Cinderella Loses Her Glass Slipper
(Et Cetera, Et Cetera)
Maybe he hadn’t read Camus, but she couldn’t really say he was stupid. You don’t learn everything out of books either, she’d realised again last night.
Griet lay on her stomach, looking at the sleeping form beside her. He was naked, shameless as a child, the sheet flung aside. She’d never manage to look as relaxed with nothing on. Especially not with the blue veins on her legs or the pads of flesh on her hips clearly visible to a stranger’s eyes in the bright morning light.
Not that there was any detail of the honey-brown body beside her that should be kept hidden under the sheets. It was probably as close to a perfect body as any she’d ever get into her bed. Not even a hint of fat or flab. Not one single pimple on the buttocks. Even his penis looked as though it had been dipped in honey, shiny after a night of sex, the same healthy colour as his shoulders.
She normally felt disconcerted waking beside a naked man whose family she didn’t know. She was probably old-fashioned, but she preferred having her body discovered little by little, from forehead to foot, from top to bottom. Certainly not the other way round. It was just that everything had happened so quickly last night that she’d lost control of the sequence. Adam had slipped her sandals off and started massaging her feet … Next thing she knew, here she was lying as naked as Eve before the serpent led her astray. And it didn’t even occur to her to cover herself with the sheet.
Adam had cooked dinner on the gas stove and they’d sat on the floor eating it: a meal that had far exceeded her naughtiest dreams. Fresh artichokes to start with, then a seafood paella, and then the crème de la crème of desserts: cunnilingus, on the dusty living room floor, under the merciless light of a bare bulb, with the South African national anthem on TV as background music.
‘We won’t be able to say tomorrow that we were seduced by the romantic atmosphere,’ Griet warned, shutting her eyes against the blinding light. ‘We won’t have any excuse.’
‘Hey, man, we don’t need an excuse,’ mumbled Adam, his mouth against the curve of her instep. ‘Romance is for people who feel guilty about sex.’
Griet was speechless. The boy wasn’t as innocent as he looked, she thought as his tongue slid over her ankle and his hands stroked her legs, right up to the thighs and then back to the ankles. She felt like an insect pinned down by an angel, squirming on the floor as her skirt worked its way up, higher and higher. How on earth had she landed in such a divine position? She’d been eating, her desires reasonably under control, when she realised he was staring at her foot. He’d slipped off her sandal without a word and taken her foot in both hands. Her fork had clattered to her plate.
‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, swallowing hard, ‘but I have reasons to feel guilty about sex.’
‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ someone who looked like Grandpa Big Petrus exclaimed from the top of a mountain, and the earth beneath her trembled. Or maybe it was only a thrill of pleasure.
Adam raised his head – his mouth set on a steady course for her thigh – and flashed her his Angel Gabriel smile.
‘You’re the kind of person who has to feel guilty before you can enjoy anything.’
Once again his insight – and what his mouth and his hands were doing to her thighs – took her breath away. The lower body as dessert, she’d thought while she could still think. Just the other day a friend had told her about a new sex handbook for women by an American with long blonde hair and long red nails, photo on the back cover slightly out of focus, age unspecified. She advised her readers to sample their own sexual juices.
You wouldn’t put a plate of food in front of your husband if you weren’t prepared to taste it yourself, would you? Not only did you taste different from other women, the book claimed, but your taste also varied on different days of the month. As a good sex partner you should know when your good days are – vaginal-gastronomically speaking – and when you shouldn’t open the restaurant Mount Venus.
Griet wondered whether she shouldn’t have taken the American writer’s advice, but Adam thrust his head between her thighs with the eagerness of an animal about to slake its thirst. The sharp light against the ceiling and the numbness in her wide-splayed legs reminded her momentarily of the maternity ward, but that was her last coherent thought of the night. After that, everything happened without giving her a chance to think. Without a clear boundary between agony and ecstasy. Like in a maternity ward.
After thousands of years of philosophy and logic, thought Griet in her bed beside a man she barely knew, Western civilisation was still virtually powerless against man’s animal urges. Intellect still had very little influence on birth, sex and death, the three greatest experiences in anyone’s life. Thank goodness, thought Griet, raising herself on an elbow to admire Adam’s hair, which was fanned out long and loose on the pillow beside her.
There were ways of making sex less bestial, she reminded herself. Ministers, priests and other clerics were often experts in this field. And clever men who were afraid of losing control.
When she and George first had sex they’d whispered so as not to wake his children. And like so many things that are done early in a relationship without any thought for the consequences, the silence in their bed had almost immediately become a web in which they’d spun themselves fast. Even without children in the vicinity, George’s accompanying noises were limited to a few approving groans or dignified grunts. He believed that sex, like women, was better seen and not heard. If you held your tongue in the heat of battle, you wouldn’t let anything slip out that could be used against you later. You wouldn’t say something as rash as I love you.
And as they normally only found time at weekends once the boys were in bed, there wasn’t much to see either. George would switch off the light and reach for her. It was a silent, dark affair.
