'Giverny'
It was only when Eve and the young stranger had exhausted the Kama Sutra (was that last position Splitting the Bamboo, or the Congress of the Cow?) that she realized what it was she really wanted. As the guard came running over the Japanese bridge, the beam of his flashlight stabbing wildly at the undergrowth, she took the stranger by the hand, helped him down from the lily pad, and began to wade with him through the still waters of the pond towards the house. She had been in the garden for only a few short hours, but she felt that it was somehow part of her, as though it had grown, in all its florid majesty, from the shadowy cleft between her legs. Eve tapped her fingertips against the damp triangle of her pubic hair. It yielded fast and firm, like keys on a computer keyboard; bouncing back up the moment she released the pressure. They were almost at the house now. On the other side of the pond, the guard blundered and swore through the warm Normandy night.
Every December, during her Christmas shopping expedition to the mall to buy presents for her husband and her children, Eve would pick up a calendar from Barnes and Noble. Although she would sometimes make a small, internal pretense of considering her options (perhaps this time she really would go for ‘The Native American Spirit’, or even ‘Twelve Baby Owls’), she knew in her heart that she would return home, as always, with ‘Claude Monet: Impressionist Master’, and consider it fifteen dollars well spent. On the first day of January, she would hang the new calendar on the wall of her neat suburban kitchen, taking care not to peek at which paintings illustrated the months to come. Eve did not, as a rule, like surprises, preferring the dim, comforting clairvoyance conferred by a life of domestic routine, but she welcomed the soft throb of unknowing that built inside her every four weeks, as she waited for the moment when ‘Impression, Sunrise’ transformed into ‘Haystack, Sunset’, or the detergent ad freshness of ‘Woman With a Parasol’ gave way to the jeweled and oily undertow of the Munich ‘Nymphéas’.
Monet (she pronounced it ‘Mow Nay’) had been Eve’s favourite painter since High School, where her art teacher Mr. Rogacz had shown her ‘Bridge Over a Pond of Water-lilies’ in a heavy hardback catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum. The last time she had seen Mr. Rogacz was at her senior prom. That night, while her classmates gathered on the athletics field to watch the fireworks bloom and clatter against the black Wyoming skies, he stroked her to her first orgasm behind the locked door of the school’s painting studio, pushing her hands away with what felt like infinite gentleness each time she scrabbled at the hard ridge of his cock. Eve did not tell anybody about this encounter – not the new friends she made at secretarial college, not the handsome, kind, and unimaginative man who soon became her husband, and certainly not her two teenaged daughters, although the three of them discussed sex (or as the girls called it, ‘fucking’) with what she considered to be a frank and healthy openness. It wasn’t that Eve regretted those few short minutes she’d spent bucking wetly against her teacher’s fingers, only that she had come to realise that they would have to last her a lifetime, and to speak of them, to turn a memory into language, risked its diminishment. And so each January she pinned up a new Monet calendar, and let his paintings hang silently over another year.
A few days after her youngest daughter left for college, Eve’s husband died of a heart attack. She had loved him deeply, and mourned his sudden and irretrievable absence, but even in her grief she recognized that whatever hidden force it was that governed the world’s affairs (she could not conceive, she told her friends, of there being ‘nothing bigger than me’) had seen fit to set her on an unfamiliar path. It was two years later, sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop, that she chanced across a banner ad for Fallen Eden: ‘The Internet Chatroom For Educated People, Where You’re Erotic Fantasies Run Free’. Eve glanced up at her calendar, entered the site, registered the screen-name XLilithX (Lilith and Lilith69 had already been taken) and waited for the first chat window to appear. It did not take long.
‘A/S/L?’ This was her suitor, screen-name Billionaire_Slit_Licker
‘A/S/L?’
‘Age/Sex/Location?’
Eve paused. It might be fun to tell the truth, at least at first.
‘41/F/Wyoming. U?’
The window remained empty for what felt like forever. Eve was about to log out when a block of text flashed up on her screen.
‘Honourable lady, I am a male, 18 years of age, living in the city of Bangalore. My mother knows me as Aadesh, and my good friends in America call me Adam, but here I am Billionaire_Slit_Licker, big boss and number one lover man of Fallen Eden. It is my particular delight to take a woman’s most precious reveries, her most deeply buried fantasies, and to help them flower into beautiful reality’.
Eve laughed. This wasn’t how she’d imagined things would go at all.
‘C’mon kid, aren’t you a little young for me?’
‘Here there is no age. No male or female. No location. Only the fulfillment of desire’
‘OK, then, what’s your fantasy, big boss?’
‘My dear Eve, I am but a simple facilitator. Please be so good as to check your inbox’.
Eve clicked nervously on her email. Plane tickets to Paris. A hotel reservation in Giverny. All in her name. She returned to the chat window. Billionaire_Slit_Licker had already typed in a new block of text.
‘Do not be alarmed, honourable lady. There are some things that are bigger than all of us’.
Eve stared at the screen. Finally she typed ‘But how did you pay for all this?’
‘My dear Eve, didn’t I tell you that I am a billionaire? ;)’
* * *
‘I am sorry to report the door is locked’ said Aardesh ‘and in my nakedness I cannot be carrying a key. No pockets you see.’
‘No problem, lover man’ said Eve. She tapped imperceptibly on the swell of her groin, four short strokes. The door opened. ‘This way’. She led Aardesh through the Blue Sitting Room, across the cold flagstones of the Pantry and into the Studio. She stopped. ‘This is it. This is where it ends’.
Aardesh looked around. A large window. A bank of red radiators. Reproduction canvases hung three deep on the high yellow walls.
‘The Studio. Mr. Rogacz. Of course’. His elegant brown fingers smoothed her breasts, moving down past her belly towards her wetness.
‘No. Not like that. Here’. Eve took his cock in her hand, and stepped backwards, her body now out of his reach. She glanced at him. He was so very young and perfect. So very hot and hard beneath her touch.
‘Aardesh, we were never in Monet’s Garden. The man who painted those paintings did not see the bridge as we saw it. He did not see the same lilies, or the same reflections in the pond’. She moved her hand more quickly, fingers fluttering over his shaft. ‘Claude Monet was Aphakic. He could see ultraviolet light’. Aardesh was breathing heavily. She could feel him begin to tense. ‘So you see, my Billionaire_Slit_Licker, this must be somewhere else’. Eve saw the window glare with what might have been a torch beam. It was almost over now. ‘This was our invention. This was our garden, dear Adam’. The boy cried out, his body jack-knifing in pleasure, coming for the final time.
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From somewhere there came a tapping, fast and loud. An entry bid, or an exit. An advance, or a retreat. Eve looked at the window, expecting to see the guard. There was nothing there, or almost nothing. A rectangle of white light, tinged blue at its edges. A calendar square. A new and empty day.
By Tom Morton
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