The warm spring air lifts Eve’s skirt as they ride toward Brooklyn on Micajah’s Vespa. He zigzags from avenue to street to avenue, in and out of the low sun’s shadow. When they pick up speed, she feels the wind stroke her legs, from the bones on the outsides of her knees up her thighs and down to her ankles. At first she balked at wearing the helmet he gave her, wanting to feel the wind in her hair—and wondering, too, if he carries it because he has a girlfriend or if he’s just always prepared for one. But as they ride, she glories in the invisibility. In the unlikely event that someone she knows sees them, they will not know it’s her.
She has never ridden pillion before. In the first few turns, as the bike dipped to one side, she clutched Micajah’s waist, but soon she relaxed and her hands dropped to his hips, her index fingers resting along the leather belt beneath his loose shirt. As she leans in, mirroring his movements, she feels in sync with the universe, dancing with gravity and centrifugal force.
To her left, the full moon hangs low in the east, wan above the sea of artificial light that washes out the stars. Eve feels a kinship, as if the moon shares her pleasure in seeing and not being seen. As the Vespa hits a run of green lights heading south, the moon flickers like an antique clip of film, visible only when they pass a cross street, calm and fixed in the lavender sky.
When they turn onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the moon looms in front of them as if it is their destination.
They wind through increasingly derelict and deserted streets, punctuated by corner bodegas. Micajah stops in front of a large steel door, kicks down the stand and takes off his helmet.
“I told you it wasn’t the fancy part,” he says, as Eve shakes her head clear. She feels like a sailor who has to find her land legs again.
He unlocks a padlock, slides the door open, and wheels the Vespa inside. The door clangs shut behind them.
They walk up flights of concrete stairs and down passageways lit by naked bulbs. Finally, they reach another industrial door with a hasp and a padlock. Once it’s open, he flips off the staircase light before switching on the lights inside. That moment of darkness is another break between her old self and the new.
“It used to be a lace factory,” he tells her. “I chose it for the windows.”
Windows line three sides of the cavernous space, here and there shaded by lengths of hanging silk in rich colors.
“Secondhand saris,” says Micajah. “I had a girlfriend who did set dec for fashion shoots. She taught me to shop in Indian neighborhoods.”
Will he say one day that he had a girlfriend who designed gardens? And taught him . . . what? Eve feels a sense of vertigo. To reach the position of girlfriend, and then ex-girlfriend—each one requires a fall.
He sets the takeout boxes on the kitchen counter, and disappears into a far corner. Eve hears a clanking of pipes, then the sound of water rushing into a bath.
“Okay?” he says as he comes back toward her across the acreage of tightly laid hardwood floor. He is already barefoot.
She returns his smile. “Yes.”
It’s frightening, though. The track lights will show up every sag and crease and cellulite dimple on her body.
“How hungry are you?” he asks. “Dinner before bath, or after?”
“After,” Eve says. Her appetite has vanished and, in her state of unease, she is comforted by the promise of a detour between bath and bed. If he changes his mind and doesn’t want to go to bed at all, it will be easier that way.
He takes her hand and leads her to the bath. The wall partitioning it off is made of hundreds of framed photographs hanging from the ceiling on ribbons of duct tape, like heavy bead curtains. Each black-and-white photo shows a group of people, seated and standing, from six or eight to many dozen, in Arabic-looking robes or fezzes and high-collared suits, formal in their strangeness and touching in their formality.
“The Hermenautic Circle.” “Snake Handlers: Athens, Alabama.” “The Bassanda Society of Talpa, New Mexico.” Every photograph is the record of some mysterious enthusiasm and the people who shared it.
“I’ve never heard of anybody collecting weird societies before,” Eve says, peering at these somber, long-forgotten faces. The light here is low; fortunately, the overheads don’t point toward this corner of the loft.
