“Ma cherie, what can I do to put a Roman candle in your pants?”
My Baldy-laire sat there heavily, a puppet with strings cut, his back against the wall by the fireplace; its embers were sullen suns, fog-drops of fire; his eyes were two drops of ink ploosehed from a dropper.
“It is the absinthe. It has unmanned you. What you need is another draft of that incomparable liquid…. That will either bring you back, or set you sailing into carefree fancies. Either way, ma cherie, success.”
Charlie said nothing, his enormous brow bent downward. I set about with candle and philter, wormwood and liquor, and in a few minutes–as the flame softly hissed–the distillation turned gray and green and was ready for my sad little man. I looked back at him, awake as a snake, and as motionless, the tragic penetration of his gaze directed–not at me, not at any living creature–but purely and irreducibly at the void. Such a sad little fuck, my pleasing poete maudit!
I positioned myself before him, lifted my dress and pressed against his cold, cold lips.
“Sniff this,” I instructed.
I backed away and brought the green vial down to meet his cold, cold lips.
“Sip this.”
As the chandelier flickered, a flare of blush rose in a blade up the side of his neck. His lids lowered dully, banking a renewed spark within. I bent before him to massage the front of his trousers. There he was, breathing shallowly, his blood club doubling in my palm.
“It is my unshakable conviction that men ought to be superior to women,” he said, his eyes lidding with distracted desire. “They just never are.”
“Come, my lazy lamb, what scourge would you apply to women to revenge yourself on their illogical supremacy? Surely such fainting fakers must pay some price for their deception.”
“Morality’s illusory. To live is to deceive,” he said, losing me with his boyish sophistries. Are we ladies to be punished or not? The sting of the whip, the whispy roughness of a scar, both have their allure. He raved on.
“The commonest blossom paints her cheek to lure the bumbling bee to her breast. If women deceive the same, what of it? They but follow the plot concocted by God. It is we men who fail and flounder, pretending that our much-vaunted purpose connects some chaotic or cathartic here to some dizzily paradisiacal there. Where do these manly ambitions and illusions originate? No one knows…. With the human female, as with the bitch in nature, the goal is to cozen and conquer. With the lame male, who cannot entice but must be content to command, it is his own self that he deceives–and the benefit of it is that he lies cracked and dismasted by his dreams. Perhaps, if he is born nobly, or possesses natively some lively trick of the whore’s art, he will have companions on his path to disaster. That is all. Should he awaken from his sleeper’s parade and toss off his rose monocle, he will see that all the while he has been beguiled by the efficient deceit of a woman. Helpless in the hands that ‘love’ him. Ahh! Yes, faster, harder. Strangle the banana, baby! Oh, I am your hammy fan, lost in your molten folds. My black butterfly, my one, my only luuuuuhhh….”
Soon enough there was no more to the story than a washrag and warm water laving his iridescent thighs, erasing the traces of the rainbow he had made.
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