(I)
Salix Babylonica
“So...
were you and my mom ever, like, together?”
The girl strokes my wrist, tracing an invisible bull’s eye around my pulse.
“Please
don’t do that if you don’t mean it.” She thinks I don’t know what she’s up to,
assumes I have not noticed the humid web of sex she’s been weaving around me
now for the past five minutes. And it’s true, I am unaccustomed to such
closeness. The intimate proximity of her young body is bliss and terror,
lulling my spirit into languor even as it wakens something warm and hungry deep
within my too-long slumbering loins. I know that I will be telling her the truth
sooner rather than later.
“So?”
she presses.
“You
have to understand, Willow,” the words fall mechanically from my mouth, “your
mother loved you very much—”
“I
know—”
“You
and your brother were her whole world. Everything else came second.”
“Do
you think I haven’t heard that before, Mr. Laclos? Two hours standing in the
receiving line at Mom’s visitation and I could probably count the number of
people who didn’t say those exact
same words on the fingers of one hand. Please, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Call
me Jim. You used to call me Jim—”
“You
were around almost all the time—”
“Your
mother and I were friends.”
“Only friends?”
“How
old are you now, honey?”
“24
in October. Why?”
“It
just doesn’t seem possible—that it could have been so long ago.”
“But
you do remember?”
Of
course I remember. I remember everything and forget nothing—it is my gift and
my burden. I remember her as a bright-eyed 8-year-old, a gawky, towheaded
Disney princess-in-waiting, tearing around with her little brother, all giggles
and shrieks, blissfully oblivious to the turmoil in her parents’ marriage. A
fairly unremarkable little girl, I’d thought, though children seldom hold much
interest for me.
But
Willow is no longer a child. A dozen years and she has blossomed into a
striking young beauty, uncannily grown to resemble the supplely graceful tree
for which she is named. Her hair has darkened somewhat, and she has begun to
look more like her mom, or, at least, what I imagine Sharon would have looked
like in her early twenties, long before we ever met. The young woman before me
has that same sultry social-butterfly nonchalance, the same bright blue eyes
and easy sunny smile I once found so utterly disarming in the mother.
How could she do this to me? Make a
copy of herself only to torment me from beyond the grave.
“What
is it you want from me, Willow?”
“I
want to know who my mother was.”
“I’m
hardly the person to ask—”
“Please,
Jim.” She touches my arm.
“Don’t,
honey—”
“There
are things I want—no—things I need to
know—”
“Such
as?”
“All
the stuff she was supposed to tell me when she was older. The stories and the
secrets, the life lessons, the warnings.”
“Didn’t
she ever warn you about me?”
“I’m
serious, Jim—and I’m seriously confused. See, I always thought I knew exactly who
she was, but lately I’ve discovered things, things that make me wonder if I
ever really knew her at all. It’s as if I’d found two pictures of her that
don’t look anything alike, and I can’t figure out how to reconcile them. I need
to know the whole truth, the good and the bad. I need to understand this weird
jigsaw puzzle that was her life—”
“And
you think I’m a piece of that puzzle?”
“I
know you are, Jim.” She looks me in the eye for the first time. “I found some
of the e-mails the two of you sent each other all those years ago—”
“She
kept them?”
“She
kept everything.”
“I
don’t know what to say, honey. I...”
I promised never to tell and I
never have. I was always true to her, at least as regards that small final request
she made of me. But does this mean I’m free at last? Can I tell the daughter the
truth now that she’s found out on her own? Now that she’s—
“I’m
not trying to blackmail you if that’s what you’re thinking,” Willow says. “I
only want to understand—”
“What?”
“There
was something about the passion in those e-mails, something about the way you
got into her head and under her skin. She showed you a side of herself that
nobody else ever got to see, and, to tell you the truth, I’m kind of jealous.”
“She
had lots of friends—”
“Oh,
my mom knew lots of people, but I
can’t find anybody who really knew her.
She was married five times, but none of those guys—not even my dad—seemed to
have a clue about what was deep down inside her soul. None of them ever really
owned her heart. And all those strangers at the visitation telling me what a
great friend of theirs she’d always been, and how much fun she was to be
around? Well, it’s true, she was friendly
with hundreds and hundreds of people, but I don’t know a single person who was
really and truly her friend—except
maybe you, Jim.”
“We
were close for a little while, I suppose.”
“Close.
That’s one way of putting it.”
“Yes,
for a year or so, until we weren’t.”
What is the opposite of close where
the heart is concerned? Not far away. No: Forgotten, perpetually unremembered, ever
out of mind—
“She
always seemed happy when you were around. I remember one time when Ash was
about 6, he said ‘Mommy! You should marry Jim!’ and when she asked him why he
said ‘because Jim makes you sing!’”
“The
darndest things from the mouths of babes.”
“You
were together, weren’t you?”
“If
I say that your mother and I were lovers, what difference can it possibly make
now?”
“It
makes a difference to me if I can begin to understand her.”
“And
you think that flirting with me will help you gain insight?”
“If
I can see the same things she saw in you—”
“She
saw a much younger man back then.”
“—and
what you saw in her.”
“Willow?”
“Tell
me, Jim, am I anything like her?”
“You’re
beautiful like her, honey—”
“Really?”
“And
you’re a good little actress—”
“Is
that what you think?”
“Just
like her, yes. She was extremely good at using people to get what she wanted.”
“The
way I’ve been using you this afternoon?”
“Are
you denying it?”
“No.
But let me ask you this, Jim. Can you make me
sing? Can you...” she whispers the rest in my ear.
“Willow.”
I reach out to frame her lovely face in a garland of trembling fingers, staring
into the infinite blue of her eyes, the calm surface sparkling now with a
promise of salacious anarchy. But will I also find her mother’s madness there?
The
moment unfolds slowly, though I will probably remember it only as a fevered
blur, an aging agnostic’s fleeting glimpse of heaven. We undress each other,
uncertainly at first, with a kind of awkward reverence, paying our final
red-faced respects to the past. The details themselves are unimportant. All
that matters now is that she is perfect, young, and beautiful, and willing,
freely giving herself over to the tender mercies of my lust.
My
mouth waters at the sight of her body—so wondrously, aptly willowy—her long lissome limbs, and the sweeping, luxurious arc of
her torso. She is naked now except for the silver crucifix around her neck,
like the one her mother always used to wear—or perhaps it is the same one—Jesus
resting in the blooming bosom of eternal youth. We lie on the couch together. I
use my tongue and fingers, drawing her into a state of moist wakefulness,
though she has been ready from the beginning.
“Jim!”
She
shudders as I come into her. Wanton, she arches her platinum cunt to meet my
dusky animal thrusts, over-excitedly at first, unable to control her breathing.
I slow the pace long enough to reassure her, giving her the time to relax. We
kiss, open-mouthed, as beneath me, she eases gradually into the rhythm I set,
the intricately metered cadences of grownup lovemaking. She whimpers softly as
I fill her, each forward surge eliciting a giggle of joyful surprise, each
lugubrious withdrawal, a questioning sigh of forlorn despair, until, at last,
the daughter comes the way the mother never dared, with a full-throated wail of
primal ascent, her body tremoring in hysterical ecstasy from the blazing
epicenter of its core, as she begs to be taken again—as somewhere, far away,
the ghost of her mother begins to weep.
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