Sometimes Edward took them up on the offer; sometimes he didn’t.
He was getting discriminatory as his art flourished, choosing only those faces that, like a slab of unchiselled marble, told him what new creation lay hidden inside. And he no longer limited himself to a single woman. In the late seventies Edward embarked on what was to become known as his pivotal work – menage No. 1. A group of three women.
By now, people begged Edward to let them see a creation in the making. He only had to say the word and tickets would be sold at exorbitant prices, auditoriums would be filled to capacity. The outpouring of admiration nearly brought tears to his eyes. So he agreed to showcase this most astounding, most daring work yet.
He arranged the women on a soft landscape of velvet and satin pillows, making sure that the lighting was right for each one of them. The players were stunning – a young African-American woman with skin the color of flawless mahogany, a strong Nordic blonde with the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, and a delicate Asian woman whose features were exotic and enticing. The spectators were gathered at a discreet distance, none of them wanting to become known as the one who disturbed the master at his greatest moment.
He began with the Asian woman. They watched as he moved over her, his once awkward and stringy body moving with a fluid ease that was borne of his inherent talent. She writhed and moaned and her hands clutched at him wildly. While one hand worked between her legs, the other hand moved on to the African-American woman. She arched her hips toward him. And as he worked the canvases of these two women, he lowered his lips to the blonde.
The pillows were a sea of writhing limbs and colours, Edward’s blond head and long arms moving in an orchestrated dance the way a conductor controls his music. There was not a single part of his body, a single appendage or muscle that was not somehow making these women sigh and moan and weep in almost religious ecstasy. Even the crowd, in a strange kind of sexual osmosis, writhed in tiny movements as they watched Edward bring the symphony to a close.
The moment was right. In that bubble of expanded time that only included Edward and his creations, he watched each woman carefully to determine the right moment in which to bring her to climax. He decided to go with the blonde first, then the Asian woman, and then the African-American woman in a dazzling sexual spectrum. While he moved gently in and out of the delicate Asian beauty, his lips and tongue danced between the legs of the blonde. Edward’s art had become so refined that he didn’t need to see the blonde to know when the timing was right to release her; he felt it in the core of his being. As her back arched and her eyes closed, he watched her quiver and clutch the pillows by her head in orgasmic ecstasy. In an instant his attention was focused on the Asian woman, her dark hair scattered over the pillow under her head like a halo in shadow. She came seconds after the blonde, her tiny mouth open in a small O. Finally, he moved to the African-American woman, who he had been saving for last, keeping her on the edge with his free hand. He moved down between her legs and watched as she threw her head back with wild shrieks.
The room exploded in raucous applause, shouts of “Bravo!” filling Edward’s ears.
It capped off the closing of the decade nicely. Through the early eighties, Edward was often asked to repeat the performance, but he felt that every woman was an individual creation under his body, and any work of art that she was involved in was an extremely limited edition.
As the years wore on, Edward Grable grew tired of his art. In his seventies, he had begun to feel that he’d exhausted all the creative possibilities that sex and women afforded him. He had seen every nuance of the female orgasm, had seen every conceivable contortion of the lips, the eyes and the face. There was simply nothing left.
He had gone to a bar near his small studio apartment in L.A. to try and forget what the passage of years had done to him. As he ordered a gin and tonic and fixed his gaze on the old television above the bar, he heard the most beautiful voice reverberate next to him as its owner ordered a drink.
She was stunning. She looked to be in her late twenties. Her hair was gold without somehow being blonde, and her face held all the images that Edward had mentally collected over the years, all of his most striking compositions. This was a woman who would awaken his muse, he thought.
“You’re Edward Grable, aren’t you?” she asked politely. He could tell that she knew exactly who he was, but was demure enough not to fawn. “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you.” She extended her hand firmly.
They talked over drinks, and once again Edward could almost feel that bubble in time, and he tried expanding it and transforming it, not wanting the moment to end for a while. But it did end, and they sat across from each other and stared.
“I think we should go back to your apartment,” she said quietly. It was not a question, or even a statement inflected as a question. It was almost an order.
Edward did not refuse it. His seventy-odd-year-old bones felt almost twenty again, almost as young as when he had first walked into Mrs Carlson’s house that day and drank her lemonade and saw her bedroom and made her come. He watched this woman’s hips lead him forward the same way that Mrs Carlson’s hips led him forward as they climbed the stairs to his apartment. And he almost felt the same nervousness that he felt with Mrs Carlson as the young woman removed her clothes in a seductive striptease that elicited a croaking moan from him.
They eased to the bed. Edward instinctively covered the young woman’s body with his, but she put a hand firmly on his chest.
“Let me,” she demanded.
He gently lay back on the bed and let her.
She moved like a cat above him, her hands and mouth and legs all working in concert. He was amazed. The heavy lids of his eyes closed and he was back in Mrs Carlson’s house, in her bedroom, listening to her sugary voice whisper, “Don’t be nervous, honey. It’s perfectly natural.” And he heard Marilyn Cullers ask desperately if he would go home with her, and he heard himself answer that he would. And he saw the three beautiful women he had made sexual art with and heard their sighs of contentment as the audience applauded.
The young woman slid down between his legs and began working her own magic, sliding him in and out of her mouth with fluid grace.
As his back arched in delight, he heard the familiar whisper in his ear. “You were the genius, Eddie,” Mrs Carlson cooed, long dead now.
“You gave to all of us, Eddie, but you never took any for yourself,” he heard Marilyn whisper.
“You deserve so much,” the blonde, the Asian, and the African-American all whispered.
Edward had never experienced the sexual ecstasy that he had elicited in hundreds of women. But as the young woman with him covered his body with hers, all the faces of all the women he had made love to, all the lips and all the eyes and all the arms kissed and embraced and smiled at him, all at once.
Edward Grable died, his face the ultimate work of sexual art, far surpassing any composition that he had ever created.
Alchemical Ink: Shattered Angel by Morgan Hawke
For Grey
The Alchemist was getting ready to close his tattoo shop when the bells on his door chimed. He turned and there she was, a shattered angel. She stood paused, frozen in his doorway, neither in nor out, motionless on the threshold, undecided.