Close Too Close (26 page)
But so many dead dicks, of men lying behind me, that don’t witness my vomit.
I can’t take the sight of my half-digested food and pills on his stuff. I wish I had a wet tissue. But this, and my increasing sense of fainting, turn him on further and he puts all of it back in my mouth again. As if in there forever. With his emaciated body, naked to the bone. I have less and less strength in my legs and my heart is sinking; I want to close my eyes and he takes complete control. Holding me up from my armpits, taking my full weight at his wrists and shoulders, half bent over me, he moves like madness, in and out of me. That I am fully on the ground and hardly moving is not going to stop him. His movements are a hysteria now. I hear him say
‘Abbe! Behosh mat ho! Murde ke mooh mein paani chudwaega kya?! Utthja!’
*
*
‘What happened?’
‘Meaning?’
‘I mean, when you were a child, did someone . . .?’
‘. . . yank on them?’
‘What . . .?’ ‘
But I’ve never seen such big tits on a man before.’
*
‘Where do you do it?’
‘First get this over with, then I’ll take you there.’
*
‘Hey! Don’t faint! You think I want to come in a dead man’s mouth?! Get up!’
‘W
hat is essential is invisible to the eye,’ said Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and he could have been talking about V. V wasn’t essentially beautiful. He was short, stocky and adored and embraced his natural smells. But what he had was a bewitching after-sex smile; it was still seductive, luxurious and fat. He was quite unbearable otherwise, and you had to fuck him a lot to get him to look fuckable again. For my best friend L, it was that very incompleteness that made him attractive. This wasn’t strange because L collected the weary, the unusual and the extraordinary among the masses.
At the time, L and I were on an adventure. We had a little room to live in, a small income to spend unwisely and a pack of cards. We did everything together; we tried on dresses, blouses and saris, wore mundus and made sarongs with lungis. On Sundays, we bought second-hand books on the streets, dressed in seedy clothes with kohl in our eyes and then read to each other all night long. And then nearly at dawn we cuddled. That’s right, we were not having sex; you see, I was straight and he was gay. Well, not strictly, just at the edges of those boundaries, always threatening to spill over, but balancing rather breathtakingly.
One evening, we snuck into a film society’s screening; the film had been the usual subtitled fare of post-war angst and soul search, much, much sex and many flashbacks to peaceful days. It was disturbing and disturbingly titillating. I cried at the end of the film, you understand, for all the sadness in the film. L cried too, he did that, he cried about films, not about life, mind you. Our display of cinematic stimulation must have been emphatic; the patroness of the film society, let’s call her M, was moved enough to invite us to her house to discuss the film.
M, the daughter of a very famous actress from the 40’s and the 50’s, had a very expensive and largely garish house. She sat us down beneath a huge poster of her mother’s film and left to get into “something a little less . . . ” her silver-bangled hands tinkling jaggedly in the aftermath of that expansive gesture of her hands. The poster, not of one of M’s mother’s more well-known films, was most of the wall; the actress had carried a character from her teens to an aging grandmother, and on the poster she looked pruned and shrivelled like she had never been in life. There were, of course, other photos of her, the black-and-white ones where she was young and stunning, framed and placed on small end tables along with much knick-knack.
M came back wearing a pink silk singlet and pyjamas that revealed all those fat little tyres that the Shambalpuri tussar had lovingly embraced. She walked towards us unfurling a long black shawl that I can only assume was cashmere. She wrapped it around herself and sat down next to L, neatly, like a large geisha. She ran her fingers through L’s at the time luxurious hair and said, ‘So? Wine?’ We said yes, I made the small well-brought-up noise volunteering to fetch, she shook her head ever so slightly and whispered. A girl, her ‘domestic,’ appeared magically, carrying a tray with four glasses of white wine and a plate with small cubes of cheese. L accepted his wine and gushed about the slender wine glasses and the Auroville-esque earthy-looking platter of cheese. I popped a piece of what turned out to be Amul cheese in my mouth and stared at the fourth glass. ‘Who is the fourth glass for, M?’ asked L, deftly avoiding a cube of cheese. ‘Ah, my son, V, I hope he will join us soon, he would love to meet you,’ she said pointedly to me. I smiled a cheesy smile, L looked aghast and rolled his eyes at me. ‘He is a little shy, but I want him to meet sensitive young people like you two.’ M discreetly wiped her mouth; I self-consciously dragged out a disgusting piece of tissue from my jeans and dabbed at my lips. Meanwhile, M had oriented herself towards L and was smiling, he had started a long monologue about wines, ‘Napa valley . . . now even
Nashik
. . . but French wines . . .’ and he took a graceful swallow, exposing to M’s adoring eyes his beautiful long neck. I don’t know how L could be so confident talking about wines, all we had glugged was Golconda and the odd cheap Goan port.
