Quiver

I could feel men watching me. The hunger in their faces made me wet. Ignoring them, I continued to dance on my own. The music coursed through my blood and up through my womb. It was like dancing in thick honey.

There was that scent again. Faint but totally distinctive, it floated past my face. I opened my eyes to find Humphrey dancing in front of me. Normally clumsy, he had real grace. He moved as if he was making love; every movement instinctive and sure. He wove himself around me for hours, caressing the air between us.

Outside, dawn had turned the sky a pale gray. Humphrey, not daring to presume anything, offered to walk me home. As we all know, momentous events start in the most arbitrary way; destiny doesn’t really offer us a choice. It’s a trick God plays. In this instance it started with my bursting bladder. Hobbling along in my high heels, full of beer, I realized I’d have to stop off at Humphrey’s place.

His flat was in an old Victorian block, bleak in red brick. I had always resisted visiting him there, feeling that the proximity might have an inevitability to it. A sexual fatality.

The room was dark, with a few broken pieces of furniture. There was a model of a heart resting on a picture frame, one of those three-dimensional plastic replicas of the organ. I remember I brought it down and began to open it up. He told me it was a present from his last lover, who had fled to England a week before. He seemed to find the plastic organ an apt metaphor for their relationship. I didn’t bother probing, but now I wish that I had. In the center of the room was a beautiful wooden model of a sailing yacht. It stood about four foot in height, with miniature rigging and brass fittings bolted to the deck. It seemed to be the only cherished object in the room. Humphrey watched me as I gravitated toward it. As I bent over the polished stern I could feel him wanting me from the other side of the room. I liked that, teasing the moment out before we touched for the first time.

He came up silently behind me. I stood pinned, feeling like a deer caught in the glare of headlights. He lifted my long hair and bit into the back of my neck. I could feel his teeth as he breathed in the smell of my hair, my body. We stood there for aeons, caught in that dangerous impasse between friendship and lust. I could feel his cock, hard in the small of my back. My head rolled against his shoulder, resting in the hollow of his neck. In the silence, I swear I heard a faint gasp, a woman’s breath caught in pleasure. Man of sighs, I thought, he is a man of sighs.

There are two kinds of men: those who are cunt-shy and those who are not. Those who are not are the connoisseurs who know where a woman likes to be worshipped. And Humphrey was the ultimate connoisseur, a sex artist, one of those rare men who was able to focus completely when making love to a woman. He was totally intuitive about what I wanted when weaving his naked body around mine. It was as if he was able to second-guess my fantasies.

He squatted over me, his cock moving slowly in me, between my closed legs. He threw back his head and I h

ad the definite impression that he was in direct communion with the great god Pan. There was a complete abandonment of intellect in his lovemaking, as if he was tapping into a higher frenetic power. I was drunk with his tongue, his cock, his lips, the hair on the back of his neck, his hands and the danger of it all. What could I do? I fell heavily headfirst like all the women before me. Love is like vertigo. I know, I suffered from it—as a child I couldn’t even cross bridges. Falling in love with a friend is disastrous, it’s like stepping into a shower that you know will scald you.

There was no way I could plead ignorance, after all I’d been warned about his previous conquests, his tendency to evaporate at the mention of commitment. And hadn’t it been me he’d confided in over all those coffees?

We were lovers for three months. In those days I was working for the Ministry of Planning and Environment as a consultant for salinity. After days of touring around the barren districts of New South Wales, photographing the white crusty rims of saltbeds, visiting the local church halls and standing in front of suspicious beery men twenty years my senior to lecture them about the dangers of over-farming, chemical insecticides and blue algae, I’d find myself stumbling down Oxford Street, still dressed in my pin-striped suit, heading toward his apartment.

Humphrey would open the door without questioning my sudden arrival, take my briefcase from me, sit me down in front of the television and present me with a plate of spaghetti or paella, the only two dishes he knew how to cook. I’d sit there eating, losing myself in some disaster in Eastern Europe or graphic car crash in Newcastle, but still acutely conscious of him moving around behind me. The very space between us was erotic. Once, after finishing my meal, I put my hand to the back of my hair and found he was pressing his erect penis into my tresses. Humphrey loved my hair; he called it the hair of Eve, loving the scent, the weight of it.

I don’t think he thought in language at all, but in images that were juxtaposed like some mad surrealist painting. He exuded an electricity that disrupted the linear in nature: plates would crash to the ground, thunderstorms would suddenly break out when he was around.

He would take me on the bare wooden floorboards, lifting my skirt to part my lips and pay homage to my vulva, finding every possible caress with his tongue, teeth and lips, taking me to the brink for hours before finally entering me with his blunt, hard cock. Afterward we would lie there twisted, exhausted, sated, my head against his foot, my back upside down against the corner of the room, his knee in my mouth, his cock in my elbow. When the silence became uncomfortable he would pluck out my pubic hair from between his teeth and tell me about his sexual escapades.

Early one morning when the streets were still desolate, with only the party-goers gliding past the pimps, the homeless and the desperate, while a flock of cockatoos shrieked above like a thousand rancorous drag queens flapping their way over Kings Cross, Humphrey was stopped by a traveler when returning home from a lover. The man asked for the way to Central Station. Humphrey obliged and began to trace a map in the dust of the pavement. Suddenly he noticed the man staring strangely at his face. Humphrey, who was used to being stared at, continued on regardless. Eventually, the man excused himself and rushed away. Humphrey, bemused, walked on and in that hazy, muddled morning state soon forgot the man’s fear.

