Out of the Line of Fire (15 page)

You are a very attractive young man, Wolfi, she said. We shall enjoy each other. We have all afternoon, so there’s no need to hurry. Omi tells me it’s your first time.

I shrugged and nodded, opening my hands to her as if they contained some invisible gift. What could I say?

We shall take things slowly—as if you were beginning to learn to play a musical instrument.

I tried to concentrate on what she was saying. I watched her lips moving. I wondered how many men or women could remember the first breast they had kissed or the first lips they had touched. I was determined to register every detail, every sensation, every breath I took in Andrea’s presence. If only I concentrated, then time would never dispossess me of this, the ultimate of all experiences.

Andrea got up and walked into the kitchen where I watched her prepare two drinks. She came back to sit down again and handed me mine. We touched glasses and I sipped the slightly herbal-tasting cold clear liquid. She placed her drink on a small table beside the sofa and resumed her former position. She certainly seemed in no hurry and merely sat half-smiling, looking at me.

I felt myself relax. My gaze began to wander about the room, absorbing more of this strange creature from the surroundings in which she lived. Her apartment was elegantly and comfortably furnished. The walls of the living room were wall-papered in a deep red, the effect of which would have been overwhelming were it not for a number of large paintings which seemed to pierce the red plane against which they were suspended. Again some of them reminded me of paintings my grandmother owned. Against the wall behind me was a bookshelf with a surprising number of books in it, mostly on art and art history. The rest of the wall was covered with photographs. There was also a doorway which, I presumed, led into one of the bedrooms. At the far end of the living room there was a row of windows which looked out over the tree tops to the street below and the park opposite. In front of the windows and parallel to them was a long, very modern-looking wooden table. On it sat an ancient stone bowl with a large fracture in its rim and this was flanked by two simple fluted vases. Each of these I remember contained a single yellow chrysanthemum. I continued my sweep around the room, lingering for a moment on a small bronze figurine of what at first appeared to be an old woman leaning on a walking stick, but which closer scrutiny revealed to be a decrepit blind man groping his way for breasts, two oh my God, beautiful bra breasts faint nipples. Concentrate, concentrate.

Your blouse? I said.

She shrugged her shoulders.

Look at me, Wolfi.

My confusion began to mount. What did she mean by ‘me’. Her eyes? Those infinitely revealing and yet infinitely mysterious dark wells into which I now gazed. Wasn’t this what people meant when they said look at me. Or did she mean her smiling mouth, or her neck perhaps? Or was it the two dark centres of her breasts which were now outlined beneath the translucent fabric of her bra? What was ‘me’ when images of Elena kept floating up into my consciousness? And in addition to this there was the overwhelming power of Andrea’s physical presence which set my whole being trembling. Andrea’s physical presence—what did
this
mean? Her body? Her beautiful, young, irresistible, heavenly body? This flesh and blood. Was this ‘me’.

She moved forward, nearer to me. My heart began to race and my head to spin. I couldn’t concentrate on what was happening. She took my hand and ran the tips of my fingers across the small hard swellings of her still concealed breasts. She reached up behind her back with my hands, drawing me to her as she did. She lightly brushed my lips with hers, then bent her head. I felt her tongue graze the lobe of my left ear. I could hear her breathing become momentarily suspended as she released the clasp behind her. She drew away slowly to free herself fully. Again she took my hands and traced the curve of her breasts along her rib cage in a long slow arc. For the first time in my life I felt that strange pliant weight. She arched her back and pulled my head down to her chest.

Kiss me, Wolfi. Let your tongue glide over my nipples…That’s it, that’s it. Ah, that’s soooo nice.

I felt them change shape, grow harder. I wanted to call time out, get myself together, slow things down. I felt I was beginning to lose consciousness. Instead she pulled my head abruptly away and stood, dragging me to my feet. She undid my tie, then unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it playfully out of my trousers. She was laughing as she grasped it in her two hands and, in one fluid movement which ended in an embrace, pulled it open and down my back. The cool softness of her body and the two small nodes of pressure against my chest began to enflame me [mich zu entflammen]. Her face arched up and she gave me a long, full kiss. Then she pulled away until our lips barely touched and instead, merely brushed caressingly against each other. I felt as if each tiny cell in my body had come to life and now reached out after that lingering, infinitely intangible touch. She let the tip of her tongue glide lightly across my lips and then kissed me again. I watched her eyes close as she seemed to lose herself in the warmth of our embrace.

