The
Directress
A
door in the main hall opens into the spacious kitchen. The kitchen
gives to the dining room. Sliding doors separating the kitchen from
the dining room are in open position, giving the impression they
permanently are. Another door in the hall opens into the middle room.
A doorway connects the middle room to the dining room. At the other
end of the middle room is an arched passage to the front room, open.
1.
"You
wear pretty dresses", he said.
The
days being hot from mornings through late evenings it was true that
on every day he had come she had been wearing a different summer
dress. On none had she been wearing anything expensive, even if she
possessed many expensive clothes. She was tall and slim, her waist
markedly slimmer still than her slender hips. She was rather
large-breasted. Any summer dress catching on those physical
characteristics would flatter her, and each she wore on each of those
five days did.
The
first time he had called in after she had phoned him straight off a
flyer he had distributed personally, months ago in fact (she must
have kept it all this time), in her very upscale neighborhood, the
flyer proffering any and all fixes around the house that residents
can think of being in need of being done but for some reason or
excuse never done or made to be done. She needed the rain gutters of
her house and the detached garage cleared from debris that came from
the many trees in her enormous and largely uncultivable garden, the
grounds of which back of the house sloped steeply upward to protected
dune forest. He easily identified other sores, and angled in $750
worth of work (his calculation, which she neither contested nor,
even, discussed), which he performed, and got paid for, on that same
day, that first day.
That
day and the days following she had impressed him as pretty, meek,
dependent, and, if only because of the enormous monumental brownstone
she lived in, affluent. She spoke softly, she was generally
acquiescent. Her many smiles were defensive and wrangled. He knew
that, intellectually, she was beyond his reach. He didn't think
that anything that would interest him would interest her, and vice
versa (the latter not words he would use, or even know). But from
what she told him - and (this not being an analysis he was capable of
consciously reasoning out) she clearly had a proclivity of pouring
out her heart to someone, like him, whom she depended on to perform
an odd job from time to time - he gathered that she had got beaten up
by life, in years more recent rather than long past, and that her
apparent wealth might be flotsam in a sea of trouble still raging (a
metaphor, with a whiff of Shakespeare, representing his gut feeling
of her situation, but one which he would never think of).
In
a matter of days, if not on that very first day, he had "fallen in
love" with her, though, with acute erotic desire into which his
gentler feelings towards the other sex inevitably devolved, and to
graft off her never crossed his mind. By nature he wasn't a
grafter. Principle had nothing to do with it. He wasn't a man of
any principle, high or simple. He lived the best he could, in terms
of foraging, not of ethics or estheticism, or of intellectual
curiosity and advancement. He had a wife, children. He would grow
old, die. His being was nature all over him. By a stroke of luck he
wasn't dishonest by nature. Nature inculcated his love for her, as
it, as nature, would to him for any woman exhibiting her distressed
prettiness. She fitted the type.
If
he wasn't dishonest by nature, neither by nature was he faithful.
His marriage and his children were chattel he had gathered along the
way.
2.
Yes,
she was in trouble, and her wealth was a fade fronting the ruins
that remained after a rapid collapse of her 20 odd-year long stab at
being a wife, a mother, and a careerist.
But
that is not something we must delve into. What is told here is about
the interaction between him and her, with the application and the
benefit of the Directress's comprehensive perspective, which we
have seen instances of already in this story. Vetted by the
Directress's omniscience we can consider her predicament a given,
and that it had caused her to gradually withdraw, not from what we
can reasonably (i.e. using reason) establish to be facts, not yet
(she had not lowered the shades, flipped the slats, retreated to the
immured world of her own mind, not yet; not yet), but from the
struggle for the only kind of a life that she wanted to do life for:
art and splendor, the vindication of her fight against all religion
and creeds, and of her stern morality.
It
was because of this withdrawal from her aspirations that she
impressed him as she did. The interaction between her and him was
predicated on her withdrawal, and on how she impressed him because of
this withdrawal, this loss of faith and drive.
Today
(the day, as you will recall, when he complimented her on the dresses
he'd see her in on every day he came to her house) she sank to her
knees before him (this was in the kitchen), certain of his sexual
desire, undeceived of her own. She could never have made out with him
first, so much as have kissed him first, come close to his face and
whispered words in his ear first, looked into his eyes and breathed
his breath first. Nor would he have known how to deal with such
things. If it were to be done, as their interaction over the past
days suggested (the frequency of his visits, the sexual tension
between them, the wondering, that they could almost sense in one
another, if this wasn't the situation when these things are
expected to happen between a man and a woman who werent lovers, and
never could be), then it could only be done raw and peremptory,
blind. Penetrative and ejaculatory sex she saw as their only common
ground, anywhere outside of which they would remain strangers to one
another, probably find disgust of one another; which is why she would
not look him in the eye, or talk, or kiss; which is why she would not
allow intimacy a part in what they would do to each other.
