by JAMES SALTER
University. Lecturers in shabby ill-fitting jackets, with hacked-into hair, blinking like moles as they raced from battered old cars to shiny halls. Students mocking them in faux vintage chic, the jeans carefully faded and custom torn. Shiny cars. Cars waxed by employees. Daddies’ cars. Cars that were gifts for graduation from private schools.
Holly walked through the car park and waited for a blocky black vehicle to edge in front of her. There was a dead flower hanging from the mirror, a withered reminder of a kiss, perhaps, now shrivelled and no doubt smelling slightly of decay. She could imagine the girl at the wheel looping string around the single bright iris. The colour of it singing in the harsh light. Now, with the passing of a day or two, the purple was almost grey. The girl at the wheel shifted a lock of orange hair behind her ear, bit the corner of her lip. Holly was startled by the immediacy of everything, the scent of exhaust buffeting her. Her own shadow draped on the asphalt in front of her. The dead iris swinging back and forth as the girl parked the car inexpertly, a little crooked, a little too close to the car beside her. She had to squeeze out of the vehicle with the door half closed. She slid along the side, throwing the locks with an unconscious flick of her wrist. The car barked like an abandoned pet.
The dead iris mesmerised Holly, the way it turned its languid circles, petals tipping into and out of a small patch of sunlight. The iris was somehow significant, special enough to be singled out for preservation. Some story behind it, some hint of love. A vision rocked Holly, sudden, brutal, the girl with her thighs spread wide like the woman in Mandy’s needlepoint. The single still-fresh flower outlined with a blaze of orange pubic hair, the stem electric green with life dipping between the almost-hidden folds of the girl’s vulva. A man’s hand pulling the flower slowly from its makeshift vase of flesh.
There’s enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. The words had leaped suddenly from the page as she read them. She heard them now, not in Salter’s voice, which she imagined to be soft and wise and masculine, but in the deep treacle of Mandy’s tenor.
Holly blinked. The ginger-haired girl was just a smudge of colour at the very edge of her vision; in a minute she would disappear completely. The iris now hung motionless from the rear-view mirror. Just a flower fading away from the memory of its origin. Sooner or later the girl would cut the shrivelled plant down from its thread and throw it away. Holly re-shouldered her book-bag and climbed the steps towards the buildings.
When a group of students brushed past her their short skirts caught a breeze and tugged outwards. There was a hint of soap in their wake, a delicate trace of perfume, the schoolyard whiff of bubblegum, ‘—at 5 a.m. Can you believe that—’ the scrap of conversation as they passed. Holly was suddenly imagining this girl awake at the first hint of dawn, 5 a.m., her bare arms colouring with the gorgeous amber light of early morning, her hair a liquid measure of gold poured over her delicate shoulders. The world seemed closer than it had ever been and it had something to do with reading the illicit book.
It was different somehow. Something had changed since she had begun to read A Sport and a Pastime. It was as if just reading the book had changed her relationship to time and space. Holly steadied herself on the railing and felt it sharp and cold on her fingers. The very steps had somehow become more solid and defined. As if some exterior designer had touched the world with light and shadow, making everything more distinct, sharpening the edges, smoothing and polishing every flat surface.
The Angels always sat on the hill beside the history block. None of them did history and this place was like a small island of anonymity. The girls stretched gorgeously out, their limbs tan against the lushness of the lawn. Holly saw her own group of girls now as others must see them, a sweetness of perfection. The history students, a shorter, stockier, more bookish breed, stomping past them in heavy boots and various shades of khaki, glancing enviously in their direction, appreciating the apparition, this glow of beautiful young female flesh.
Holly slipped easily into the group, folded herself into their greetings.
She leaned back on her elbows, propping herself up so she could look up at the sky. The trees threw mottled light and shade onto the ground beside her. Light like confetti. ‘Huge party,’ someone was saying and Holly thought, ‘Fete’. In the novel by James Salter they would call it that, a fete.
