Fiction from The Literary Review

The “Other”

EILEEN TABIOS

I hunted Helene because she was his wife and I was in love with him. That's the story of my life: a series of compromises. What mostly surprises me now is how, in the beginning, I thought I would have fun.
     As always, Helene was looking at him adoringly. He was expounding, no doubt, on the “parallel universes” for which his sculptures of thick steel squares ostensibly provided “doorways” to experiences which the “discerning” could enjoy--I'd heard this all before as he becomes even more garrulous than usual during postcoital bliss. His show at the Contemporary Museum of Art in SoHo featured the thresholds to twelve different worlds of such experiences.
     I looked at him and Helene over the rim of my wine glass from the other side of the wide room. They seemed to gather all the radiance emanating from the halogen lights and bouncing from the white walls as dark shapes contracted and expanded around them from the adoring crowd. He was dressed in Armani. She was also in black, but I mostly noticed the tightness of her clothes which further highlighted her high breasts and narrow waist. I began by envying her figure, then I began to salivate.
     She was ten years younger than him, a year older than me. She was also an artist and mostly painted small abstract works. She was beginning to develop a reputation, but it seemed likely that it may never be known if any success she will muster would have occurred had she not married the sculptor once heralded as “The Only Artist Who Could Out-Macho Richard Serra.” As with most things, it often takes more than talent to attain recognition. Looking at her then, however, I knew she didn't marry him for advancing her career, which was rumored about his first wife. I recognized that light that glimmered in her eyes whenever she looked at him-- how, even when she was talking with someone else, her eyes kept shifting until she could locate him within the perimeter of her vision. I still look at him that way. I will always look at him that way.
     But I couldn't have him. He had been willing to have me as his secret mistress. Once, he had said as he stroked between my thighs while I stood naked before him, “Seurat had a secret lover for years. But her role as his mistress became known only after he died.”
     I wasn't listening then, or listening as well as I try to do nowadays: I replied by asking him not to marry Helene, thereby breaking the rules of our engagement. He then said it was “the end,” which didn't stop him from fucking me one last time. Which didn't stop me from falling to my knees and opening my mouth for him one last time. But, as I have consoled myself often, I was, after all, in love. I am still in love.
     He hadn't seen me yet, or if he had he wasn't showing any consciousness of my presence. I knew they had just returned from their honeymoon in St. Barthes. They both looked tan. I leaned back against the wall as I felt jealousy rear up at an image of them on the beach, she undoubtedly topless while he smoothed oil on her breasts. I remember how his hands had grasped my breasts, kneading them from behind silk. I always wore silk tops for him. He had loved to pinch my nipples, then move me around with his fingers still clamped on my nipples. I thought of doing that to her, too.
     “I like my sex rough,” he had warned me shortly after the first time I had convulsed around his tongue.
     “Whatever you want,” I had replied and only leaned closer towards him.
     A few moments later, I had asked him if I gave him something he couldn't get from anyone else. We both had known we were discussing Helene, innocent Helene, as he said, “Yes.”
     “Then why . . .” I had tried to ask, but he had silenced me by tightening his hold on my breasts.      “There are certain things we must never discuss. One of them is Helene.”
     As he had taught me, I whispered, “Yes, Master: whatever you want.”
     I looked at Helene's jutting breasts and wondered if, just as she unknowingly was unable to satisfy him, there was some need he didn't know about her and, thus, was unable to fulfill. Once more, I considered how so many couples compromise for the end result of being buried in coffins laid side by side.
     
