“What grease?”
“I found some kind of disgusting pomade all over my comb, and it certainly wasn’t mine. Or have you taken to using Brylcreem recently?”
“Look, this is going to sound really stupid…” I ventured.
“Try me.”
“It’s a ghost. I think this house is haunted.”
“That is pathetic, Jodie. Surely you can come up with a better story than that!”
He storms out, his plate crashing down to the floor as he leaves. I sit staring into my glass of wine. It looks so cool and calm in there, if only I could just dive in. Outside there is the sound of his car starting up. I don’t want to be left alone. I don’t want to be left alone in this house.
I sit naked on the edge of the bed. I tell myself my name is Jodie. I run my hands through my hair, my shoulder-length blond hair. I trace the planes of my face, feeling the bridge of my short nose which disappears into the full curves of my cheeks. I press the palms of my hands against my breasts, feeling their weight, feeling them sitting high on my chest. I clutch at my abdomen. I know that my womb is empty.
Something moves in the shadows. I freeze. Only my eyes shift, peering into the dark recesses. A man stands by the bedroom door. He is short and dark, his eyes a warm brown in the greenish shadow, his hair a shining helmet. He is in his late thirties, and is wearing an old-fashioned suit with a crisp white shirt peering above a waistcoat. He is holding a battered leather suitcase in one hand and a Trilby hat in the other. He winks at me, a languid batting of the eyelid, then smiles, the arch of white teeth splitting his tanned face.
I swing around. Adrian stands there looking sheepish. “I drove around for hours before I realized I had no place else to go.”
I hug him. His body, resistant, eventually softens against mine. His hands creep up to my breasts. We fall onto the bed. Frantically I pull his shirt free and undo his trousers. I bury my face in the fur of his testicles, his penis, still soft, rolls across my cheeks. He smells fantastic. I take him into my mouth, feeling him grow hard. He pulls me up to his lips and we kiss. His tongue traces the inside of my lips. He sucks my tongue as if I am the man and he is the woman.
My ankles are resting on his shoulders as he holds my calves and pushes my legs even farther apart. He plunges into me. I feel my whole body rotating around the swollen head of his cock, savoring every grain of his skin as he slowly slides in and out. Someone is sucking on my clit. I crane my neck to see if Adrian is touching me, but his hands are firmly around my ankles. I gasp—a tongue is slowly caressing the tip and then sucking hard on the tiny shaft. I am delirious with pleasure. It isn’t rational; nothing is touching me there, and yet I can feel a man’s breath blowing across my hips, his lips over me, as Adrian’s cock gains rhythm. Paroxyms of bliss tear through my belly. I am coming, contracting wildly. The scream of my orgasm breaks out from my throat, and it echoes in the dark.
He lies with his back to me, curled up against the hollow of my belly. I am staring out at the wall, my mind skipping backward and forward in waves.
I remember the figure I saw against the sky that morning with Robin in the mountains.
I see red streaming down my thighs. I see a bathtub full of blood.
My lover stirs. “Leonie, sono a casa.”
And I find myself replying, “Sí, Alberto, sí.”
ICE CREAM
The long old-fashioned bus gleams a steel gray in the sunshine as it waits outside the redbrick gates of the school. Cicadas echo shrilly in the summer afternoon. The fifties fender painted scarlet and blue runs the whole length of the bus. Above the grid of the radiator sits a tiny statue of a silver ballerina. Tinkerbell, the little girls call her. One side of the bus is opened up to display the tubs of ice cream sitting just out of arm’s reach.
Above the advertisements for double-chocolate whips, vanilla scoops with raspberry, and choc-and-nut supremes is a hand-painted sign embellished with dancing clowns and luminous red balloons: Jerome’s homemade ice cream, the finest in Illinois. Underneath, visible through the two windows flanking the open hatch is Jerome himself, busy filling up huge plastic containers of ice cream, ready for the three o’clock rush.
