Iceberg Tempting Page 4

  I took her hand. “If we weren’t in public, I’d show you.”

  “Oh.” And Maria smiled, and it was the sexy shy smile. She squeezed my hand, and whispered, “You make me wet.” My guess was that she’d never told that to a guy before.

  So it wasn’t just me.

  ***

  Didja ever have these loose ends?

  Nobody ever goes into a new relationship without some old things still happening out there, that other girl or guy or two, and if life were simpler, they just would become pleasant memories.

  I was dating two other women when I started going out with Maria. No, they didn’t know each other, no, there were no threesomes, though the thought had entered my mind, just for the myriad options, and that was indeed how men thought. But in truth these two were my screwing buddies. It’s about companionship and sex, and we understood that we weren’t serious, and anybody could walk away at any time.

  I’d stopped calling them, and it took a week or two, but here came the “Where are you?” messages on the answering machine. Okay, what was the right answer? Did I tell them that I might be getting serious with somebody else? I didn’t know that for absolute sure, and face it, I wasn’t ready to burn bridges here. I wanted to stay friends with these two, at the very least.

  The first, her name was Gracie, had unlimited access to Blockbuster and was always bringing over nifty old movies, and we’d have sex and pizza, usually in that order, and talk about the movies. She’s a great friend, but that’s all that relationship would ever be.

  The second was a librarian, I’m serious now, and she’s my pipeline to all things biblio. She’s a sweetheart named Sharon, with a master’s degree in library science, and we’d talk all night about books. And have sex.

  So excuse me if I was a little reluctant to let these two go.

  Just why was it that I didn’t once think Maria had something going, too?

  Chapter Five

  Meanwhile--and wasn’t there always a meanwhile in a story like this?--my writing had taken off again. By F. Scott Fitzgerald or some other writing god, I was inspired. Suddenly there were half a dozen stories in my head. Who knows, Maria had gotten my blood pumping pretty good.

  My current favorite story was the one about eternity. At the split second of death, the person dying was given all of the answers, every last one of them.

  Hooboy, didn’t you want to know where you were going, heaven or hell? There were indeed those two destinations, and there’s an infinite number of other places, more interesting places. But one had to apply for membership, and then sit around and wait for two or three thousand years while they checked your references.

  Waiting, you sat there, and you had the answers to everything in your life. So of course you started with your teenage love. Everybody seemed to start at that point. There was Mary Ann, your childhood sweetheart. Now you find out that she was being porked by some guy twice her age while you thought she liked only you. All you’d ever gotten from her was the occasional handful of cheer. So you spent another thousand years wondering, Why, Mary Ann, why did you do that with him, why not me?

  You found out why your kids didn’t look like you.

  You also found out that you’d been wearing an invisible sign that said ‘kick me,’ which accounted for why you never got the big promotion.

  You found out that you weren’t paranoid, that there was a car god and he had it in for you, and that’s why all of your cars were lemons and were constantly breaking down.

  You found out that the standard length of a man’s penis was ten inches, and that fourteen was fairly common, and that every woman that you’d made love to had only been trying to be nice when she said that you were a good lover.

  And everybody in the universe treated you like the French treat Americans, and they were laughing at you for being so stupid, or they’re just pissed because you can’t speak Universe.

  This place was so painful! And then you realized that this was Hell. The real one.

  ***

  It was at about this time that Maria had received her first large commission to do somebody’s portrait. Large, of course, is a relative, subjective designation. Up until then she’d done people’s faces for a hundred on up to three hundred dollars each. It was fun money for a hobby, but nobody could earn a living at that rate. I was receiving similar small bucks for short stories here and there.

  Suddenly somebody wanted a portrait--a good one was the way they had put it--and they were willing to pay three thousand dollars.

  Here was Maria’s reaction:

  Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

  It was such a great story behind the painting. All colleges and universities had portraits done of their honored ones, the award winners, and the super administrators, and the big donors. There’s hardly a dean in existence without his or her mug in oils.

  A small college, the University of Dayton, wanted a portrait of a woman who’d recently died. The woman hadn’t won any awards. She wasn’t a great administrator.

  She was a cleaning lady.

  This incredible woman had mopped and dusted at the college for almost fifty years. She had no family. She lived frugally and saved everything, and had a few investments. Then she died, and left eleven million dollars to the school.

  They damn sure better put her picture up somewhere.

  Word of mouth had gone out on the portrait artist named Maria, and a friend of a friend had recommended her. Maria had received a letter in the mail, with photos of the woman, and a check for a thousand dollars up front. She promptly had a panic attack, and ended up with her head in the toilet again.

  There’s this myth of the artist’s fragile psyche, and there are the nutty artist stories. I’m here to tell you that most of it is true. The sensitivity of an artist is a two-edged sword; this same vision that allows somebody to create art does not see the world in its real light, or perhaps he or she sees it so clearly and intensely that it’s painful. Not sure which. But the vision of an artist is different.

  ***

  We were laying around in her bed again that next Saturday night; we were supposed to go see a play, but as the evening progressed, I knew that we weren’t going to make it. This other activity had sapped our energies. We were so new to each other, and we had all of this exploring to do.

