The Golden (12 page)

“What is
it? What’s wrong?” he asked, and she said, the words
coming in a clumsy rush, “Not the first time, not like that. Is
it all right? I’m sorry. I just want you here. With me.”

Embarrassed,
feeling that he had been failing to please her, he said, “I’m
sorry, I thought you’d . . . No,” she
said, pulling him close, cradling his head to her breasts, “no,
it’s not you, I just need to see your face, your eyes.”
And when he started to speak again, she kissed him to stop the
clutter of words.

After a moment
quiet flowed in to surround them, the way it fills in the ruptured
spaces created by an explosion, softening the angles of the room,
refining it into an intimate and finite place. They kissed again, and
the kiss cured the last of their awkwardness. She lifted her right
knee, rested it on his hip, letting his member glide between her
legs; if he had shifted a degree, he would have penetrated her, but
he held back, a bit unsure of himself now, wanting her to guide him.
Her breath quickened. Her kisses grazed his lips, his cheeks; her
tongue flicked out. Lamb kisses, serpent kisses. At last she reached
behind her, her fingers curling about his member, cool as live
marble, and he went deep in one long, sweet plunge, feeling those
empty years give way, then close around him, her oiled heat
clutching, pressing, all accompanied by a musical exhalation, and
then, as he went a fraction deeper, a sharply indrawn breath. Her
hips hammered against him, a frantic rhythm, as if she had gone
weightless in a flurry of wings.

“You’re
so wonderful, Michel!” she whispered.

Even submerged
beneath the sexual veneer, the luster of intimacy, that childlike
phrasing and fairy-tale word sounded with brazen incongruity in his
ears. That she could think of him as wonderful in any way distanced
him, made him doubt her once again. And yet bound to her, he could
not wholly doubt her, and he was inspired to match her energy, to
batter against her, as in some demented contest, breathing fractured
endearments into her mouth. But she could not keep up the pace, and
when she lapsed, her rhythm becoming sporadic, unguided, he worked
her into a slow, lascivious grind, a calm torsion at the heart of
their storm, a space in which speech was possible, tenderness
expressible. He told her how beautiful she was, and looking up at
him, touching his jaw, his cheek, she said, “Michel,”
soberly, reflectively, as if he were a treasure she had discovered at
the bottom of an old chest and now she was giving it a name, deciding
to know it by that name. He drew her tongue into his mouth, and at
the same time touched the place where they were joined, the gluey mix
of sweat and juice that sealed the join, that was smeared across
their groins. She caught at his hand, pressed it to her cheek, then
licked the taste of their mutuality from his fingers. He began to
move furiously in her, but she held him still, her eyes luminous,
half-lidded, and said, “Wait! I want to feel you like this for
a minute . . . just for a minute.” Her head
drooped, her brow rested against his. Something was pushing down on
him, some dark restraint. He imagined the air was hardening around
them, growing warmer as it molded to their shape. Words and emotions
crowded together inside him, but he found it impossible to speak. His
hands roamed aimlessly over her breasts and waist and flanks, a blind
sculptor familiarizing himself with new materials. There was a pulse
in every part of her body, rapid as a bird’s. He knew she was
eager to engage him fully, but for long minutes she lay quiescent,
her face dazed with concentration. Finally she hooked an ankle behind
his knee, a movement that conveyed an insistent easiness. And
strength. Damn, she was strong! There were vast complexities of
strength inside her, all focused upon the place where she held him
deep, nets of satiny sinew lashed over a saddle of bone, and those
connected to great flows of muscle and bridges of tendon over rivers
of blood, wired, webbed constructions that carried a thrilling neural
traffic, symphonies of roaring anxiety and screaming joy that evoked
an entire city of convulsive power, a female world of
incomprehensible endurance and resilience. His own strength seemed
insubstantial by contrast, a joke, a measly animal virtue, whereas
hers was redolent of timeless mystery and tragic tradition, so
self-contained and assured it did not require stupid totemic acts of
male authority to validate itself, to ratify its measure. It existed;
it flowered in secret; it was its own nourishment. Sensing this, he
felt oddly innocent and unsophisticated, and that simple action, the
hooking of an ankle behind his knee, made him feel that by moving in
her, he would satisfy some inborn purpose of her strength. But when
she pulled him atop her, fencing him with her long thighs, he lost
this sense of submissiveness and felt absolutely with her, equals in
their hunt for pleasure. Their cries and whispers seemed part of a
cocoon they were weaving of warmth and closeness, extruding happiness
like strands of silk. They progressed from a steady, explorative beat
to wild variances of rhythm, suffering only minor incompatibilities
of pace and accommodation: thrashing, sweaty passages; gentle, almost
balletic shifts of position; idling movements during which they
gathered their energies, reminded themselves of tactile specifics
before accelerating toward some ill-defined intensity. He had assumed
that he would finish before her, a genital assumption based on the
thickening heat in his groin, but then he felt her body change
beneath him, grow slack, then stiffen, then ripple internally as if
she were experiencing alternations of gravity. The tidal flex of her
hips and buttocks became spasmodic. She thrust at him, rising to meet
his thrusts too soon, their flesh smacking together in midair. An
ugly groan was dredged from her belly, the cry of someone just
regaining consciousness, rolling over, waking to the pain of the blow
that has knocked them out. And then another groan, this one a
fevered, rattling expulsion. Her heels dug into the backs of his
knees; but a second later her legs fell apart, and the tension that
had clenched the muscles of her calves and thighs flooded her
abdomen. Her hands fluttered about his face; then she flung them out
to grip the edges of the mattress, and with a heave, she lifted her
head and shoulders, staring wildly at their toiling hips, as if she
had wanted to know what was happening down there and was dumbfounded
by what she had seen.

