Laksmi
April 24, 2012
He had experienced Laksmi, had experienced pure love, and found he could not accept it yet. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself even a taste of woman, had intervened in a woman’s day to tell her she was heartstopping in her beauty. But he had held her and kissed her and felt her warmth, had felt the pervasive nature of her companionship, the way she responded to his questions with humor, the twists in her subject matter that made him dizzy and drunk with theory — every kind of theory, for she was a scholar. A scholar with a bangin’ body, that’s how he had described her guitar-shaped frame. He had seen her breasts first when she had walked into his coffee shop, they were full and youthful underneath her tight blouse of dark teal. Her hips were generous, too, lean but round. The waist pinched inward like a sand-filled hourglass. Thighs pressing outward against the gray slacks. Smarty slacks, he called her, because they looked custom-made.
There was no hesitation in her speech; she was confident and funny and childlike in the way she entertained herself with jokes. The second time he visited her, he asked, “Did you miss me?” It had been two days. “Yes,” she said, “did you miss me?” “Maybe…” he teased. She had put her hand on his knee then, they were sitting next to each other at her kitchen table, she touched him to show herself to him. And he took his hands in hers, had looked as if across a thousand miles into her nut-brown eyes. He told her how lovely her babies would be should she have any, he squeezed her strong body, admiring it, feeling its buoyancy and resilience.
He pointed out numerous details about her body and words, he asked her a second time questions whose answers he had forgotten since their first meeting. He spoke plainly about his younger age, five years apart from her. He could not be a boyfriend, he said. He told her before he had a chance to touch her, before he could fully ingest her. He made sure to mention it early. He leaned on her listening, shy to say that sex would not keep him near often. He could not be boyfriend.
He was a foot taller, a lanky skateboarder. The density of her muscular, feminine body was concentrated into only five feet and one inch of height. They discussed their varying styles of writing poetry and genres of dance they had studied. His dry sweetness was intoxicating, he could see that from her reactions, the hands caressing him, body pressing to his. For even as she remained cool, her temperature rose when he pulled her into his lap, his rough and calloused sailor’s hands covered in the raw coconut oil she had massaged into the fingers and palms, the cuticles and nails. Romance had come like a tsunami, there was no need to make love though desire was there. The mirroring had happened, and there was no pretending it hadn’t.
His straightforwardness had been oxygen to her after so many men who could not speak for themselves, had let affections and communications crumble just after the most passionate and promising beginnings.
He stopped calling, he was unprepared for all he had learned of Laksmi so quickly. He slowed his text messages because her words were too potent. She was commanding, her lust-inspiring figure, her ringlets of scarlet-black hair, her dancer’s posture, her swordlike intellect. How she ridiculed everything into the present moment, effortless, making herself laugh at all she said. She tried not to laugh at all her own jokes, she said, that would be bad onstage. She was always thinking about performance, talking about yoga. He wondered how flexible her legs were, how he could pry them apart into a lateral split. Yoga in bed, he could see her doing that. How would she be, naked and wet and held down by him, would she push back against his pressure and insist on her own pace, her style? Or submit? He imagined her under him, her hard brown legs pulling him into her, her long, square nails scraping him as she moved her hands from his neck to his legs, spelling her names on his skin.
When her texts came, he was usually at work or with friends, it had been a week since he’d seen her. It was clear she wanted more of him. He didn’t respond to her text, not with words. What stopped him was that she wanted him in return. Did she want too much?
He went to bed alone on his sailboat, reading her unanswered text messages and thinking of her pianist’s fingers with their long, square nails pushing the buttons on her phone. She wanted his response, wanted to hear his echo meet hers across the water of the bay between them, but she would receive none. Except the reverberations of his desire, silent in his own bed. He said her name a few times, he didn’t know her last name. Clutched at his own flesh in her absence, expressed only to himself what she would have liked to witness.
© 2012 Tahminah Zaman
