The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [38]
“Ô combien je t’aime!” he breathed directly into my ear. “I adore you! I must have you! Meet my lips with yours!”
I stared into his eyes, which were hazel, and large, like Coco’s, seeming even larger in contrast to his mouth, which was as tiny as a pimento. I permitted the pimento to mash against my mouth for a moment before I shoved against him again and asked, “Did you and Coco have another fight?”
“I haven’t seen Madonna tonight,” he explained. “I left her a note saying I had to go out for a while and would soon return and asking her to wait for me. I did that so that I could steal away to this place and be with you.”
“That was a sneaky trick,” I said. “Coco will be furious with you.”
“You won’t tell her,” he said. “Come, let me recite for you a poem you have inspired.” He unfolded a sheet a paper from one of his pockets and read it to me. The poem was called “Lundi après mon lundi,” a play upon my name, Monday, and it was written as if he had composed it the next Monday after this weekend we had made love. He described our love-making as if it were a fait accompli and he were remembering it in graphic detail but with flattering sentiments: Cette femme était si belle qu’elle me faisait peur (That woman was so beautiful she frightened me) and Elle balla mimant un rythme de l’existence (As she danced she imitated a rhythm of existence) and Qu’elle les dresse ses mains énamourées devant mon sexe (Have her lift her lovesick hands before my sex), and so forth. I tried to remember if I had heard any of these lines before. I was touched that such a great poet—Pablo had called him the greatest poet of the epoch—would write an original poem for me…if it was original—even if the poem was less concerned with my specific identity as a person than with sex acts we had not yet performed. When he’d finished the poem, he looked with those hazel eyes longingly into my eyes and said, “Quickly, now, let us do it!”
I said French words which mean, crudely but honestly, “You just came here to fuck.”
Willy was taken aback. But he was ready for it: “No, of course not,” he said. “I came here because I need to have your opinions of Pablo’s latest paintings, but I think we can talk more freely after we have put the nightingale in his cage.”
I was ready for that: “I’d rather listen to the nightingale sing first.”
“He is mute, for now. He wants only his cage. The cage is new, and he has never been there before, but he knows it is made of beautiful, warm red gold.”
Willy stayed for two hours, longer than Coco should have had to wait for him, and when he saw that his finest blandishments would not work, he even tried solicitation of my intellect, a great effort on his part: “Well, if you can’t open your legs, open your mind and tell me what you think of Pablo’s pictures.”
I was game. “I haven’t seen his most recent things, what you call his Scientific Cubism. I did not like the Demoiselles.”
“Hah! Nor did I. What did you find wanting in it, Mademoiselle Monday? The transformation of Negro sculpture? The mislocated physiognomies?”
“I think,” I declared, “that Nature admires geometry but improves upon it in all Her creations. The artist should not return to geometry.”
Willy stared at me, as if he had not been listening but now was ready to. “Would you mind repeating that?”
I then proceeded to elaborate on this idea—quite a firm conviction of mine, at the time and ever since—that geometry should not be emphasized at the expense of actual appearance. This was more than poor, lecherous Willy had bargained for; as he appeared to be dozing off, I produced an example that woke him up a bit: “It’s as if I drew a skeleton of you and called it your portrait. Not that you wouldn’t look better if you were more skeletal.” I laughed teasingly.
But he only replied, petulantly, “You’re saying I’m obese.”
“No, I’m making a point.”
“If I were thin, would you have sex with me?”
“No. You are Coco’s.”
“I am not hers! Nor anybody’s! I’m mine! She doesn’t own me, nor do I own her. We aren’t even married.”
“‘We are wed in all but