L had moved himself to the floor; he had this way of caressing his collarbones that made him look so desultorily sexy, he was doing that now. He wasn’t actually sitting on the floor, he seemed to be hovering just above it, like some great gazelle moving in slow motion. M was in the throes of excitement already, she had let the shawl slip to reveal a bit of her shoulders and an arm that had just a hint of fat over robust muscle and sinew.
Sitting next to her, I looked like a teenage frump. I wasn’t unattractive, I was actually classically beautiful; small and thin from my current malnutrition but I had long hair that was lusciously raging against the destruction I was subjecting my body to. All the smoking had caused the baby fat from my face to vanish, I had high cheekbones, and large kohllined eyes, ergo classically beautiful. Except when I smiled. I had an obviously fake smile and often, to L’s amazement, it even touched my eyes. I did not know how to smile; it had always been toothy and extra wide. I had the deepest dimples amongst my less-dimpled siblings and cousins and this fake smile was developed from winning contests with them. When I was uncomfortable, like now, I pushed my cheeks up so much that my dimples were craters. I felt like that gorgeous French girl in
Bitter Moon
, who gets uglier and uglier when her lover subjects her to petty humiliation.
I had reasons to be in that filmic moment right now. M was almost whispering into L’s ears, I could no longer hear her, while L, for no logical or physiological reason, was studiously engaged in this game of seduction. I sat there with a stupid grin, and hoped that V would appear soon and was not a figment of this aging diva’s imagination. M was beautiful and so was her-mother-the-actress, chances were the son was beautiful as well. I firmly believed in genetics.
Our wine glasses were empty and every cube of ghastly cheese on the platter had been eaten by me, the one nice cold glass of wine was perspiring invitingly, M had not offered to refill, and I was all cheesy-mouthed and thirsty; as yet no sighting of V. L was being revolting with M, he was fingering her shawl saying, ‘You know M, as a child I always thought cashmere had something to do with Kashmir!’ She laughed a short pretty laugh, ‘You say the most naive things, we shouldn’t let people think you don’t know about all this.’ He curled up to her like a cat. He was such a glutton for beautiful things.
I got up from my chair to explore that large room. I picked up one of those frames with the actress’s photograph. ‘M, your mother was such a great beauty, almost ethereal.’ Ethereal, I had read, was a favourite description for the actress. ‘Yes,’ she said, just a little brusquely. ‘Where is that son of mine?’ For the first time that day she raised her voice and called out to V. Then when she heard no reply she left the room, to fetch him, I assumed.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I pinched L. ‘Are you going to fuck her? That’s your type, the aging diva? So I can expect sex when I am about seventy?’
‘Shut up, she is so lonely and beautiful.’
‘And cheap! That was Amul cheese for god’s sake!’
‘Yet you are the only idiot who ate it.’
‘Yeah, what do you want me do when you are fawning on her like some gigolo, I was bored. If you touch that shawl one more time ever so gently you think she is going to wrap it around your shoulders . . .’
‘Then you flirt with her, why are you sitting there like an egg? Have you felt that shawl, it is beyond exquisite.’
‘So this is a shawlgasm!’ L had a thing for shawls so bad that he hated summers. ‘Doesn’t she know you are gay?’
‘I have told you this before; it doesn’t matter, especially to a woman of a certain age and type. You only seem to get it at some academic level.’
‘So let’s have a studious fuck L, I will cram like hell for it,’ I hissed.
‘I can’t talk to you when you are like this. We can sleep together, only it can’t mean what you want it to mean.’
M walked back into the room as though on cue saying, ‘This is my son, V . . .’ I couldn’t see him at first, he was standing behind his tall mother, then he emerged. M had clearly not mated with her genetic match. I heard L take in a short sharp breath of desire, V was the best of the misfits that we had met in recent times. M introduced us, V shook the tip of my fingers, and raised his hand to L in a short wave. L’s hand almost instinctively went to his collarbones, ‘Hi!’ So impish, so appealing.
M let L stand in front of V for about twenty seconds, then like a seasoned pro, ‘Come,’ she said unfurling her great black shawl and flinging it casually on the sofa, ‘let me show you my sari collections, I even have a few that Ma wore.’ To her son she said, ‘I hope you will take care of the young lady?’ L was torn, but he made his choice: ‘Do you collect shawls as well?’ as they left the room.
V looked me over from head to toe, did not linger over my breasts, then he picked up the wine glass and flopped on the chair, ‘Are you two together?’