The city of Nashville straddles its polluted stretch of the Cumberland River like a lover, nestles into its fertile patch of Tennessee land like a cluster of rhinestones sewn onto a rich cloth of earth brown and malachite green. The streets of the downtown area are brick, dating from the early days of the city. Above these cobbled paths, towers of glass and chrome soar up and up, some for 30 storeys or more, elegant hotels and shopping centres and temples of commerce, catching the southern sunlight by day, reflecting the million coloured fairy lights of the city by night. Many of the tallest buildings have glass elevators that can be seen from the street after dark, ascending the sheer faces of the buildings like shimmering insects climbing towards the moon.
Or spiders, thought Anthony, going up to spin a web between the few stars that were faintly visible through the haze of city light. Yes, he could paint that: white and silver spiders, spinning gossamer threads between points of light in velvety purple-blackness.
But he thought Rose might paint it better. The image was more suited to her style.
He stood naked at a window on the 31st floor of a grand hotel, pressing his body to the cool glass so that a foggy outline began to form around him – his body heat made visible – and gazing out over the city. Only the faintest shadow of his reflection was visible in the glass: sharp-featured, big eyes staring, skin very pale and hair paler still. He was backlit by the Christmas lights strung around the room, the candles burning, the tiny orange eye of an incense stick smouldering here and there. A room lit by juju.
From what Anthony had seen, the hotel staff consisted of impeccably dressed black men with gleaming bald heads and big-haired white ladies who wore their make-up like an extra face, so thickly applied that it seemed to hover a fraction of an inch above their actual features. They would certainly suspect juju or worse if they saw the room now. But they never entered, nor did the housekeepers, not during this week. Anthony met them at the door to receive towels and soap for the long, steaming baths he and Rose took. The bed could not be changed because it was in constant use, so that by the end of the week it would be a swirled, jumbled confection of sheets and pillows and small creamy stains, rich and ripe with the many scents of love. And, this year, with the faintly sour tang of spilled champagne.
All the rest of the year Anthony was a sherry drinker. He had never been able to make himself like the taste of beer, and liquor mutated his personality, made him a mad thing, unable to paint. Rose always drank champagne. This year she’d begged him to drink it with her, and he had given in. It produced a strange drunkenness he’d never known before, balloon-headed, almost numb. It made him want to obey her, to please her more thoroughly than ever, no matter what it was she wanted. Yesterday she had wanted to urinate on him in the empty bathtub, and though every fibre of his fastidious being shrieked its revulsion, the very dirtiness of the act made it more thrilling.
You’re mine, she had whispered as the recycled champagne flowed out of her, over Anthony’s chest and stomach in a pale yellow stream. You’re mine, no one else’s, not hers, only mine now.
Her words, as much as her act, had given him a jolt. Rose never referred, even so obliquely, to the uncomfortable fact of Anthony’s marriage.
He placed his hands flat against the glass – two perfect, long-fingered handprints limned in a nearly phosphorescent mist – then pushed himself away from the window and reached for the ice bucket. A half-full bottle of champagne was chilling there. Magie Noir, the strange brand Rose always brought with her. She said it came from a winery near New Orleans, where she spent the rest of her year.
“Cajun champagne?” he’d asked, a little nervously, the first time she had poured it for him.
“You’d really have to call it sparkling wine, I guess,” she’d said. “But that sounds as if it ought to be pink and served in Dixie cups. Magie Noir is a potion.”
Now Anthony poured some of the potion into a tall fluted glass and sipped slowly. Bubbles exploded against the roof of his mouth. There was an underlying spiciness, a slight burn like the essence of Tabasco without the garlic and vinegar, like oil of cinnamon, a subtle heat stitching across the tongue. Still, he could not detect all the flavours Rose said were in the bouquet; she knew the names and tastes of herbs he’d never heard of.
