Edge Play X (29 page)

X continued past a few bedrooms and
entered a recreation room. People were playing pool, drinking, and smoking
cigars in it. There was a bathroom at the edge of it, and she entered it, but
before she could close the door, Simeon had joined her inside.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t
want to talk to you right now.”

He was wearing a pair of black
trousers and a tailored button down black shirt along with a simple black mask
over his face.
 

“On your way to a funeral?” she asked.

Simeon picked up her hand and looked
at it the black ‘X’ written on the back of it.

He said, “You’re on ecstasy.”

“Yes.”

“Is
Compton
?”

“No. I didn’t know the candy was
drugged.”

“
Compton
did. He didn’t tell you what it was?”

X shook her head no and Simeon let out
a disgusted sound.

Simeon watched as X sat down onto the
toilet and began to urinate. She didn’t care if he saw. The drug took away her
embarrassment. And besides, he had already seen her take a piss once before.

X asked him, “Why are you here? You
don’t belong here.” She wiped herself off and stood up.

“I am noting who the attendees are,”
he answered. “It’s a virtual cabal. If I told you who some of the people are
behind those masks, you probably wouldn’t believe me.”

X peered at herself in the mirror over
the long sink, then turned on the water and took a drink from the faucet. When
she stood up again, she tapped at the corners of her mouth dry with her
fingertips. She wanted to take her mask off but knew she could not.
 
Simeon, behind her, watched her reflection as
well, and X realized that when she had bent over that he had gotten a good look
at the thong under her dress.

Simeon, upon seeing the thin band of
fabric that covered X’s own bands of ochre flesh, a sight deprived to him by
just a few millimeters of cloth, felt a deep urge to experience X with all his
senses.

He asked her, “Did you have sex with
Compton
?”

There was a pounding at the door.

“Just a minute,” Simeon said.

“No sex in bathroom, I need piss,” a
man said in an Italian accent.

X opened the door and Simeon followed
her out and through another doorway and into a library. There, a group of
people was passing around marijuana pipes and joints. A man handed one towards
X and she declined it. That drug wasn’t going to take her to a better place
than where she already was.

Simeon repeated his question. “Did you
have sex with
Compton
?”

“Yes,” X responded simply.

“You did,” he said quizzically. “Why?”

“Because I wanted to, Simeon. I
wouldn’t have sex with anyone for any other reason.”

“Where is Terry?” X asked.

“He’s upstairs in the private rooms
having a drink and a cigar with the man who owns this chateau.”

“Who owns it?”

“The masked man who opened the door
this evening.”

The man with the tuxedo and full face
mask who had opened the door for them was the one who owned the chateau. He had
greeted all of his guests by welcoming them in with a wide sweep of his arm.

A lighter clicked on and X remembered
how she had branded Simeon with the letterpress X. While she forgave herself
for the pain she had inflicted, she suddenly wanted to see the wound, to
confirm that it existed. The wound connected them both to the past. She reached
out and touched his shirt, feeling the perimeter of the bandage under the
cloth.

“Don’t touch it,” he said. “It isn’t
healed.”

A deep compassion came over her, along
with a sense of regret for the violence they had traded between each other.

“I’m sorry, Simeon.”

He said nothing for a few moments,
unsure how to respond.

“Are you?” he asked, lifting up his
hand and touching the tips of his fingers over the bare flesh of her sternum
before running them down the length of her belly. The sensation sent
electricity through her veins. He noticed her reaction and leaned into her,
pressing her up against the wall of books. The air was a fog of smoke, the
people continuing to hit pipes and pass around fat joints or cigars filled with
the herb.

X turned her head away from him, took
a deep breath of air.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Why? Because you like it?”

Simeon lifted his hand up and gently
stroked her jaw before letting his hand slide down to her throat. Feeling his
hand there, X took a quick breath or air, and upon hearing this, Simeon
tightened his grip.

He whispered in her ear, “Don’t act
like you don’t like it. I know that you do.”

X didn’t deny that his treatment was
exciting her, the obsidian thrill of his hand at her throat. Simeon tightened
his grip, making X gasp.

“You left a scar on me,” he said. He
pressed his fingers deeper into the side of her neck, dug his thumb into the
muscle next to her windpipe. “Don’t ever pull that shit with me again, do you
understand?”

“Yes,” X said breathlessly.

Simeon removed his hand. He gently ran
his fingertips from her shoulder down along her arm, ending at her wrist,
sending the shivers through her again. It felt so good to be touched. She
wanted to touch him. There was forgiveness in it, in the laying on of hands.

Simeon reached out and took a hit from
a joint and then gently blew the smoke into X’s mouth, the same thing she had
done to him when he had been in her bondage chair. The smoke entered her mouth
and lungs, and upon exhale, gently floated out of her nostrils, because now,
she was kissing him, their lips were sliding over each other, tongues darting
in and out of the caverns of their mouths.

“Since the first moment I saw you,
I’ve wanted you, X.”

After taking her hand in his own,
Simeon led X through the hallways and rooms and then down the steps, the pair
hurrying outside to a limousine, one exactly like the one she and Compton had
arrived in with the exception that the leather seating in Simeon’s was red and
not gray. He knocked on the driver’s window, and the man looked up at him from
the book he was reading before rolling down the window.

“Take a walk, buddy. A long walk.”

