Your serial is served! In the form of Installment XV of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), garnished with chocolate and a sprinkling of rose water, for your guilty-reading pleasure. Livia gives him the tart, he eats it and he likes it, so he’s safe. Right? So say Wanda’s instructions, which Livia has followed to the letter, but something tastes…off. Good–really good–but…off.
So, Bad, Bad Lovers, what would you do? Head home, right? Leave the guy there and do the responsible thing and head home. Just in case. Because you have a big day tomorrow. Sure you would. Ehem.
BTW, if you’re a new arrival to the party and you’d like to know how Livia got herself into this…er…situation, click right here. There’s a rhyme to the reason, a method to the madness. Sort of.
~
Rick (cont.)
Livia touched her bag like a talisman; the chocolate tart was inside. Soon she would have to invent a way to get him to taste it. Livia sighed, inwardly, a sigh that only she could hear, and admitted to herself that she would not be surprised if Rick’s mouth wrinkled in disgust at his tongue’s first contact with the chocolate. The flutterings were darting through her chest toward her heart. She was intensely conscious of the hollow at the base of her throat. It did not hurt, but Livia was more aware of its existence than she had ever been before.
Rick was reaching into the hip pocket of his jeans, to extract a card from his wallet for Ophelia. Rick was sure that he wanted to see Ophelia again. Livia said nothing; she smiled into her bourbon glass.
As Rick’s hand returned from its journey to his pocket, it made inadvertent contact with Ophelia’s left hip. Livia started as though the light touch had been a blow. Her hip burned (Livia remembered her fingertip against her tongue the night before) but the burning was pleasurable. It lingered for a moment, then fierce possession of her belly, her chest. Livia looked up.
Her impossibly blue eyes met the paler blue ones, under the slightly differing angles of imperfectly arched brows, and she knew that the contact with her hip had produced an intensely pleasurable sensation in Rick’s right hand, which still held the card. His left hand rubbed the back of the right one, protectively, as though to preserve the sweet burn.
When Rick asked if Ophelia would like to see the antique store, it was just around the corner, Livia accepted, though she knew, deep down, that she shouldn’t. Wanda would disapprove–she had not yet proffered the chocolate tart. She would do so, she promised herself, as soon as she crossed the threshold of the store. And be ready to renounce the certain pleasure of further contact with Rick should his reaction suggest the least objection to what she herself knew to be a nauseating bitterness.
~
The shop was on a tiny West Village street; it connected two larger streets. Sometimes the tiny streets, like the tiny streets that had so fascinated Marta on her one and only trip to New York, are only one block long, and no one even knows their names. The shop was a long, narrow space; it surprised Livia with its depth. The studio, Rick informed her, was at the back. There was a garden behind the studio. There would be ivy, Livia imagined, perhaps a small fountain.
The shop was full of layers and layers of things, all old, and all beautiful. Victorian. The interior of the shop, glimpsed in its totality, immediately suggested that particular word to Livia. She appreciated the sensuality of the Victorian aesthetic precisely because it was secret and controlled. The colors reflected those of her own apartment, of whose walls Ophelia was the centerpiece.
There was terracotta, the color of Italian earth (Livia had learned to prepare sauces in Milan and Siena, tiramisù in Rome. She had brought her love for that color back with her to treasure within the hidden interior of her being), shades of brown (shades of French earth. There she had learned about bisque, different grades of butter and tiny partridges in paper bags), the covert greens of the dried vines, thick and difficult to manage, that made up the baskets where she kept her onions and garlic.
Rick’s colors were Livia’s colors. She knew the shop, knew his things (no, she was drunk); she had been here before. She didn’t know when, but she had.
And she should leave.
Rick took several minutes to light the candles placed at random on spindly-legged tables, on the mantlepiece and high atop armoires. Livia was seduced by his selection of pieces–she would have picked the very same items. There was a Japanese screen (possibly eighteenth century), a chaise-longue covered in peacock-blue satin (the color of the sky at dawn, a sky whose varied hues Livia, because of the chocolate tarts, had come to know intimately), a wicked cupid, a sly shepherdess, some busts.
There was an ornate bookshelf behind the desk, floor-to-ceiling, filled with the orderly spines of leather-bound volumes. Rick informed Livia that he also dabbled in rare books. Livia would have examined them had she not come with the purpose of the chocolate tart.
Of whose presence in her bag she was now terribly conscious. Her guard was up; Rick’s clear predilection for the Victorian, so similar to hers, reminded Livia of other similarities (the complementary blues of their eyes, for instance, and the bit about the deconstructionists). Those similarities were reason for caution. Wanda had not mentioned earthly, physical similarities as grounds for concern over the possible similarity of souls, but Livia’s instincts informed her that her soul, the jealously guarded hollow at the base of her throat, and her heart were taking grave risks by remaining.
But she stayed.
“Ophelia?”
“Sorry, I was just looking at your stuff. You have some great pieces.”