Jerome lifts the large silver trowel and digs it into the freezer of ice cream. It sinks with a crunch. He, cooled by the air lifting up from the open freezer, transfers the ice cream into the plastic container sitting just below the counter. His arms, muscular and tanned, strain against his thin cotton T-shirt as he lifts the heavy scoop. His neck, strong and sculpted, rises up from the swelling curves of his shoulders. His chest hair etches a black wispy pattern between the cushions of his breasts and over his white T-shirt. Beads of sweat hang suspended, momentarily arrested by the gusts of frozen air. Bent sideways in concentration, Jerome reveals small ears set closely against his skull. The translucent perimeters are flushed deep red with the heat. If you traveled across from his ears, you would find yourself walking up the steep incline of his cheekbones. Two jutting mountains, delicate in strength, perhaps betraying some past Mongolian ancestry. They swoop and dip across the breadth of his face. Set below heavy black eyebrows, his large and oval eyes switch from blue to green depending on the light. Today they are a definite sea-green—swirls of light around jet-black pupils that bleed into the green like oil on the ocean.
His nose flares out from under the eyebrows, widening slightly at the bridge then streaking down to a defined point. The tip is divided into a subtle cleft, a sublime reference to a lower, more pronounced beauty.
His mouth is a dark red gash that splits the angular planes of his face into a rude asymmetrical beauty. His lower lip is fuller than the upper. It swells out, almost threatening to burst open like a fig. The upper lip is narrow and lies in elegant submission against the decadence of its companion.
A droplet of ice cream melts and runs down the edge of his lower lip before dripping onto the floor. A second earlier, Jerome had licked his finger. The finger he had plunged suddenly into the ice cream and brought up to his chaotic mouth. As if on cue, there is the screech of brakes as a car pulls up behind the bus. Jerome’s hands tighten imperceptibly around the handle of the silver scoop. He doesn’t need to
crane his head out of the glass hatch to see who it is. He steadies himself for a moment against the wooden paneling that lines the interior of the bus. He is fighting his heart that has betrayed him with its sudden acceleration. His penis, which until now has been lying curled against the warmth of his thigh beneath the heavy jeans, thickens. The head, a sleek helmet of velvet flesh, stirs against the rough material.
Jerome stares down at the container of ice cream, at the streaks of raspberry jam swirling through the thick yellow cream like strata of rock. He is reminded of flesh, of the webbing of busy veins carrying life from brain to heart beneath pale skin. There is the slam of a car door, the distant hooting of a horn as another car approaches. In a nearby street a mower starts up.
Jerome looks up at the large clock hanging over the cartons of sugar cones. Two fifteen. He loosens his belt. Another car pulls up on the opposite curb behind the bus. Jerome opens the bar fridge set up on the wall. He plunges his hand into a bucket of ice and delicately pulls out something between his fore- and index fingers that flashes for a moment in the light. It is a large silver ring, too large for a finger, too small for a wrist. He holds it up to his eye. The silver encircles the green. Like this, he has the eye of a bird of prey. Like this, he imagines he can see beyond the bus.
Three steering wheels press against soft breasts. Three mouths twitch in nervous anticipation. Three sets of labia moisten in the still minutes, the moments before movement. Jerome unzips his fly. His cock stands at right angles to his body, its engorged mauve flesh incongruous against the weight of his jeans. Jerome grasps the base with his left hand tightly, close to his balls. With his right he caresses the whole length of it, up over the head, down the shaft. Swiftly, instinctively assessing his own flesh. He bends over the plastic tub of ice cream, scoops up a handful and rubs it slowly over his hot cock. The coolness sends tendrils of pleasure up through his stomach. He rubs the ice cream up and down the shaft, the head bursting a deep scarlet through his sticky fist. With his left hand he slips the ring over the knob down to the base. The cock ring sits nestled against his pubic hair. Now he is ready. Outside three car doors slam shut.
The first woman stands by her green Ford, her eyes flicking from the back of the gray steel bus to the two other women. Her blond hair hangs in a fringe over her eyes, her nervous and thin hands bounce a small red leather purse against her hip. A silence has filled her head.
The second woman catches the first woman’s gaze and smiles back—just the merest twitch of the lips in reassurance. Sweating slightly, she pushes back her brown and wavy hair. I own this, she is thinking as she shifts the weight of her well-cushioned hips to the heel of her left shoe. I own this experience. This is my afternoon. She is wet under the armpits and between the legs. She can feel the sun burning the thin skin of her shoulders. She longs to be cool.