Iceberg Tempting Page 2

  “Oh!” Her moan told me that I was doing something right. So I continued to undress Maria, pulling blouse and bra right over her head. Wow, she was beautiful! Perfect breasts, wonderful body. I tugged at her shorts, and she was unbuttoning me, and we struggled toward her bedroom, stumbling, moving awkwardly as one, scattering shoes and pants and assorted underthings in our wake.

  Mona was indeed a good nickname for Maria. In relative darkness I fondled her bare breasts, and it was “Ooh!” to that, and another, shorter, sweeter “Oh!” as I touched within, feeling surprising wetness.

  “Gimme a minute,” I said, and found friend prophylactic. You know, the one in the wallet.

  “Good move.” Maria lay back on her bed in semi-darkness, watching as I struggled to subdue protection. Man, it never goes on easy when you need it to.

  Wordlessly I entered her. Yow. Tight, omigod, she was virginally tight, and I almost came just from that.

  “Oh...” And it was primitive, her sounds. With each stroke, “Oh!” A string of them, almost like she was surprised at how good it felt. Her thighs brushed against my ribcage, and then tightened against me; she was no longer passively laying there but pushing against me, her legs like pistons, locked on my body. “Oh, oh, oh, oh!” And "Ooooooh!” And the death grip, driving the breath right out of me, her legs, her arms, her very being trying to surround me, consume me.

  Then I heard nothing and everything; the sound of waves on a rocky beach, the sound of thousands screaming at a ballgame, the moan from the end of a long tunnel, my moan this time, punctuating the finest sex I’d ever had. We rocked together, melded as one, and I’d swear that she was coming with me, though all I cared about at that moment was continuing until I died.

  Petit mort, my ass.

  Pause to catch my breath. Damn, that was way too fast. And then there was more wrestling, a struggle, and it was all in my head, this post-coital battle: What the hell am I doing? Here was this beautiful, intelligent, athletic, fervent, naked woman laying next to me, and I knew that she was all happy and smiling, though I couldn’t see because it was just a bit dark in her bedroom. Like any guy, I had to get the hell out of there.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, as I put my clothes back on.

  “Uh, I’m supposed to go see my grandparents,” I lied. I had not seen or even talked to them in months. They were out in Elgin, light years away in distance and attitude.

  “Oh. Well, bye,” she said.

  I was deep into the city before I realized that I hadn’t asked Maria about her art, not one bit. I vaguely remembered, from some tiny alcove of my brain, that I’d seen an easel in her apartment, and canvases and a paint mess that was just outside her bedroom. The messy part may have been a small dining room in another life, but it was a for-real artist’s studio now. To catch errant paint, the room had brown paper on the floor and on many surfaces, layers of paper, as though the room had been onioned with art.

  I’d just gone to Maria’s place, and had made love to her, and had jumped out the door in about twenty minutes flat, and even I knew that I shouldn’t have done that.

  Real classy, Steve.

  Chapter Three

  I grew up on the North Side of Chicago. What the experience gave me was healthy skepticism, mixed with a bit of wariness--not quite street smarts, because I wasn’t gang material, far too middle class for that.

  There weren’t clearly defined Good Guys and Bad Guys on the North Side. There were a bunch of people who were not a threat, and some people who could be a threat, and there was a small amount of people who definitely were a threat, and one avoided that last group energetically. The questionable folks were held at arm’s length until they proved themselves not to be a threat. It was just a smart way to live.

  The job took me to Independence, Missouri for a couple of years, and it amazed me that the people there had the opposite attitude. They accepted a stranger as a non-threat until that person proved himself otherwise, and I thought, Jeez, this attitude is going to cost these folks some money someday. But I wasn’t around to find out.

  So I grew up in Chicago, and I went away and came back a few times, and it didn’t seem so far-fetched when I decided to live on the North Side. I could have chosen a ‘burb where all the rest of anybody who was anybody had gone, all of my siblings, and my parents too, once they’d shoved all of us out the door.

