The Green Hour: Literary Erotica

A dissolute confounds bad choices with good liquor, and offers a nice helping of Rimbaud on the side. Copyright © 2008 Teresa Wymore. All rights reserved. The Green Hour is a fictional work of literary erotica.

Longing for what you can’t have is like suicide, a loss of hope, but I was too practical for that. Besides, I knew she wasn’t what she appeared to be, wasn’t who she wanted to be. She was a reflection in search of a mirror.

The first time I saw Sally, she was taking my photograph. The flash blinded me, and when the sparkles faded, I saw her sitting at my table. Her mouth smiled but her pale eyes never stopped probing. They were hungry eyes, the kind that were too curious to be self-conscious.

“Hope you don’t mind.” She peered out the window beside my table. “What were you watching? Not ducks.”

Following her gaze, I saw a flock of mallards floating in a pond. She was right. I had been thinking about my last girlfriend, thinking the only sense I had was bad sense, always striving forward, ass first.

“I don’t photograph what people are looking at.” She rotated the lens and replaced the cover. “Just what they’re looking for.”

She buckled her camera into her shoulder bag, while I nodded, having no idea what she meant. I spent the next three months trying not to fall in love with her, but as effortlessly as air, she entered all the spaces caution left unfilled.

While I analyzed business strategies on my laptop, she made a diet of black coffee and Rimbaud, sometimes at my table and sometimes alone. As she read, she sipped from a steaming cup, her moist lips forming words in silence.

I recognized some of the words she mouthed but didn’t know French well enough to recognize the poem. Je regrette les temps de l’antique jeunesse, Des satyres lascifs, des faunes animaux. Watching her so absorbed in a libertine’s fantasies made me wonder what her marriage was like.

She was the only daughter of a philistine who made it rich with thoroughbreds and an actress who left the stage to become the old man’s trophy. She was married to a trust fund baby, a marriage over in all but name. Because she was Catholic, she stayed with a man more interested in screwing his caddy than his wife, despite the successful union of cigarettes and self-abuse that kept her own figure boyish.

Some days, I preferred to watch her from across the coffee shop rather than my table. We smiled and nodded and went about our business. She would glance at me and let me know she saw me. My appreciation, my desire, was nothing I could hide, nothing I wanted to hide.

When she finally shared her portfolio with me, her cryptographic allusions returned. A well-groomed cadet in yellow boots looking through a sheet of rain. She said this was her husband. An orange sun eating away the edges of a prosecutor’s silhouette. This was her mother. A fat priest in a worn cassock gazing at a crumbling brick church. This was her father. Two children in snowsuits waiting on the curb of a busy street. These, she said, were us.

After translating a poem for me one Friday, she invited me into her limousine and introduced me to her “green hour.” With ice water and a sugar cube, she performed the louching of a glass of absinthe, which turned the spirit milky green. A sip of the licorice-laced liquor, banned for nearly a century, infected me with uncanny lucidity.

“The most luminous geniuses used absinthe to liberate their art,” she told me. “Baudelaire, Van Gogh, and, of course, my dear Rimbaud.”

The elixir had helped generations abandon their gritty reality in favor of symbol, imagination, and dreams. It was no less for us. She was a camera seeking scenes. I was a widow at a grave. Like Percival avoiding the healing questions, we talked and read, and our days together were a collage of impersonations.

After one green hour that lasted three, she had us driven around four houses comprising the fifty-acre estate called “Witch Creek.” She spoke casually about her wealth in a way that showed she didn’t think of it as belonging to her, and we ended our tour at her pool house. The hum of the pump echoed off the high ceiling, and, along with the institutional smell of chlorine, gave me a sense of exposure. I anticipated an invitation to one of the bedrooms upstairs, but pleasure was a burden for her, a call to revelation. She turned passive, and when she stepped away, I stepped near again. We moved across the room that way until she was against a wall.

I set my lips to her cheek, and my words rained onto her skin. “I’ll keep your secrets.”

She tossed her pink blouse onto a chair and slid out of her black skirt.

My throat was tight as I said, “I want you.”

“I want you.” Her voice was dull, as if my echo had returned from the ceiling.

She removed her panties and settled onto a mahogany settee. She squeezed the slight scoops of her breasts and eased her legs apart. A deceptive sophisticate at ease in her boudoir. Her blushing inner lips peeked through glistening brown curls. Nestled in the smooth landscape of her creamy thighs, her hairy cunt held such primitive beauty, I couldn’t articulate all I longed for.

Tossing my clothes aside, I fell down beside her. Our naked bodies entwined, and she coaxed my tongue into her mouth. She began to suck with a Siren touch that tried to lull me, tried to cool the passion with tenderness, but I didn’t feel tender. My unsteady fingers groped into the tangled patch between her legs, parting the curls as I searched for the little pad of flesh and found it fat with pleasure. I scooted down, took one of her nipples in my mouth, and abused the pink stain until it thickened into a lump.

“I can smell you, Sally. I want to eat you.”

She lifted her head from the settee to look down at me, and one eyebrow darted up beneath her messy bangs. “You can have anything you want, Darling.”

What I wanted was to unravel the moments weaving this pleasure into history. Losing myself in lust would leave the blaze of touches and smells and sounds little more than embers in my memory. The paradox of losing control in order to find it left me wanting every moment to remain a flame, even when the heat was gone. There are those who say love doesn’t fail through denial but through excess. Still, there was no stopping a waterfall. Moist heat cascaded across my face like a southern storm, and breathing her in, I lost myself to fantasies of orgiastic freedom lived out under a tropical sun.