The man turned on the car so that it
would be warm for them, so that they would have all the controls at the touch
of their fingers, and after he opened the door for the pair, X climbed inside,
followed by Simeon. There, on the smooth leather row of seats, pestle ground
against mortar, pulverizing all of their inhibitions and desires into the
finest of powders, a concoction that seemed to linger transcendent in the air
until finally settling onto them once again.

And after they had expended one
another, X returned to the chateau and found
Compton
. On the long ride home, Compton, noticing that
X’s chignon was tussled, noticing the glow that had concentrated itself on her
chest and cheeks, a glow associated with the flushing that occurs after orgasm,
had asked her simply and directly if she had engaged in sex with another man at
the party.

X nodded her head yes, not feeling any
need to lie to him, and Compton, receiving confirmation to a question to which
he already knew the answer, pulled X close to him, their bodies tangling
together as they made their way back to Paris, she achingly resplendent and he
basking in her mystery.

Act
IV

1.

Newton
understood it:
For a force, there is always an equal and opposite reaction
. Or, to put it
another way, what goes up must come down.

And here, for X, this fundamental
principle was at play. Ecstasy had rebounded to depression. The flood of
serotonin,
norepinephrine
and dopamine had been
reduced to a trickle. A drought had arrived. Soon enough, her mental
environment would return to a state of equilibrium, but now, as X sat in her
studio painting, a thought kept replaying itself in her head, one of regret,
one that repeated:
Oh, good God, what
have I done?

At least the weather was good. It was
early spring in
California
, warm and sunny, and X had opened the windows of
her studio to let in the fresh air. She had just recently started working on a
new canvas when Anne came upstairs with a newspaper in her hand. X kept hold of
her brush, afraid that if she put it down that she wouldn’t pick it up again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Anne asked.

“Tell you what?” X said, turning away
from her easel.

Anne opened up the paper to the society
page and pointed to a small article.

“It says here that you went to
Paris
with Terry Compton.”

X motioned to a short stack of boxes
that were near the wall. “I brought you back some things,” she said.

X set down her brush then walked over
to the open window and breathed in the fresh spring air.

Anne said, “I got a couple phone calls
from reporters asking for more information about you and Terry Compton. I could
only tell them that I didn’t have a comment.”

“Just tell them that I was
accompanying him to the
Louvre
, and that we are not
in a relationship.”

X walked over to the boxes, lifted off
the lid from the top one, and pulled out a purse which she gave to Anne.
 

“You want this?”

Anne took it from her excitedly.

“Do you know how much one of these purses
cost?” Anne asked.

“Why, yes, I do,” X said. “You can
sell it if you want. I don’t want it.”

“So he took you shopping?”

“He didn’t go with me. He’s much too
busy for that. I went to the shops with a Parisian woman.”

“And he paid for it all?”

“Of course he did. You think I’d buy
all that stuff?”

Anne chuckled.
 

X felt that it was best to give Anne
an explanation before the woman began prying too much, even if what she was
about to say was a lie.

“Terry asked me if I would like to
come along on his business trip. He said he would take me around the city and
that we’d go to the
Louvre
. I didn’t want to turn him
down since he had just bought all the paintings.”

“Uh-huh,” Anne said, not entirely
believing her.

There was another explanation, of
course, one that she had no intention of giving to Anne, this one being that
the
CIA
had cornered X into dominating Mr. Terry Compton
because he had a submission fetish, (there was a slight possibility that he was
a murderer, a claim X thought was ludicrous). How could X explain that she had
initially detested the man, everything about him, and that now she was actually
fond of him? Not in love, but fond? Like her emotions, her relationship with
Compton
had been a see-saw.

“Is he a gentleman?”

X went back to her stool and started
painting again.
 

“He’s just a regular man.”

“He’s the one who sent you all those
flowers, isn’t he?”

X didn’t answer.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Anne said.
“Sounds like he’s in love with you.”

Now X put her brush down and turned
around.

“What?”

“He bought all your paintings. He sent
you an obscene amount of flowers. He took you to
Paris
. He let you buy what ever you wanted there.”

Anne pulled a cashmere shawl out of
the next box and draped it over her shoulders, enjoying its smoothness against
her skin.

“Look, Terry doesn’t love me. The only
thing he loves is money.”

Anne shrugged her shoulders.

“A man like that is complicated,” Anne
replied.

Complicated
, X thought. The man certainly was an enigma. But
she didn’t want
Compton
to love her. Maybe the man was obsessed,
intrigued, driven by lust. But love?
 
X
didn’t believe for a moment that the man really loved her. She turned away from
the thought, not wanting to admit that it was even possible.

Anne, the shawl still draped over her
shoulders, said, “I must go downstairs—I just heard the door. But you are going
to come out with me this evening and tell me every last detail.”

As Anne went down the stairs, X began
to see a shape forming in the colors of her painting, an image growing out of
the base coat that veiled the canvas. She spent hours continuing to refine the
image, intensifying the chiaroscuro that had already presented itself,
highlighting an arm here, bringing to life a torso, then creating a face
remarkably similar to Terry Compton’s, until, finally, a figure had emerged
from the painting as if materializing from an alternate dimension. It emanated.
And this figure, that of a man, mostly naked, his body Christ-like in its
posture and wearing a crown on his head, not a crown of thorns, but a jeweled
one, was carrying something on his back, not a cross, no, although what he
carried on his back was large and heavy and the figure strained under the
weight of the burden, one made of gold and shaped into the unmistakable symbol
of a dollar sign.