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Dark Cloud, Falling Rain [2321 words] (F M rom)
By Ava_Pavlova (artiste)
Copyright © 2004 by Ava Pavlova.
It is the memory of him that stays within me. When I try to imagine him, I see his face as if I am looking at a photograph in sepia. His face: luminous as warm porcelain, smooth as lychee fruit, his eyes questioning. Chinese eyes, full lips, a sincere mouth, a luxurious mouth. He is beautiful, unreal almost. But I will never again see his face. I can only find him through the dark clouds of my dreams.
He exists in this memory, where I can look at him: tall, in a gray suit, red and blue lights curving along his elegant silhouette, in the dimly lit nightclub where we met. Here he appears, as if out of a vintage photograph, or a 1930’s film noir. His slender hands are exquisite, His hair; thick, black as the ink-dark night outside. Then his face appears, like the moon from behind a cloud, so beautiful, that if its full light fell upon me, I would shatter into a sky of desire.
I was a nude dancer in one of the nightclubs in New Orleans.
I was twenty-two. I had moved away from my family to live my own story. My face held the wild beauty of gypsy immigrants; long, dark hair, eyes the muddy color of a river. They held a secret; my eyes, my smile. My family had splintered apart from divorces, then distance, moving apart like the earth. The fragmented, dry ground of California crumbled underneath my feet, so I left to find a place where the earth was soft, where I could take root and become someone else. Yet I have come to expect that things do not last, not even the solid earth. The earth fractures, erodes.
How I became a dancer at the Desire Club on Bourbon Street is another story; a story that does not belong to this memory. It is that other story, though, that brings me to this place, this moment I am telling you about.
There I am: a young woman, in silk, nude underneath my red dress, nothing else but the dress. My body as a blossoming flower, magnolia-white. The silk dress falls away, revealing my nakedness, standing in front of him, in high heels. Stage lights spilled over my skin, sticky with humidity, desire. He watches my body move; smoking a casual cigarette, holding his gaze upon me. It is then our eyes meet. Others that watched me as I danced on stage fade into shadow. I don’t see them. In that first moment of seeing his face, it glowed with a mysterious light, surrounded by spirals of haze in the smoky room, as if he emerged from a dark cloud.
Like a blossom wrapped in cellophane waiting in a market, he chose my body. After the stage, back in the silk, the red silk gown that I wore that evening. What if we had met somewhere else, I thought in that moment. I could imagine us in a another place, where the story changes. Where he takes me with him, somewhere far, to another life. But in that that night garden, fragrant and beautiful, he chose me-- pollen dusting his lovely hands, and for that moment, far away, nothing in the world but those hands.
I am there to show my body, for his pleasure, for others.
“Please, will you dance for me?” he asked, looking up at me as I descended the stage steps. His voice was pleasant, the scent of him was warm; a faint, warm scent of sandalwood cologne. He seemed eager, like a college student; he could not wait to ask for me.
“Yes,” I answered, my voice softened by the music, by the roomful of voices; men laughing, drinking, carousing at the round cocktail tables surrounding the center stage. I gave him a reassuring glance.
Up the stairs, his hand leads mine, up into the darkness. I stand before him in the space where he waits, for my body to charm him, moving with the rhythms of the music. He sits and watches me in the private dance room, hidden only by a small velvet curtain. With the music, I move my hips like a belly dancer, slowly, my body guided by eroticism. I turn my back to him and look over one shoulder. His hand reaches delicately to caress the curve of my hip. I stop. His touch is not allowed, a club rule, but it possesses me. Somehow, I cannot tell him not to, like the others. The feeling of his hand upon my hip resonates through my body, setting off little fires through my veins. I can hear the blood rushing into my ears, the soft explosions of desire.
I begin to undress again, as I did before, onstage. He stops the dress from falling; his hand reaches, carefully lifting the silk, pressing it against my skin.
“No,” he says. “Please, leave it on.” His eyes follow along the slope of my back, pulling up the straps, a continent of mysteries to him. As I turn to face him, he holds my gaze, looking at me intently; a gaze that touches me all over. I am drunk with the scent of his skin, like incense, only half my arm’s reach and I could run my hand along his shoulder, the bare pearl of his shoulder underneath the gray suit as I imagine it.
Gray silk, scent of tea leaves, wet grass, scent of damp earth, heat of his mouth. He fades away when I reach for him in this memory. When I linger in the sensory remembering, he returns. Then I see the stage, a whirling pool of neon shimmer. I see the curve of his cheekbone, and the gray suit. I recall the feel of his hand when it first touched my hip.
“Stay with me,” he asks, as his long, willowy fingers select the carefully folded one-hundred dollar bills like delicate leaves of origami paper from his wallet.
“Please,” he says, “stay and talk. I want to be near you.”