  Man, there was an attraction between us. I ran through this list of adjectives: electric, magnetic, fantastic--all of the ics--and none of them expressed what we were like together. I try the clichés: fits like a glove, smooth as silk, and on and on. I created my own. Maria washes over me like a hot sea. She embraces me in velvet warmth.

  This time she’d greeted me in a chenille robe. “No sense in wasting time,” Maria said. She closed the door, and opened her robe; like a bird lighting a cigarette in the wind, she brought chenille around me, and I felt her nakedness, her incredible body heat, as we kissed. I took her hand and led her to the bedroom. Off with the robe, and onto the bed; this time I managed to get all of my clothes off. We embraced and kissed again, and my hands were all over her sweet body, feeling silky skin, muscled in so feminine a way.

  “Been thinking about you all day, Bubba,” she whispered.

  “Yeah. Me too, about you.” I caressed her breasts, my palm gliding over her nipples, exciting her. “Let me do something different,” I said. Our first two times had been missionary. “Turn over.” And as she did, I was confronted with that sweet ass, the one I’d been admiring for some time now. Was I big? You bet I was huge. I rolled on a ribbed prophylactic, and then rubbed my shaft against her.

  “Slow,” she whispered. And slow it would be. I entered, amazed again at her tightness; I gripped her hips, reveling in the firmness of her buttocks. “Oh!” That moan again. Had I ever heard such a sweet, primitive sound in my life? “Oh!” and she told me everything, how it felt, how she felt, how pleased she was. All of that in “Oh!”

  Long strokes at first, the whole length of me, slowly filling her, giving Maria big thrills with
each thrust. “I’ve wanted to do this from the moment I met you,” I said, breathing harder, and pushed a bit faster.

  “Oh!” That was all she could say right then, “Oh!”

  Maria was a banquet for the senses, the way she looked, even at this angle, and how she moaned, and that wonderful feminine smell, that mixture of perfume and sex, and how unbelievably tight she felt. She really got to me.

  I stroked faster, because I couldn’t hold back any longer. I had to finish this thing. I’m a man, after all. I had to come. Quickly, now. “Aaaagh!”

  Maria pushed back, and again I felt her delicious squeeze, and I knew she was coming. I felt her shudder, and felt the tightness of her pussy contracting against me. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” That series of moans, one per thrust, and we were doing it again, coming at the same time.

  Here’s some truth: I’d had simultaneous orgasm maybe twice in my life before Maria. It seemed to happen almost every time with her.

  ***

  Later.

  So I didn’t know that Maria had received the commission, and that now she was yaaa! about that and yaaa! about me, and she still had this forty-hour-a-week job, and there was another guy lurking in the background, too, about whom I still had no knowledge. And that’s when I asked her, “Well, whattya think of my writing?”

  To her credit, in spite of all this other stuff going on, she’d managed to read two of my short stories. “I didn’t like the way the girl just sat there passively,” Maria said, about my first story.

  “I was trying to convey her personality,” I said, rather defensively. And I’m thinking, Don’t critique it, just tell me you like it!

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t like her. She was, well, just a little weak.”

  Oh. “What about the writing?” Tell me that you like the way I write!

  “You know, Sweetie,” she said, smarter than me any time night or day, “maybe we shouldn’t talk about this right now.” Naked and spent, we should be having fun, appreciating the moment, not talking shop. I had enough critics, those assassins called agents and publishers and editors. I didn’t need this from my main squeeze. Of course, it might have helped things if I’d told her any of that.

  It also may have helped if she’d told me about the commission, and what incredible pressure she was feeling: that a good rendering of the cleaning woman might lead to more jobs, and open the magic door to the serious art world, and possibly allow her to quit her job and do this thing for a living, the thing that she loved to do, for the rest of her life.

  And thus began another evening’s worth of downward spiral. I stopped talking, but I felt a distance from her, and neither of us had the energy to fix it. So the night regressed, digressed, receded, faded away. We had not gone to the play, we had not done much of anything except screw around and get into another fight.

  “Gotta go,” I said finally.

  “Oh. OK,” she said, and she looked relieved that I was leaving.

  ***

  This time we were finished. No doubt about it. Man, we just couldn’t get along.

  Why did she have to say anything? Because I had said, Tell me what you think.

  That’s what I thought about, all the way back to Bucktown. By the time I got there and micro-waved some Orville Reddenbacher’s Super Poppy popcorn, turned on the TV and stuck ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ into the VCR, I was pretty despondent. No amount of Kubrick hubris was going to make it all right.

  Fuck me, I’m an idiot.

  At about the time the bone in the air turned into a rocket ship, I heard a knock on the door. I knew who it was. I just didn’t know how she could’ve remembered where I lived, for all of the excitement of her last visit here.

  I opened the door. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Maria said, and we were all over each other again. We’d made love just three or four hours before, but there we were, ripping at each other’s clothing, needing to get close, needing to meld together. Right there, on the hall floor of my apartment, nothing but a Persian throw beneath us, and I felt her thighs walking up my ribcage.

  “Aaaagh!” That was me.