“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. Perhaps he was nervous. But the Van Eyck skin and the jarringly beautiful angles betrayed nothing other than a relaxed calm. “I was asking what you’d like to drink. I have a couple of Scotches, some Calvados, some pear brandy, Frangelico.”
“Let’s have the Frangelico–goes with dessert.” She must speed things along; it was getting late. “I brought something for you to try. I’m a chef, remember? I made these today at work…” As she told the lie, Livia noticed a faint taste of roses on her tongue. She summoned saliva and swallowed, extracting the midnight-blue rice paper package from her bag.
Rick opened a cabinet just behind the desk. The liquor cabinet. Livia’s spine stiffened and her head felt suddenly clear, her mind lucid. She was being silly. He probably brought women here all the time, three or four a week. Maybe he even had his own personal ad. The liquor cabinet at the ready, placed conveniently near the silk-covered chaise-longue…an alluring scene for seduction, scoffed Livia’s mind. That way he wouldn’t have to change his sheets every time he got laid. The irony made her feel invincible. She clearly had nothing to worry about. She tossed the tart impudently in her right hand.
“On the rocks or up?”
“On the rocks,” Livia answered. She wanted to see where he kept the ice.
But she was disappointed when Rick had to disappear into the back of the shop. The refrigerator was in the studio. Livia’s fragile defenses crumbled and the taste of roses returned, triumphant, to her tongue. Rick had put on music. German. A lovely feminine voice. Lieder. The stereo, too, must be in the studio. Her theory about Rick’s promiscuity was thus rendered even more questionable.
And the similarity of souls even more likely.
Livia had cultivated a preference for the sober sounds of requiem masses, stabat maters, Bach fugues, or the delicate cadences of sixteenth-century lute music, probably, Livia had theorized long ago, as an antidote to the theatricality of her nature (similar to Marta’s, to Danae’s), which she had successfully learned to control. Deep down, she loved Wagner, though she rarely listened to him.
Rick informed her that he was fascinated by the lyrical, gigantic worlds, the mythic realities, of Wagner. He disdained Verdi, but he had sat through the entire Ring Trilogy, alone. His pale face revealed satisfaction. Music was his drug. It transported him. Livia was overtaken by an absurd impulse to run out and buy a pair of tickets so that she could listen to music with this man. Wagner, if possible. Her vulnerable senses were assaulted by a voyeuristic desire to watch his face as the music insinuated itself into his soul. Livia reached for a cigarette.
Rick had placed their two glasses on the spindly-legged table in front of the chaise-longue. A shade of the invincible irony returned to accent Livia’s gestures as she took up her glass. At least she had been right about the chaise-longue.
He sat close to her; his thigh almost touched hers. As though from a distance, as though it weren’t really happening to her, Livia felt a strange throbbing in the hollow at the base of her throat. She knew that she should stand up, recover her bag and her composure, make an excuse and leave; her heart thumped against her chest like a frightened animal and Livia stayed: he hadn’t tasted the tart yet.
Rick lit Livia’s cigarette before she could do it herself, with a match instead of her lighter, his hand like a beautiful dove (even his hands were beautiful) cupped around the flaming match head. Livia was thankful for the burning ember at the end of her cigarette–otherwise, she might have given in to the magnetic pull of that hand and buried her face in it.
Time for the tart
Livia straightened and pulled away. She handed him the midnight-blue rectangle and held her breath as his fingers untied the black ribbon. If the paper had stuck to the tart, it was probably ruined. But the paper had dried completely; it separated from the flaky crust with barely a sound. Livia’s eyes were now riveted on Rick’s mouth, on the curiously angled lips, as his teeth sank into the moist, chocolate center of the tart. His lips closed and Livia clenched her fists into knots of unbearable tension.
For a few seconds, the almost-perfect face was still; the eyes remained closed. Then, slowly but unmistakably, an expression of pure joy, unadulterated and exquisite, transformed that expressionless near-perfection into the very embodiment of pleasure.
He took another bite, and then another. He chewed slowly; Livia watched the sensuous motions of those jaws, mesmerized, unable to believe her good fortune but not wishing to question it. Ready to get down to business.
Then the curiously angled mouth emitted a low, guttural sound, like a moan. Rick’s hands grasped Livia’s face, no, Ophelia’s, and pulled it toward his. Livia’s (no, Ophelia’s) lips were parted, her mouth penetrated by a warm, moist, masculine tongue. She felt the tongue as it examined her front teeth, the interior of her lips, her tongue.
After a few seconds, Livia realized that that tongue was filling her mouth with the taste of roses, as though the very essence of roses, of all roses, were dissolving in slow motion right there on her tongue. Her saliva glands worked feverishly, filling her mouth with the rose-taste, like the rose tears.
Then, to Livia’s complete astonishment and intense dismay, the rose taste was tempered by the most heavenly flavor of chocolate she had ever, ever tasted.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
~
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