He kept thrashing and crashing around on top of her, making the required efforts to reach his record-time orgasm. If there had been an Olympic category for ‘wham-bam-thank-you-Ma’am’ sex, he would have easily made the team, she thought. It happened all too often: the big build-up over dinner and hanging out at Bar None had led to another unsatisfying conclusion. Now the performance was over. He withdrew himself, limp and spent, rolled off to his side of the bed, sweating on the sheet. Francisca had learned not to expect fireworks, yet she did hope for slow, practiced arousal-or perhaps a little humour along the way.
He let out a deep yawn. “Very tired, lah.”
He looked across the room, taking in the easel next to the dresser. “Hey, you also paint, ah. Very sexy! This one, who, ah?
She cringed. Oh God! What to tell him? But before Francisca could answer, he had turned over and was off to count sheep or naked pole-dancers, or whatever he did to fall asleep. She half-muttered to herself, “Yes, why don’t you make yourself at home, ‘Stud’!”
He was asleep now, but his words echoed on like the ghost of an insincere idea. Did he not see her resemblance in the unfinished portrait?
Well, what do you expect! You didn’t hook up with an art lover, did you?
Francisca’s sagging, forty-eight-year-old body had been raging and partying for years, progressing like flaming octane through the clubber’s long, dark night of the soul.
She left the bed and went to clean up in the bathroom. When she returned, she sat down at the dresser-mirror. Soon, the numbskull sparrows would be up in the Flame of the Forest tree outside her window. Before long, the tropical sun would be getting her and the workers off to their office blocks for another day’s spreadsheets and marketing campaigns and the food courts would be queued up with hung-over monsters craving for kopi and kaya toast. Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and sour margaritas.
She looked at the black waterfall of her hair draped over the red silk gown embroidered with tigers. Ah, her smeared mascara. At the end of her life, would she be still picking up guys in bars until the last round of drinks?
She really was too old for this now. Her biological time-bomb was beginning to tick louder between heartbeats. Too old for kids. She had some cash in the bank for a trip or two, but to where and with whom? The “who” in bed, reflected in the mirror, was just another jerk in post-coital whale-slumber.
The sex and booze had done the job for him: out like a light. Typical! But she was still turned on like flashing neon.
Next to her on the easel was the nearly finished canvas. She stood up to look at it-a voluptuous nude. She flashed back to the mirror-then to the canvas, then the mirror again. She undid the red silk dressing gown at the waist and opened herself for objective appraisal. Who is this person? Do I still know her? The breasts were certainly not as perky as a twenty-year-old’s and she saw the evidence of a little-dare she say it-paunch! My God!
A man’s word for a woman’s tummy. What is happening to me? There was some shadow of fuzz on the upper lip, a stray hair or two on the chin these days growing faster between tweezer attacks. Yes, Francisca was losing her soft feminine edge to a menopausal creature known as Fran the frump. She was becoming thick brush strokes, like a Rouault painting: man-solid, deep-vowelled.
Yet it wasn’t the bagginess of her skin that disturbed her so much as what it all stood for: no partner, no family, no orthodox identity except an executive position which was now under attack from those “Hello Kitties” scratching at her heels. She had to keep on top, swat them like flies… She was known as a tough nut to crack in her industry, but under that hard shell, she was sensitive: someone who tried to manifest her realness through one-woman shows in a friend’s art gallery. Alas, she was only a part-time artist in a Sunday-painter country with little art appreciation or market potential.
Francisca reached for the cleanser and tissues and began clearing up the mascara-disaster area.
“Oh God,” she shuddered, closing her eyes in fright. She stood up, turning to look at the bed where the whale-man was snoring. She turned her back, leaning against the window, looking at the self-portrait. She needed comforting, so she closed her eyes again and let a well-trained finger stray below the embarrassing belly to the bearded-lady lips of herself and, imagining her finger as a delicate paintbrush, started doing what she normally did at the easeclass="underline" shutting out the left-over white noise of her workday to look for that other Face, the ideal woman within herself. She then began to re-create its lines and contours, working her finger-brush this way and that.
The sexual heat began to build like the first kindling placed on a match-blaze. It grew gradually with focus and effort to twig-bright redness. She kept her eyes closed and felt her left calf muscle going taut as a bowstring as her body remembered this fiery dance for one-all the while dwelling on the image of the younger woman she knew so well, the one she had starved, exercised, then bounced through nightclubs and parties with European men and big expense accounts.
This laughing, joking woman had been the wild one with a reputation for doing the most daring things in beachfront chalets all weekend long. She warmed to that bright young image as she worked the finger-brush, painting a face like a miniature portrait on the red ruby of her clitoris-a face all lips and tongue now finding the sweet-spot. Rising on her toes she embraced the full force of her orgasm, shuddering with hot, delicious stabs.
Feeling revitalized, she imagined a new beginning with a clean slate and felt her feet soften into the floor again. As she opened her eyes to the reddened cheeks of a woman flashed sideways in the mirror, Francisca realized she was still that empowered woman. She was not down-and-out. She didn’t need the man-whale beached in the bed behind her. No one had ensnared her in any domestic tussle. She had a job, she had her house (almost paid off), she had her CPF savings. All was not lost. Above all, there was her art. Yes, that had always served even if it didn’t make any money. She could still paint, could still create. Francisca still had a way of being honest with herself, despite the prowling diversions of her tiger-woman lifestyle.
The morning light was just beginning to do its little halo-dance around the outlines of apartment blocks. A shaft of it began to walk a finger through the slit in the curtain. Francisca took it as a signal to action and stepped up to the canvas. She lifted a brush from the Chinese inkstand on the table next to the easel where she kept her materials. She looked at the green soapstone piece carved with three monkeys ascending a mountain. The pool at the bottom was the muddy pot that she now dabbed into like a water-bird taking a morning drink.
How strange! The climbing monkeys now seemed to be laughing and joking. How foolish one can be, possessed by moods and darkness. Francisca grabbed her palate and felt like flinging it up like pizza dough, but restrained herself. Instead, she squeezed out some colour onto its paint-scarred face, then began intoning her mock mantra as she did before commencing any work at the easeclass="underline" See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
Such a silly saying, yet for her it meant that she could turn a blind eye to the necessary sins of her day job. She didn’t have to listen to the bleating voices of family expectations and she wouldn’t ever have to speak again to this latest jerk slumbering in her bed, once she sent him off without breakfast .
She focused her eyebrows as if she was a mathematician searching for a way to crack the formula.