“When I was a kid my mom loved going to yard sales, so it gave me something to do. Since they took themselves so seriously, I figure they deserve to have somebody else take them seriously too. I love that I’ve become the keeper of all these bizarre flames.”
I love it too, Eve thinks. I am skirting the danger zone.
He undoes the buttons of her blouse, then turns to pour oil in the bath and takes off his own clothes facing away from her, allowing her to undress unwatched. She’s grateful for his delicacy.
The feet of the bathtub are lion’s claws. Fat-lipped dolphins—which Eve remembers from the lampposts in Paris—are painted around the outside. The faucet rises above the center. As Eve steps into the tub, Micajah lights three candles which sit on a rickety table. He settles at the end opposite Eve, his legs on either side of hers, his feet snugged against her hips.
What will I do with my feet? she thinks in a panic, her knees still bent, feet flat on the bottom of the tub. If she stretches out her legs, her feet will end up in a place way beyond her comfort zone. Resting her feet outside his legs would be even worse.
Micajah reads the confusion on her face. His laugh begins barely a second before hers.
“Give me a foot,” he says, holding out his hands. “Leave the other one where it is, so you don’t slip down.”
Micajah rubs the arch of her foot, gently pulls each toe until it cracks, and then makes tiny circles with both thumbs at the corners of the nail of her big toe. Eve feels like a snake whose dry husk is dropping away.
She lets her left foot slide forward and edges it beneath him, so that it’s pressed between the hard enamel of the bath and the firm muscle of his thigh. She glances down at her breasts, buoyed up by the water. They look as they did twenty years ago.
“Yann,” Micajah says. “You haven’t asked me about him yet. But I know you haven’t forgotten. He wasn’t just an excuse.”
“I wouldn’t have called you otherwise,” Eve says.
“So you only want me for my contacts?”
Yes. No. She can’t answer him.
“That’s all right,” he adds. “Any reason will do.”
“Why do you want me?” She’s horrified at having said it. She’s always looked down on clingy women who need reassurance, women who ask their men, Do you love me? It’s either weakness or feminine wile.
“You mean, why would I desire a woman twenty years older than me?”
“Yes,” she says, relieved that he’s taking her question at face value.
“It’s a fair question. Funny, isn’t it, how hatred and cynicism are this cosmic tide, and love is flickering and dim and needs a pilot light.”
He places her foot against his abdomen, and holds it against him with his palm.
“First of all, because you don’t need me. In fact, you really don’t need me, I’m probably the last thing you need. You weren’t looking for me, or anyone like me. You don’t want to marry me and have my babies and play out some fantasy that’s got nothing to do with me but everything to do with your buttons, your story. You’re not looking for forever, and I don’t believe in forever. I believe in now. And right now, this incredible woman, whose body and heart have gone through experiences of meaning so huge that I could never even imagine what it feels like, this woman whose grace sparks music in me and whose mind intrigues me and who is, by the way, really good-looking, is sitting in my bathtub, and I am massaging her feet. So, basically, that’s it: instead of playing some fake role in someone else’s story, I get to play a much more fun role, that’s actually me, in a story you and I are making up as we go along.”
He kisses her toes, each one in turn, and lowers that foot beneath the water, to rest between his legs. As he gentles her left foot out from beneath his thigh and lifts it out of the water, she moves her right big toe against him, feeling the blood rise and change the shape of his body.
The ease of it all, the absence of game plan, is new to Eve. Larry, and the few boys she knew before him, all made their circuit of first base, second, third, and home with no deviation. The unaccustomed frankness of the pleasure Micajah takes, and gives, makes Eve more daring. This, she realizes, is what being turned on feels like.
She strokes the arch of her foot against him, up and down. Momentarily, Micajah closes his eyes and a sound comes from deep in his throat, so low that Eve barely hears it. Then he opens his eyes and smiles at her. It’s seductive, his absence of urgency. Maybe this is Tantra—that arcane, illicit practice Eve has heard of but never understood.