Anthony drained his glass and turned to look at the woman who shared this room and this week and this city with him. The woman who slept the sleep of the sated, sprawled across the white expanse of the enormous bed. Every year the beds seemed to grow huger, softer, more enticing. Every year their bodies seemed to fit together more precisely, their hearts seemed to bleed into each other more willingly.
Rose LeBlanc.
He knew so little about her, knew not even whether that was her real name; the symmetry of its syllables seemed too perfect. But he could imagine no name that would suit her better. And that was what it said on her Louisiana driver’s licence, next to a tiny snapshot, all disarrayed hair and fierce, camera-hating eyes: Rose LeBlanc of New Orleans.
They had met in Nashville, two up-and-coming young artists invited to exhibit paintings in a museum show. Anthony’s wife wasn’t with him; his career did not interest her. He’d been at some cocktail party sucking down the free sherry, and suddenly there was Rose wrapped in black lace and silk, hair in a wild purple cloud around her head, a glass of Magie Noir already in her graceful, gloved hand. When he saw her work, Anthony knew he had to sleep with this woman.
Rose’s paintings seemed ready to crawl off the canvas and twine tendrils round your wrists, almost too beautiful and too morbid to bear. Psychedelic washes of colour twisted into intricate, mandala-like patterns, seeming to swarm on the wall. Black-green swamp scenes so lush and organic that you swore the leaning tree trunks could be made of bone, the draping foliage and shadow a thin network of viscera, of stretched flesh and trailing, looping vein. Her paintings glistened and seethed. It was as if she mixed quicksilver into her tempera, LSD into her watercolours.
They made Anthony think of creation and destruction, sex and voodoo, of broken skulls resting on candlelit altars, eye sockets blazing dead black light. Of the thousand ghost stories that must pervade any block of her native French Quarter, of the thousand deaths and pains inflicted there daily. And of the sodden, decadent pleasures.
Looking at Rose’s work – even the Polaroids of new canvases she occasionally sent him between visits – was like being in a hotel room with her, her tongue working him over or her legs wrapped tight around his hips, burying him deep inside her. Sometimes Anthony felt stupidly, nigglingly jealous of the other people who must see her work, wondering if it made love to them in just the same way.
But they did not hold her tight as she laughed and cried with pleasure. They did not bite her throat and lick her nipples, they did not spread her thighs and drink the sweet nectar of her cunt under a rainbow of Christmas lights, 31 floors above the city. They did not drink Magie Noir with her.
At least, Anthony hoped they didn’t.
He approached the bed. The folds and ripples of the white sheet caught all the colours in the room; they spread like a watercolour wash over the hills and hollows of Rose’s body. A comer of the sheet was draped across her face, trembling with each breath. He took hold of the sheet and gently pulled it away.
Flawless skin paler than his, pale even against the white sheet. Mouth raw from the days they had already spent together – from kissing and the sandpaper rasp of Anthony’s scruff, since he did not often leave the bed long enough to shave – too dark in the pale face, like an overripe plum. Lashes smudgy against cheeks, twin streaks of charcoal. Hair of a curious purple-black, the colour of a bruise, teased and tangled around her head; there were a couple of patches at the back where it had begun to knot up into dreadlocks. The soft bush of hair between her thighs was the same strange colour; when wet with his saliva or sperm, it glistened nearly violet.
Rose was thin and lithe, the upper part of her body almost boyish in the hollowness of its shoulders and collarbones, its small, vivid nipples, the subtle framework of ribs visible beneath skin white as parchment. But her hips were wide and strong, and her ass was as round and heavy as fruit, delectable. With the tips of his fingers Anthony brushed her cheek, then ran his hand down the side of her neck and cupped the small swell of her breast in his palm. The nipple puckered at his touch, and Rose opened her eyes: all great black pupil and glittering purple iris, hectic even at the moment of awakening. Huge, wild eyes; feral eyes.
“How long did I sleep?” she demanded.
“A couple of hours.”
