by R. Cerf
(06/20/01)

After she had gone to bed, he lit the seven-day candles; first the red, blue and black ones on the bookshelf, then the yellow candle on the piano. He placed a glowing cone of myrrh incense near the blue Buddha with the slightly sinister smile. Seating himself at the piano, he paused to decide which piece of music to dedicate to the deities. A friend had recently given him a large bud of the new crop; feathery stamens purple-tinged and still glistening with a frosting of white. He cut it up, put it in the wooden pipe, and inhaled once. In this heat, he thought, Heliotrope Bouquet by Louis Chauvin and Scott Joplin will be appropriate.

Fixing his thoughts on Chauvin, he coaxed a languid melody from the piano. Chauvin was an opium wastrel who had died, beautiful, dissolute and young, in the arms of a St. Louis whore. The most talented of the St. Louis ragtime composers, he was infamous among the brothels near the docks of the Mississippi. Enraptured by his music, the women came to Chauvin for free. And upon his death, all the waterfront whores dressed in black for three days.

With the second movement's exquisite blossoming of melody, the alchemy he lived for occurred, and he disappeared into Chauvin's music, his fingers unraveling skeins of yearning and tired joy. Tendrils of sound twined round soft shadows as if he walked Chauvin's gas-lit cobblestones, where it was always a purgatory between night and dawn.

Both Chauvin and Joplin had known Beauty; they had both been held in Her arms, rolling there sweet and slow. Ragtime ached with the sublime burden of Her kiss. He was happy to serve as Chauvin's and Joplin's priest, believing that it was important that certain spirits be fed, if only through acts of conscious remembrance. For them, he lit the candles and played these melodies.

The first two movements were pure Chauvin, the only recorded traces of the composer. Scott Joplin, Chauvin's friend, had written the third and final themes as a tribute and act of love for his friend. Chauvin's opium-drenched dream, full of longing, dissipated seamlessly into the pure floral vision of Joplin, yielding to Joplin's chords of triumph and release. As the last chords of the final movement faded, he felt he could sense their spirits, full to brimming. He was free to leave them now, and go to her.

As he rose from the piano bench and turned, he noticed the signs of her presence. A black leather jacket, crumpled in the living room chair. Red high-top sneakers, abandoned on the floor. He loved her guileless chaos. Hoping she was still awake, he blew out the candles and passed through the hanging tapestry that separated the bedroom from the rest of the apartment.

Nine yellow candles of different types and sizes glowed from the dresser, bookshelf, and windowsill. He sat on the bed next to her and studied the fine reddish hairs on the back of her neck, brushing his lips softly there, behind her ears. Early Ray Charles preached the blues from an open window down the street. The spirits were feasting.

Her voice, smoky and brown, said, "Someone else's got good taste, too. Joplin and now Brother Ray. 'S like fuckin' heaven!" He sat back, caressed by the slight breeze from the ceiling fan, looking at her outline, illuminated in soft shadows. The sheet rustled slightly. Watching her and the play of candlelight on her face; his hand rested on her calf, above the cotton. Her heat rose through the sheet to warm him.

She moved her hand from beneath the covers and stroked his lip with wet fingertips. He tasted her sweet, thick alkaloidal liqueur. "Your music did this," she said. Accepting the tips of her fingers in his mouth, one by one, he savored her. "I was lying there, and it just tongued me right open. Split me quite sweetly, see?" The taste of her recalled memories of the house where he lived as a child, the profusion of honey-suckle that grew around the mailbox, discovering the drops of honey behind the bloom. While all the other kids ran off to play ball, he had sat there on the grass, pulling tiny yellow blooms, drinking the honey drop by drop. A cloud of yellow at his feet.

He was too full for words. Watching her watching him. She touched a thick shadow at the juncture of her throat and breastbone, and the gesture aroused him. His cock lengthened, warmth snaking down his thigh. A tinge of musk in the still, torrid night.

"I don't know what century you're from," she said. "Sometimes I think it's the nineteenth. All I know is, your music made me come. It felt like being stroked by black orchids." He silently thanked the spirits and Chauvin, wherever he was.

He lifted the sheet away from her, feasting his eyes on the curve of her hip into the pelvic arc, and the scented shadows that swelled there. And he was suddenly rampant, a flesh-magnet, hungry for the pull of the opposite charge, so hard that he thought he would rip through the denim of his jeans. He dropped the sheet to cover her again.

"Yeah," as she reached up to his belt. His pulse must have sent a drumbeat or some pheromonal wave lapping over her. She knew. She popped a button, parting the fabric of his black jeans; stroking the velvet corona of his cock with her fingernail, ever so lightly. "Oh, its the strawberry man! You got something to sell?"

"Yeah, baby. The freshest in town… goes real good with cream. Got any?" Her touch sent ripples of sensation across his glans.

"Oh, I got cream, sugar. 'Deed I do. Drink it and live forever."

She pushed his T-shirt up, fingering, pinching his nipples into stiff, little pebbles. Laving them with her tongue until they seemed incandescent.

