BRIDEY WAS FACING THE PHONOGRAPH player when I returned. Her biceps glowed bluish where it had struck the shelf. I heard the moist whump of a needle drop, followed by the opening drawl of Artie Shaw’s “Stardust.” Her naked back rolled with the wistful strain, spine and scapula pressing against her skin like dragon wings wanting to be freed. Her hips swung this way, slow, and that way, slower, so that her blood-colored gown was a dripping wound cut through the air.
Her languid turnabout was protracted agony. Throbbing pale neck, smothered cinder eyes, slippery crimson lips. She sucked on a long cigarette.
“My dance partner. He’s run off. I need another.”
I became a bull. Lower the head, square the shoulders, and snort.
Bridey Valentine always got what she wanted, is that right?
Fine, then, fine. After all, she’d earned it.
Our love story, if that’s what you’d like to call it, was never going to end any direction other than horizontal. I took her by the waist and lugged her toward the hearth. A Persian rug fattened before her dragged feet and her hip collided with the end of the loveseat; it splintered and she grunted in pain. But it was she who pushed me over the back so that I landed upon the cushion. Around it she paced a coyote circle, gauging which part of me to eat first.
She ankled off her shoes, worked her hands under the hem of her dress, removed her knickers, and threw them into the fire. She was then upon me with claws and teeth, ripping at jacket and shirt, unmindful of the signatures her nails might forever write across my flesh. She was sloppy and impatient; she left my upper body half-dressed and went for the trousers, beneath which she felt the hardness she’d so long hunted.
Just as rigor mortis had stiffened individual muscles of my body, so had it stiffened the softer tissue of my genitals. I had over the past year grown rigid enough to do a man’s work, even though I was not a man, not even a boy, just a corpse who turned this consensual fornication—“carnal knowledge” as Bridey would say—into a rape of all things natural. She snarled and grabbed it, her selfish motivation, after all this time, still intact: to screw the Wilma Sue, and everything else left of my old life, right out of me. She positioned my pecker at the bow of her sex.
I was colder than cold. She was hotter than hot.
White steam crept from under the red skirt.
Bridey bucked her hips and we were locked. She pointed her face at the coffered ceiling and shivered at the deep chill. Then she swore gruffly, directly cursing her icicle invader, and began to jolt back and forth. Faintly I felt a single bead of mercury heat. I dug my fingers through the dress and into her thighs so as to hang on for dear death.
We were foes caught in a playground fight of slapping limbs when things inverted. We fell from the loveseat, rolled, and sprang back in the same position, she on top and crashing her hard pelvis into my fragile own. A general softness cushioned the assault and I turned my head to find beneath me a bedding of black fur. The bear rug, that mocking bane, had me in its clawed clutches! See? laughed the bear. Even dead things have their uses.
Bridey dragged her bosom along my chest so that the friction peeled away the bodice. She pushed the dress down to her waist and slid her hands up her naked torso. What looked like sensual self-fondling was anything but; it was a mirror of the tour of my wounds I’d given her our first night together, her own Revelation Almanac—a meticulous account of the damages accrued when playing tug-of-war with Death.
The scars glowed in the orange light. Here, a breast-lift. There, a tummy-tuck. Evidence of Dr. Biff’s meddling was curlicued into her navel and tucked into the crevices of her armpits. Bridey lifted her hair from her shoulders and angled her body so that I might appreciate the disfigurements for the war injuries that they were. Church had removed his facial prosthesis to disclose his damage; Bridey removed her gown to reveal hers.
“Stardust” finished. Needle nudged label and made a cyclical thump. Bridey adopted the rhythm, squeezing her lathered legs around my white slabs of cold thigh. Forget the Greek death mask, the Egyptian mummification kit; forget every spookish icon with which she’d styled herself a patroness of the dark. Copulating with the Devil himself, now that was the outermost thrill.
Within this meat-etiquette melding I began to experience uncoiling spires of pleasure. These went far beyond the cheap pumps of blood I’d felt as a youth; this was a lessening of deadness for having been plugged into a furnace of life. I, the gigolo Zebulon Finch, was once again a fumbling virgin. Bridey, voracious vamp, was restored her maidenhood.
It was our first time. It was our last time.
Shakespeare had it right about a post-poisoned Juliet:
She was a flower, but death deflowered her.
“Yes,” cried she.
Yes—devastation.
“Yes!” cried she.
Yes—immolation!
“Yes!” cried she.
Yes—erasure, destruction, oblivion, take me!
Her starved muscles, biting; our quick cadence, disrupted; her flammable sweat upon both of us, sparked and rushing in blue flame. With one brute thrust of her hips, she harvested my root. There was a dull snap. No orgasm on Earth could lighten so heavy a weight, no ejaculation could offer such overdue release. Bridey slid away with my pecker still inside of her and I was glad. She could not keep the whole of me forever, but this single piece, for which I had no further use, belonged to her—it had for a while—and would make, thought I, a nice addition to her museum, a final endowment from me to my cut-up and sewed-back-together patchwork queen.