Then she broke free and pushed me sharply in the middle of my chest so that I toppled back onto the sofa. She bent down and grasped my shoes in her hands and, with a flick of her wrists, sent them sailing over her head. She knelt and roughly pulled my knees apart. She undid my belt. Now off with these, she said as she worked at my trousers with a combination of playful fury and mock ineptitude. I felt increasingly mesmerized by the intricate pattern of arcs, ellipses, crescents and parabolas her restless nipples etched into the retina of my sensual being. These celestial mammary trajectories fascinated me and even then I remember thinking that perhaps some infantile primaeval urge had been suddenly resurrected from my subconscious—that perhaps during those early post-natal months of incoherent visual stimuli there was not some primitive biologically encoded mechanism which caused every tiny putti-like hand automatically to reach out after the random tracery of those blurred orbs in search of sensual gratification. Could it be that the smooth, dark-centred fullness of a mother’s breast became, as it were, as archetypal ‘madeleine’, condemning man to a more or less hypnotic trance whenever they, or something else in the natural world, inadvertently resonated with the oscillation of this inchoate erotic stimulus? Who knows, perhaps Galileo’s interest in pendulum motion could be traced back to an early image of a richly coloured areola suspended before his smiling, chubby little cherub face.

Andrea was clearly enjoying this well-choreographed prelude to the more serious and heady exploration of her sensual geography that was to come. Having succeeded in loosening my trousers, she had gathered them in a large concertina’d bundle around my ankles and now commanded me to raise my legs. She stood and, with one swift unravelling, cast them over her right shoulder in a long tumbling trajectory which was prematurely interrupted by a hat stand in the corner, where they hung for an instant with one leg bizarrely outstretched before slumping into a configuration of surrealistic dejection.

Of course, by this stage I had reached an obvious state of arousal and Andrea knelt between my knees again and slipped my impeccably starched and newly purchased underwear expertly off.

Io sono gentile, ma tu non sei un gentile. Ma è bello, molto bello, she said.

She cradled me in her hands and began talking to me as if I were a third person, admiring me as though I were a prized possession. Then I watched as her head slowly bent and she raised me to her lips. I know this sounds ridiculous, but that moment of exquisite, breathtaking contact became for me a moment of sudden and transcendent philosophical insight. For the first time in my life, with Andrea bent tenderly over me, I became conscious of the
real
implications of the Hegelian dialectic—the implicit, irrefutable duality of the world, the polarity of human thought, the constant apposition of thesis and antithesis, noumenon and phenomenon, body and soul, reason and passion, Io e lui. The whole of Western philosophy seemed to me to be paradoxically defined by this strange and exciting ritual, as if it were, so to speak, inextricably linked to the male-femaleness of human existence, to this, the most fundamental of human dichotomies.

It was difficult to imagine, so natural and spontaneous was her behaviour, that this was all probably an act, an act she was paid to make appear as fresh and uncalculated as possible. Even in my state of heightened sensory intoxication I was still aware of how theatrical much of what she was doing was. For a long time I was to wonder whether her motivation had been purely financial or not. It wasn’t until some months, or perhaps even a year later that, as I walked through the busy central shopping area of G., I felt someone touch me lightly on my arm and I turned to see Andrea’s smiling eyes looking into mine.

Wolfi, she said a little breathlessly. How are you? I was just sitting over there having some coffee when I saw you walking by. Would you like to join me? I would be so glad if you did.

We went back to her table and she ordered another coffee.

I’m so happy to see you, she said. That day was such a wonderful day. You know, I felt I was really doing something for you. I kept putting myself in your position—saying, now if it were me what would I like? I wanted you to live forever with a memory of your first sexual experience that you’d never forget. I even half expected to see you again, but as time went by I became less and less sure about whether you
had
enjoyed me…

She hesitated for a moment, looked slightly flustered and then said.

