When my fingers slide against beautiful Rose, when they swell her to a sweet unfolding and she puffs out like a sail at my every breath, when they glisten into her and disappear, it’s as though she were a soldier fallen in the field getting healed by me, her head to one side. I take off her uniform and she can finally come home. You don’t know how beautiful she is. Her hair finally released, black foam. Her skin, nocturnal waters worshipped by the moon, her white lover. I fold her clothes carefully and dress her with my tongue, my hands, my wet centre, the true balm of Gilead. Did you know it closes wounds and opens hearts?
My pale green silk dress is what they’d call an undergarment at home. I wear only it. It slips like skin and conforms to the slightest caress like the shirt of a Mongol warrior meant to smooth the piercing arrow’s exit from the wound. It casts an arboreal shade when I kneel above Rose and invite her to refresh herself in this cool glade. “Look,” I say. And I can feel the caress of her eyes. “Touch me.” And it’s the closest thing to having no skin. “Kiss me.” She guides my hips, lowering me to her lips as though to sip from a legendary flask. The more you drink the fuller it gets.
Rose was a bit shocked at first. But I have discovered something about modest people. They’re just waiting for the call. Then they are the first over the wall and into the temple. When she’s inside me I sometimes think of her fingers on the piano. Wicked, I know, but I can’t help it. She is endowed with a span of a tenth. I sometimes sing a line of Traviata between her thighs, which scandalizes her because she is as serious about sex as she is about music. Reverent.
When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me?
“I love you, Rose.”
“I love you, I love you, love you.”
“Who?”
“Kathleen.”
Then we bathe in the Pond.
When I arrived home on the third night — morning actually — Giles was up already with the coffee perking. I thought, oh no, this is it. She was in her heavy brocade dressing-gown with the Louis IV sheep frolicking — somewhere there is a parlour with a naked armchair. But really, what am I to make of her? She put the marmalade on the table and said wispily, “Kathleen, dear, I’d really rather you brought your friend home nights.”
I’m acting cocky here on paper but I nearly spewed. She said, “I know you two have formed an attachment and naturally friends lose track of time. There just seems to be so much to talk about.”
My throat closed, I couldn’t swallow the coffee. How much does she know? Does she imagine that we talk Verdi till dawn? That we plan to enter the convent together? But I said, “Thank you. It would be nice if Rose could spend some time here. Her home situation is not the most wholesome.”
“Poor thing. She’s welcome to stay and use the piano too, any time.”
Jesus Murphy! “Gosh,” I said, “that’s awfully generous of you, Giles.”
“No, Kathleen. It’s selfish.” She twinkled at me, sipped her coffee and crinkled the newspaper. I decided not to look a gift-horse in the mouth.
“No wonder people in Cape Cod thought I was crazy,” thought Lily. “No one would ever mistake the Island of Manhattan for any other place once they’d seen it.”
The highway had become Broadway. She had crossed the Harlem River and asked, “Where’s Central Park?” This time she was confident that it was a sensible question. But people still didn’t want to answer for some reason, they looked quickly away. Finally, a big white lady with fruit on her hat said, “Come with me, child.”
Lily wound up at a mission in the East Village where a volunteer lady tried to get her into a bath and a new dress. Lily bargained, “You may wash my dress, but I do not want a new dress, and you may wash me but I will not remove my boots, thank you.”
“Your ankles are badly swollen.”
“I’ve been walking a lot.”
“You’re actually quite pretty under all that grime, aren’t you?”
“Thank you.”
“Poor little thing.”
“I’m not poor.”
“God loves you.”
“I know.”
Lily’s green silk dress began to disintegrate at the first hint of water. “This is fit for the trash,” said the lady and the next instant shrieked in pain.
“What happened?” asked the matron, who came running, and the charity worker replied, “Little bitch bit me.”
But by then Lily had her dress, her brace and her diary, and was out the door.
A pale man with long black hair, a top hat and curly sideburns pointed north.
She entered through the south gate of Central Park and found the pond as evening fell. She looked for the thicket but couldn’t find it. She found an untenanted bench, curled up, hugged the diary and fell asleep. She moved several times, awakened by the crack of a billy stick on the soles of her feet, “Move along.”
And more than once, as she rose and began to walk away, “I’m sorry, little girl, don’t you have anywhere to go?”
“Yes, thank you, don’t worry.”
“Are you all alone?”
“No. My brother is with me.”
Sept 23 — She said, “There’s a tree growing inside you.”
In my little room with the Greenwich roofs beyond the window. Red geraniums, cool metropolitan night air, industrial blue. We lie next to each other a long time, looking. Lightly touching, as involuntary as breath. Black and white. Except she thinks I’m actually green.
“There … see?” She traces the green shoots of this alleged sapling, starting from behind my ear, down my neck, where it submerges then surfaces at the base of my breast, reaching up, cleaving in two twigs to encircle my nipple. She finds more evidence at my inner thigh.
“It’s growing up to your belly button. I wonder where the roots are.”
“It depends whether I’m a shade tree, or an aquatic plant.”
“You’re green.”
“My eyes are green.”
“You’re so white, you’re green.”
“You say the sweetest things.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“I’m green —”
“The Green Diva, la Diva Verde —”
“And I smell —”
“You have a scent.”
“So do you,” I said.
“What’s mine?”
“… Trade winds —”
“Ha —”
“— everything that’s ever been worth stealing.”
“Hm.”
“What’s mine?”
“… Mineral.”
“You know, it’s because I know you that I’m able to translate. I know that what you’re really saying is, ‘Darling, you’re ravishing, milk and honey are under your tongue —’”
“‘And the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.’”
“Ha!”
She kissed me. And after a while she said, “Actually, you smell like the sea.”
“What do you know from the sea, there’s no sea in New York, there’s a grubby harbour.”
“I know you.”