He soon came to
feel that he was participating in a transformation, or rather a
repossession, the liberation of an angel of desire and its struggle
with the repressive demon who had inhabited her body for so long. Her
head tossed back and forth, and she snatched fistfuls of the sheet,
trying to rip it up from the mattress. Her features were stretched,
distorted. Her hips shimmied and twisted. One leg stiffened, knocking
against his side like a loose board in a gale. Then she went limp,
and he felt, actually felt through the join of their flesh, a gliding
inside her, a planing away of response, relief in the form of some
sensation that was easier to bear, as with rain after lightning. She
looked beautiful again, agleam with sweat, past the crisis, and he
was once again awed and innocent before her, perceiving her as
intrinsically different, alien or angel, one of those characters in
fantasy novels who fall to earth from some enchanted sphere and are
like us but not like, who hear the heartbeats of insects and smile to
display anger and have only love in common with humankind, and who,
ensnared in that base and pathetically primitive society, after their
own innocent grandeur has been sullied by betrayal, suffer some
complicated ecstasy of death . . . or else are
transformed into ethereal beings of whom we have even less
comprehension.

Alexandra’s
body began to shake a second time, to tremble, every nerve involved.
Sweat beaded her breasts and neck, shone on her face. Her nails raked
his back. Her hands fumbled at his hips, and he braced himself above
her as she arched and bucked, thinking that she wanted him to hold
still. Her cries seemed bewildered, alarmed. Her fangs scored her
lower lip, drawing a drop of blood. It was as if she were being
violated, savaged by the electric shocks of some godly yet
ungovernable and mutant force set loose within her, and he laid his
palm on her breast, speaking her name, trying to soothe her as her
moment finally subsided, as she sailed down like a feather sails, in
gentle pendulum sweeps, through the final shivers and drifts of
feeling.

The shadowy air
circulated around them slowly, warmly, pricked by a confusion of
pinhole flashes, the way a djinn must circulate in its prison bottle,
a murky cloud of genius and magic. Beheim did not want to finish, he
wanted to remain inside her, to hold on to the peace and easiness
that enveloped them. The things he had been unable to tell her
earlier now seemed possible to say, but he was afraid that even
something as insignificant as the sound of his voice would infect the
atmosphere. He smoothed his hand along her hip, and just that touch,
that and her response, a slight shifting beneath him, brought him to
the edge. He felt a trickle of pleasure, a trivial unburdening, like
a thin, hot gold string being spooled out. He thrust hard into her,
trying to enhance the feeling. Thrust again. And recognizing what was
happening, she rolled her hips, pulling him deeper, herself climbing
one last small peak of intensity, sobbing out bursts of disjointed
words, saying, “I’ll never . . .
never . . . ah, Michel! . . . I’ll
never . . . never betray you . . .”
And then, as he lay spent, she locked her hands behind his back,
pressed her mouth to his throat and—as if trying to speak the
word to his blood, to convince whatever dwelled there of her
improbable fealty—she whispered fiercely, “Never!”

