Initially, Virginia resisted his advances. “I’m really only interested in friendship Jude,” she admonished. Yet, the rejection served only to make her more attractive to him. He didn’t take a taxi cab home that night, as was his custom, but walked briskly, releasing images of her lips, hair and skin into the wind behind him. Winning her was a game requiring subtlety and patience, and although he was a young man of twenty-eight, his experience and wit had made him an expert at both. He became the best friend imaginable; the kind who always picked up the tab when they went out, who never criticized, who kept her favorite sorbets and wines in his refrigerator; the kind who massaged her aching back, neck and supple hips until she fell asleep on the left side of his bed, too comfortable and content to bother going home. Slowly, he wore her resistance, opening her to him like a daffodil waking to the sunrise. When she finally came to him, he savored every centimeter of her body, sampled every crevice and swallowed all her feminine flavors until she was delirious, spoiled and smitten.
They enjoyed an arousing exchange of satirical banter that kept them indoors most weekends, stepping out only to brunch at the creperie, then back to his Upper West Side apartment to make love. He did her taxes, and revamped her resume, he bought her gifts and introduced her to friends. In return, she took to caring for him, lining his shoes neatly against the closet baseboards, hanging art on his naked walls and cooking him grilled avocado, egg and tomato sandwiches on wheat bread with the crusts sliced away. Most of all, she let him have her, devour her and consume her sexually, which was really no sacrifice at all, for he pleasured her orally for hours before he entered her, until she was so intoxicated with love that he could have his way with her.
One morning, at the close of a quiet weekend, Jude opened his eyes to the pale morning light leaking through the cracks in the drapes. He awoke sexually aroused, just as every other morning, and looked to the left where his girlfriend slept. The white, downy comforter covered her, but her frame appeared much more haunch than usual. He smiled, recalling images of her womanly nakedness and peeled back the sheet. Yet, rather than the honey smooth, viola-shaped crescent of her back, it was wide, thick, round and sparsely hirsute. His erection shriveled like a prune, and he leapt from the bed in fright, tripping over a stool and skidding to the floor with a thud in his haste. The bed covers tussled.
“Jude?” It was Virginia. Her voice resonated deeper, as if were being projected from a barrel, rather than the narrow passage of a throat, but it surely was her. “Jude?” she called again. The blanket slid to the floor where Jude lay motionless, his breath a stagnant bubble inside his chest. This is stupid, he thought, pushing himself onto his feet. “Jude, what were you doing on the floor?” a short, congested huff similar to a pig’s snort tailed her question, and when Jude turned to face Virginia sitting naked on the bed, he gasped in horror, for it wasn’t Virginia who faced him at all, but an animal.
It was peculiar looking with a long shovel-like snout, and tubular ears that perked up like bat’s on its elongated head. The neck was short and connected to a massive body with a strongly arched back and there were long, sharp claws attached to short, square limbs that were longer in the back than the front. The skin, a jaundice yellow-gray shade, was thick and fatty like a pig’s.
“Are you okay baby?” Her affection unleashed a wave of disgust that rippled through his body. Oversized and awkward, she inclined toward him, her large, black eyes blinking slowly with concern.
“Fine,” he blurted and darted into the bathroom, slamming the door and feverishly locking it behind him.
Incongruous sounds came from just outside the bathroom. He listened attentively, plastered flat against the door like a bug on a windshield, to a series of hollow clacks and heavy steps, the faint scratching like nails on wood and the slothful sound of something long and weighty being dragged across the floor.
“Jude honey, is everything all right?” called Virginia empathetically, but her congested animal breathing, loud and trenchant outside the door, terrified him.
“I don’t feel well.” He feigned a cough. “I’ll work from home today. Go ahead, I’ll talk to you later.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone if you’re sick.”
“I’ll be fine, just go to work.”
“Okay, but I need to take a shower. Come out of the bathroom,” she coaxed and snorted again, pinning him to the door in fear. He scanned the four, barren walls for an escape, but he knew the only window, a small ventilation shaft in the alcove of the shower, was sealed with security bars.
“Okay,” he relented. “Will you bring me an aspirin and a glass of water from the kitchen?”
He listened to her waddle away from the door, the cadence of two sets of limbs drumming into the distance. He unlocked the door and peeked out just in time to see a long, cone-shaped tail disappear around the refrigerator. Jude sprinted across the hall to his office and locked himself inside. His skin crawled and chilled as the clumsy waddle drew nearer.
“Jude?” the doorknob jiggled. “I have your aspirin.”
“I’m on the phone with my boss. This may take awhile. Go to work babe. I’ll be fine. I’ll call you this afternoon.”
