Honey is Sweeter than Blood (11 page)

“Yeah.  I read recently about a woman who used a partial birth abortion to terminate a pregnancy because her baby was having seizures.  It seemed to her to be the more humane fate for the thing.  And who else can judge that, huh? She’s the one who had to carry the thing, would have to care for it, watch it suffer this physical condition…”

I nodded, not willing to voice an opinion.  Not willing to even take on an opinion.  It seemed beyond my grasp, my abilities, to do so.  No wonder those men I often thought of as brown-nosers would rather leave it to the women to decide such matters alone.

“It sounds gross, huh? But so does a mastectomy, if you read about it.  Open heart surgery.  But that stuff can save your life, as violent as it seems, right? You want to see something ghastly? Watch someone getting a face lift some time.  And you know what’s also ugly to hear the details of? A six-year-old kid beaten to death by a father who never really wanted him.  A teenage girl knocked up by her stinking drunken step-dad.  A woman getting impregnated by some worthless waste of DNA rapist who should have been aborted himself.  That stuff is unpleasant when you get the gory details of it, too, isn’t it?”

She was getting worked up.  Defensive.  Maybe she had seen the surprise in my expression.  I tried to gently steer her back to her friend.  “So Simone…Simone was that far along.”

“Yeah.  Farther than I ever took it.” She blew the steam off her black coffee.  “Guess I didn’t want the stretch marks.”

I nodded again, which seemed to be the best response, and sipped at my coffee thoughtfully or thoughtlessly.  “Did Dwayne…did he ever know about you doing this, for your art?”

“No.  I never told him.  But I was pregnant from him, the first time I did it.” She smiled widely, so that I could see her teeth.  Usually her smiles barely stretched her sealed lips.  “He was seeing Tamsin then, too.  Bet she wouldn’t be happy about that, his perfect little Princess Die.   So…little Corey wasn’t his first.”

I nodded.  I said nothing.  I sipped my coffee.  I was horrified.  I was fascinated.  I wanted her again.

*     *     *

Over the passing weeks I tormented myself with cinematic images of Damask inching that mummified, magical monkey’s paw along the quivering, sweaty body of some fat, wealthy, balding patron of the arts.  I tortured myself by imagining Damask and the now inadvertently aborted Phetsamone erotically entwined, whispering the secret language of women into each other’s hot kiln.  But the sweeter tortures kept me enthralled.  Damask was a walking museum of wonders, the whole of the Smithsonian’s attics and basements locked up in her head, every thought and dream, fantasy and fear labeled in a jar of cloudy formaldehyde.

I was a lucky man, you see; a privileged soul.  Because Damask treated me to more of the performances that I knew other patrons were paying thousands of dollars for.

In the piece called
Ultrasound
, Damask had taken a rubbery toy-like figure out of a large jar filled with alcohol, worm out of the tequila bottle, kept in a closet I was not allowed to open.  She had placed this creature against her belly, and then held it in place by tightly twining clear plastic cling wrap around her middle.  Shiny, like a window of glass letting me view the mystery inside her.  Her skin through this plastic felt hard and smooth like plastic itself.  And I palpated the fetus through this membrane, with my hands, and then with my lips.  Damask had recovered enough from her most recent abortion that I could penetrate her again, and when I lay atop her, the fetus was snugly sandwiched between us as if we were both pregnant with it.

For the piece entitled
Dressing Up in Mommy’s Clothes
, Damask stood motionless in one corner of the room, a scalpel in her right hand, nude except for one black stocking.  The other stocking had been filled almost to the brim with all of the contents of the plastic containers from her miniature fridge.  Like an Xmas stocking, lumpen with exciting, unknown treasures.  Then the open end of the stocking had been tightly bunched and sealed like the end of a huge sausage.

