Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [16]
When Robin came in he was on his back asleep, bedclothes and towel fallen off. She let her hair down onto his stomach. Her hair rustled against the black curls of his belly, then her mouth dropping its tongue here and here on his flesh, he slowly awake, her tongue the flesh explorer, her cool spit, his eyes watching her kneel over the bed. Then moving her face up to his mouth his shoulder.
Stay with us.
Does this change things?
Don’t you think so? Don’t you think Jaelin would think so?
I wouldn’t feel different if I was him.
I can’t do things that way Buddy.
She put her mouth at the hollow of his neck.
Your breath feels like a fly on me, about three or four of them on me.
Talk about the music, what you want to play.
You know Bellocq had a dog I’d watch for hours. It would do nothing, all day it would seem to be sitting around doing nothing, but it would be busy. I’d watch it and I could see in its face that it was becoming aware of an itch on its ribs, then it would get up and sit in the best position to scratch, then it would thump away, hitting the floor more often than not.
Who was Bellocq.
He was a photographer. Pictures. That were like … windows. He was the first person I met who had absolutely no interest in my music. That sounds vain don’t it!
Yup. Sounds a bit vain.
Well it’s true. You’d play and people would grab you and grab you till you began to—you couldn’t help it—believe you were doing something important. And all you were doing was stealing chickens, nailing things to the wall. Everytime you stopped playing you became a lie. So I got so, with Bellocq, I didn’t trust any of that … any more. It was just playing games. We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out.
Buddy —
She refused then to take off her clothes. She lay on top of him, kissing him, talking quietly to him. He could feel the material of her clothes all over his naked body, as if he were wearing them. His eyes closed. It could have been a sky not a ceiling above him.
Don’t lean on that arm. Sorry. It got broken once.
She was conscious that while they spoke his fingers had been pressing the flesh on her back as though he were plunging them into a cornet. She was sure he was quite unaware, she was sure his mind would not even remember. It was part of a conversation held with himself in his sleep. Even now as she lay against his body in her red sweater and skirt. But she was wrong. He had been improving on “Cakewalking Babies”.
Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky.
She. Again in the room, now in the long brown dress. Brown and yellow, no buttons no shoes and the click of the door as she leans against the handle, snapping shut so we are closed in with each other. The snap of the lock is the last word we speak. Between us the air of the room. Thick with past and the ghosts of friends who are in other rooms. She will not move away from the door. I am sitting on the edge of the bed looking towards the mirror. With her hands behind her. I must get up and move through the bodies in the air. To the first slow kiss in the cloth of her right shoulder into the skin of her neck, blowing my nervousness against the almost cold hair for she has been walking outside. My fingers into her hair like a comb till the hair is tight against the unused nerves between my fingers. The taste the pollen in her right ear, the soft circuit of her hearing wet with my spit that I send to her like a ship and suck back and swallow. This soft moveable limb on the side of her