A.J.’s eyes darted back and forth, from corner to corner, from ceiling to floor. He’d never been in such a room, a room so large that it was as big as some apartments he’d lived in. He’d never seen a room packed with so many things, yet still appeared spacious. It was so overwhelming that he was unable to move for what seemed like many minutes. It was so overwhelming that he lost track of Vee in the room; lost her from his line of sight until she was moving back toward him from some undisclosed niche, the glint of silver in her fingers.
“Something for you, so you’ll remember your visit to Vieilles Chantantes,” Vee told him as she lowered the chain that held the charm over his head. Her fingers brushed through his hair, tickled the back of his neck as she settled the cool metal on his skin. It raised goose flesh on his body.
“I don’t think I’ll forget it,” he murmured. He looked down at the cross that rested on his chest now, but became distracted by Vee’s fingers that began stroking his shirt. One, two, three times they touched the fabric before they began undoing the buttons. A.J. felt his entire body tighten up as the tips of Vee’s fingers touched his bared skin before her entire hand rested on his chest.
“You’re warm,” she said. He was burning, a living flame standing in the center of her room. Sometimes the air in the country did that to strangers, brought up a consuming heat that needed to be extinguished. “Here, come here,” she told him, and she took his hand to lead him across the broad expanse of carpet to a marble topped stand that held a deep, porcelain bowl and pitcher. The bowl was old, showed signs of a century’s worth of use. There was a patina to it, a web of cracks like small veins that served as a backdrop to a pretty pattern of vines. Genevičve picked up a small sack and sprinkled something that looked like dried leaves into the bowl, then poured water on top of them from the large pitcher. A sweet smell rose up as the leaves mingled with the water, and Vee caught A.J. taking in a deep breath to inhale the scent. She found a soft, flannel cloth in a small drawer that was hidden by the thick marble tabletop and dipped it into the water.
“This will cool you,” she whispered, and she pressed the wet cloth to his heated skin.
A.J. felt the now familiar sensation of leaving himself. He became detached from what was happening, yet deeply aware of each sensation Genevičve’s gentle hands elicited. Back and forth, back and forth, she wet the cloth and then dragged it across his skin. The scent of the leaves mingled with the thousand other aromas in the room, making a heady mixture that rivaled any incense he’d ever smelled. His shirt slipped from his shoulders and hung from his wrists while Vee continued to bathe him. Genevičve caught it with her free hand before it fell to the floor, and turned from him for a moment to place it on a nearby rack.
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Vi-vi turned around after hanging up Alexandre’s shirt on the rosewood suit rack and found herself blinded by tears. Keeping her head bowed she was able to hide her eyes from the man standing before her while she continued to wash his body that was overheated from wine and food and dancing. Her tears mingled with the fragrant water in the basin, adding their own nuance to the liquid made special from the dried herbs and flowers she had added to the plain well water. All she allowed herself to see were her own hands, dark against his pale skin as she wiped away perspiration with the soft, moist cloth.
Years and years and years had passed since Alexandre had been home, and now it seemed he was home for good. Not a day passed that she hadn’t thought about him. Not a day passed that she didn’t wonder where he was and what he was doing. She had been filled with true grief, but those feelings had been erased and replaced over the decade he’d been away by desire. She wasn’t sure when they changed, or how they changed, or why they changed; they just had. In the beginning, when Alexandre had left those many years ago, she felt as if someone had cut a piece of her off and removed it. She had been heartsick, she had languished, and it was only through the grace of the absence of the Maitre from the plantation at that particular time that had afforded her the indulgence to overcome the initial despair that Alexandre’s departure had brought about. It took years for her to come around out of the darkness she experienced, and within those years the desire had grown to replace the hurt.
Now he was home again, a man, not a boy, and he was home to stay.
Only he was as unhappy on his homecoming as she had been on his leave taking. She saw it in his bearing, felt it when she touched him. He was sullen and miserable. His smile was gone, his lips pressed tight together in a cruel line that was reminiscent of his father’s hard mouth. The unhappiness in him was something as real as the basin that held the water Vi-vi bathed him with.
Alexandre was in shock. The last person he had imagined would be attending to him in this personal way was Vi-vi. He had a man, Martin, brought back with him from France to see to his needs, but Martin was nowhere to be found. This, here, now, this being bathed by Vi-vi’s hands, was an excruciating experience among a series of excruciating experiences he’d been subject to over the past forty-eight hours.