  It was not about the Cubs. I swear. Yeah, I had helped to clean the park after games in exchange for free passes when I was a kid. Yes, I suffered through the end of the 1984 season and I’m perhaps a better person for it. If the team had been that big a deal to me, I’d show up at the park a bit more often than a couple of times a year.

  Maria was from Connecticut. If she’d been from New York, she would’ve been intolerable from the first moment I‘d known that fact, and nothing would’ve happened between us, and I would’ve kept a safe distance. She’d been just far enough away from the vortex not to be sucked in.

  She wasn’t a baseball fan, and that would allow me to take her to the ballpark, give her a proper indoctrination, buy her a Cubs hat, and take her on a tour of the neighborhood. The place was still relatively unchanged from my childhood, except for all of those strange new people who actually expected the Cubs to win from time to time. I never understood them, not at all. Yuppie-come-latelies.

  There was romance to Wrigley Field. The ballpark was such an anachronism; it wasn’t electronic, and the center field scoreboard was still operated by hand. The place was locked somewhere in time, about 1940 or so, and it was therefore timeless. Forty years after everybody else had lights for night games, Wrigley finally got them.

  Occasionally the Cubs had a winning team, winning in the sense that they won more games than they lost. I won’t get crazy here and start talking titles because there simply weren’t any. But when they won a little bit, then everybody showed up, and there was chaos, and then there was the big letdown at the end.

  There was a more sensible way to approach this. A proper Cubs fan didn’t expect too much. There were good days and bad, you win some and lose some, and after all, wasn’t it a really nice day, and you’ve got your health, right? That was how to be a Cubs fan.

  All of my teenage years were spent on Wilton Avenue, just the other side of the tracks, the elevated tracks. Just out of sight of the ballpark. My place was behind all of those houses that everybody sees on television. That’s how close I was to the Cubs.

  When I met Maria, I had three rooms in Bucktown, also known as Logan Square; it’s a neighborhood southwest of Lake View, where I’d grown up. I was at a temporary place, I thought, just waiting for a perfect apartment near Wrigley to appear miraculously. I’d been dropped near Logan Square after another of my migrations.

  There’s nothing wrong with living in Bucktown. See, I wrote that and hardly snickered or anything. The place was just like my old neighborhood, except that it doesn’t have Wrigley Field, nor was it anywhere near Lake Michigan. It did have a lot of Cubs fans, and that was in its favor.

  ***

  I had experienced perfection. Without fault or defect, flawless. Expert. Proficient. Unequivocal. Pure. Absolute. Total. Complete.

  And the metaphorical cigarette afterward: contented; satisfied.

  That’s what it was like to make love to Maria. That’s what I thought when I’d had time to reflect on it, after the omigods and one fantastic Ooh! Then the quick escape, because she’d scared the bejesus out of me.

  There was the act itself, and then there was the aftermath, and now I was deep into the aftermath, knowing that things just might have changed for me.

  Oh, fuck, was I in trouble now.

  ***

  “Still alive, I see,” Maria said to me at work, the first time that I’d seen her since I’d made love to her and had bailed out soon thereafter. This was three days later. I’d been busy.

  Maria came right up to me in my cubicle at work. Cornered like a rat, as they say. “Hi,” I said, and tried
to smile.

  “How was your family?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Your grandparents. You went to see your grandparents. That’s why you left like your pants were on fire.”

  “Right,” I said. “They’re fine. My grandfather says hello.” Gramps was eighty-seven and that was about all he could say. So I hadn’t really lied to Maria, except for the visiting my grandparents part.

  My God she looked good, in a skirt and a maroon sweater; have I mentioned that her breasts were wonderfully smooth and firm, and when I touched them she moaned in a way that must have been the sirens singing? Yes I did. Sorry.

  Maria looked left and right, and nobody was there, and she kissed me there in the cubicle, put her hands on my face and pulled me to her, and her tongue was inside of my mouth. My arms automatically went around her and embraced her, and it was hot indeed.

  Then she gently pushed me from her. “Something for you to think about,” she said, and walked away. I watched until she turned the corner; I gazed at her legs, stared at her backside. I wanted to say ‘ass’ but when it was somebody I’m involved with, I try to reach for higher ground, I guess. But she had one sweet ass.

