Aug 27, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Photo: Joel Goodman
Flash Fiction
“I want you to touch my______” Tatiana cried out, the second they had their clothes off. He had never heard that particular word said out loud before, he scarcely knew what the word meant. His wife didn’t call it anything and neither did he.
She said it now again, and reached for his hand, in case there was any question of him not hearing. Though one ear was kind of whacked, he wasn’t deaf. Not yet anyway.
He wondered if it was true what they said, if you didn’t have one sense, it made the others stronger?
Presently, she declared, “Ah,” in her faintly accented English. Her brother, who had arranged this whole unreal situation, had a much more pronounced accent than she did.
It was two on a Wednesday afternoon in Westwood in September.
Outside the windows of the high rise, the mountains were rust colored and looked like any moment they would burst into flames. He wondered what it would be like to live with such a view: such expanse, such space? And of course he wondered what it would be like not to be able to enjoy it, or at least in the way most sighted people could.
Maybe if they decided to go through with all ten sessions, he’d been paid for five, he’d find out what it was like to be so smart, so successful in the world, did she know how beautiful she was, was she always blind?
II
Today Tatiana had on a bright silk caftan and, artfully applied make up. Her black hair was shiny and smooth around her face, and she wore a different pair of dark glasses, ones that turned up at the ends and were edged with bright stones. They couldn’t be diamonds, or could they?
Fifteen hundred dollars a session for what they were about to do again. He decided then, she must not know how beautiful she is, she didn’t have to pay for it. If he weren’t married and loved his wife, he’d go out with her, she was actually funny. Smart as a whip too.
“Next time you’ll meet Lancelot.”
“Who?”
“You’ll find out,” Tatiana laughed.
III
Lancelot turned out to be the biggest, blackest poodle he had ever seen. He was as beautiful as Tatiana.
“Now I’m going to _____,” she cried out sometime later, when the black caftan was on the floor, and the black dog reclined on the foot of the bed.
“Don’t worry, lie back, I’ll find my way to you.”
IV
The text read: “I knew you were the right person, five minutes into your class I could tell you were perfect for Tatiana. She’s very pleased. And so am I. I’d like to send you a check for the next five.”
They needed the money. Fifteen grand at this particular time in their lives was exactly what the doctor ordered. It would free them from their immediate worries, and enable them to put away a bit in case of an emergency. Who knew he would get this for making love with a rich blind linguistics professor who wanted to make herself more desirable in the dating market? Would she list him on her resume?
V
He started to notice, when he’d go home after the session, things looked drab: their small apartment, the neat row of shoes at the door, the living room that needed paint, the small bathroom with the shower curtain he had never liked, and now was beginning to mold at the hem.
His wife would look up from her computer—she worked from home—and as always her smile was both sad and sweet. She, and he hated to think this, was beginning to look sort of drab too.
VI
“I was married once,” Tatiana told him. “I never had pleasure, not once. I did not even know what pleasure was! Until you. Now, when I am married again, I will be knowledgeable.”
“I’m glad your brother approached me,” he told her. “I thought it was weird, it’s a first for me too. ” He added playfully, “Do you have any candidates?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
They were lying naked on her bed and Lancelot was between them. Both of them were stroking the magnificent black dog, which had taken a liking to him, licking his toes while he made love to his mistress.
“I’ll miss you!” she confided.
“I’ll miss you too!” he replied and it was true.
VII
On the last session she asked,
“Would you like to see my eyes?”
“You always cover them.”
“I’m told they are harsh.”
He stroked the dog.
“Lancelot’s seen them he doesn’t mind.”
“Amanda who puts on my make up and helps me to dress, she has seen them too!”
“How about your brother?”
“Of course! “
“I’m ready!”
She was wearing a bright, colorful, silk mask today, securely wound around her shiny black hair.
With one tiny pull, it was off.
Her head was very still, her chin lifted proudly. Her new confidence, he liked to think had something to do with him. Staring, he thought of nuclear war, Guantanamo, and of a horror movie he had seen at a neighborhood revival house.
Tatiana told him, “When I was little, just after the accident, I was informed I could have glass eyes, like the doll’s eyes, or just have what I have now. Sometimes I dream about doll’s eyes. Are they my eyes?”
“That’s why you keep that doll with glass eyes on the shelf over there?”
“Yes!”
“I understand.”
“I’d like to know what you think: My former husband would not have them seen.”
He was staring at the dark holes in her head.
“Am I pretty without my mask on?”
“Yes,” he lied. “You’re a beautiful woman. Everything about you is beautiful!”
“Should I keep the mask on?”
“It’s up to you.”
“But I want to know what you think.”
