by Adrianna de la Rosa
(02/13/02)
When was it that she chose to reinvent herself exactly? She must have remembered herself. At least the person she once was who knew how to dance and paint and seduce.
Taking a big chance, she placed a personal ad. There were many replies, but only one stood out. It was from a man who said he had two calico cats. Then he wrote her a little story about watching a cat come into his garden. Of course this cat was a woman in metaphor. Once upon a time she understood this language. In the end, the cat lay at his feet while he stroked it leisurely. She knew she could be this cat. But the exciting thing was his mind, really.
He seduced her with a pen. He might as well have fucked her with it. She was excited that he could find his way inside her mind so easily. Before they ever met they wrote each other. For weeks. You might say they made love on paper first. By the time they met in the flesh, age and circumstance no longer mattered. It was the inflammation of the mind and soul that counted.
How did it happen that first night? The night she seduced him? Nothing, yet everything was planned, from the shrimp scampi to the bath. When she fled her marriage, she had found a tiny studio. At first she would just go there and sit. She contemplated the bare white walls and the sea of grey carpet. She walked the beach every day. Then she would go home. It took a month before she actually moved in.
How is it that we pick someone? Or is it all predestined? She was at a loss without her accustomed circumstances, her marriage. In this place she was a free agent. There was a bathtub with a Moorish feel underneath an arch. She spent hours there caressing herself and just dreaming. She painted her toenails different shades of pink, and later blue. There was a kind of freedom in this naked swirling in bubbles looking at one's toes by candlelight.
When he came for dinner she had no plans, and yet to be truthful, perhaps she had. She fixed shrimp and fed him on the floor. She plied him with Glenlivet. He smoked a cigar. Then she wanted a puff, which gave him a kind of license to do something. She put him in a bubble bath that had the scent of Spain under a summer moon. She insisted on reading him a poem -- Sunstone by Octavio Paz. It was important that he understood the existential qualities of this kind of writing. Later she would find out that he had cried while she read to him.
That night she said, "You can sleep here because it is so late, but you can't touch me." He peeled off her unitard in less than a minute. He went everywhere inside of her. He marveled at her wetness and her taste he named as cinnamon. He took all the wrongs and made them right with his tongue while she lay back and just let him do this, have his way with her. How different this was. He licked his fingers and then told her he wanted to shock her.
After this she only wanted him near water. She would find herself panting at the thought of his touch. How did he know so much about her? How could she possibly be this free with him? She had long pushed past the boundaries of convention. She only wanted his tongue to lick her everywhere.
"Man in the Moon" is a continuing series.