He waited for the shower to stop running and the familiar click of the latch locking on the apartment door before he crept out of the study. All was quiet and normal, but for a lingering animal scent, a faint feral mélange of flesh, urine, dirt and sweat. Virginia had left the water and aspirin on the dining room table with a note.
I hope you feel better soon sweetheart. Get some rest, and don’t work too hard. I’ll come by and check on you later. xoxo V
Jude inspected the note. He recognized the elegant, cursive letters and slanted, vertical V that was Virginia’s signature on every letter and email she had ever sent him.
“This is insane,” he told himself, but he still bolted the door and affixed the copper chain in place before sliding back into bed to rest. He wasn’t sleepy, but he lay teetering on the brink of lucidity for hours, and when he finally rose, he felt confident and reassured that his early morning scare had been a nightmare. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the stock market had just closed. He flipped on CNBC to watch the highlights for the day, chastising himself for missing a day of trading. His iPhone buzzed and Virginia’s heart-shaped face illuminated the screen.
“What’s up?” he said when the headphones were wedged inside his ears.
“Hey, how are you feeling?”
“Much better,” he said and let out a long breath.
“What was wrong?”
“I don’t know, just feeling ill. I slept it off. Everything’s fine now.”
“Do you feel well enough to make the Salvador Dali reception at the museum tonight?”
“I feel fine and I’m looking forward to it!”
“Great! You’re on the list, so find me in the gallery when you arrive.”
“All right babe, I’ll see you later.”
Jude hung up the phone and gazed at the large, framed Dali print above his Television. The piece, titled, Reflections of Elephants, was probably his favorite, and depicted three majestic white swans with elongated necks reflecting grisly trunked Elephants in the black pool of water they swam in. Virginia, who was an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, had surprised him with the painting after learning he had a penchant for surrealism.
“Keep the change,” Jude told the taxi driver as he stepped onto 53rd Street dressed in a sharp black suit, crisp white shirt and gold cufflinks. He strode toward the giant banner reading Salvador Dali and the Paranoiac-Critical, and fell in line with the crowd of Manhattan socialites, older, well-to-do art patrons, and beautiful women wrapped in designer fabrics with plunging necklines. Jude loved the fact that his girlfriend, although modestly financed and without legacy or prestige, had exclusive access to this community of wealth and privilege and was rubbing shoulders with Manhattan’s social elite.
Jude was ushered into the main reception room where champagne and hors d’oeurves were being passed to guests on heavy silver trays carried by tuxedo clad waiters. He sampled the duck pate and ordered a Chopin and soda from the bar. The low hum of merry conversation and laughter reverberated off the polished marble tiles and echoed faintly in the capacious hollow of the geometric glass ceiling. He sipped his cocktail and scanned the room, his eyes resting on a pair of slender, tan legs, before following a plump bottom switching under a sheath of silk into the gallery.
Massive canvases encased in elaborate bronze frames lined the gallery walls. Jude examined them closely. The palatial decadence absorbed by rich red and blue hues contrasting a desolate and ghostly hollow of tans and grays in Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critical Town; the reverent nuns sanctifying the destitute in the gaunt visage of the atheist philosopher in Slave Market with the Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire; the transparent limbs a wash of azure rivers flowing into the blackened ovaries of mother earth below in the Freudian sexuality of the Invisible Man. He studied the clocks soft as wet pancakes, the lush red rose, the centaurs, the butterflies, the caravans of crooked, stilt-legged elephants marching across a sparse horizon of blues, browns and creams. Each image was a fantasy and perhaps a nightmare, a submersion in the subconscious, the surreal, and the cadence of time ticking noiselessly into eternity. Jude could not interpret the arcane suspension of reality or the disturbing double images. Were even his dreams as amorphous as Dali’s imagination?
He approached Herve Guillaume, the museum curator, and Virginia’s boss, who was surrounded by several patrons.
“Monsieur Guillaume.” Jude extended his hand to the bald Frenchman, his only hair a thin strip of blonde tapered into a V on his chin.
“Jude, welcome. What do you do you think of the exhibit?” Guillaume asked pronouncing his words in a tight, nasal accent.
“It’s fantastic! I’ve always been a huge fan of Dali, so it’s great to have so many pieces here in New York.”
“Indeed, it is an honor. We were very fortunate to obtain such an impressive collection. Have you found Virginia? She is there, near Reflections of Elephants.” He nodded toward the far end of the gallery.
“Thank you. I will find her.”
Jude spotted the Elephants painting and meandered toward the coterie of black suits and bejeweled ladies gazing and gesturing toward the dark canvas. As he approached, he heard Virginia’s familiar voice explaining Dali’s impetus behind paranoiac-critical from inside the human cluster.