“I’ve known Yann for probably eight or nine years.” His answer is as natural as if she’d just asked the question. “A friend of my parents introduced us. Her name is Barbara—you’d like her. When I went from being a sulky kid with a guitar to someone who could actually be considered a musician—though not a very good one—she thought that if music didn’t happen for me, building instruments might be a good career move. I wasn’t what you’d call academic.”
“You worked for him?”
“Only sweeping floors and washing his dogs. I was still a teenager, an amateur, and you already know that Yann doesn’t have a lot of time for amateurs. I was super lucky that he tolerated having me around.”
“Because you learned a lot?”
“I learned a bit. The big result was that he got used to me. So when I asked him if I could be his apprentice—which I did, finally, yesterday—he said yes. Which is the first time he’s said that to anyone. So I’m pretty stoked.”
“You’re not too busy with the whole rock star thing?” Eve feels rather silly saying that.
“Partly it’s to stop me being too busy with the whole rock star thing,” Micajah says. “At least, that’s why I want to start now, not wait. If the whole rock star thing was all I was doing, God help me. I’d be either dead or so obnoxious I wouldn’t want to live. If I ever got the moment of clarity to know it,” he adds. Eve is coming to recognize Micajah’s afterthoughts and non sequiturs as a way he has of measuring his words against some yardstick of truth, and shaping the statement more exactly if he finds it wanting.
“The work will keep me honest,” he says.
When Eve wakes in the morning, she’s alone in Micajah’s bed. She sits up and sees him in the kitchen area making coffee. His bare back is bent to the side as he presses the coffeemaker down. Something looks odd . . . then Eve remembers he’s left-handed. She’s seeing his movements as if in a mirror.
“Cream? Sugar?” he calls. There is a mirror on the wall in front of him, in which his movements look more normal. An odd place for one. Eve wonders if it was his idea, or an ex-girlfriend’s, to put it there, to allow him to see the bed as he makes coffee.
“Milk, if you’ve got some.”
“Yup.” He opens the fridge, pours milk into a pan. Eve hears the hiss of a steamer.
When he emerges from behind the kitchen counter, holding two big mugs, she sees that he is naked. Her reflex is to avert her eyes as he walks toward her, but his ease overrides it. It’s like watching a cat move. Lean as he is, she can see the V-shaped muscles of his abdomen tensing as he walks.
The previous night, when they got out of the bath, Micajah wrapped her in a thick towel and dried her—just as she had dried Allan when he was six years old, delighting in the feel of his little body beneath the towel. As they ate their Chinese food, a pink neon sign outside the window blinked on.
“I’ll give you a ride to the train station if you want to go home,” he said. “But really, I’m hoping you want to stay.”
A sequence of steps: the phone call, the mushroom, the Vespa, the clang of the door, the moment of darkness, the bath. With each step she took, Eve feared that the trail of breadcrumbs she was trying, mentally, to lay behind her would disappear, stranding her in a forest of dark, uncharted emotions. Still, she has already resigned herself to heartbreak. It’s the destination that’s the risk. The reward is in the marvels of the journey.
She looked away from Micajah, her eyes falling on the vertical rows of somber-faced mystics and falconers and builders of ships in bottles staring out at her through the cameras of long ago. They are her allies. She has their benediction.
“I do,” she said.
The sheets were fresh, still creased in straight lines from the packaging. So Micajah had planned to bring her back here, long before she agreed to come. Should she feel manipulated? She didn’t. The heart defines the meaning, and Eve decided it was her choice what to see. As she inhaled the papery smell and felt the crisp cotton against her back, she was pleased that he had bought new sheets for her.
“I love these,” he said, tracing the stretch marks on either side of her belly. “They look like a panther’s claws.”
Eve hated those marks. After Allan was born, she never wore a bikini again. When Micajah suggested the bath, she worried that he’d be repelled by them, but the bathwater and the candlelight disguised them. Overwhelmed by her decision to stay, she’d forgotten about them after that.
