The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [48]
She led me through the living room past the leather furniture and the operating lamp to the bed. She took off my clothes and had me lie down. I had imagined this moment many times and finally it was occurring. She licked me, delicately at first, like a cat. Then she pulled the mustache off and began to really lick, applying pressure with her teeth and tongue.
I was so thrilled I couldn’t think.
“See,” she said afterward, lifting her head, “I don’t need a dick.” Her face was flushed with triumph. “What can I bring you?”
She brought me some juice, then went into the bathroom and changed her clothes, putting on makeup and perfume, coming out in a little pink T-shirt dress that reached mid-thigh. I was sitting up on the edge of the bed. She was girly, flirty. “Now I’m going to cook,” she said.
These visits made me dizzy. The thrill was that she combined everything, girl, boy, youth. The one thing she was not was mature.
The next visit, I asked if I could lick her this time.
“Okay,” she said. She seemed nervous. She went to wash first, then came out and sat under the lamp. She had shaved. I could see the line of shaved hair going down from her belly button, on her pussy that glistening veil of snail trail substance. She tasted bitter, not in an unpleasant way. Her breasts were heavy, strong and nervous, pressing against her T-shirt.
I would go back to my house to sleep and wake in the night, feeling disoriented. Not so much about where I was, which city, though that would happen too, than a deeper confusion inside my brain. It was as if my conception of the human adventure had changed. The things I had held to be important, at the center of my life, suddenly seemed insignificant, bits of stray matter swirling around. I felt that I needed to find new ideas, new ways of conceiving of a life, any life, including my own. I would find these ideas not within myself, but outside. And I would have to look beyond the systems I was used to, to seek out, insist on, disruption.
Leonarda showed me what she’d been doing, acts of private vandalism throughout his house. She had mixed the colognes in the bathroom, opened a bottle of what she assured me was very good wine and half filled it with a bottle that was mediocre. She had been shifting paintings, objects, furniture slightly to the left, placing everything, however slightly, awry.
Certain figures in Buenos Aires are known to have important libraries. If you need a book, you can find a friend who has a friend who knows this guy who probably has it. Then you can hope to arrange an introduction. These figures with the marvelous libraries are often happy to lend books—it is, after all, part of their prestige. They rarely ever ask for a book back directly, too gross a gesture. Rather, if the book is not returned, they find ways of securing it, sending envoys who insinuate themselves into your house and slip the book off your shelf when your back is turned.
Miguel was the possessor of one of these famous libraries. Leonarda had been scrutinizing his books. She showed me the way he made comments as he read, underlined things. For her part, she had been making comments on his comments, disparaging, mocking remarks or suggestions for further reading, there was something he hadn’t understood. The next time, she showed me some love letters from a woman, where she’d done the same, put commentary in the margins, made grammatical corrections.
Must youth be bound up with evil? What was not clear to me was to what degree Leonarda’s evilness was real and to what degree an affectation,