John Hawkes - Travesty

Yes, dead passion is the most satisfying, cher ami. You have hinted as much in your verses. But no wonder I have always thought of Honorine as mistress of a small chateau and nude beneath a severe black hunting costume for riding sidesaddle, though she has never been on a horse in her life. And you can imagine my pleasure when Honorine did in fact inherit from her mother, that noble woman, the small chateau which I myself named Tara and which you and I have filled with the deadest of all possible passion. You don't agree? You disclaim anything but vitality and tenderness in your relations with Chantal and Honorine? Then perhaps it is only my own passion that is so very dead, cher ami.

But the owl is watching us. And look there. Rain. Just as I expected. Soon the invisible camera will be trained on us through the wet and distorting lens of our windshield.

But I too once had a mistress. You did not know? Well, I hope that despite all you have been told about the power of your sullen allure you do not consider yourself the only person to have received the gift of love as seen through the prism, as I may call it, of another woman, though it is true that my own experience was confined to a single mistress and not to a pair. Never in my lifetime would I have contemplated a pair of mistresses. I am one of those lesser and hence more limited men, as you well know.

But little Monique was quite enough for me at the time. At the beginning of our friendship she was only a few weeks into her twentieth year, which, come to

think of it, was exactly Chantal's age when you, in all your mysterious naturalness and unconcern, determined to extend to her the love of the poet, if you will indulge the expression. Then too, Monique was a shade smaller even than Chantal, a fact I take to mean not that I was trying to duplicate my daughter in my mistress but simply that I was lucky enough to win Monique with a single glance and that she was the smallest person with whom I ever shared what she used to call the dialogue of the skin. Her size was important to me not because it mimed specifically the small size of Chantal and Chantal's lovely grandmother, but only because it bore out so perfectly an idea that has obsessed me since earliest manhood: that the smaller the woman one regards the greater one's amazement at the vastness, fierceness, of the human will.

So Monique was remarkable, then, for her startling size, the utter harmony of her physical proportions, the immensity and even dangerous quality of her will. Her self-assertiveness was staggering. Of course she never failed to obey me, and yet even when she conformed to my simplest suggestion (about what to eat, what not to eat, some article of clothing, and so forth) she did so with beautiful vehemence, as if she were acting on her own prideful volition instead of mine. But never fear, she gave as good as she received.

If I loved Monique for her size, I loved her equally for the nature of her skin and its complexion. Tight, painfully and wonderfully tight over the entirety of her little face and limbs and torso, so thin and tight that actually I used to fear the consequences of a slip of the threaded needle. And of course her skin was white, almost glazed, in fact, and whiter even than Hon- orine's fair skin. And you know that my predilection for whiteness is just as intense as my appreciation of the Mediterranean hues.

Short skirts, short hair, bright blue lacquered shoes, occasionally a blouse tastefully crocheted, and the inevitable silk stockings as if always to confirm her threatened womanhood-I can still see her, one of the most inventive girls and strongest human beings I have ever known. I used to meet her twice a month on a schedule so strict that it did not vary more than several minutes from one occasion to the next. We were equally intolerant of lateness, though the flowers I carried and the luxury of the car I drove always gave me the advantage in these matters of time and demonstrations of anger. But we enjoyed each other's anger, and vied with each other in the creation of embarrassing public displays of bad temper. It was as if we shared between us an unspoken agreement to parody the lovers' quarrel, the domestic disagreement, whenever possible. Yes, even now it gives me oddly pleasurable satisfaction to recall how often I submitted to the insults she shouted at me on the most crowded of street corners (in the sun, in the rain, in the darkness after a splendid meal), and how she in her turn bore with quivering fury the disciplinary blows I so often inflicted with the edge of my heavy fork on her fragile wrist, usually under the eager eyes of an old waiter in the most elegant of restaurants. But as I say, it is a familiar and convenient pattern, this happy ritual of disruption and reconciliation. We relied on it totally, Monique and I.

At any rate Monique was proud, opinionated, hostile, inventive. It never failed to delight me that she could be so cruel of tongue, so vicious, or that a chest as small as hers was capable of such heavy breathing, or that she could become so quickly subdued and smaller than ever once seated in the rich interior of my powerful and highly polished car. But let me tell you that this Monique, whose youth and personality were so impressive, nonetheless and of her own free choice was the living example of all the uninhibited nudes I courted in the pornographic magazines of my own late and isolated boyhood. Not only was she a natural actress in the theater of sex, not only did she become in her mind and body the very flesh and activity of all those distant uncountable images of mine, but on top of everything else she collected in her small overfurnished rooms every conceivable kind of pornographic or erotic book, magazine, photograph that she was able to discover in our museums, kiosks, bookstalls, establishments devoted to the equipment and stimulation of the sexual drive. She lived her very life in unwitting competition with that rare photographic study which I prepared over the years of Honorine's own erotic womanhood. But Monique's performances were cruder, much cruder, than my study of Honorine. And at times they suddenly revealed my young friend's sense of humor, whereas there was no place for humor in my nude or partially nude views of Honorine.

Quick to take offense, quick to become aroused, quick to laugh at herself and at such exaggerated sexual animation in one so small-there we have our tireless Monique, who thrived on her pornography old and new and liked nothing better than to adorn her own little nude figure in the outlandish black lingerie of those ladies of the boas who in another era so incensed our forefathers. Yes, she collected and wore all those belts and harnesses and spangled black stockings as avidly as she immersed herself in her books and magazines. And do you know, cher ami, she had a palate that demanded only the finest of white wines. Only the finest.

But then there came at last that warm spring night when, suddenly inspired, I spanked Monique. It was not entirely my fault, and it was the only time in my life when I fell so close to being the sadistic villain lurking everywhere in the stories, photographs and fantasies of my little mistress. You will agree that no one wants to find himself becoming nothing more than a familiar type created by a hasty and untalented pornog- rapher. We do not like to think of ourselves as imaginary, salacious and merely one of the ciphers in the bestial horde, to put it somewhat strongly, cher ami. But it was not totally my fault, as I must repeat, since the night was rainy and since the hour was late and since there was provocation, a provocation I did not even think to resist.

Well, you have the picture: spring rain, the city sleeping in its tile and stones, a wash of faint light from a bulb in a rose-colored shade, the warm little room smelling of the new season and of the oil of peach seeds with which Monique had scented her hot douche, and of course the two of us lying nude among the bolsters (except for Monique, who was wearing one of her scanty black harnesses known in the parlance of our grand temptresses as a garter belt). There you have it: the small, young, nearly naked girl on her stomach, the stockings which she had already removed adrift on the floor, the two of us slowly passing between us a set of large new photographs as rich and stimulating as ripened cheese. It was a scene that might have come directly from the writing desk or cold and shabby studio on one of our poor, dull, unshaven pornographers.