The Face of Days
Jacqueline’s eyes strayed to the right, out of the booth. Her line of sight went past my shoulder to someplace deeper in the restaurant. A line of consternation appeared over her eye, then on the bridge of her nose. Her eyes hovered between glazing over and sharpening intensely.
I turned to follow her gaze even as the apparition came abreast of the table.
I say apparition out of belief it was not a boy. It had the form and face of a boy. No boy had the eyes of this creature, however. No boy had the hint of bright teeth beneath barely parted, rouge lips. No boy had skin as this, that appeared to be that of a mummy, irregular and covered with fine bumps, finely lined yet slightly gleaming as if rubbed with oil. He wore nothing but a dirty white shirt, unbuttoned, a size too large for his shoulders. The frame visible within was not emaciated, but still gave the impression of being tortured. You saw the ribs, but not because of starvation. The pelvis bones jutted within the skin, yet not with the uncompromising ugliness of utter destitution. Adequate flesh covered all those bones. But that flesh was not Northern European nor African nor any hue I had seen in human flesh. Corundum-dark almost to blackness, the boy would have passed invisibly into any shadow. The yellow-glazed lamps of the cafe slightly warmed the colors of his bald skull. His eyes turned to us. They had whites I had somehow expected, given the oddity of the skin. A nearly perfect chocolate brown color, flecked with spots of magenta and orange as if they were the eggs of an exotic species of tropical bird, they stared blankly. The centers sat like blisters, the roughness of the retinas almost three-dimensional, surrounding the dark foci with crevasses and crumpled highlands that folded up and bent and plunged into the iris.
His glance may have lasted one, two seconds. Time froze. Once I turned his direction all stopped save his movement across the parquetry between red table covers and black-painted wire chairs. Something fiery burned within his constitution, judging from the set of the head and the lines upon the face. It might have been the peak of all emotions that blazed within that leathery skin, for where the shirt parted before his groin I saw his penis, dark and scaled with odd folds of flesh, standing stiffly erect, unmoving even as he marched past us.
It did seem almost a march: military, high-stepping steps would have taken him past as quickly.
He disappeared with such suddenness I doubted he had been there.
Jacqueline’s gaze met mine.
We sat in such silence that the waiter must have noticed, for he appeared beside our booth.
“Do you lack for anything?” he said. He was a tall, broad-shouldered youth who took great pride in the neatness of his uniform and the perfection of his speech.
“Who was that boy?” said Jacqueline.
“What boy?”
“The one who just walked by.”
“There is no boy in here. I would not let in a boy at this hour.”
“He just walked by in nothing but a shirt.”
“I will shoo him out.” He looked back up the length of the restaurant, making it apparent he saw nobody. “I will find him and shoo him out,” he said to us, nodding his head confidently. “Anything else? More wine?”
Time disordered itself in my mind. I gazed upon Jacqueline and knew I had known her forever. I knew equally that I would know her forever. Yet we hardly knew one another. I felt exquisitely strange.
We walked the four blocks from the restaurant to my hotel. I remembered Henri’s invitation to return to his cafe, to hear the music. I rolled the idea of music through my thoughts, and felt Jacqueline’s touch. In my room, she held herself against me eagerly—she was almost my height—and drew me into a series of long kisses. I normally thought of kisses as being not so much pleasurable in and of themselves, but as being preludes or postludes to other pleasures. To these, sufficient unto themselves, I surrendered myself. I could have remained contented there, cushioned in her arms and upon her lips.
As I considered the option a thought disturbed me, a thought from nowhere.
I remembered that my ex-wife floated upon a bed of laboratory gelatin in the adjoining room, the one with the window looking out over the street. She floated there bathed in moonlight.
I pushed myself away from Jacqueline and looked through the door into the other room, and turned on the light. I saw nothing. My wife had never been here. She had never seen Talleil. I had last seen her years ago.
Jacqueline approached behind me, then reached past me and turned off the light in the other room. With her other hand she traced the slight curve of my back. She kissed the side of my neck. She turned me toward herself, caressing me even as she was pulling my clothing looser.
I thought, for some reason, of my first time with a girl, when I was fourteen, when Suzy, a neighborhood girl with braided hair and blue coveralls and a shirt that had unbuttoned more quickly than I could ever have believed, her small breasts with pink aureoles and her rough lips that were just learning to kiss as she taught me not only kisses but the secret recesses of the female. I comprehended the moment only dimly. I failed to realize what was occurring. At times I regarded it as dream. You can live dream, for moments at a time: you are awake, you are conscious, you are thinking, but what takes place around you is dream. Suzy became a friend and lover in a dream, and the place I entered when I entered her, where I took a step away from boyhood, was a place of dream.