"I never knew my nipples could feel that way," he said. "Look at 'em."

"Your hipples? What? I didn't hear you."

"I said my nipples."

"Nope, you definitely said 'hipples.'"

They both laughed at this, and then it was lips brushing and the light sweep of tongues. Dragging his nails through the crisp texture of her pubic hair, under the sheet. He thought that he could see her nipples tenting the cotton. She propped up on her elbow and the sheet slipped away from her. Bending over slightly, holding the curved weight of her breast in his hand, moving five light fingers over its tip.

When he had first seen her, she was bopping down Main Street, her breasts moving freely under the purple tank-top. Nipples keeping hypnotic counter-rhythm under the cotton. He wanted to rip the shirt off with his teeth. As it was, she came right up to him and started talking. Small talk. He stammered, bashful, not knowing why she approached him. Later, she confessed that she felt as if he had undressed her with his eyes. And she liked it.

She seemed sweet enough at the time, but it was the depth in her eyes that had captured him. Her eyes, and his desire to see what music he could coax from her when sliding his hands up her unshaven legs and licking the tufts of fur under her arms. He was jealous of the inseam of her cut-offs; it should be his tongue there. And as she talked, he could barely hear her, distracted by the blood pulsing in his teeth and under his tongue.

Six months later, he was in his car, stopped at a red light; she was crossing the street, playing a Jew's harp. Seeing her again filled him with an odd joy. Not knowing where the courage came from, not even knowing her name, he leaned his head out the car window, shouting: "Hey! I've had six dreams about you." And she, lower lip tucked beneath top teeth, appraised him with a broad smile and climbed into his car. They pulled into a parking lot and talked for over an hour. They were lovers within twenty-four.

And now, they had discovered a language of their own. Melodies. Rhythms. Harmonies of touch. His fingers playing an andante down her back. Her fingers, more lively, a minuet around his cock. He closed his eyes and traced his ten fingers on her flesh, from her collarbone and down. Around the weight of her breasts and over her belly. With all his senses focused in his fingertips, imagining he was a blind piano player. First a gentle samba, then a tango perhaps. Later, a slow rolling blues or a classic rag. Pianissimo or forte?

She pulled his shirt off and then his pants. She appeared to debate about his socks, but they too came off, finally. And then a new theme was introduced as he worked his lips down her belly, flavored by the slight dew of sweat where her hair began to thicken. Almost lemon. And then lower, with her delicate lips between his, working his tongue up the flesh of one petal and down the other. Hearing the breath catch in the back of her throat. At times taking both lips and sucking them together into his mouth, playing with his tongue. Feeling her lower belly rippling under the breadth of his hand.

At the bud of her clit, he could sense the nerves firing there, knowing that every slight pressure, a single movement of his lips or tongue, caused a seismically greater response in her. And again lapping the elixir that flowed sweet and thick from her core, into his mouth. Rimming her swollen unfurling with lips and tongue, stopping for a moment to feel a languorous throb of muscle and nerve. Listening to her moan.

Until she gripped him by his thick dark curls and pulled him up. His face drenched in her juices, he kissed her mouth. And she, grasping his heat with cool fingers, moved herself against him until her labia wrapped like a tulip around the shaft of his cock. Not letting him inside yet, but riding his slick length.

"I want you in me. " Words coming from a place normally reserved for moans.

"Let me just rest it here, like that," his tip just at the portal, an ambassador on a mission requiring elegant diplomacy.

"No!" Pulling him in with her fingernails digging into his buttocks and thrusting upwards. A loud guttural affirmation crossed with a deep chuckle. Her head thrown back. Sliding in, slow but with force, into the center of her. Pressed together all the way. And he wanted even more, to press so hard that they would pass through one another, their molecules interpenetrating and mingling until they regained substance.

Slick with sweat, suddenly serious, she commands, "Stop, don't move." Her inner thighs shaking. "Do you feel that?"

"Feel what? I feel everything!"

"A buzzing. Like a transformer, a whirring. Do you feel it?"

Holding very still, he felt the trilling.

Moving slowly again. Withdrawing to the tip and then moving back into her, tight, until he could feel the buzzing again. She rubbed hard against him, her face collapsing in pleasure, features broken down in concentration. The whirring of the current growing stronger.

She made him roll over and climbed on top to ride him, hard, moving in circles, churning. Then rocking back and forth on the fulcrum of his cock. He lifted his head and took her left nipple in his mouth, a cross between a bite and a suck. Tongueing lightly to feel the ridges. Her thighs quivered more and then most, and then her legs spread wide, back arching and her face radiant with surprise and delight, until the whole of everything he knew went shuddering, melting down and flowing from his scalp and his toes. Into his spine and spilling out in a molten river.

Afterwards, a golden silence. Having stolen the giant's harp, they could stay and listen to its music, forever.

Footsteps sounded on the sidewalk outside, hanging flat in the moist, hot air of summer. Ray Charles, preaching the blues down the street. The spirits sated. Together, they blew out the candles, one by one.

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