“I always thought they were ugly,” she said.
“They’re beautiful,” he said. “They’re your battle story.”
He made love to her with deliberation, moving inside her with a hypnotic rhythm as slow as the pulse she’d sensed beneath her fingers. When climax came, she felt like he’d launched her off a cliff and she was flying. After a second, or ten seconds, or longer, she reached back for him, and he leapt toward her, the two of them holding each other in a tight, perfect unit, until gravity reasserted itself, they drifted back to earth, and Micajah settled himself on the bed beside her.
“I feel strange telling you this,” she said, after a while. “It was four years. Before . . . before I met you. I thought maybe I’d never have sex again. Or even want to.”
“That’s obscene,” he said. Then, “What kind of man neglects a woman like you?”
Micajah hands her the mug of coffee without ceremony, as if this is an ordinary situation. Could it be? Could this become normal for them? How soon would the shine fade?
The only way the shine will not fade is if this is the last time. And if there is another, that too must be the last time. Eve knows she must be rigorous. There is no future.
“You know the G-spot,” he says, taking a sip of his coffee.
“Yes,” Eve says warily. She drops her eyes to her own mug and sees that her hand is trembling.
“Actually, no,” she says, “not personally.”
She didn’t intend to be so open, but she feels safe: he won’t take her inexperience as a problem, or a failing. In the past, she turned her naivety into a source of pride. Now it gives edge to the adventure.
“You never tried to find it? Even alone?”
“I was never a hundred percent sure I had found it.” She’s unwilling to reveal that she made very few attempts. Pleasuring herself, she’d always felt self-conscious, even at the moment of climax. It wasn’t puritanical shame; she just felt that she wasn’t very good at it, and that her hand was a feeble substitute for a man. Her husband.
Or a lover.
“I read somewhere that it’s only a theory,” she adds. “That scientists haven’t been able to find it either. At least, not consistently.”
“That’s scientists for you.”
She laughs. “My husband was a scientist by training. Before he took an office job.”
“Bang,” he says, setting down his coffee mug with one hand while sliding the other down her breastbone, moving the sheets away.
“How about we try to prove it.”
“Some theories can’t be proven,” Eve says. His fingers on her skin are as light as a ladybug. Her breath comes faster.
“Like gravity,” she adds.
“Damn. So we may have to keep repeating the experiment.”
“We could be accused of a lack of scientific rigor,” she says. “This isn’t double-blind.”
The gold flecks in his eyes spark through the air between them and ground in the fibers of her body. He reaches over to a chest of drawers, pulls out two bandannas, and drops them on the bed.
“Your idea,” he says. “Double-blind. You want to do it?”
Eve feels as raw as a newborn. It’s not that the old Eve would have said no. The old Eve would never have been asked the question.
She folds both bandannas into blindfolds, places one across his eyes and ties it. He holds out his hands, palms up, for her to give him the other one. Before she does, she takes greedy minutes to consume him with her eyes: the strong lines of his cheekbones and jaw, the full curves of his mouth. She places her index fingers at the center of his upper lip, and strokes outward. He opens his lips, just slightly, as if obeying her command. She leans in to kiss him, her fingers on either side of his mouth where dimples would be.
The movements of his tongue and lips are almost imperceptible, yet the energy flow toward her makes her head tingle. It’s like he’s returning the kiss with his mind.
Eve puts the second bandanna in his hands and guides it into place, flattening her hair while he ties the knot. With vision blotted out, her other senses catch fire. She feels his breathing, soft as mist, against her skin, down her throat, brushing across her breasts. She hears the steady thump of his heart, distant sirens and motors, the cooing of pigeons on the windowsills, the creaks of the bed as he moves. His tongue plays circles in her navel, his strong hands stroking the insides of her thighs, gentling her legs apart.
