old notes 4

The Cunt

We bathe together before bed. This comes as a surprise to me. I was anticipating a place on the couch but she folds a towel onto the pillow beside her own and our sleeping arrangements are taken as settled.
The bath is highly scented with fat bubbles spilling over the edges in voluptuous clusters. Everything about this woman is perfumed, such a clash of scents that I am often overcome when she emerges from a shower with a thick white towel wrapped around her head, a matching white towelling robe spilling floral scent into the room.
I sit on the edge of the bath, finishing a conversation, poised to move away when the bath is full. She slips her skirt off before I have a chance to stand and I am struck by the perfection of the lace covering a hint of shadow beneath. She is wearing white lace knickers and when she crosses her arms over her body and tugs the shirt over her head. I notice how her bra matches the knickers. I have always been fascinated by the idea of matching underwear. Such an extravagant expense, such an effort to find the mate of the bra hidden in the bottom of a drawer, so much planning, such a feminine result.
My own bra is old and haggard, the lace edging trailing threads across the tight swell of my breasts. There are no knickers at all under the long black skirt, just a rabble of unruly hair. There is nothing neat about me, nothing matching. Even my socks are variants on a theme, dark grey and light grey slipped carelessly into boots with mismatched lacings. She bends to untie them and I look down onto the top of her golden head, always so clean, always so carefully died and I think – this is what a real woman is like.
When she takes off my socks, she folds them as if they were sacred objects. She sets them one on top of the other, a neat little cairn, an altar to my feet. The toenails are ragged. There are sock marks cut into my ankles.
When she stands, her little lace-covered breasts are in line with my face. I am afraid to touch them. They are fine and pale as china. From between the petals of lace flowers I see a flash of pink. Pink nipples and I imagine that all the soft places of her body must be this same colour, the inside of a shell.
She leans towards me. I can smell the fabric softener in the spun cotton pressed against my nose. There are petals on my lips. I open them and my tongue finds a way through the flowers to the hard little nub of pink beyond; the stamen; the seed of her desire; the honeyed protrusion at the heart of an orchid. I take a mouthful of flowers. Her breast is small and warm and bitter with the creams and perfumes that she rubs into her flesh. I suck until the fabric is soiled with my spit and then I reach up and push the riot of petals down and there is her breast in my mouth, so small that I am left hungry. I stretch my lips over the pale flatness of her chest as if I would eat her. I would eat her. I am thinking of the inside of shells and of the soft flesh of muscles and of oysters. I am thinking of salt meat and a squirt of seawater at the back of my throat.
She is fumbling with the clasp of my tatty bra. My breasts are spilling out into the twin cups of her trembling hands. The size and weight of them must frighten her. She pulls away from the hungry teeth and there are out breasts between us. I press mine against hers.
“Look,” I tell her, needlessly, because she is looking, noticing the differences, which are obvious. My skin is darker than hers, tan in the places where the sun cannot reach. She is china doll white. The nipples are hard and dark on the voluminous flesh of my own breasts. The aureoles spread across them, everything heaped on in generous servings. There are silvery lines cut into my hips which were once just as generous, but which have been starved into a more modest proportion. Still, even in this slim-hipped body there is the possibility of blossoming. There is a swelling, a leaning towards excess. I have forced myself into the kind of thinness that is fashionable but my flesh whispers at other possibilities.