Did you enjoy me, Wolfi?

I told her that that day had been one of the most wonderful days of my life. I related what had happened before I arrived, what a fool I had made of myself, the look of disbelief on the receptionist’s face when I told her my grandmother had made the appointment and what a sensation I had caused when I eventually arrived home that night. She wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes as she dwelt on the images my words conjured up in her mind.

The conversation became more intimate as we recalled some of the details of that day. She said how startled I had looked when she had said, Non sei pagano, ma sei bello, and had started caressing me with her tongue, repeating what her fingers had so deliciously done, and how, at the end of one long tongue-tickling caress, she had gently eased me into her mouth. I remembered her teasing me like this for some minutes. Then, suddenly, she had stopped!

Now you have to do the same to me, she had said, and she stood up, her hands on her hips. She held her head high, looking down at me with eyes as cool and dark as moonlight shimmering on a summer sea. I knelt before her, unzipping her light skirt and let it fall to her feet. My cheek grazed her hip and I slipped my fingers under the slender piece of material which was all that remained to conceal her nakedness. Even as I write I can still vividly see, centimetres away from my face, her dark tangle of pubic hair emerge. I can see the moulded form of her sex and the mysterious folds of flesh which conceal her intricacy within.

She drew me up, pressing her open mouth against mine, twisting her lips, engulfing me.

Then she broke free and fell back onto the sofa.

Have you ever seen a woman’s sex before? Andrea asked.

[Hast Du jemals zuvor das Geschlecht einer Frau gesehen? fragte Andrea.]

I shook my head.

Kneel down then.

As I did she raised her legs. I could glimpse nestled between the dark declivity of two longitudinal ridges a small inner fissure surrounded by two glistening, soft, petal-like pink folds. Compared to my own sex hers seemed strange, complex and mysterious. She reached down with both hands and by placing her finger tips along these two ridges and slowly drawing them apart she magically, as though everting some rare and exotic fruit, revealed herself to me. It was as though she had suddenly blossomed and where previously her sex had seemed so hidden, so innocent, the full, intricate, yet still mysterious terrain of her sensual being, with its subtle shadings of the most delicate rose blush to its full, dark, plum-coloured fringes now appeared exposed before me. For some reason totally unknown to me I thought of falling autumn leaves reflected in an Oriental lily-pond glazed by a pale night light.

Then, with one of her fingers, she pulled back on the short ridge formed by the intersection of her petal-like inner lips to reveal a tiny, paler, glistening pink bud.

Wolfi, she said, you see this little spot. I want you to run your tongue lightly over it. If you bend your head down and wrap your arms around the tops of my legs you’ll be able to pull me closer to you. And if you hold this little fold of skin back with your lips you’ll be able to draw me into your mouth and caress me with your tongue.

She reached her hands behind her knees and pulled them towards her chest, making it easier for me to bend down and kiss her. I placed my thumbs where she had and, cautiously, pulled them apart. Magically her sex blossomed again. This was incredible. I leaned down as she had told me to do. She shivered as my lips touched those dark petals and, tentatively, like someone testing the water with their toe, I pushed them open with my tongue. I looked up to see my reflection swimming in Andrea’s moist eyes.

I remember thinking how utterly extraordinary all of this was. These whorls and eddies of pink flesh were like a tiny mirror of the universe to me. Inscribed within them seemed to be some inscrutable, unfathomable truth about the world. If only one could unlock their intricate pattern.

I bent down again and resumed my exploration of her with my tongue. My confidence grew as I began to locate that tiny pale bud with increasing accuracy. Each time I did so I felt her catch her breath and push herself harder against me. Her warm heady fragrance enveloped me. Then a curious and unexpected thing happened. Her sex began to change shape! Under my mouth everything, I felt, had started to become more prominent, more rigid. Unbelievably, that tiny bud now seemed to reach out to me after each caress! She began to writhe against me.