Sometimes the violence of an orgasm forced her mouth open, but time and time again the shriek froze in her throat. She felt like that poor screaming woman in Munch’s painting, trapped in silence for ever after.
But last night, on the living room floor, she’d shrieked. Last night she’d taken vengeance for every woman who’d ever been gagged by a man. For Munch’s poor model and for all the women who were burnt or drowned because they were suspected of witchcraft, and for all her fairy tale heroines who weren’t able to save themselves, and for all the stepmothers who always got the lousy roles to play, and for seven years of decent, civilised, silent sex.
And Adam snorted and cavorted along with her, MGM’s roaring lion, her fingers tangled in his mane of hair, her legs locked high over his jerking back, her teeth in his neck, a dragon spewing fire from his loins, a devil skewering her on his trident and leaping over the moon with her, an enchanter whose tongue licked away all resistance. Anything but an angel.
Maybe it only happens once in a lifetime that precisely the right sexual partner comes knocking at your door at precisely the right moment. ‘Angel visits’, said the dictionary that she kept at her bedside. ‘Delightful intercourse of short duration and rare occurrence.’
Once upon a time there was an angel and a witch, but sometimes the angel was wicked and sometimes the witch was good, and in the end no one knew which was which, not even the witch and the angel themselves. But an angel would be silent during sex, thought Griet. So George must be an angel. The thought made her shake with laughter.
Adam stirred and reached out indolently, without even opening his eyes. He touched her back gently, feeling his way downwards, blindly, and sighed happily when his hand found her buttock. He lay motionless for a few moments and she wondered disappointedly whether he’d dropped off to sleep again. Then he started to caress her thigh slowly. The memories of last night were enough to open up the floodgates of sensation again.
‘Angel n. Divine messenger; (fig.)lovingor obliging person.’ She’d been given over to the mercy of this hand, sliding down the inside of her leg. ‘Witchn. Woman supposed to have dealings with devil or evil spirits; (fig.) fascinating or bewitching woman.’ Which of the celestial teams would she choose to fly for? The angels with their wings were so terribly serious; like the English; like Louise’s husband who wouldn’t even pass wind in front of anyone else. But the witches on their broomsticks could be just as humourless; like the White Left in her fairy land. The angels with the seriousness of religion, the witches with the humourlessness of politics, and Griet Swart with an identity crisis.
‘How’s the guilt?’ asked Adam in a croaky, early morning voice. His eyes were still closed.
‘What guilt?’
He opened his eyes and turned his head slowly to her.
‘Hey, are you OK?’
‘I can’t remember when I last felt this good.’
‘When did you last have sex?’
‘Long ago,’ sighed Griet, ‘Long, long ago.’
Witches obviously had better reasons than angels to be Angry Young Women. It was hard to laugh when you were standing on a pyre. In the three centuries after Pope Innocent VIII had published his infamous Summis Desiderantes in 1484, almost nine million witches were systematically executed in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And it wasn’t over yet, thought Griet, her throat contracting. In the terrible country where her own fairy tales were set, women were still burnt as witches, stoned, stabbed to death.
‘No wonder you jumped on me like a wild animal,’ said Adam, pulling her on top of him, his eyes closed again.
‘I did not jump on you! I was eating my supper and the next moment I was flat on the floor! I couldn’t even protest because my mouth was full of calamari.’
‘It’s the way you eat that drove me berserk. I figured anyone who enjoys food so much must also be into sex. Even if she feels guilty about it.’
‘I’m telling you, I don’t feel guilty any more.’
‘Hey! This sounds like sin!’ He pulled her head against his neck and ruffled her hair into an even wilder mess. ‘We can’t have you living without guilt. We’ll have to do something about this.’
‘I can’t think of anything we’ve left undone.’
‘Where’s your imagination?’ sighed Adam with his mouth in her hair. ‘I thought you wrote fairy tales?’
‘Exactly,’ answered Griet. ‘The princesses in my fairy tales would never get laid on a dusty living room floor.’
‘Imagine what they’re missing,’ whispered Adam in her ear.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Anything.’
‘Do you always keep a condom handy?’ She felt the laughter well up in the body under her cheek. ‘Or did you know what was going to happen last night?’
‘Hope springs eternal.’
Griet rubbed her face enthusiastically against the hair on his chest.
‘Two women aged sixteen and seventy-one years were burnt to death at Izingolweni.’ She drew her fingers through his pubic hair and felt him grow hard. ‘The following day a fifty-year-old woman was struck with a stone and then set alight in Oshabeni.’ She’d always been amazed at how easily a man could get an erection in the morning. ‘A woman was burnt to death and another woman killed with a sharp instrument in Enkulu.’ It was like witchcraft: abracadabra, you take hold of him and part of his body changes before your eyes. ‘On the same day at Msinbini a forty-year-old woman was set alight.’ In the last years of her marriage it had been the only power she still held over her husband. ‘At Maguchana a sixty-year-old woman and a thirty-year-old woman were burnt to death.’ Sexual sorcery in bed in the morning – until he’d started sleeping in another bed.
‘The police said all those killed were suspected of witchcraft.’