Next he expected her to ask, How many more days do we have?
It was the only thing that disturbed the flow of their time together each year: halfway through the week, Rose would start counting off the days until they had to part, then the hours, and finally the last, excruciating minutes before Anthony boarded a plane for the other side of the continent, back to the wealthy wife he could not bring himself to leave, and she hopped a southbound Greyhound. The diminishing time seemed to twist inside her, to cause her actual physical anguish. At the end she could not even bear to lose time to sleep. If Anthony slept, she would sit awake watching him, studying the tightly drawn, compact lines of his face and body as if memorizing them for another year.
But she didn’t ask the question, not this time; just pulled him down to her.
In lust her voice became thick, clotted, like slow southern sap, like sweet oil. Her sobs and her cries of pleasure were curiously muted, as if her strongest emotions burned pure and hot enough to drain the air of oxygen. “Come into me,” Anthony heard her say faintly. “Come to me now. Come into me now . . .”
He descended into the moist, fragrant world of the bed and the body of his lover. Nothing mattered but Rose’s tongue in his mouth, his hand between Rose’s legs, sliding up and down the wet length of her cleft, then sinking two fingers deep inside her. It felt like wet silk in there, like the slow rippling muscles of a snake. She groaned way down in her throat and moved hard against his hand, forcing it deeper. For a moment his fingers found her rhythm, heightened it.
When he pulled away, Rose caught at his hand. Anthony brought her fingers to his mouth, kissed their small, sharp tips. Then he pulled her legs wide. A passage more ancient than the river, with a stronger pull than the ocean’s tide . . . He lowered his face to her, ran his tongue around the swelling bud of her clit, then let it slide into the rubypearl depths of her vagina. Her smell was like flowers crushed in seawater, her taste like fruit ripened and slightly fermented. Anthony thought he would die before he could drink enough of it.
Soon, though, he burned to be inside her. He tumbled Rose onto her back and found the heart of her womb with one liquid thrust. Her scream was like a crystal knife falling, splintering. Time went away; he might have spent minutes or hours inside her; his orgasm seemed to stretch the fabric of reality to the breaking point, then beyond.
Afterward they lay tangled together, too spent to speak. Anthony’s penis felt as if it were melting inside her. In fact, his whole body felt ready to melt. He slept.
When he woke again, he could not move.
The slight, pleasant numbness he’d felt earlier had grown to vast proportions. It weighed down his body, his thoughts. His brain buzzed dully. He could not twitch a finger or an eyelid, could scarcely remember his own name. He hadn’t drunk enough to feel this bad, had never drunk enough to feel like this.
Rose was sitting up in bed beside him, her huge eyes shining. She smiled when she saw he was awake.
“Sit up, darling,” she said.
Anthony knew he would not be able to obey. But even as he thought this, he felt himself bending at the waist. He looked on as if from a distance as his body levered itself into a sitting position.
“I’m afraid you won’t be going home to your wife this year. I get so lonely, Anthony. I haven’t painted anything for months and months. I spent all that time perfecting my recipe . . . my potion.”
She held up a bottle of the champagne.
“Magie Noir, darling,” she whispered. “Black magic. Bufo marinus . . . itching pea . . . children’s bones . . . and datura, the concombre zombi.”
Zombie, he heard dumbly. The word ought to mean something to him, but he couldn’t think what.
“I don’t have much money, but that’s all right. You can go out and work while I paint. You can do anything I tell you to do . . . and not a damned thing more.
“Now come here and fuck me again.”
He would not move. He would simply refuse to move, would exert every ounce of his will to resist her. He strained against his own treacherous musculature. He was losing the battle.
“Fuck me,” Rose said again. Her voice was more urgent this time, and edged with the slightest hint of danger.
Helplessly, Anthony took her in his arms and entered her. He couldn’t feel a thing, and soon the buzzing filled his skull so that he couldn’t think either.
“Perfect,” Rose sighed beneath him.