  It’s physical. It always starts out that way. Allegedly this was how the species continued. Don’t tell me that I’m in it for Maria’s ass, like it’s a bad thing. Of course I am. I’m also in it for all of her other body parts. And here was where we departed from every other species on the face of the earth: I was also after her mind. It was the unseen part of the iceberg.

  But my interest starts with the meteor that is her wonderful body. Did I mention that she’d wrapped her legs around me, those athletic runner’s legs, and she squeezed me so tight that I’d thought she had cracked one of my ribs, and worse, I didn’t care if she cracked them all? Nope. Hadn’t mentioned that.

  ***

  She’d become a preoccupation.

  So I did what anybody would do. I went to the gym, to the Lake View YMCA, on Chicago’s North Side. Okay, so the other options were to get drunk or get stoned or both, or go to St. Somebody’s church and pray about it. Or go on Jerry Springer. I forgot Jerry Springer.

  I tended to think more clearly when I worked out. Or maybe I didn’t think at all, and that was okay, too. I ran on the track and shot some hoops by myself, (nineteen of twenty-five from the line) and pumped some iron, and I didn’t think of Maria too much, maybe in between exercises, well, okay, sometimes her blonde hair and pretty face was just right there in the front of my mind, and it was pleasant. Scary, but pleasant.

  I was out of the shower, and dressing, and I encountered another of the regulars, Jimmy the Lifter. A big guy, he pumped iron five days a week. “Howya doon, Steve,” he said in West Sidese.

  “No complaints,” I answer, “Just sad for the Bears.” The Chicago Bears had gone down in flames just a brief two months ago, and the mourning period was just about over, and baseball would soon be upon us.

  “Yeah, too bad about the Bears,” Jimmy said. Normally that concluded the conversation.

  A third guy jumped in, somebody I didn’t know, and soon decided that I didn’t want to know. “The Bears stink,” he said. “Cubs, too. Particularly the Cubs.”

  Oh. Bitter man. I answered, before I could stop myself, “You’re not from around here,” meaning the North Side. Apparently not.

  “North Side?” the man said, his voice rising. “The Cubs? Hell no!”

  The picture was clear to me. This tortured, angry man hated the Cubs as only a Sox fan could. His team had gone into another death spiral late last season, and his baseball soul seemed doomed to wander in darkness forever. Soon he would be consumed by his dislike of life itself. The next step would be spontaneous combustion.

  I dressed in silence at that point, and the man huffed his way out of a very cool locker room. In the background, from the other guys, mostly Cubs fans, a short chorus of assorted ‘Jeez!’ and ‘Hooboy!’ and ‘Fuckin’ Sox fan!”

  ***

  Maria had made a move of sorts. She’d sought me out and all but said everything was okay. If I understood the rules, I’d have to do something next, or we as a ‘we’ could swiftly be past tense.

  The truth was, I wanted her in the worst way. Let your imagination run wild with that. I wanted her, wanted to be with her, wanted to feel her warm body next to me, and to talk and laugh together, and tell stupid stories and get drunk and watch movies and dance and be as one for as long as it lasted.

  And to screw her, of course. No, no, make love, I mean, it isn’t screwing if you’re really into somebody. Ha. Still seeking that higher ground, or something.

  It was my move, so I called her. “Show me your etchings,” I told her on the phone.

  “Sure you have time?” she said. “Maybe I show you my art first, while I still have your attention.”

  “Look, how about I pick you up at your place, please show me your paintings for a while, and then we go to the movies or something, what say?”

  “And see what?” she asked.

  “’Henry and June’ is at the Music Box.” The movie was great, the story of Henry Miller and his wife June and the erotica writer Anais Nin, and it was at a fine little movie theatre on Southport Avenue, half a mile from Wrigley Field. I was trying to acclimatize Maria, get her used to the North Side, preparing her for Cubs fandom.

  “Okay,” she said, but the way she said it, the ‘ay’ trailing away, dropping a degree or two on the music scale, just the tone indicating skepticism.