He closed his own eyes then, and kissed her for the last time.
by 
Aug 6, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Gentle Readers: Instead of a blog, this is a flash fiction offering… My first! While the female in the flash fiction does yoga, that’s about where the resemblance to the Blogger you know (and hopefully love) begins and ends…
“I think it’s a terrible idea, really I do.” And she did. He was 34 and she, though she didn’t like to say it, or allude to it, and could pass in some circles for ten years younger, was 60. In four years she’d be the song. “Do you really want to do it with someone my age?”
He did. He really did, so eventually, she succumbed. One afternoon, they met at one of the big hotels on the beach where his company had rooms. She had wondered when the idea came up if she would pay for it. She had cash, she had miles, and she had everything a proper 60-year-old could want–to a degree. She even had a husband and grown up children, one a year older than her new boyfriend. She had everything, except her seamless legs back, or her old face, not the one with the injectables at discreet creases. She didn’t even want to think about hair. Every three weeks on top. And if she wasn’t exactly grey down there, she didn’t do any of the stuff the girls did. That wasn’t her generation, or if it was, she had not participated, other than what they called the “Alaskan” at the waxing parlor where she paid a visit a few days before the first tryst.
A la recherché de la temp perdu.
She remembered all right. She longed for her old face and body. Remembered, especially, the easy slide without lube, she and her husband didn’t even try anymore. He could get it up, but couldn’t get it in, and felt insulted by the lube suggestion. She supposed he watched porno. And that’s how he got off. She decided he did it before coming to bed several times a week. His bathroom was downstairs, their bedroom up the stairs. She could sail through her rituals: shower or bath, the steps of her face wash, her teeth cleaning, the moisturizing of face and body in less than twelve. His, whatever he did down there could take up to an hour. Surely he was doing porn down there–nobody, not even her sedulous husband of several decades, could floss for forty minutes. Didn’t they all watch porno? She supposed her new boyfriend watched porno. Maybe she would ask him; he was remarkably easy to talk to. Isn’t that how they’d gotten into it, into it, and out of it and now it was over…
A la recherché de la temp perdu.
Proust, of course was gay. She thought her new lover was gay when they first met. He had the easy gay way with women, the excellent bantering skills, the genuine interest in her. What straight man had that?
She had thought it was a shipboard romance, or to be more specific, a yoga retreat romance, though nothing but a hug had happened, and a hug at a yoga retreat is nothing out of the ordinary, though maybe the squeeze had been longer than necessary. Even if her lip hit his soft neck during the hug. So what?
He started it by texting her three days later.
Then the next week, she found herself in a parking structure several blocks from the hotel. Ahead of time, she decided, if she ran into anyone she could say, “I’m on my way to such and such.” There were literally dozens of such and such places by the beach in Santa Monica where the tryst took place.
She took the stairs, because no one takes the stairs, and when she knocked at the door, he answered it with a smile.
She had never seen him dressed before, just in yoga clothes; and the wide black pants, the bright white shirt, the psychedelic bow tie startled her. With his young unlined face and the shock of blond hair that stuck up like straw, the head looked like it was sitting on a mountain painted white black and red.
He’s enormous, she thought, he’s Moby the Dick.
They didn’t kiss, they went straight to the big king, and she took off the germy looking bedspread, which is what she always did when entering a hotel room. They smoked a joint.
And then room service knocked with a bottle of wine and some snacks.
“How’s Lloyd?” he asked presently. By now they were stoned. Lloyd was her Bernese, she had shown him pictures at the yoga retreat. None of them asked for pictures of the children or the husband. But they all wanted to see Lloyd who was a minor hit on Instagram.
I was having love affairs before the invention of Instagram, she also felt like saying. In fact I was married with children before social media.
“What do you weigh?”
“I don’t know, one fifteen, something like that.”
“We’d never be able to borrow each other’s clothes!” he laughed and finally kissed her. And she kissed him back, and they rolled around on the king giggling for what seemed like a long time.
“For obvious reasons, you better get on top,” he smiled, a little later.
And with her own crepe and his rolls of fat and all the dope, it was a surprisingly sweet coming together, one that happened a few more times, and then never happened again.
She carried the memory of it lightly, the deep pleasure of those hours, the strange rooms, because the room changed every time, a different bottle of wine, a different strength of dope.
Some years later, the year she was 64, like the song, she bumped into her former lover on the Third Street promenade holding hands with a man. Their eyes met and simultaneously they blew one another a kiss. She was instantly elated. And stayed that way for some time.
She was with her husband, and daughter who asked, “Who was that?”
“Yoga?” replied her husband and she smiled.
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
by