Chapter
Eleven

F
elipe Aruzzi de Valea’s apartments were located, as were those
of all the lords of the Family, behind a doorless wall set at
asymmetrical points with octagonal windows—like crystals
scattered randomly in dark ore—that overlooked an immense
drawbridge stretching between two towers with curious boxy
bay-windowed enclosures atop them, rather like fortified cottages. An
iron lantern half the size of a cottage itself hung high overhead,
casting shadows from the statues that lined the bridge; the stonework
was crusted with a millennium of pigeon droppings, and on either
side, the view from the bridge was daunting: a vertiginous drop into
a labyrinth of stairways and arches and flying buttresses and ornate
stone piers, all so like one another it seemed the vista must have
been contrived from the mirror images of a handful of originals. To
gain access to the passages that ran inside the wall, one was forced
to cross the bridge and enter a spreading crack that appeared to be
the result of an earthquake or some structural flaw, but in reality
was an intentional effect, disguising a winding stair; and as he and
Giselle hurried across the bridge, fearful of being spotted from
above, Beheim—though to some degree preoccupied with the task
ahead—continued to puzzle over all that had happened to him
with Alexandra, the things he had felt with her, the things she had
said, the dangerous path she had set him on.

Though there
were other matters that related more to the business at hand, or that
ultimately might have more significance, Alexandra’s
declaration that he was, essentially, an unfinished work came to
dominate his thoughts. It was not that he disagreed with her. He knew
he had much to learn, much to experience. But he had assumed that his
growth would entail a deepening, an enrichment of the qualities and
characteristics already integrated into his personality, whereas she
had implied by her use of terms such as
metamorphosis
and
turbulent
and
storms
that the changes he was to
undergo might be far more wrenching. Despite the ambivalence of his
feelings toward a variety of subjects—the conflicts of which
Alexandra had spoken?—he was comfortable with the man he was,
and her suggestion that he was ignorant of his own nature seemed
ludicrous. In large, he thought, he had remained the man he had
always been: quiet and retiring; passionate in his inner life, but
shy and somewhat tentative as regarded his relationships with both
men and women; studious, a bit of a bookworm; methodical in all
things, careful in his diet, temperate in use of alcohol. True, since
his judgment, brighter colors had been added to that dreary scheme,
and many of the acts he had committed in his new life repelled him,
even though he delighted in the potency that afforded him the license
to commit them. And he would admit that at times his personality
appeared to consist of two incompatible halves, one capable of
gentleness and sympathy, the other madly calculating and violent. But
was not this contrariness identical to that which invested the human
condition, and would not—as was the case with similar human
variances—the disparate halves of his being eventually cease
their warring and grow together? On sounding his depths, testing
himself for any taint of self-delusion, he found no flaw in this
interpretation. He was changed, surely. What man would not be who had
tasted blood and seen the prospect of eternity open before him? Yet
he was still moved by many of his old reflexes and desires. He must
learn, he told himself, not to give so much weight to the words of
his new brothers and sisters . . . or at least he
would have to learn to balance what they said against what they
wanted. Perhaps Alexandra had only been trying to unnerve him, he
thought, trying to direct his attention away from some more pertinent
matter by drugging him first with words and then with kisses. And
perhaps she had succeeded more than she might have intended, for he
was unable to forget the desire with which she had infected him. That
single encounter put to shame all that he had known with other women,
not so much in the clinical aspects of the act as in its emotional
richness, the tenderness Alexandra had inspired in him; and for some
reason this made him uncomfortable with the conclusions he had
reached in his brief self-appraisal.