Impatient with my wandering tongue, she reached down and parted the short curls of hair. A listless nurse dispensing medication. Ignoring her invitation, I licked her fingers, and they poked into my mouth, touching my tongue, my teeth, my lips. Curiosity drove her to explore a mouth as small and sensitive as hers.

When I flicked my tongue across her fingernails, her eyelids drooped and her breathing grew agitated again. With teasing slowness, I returned my tongue to her source and sparred with her stubborn curls until sloppy sucking left the settee soaked. Pulling her from the settee, I led her upstairs, and she chose one of the bedrooms that overlooked the pool. The room was dim, and wisps of smoke hovered near the bed. A white taper in a brass stand had been burning for some time, releasing an aroma like vanilla poured over ancient wood. She said she often slept in the pool house and left the candle burning.

On the nightstand, a pile of linked red beads lay atop a prayer book. The rosary’s metal glinted, like memories fading. She glanced at it and then at me. A vulnerable penitent facing temptation. I tried to believe she was the victim of a strict upbringing, forced by conscience to honor a covenant made ten years ago before a priest, as if that was all God would remember. The fantasy had me liberating her from the belief that God was absent from her desire, like a carved-out moment in time, a blind spot to eternity.

After stripping the patchwork blanket from the mattress, I pushed her backward onto the sheet. Kneeling on the floor, I rested her legs over my shoulders. Her cunt opened to me. I rubbed my face against her, smearing her wetness across my cheeks and lips. Musk washed over me, through me, a current stirring my blood. She whined when my nose bumped her clitoris.

My finger plunged into her. She erupted with a cry and groaned with guttural joy so erotic, the surge in my gut made it impossible to speak. She crossed her arms over her face and began to rock her head back-and-forth. “Come on,” she pleaded. A little girl denied candy. “Oh, sweet Grace, why can’t you make me come?”

“Sally,” I whispered when she had grown quiet. “You like this? It’s all right to like this. Tell me you like it.”

“I need to come.”

Her clitoris was throbbing as she ground against my teeth, and what little control she had released itself in gasps of gratitude for the pleasure coursing through her. Her hands pulled my face against her, and she groaned in rhythm to the waves of orgasm.

When I held her, I found my heart hungered for her in the way my mouth had earlier.

She looked at me. “Jack will be home in an hour.” A sensible maid impatient to clean.

Her sudden coldness didn’t surprise me, since her moods often ran hot and cold. Still, her dispassion was a lie. When she tried to leave the room, I blocked her way. I knew I wasn’t the first woman to love her. She was a passive lover, and that allowed her to pretend, but I didn’t want to feel like I was somebody else. Even less, like nobody in particular.

She had contrived to bring me there and planted the image of herself as conflicted, but I knew she shared my faith, that the only sins were in our lies, not our love, that paradise didn’t wait for those who were worthy, but for those who were aware. She wanted to use my fetish as a mirror, another green hour spent in a wasteland of feverish fantasies, but she had become an island of meaning in my sea of chaos. Unlike her, I needed something more than imagination.

“Bored with all the fucking?” I asked.

Her eyes flashed. “You can’t hurt me.”

I wanted to hurt her. At least, I wanted to be able to hurt her, as only someone she loved could hurt her. She treated body heat like a foreign language and tried to invent herself. She didn’t realize she was something to be discovered. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I said, “We’re not done.” Curiosity held her in place until I spread my legs. “Your turn.”

She seemed aroused or fearful or maybe they were the same thing, but she licked her lips. A fallen hurdler contemplating the track. “I’ve never done that to a woman.”

“Hot breath, wet tongue, patience.” I shrugged. “Women are easy.”

With hesitant steps, she made her way over to me and settled onto her knees. Resting her arms across my thighs, she speared her tongue and touched the tip to my clitoris. She reached a finger to spread my labia, and when she continued to use the tip of her tongue, I said, “No one’s watching. All that matters is how it feels. Use your whole mouth.” She was intrigued but didn’t seem to understand what taking pleasure, rather than receiving it, might reveal.

Before I could speak again, the heat from her mouth spread across the entire lower half of me. Her tongue licked my labia, found my clitoris, found inspiration. Her lips caressed and sucked. Her teeth tugged and nibbled. Her restless desire grew wanton, not in the way she set up a scene but in the way she lost herself in mine. She pressed her face hard against me, and I felt her mouth quivering and clenching, as if she couldn’t decide what to do, but whenever her tongue or fingers flagged, I urged her on. It was an epiphany. Maybe an apotheosis. “Just like that. Feels good.”

“Feels good,” she echoed, only this time it didn’t sound like an echo. It sounded like lust. It sounded like hope. It sounded like her faith would never again consist in why she spread legs, but in what she risked for the revelation.

O Venus, O Goddess!
I long for the time of ancient youth,
lascivious satyrs and animal fauns,
Gods mad with love bite the bark of branches
And among water lilies kiss fair Nymphs!
I long for the time when the sap of the world,
The water of rivers, the rosy blood of green trees
Put the world into Pan’s veins!
When the ground shook, green, beneath his goat feet;
When gently fucking the fair syrinx, his lips
Murmured a great hymn of love beneath the sky;
When, standing on the plain, he heard all around
Living Nature responding to his call;
When the silent trees, rocking the singing bird,
The earth rocking man, and all the blue Ocean
And all animals loved, loved in God!
From “Sun and Flesh” by Arthur Rimbaud, 1870

The End