I quickly cleared away the remains of the previous night’s party and went back to bed. The cold floor under my bare feet had me shivering, and the milk had chilled me through to the bone. All I wanted was to curl up under the warm blankets and go back to sleep again.
Making a gap in the Venetian blind with my fingers, I peered outside.
It was raining. It looked as though it wouldn’t stop all day. I was feeling good and put the telephone away in the closet. When it starts raining early in the morning it feels like evening all day long.
I slipped into bed beside Spoon, wrapping the blankets around me.
To me his naked body was the most comfortable sheet in the world.
“I can hear rain,” he mumbled
“Are you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It looks like it could last all day long.”
“I feel like shit.”
“Tired?”
Spoon stared into the big frameless mirror by the bed, and answered
“I’ve got a hangover.”
“Me too. I think it’s a good excuse to spend the day lying around.”
“Umm… ”
Resting his cheek nonchalantly on his palm, his elbow on the pillow, Spoon began caressing my body. It felt so good, my eyes narrowed like a cat’s and I confessed to him, “You’re my most comfortable sheet.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re my blanket,” he said with a smile.
The way he put it made him seem so innocent, like some rough, in-experienced young boy trying to whisper sweet nothings. It reminded me of the way I was impressed by Chet Baker even though he had a terrible singing voice. Whenever I listen to his songs, my insides feel like sugar dissolving.
It was still raining. Spoon began to nibble my earlobe. I wasn’t wearing earrings, so I could feel the saliva seeping through the hole in my ear.
Spoon asked me what my favorite time of day was for making love.
“Anytime,” I said coyly.
He told me he liked to make love best in the morning, especially if it was raining.
“It’s raining now,” I reminded him.
“You didn’t know that about me, did you?” he said tenderly.
He pressed his lips to my neck and sucked hard—so hard I thought he might suck the skin clean off—and he left a spider’s web of purple bite marks scattered across it. Meanwhile the spider inside me was waiting to feast itself on his heart, but it wasn’t long before I gave up on such an ambitious plan and began enjoying my role as Spoon’s little play-thing. And as he threw his toy around like some impulsive child, I began to feel pleasure in the pain.
He reached out his arm and put a record on the turntable. On days like this he liked to listen to Thelonius Monk. The piano sounded like rain. My pleasure was interrupted.
Spoon lay on the bed, his burnt-black body only partly covered by the sheets. He reminded me of Brother Rufus in the Baldwin novel, listening to the saxophone and crying out from deep down inside his heart:
“Please, won’t you give me your love?”
Spoon didn’t need a saxophone. He could say all he wanted to say with his body. I would probably have even become an alcoholic prostitute for Spoon if he had wanted me to. But I wouldn’t have wanted him to be my pimp—if I were up for sale, he wouldn’t be able to leave bite marks on my neck anymore.
“When I was young and I didn’t know anything about women, a friend of mine told me they had a hole between their legs for guys to stick their cocks into. So from then on I thought there was, like, this big gaping hole between a woman’s legs. So the first time I slept with a woman I was really confused—I thought, Damn, this bitch ain’t got no hole. I didn’t realize I had to look for it.”
His story made me feel more relaxed.
“So now you know, do you?”
“Sure, like this. But now I don’t need to search for the holes with my fingers no more—they come looking for me….”
I wanted to tell him the hole was alive. I wanted to tell him it was breathing and that if you put a mirror up close, it would mist up. I opened my mouth to tell him, but nothing came out. I often lost my voice when he was doing that to me.
“Your skin really is the color of ebony, isn’t it?”
It was the saddest color in the world, and yet it was the most beautiful color I had ever seen. However suntanned I got, I could never come close to the color of Spoon’s skin. If I ripped his skin, the blood would flow red from his flesh. When he made love to me, there was white liquid.
I felt his head between my legs and I was helpless. I could see the top of his head, covered thickly with hair like little coiled springs. His tongue was like some enormous snail eating up my skin, layer by layer.
I could feel his little gold earring against my thigh. It always got in the way when he was down there, but he liked to wear it because it made him look good. Small rivulets of sweat ran down from the hollow of his back to his ass. I was always wary of touching him there. I was sure that if I got my hand in between the hard muscles of his butt cheeks, he’d grip it so tight I wouldn’t be able to get it out again and I’d probably have to cut it off at the wrist. It would be like the little girl in the fairy tale, the girl with the red shoes who had to keep on dancing and dancing and couldn’t stop until they cut her feet off. I’d have to keep dancing, too.
I didn’t want to lose these things that bound me.
“Mmm, delicious. Juicy.”
Spoon wasn’t concerned with what I was thinking—only with what he was feeling himself. He didn’t think. He only spoke about the things his body reacted to. When he danced, it wasn’t because he heard music—it was the other way around: he needed music because his body had started to dance. And now his tongue was dancing and playing music all over my body.
There was no let-up of his tongue. My pussy juices were starting to turn into the kind of filmy skin you get when you boil milk.
“Do you know how cats fuck?” he asked.
“No…”
In an instant I felt Spoon’s weight on my back. His thick, wiry chest hair was rubbing against my spine, and I felt like I was going to cry.
Then suddenly he bit my left shoulder hard.
“That hurt! What the…?”
“This is the way cats fuck—till all the hair comes off the female’s shoulder.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and they make a horrible noise, too.”
“Like this?” I made a noise like a cat yowling. Gradually the cat’s yowling gave way to my own yowling, and it gave me such pleasure to allow Spoon to subdue me. I looked in the mirror at the side of the bed.
Grasping the sheet between my fingers, I could see my body laid out on the sea of white wrinkles. It looked like a blurred photograph. Then, on top of me came my favorite black sheet, forming a sharp, tight contrast.
After a while I could no longer tell whether the sheets were white or black, and through a hazy semiconsciousness, all I could do was follow the reflection of my red polished nails in the mirror.
I cried out again like a cat.
“Shhh, quiet, baby. Listen to the rain.”
I hadn’t noticed, but Thelonius Monk had finished playing, and the rain was the only sound left in our dimly lit room.
I had just finished taking off my stage makeup and peeling off my I big, feathery false eyelashes when Spoon came home. He stumbled I around the place, shouting and bumping into things, drunk.
I got out of bed and offered him a glass of water. Not out of kindness, you understand, especially since he was drunk and being so obnoxious. I just knew how to deal with him now that we were living together.