John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

“The heads. I see we eat the heads, Rosella. And the beaks. For the full effect we must eat the entire bird. I understand.”

Her example was not at first easy to follow. Beaks that were very much like little split black fingernails. Heads smaller than my thumb and without eyes. I noticed such details, calmly watched how Rosella ate each sparrow in a single bite, and realized that it would be difficult for even a seasoned sex-aesthetician to follow her example. But then I saw that Rosella’s two front teeth overlapped each other, and at this observation, this further instance of poignant incongruity, I could hesitate no more. And there amidst heat, shadows like finger puppets, savory taste and savory thoughts, how wrong I was to have hesitated in the first place. Because thanks to Rosella’s cooking, the sparrows, I found, were simply soft and crunchy too, as if the different textures of sweetness had been so combined that it was still necessary to chew a moment that very substance which had in fact already dissolved, melted, in the aching mouth.

“Rosella,” I said, with my jaws working and elbows propped casually on the table, “magnificent!”

Across from each other at that ancient broad lopsided table we sat, and according to the rules there was no touching of knees, no ravaging of sticky lips. My hand did not find her thigh and, in rhythm to that long slow dripping meal, please her thigh with the unexpected strength and tenderness of its unhurried caress. None of this. No removal of shoes and sandals, no meeting of bare feet. No slipping down the dress or licking fingers.

Throughout the meal I was unable to tell what Rosella was thinking, throughout the meal she managed to keep her face expressionless and her eyes averted. To me it was poignant that still I had no desire to put one finger behind her ear or to take her little mouth in mine. And yet her lips were sticky and there were a few drops of gravy on my vest while my plate, at last, was empty. Had I gone too far? Had I somehow raised false hopes? Was that whole vast tapestry beyond villa, cypresses, village, crying out for my re-entry into the pink field? Was my very skin about to be fired again in the kiln that has no flame? At least the sparrows inside me were already singing a different song, and I was listening.

YESTERDAY I KISSED MY MIMOSA TREE. AT NOON, WALKING slowly toward the well house with my shoulders heavy and hands thrust into empty pockets, I noticed that overnight my mimosa tree had reached its prime, had attained the totality of its yellow massiveness, and a little more. Each of its green filaments was bright, each of its seeds had become a puffy yellow globe as large as the tip of my middle finger, and packed together they hung, drooped, in thick puffy clumps, clouds, each one three times the size of a cluster of fat grapes. I stopped, reconsidered, turned to the mimosa tree, and with nothing more than a mild and rational interest in this sudden burgeoning, approached the tree and found myself standing unusually close to its silent flowering. Actually, at that moment one of the yellow clumps was already brushing against my vest. I stood there thinking of the delicate structure of so much airy growth and admiring this particular depth of yellow. I was alone, the sun had warmed the tree, the tree was full throated, I began to smell its gentle scent. And then I raised my hands, displaying my thick black coat sleeves, my frayed white cuffs, my golden cuff links and golden ring, and slowly thrust my hands deep into the vulnerable yellow substance of the mimosa tree. Into my hands I gathered with all possible tenderness one of the hivelike masses of yellow balls. And keeping my eyes open, deliberately I lowered my face into that cupped resiliency, and felt the little fat yellow balls working their way behind my spectacles and yielding somehow against my lips. I stopped breathing, I waited, slowly I opened my mouth and arched my tongue, pushed forward my open mouth and rounded expectant tongue until my mouth was filled and against all the most sensitive membranes of tongue and oral cavity I felt the yellow fuzzy pressure of the flowering tree.

The kiss, for it was a passionate kiss, really, reminded me of the grape-tasting game, though of course we never allowed ourselves to use hands in the grape-tasting game. But also in the midst of the kiss I thought I heard Fiona’s giggle, Catherine’s sigh. And Rosella may have seen me kissing the mimosa tree. If so, will she today or tomorrow follow my example? I think not. Kissing the rich yellow fluff of the mimosa tree may always lie just a step beyond Rosella’s abilities or inclinations. Yet kissing me, or her chances of kissing me, daily assume a still faint but ever-increasing tangibility. Perhaps I shall turn out to be Rosella’s mimosa tree as well as her white beast. Who knows?

TOGETHER TWO HEAVENLY CREATURES SPREAD THEIR BLUE feathers for me on a rock wall overlooking sea and sky. I uncupped Fiona’s breasts and Catherine lifted her own white breasts from the madras halter. The buttons on Catherine’s white cotton pajama top were like eyes of pearl. Fiona caressed the wooden arm, I removed my spectacles, Hugh moaned. Between the two villas I strung the clothesline high. Remember?

WITHOUT PAIN? PERHAPS NOT EXACTLY WITHOUT PAIN. After all, the artistic arbiter of all our lives — Love — is only too expert at depressing with one of her invisible fingers the lonely key, the sour note of pain, and most of us enjoy the occasional sound of pain, though it approaches agony. In fact, could any perfect marriage exist without hostile silences, without shadows, without sour notes? Obviously not. Throughout the many years of my sexually aesthetic union with Fiona, for instance, there were the momentary but nonetheless bitter whispered confrontations over use of the bed in the master bedroom, brief spurts of anger about a sudden loss of form on the violet tennis court. And there were also instances of deeper and more prolonged periods of threatened harmony, such as the nearly disastrous days of my love for a small young woman whose husband was one of the few men whose spirit and personality and entire body (his lips, his eyes, his fat chest, his beard) Fiona found intolerable. Revulsion in my wife was rare, this woman whose very quickness of breath could liberate the lover buried inside the flesh of almost any ordinary man in undershorts. But despite his strength and crippling desperation, the husband of the small young woman was clearly doomed. I pleaded for him. Fiona tried. We failed. There were tears, locked doors, a wedding ring slipped like a cigar band around a rolled-up handwritten note of accusation. We failed. Then luckily enough, Love herself changed the metallic scene, shifted to some sweeter pitch our melodies.

I am a man of feeling. And in our more than eighteen years of dreams and actuality, Fiona and I knew hours of miserable silence, knew the shock of intimacy momentarily spurned, attended funerals, held hands in the whiteness of other weddings, tasted departure and the last liquid kiss, tried to console each other for each pair of friends who, weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, went down in flames. Once in anger Fiona snatched from my hand the brief silken panties she had only moments before slipped down and removed. Once I was graceless enough to lead Fiona nude from our dimly lit living room under the quiet eyes of a naked man whose extended fingers were pressed together as if in prayer.

And more. The gradual discovery that most people detest a lover, no matter how modest. My unavoidable fist fight with an older wind-sucking man over the question of virginity in young girls. Fiona weeping through the wood with the sun running wild over her lovely buttocks. Hugh’s neck in his noose. All this and more we knew, all this we suffered.