Then, as his tongue abandons her navel, licking down the midline of her body, his fingers move north again, the sandpapery calluses etching arc after arc up her abdomen, like fireworks.
His strong lips kiss the tip of the cleft between her legs. His tongue, insistent, explores her. Every nerve in her body zooms in to those few square millimeters. She thinks, Maybe nobody has ever touched that exact spot before.
“That’s not it.” His voice is a low echo, barely more than a whisper. “I’m calling that the M spot.”
At first, she doesn’t know what he means. The conscious processing of her reason is sputtering, like a machine with its battery running out.
He moves down further, his tongue brushing against her clitoris. She gasps.
“That’s yours. Found territory. I won’t claim it.”
The breath that makes his words plays across the folds of flesh, contours she’s never seen. Under his fingers and tongue they take on unfamiliar shapes, rises and valleys that she never knew were hers.
His finger edges past the rim of bone to slip inside her.
“The I spot,” he says. “Because I like it.” She feels his tongue flick into her. “And because my name is Micajah, and I’ll be your server today.”
His tongue licks like a cat’s around the very edge of the opening—though not quite all the way around—so that Eve can hardly tell whether it’s still on the surface of her body or inside her.
“That’s a C.”
She forces her pleasure-saturated brain to do the math: he’s less than halfway through his name.
His fingers again, moving inside her—his two index fingers, she thinks. One stays low, stroking lazy Cs on the bone. The other presses first here, then there, toward the sides of her body, the back. She hears a long, low moan, and realizes she made it.
“Aha,” he says, “A. Good enough to come back to.”
Without taking his fingers away, he kisses a spot on her inner thigh, just where the crease of her behind starts. Another spot that Eve has never felt specifically before, that’s never been isolated and caressed.
“Is that J?” Her words are soft-edged and slow.
“If you like. Or it could just be a bonus, and this is J.”
The two fingers are together now, kneading a hidden mound inside her. She wants to tangle her fingers in his thick hair, but the nerves that fire conscious action have been taken hostage. The entire network is devoted to only one purpose: to magnify the sensations created by Micajah’s fingers, and Micajah’s tongue.
“Back to A.”
One finger moves, while the other continues to stroke on the mound he’s christened J. Eve’s whole body, not just her voice, has turned to honey. H for honey, she thinks, her brain firing lazily. H comes after G. That means the H spot is better.
“H.”
She shudders against his hands, which are on her hips now, holding her tight against his firm mouth and his tongue as he simultaneously devours her and feeds her, sending wave after wave of energy flooding through her, fizzing like champagne at the crown of her head.
His mouth moves to hers, his breath merges with hers. She tastes the thick saltiness of her own pleasure on his tongue. This could all be a creation of her mind: his weight on top of her, the warm scent of his neck, the soft rasp of his stubble against her face. My desire made you, she thinks. She wraps her legs around him, pulling this creation of hers closer in, filling herself with him, cherishing him.
She feels his body taut as a bowstring pulled to breaking point, then release with a rush. The air around their joined bodies whirs with it.
“Micajah,” she says, savoring his name, lifting the bandanna away from his eyes and then her own.
“The experiment failed,” he says. “None of those spots was called G.”
“Edison said he never failed. He just found ten thousand ways that didn’t work.”
“I could try changing my name to Greg. Though it’s not long enough. Gregory.”
“George,” Eve says. “Still not long enough.”
“Gogol. Guglielmo.”
She laughs.
“Guggenheim,” he says. “Peggy Guggenheim. If you swung that way.”
He takes her right hand and guides it to the place he brushed over and left behind.
“Remember?” he says. “This is yours.”
His index finger is above hers, its pad pressing on her fingernail, the two fingers stroking as one, in tight circles.
“E,” he says. And with his third finger, he moves her third finger inside the bony ridge. “V.” His fingers on hers are strong and precise. “E.”
Again he spells her name with their locked fingers.
“E.”
“V.”