“Dali systematically explored the unconscious with his paranoiac-critical method, inspired by the power of paranoia in association to what we view as abnormal. What is weird, grotesque and incongruous, are matters of perception, and change radically over time. In Reflections of Elephants, Dali challenges subconscious paranoia by yielding bizarre and distorted images of dark elephants in the reflection of the conventionally aesthetic swans,” she said. Yet, as he broke through the barrier of warm bodies, smelling of Chanel and Yves St. Laurent, he felt his legs wobble and give into near collapse, when he descried the aardvark center to the distinguished crowd. A middle-aged man in a ruffled white shirt with a thin, black tie caught Jude by the arm and helped steady him.
“Are you all right son? You nearly took a tumble?” Jude’s cheeks flushed scarlet and each face turned to observe the commotion, including Virginia, the aardvark, who rushed to his side.
“Jude! Are you okay?” She nudged him gently with her snout. The coarse, wiry hairs tickled his cheek and Jude felt the duck pate rise in his throat and his legs begin to quiver again. “I think I need to sit down,” he said feebly. Virginia led him to an ottoman in the center of the gallery.
Jude leered at her as he loosened the collar on his shirt. Just yesterday, he had possessed a beautiful, articulate woman, a swan among geese, and now he was confronted by a massive, repellent creature with a slithering protractile tongue and black, cavernous nostrils that flared widely with each breath. He looked away in disgust, sweat pouring down his face, as a short brown gentleman approached announcing that he was a doctor.
“What happened?” the doctor asked, squatting on the floor to look up into Jude’s pink face.
“I’m not sure. He wasn’t feeling well this morning, but said he was fine. A moment ago he nearly collapsed and now he’s sweating profusely.” The doctor felt Jude’s forehead, neck and wrists as Jude sat limply on the ottoman, his eyes turning back in his head.
“Please bring some water and a towel or napkins,” the doctor ordered and Virginia lumbered away from them. “Young man, tell me what happened. How do you feel?” He dabbed Jude’s head with a handkerchief.
“Doctor, do you see it? Do you she her?” there was desperation in his voice.
“See what? Who should I see?”
“Virginia, she’s changed. Virginia’s an animal. Don’t leave me with her! Don’t leave me!” Jude rolled back on the ottoman, faint with fatigue. The doctor shook his head in pity.
“Here’s the water doctor, and the napkins,” said Virginia. The doctor took the glass of water, his eyes locking with hers a moment in sympathy. He held the cup to Jude’s lips as he drank.
“Just a few more sips,” coaxed the doctor until the glass was empty and Jude lay back, the perspiration beginning to dry on his face.
“Take him home. Give him eight hundred milligrams of ibprofin and put him straight to bed….and let him sleep alone tonight,” the doctor added, cupping Virginia’s hand in his. Her eyes shifted anxiously between the doctor and Jude, who lay motionless on the ottoman.
“What’s wrong with him doctor? Will he be okay?”
“He should be fine by tomorrow dear. Either way, you should schedule him an appointment with a physician soon. Call me if his practitioner isn’t available.” He handed her his card.
“Thank you so much for your help doctor.”
The doctor helped Jude to his feet, but when Virginia touched him, he reeled back and shouted:
“Leave me alone! Don’t touch me you beast!”
All conversation halted at once, and the gallery was silent as a morgue as Virginia stood out in the center like Dali’s ruby Meditative Rose against a periwinkle sky, hurt, embarrassed, and with no place to hide. The ruffled shirt man offered his assistance and he and the doctor escorted Jude out of the room.
The pair rode in silence, the only sound the low murmur of the driver speaking Punjabi on his headset as the taxi plowed through the mighty rows of regal, turn-of-the-century apartment buildings lining West End Avenue. When the car stopped, Jude passed the driver a twenty without reading the meter and stepped onto the street. Frank, the evening doorman, tipped his hat to the gloomy couple as they entered. Virginia took to arranging his bed while Jude sank into the sofa, deadpan and reticent.
“Your bed is ready,” Virginia announced as she set a kettle of water on the stove to boil. “The doctor advised that you sleep.”
Jude gazed up at the Elephants poster on the wall. It had always seemed to him, that the white swans were elegant, regal, sublime, and that the elephants were dark, and ferocious in their beastliness. But now, he saw the swans differently, their elongated necks no longer appeared delicate and refined, but twisted and contorted, grotesque and unnatural. Now it was the elephants who appeared majestic, as if their murky existence beneath the water’s surface had merely been to camouflage their power over the attenuated swans.
Jude went to his bedroom. Several minutes later, Virginia placed a cup of hot tea and the aspirin on the nightstand beside him. The orange scent of the tea mixed with her earthy, mammalian odor and he thought she smelled less repugnant than before.
