John Hawkes - The Lime Twig

“Don’t ask me, Mike,” hands above her head, hips wriggling a little at the apex of crossed legs, “I don’t intend to help you. …” Then with a catch of sheet she idly daubed herself and laughed some more.

He came up crawling on hands and knees, still lagging after the tremor, the fanciful sex, and began to feel about in the tumult she had made of the sheets, himself not yet recovered from the breath of her own revival, the swiftness with which she turned from deep climactic love to play. As if she always saved one drop unquenched, the drop inside her body or on the tongue that turned her not back to passionate love but away from that and into attitudes of frolic. No moment of idleness or a yawn or slow recovery but each time surprising him by play and acrobatics, her fresh poses making his own dead self fire as if he had never touched her and making her body look tight and childish as if she had never been possessed by him.

“I can’t find the bloody thing,” he said.

“Go on,” she said, and changed again, took one knee beneath her chin, “you find it.” Then, while he searched beneath her pillow, felt down the center of the mattress and into the still warm hollows: “I’ve seduced you, haven’t I, Mike,” she said.

“You have,” he answered. “Good as your word.”

With Sybilline watching, he moved back and forth on the undulations of the springs, with moonlight striking across his spine, and his hands and knees softly sinking; and felt at last the opalescence, the hard tiny tear of pearl on its needle shank, and held it up by the point for her to see.

“You’re a charmer, Mike,” she said.

He reached out then to the skirt flung over the chair and stuck the pearl in the row of three. There were no pearls left in her reddish pompadour, only the thick round of the hair and, as if it had been rumpled, a coil coming down her neck and tickling. The bottles were still crashing below them and someone was playing the widow’s piano so quickly, heavily, that Needles might have been running up and down the keyboard in his naked feet. But it was all bubbles of talk and musk and closeness in the room and Banks cared nothing for the noise. As he turned to face his Sybilline, began on hands and knees the several awkward motions it took to reach her, he knew remorse for the empty face of himself once more: because her eyes were big and brown, steady and temperate as those of a girl peering over a stile, while the rest of her was still animated, quivering, with the fun. Thrice she had taken him and he had thrice returned, riding into the bower that remains secretive and replete after blouse and skirt and safety pin, silks and straps, have all been discarded, flung about helter-skelter on the thorns. No more now, he was fast returning to the old man. While she, his Sybilline, was still tasting of that little shocking drop of incompletion that gave her a maiden’s blush, a shine between the breasts, as if she was always ready for another go at it, another lovely toss.

After searching for all her pearls he was tangled in the covers now himself. His skin was gray. His head was hanging but he smelled the delicate stuff and blindly put his hand on her leg’s underside, touched the mild flesh for an instant, then let his fingers drag away. She wriggled and was laughing.

“Be a sweet boy, Mike,” she said, secluded with him from the party, moving her bare shoulders in childish sailor fashion, “and fetch the stocking.”

So at two o’clock in the morning he labored off the bed — she gave his arm a push — and took several steps until the moonlight caught him round the skinny ankles. Standing there, with sheep passing outside through darkened fields and the jockey screaming the first bars of an enticing song, he could hear the girl behind him — and that was the fine thing about Sybilline, the way she could kiss and play and let her spangles fall, keep track of all the chemistry and her good time, and yet be sighing, sighing like a young girl in love.

He stooped, picked up the stocking, turned to hear her whistling through puckered lips.

Then: “I’ll take that if you please, sweet Michael.” She held the length of silk in her hands and he was scrambling over the tossed pillows, down the crumpled sheets, until the two of them were facing and once more cross-legged. The pharmacist’s cure for women was on the edge of the sink, the smells were of the shores of paradise. Before his eyes and with the ends of her fingers, Sybilline drew the stocking out full length, held it swinging by the wide top and little toe, then in a quick gesture ran the whole porous line of it across her face and under her nose, just touching her nose, smelled it deeply and winked as she did so. And suddenly made a flimsy ball of it and with one hand lightly on his knee, reached forward and thrust the round of silk between his widespread legs and against the depths of his loin, rubbing, pushing, laughing. He flushed.

“You see,” whispering, “you can win if you want to, Mike, my dear. But that’s all for now.” With lively arm she threw the balled stocking at the dusty moonlit glass and hopped off the bed.

He watched her dance round to the chair, dangle the blouse and skirt, replace the pearls and do a faint jazz step that kept her moving nowhere. Then she posed in the unbuttoned blouse and her fingers were sending off kisses and her legs, friendly and white and long, were the legs he had seen bare in the undergarment ads. Then she whispered through the oval of the skirt she was just dropping over her head: “Put on your trousers, Mike … we’ll join the fun downstairs.”

They stepped into the light of the orange bulb, held hands, walked along the widow’s carpet to the start of the rail with grapes carved on the post. The hallway smelled of dust and nuptials; a rag was lying on the carpet. “We’ll go down together,” she said, and gave his arm a pinch. “We’ll let them see we’re untidy. But Michael,” holding him midway on the stairs, “all the girls will love you, Michael. You’re alluring! So don’t forget, Mike, come back for me.” And she kissed him, she whom he would never kiss in privacy again.

“I couldn’t lose you, Syb.”

She laughed for the two of them at the bottom of the stairs and her hair was redder than at any time that day. The lamplight shone upon it — lamps were lit all about the room, small bulbs and large, glass shades chiming and tinkling and strung with beads — and her eyes were brown and moist.

“There’s that lovely girl!” shouted the widow, “and our funny boy. And look what she’s done to him!”

Not only Jimmy Needles was playing the piano, but Larry as well, jockey and Larry having a duet together side by side and beating on the keys with nearly equal strength. On the bench before the upright, the little man in color and the large man in navy blue — hour by hour the wrinkles in the dampened suit were flattening — kept talking all the while they played and a bottle of rum stood on the seat between them. And Little Dora tried to listen. Sunk in a velvet armchair, wearing her lopsided matron’s hat with a bit of feather now, her upper lip of pale hair wet with gin, eyes surly and black behind the glasses, stretched and recumbent on cushions as near as possible to the piano bench, she watched them, listened, in a torporous and deadly mood.

Sparrow was there. He was drinking whisky out of the widow’s cup. The widow’s daughter was in the crowd — a big girl in a child’s dress pulled high who sat straight up and kept both hands on her knees, laughing and smiling out of a loose mouth and enormous eyes. And all the room was brown and filled with smoke and toy alligators and donkeys. Newspapers were strewn across the rug faded and worn with the footpaths of long-dead residents. A portrait of a Spanish nobleman hung above the mantel on which there burned a candelabra with smoky wicks and molten wax; and duplicates of Little Dora’s chair, soft mauve contrivances on wheels, made humps along the walls. In volume nearly as loud as the piano the black wireless was turned up and an orchestra played out of the tufted speaker.