Yearn: Tales of Lust and Longing

Elise sat beside her sporting a Comme des Garçons dress and white silk stockings with French slang elegantly stitched into the seams (by La Perla), below which a pair of state-of-the-art Nike runners squatted incongruously. Her gaze was set with flirtatious determination as she scanned the crowd.

“Port side, red shirt,” Elise suddenly murmured, with the discretion of a ventriloquist; Tigger wasn’t entirely sure she’d spoken at all. Nevertheless Tigger cast her gaze to the left and immediately sighted a lean young man who appeared to be ostentatiously ignoring her (although whether he was or he wasn’t I cannot remember). He looked like the kind of man she used to be attracted to in her early teens. More disconcertingly, he had exactly the same look she had affected during that era: shoulder-length hair, T-shirt, flared jeans, and a sultry pout. He bore a strong resemblance to the young Mick Jagger, his physique glimmering with an unabashed feline sexuality. Now, to her amazement, she saw him looking back at her. She almost checked behind her, wondering whether she had mistaken the direction of his gaze. Elise nudged her sharply in the ribs, spilling a little of the margarita into her lap.

“Want an intro?”

“I dunno—is he legal?”

“Don’t be fucking stupid; of course he’s legal. I know him; he’s a traveler, a Californian—been working here for a couple of years. He’s got a wild reputation but, hey, you’re not after marriage, right?”

Tigger glanced back at the young man, her heart and groin uncomfortably jumpy. If I remember, and I should, he was very good-looking in that dark, troubled way, with high cheekbones, intelligent eyes, and a kind of self-deprecating posture that she immediately responded to. Tigger recognized herself in it, or so she told me. Okay, perhaps at a younger, more self-conscious age, but nevertheless she empathized with that prickly awareness, that inability to completely own your own power, sexual or otherwise. She wanted him but why on earth would he want her? He was far too handsome; he could have had any of the young girls milling around the tables. Or at least that’s what Tigger thought.

“Go on then,” Elise prompted.

Tigger glanced at the youth again. He met her eyes, smiled, then looked down at his feet. His jeans were torn, a slash of tanned and muscled thigh visible through the denim. She battled the urge to glance appraisingly at his crotch, uneasy with what she felt might be blatant gender role reversal. But she knew the longer she waited to drum up the courage to speak to him the harder it was going to be.

“Jesus, Tigger, what’s holding you back?” Elise, frustrated by her hesitation, pulled at Tigger’s arm.

“I don’t know. It all seems a bit predatory. Besides, how do you know he even likes me?”

Elise rolled her eyes. “Okay, this is what you’re going to do. I’m going to get a glass of champagne and take it over to him. After a beat you follow, walking toward us with that famous hip-fuck of yours, all right, and you hook him. Got it?”

Before Tigger had a chance to answer, Elise had grabbed an extra drink from a passing tray, sauntered over, and sat next to the youth. Elise now waited with a plastic beaker of champagne in each hand, signaling wildly to Tigger with her eyebrows and then nodding in the direction of the unsuspecting youth, indicating it was time to make her approach. Tigger nearly died with embarrassment.

Finally the terror that Elise might actually tell the youth that her friend fancied him drove Tigger into action. She stood and began walking over. As she moved she tried not to think about what she was doing but instead allowed the inherent grace she was so famous for to flow through her: from the way she placed each foot on the pavement to the ripple up the slender thigh to the hip, the faint shudder of gravity, of momentum, undulating upward through the pelvis, diaphragm, and rib cage and up through the throat to finish like a lingering sweetness at the back of her tongue. Within seconds she was aware that several men had turned to watch her, the heat of their eyes brushing against the thin cotton of her skirt.

Reluctantly, Tigger joined Elise at the young man’s side. For a moment the three of them sat in uncomfortable silence.

“Seth, isn’t it?” Elise handed the youth the beaker of champagne. “I met you through Mark, right?” Mark was Elise’s younger lover at t

he time, an aspiring website designer with a penchant for custom-made skateboards.

Trying desperately to retain his cool, the youth nodded. And again the three of them fell back into an uncomfortable silence, while Tigger frantically searched her mind for witty opening lines.

“Seth . . . Tigger . . . Tigger . . . Seth,” Elise announced, pointing to the two in turn. “So, I’ll leave you two to it,” Elise concluded before getting up and walking away, to Tigger’s secret dismay.

She stayed glued to the milk crate, surprised at her sudden apprehension. This is what older blokes must feel when confronted with a far younger and better looking female, she thought—fear of rejection. Then she reminded herself how all her womanizing male peers (and she knew a few) always seemed to have an infinite supply of confidence. They were never frightened of rejection, so why should she be? Besides, all she had to lose was her pride, and one of Tigger’s great strengths was always to regard pride as an obstacle.

“Seth—so you’re the seventh son, right?” She was careful to sound as nonchalant as possible.

Surprised, he looked up. His eyes were a disturbingly deep green, or so she told me later.

“Wow, you guessed.”

Back then his accent had the flatness of a Californian surfer with an undertone of irony. I remember he grinned; one of his front teeth was chipped, an imperfection he was deeply conscious of, but Tigger focused on it as a counterbalance to his otherwise perfect beauty.

“What are you, psychic?”

“No, just a good detective. Seth is a biblical name, associated with the number seven. And isn’t there an American movie with “seven sons” in the title? One of them’s a Seth.”

“Yeah, I think my parents were into that film. They’re total film buffs—old hippies, really.”

And probably only a couple of years older than I, she noted darkly, after which they both fell into the kind of silence that makes you want to tear your clothes off and dive in, regardless of the consequences. Tigger shifted to the edge of her milk crate and clutched the hem of her short dress, terrified her body language would give away the wave of lust swelling through her. Many years later she told me she was even frightened that she had started to radiate a scent, a dangerous musk that screamed, “I want you at all costs.”

“So you’re from California?” Her voice echoed in the sexual tension that hung between them. To her ears it sounded thin and pathetically transparent in its intentions; to his ears it was the key he’d been praying for.

“Totally. Encinitas—it’s a small town just north of San Diego.”

“Sounds very exotic.”