     “I see that you like breaking the square,” I said as I circled the walls of her studio. This was the third time I'd met Helene after her husband's museum show. I had introduced myself to her while she was replenishing her wine glass, and managed to engage her in a discussion about her work. Naturally, I had become familiar with her paintings through various group exhibitions in town—I wanted to know anything that even remotely touched his life. Helene seemed to be in a period of featuring incomplete squares within her paintings. The ruptured squares were set against lushly painted surface etched here and there with slanting horizontal lines.
     “Yes, well. There's no such thing as perfection, is there?” she replied, handing me a glass of champagne.
     “Champagne?” I smiled.
     “Well, it's your first time in my studio,” she said as we lightly touched our glasses together.
     Her studio was tiny, but had a large window that framed the Statue of Liberty.
     “Oh, her,” she replied, almost surprised, after I mentioned the green lady. “I rarely focus on the Statue. I usually look at the water.”
     She went over to a file cabinet, pulled out the top drawer and motioned me over to look. I joined her and saw that the top drawer was full of drawings, all evoking waves.
     “Hmmm. So the etched lines on your paintings are actually just minimalized portraits of broken surfaces? Like the tips of waves when they swell to sunder the watery surface? How did you come to have such an affinity for broken surfaces, for imperfection?”
     “Most people don't see that, even after they see my drawings,” she replied, smiling, though she dodged my questions.
     I wanted to press her but suddenly noticed how she seemed to be nervous. She seemed to have stopped breathing.
     
     “It's not that I'm not receptive,” I said as I finally moved, raised my hand to stop her from taking off her blouse. I had decided to let the silence expand between us, simply looking back into her sad eyes until she raised her hands and started slowly unbuttoning her blouse. But though I stopped her from letting the blouse fall, they already had revealed the breasts that had so tantalized me during his show and which I furtively relished with my eyes at every opportunity.
     “I want to please you,” she blurted. Then she reached for my right hand and pressed it against her left breast. The weight of a soft pear: I felt the doves on the windowsill begin to cry. Silently, I began to roll her pink nipple gently between my fingers as, with my other hand, I raised the champagne glass to the pink nub. She parted her lips when I dribbled champagne on her breast but didn't utter a sound. I was an eagle: my lips swooped down.
     
     “Why?”
     Of course, I asked her the question only afterwards. Is not such the manner of those who intend to seduce--first physically overcome the target and reserve any discussion for the “afterwards”? I had learned this from him. I stood over her drinking directly from the champagne bottle as she remained in the position I'd left her, lolling back against the folds of raw canvas I had flung across the floor before pushing her down.
     As I had done after the first time with her husband, she felt a shyness surface. She began to close the thighs I had parted as wide as she could muster before I left her on the floor. I stopped her when I whispered, “Sssshhh.” Then I whispered again, “Spread.”
     She was my own painting, my version of Courbet's “The Beginning Of the World.” But her hair was silkier than the coarse, bushy hair Courbet painted on his model. At the moment, the hairs were also matted together from our sweat, which only served to heighten the mouth of the cave still rearing at me, offering at its center a ridge replete from my fingers' furious dance.
     “How pink it is,” I said, then dribbled champagne on it.
     She wriggled, and I loved it.
     I asked again, “Why?”
     
     I refused to leave my reflection. I kept staring into my eyes as I considered her replies to my question. Beyond my bathroom door, the apartment whose address I'd used for twenty years felt alien to me. When Helene had said that she suspected he was having an affair, I had only encouraged her to continue talking. When she had said she wanted a woman's love because her experience seemed to prove the impossibility of obtaining love from a man, I had begun straightening my clothes to leave.
     Immediately, she had leapt from the floor and flung her arms around me. It was the first time I had noticed her lips nude, lipstick long licked or bitten away.
     “Please. Please tell me you'll return.”
     The best I could do, even as my hands began fondling her breasts then twisting her nipples the way he had loved to do to me, was to repeat something he also once said to me, “I will never ignore you.”
     
     I already anticipated the ending of this story. Helene would leave him for me. And I would cherish her and remain faithful to her for as long as she would choose to remain with me. Then, after she left me, I would return to him; knowing we share the same compulsion, he would take me back. But I would accept the risk that Helene might wish to remain forever with me--blocking from me and him a happy ending that we both once revealed to each other to be something we have never known.
     I would accept the risk that would obviate a happy ending for him and me, for I have only ever been moved by one thing beside him: the story of George Seurat's mistress who was his lover until she died. She even bore him a child. But no one knew of her existence until after Seurat died. Her name is more relevant than the name of Helene's husband, the target of my obsession, for the purpose of this story.
     
     And I recall too as I begin to prepare to trade the unfolding of this text for the unfolding of another reality which includes Helene's voice now singing into my phone message machine, things are often only what they are named. Thus, for the purpose of this story, you may assume that my name may as well be the same two words that comprised the name of Seurat's secret lover: Madeleine Knobloch.