Jude rolled his neck on the pillow to stare out the window and saw a shapely figure reflecting in the thin strip of glass between the iridescent drapes. He turned and saw the silky fabric of Virginia’s dress hugging her hour-glass frame as she drifted toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly before she was gone. She turned in the doorway to face him. Her small, pink mouth was folded into a frown. She lifted her chin, exposing the length of her slender neck.
“Why would you do that? Why would you publicly humiliate me in front of my colleagues?” Her voice trembled like strings plucked on a guitar. “I don’t know where we’re supposed to go from here.”
“We had a fight, just a fight. It won’t happen again,” he said dismissively. Virginia switched off the light and left the room.
Jude and Amanda, watched people, dogs, and cars push up Third Avenue as they relaxed in the shade of an oversized umbrella outside Seville Restaurant on humid Friday afternoon.
“It’s so good to be back in New York! I thought I might turn into an Eskimo if I stayed in Alaska any longer,” Amanda proclaimed, her brown eyes bulging with animation.
“It’s good to have you back. The city missed you.” Jude smiled, glad that his friend was back from her travels. His relationship with Virginia was becoming a struggle; one day she was an aardvark, the next she was a beautiful woman again. Jude thought he might be going crazy and needed someone to talk to.
“Did I mention that I’ve been seeing someone?” Jude asked, stirring the ice chunks in his margarita.
“You did awhile back. Is it the same girl?”
“Yeah, it’s been about six months now.”
“I’m impressed. That’s like a marathon for you!” Amanda grinned, exposing the straw inserted between the gap in her teeth as she sipped her margarita.
“Yeah, well she’s kind of disgusting,” Jude confessed. Amanda backed away from her drink. Her round eyes thinned like slivered almonds.
“Disgusting?” Amanda’s nose wrinkled. “Define disgusting. Is it stinky disgusting, obscenity disgusting, fluid excretion disgusting, animal sex noises disgusting, she won’t shave her pits disgusting? Disgusting can mean many things my friend.”
Jude stared at the hand painted face of his watch, a gift from Virginia on their trip to Argentina a few months back. She had found it in San Telmo and surprised him with the wristwatch that depicted the street market where she bought it. At first, he felt the soft blue and yellow face was too colorful, and not his style, but the more he wore the unique timepiece, the more he grew to love it. He didn’t understand why Virginia, who represented the watch, the art, and everything colorful and creative in his life was now having the opposite effect on him. Jude leaned across the small table and whispered:
“Virginia’s an animal.”
“An animal?” A crease formed between Amanda’s eyes.
“Yes, an aardvark.” Amanda threw her head back and roared with laughter.
“Dude, isn’t an aardvark like, an anteater?”
“Yeah, but looks more like a pig.”
“Does she feed on ants and termites as you slice your steak?” she snickered. Jude scowled.
“It’s not funny Amanda! I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do! She was everything I want in a woman; sexy, smart, classy, fun. She was perfect! But now, there are just so many things about her that I never noticed before, like how hairy she is, or how big her stomach is, or what a mess she makes. I can always tell wherever she’s been in my apartment!” he said angrily.
“Have you talked to her about this?”
“No.” He looked at the watch, remembering the outdoor antiques markets, the historical Spanish churches, the seductive tango dancing, and how excited Virginia had been to share it all with him. “I do enjoy her company, and we have good sex, but I can never predict when she’ll be gross again. It’s getting worse.” Amanda sucked up the last of her margarita.
“I want to discuss this, but I have to pick up the keys to my new apartment by five. Come by later this week and we’ll talk more okay.” Amanda kissed Jude’s cheek and faded into the sidewalk traffic.
Copyright 2008 Starryeyeslie
This painting is a biggie: 5x4 ft. and the warm colors really fill the room with light. it's actually an illustation for my story, the Aardvark. The scene depicts two hot naked black people in a nature, but look at homegirl. I still haven't decided if she is going to throw that apple at him or jump his bones. Probably both! in that order.
I just wanted to give props to the sexiest R&B/AfroPunk/diva-deluxe chic in NYC, Ms. Raye Sheen, A.K.A. Raye 6. Raye 6 is a whole lotta naughty with a little bit of nice and enough style to donate to the needy. Don't believe me? Check the dusty white power on those dark amber cheeks- Meow!!!
I can't front, there is sadness in the world, there is pain, there is suffering everywhere...in all of us and me too. This collage attempts to mirror the fucked up, indescribable way I sometimes feel inside and about the world and human nature.
This is my fav pic of Emanuella de Paula. I guess that's why I painted it. Check her out in neon on the next post!
Ah the more beautiful the subject the more beautiful the painting. That' s no lie when it comes to my muse of the moment, 19 year-old Brazilian supermodel, Emanuella de Paula.