  ***

  Saturday night, and I was breathing a tad harder on my way up to Maria’s third floor apartment again. I thought that I understood her reasoning about living on the third floor: the burglars stuck to the first floor and to the garden apartments, seldom going any higher. Anything beyond that was a lot more work, especially carrying those big televisions.

  Maria opened the door. “Hey,” she said, and it was as sexy a ‘hey’ as I’d ever heard. She was beautiful; she had on a silky print blouse, and a skirt that was oh so nicely tight. She wore low heels, which just about put the top of her head at my eye level, just a comfy nice height. Her face was different in some way that I didn’t readily catch, no, now I got it. No granny glasses. She was stunning in the stun sense of the word.

  “Hey,” I answered, my libido running wild.

  Maria pulled my head down to her, like she had in the cubicle, to kiss me. Yow, I thought, she wasn’t passive about kissing, and I thought quickly of the last time I’d been there, at her place. We’d been mutually aggressive. I always wondered why more women weren’t that way, instead of settling for what the guy was offering, and then complaining about it later to their friends.

  Suddenly we caught fire again, the heat of Maria’s tongue on mine, exploring me, and me tasting her; in an instant I was licking her neck. She gave the sweetest moan, her Mona moan: Take me, she said, but not a word was spoken.

  Again we struggled toward the bedroom, and I unbuttoned Maria’s blouse as she worked the shirt out of my pants. I could feel her incredible body heat, and I smelled her perfume, and more: I smelled her desire.

  In an instant my pants were down, and I pulled Maria’s skirt up. Her panties were suddenly in free fall, down to her ankles and off. I lay on top of her with my face so close to hers, watching her eyes. My hands felt Maria’s smooth skin along her hips, and I pulled her to me.

  I was lost in Maria, urgently needing to feel all of her. We kissed as we moved together. Then the legs. Oh, God, she wrapped those runner’s legs around me, hip high, then literally walked up my sides with her thighs, finding my ribcage, and crushing me.

  I pretty much lost touch with everything right then, but I felt Maria shudder beneath me, and we were actually doing the simultaneous climax, the mythical one that was supposed to be the ultimate expression of two lovers for each other.

  I slowed down, but then I realized that Maria hadn’t. She was taking me for a ride whether I wanted to go or not, live member or
not, live guy or not. She shuddered and came again, squeezing the breath out of me.

  “Oooh!” Then and only then did she relax, and release me.

  I had not gotten my shirt off, or Maria her blouse. It had been bare essentials, and my pants were still around my knees. If anything, we had taken less time than our first encounter.

  “Uh, well, hello,” I said.

  Maria struggled out from under me; standing, she tugged at my pants, and pulled them off. She got up and went to her closet, and hung them up, and closed the closet door. “Insurance,” she said. No quick exit for me tonight.

  ***

  There had been something different about her when I first came in. “Contacts?” I said.

  She smiled. “Yes. I don’t wear them that often, and most people don’t even notice.”

  “Writer’s eye,” I said, which is absolute bullshit, because I miss most of what is going on around me.

  I sat bare-assed as she showed me painting after painting, a body of work that had been developed over several years; she showed them chronologically, and I saw the evolution of her style. I literally watched her get better.

  “Damn, you’re good,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Again the skeptic.

  “No, I mean it.” And I did. Exactly where is that point in time, the intersection of training and talent and recognition that launches someone into her chosen profession? I didn’t know it then, but Maria was that close to greatness.

  And again, she was beautiful and talented and loving and sexy and abandoned and I was just so torn about the whole thing.

  ***

  Continuing on that evening, after she returned my pants, we drove the Eisenhower Expressway east to Lake Shore Drive, past Buckingham Fountain, this time going north on LSD, exiting at Belmont, zig-zagging through this tightly-knit maze of grid sliced occasionally by a boulevard diagonal. We went up Clark Street, to the famous intersection of Clark and Addison. It was Wrigley Field; nobody could miss it, because the place covered a whole city block. I waved ‘Hi’ at the phantoms of hundreds of players and millions of fans.