Back at home he started dressing and was about to leave when he checked to see if he needed to shave. Shocked, he noticed a huge smear of dried blood across his mouth and cheek. For a moment he tried to remember whether he had cut himself, until he realized that it was the menstrual blood of the woman he had just left. The man’s staring face suddenly made sense.

I loved that story, and imagined all sorts of romantic notions of Humphrey brazenly wearing that stain as a mark of woman. The imprint of woman on a man who loved women.

At work, in the middle of a slide show illustrating the merits of irrigation, the scent of Humphrey would miraculously drift across the room, carried along by the smell of mown grass blowing in from an open window. I would find myself faltering in front of a group of cynical wheat farmers as the lines of irrigation on the slide dissolved into the line of black hairs running up from erect cock to navel. I felt as if I was in the grip of some crazed sexual alchemist. The more I had him, the more I wanted him. My visits to his apartment became a nightly occurrence. Sometimes he would already be asleep, half-drunk, murmuring no, no, as I took him into my mouth, slowly winning him over with my tongue. At other times it would be me falling onto his disheveled bed with the red dust of the soil still in my hair. He would work over my body in the same way he drew shape out of a stone.

My fascination with his past moved from the objective to the subjective. I could no longer listen to stories of sexual duplicity and deceit without identifying with the female victim. For the first time in my life I felt as if I understood the phrase “you have undone me.” Humphrey had achieved it very simply, without words, without psychology. I had made the fatal mistake of believing in his touch, as if the intelligence of his hands, our orgasms, the way he penetrated me, had affected him as much as it had affected me. Perhaps this is the catch cry of the egoist: I love, therefore I must be loved. Perhaps it is the Achilles’ heel of my gender.

I became possessive. As we all know, the way to retain a wolf’s interest is to feign complete indifference, to keep for oneself a kernel of dignity, of independence. I’ve always had a policy of placing myself and my autonomy first. That way I had survived all the sudden departures, deaths, deceits and emotional ambiguities. Until Humphrey.

Like all conquest junkies, Humphrey had begun to detect the stale smell of victory. Soon he stopped returning my calls. Sometimes I’d arrive at his apartment sweating in panic, having imagined all sorts of scenarios as I walked from my place to his. I’d bang on the door, knowing that his light was on, but he’d just sit in silence, refusing to answer my knocking. Furious, I would ring for hours from a nearby telephone booth, as the street-cleaning van crawled along the empty streets. He was cutting me out of his life, neatly, like a piece of marble falling away from a fault line. Humphrey’s sense of time and place was finite. Women belonged to certain periods of history that, once experienced and consumed, were then obsolete.

At first I refused to believe that our intimacies meant nothing to him. My ego wouldn’t allow it; my instinct couldn’t rationalize it. Then a terrible anger set in. I felt as if I had been poisoned. I wanted to put him through as much pain as I was going through. I wanted revenge.

* * *

I first met Elsa at a cocktail bar situated above a gay pub on the corner of Taylor Square, one of those Sydney locations that ran the whole gamut of sexuality in the course of a Friday night. The parties started at five with happy hour, when the half-price drinks attracted the heterosexual office workers in their short-sleeved shirts and shoulder pads, to be replaced by the local gay community two hours later. Many of the lesbians were only distinguishable by the nipples poking up beneath pristine white T-shirts, their cropped hair reflecting the style of their male counterparts. It was the beginning of the era of lipstick dykes, when the audacious anti-beauty stance of the older separatists was slowly being replaced by a whole generation of highly fashionable gay women celebrating the blatant sexuality of their scarlet-painted mouths.

I was marooned there, waiting for Humphrey to turn up. Happy hour came and went, and gradually the tables were replaced by boys and their men, girls and their women. I found myself staring into my vodka, trying to adopt an exterior of nonchalance, while my heterosexuality flashed like neon over my head: straight, straight, straight.

It was then that Elsa walked in. She had the kind of grace that turned heads, as if you had caught the flight of some tropical bird in your peripheral vision. She was tall, with black hair that fell to her shoulders, high cheekbones, heavy eyebrows and green eyes a shade I’d never seen before. It was as if she had no iris. Her large breasts swung free under a loose T-shirt of thin white silk, below which a pair of leather jodhpurs cut angularly across her hips. She made her way past the tables and pinched the bottom of the transvestite waitress before throwing herself down in the chair next to me.

“Don’t get paranoid,” she said, “I know you’re straight.”

I felt Elsa looking at me, her eyes surreptitiously sliding down my body, leaning forward, finding reasons to touch my thigh or brush her naked arm against mine, her musk settling over me like a hypnotic mist. I knew she wanted me. More than that, Elsa was the type of woman who was used to getting what she wanted. To be desired by those who are themselves highly desirable is in itself an aphrodisiac. I found myself wondering how easy it would be to reach across and slip a hand under the thin silk, to feel the weight of her breast cupped in my hand, to bite suddenly into that luscious flesh.

By the time Humphrey arrived we were drunk, and firm allies. Humphrey noticed her immediately, assessing her youth, her body, her beauty in one glance. Faking indifference, he could hardly look her in the eye, but I knew that glimmer, that glint as he glanced surreptitiously across at her. I watched as he licked his lips, measuring his silences carefully, projecting that fatal broodiness. He performed for Elsa, while Elsa performed for me. It was perfect.

Obsession is an interesting thing: to be the object of obsession is empowering; to be obsessive is totally disempowering. Later that night, Elsa phoned me and made a date for coffee. After she rang, Humphrey phoned me asking for her number. A plan began to form in my mind. Elsa was like that, one of those rare moments of beautiful synchronicity that left me contemplating my atheism.