Yearn: Tales of Lust and Longing

weight. In that moment Sara was convinced she would never attract another man. It was a terrifying thought. To prevent herself from slipping further into depression, she averted her eyes and left.

Back home, her housekeeper was waiting with a deliveryman. Rosa, a deeply religious Catholic Filipina with a shrine’s worth of religious icons stashed in her bedroom, stood with her arms crossed, staring disapprovingly at the man, who seemed a little embarrassed.

“Is there a problem, Rosa?” Sara asked, her heart sinking. It was ridiculous to be intimidated by one’s housekeeper, but she was.

“This man, he has brought some art he tells me you purchased, Mrs. Le Carin.” She pulled Sara aside and continued in a stage whisper: “It was filthy pornography! I told him, wrong address! Wrong address!” Rosa glared at the deliveryman while crossing herself as if he were some kind of infectious demon.

“Where is it now, Rosa?”

“In the dining room, on the table.”

Throwing her coat off, Sara strolled into the dining room. The large white porcelain sculpture had been placed unceremoniously onto the table and sat shrouded in a large tea towel. It looked like some strange domestic offering. Sara whipped the tea towel off. Rosa gasped.

“Madam, this thing should stay covered; it is not proper!” Behind her the young deliveryman grinned at Sara, who was having trouble keeping a straight face.

“Why is that, Rosa?” Sara innocently asked.

“Because it is un-Christian!”

Sara walked slowly around the table. With the light catching on the petals, the piece had taken on a pleasing luminous quality.

“Un-Christian? I think not. After all, the Holy Mother might have been a virgin but I’m positive she had genitals,” Sara replied sweetly, and deliberately wide-eyed.

Muttering grimly in Spanish, Rosa crossed herself again, then flounced out of the room. Sara didn’t bother stopping her. She tipped the deliveryman five pounds, then found herself alone with the piece. She stared at it, then had the uncomfortable feeling that it—or at least the sixteen or so vaginas perched at the end of each flower stem—was staring back at her. It was a disconcerting sensation.

“Madam?” Startled, Sara jumped. Behind her Rosa stood defiantly dressed in a coat with a Hermès head scarf (a hand-me-down from Sara) knotted sternly under her chin. “I have to go to church now, madam,” she stated in a tone that seemed to suggest the visit was nonnegotiable.

“Is it Sunday?” Sara asked, knowing full well it wasn’t.

“No, but I have rung ahead and Father Keelan is expecting me. I feel as if my soul needs . . .” Her eyes slid toward the sculpture, then back to Sara. “. . . purging.”

“Indeed, I have always thought of Father Keelan as a kind of celestial plumber.”

Without waiting for permission, Rosa was gone.

Sighing, Sara turned back to the artwork. She couldn’t leave it on the dining table. As attractive as it was, she suspected some of her more conservative dinner guests would be put off eating. And yet conversely it might prompt some of her more liberal guests to indulge in pleasures other than culinary. Two years ago Sara would have found the image of an orgy initiated on and around her dining table both amusing and more than a little intriguing, but now the thought just reminded her again of her own celibacy.

Saddened, she picked the piece up and carefully carried it out into the reception hall, where she placed it on the Empire side table. She moved back to get a clearer view. There seemed to be a hundred china vaginas reflected in the large oval gilt mirror that hung above the side table; it was an interesting effect.

She stepped out the front door, then stepped back in. The sculpture was the first thing that caught her eye. It dominated the whole entrance hall. “What kind of message would that give my guests?” she wondered. The first impression one had of the piece was fragile beauty, but there was something a little odd about it that compelled one to look again. This time one always noticed the genitalia. She imagined the piece might be more appropriate for, say, the entrance hall of some lesbian power monger like Annie Leibovitz, or failing that a female politician who was a defiant feminist, although when she stopped to think about it no one came to mind—not even Margaret Thatcher.

Now the piece seemed to be mocking her. Had she made a mistake in buying it? Encircling it with her arms, she carried it slowly into the adjacent sitting room, where, after crouching down, she placed it on a low coffee table. Now she had a bird’s eye view and from this angle the piece looked a little like white coral, thick branches dividing into smaller branches and so on—all tipped with the inevitable crumpled flower.

She collapsed on the couch and touched one of the “buds” carefully, the smooth surface of the porcelain cool under her fingertip. Like a young girl’s the bud/vagina was barely unfurling. Such innocence, such simplicity. The hallway clock striking four brought Sara back into the present, her gaze still fixed on the bud/vagina. It seemed to personify all the youth and beauty she now felt she’d lost. A sudden desire to smash the whole sculpture to bits swept through her. Not trusting herself, she gripped the arms of the chair and allowed the sudden fury to dissipate before carrying the piece upstairs to her bedroom.

There, after pushing aside her wedding photograph, she placed it on the circular table that sat in the large window alcove opposite her bed. Again the sculpture seemed to dominate, and Sara realized that the only time she would escape the sight of it was when she was lying on her back in her bed. Could she live with it? It reminded her of her own aesthetic failures, the inevitable comparison people always made between her and her mother, and how she was always doomed to disappoint. The sculpture was a ringing alarm clock, an alarm clock of birth, sex, and death, chiming out the passing of the years. Again a growing panic rumbled up below her rib cage as her internal monologue grew wilder and more irrational. She glanced back at the sculpture. For a minute she thought she saw the lips of each vagina open, quivering in the golden summer light, whispering viciously: Sara, you are going to die an old maid! Childless, sexless, and withered!

Sara picked up the business card for the cosmetic surgeon and began dialing the number. At the other end a well-spoken man answered the phone. Silence stretched like a spider’s web from her end of the phone to his as Sara lost the courage to speak. Abruptly she put the receiver down.

I will not live with this oppression, I will not, she told herself as she searched for the large, heavy shoehorn—an old-fashioned object with a heavy silver handle—that she kept in her. She was moving toward the sculpture ready to smash it when suddenly the doorbell rang. She froze for a moment, forgetting that Rosa was out at church. The doorbell persisted, an angry buzz that echoed up through the spacious house. Whoever it was wasn’t going away. Slowly Sara lowered her arm. The buzzing felt as if it were now drilling behind the back of her eyes. Swearing (in French), she ran downstairs, across the hallway, ready to tell whatever salesman or religious busybody it was to bugger off, then somewhat breathlessly opened the front door.

Stephen stood in the doorway with a huge bunch of pink lilies and tuber roses tied tastefully with white ribbon. Without asking to be let in, he pushed the flowers into her arms and walked into the house.

“I brought these, to celebrate.”

Hiding her surprise at his arrival behind the huge bouquet, Sara followed him into the reception room.

“Celebrate?”