Homecoming.
The years of being away hadn’t helped to steel him to the impact of returning. Nothing had changed here to any great degree. The house stood against the same tangled backdrop of live oak and forest as it always did; a hulking edifice that blocked the view of the fields and river. He had approached it from the dirt and gravel road two days ago and was immediately engulfed in the oppressiveness it had always conveyed to him. His mother was still confined to her magnificent bed, was still her own silent edifice, as imposing as the house. His father was unchanged as well, but for several more lines that etched his tanned face. All of it was stone, the house, his parents, the house staff, the field hands, with the undeniable permanence of stone.
He hated the house. He hated the land surrounding it, and the people within it. Everything about the place had been close to forgotten once he left the confines of his prison-like existence there more than ten years ago. Everything but the girl, the woman, who was carefully tending him. She had been the only good thing about his life at Vieilles Chantantes and she was the only good thing about his return here. Through the years he had held her memory close, but hidden, sometimes catching himself dreaming of her when he laid in strange beds in strange places, wondering what she might make of the things he was introduced to; the things that at first seemed exotic, but soon became commonplace. Now he tried to look into her clear, green eyes, but she kept them averted; the perfect picture of a demure maid. The heavy hair that had always flown down her back was caught up and pinned tight to her head. The dress she wore was no longer the cut down cast offs that belonged to his mother, but something fresh and new and seemingly made to mold to her body. Her crisp, white apron was becoming stained with drops of water as she washed him, and he began to count them, one, two, ten; twenty and beyond until he realized that the droplets weren’t coming from the rag in her hand but from the thick fringe of her eyelashes and the sharp angle of her chin.
Alexandre stopped trying to look at her, because looking at her cry made him want to cry, too. Cry for the misery that blossomed inside of him as soon as his feet stepped on the polished wood floors of the house. Cry because, once again, he was being consigned to living in the prison this house was, and that there was no immediate way around the duty to the plantation that was required of him now.
Vi-vi moved around him, out of his view, and drew the wet cloth over his shoulders and down his spine. Alexandre bowed his head at the pressure of the cool cloth on the back of his neck and sighed so deeply it sounded like a groan.
“Have I hurt you, Maitre?” Vi-vi asked him, her voice as soft as the rag she washed him with. Alexandre caught her hand, took the cloth away and brought it to his face.
“No. No,” he said, repeating the word over and over until it made no sense to him, until nothing made sense but the hand on his face and Vi-vi’s cheek on his bare back.
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A.J. stood, trembling as the cool water Vee swabbed over him caused his skin to chill. It had been years since anyone bathed him; not since he was a small child, and never in the middle of a bedroom. It was strange, adding to the overall strangeness he experienced just being in the house, but it was also erotic and it was the eroticism that kept him standing there, wondering where it would lead. Women had come on to him time and time again in all sorts of ways, but never like this.
Vee stood behind him as she washed his back and arms. The scent of the herbal water rose up like steam from his pores, permeating the air around them until she could no longer smell anything else. It served as just one more thing to bind them together; one more tie, one more link.
She loved him. She loved this man and could see no alternative to it. No one knew that she loved him; not any of her friends, not anyone in the house, not even Françoise who knew everything. It was her own dreadful secret. Dreadful because it often hurt her to be separated from him by geography and the knowledge that in reality he didn’t know who she was. But he did ‘know’ her, in the same way that she ‘knew’ him. That fact became evident when she managed to touch him in the hallway before the concert; they both felt something pass between them, and Vee had understood that she was on a path she no longer could change, a path that would lead them to each other as simply as the river flowed to the Gulf. So it was with love and devotion that she cleansed him and anointed him, before she invited him into her bed.
Dark hands snaked around A.J.’s waist following the leather of his belt until they rested on the heavy buckle. He felt the luscious weight of breasts on his back as Vee pressed close to him. He wanted to turn in her arms and touch them, to undress her the way she was undressing him, but he sensed that it would be the wrong thing to do, that it would almost be inappropriate. Instead, he stood still and allowed her to do what she wanted, to unbuckle his belt and unzip his jeans and sink to the floor behind him as she pulled them down. Time slowed. Two gentle taps on his calf were all the indication he needed to step out of his boots, his pants, his socks; all with the help of those willing, dark hands.