She wanted to talk about A Sport and a Pastime. She was confused by it, disoriented. There was a rare break in the conversation and she could mention the book casually. If only her friends did not find reading such an ugly chore, suitable only for nerds and geeks. She could tell them about the passage where the man puts the pillow under the girl’s naked hips, a brief moment of being still in one room when all the rest of the book is lurching from town to town, party to party, dinner to drinks to dancing in Parisian bars. She had felt a visceral longing to go to Paris, now, without preamble, to run into the fete. And then this one still moment when the lover is inside her, driven to the rim with his balls brushing against her flesh. He reached down and traced the wet circle of her cunt with his finger and ejaculated, so suddenly that Holly was forced to put the book down for a moment, trying to calm the suddenly frantic beating of her own heart.
Holly had fallen asleep, her head resting on the stockinged legs of the girl on the cover of the book. She had dreamed the position. She was in his place, her own balls swinging gently, slapping against the young girl’s thighs. She reached down then and felt the wet slit, not the one that her own cock was buried in, a second cunt, thick wet lips. She traced them gently. The young girl lifted her hips and Holly felt her own strange little penis gripped in the most delicate glove. The girl turned her head to the side, her cheek down and pressed into the bed with each thrust of her hips.
‘Don’t worry,’ the girl had said to her in her sweet French accent. ‘It is impossible to control your dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent. They burn through resolutions like parchment.’
The girl turned her head back into the sheet and began to grunt. Holly pushed forward, into her, trying to stop the terrible sound, the sound of an animal, a pig perhaps. She reached down to the second cunt and felt it wet, a perfect ring of muscle. It came to her then, suddenly.
‘I’m in the wrong hole,’ she said, a terror pouring down over her shoulders. A trickle of ice dripping down her spine.
‘No such thing as wrong,’ the French girl grunted. But when she turned her head it wasn’t the French girl at all. Mandy grinned up at her. Holly tried to pull out of the woman’s arse but her penis was held fast.
‘I’m in the wrong one,’ she said, her eyes tearing up, her hands brushing against the great pale globes of flesh, tight as knees at her crotch. Her balls were poised, tensed, she shouldn’t spill, not here, not in a woman’s arse, a dirty place, a place for secret defecations. She shouldn’t ejaculate here where it was so wrong. Her head tipped back, she felt her balls tighten, her mouth became a perfect o, she was swallowing the universe, stars and planets, hurtling past her teeth. But then she was awake blinking in the dark, restless on the sweat-wet sheets. Only it wasn’t dark. She felt her flesh pulsing as if she was indeed ejaculating in time to the pulsing of a pale blue light. Everything was illuminated by it. She lifted her cheek off the cover of the book, felt the line of it branded on her face.
Her penis was gone. Or, more correctly, had never been there at all. She reached down and felt her vulva twitching as if it were kissing the tips of her fingers. When Holly held her hand up to her face, her fingers were moon-bright.
Now, outside the history building, she blinked up at Jennifer’s face, refocusing.
‘Are you OK?’
Holly was lying on her back. She glanced over to a group of students ambling by.
‘—their feet freeze to the ground and there’s no way to save them without amputation,’ one of them was saying.
‘Yeah, I’m OK.’ Holly lifted herself up to sitting. She took a deep breath to calm herself. She smelled Jack, suddenly, the earthy musk of him. It was a smell so strong that she looked behind her, imagining that he must be standing there. In a moment the scent was gone and there was just the overwhelming sweetness of Jennifer’s perfume. She wondered where the smell of her boyfriend had come from. Perhaps she was losing her grip on sanity.
‘Well? Are you?’
‘What?’
‘Coming to the party tonight. Holly, keep up, will you?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I was invited.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Why wouldn’t you be invited?’
Holly noticed the fall of light against her knees.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘confetti.’ And she pointed to the little scraps of light with her fingertip.
‘You need to get out more, Holly. We barely see you anymore. You didn’t come to Diane’s yesterday at all.’
‘Yeah, Holly.’ Becca flicked her hair back behind her ear. ‘What are you doing all the time?’
‘Reading,’ she said. The word was out of her mouth before she realised it was there.
Becca laughed sharply, knowing it must be a joke.
Holly tried to smile. She had been reading, and while she read something had subtly shifted, the world tilting off its axis by a fraction of a degree. A tiny shift in the universe, but the earth’s trajectory had altered irreparably and Holly was afraid that the very laws of gravity might buckle under the strain.