Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [116]
“Now, Liza,” I said, turning back to her, “please tell me your story.”
“Later, Nate,” she said in a whisper, finally taking hold of my name.
“Later?” I said. “Speak up, I can hardly hear you.”
“Later,” she said.
“Later than what?” I said, venturing near the bed and leaning close so that I could make out whatever it was she was going to say.
She reached for my hand and pulled me down close to her, so that I collapsed of my own weight onto the space she made next to her by rolling to her side.
“Liza, I—”
Yes, I tried to speak, but she was upon me, tugging me close, and pushing her soft lips upon mine, so that I opened my own to hers.
Cinnamon and bonfire, a bouquet of blood and wine, and the sour-sweet taste of desire long fermenting in the throat, and deeper—all this I tasted, as we pressed against each other, as though each wished to press hard enough to pass through the body of the other.
“Liza,” I said, halting our long kiss just for the sake of saying her name.
“Nate, Nate, Nate,” she said, the words falling on my head like petals from a night-blooming tree. “Do you wish to know me?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do. Do you wish to know me, with your own free will?”
“What is that?” she said, in a voice quite perplexed.
“You choose this, not as a slave but as a free woman?”
“But I am not free.”
“I do not own you, Liza. Do you choose this?”
“But I am the master’s property.”
“No one ordered you here, did he?”
Her slight hesitation to answer my question gave me pause.
“Did Uncle tell you to come here?”
“No!” she said in an outraged whisper. “He would have me whipped if he knew.”
“Whipped? He has people whipped?”
“It has happened, yes.”
“Who would dare to order such a thing? Who would dare to carry it out?”
Liza remained silent.
“They have never whipped you, have they?”
“No, no, no, not me. Oh, you would know it if you saw.”
“Jews employing the lash used on them by the Egyptians! I hope I never live to see such a thing.”
“If you stay here long enough, you will.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Liza, that I suggested my uncle sent you here to coerce me, to tempt me to stay.”
I kissed her again, tasting the bouquet of her lips, with the added tincture of desire now flavoring the spittle that we mingled in our mouths.
As when an apple, still tethered to a branch by the slimmest clasp, begins to shake in the first brisk autumn wind and its stem incurs a fatal tear, I found myself, pressed against her, on the verge of falling.
She made a mewing sound beneath me, and in the dark I wondered if woman had turned into cat.
This was all so new to me that all I knew was that I should behave, the way a man did, as though it were not new to me.
“Massa,” she said.
“Please,” I said.
“Nate. Nate.”
“Yes, Liza?”
“Before this happened, you were a free man.”
“Yes?”
“And you are still free?”
“I am.”
“Though now you own a slave.”
“What do you say?”
“I am yours, Nate.”
Time went by, cocks crowed in the yard also, and the faintest scrim of a false dawn showed over the tops of the trees beyond the barns. When it became light enough to see Liza’s skin next to mine it was time to figure our way out of this dilemma. Instead, we lingered, luxurious in the aftermath of our mated desires.
“Now tell me the truth,” I said, “why is it you came to me in the night? Who was pursuing you?”
Liza laughed, and touched a finger to her full lips, which stood out in a sort of inverted rendering of dark against light as the light filled in the hollows of her face made by night.
“I was pursuing myself,” she said. “I was pursuing you.”
“So it was not my old uncle?”
She laughed again, this time slightly hysterical.
“I didn’t say, massa, it was anybody.”
“Don’t call