The smell was terrible, with my nose pressed right against the coarse translucent black and my tongue traveling along its length, so awful that several times I actually retched.   My cock was engorged with gore as the stocking was engorged with soft, near-boneless flesh.  I sucked on the end that would have been toes.  And at last, Damask came forward wordlessly with her sharp blade and made a small incision in the stocking.  I knew what I was to do.  I slipped my tongue into this hole, holding my breath, exploring the moist heart of the fruit beneath its bruised skin.  And then I inserted my aching penis into this rough-lipped orifice, and lay atop the stocking, though not with all my weight for fear of bursting it (as it was there was a trickle of fluid that seeped and wept out), and I pumped myself into this icon, staring at Damask in her corner one minute, then down at the shapes that shifted inside the nylon skin, imagining (or not) that I saw small faces and limbs pressing against the material, then sinking again like water nymphs to be replaced by other forms as my cock stirred the half-liquid interior, interior of a womb, interior of a mind as if I fucked Damask in her brain, interior of a dream, of a conch whistling the song of amniotic seas, and my live sperm was disseminated throughout, blended within, and I don’t know if it were part of the performance or if Damask had given herself over to her own passion, but I saw her right hand working at her vagina, and for a moment I was alarmed that she had inserted the scalpel inside herself, but then I noticed it glittering near the candle on the work bench beside her.

Lying back on the bed, spent, I watched her return the contents of the stocking to the various brightly-lidded containers, wondering how much sperm had swum and died in those stews before mine had been added.  I saw Damask hold up a few large morsels, older and gamier, sniff them, even gag once herself, then drop them into a trash bag.  She would need more clay for her art soon, I knew, and I didn’t doubt that without Phetsamone it would be harder to harvest it in quantities.  I imagined she would need to get in touch with her contacts at the abortion factories and medical schools again.

*     *     *

Not all our sex was part of her art.  In fact, she would grow angry if I confused the two.  I never really lost my temper with her, for fear of her darker temper, but even at my angriest I never accused her of prostitution as I had originally thought to do.  I didn’t see it that way, anymore, any more than she did.  Though I always made sure I never met or saw any of her patrons, male or female.

One night I lay on my belly with her thighs pressed against the sides of my skull, like an infant straining to be unborn, assimilated back into its place of origin, crowning in reverse.  My tongue played in brush strokes painting the steamy tropical darkness, and in my ardor I would take breaths and gasp, “I want to eat a fetus right out of you, Dam        …I want to eat one right out of you…”

I could hear the small pouty smile in her voice as she purred, up there, “Maybe you will…”

I submerged again.  Came gasping back up for air again.  “I want to go down on you when you have your next period,” I enthused.  “I want to eat the blood out of you.  I want to smear my face in it   …”

“You can do that, when my periods come back.  But I missed my last period, love.” And she stroked my head as she cooed this.

Slowly I lifted my slicked face to gaze up along her milky body, to contact those black eyes glowing like beacons at its end, the empty windows of a house at the end of a moonlit path.

“You’re pregnant again?” I whispered.

She smiled.

I lifted my head a little higher.  “From one of your…patrons?”

Still that little smile.  “No,” she said at last.  “I’ve only done
Cupid’s Caress
 lately.  And two of the four were women, anyway.”

I sat up full on the edge of the bed.  “Is it mine, Damask?”

“Yes, love.  Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you proud…knowing that you’re giving to my art the way Simone did? That you’ll be a physical part of it?”

I rose from the bed, wandered to her work bench, smelled the patchouli scent rising from one of the candles as I stood over it.  My cock bobbed heavily in the air but was starting to nod off drunkenly, deflating so ridiculously that I could almost hear the air hissing out.

“You should have asked me what I thought about that,” I murmured, finally.

“What?” She sat up on the edge of the bed herself.  “What the hell is this?”

“I just think…that we should have been in agreement on a thing like this, from the start.”

“You know my art, Tim.  You know where it comes from.”

“Not all of it comes from you.”

“I thought you’d be
honored
,” she hissed.  “Jesus, where is this coming from? Huh? Would you rather I got pregnant from one of my patrons?”

“Yes.  I would.”

“And that would be so different?”

Meekly, without looking at her, afraid of her, I said, “Yes.  Somehow that’s different.”

“I see.  Somehow that’s okay.  But your fetus is different, huh? Yours is sacred.  I know, Timmy! We can have a child together! We can name him Corey!”

“Damask,” I groaned.  “It’s not that I’m against aborting it…”

“What, then?”

“I just don’t want you…doing things to it.”

“You don’t have to have anything to do with it, then.  I’ll keep it away from you.  I’ll keep it for the patrons.”

