She pulled at the necklace she had purchased earlier in the day from a handsome street vendor. A bargain. The street vendor had said it had good-luck properties. She had let the street vendor to put the necklace around her neck and she pressed against him, her nipples hardening through the thin little T-shirt she was wearing. I have very sensitive nipples, she told the street vendor, and he told her he had a lot of sensitive parts. It had been a bright Saturday afternoon, the street full of people. Last year she would have invited him over her apartment, kissed him until he screamed in pleasure. She used to be able to make men scream in pleasure, and find her pleasure. She had learned to make the equation equal.
Pleasure...
Barely you are free
free to invent and reinvent
to deform the health they order upon you
those with comprehensible names, burnished designations,
tenured aspirations—what strangling nomenclature
secure imprisonment unending elation
and so you invent madness
you mispronounce your name.
Her fiancé was removing his camera from the bag, telling Amanda technical details she wasn't paying attention to, when she broke the necklace and then slapped it down on the coffee table, as if to wake or frighten him. He planned to buy a digital camera, he told her, wanted to take hundreds and hundreds of photographs of her.
"Your necklace broke," he said, putting the bag on the floor.
"It can be repaired," she said angrily. "Nearly everything can be repaired."
"This won't be painful," he said.
"Put your camera away...and we can do other things," Amanda said, lifting her skirt, scratching at her nylon-clad thighs, she thinking it the sound of little night insects calling for help. It was the first time since the thwarted, abandoned seductions of their first few dates that she hadn't acted demure around him, hadn't seemed uneasy with her costume. Didn't he notice the stockings? They couldn't be any brighter red. She resisted the impulse to demolish the role.
"Make yourself presentable," he said, the mildest of orders.
"You wanted me to dress up for dinner," she said, and lifted the skirt higher. You know how much these fucking stockings cost? His first present to her were pantyhose, explaining that he knew a working woman's wardrobe required suitable hosiery, but he wouldn't admit, at first, that he found them erotic.
"My parents have never seen you," he said, looking at her through the camera. "Put yourself in their place. Their only child is getting married and they have no idea of how the woman looks..."
I don't care how your parents look, if they have two heads, she thought. But he had pictures of his parents, prominently displayed in his house, so proud he owned his own house, paid for, had ample savings, didn't owe anyone anything, loved his job, selling commercial property. You have very attractive parents, she had said the first time he took her to his house. They hadn't been in the living room a minute when he pointed to the pictures and announced that his parents have been happily married exactly forty years. She let her skirt drop and grabbed a small pillow from the couch and held it in front of her face.
"Now, what kind of picture will that make?"
"I told you, no photographs. Haven't you been listening to me?"
"But you've had a few drinks."
"I'm not drunk," she said, and pressed the pillow against her face.
He stepped toward her and pulled the pillow away, and carefully put it on a chair.
"I'm ready for those computer lessons. I feel sexy and excited, and I'm raring to enter the computer age this very instant."
"Plenty of time for lessons later. My parents have never seen you," the fiancé said, and stepped away from Amanda.
Someone said she was an innocent
another a temptress,
still another a plotting, conniving sorceress,
how she cried and bled
she could drive secure, prominent men into paroxysms of longing.
"They'll see me in the flesh when they come for the wedding."
"That's two months away."
"Let them use their imaginations," Amanda said.
"Please, sweetheart, get that dreadful expression off your face," the fiancé said, taking the lens cover from his camera and slipping it into his shirt pocket.
"Or what?" Amanda said, feeling no threat from the man with the camera. Yet his camera was as a weapon pointed at her and she wanted to kick it out of his hands.
"Nothing," he said, looking through the camera. "I just want to send them a couple of pictures of you. Every e-mail they ask me...beg me. They didn't have a child until they were almost forty. I was a last-ditch effort, so to speak," he stated, seeming to offer the explanation for one of life's persistent mysteries. "They're almost eighty," he added, making a further attempt to demystify.
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