“That’ll work,” she answered. “Maybe I’ll get some cheap jewelry from a teeny-bopper accessory store.”
“Whadda you mean?”
“Oh… I don’t know… If I want to start a real modeling career, I hafta have an angle, you know? My own shtick.”
“You can’t start a real modeling career just because you get a few new clothes and say you want to be a model.”
“You don’t know anything about it, Dale. I’ve had some gigs. How many gigs have you had lately?”
Dale stared fixedly at the TV screen. It wasn’t even on. He still had hair down to his collar, except where he didn’t have hair at all, and it looked wet even when it wasn’t. The flattened cushions in the chair that had come with the furnished apartment had stains now where his head rested. Sometimes he still tapped a drumstick on the coffee table while he sat there. It seemed the drumstick appeared and disappeared by magic, but she’d found it once, by accident, stashed under the seat cushion.
Leala loaded some celery sticks with peanut butter, wrapped them in a paper towel and placed them on Dale’s lap on her way to the sofa. “Listen, Dale, this is really important.”
“What, that I’m a failure?”
“No, but we are. You know? It’s only been, what, three and a half years. We could just call it one of those things. We’re both young, we could… you know, still be like our ages.”
“Instead of old married farts?”
“Speak for yourself, but I guess that’s the general idea.”
The drumstick appeared, but he didn’t start tapping. He held it up and placed the tip against his lips like a long finger saying Shhhh. “No.”
“No? That’s it, just wo?”
He took a bite of celery then replaced the tip of the drumstick against his mouth while he chewed. It sounded like a horse chewing corn. It sounded kind of nice.
“Dale, it wouldn’t be like we hate each other’s guts and go to court to fight over the car and stereo. And it doesn’t have to be now, we could do it when we’re both ready, when we can both afford it, you know?”
“We can barely afford this shit together.”
“I know, but I’m working on a plan.”
“You mean becoming a famous cover girl by next week?”
“There’s lots of types of modelling, Dale, and I may’ve found my niche, and I can even capitalize on it, expand the potential.”
“Now you sound like a yuppie businessman.” He swallowed what looked like a hard lump.
“I’m just saying I’ve discovered a way to make what I do more lucrative, and when I make enough of a stash, how about I share it with you and we, you know, go our separate ways?”
“What if I want to stay with you?”
He was just sitting there looking down into his lap like an imbecile who watches himself pee, holding a celery stick with globs of peanut butter in one hand and the drumstick in the other.
Leala stayed on the sofa for only a few seconds longer, then went into the bathroom, shook her short hair and watched it all fall into place. For the first time in her life she was glad for the strip of freckles across her nose. She wondered how much colored contact lenses would cost, because some pure green eyes would really complete the package.
Three more jobs popped up right away in January. The first just wanted her feet – feet walking, feet splashing puddles, feet showing over the side of a pick-up truck, feet on gas pedals, feet kicking a ball, feet in high heels. He said he’d done sessions with guys and older people and little kids, and some animals. When he took her out for lunch after the session, she touched his leg with her bare toes under the table, but nothing happened, so the Feet! exhibit he said he was working on must’ve been real. The second wanted her to hang laundry on a line – just white sheets and towels – on a very windy day, wearing a light cotton dress and bare feet, but the photographer was a woman and, as a matter of fact, almost didn’t want Leala at all when she saw her short hair. The third worked out a little better because he said from the start he wanted a nude, but he also made her sign a form promising she was over eighteen. Still, he liked her newly shaved pussy and fucked her afterwards, but only gave her $20 for cab fare when she asked, although she was parked around the corner from his house.
EMILIA COMES IN MY DREAMS by Jindrich Styrsky
Translated by Iris Irwin
EMILIA IS FADING from my days, my evenings and my dreams. Even her white dress has darkened in my memory. I no longer blush as I recall the mysterious marks of teeth I glimpsed one night below her little belly. The last traces of dissimulation impeding the emotion I was ready to feel have disappeared. That troupe of girls is lost forever, smiling uncertainly and with indifference as they remember how their hearts were torn by passion and by half-treacherous humility. Even her face has been exorcised at last, the face I modelled in snow as a child, the face of a woman whose compliant cunt had consumed her utterly.
I think of Emilia as a bronze statue. Marble bodies, too, are not bothered by fleas. Her heart-shaped upper lip recalls an old-world coronation; the lower lip demanding to be sucked arouses visions of harlotry. I was moving slowly beneath her, my head in the hem of her skirt. I had a close-up view of the hairs on her calves, flattened in all directions under her lace stockings, and I tried to imagine what kind of a comb would be needed to smooth them back into place. I fell in love with the fragrance of her crotch, a wash-house smell mingled with that of a nest of mice, a pine-needle lying forgotten in a bed of lilies-of-the-valley.
I began to suffer from optical illusions; when I looked at Clara her body merged into the outline of Emilia’s with the tiny heel. When Emilia felt like sinning, her cunt gave off the aroma of spice in a hayrick. Clara’s fragrance was herbal. My hands are wandering under her skirt, touching the top of a stocking, suspender knobs, her inner thigh – hot, damp and beguiling. Emilia brings me a cup of tea, wearing blue mules. I can never again be completely happy, tormented as I am by women’s sighs, by their eyes rolling in the convulsions of orgasm.
Emilia never tried to penetrate the world of my poetry. She looked at my garden from over the fence, so that everyday fruit and ordinary berries seemed the awesome apples of some pre-historic paradise, while I moved foolishly along the paths, like a half-wit, like a useless dog with its nose in the grass tracking down death and fleeing its own destiny. I was crazy, seeking to find again that moment when shadows fell across a paved square somewhere in the south. Leaning on the fence, Emilia sped on through life. I can see her so clearly: getting up in the morning with her long hair loose, going to the lavatory to piss, sometimes to shit, and then washing with tar soap. Her crotch made fragrant, she hurried to mingle with the living, to rid herself of the feeling that she was at a fork in the road.
Emilia’s smile was a wonderful thing to watch. Her mouth seemed a dried-out hollow, but as you drew near to this upper lode of pleasure you could hear something trembling down inside her, and as she parted her lips for you, a knob of red flesh burst from between her teeth. Age fondles time lovingly. Morality is only safe at home in the arms of abandonment. Her eyes that never closed at the height of her pleasure would take on a gleam of heavenly delight, and looked ashamed of what her lips were doing.
In the corners where I seek my lost youth I come upon golden curls carefully laid away. Life is one long waste of time. Every day death nibbles away at what we call life, and life constantly consumes our longing for trivialities. The idea of the kiss dies before ever the lips meet, and every portrait pales before we can look at it. In the end worms will eat through this woman’s heart, too, and grin in her entrails. Who could swear, then, that you had ever existed? I saw you with a lovely naked girl of astonishing whiteness. She lifted her hands and the palms were black with soot. She pressed one hand between your breasts and placed the other over my eyes so that I was looking at you as through torn lace. You were naked under an unbuttoned coat. That single moment revealed your life to me in its entirety: you were a plant, swelling and budding. Two stems rising from the ground grew together and from that juncture you began to wilt, but your body was already taking shape, with a belly, two breasts and a head where two entrancing pink weals swelled up. At that moment, though, the lower part of your body began to wither, and collapsed. And I grovelled before you, grunting with love such as I had never known. I do not know whose shadow it was. I called it Emilia. We are bound together for ever, irrevocably, but we are back to back.