“You don’t understand.  I don’t want you to do
anything
 with it.”

“Look!” she snarled, on her bare feet now.  “I’m not going to waste a perfectly good abortion.”

“Don’t I have any say in this?” I bravely managed.  But this question was what really fanned her fire.

“No, you don’t! You spit on my gift, Tim.  You spit on my love.  You just wanted to get laid, all this time.  You only love me because you love fucking.  And you want me to be this passive fuckee, and you want me to give birth, like we’re nice little domesticated sheep with no brains and no free will.  Nature doesn’t rule me and
you
 sure as hell don’t rule me!”

I dared to look at her seething eyes.  “I told you, I’m not asking you to give birth to it.  I just don’t want you to
use
 it…”

“What you
want
.  It’s always what the man
wants.  
You know what? You only
wanted
 me because you’re scared of women.  It was your safe way of playing with fire.  And you’ll play with me, but at the end of the day it’s a safe little cow of a wife like Tamsin that you want.  I knew you’d reject me, Tim.  It was inevitable.  You denied it, but I saw it all along.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Get out!” she screeched, so loudly that I knew her neighbors could hear us through the walls.  Not that they hadn’t heard our cries of a different sort before.

Now that I saw I was losing her, had probably already lost her, I managed to crank up my courage.  Nothing left to lose.  I said, “Damask…I don’t want you doing anything to that fetus, other than abort it.  If you do…I’ll call the police.”

For a moment, time stood still in the universe, a hovering black void between swings of the pendulum, the darkness between stars, the darkness in her gaze, too furious to even show anger.  Calmly, more frightening than before, she said, “How can you prove what I might do to some unborn fetus, Tim? Abortion is legal.  Are you going to say, ‘I think my girlfriend is going to do something awful to my fetus that we both want aborted?’”

“Yes, I will say that.  Then I’ll take them here, to show them what I mean.”

“You’d do that? Even if it implicated yourself?”

“I’m not the artist, Damask.  I didn’t make this stuff.  I didn’t have the abortions.”

She smiled.  It made me shudder.  “I see.  Now you disown all my art that you supposedly appreciated so much.  Well, you bring the police here, Tim.  Not that they could do much to me, anyway…but I won’t be here anymore.  I’ll take my work somewhere else.  I’ll do it tonight, before you can get a search warrant.  I have money in the bank.  My patrons have paid me well.  At least they appreciate me.  They’ll seek me out wherever I settle, and I’ll make new ones besides.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this…”

“But it has to be the way you want it, right? Go now, little Timmy.  Leave.  Go talk about me with your friend Duh-wayne.  Go find yourself a nice little lobotomized Tamsin.”

“Damask…”

“Go!” she shrieked, startling me, and I saw she had taken up the scalpel that lay on her work bench.  But instead of brandishing it toward me, she pressed the blade to her own abdomen below the navel.  “Go before I abort your baby right here and now.  I will do it, too…you know me, even if you don’t love me.  It will be my last great performance, Tim, my masterpiece.  Just give me a second to think of a name for it.” She always named her works of art.  I saw a bead of blood as dark as ink begin to wind down her marble skin from where the blade touched her.

I began to get dressed as quickly as I could.  I did know her.  I did know that she meant it.

She held the blade there until I backed to the door.  That was how I left her.  I’ve never seen her since.  From across the room, and in its too-intimate murk, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw tears in her eyes.  I wouldn’t have imagined that to be possible, but I like to believe it was.  I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t dare say it.  I knew that she would then eviscerate herself for sure.  Damask didn’t want to be pitied.  She wanted to be both loved and loathed at once.

*     *     *

It was nearly eight months later that I received the package from UPS.

It was left in my front hall, on the carpet, and I stood staring down at it, afraid to touch it as if it might explode, when I saw the familiar handwriting on the label.  I was afraid what the carrier might have thought with that box stinking up the inside of his truck…though it didn’t smell, of course.  When at last I opened the box on my kitchen table, I saw that the contents had been carefully wrapped in a plastic trash bag with lots of twisty white packing popcorn like an army of ghostly embryos to considerately prevent the gift from being damaged in transit.