What the fuck're you doing?"

He almost begged her to continue lying absolutely still and silent, promising he wasn't going to hurt her, that all this was somehow vital, that semen unlike paint would not last on exposure to air. He reached for a brush and it moved in his fluids, the pearly residue vivid against her dark skin in the blue light. Beneath the brush, he felt her heave and twist, very slowly, trying not to, stifling giggles; but he gradually became impervious to her, the living canvas, more so than a tattoo artist's, because here was something infinitely more evanescent, like a sonnet in invisible ink whose opening stanza may fade even before its couplet argued the poem's tidy aloofness from the passage of time.

Later he insisted on walking her back to where he'd found her.

"You're insane," she said.

He nodded.

"You can find a motel tonight," he said.

She clutched the envelope of money, four Benjamins and two Grants, to her abdomen, as if the final flourish to their strange encounter had, on its own, earned it for her. The eventual death of paper cash would signal the death of blessed anonymity, of all commercial privacy.

"You're not going to get a motel?"

"Maybe."

Then they were back at Sunset and Gower, and she began to slip, like Cinderella into her sooty rags, back into her curbside madness.

"May's well be a priest," she said, "you have the same naïve ideas about wealth and women."

"Why these tirades about priests and the church?"

"There was a time I believed that was all I'd ever talk about, all I'd ever want to talk about. Standing here in the goddamn cold and madness that was all I had left of all my choices, but the truth is no priest ever did me wrong and it's God my beef's with and everytime someone stops, I have to gear up to face him or her in case that's the angel come finally to collect and take me to the place of reckoning—"

"Is that why you went to Cytherea Grove?"

"Our deal's done. You can go home now."

"I'd've asked you to stay the night, but even if you know a few Korngold arias, I can't trust you."

"Go," she bellowed at him, and shoved her cart forward.

He watched her go.

"I want to see you again."

She stopped. She turned her cart around and came back to him.

"That so, painterman?"

He nodded.

"To do what?"

"Talk."

She laughed, too loudly, and a cruiser slackened its pace.

"Long ago," she said, "it was that one phonecall changed my whole life."

"Sounds a bit dramatic."

She turned away to stare down the lackadaisical street.

"I want to see you," he said. "Maria. Not the whore."

She turned those mesmerizing eyes back upto his face and studied him for a few moments, almost sadly.

"Maria is the whore, painterman" she said. "Maybe even the nun. I'm just Cytherea Grove."