So,
on her knees, unspeaking, not looking up (or down; she would not add
a display of humility to the act of self-humiliation implied in the
sexual act itself: such erotic playing would bring them closer to one
another than was her desire; than, she gauged, was his, too), she
undid his button fly, and she made her hand grope for his penis in
his underpants, and take it out - now it became huge and hard with a
purposefulness of its own, taking control over him (the Directress's
perspective), and effacing him (her perspective) -, and she took it
in her mouth and made him come, and she kept it in her mouth until it
went limp and, silent, her eyes steady on his groin, made her hand
take it out and away from her and snug it back into his underpants
and, her other hand made to assist, button up his pants.
But
now, on her knees, never looking up, she turned and positioned
herself on all fours, waiting for him to grow hard again, as she knew
he was bound to, unbutton himself, hike up the skirt of her dress,
and penetrate her, and, spending himself, satisfy her. She did this
for herself, because a woman's sexual desire can be kindled (as was
her motive) by what she had done to him before but not quenched as a
result. In simply, from her kneeling position, turning around and
huddling at a short distance from his feet, she had foreclosed the
interlude she did not want, the intermission that lovers, which they
were not, use to affirm their longing for closeness to the point
where their bodies crave to join once more; on all fours before him
she had merely waited for his sexual ability to be restored as she
knew it was destined to be at the mere sight of her.
3.
Yet,
when the unavoidable scene had played out and she had gotten up, she
stroked his face, briefly, brushed it with her fingers, feeling
kindly towards him. He went outside. He worked hard around the house
for a time. He rang the doorbell. She opened the door. She wore her
wrangled smile. He remained standing in the doorway. He said he'd
call it a day. He said he'd return the next morning to finish what
he had been doing.
She
said: "Will you bill me?"
He
said he would not. He said he would return the next day to finish the
work.
That
night, before she fell asleep, she imagined hiring him, keeping him
on as a hired hand, and that she would pay him with sexual favors.
But, she thought, imagining the situation, could not I be said to
have been hired by him and his doing odd jobs to be my recompense?
Would we not be trading services? I don't want that, she thought. I
pander to my needs. I'm rendering a service to myself. I will pay
him money.
She
dreamed that she had a house resembling a citadel, which, in her
dream, she could only see the outside of; clad in what her brain,
collecting her life's icons, must have adopted as Brontnovel
period attire, she closely skirted its circumference, certain of her
title, spreading out her arms, as she walked, towards the brindled
walls of tightly laid slightly polished rocks, as if to demonstrate
something - her isolation, her security, her wealth, all of those? -
to a man standing nearby, whose face, in her dream, was indistinct,
whose presence was passive and harbored no menace.
4.
He
arrived early next morning, minutes after she had seen her daughter
off to school. She let him in. She offered him coffee. He declined
but he sat down at the table in the dining room where she had led
him, for the first time. It was the airiest room, the lightest room.
It was rectangular. A rectangular table with twelve chairs with
straight backs was in its center. In one corner was a fire place. The
walls were painted a caperat lichen green. The walls were exempt from
furniture. On the walls were modern paintings (oils and watercolors)
with food themes. It was the room which imposed its order on people
in it.
She
wore a dark green silk pleated skirt, which she gathered and smoothed
emphatically as she moved to sit in the chair at the head of the
table, the deliberate fastidiousness slowing her down. She asked him
how long he would be, finishing the work. He said it would take
another hour or two. He said that he thought the house should keep
well for a while. He would move on after this. He had contracted a
large assignment in a nearby town, a condo refurbishment. It should
keep him busy through fall.
She
felt lost. It seemed to him she looked for clues, directions. She was
silent. She sensed his impatience, already, at her uselessness. He
rose.
She
said, preempting him: "Come, please, there's something..."
She
crossed the middle room, pointing at books, works of art, baubles,
details, things. She entered the spacious front room, where she
halted. He was on her heels. She stepped backward, quickly, and now
the small of her back was against his groin. She arched her back,
which made her buttocks rise against his groin. She pointed at the
woman sitting on the large window bay sofa. She turned her head. He
was slightly taller. Tilting her head she looked up at him, easily
avoiding his eyes, which took no interest in hers.
She
said: "She decides. Everything."
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