The touch of the wet cloth on the back of his thigh startled A.J., drew his full attention to the woman kneeling on the floor beside him. Their eyes locked for the first time since they’d entered the room and A.J. had the sensation of being sucked into them. They drew him down to the floor, down to his knees, down to rest his head in her lap.
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Vi-vi stroked the dark head in her lap, raked her fingers through the wild curls that almost stood on end. Alexandre had veritably collapsed onto the floor, fallen into her arms and cried and cried and cried until it felt as if her apron was soaked. She had cried for a while, too, but stopped in her efforts to soothe and comfort him.
This was hard for him, this homecoming, this return to the country, and country living. She could only imagine what his life had been for the past ten years. Freedom. Experiences she didn’t ever bother to dream about because they would never be her experiences. Fate had tied her to the plantation, and fate would keep her there for the rest of her days. When she did consider freedom, she only considered that perhaps Alexandre had found his. Apparently, though, her dreams of him, for him, were just that, only dreams. Alexandre was tied to the plantation as inexorably as she was. There was no freedom for either of them, and there never would be.
“Are you asleep, Michie?” she asked, pitching her voice to a whisper so as not to disturb him if he was asleep. If that was the case, she would gladly remain on the carpet with her head in his lap until he woke.
“No,” he said, his voice still rough with tears.
“Come to bed, Michie. Let me bring you some brandy, or some chocolate.”
“I don’t want brandy, or chocolate. And please, Vi-vi, don’t call me ‘Michie’.”
“Shall I call you, Monsieur…”
“Call me Alex,” he told her. Alex. The people he had met throughout the world outside of Vieilles Chantantes had all called him Alex, or even Alexei as a gentle form of teasing. He often thought of himself as Alex, or Alexei, or anything other than Alexandre, the child with mud between his toes and a heart torn in two from the desire to remain in the relative safety of the plantation’s shadow or to test his wings and fly to freedom. He turned onto his back and looked up at Vi-vi with bleary eyes. He’d had too much to eat, to drink; he had tasted everything and anything presented to him at table, so as not to disappoint a single soul who was there to welcome him back. It wasn’t in his nature to disappoint, no matter how disappointed he was himself. “You’re beautiful, Vi-vi. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as beautiful as you.”
“I’m sure you have,” she told him. He was drunk. She imagined only drunkenness could give his ridiculous words form and substance.
“No.” His hand reached out and caressed the curve of her cheek. “I’m home, Vi-vi. I’m home to stay. Forever.”
“I know,” she said, and bravely took his hand and held it to her face. He did nothing to stop her.
“This is unbearable,” he said under his breath.
“I know,” she repeated, because she could imagine that it might be unbearable for him now, now that he had been away, that he had tasted a quality of life she refused to let herself imagine.
“I can’t do this,” he moaned.
“You can,” she assured him.
“Help me, Vi-vi…”
“What can I do for you, Mon… Alex?”
“Help me,” he said again, and he closed his eyes before drawing her head down to kiss her lips.
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There was a sensation in A.J.’s head, a tickling in his brain. It didn’t matter that the floor beneath the carpet was hard, or that the carpet was itchy under his bare back. Vee’s lap was soft, her fingers on his face were soft, and the crush of her lips on his was soft, too. One by one the kisses came, each one deeper and more probing than the one preceding it. It was nice to be on the floor, kissing a beautiful woman. It was nice to feel the rising tension in his body that he knew so well. That tension was a touchstone; something familiar within the hazy territory he was trying to navigate. His desire was sharp and clear.
Vee’s hand rested on his chest, the damp cloth still clutched in her fingers. The perfumed odor of the water rose up and filled his nostrils with every breath, but it only served as an undertone to the headier scent coming off her skin. It was hypnotic; it made him want to taste as much of her as possible. A.J. lost himself in yet another kiss, lost himself in a tangle of lips and tongues, only to find all of his concentration drawn to the immobile hand on his chest. There was heat there, heat in her touch, and when her hand began to move, the heat moved with it. It moved down the center of his chest to his belly, where it rested and burned. Like moving through mud, A.J. lifted his hand and covered Vee’s hand with it. For a prolonged moment he held it where it was, pressed as if trying to sere the imprint of her fingers into his skin, then he gently, firmly, drew her hand further down his body.
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© 2002, 2003, 2004 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2004 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