  “Oooooh!” And Maria embraced me, crushed me with arms and legs.

  Jeez, I’ve never been in a relationship so intense as this.

  ***

  “You think this’ll ever settle down?” I asked.

  “Whattya mean?” Maria smiled at me, that smile, the one that made everything worthwhile. “I’m just playing this ‘us’ thing by ear.”

  We relaxed and watched Kier Dullea battle it out with HAL 9000, mostly rooting for the human guy, but strangely regretting the technological lobotomy. I wanted to tell HAL, Figure it out better next time, there really was room for all of us in this universe.

  Maria told me about the commission. I saw this weird combination of anticipation and apprehension in her face. She told me the story of the cleaning woman, and I loved it; of course I loved it.

  “I don’t know if I can do the painting!” she wailed. “That’s a lot of money! And pressure!”

  “Sure you can.” I knew that about her. Maria was massively afraid, and then it occurred to me that her fear was part of her art. It took all aspects of her, the good and the bad and the goofy and the fearful, all of that gave her that unique perspective. So fear it if she must. Buffer her, yes. Take it away, no. This would be a very fine line that I’d try to draw. “When you paint the woman,” I said, “you should put her in her cleaning clothes.”

  “Um, no, Bubba, that would be disrespectful.” Maria had already done preliminary sketches, as I saw the next time that I was at her place. The woman would be remembered a few stations higher, sitting properly upright in an evening gown, looking very formal. Originally she’d been holding a flower. My influence would change that.

  Dreadful what happens when two people get together. No matter what you do, no matter how much you try to ignore the other person’s idiosyncrasies, and politics, and strengths and weaknesses, you’re influenced by that person. Once two people have had sex a few times, and have hung out together, they become a part of each other.

  ***

  Maria spent the night, the whole night, this time.

  Sunday morning, wow, I woke up and here was this beautiful, talented, sexy, you know the list by now woman lying next to me. It didn’t scare me, not too much, anyway. It was kind of nice. It was real nice. This time we managed to fool around, too, a pleasant little slow screw, spoons, faces not too close, don’t kiss with our mutual dragon breath.

  It was pleasant and slow, like we were trying to see just how many different ways we could make love, not positions, but what different things we expressed by making love. This morning it was sweet, not intense, just connecting, giving and taking pleasure in a most relaxed way. We were saying, “Good morning!”

  “That was nice,” Maria said.

  ***

  After. Now we’d find out serious things about each other.

  “Breakfast,” I said. “Out for breakfast.” My idea of breakfast was bacon and eggs, hash browns, the gallon of coffee. My first alternate was French toast. My second alternate was a fine Fingerhut Bakery chocolate donut. “Where’d you like to go?” I asked.

  “Anywhere organic,” she said. Omigod. Religious differences, already. A Sunday morning, and I’m a Meaty, and she’s an Organic, leaning toward Vegetarianism. I felt like I’m backing Bacchus, and she’s a missionary for Trader Joe’s.

  But there was compromise in the air, especially after last night when we had almost blown it between us for the fourth or fifth time in about three weeks. The Panera Bread Company. They had their own brand of cream cheese, and this wonderful fresh-baked assortment of bagels. And coffee. She can have fruit salad and herbal tea, and everybody’s happy.

  Maria drove, so that I didn’t have to give up my parking space. She’d be leaving after breakfast, anyway. You had to think those things through on the North Side.

  “Babe,” Maria said at Panera, and that �
�Babe’ went right through me, “I have to go to work now.”

  I understood her perfectly. Sunday wasn’t a day off for an artist or a writer. This was when the creative people did that other thing; the art that defined her, and the writing that made me. She was going to work on the cleaning lady. I had to put together some new packages, write a funny cover letter, and send it all off to cold New York City, begging once again, ‘Will somebody there please read my novel--if you’d only just read the sucker, you’d want it!'

  So Maria drove off, and I felt pretty solid in what we were doing, or as solid as an artist and a writer ever can, what with all of that cosmic disturbance and noise in the background.

  ***

  My third novel: I knew that the presentation lacked punch. There’s something bad in my cover letter and/or the three chapters that I’d submitted to seventeen different prospective agents. They kept telling me no, without ever really telling me why.

  That was my focus. My rewrite for a Sunday. In its own perverse way, it was fun; dismantling, rearranging, rewriting. I had this nifty rig, an inexpensive computer with a printer that had actually cost more than the box and the monitor, and it gave me a flashy finished product. I thought that my manuscripts looked good, anyway. This was still at a time when I submitted through the US Mail, and email and the speed of light had not yet become the preferred method of submission. Hell, I wasn’t even on line at home when I sent off this one.

  Deeply immersed, away from the lovely artist, I did inspired stuff. And into the mail, down the block. Give the man high grades for endurance, anyway.

  I passed my car on the way back to my apartment. Yep. Somebody didn’t like me. Rear tire, driver’s side. Sliced like a big black apple.

  I jacked it up, made the change. And again, the weird thought was, Maria had been with me here at my place. Why would she do that? She didn’t do that. No, asshole, it wasn’t her doing this.