I did not try to know this man from China, elegant, smelling like fresh linen. His face searched mine. But I did not want to be known. I was not there for that. He mentioned he was traveling. When he spoke of this, he seemed lighter.
“My family lives in Wu-han where I grew up, but now I live in Hangzhou.” Then he lit up a cigarette and looked downward. “That’s near Shanghai.” he remarked, waiting for a response. Not knowing where it was, only the name, I smiled softly, and said nothing. My thoughts drifted along maps and the expanse of a land far away. Then I thought, he could be a rich kid passing time, or on a business trip, busy and seeking escape. He did not tell me his real name, or if he did, I don’t remember it, only that part of it meant Dragon in Chinese.
“Where are you from?” he asked. “Not from here?”
“No,” I reply. A small smile crosses my face. I look at him. I am not sure of what to say. He is searching for words between us, but the space, it fills with a river of longing. We just stay there like that, looking at one another as if we are the only people left in the entire world; in the half-lit room with the velvet curtain, red walls, color spinning around us. He turned his face to me as if to say something, but drifted somewhere else, and mentioned how beautiful I was. I placed my hand gently in his; skin touching with the softness of leaves falling.
Rain, warm and soft, fell inside my body. His hand closed around mine, pulling me near. He drew my body toward the center of his parted legs.
“Will you dance for me, again?” he asked through the continuous music, a hypnotic rhythm. My body swayed like sea-grass in the tide. Slowly, he pulled me against him. His soft hands stroked the silk dress, barely so. My arms looped around his neck, the spill of my hair surrounded his face, a cloud. Then, like a sudden rain, he kissed me. A kiss; barely touching mouths, the sweetness of his breath against mine. He traced with his mouth, kissing along my cheek to my ear, and whispered, “May I touch?”
Through clatter of rain falling somewhere outside, through the rising voices, the music in the club, an answer from my body was heard through the storm. For a moment, I forget who I am. I forget and give my body over. “Yes,” I answered, his mouth upon mine, melting into the heat of his kiss.
Under the silk gown, his long fingers, gentle, caressed my leg, along the inside of my thigh, up to my sex. Hesitation. The wandering tips of fingers: one, then, two, scarcely touching my sex, not entering me, just heat from his hand, hovering like a hummingbird. My clitoris became a stamen, circled by his touch, a camellia, my sex yielding. I shuddered against him; the intensity of pleasure rushed through my entire body; rippling, waves undulating throughout each limb, through my hips, stomach. As though by surprise, every part of my being had longed for that moment of awakening. I would have allowed him anything. With my eyes closed, I felt the heat of his hand, like water, like waves.
The surface of my body held in a great liquid heat, as a volcano. The touches of his hand caused the molten world within me to awaken. Everything blurred around us, with fire, with longing.
He simply stayed this way, touching my sex, butterfly-soft. He translated every trace of my response by touch, and lingering there, he waited. His hands held my body in an erotic suspense, where every motion was a whisper, another language. Inside that moment of hesitancy, with a barely audible sigh, he trembled. Then he slipped his hand away, smoothing the silk of the dress against my hip, as if to say, that is enough.
With the heat of his body against mine, through the crisp fabric, through the gray silk, the mysterious hardness of his sex pressed into me. He desired me, his hands damp, searching along my hips. My excitement enflamed; a current of feathery vibrations rushed through my body from his touch. I held his hand and led it back, under my dress. With a surge of intensity, he kissed me deeply, slipped his fingers along the little sea-shell of my sex, and slid them inside. Dizzy from his hands, from his touch, the wild little sensation arose within me, as everything swirled and disappeared into clouds. In the colored spotlights and strobe lights, time dissolved, pleasure drowned everything.
From his wallet, more one hundred dollar bills, carelessly handled, fell into my hands, into my purse, bringing us back to where we were: in a stripclub, on a street named Bourbon, with red neon signs of desire drenching the night in its pomegranate stain. The red-orange light on his face, the flick of a lighter, the click, the smoke rising into curls of obscurity. It really meant nothing, the money, just paper. Just leaves falling from wind, scattered.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “No, I shouldn’t ask you that.” He paused, watching the end of his cigarette burn. Then he looks at me, searching my face, and says, “I wish I could take you with me.”
“Where would you take me, then? Not back to Hangzhou,” I said with a tender look.
He smiled gently, yet behind the smile, was sadness, like something lost, a cracked surface of his reserve. He looked down into the shadow. “I would like to,” he said, “take you with me someday.”
I forget how we parted, for it is just this fragment I have in my mind. I didn’t know how I would long for the man from Hangzhou; a dragon-cloud vanishing into the night. In this memory, I hear him say, “I wish I could take you with me,” his voice, echoing somewhere inside this lost place. That moment, elusive as reflected light upon water, beautiful and never again tangible. Only the light of the memory.
I tried to forget about him. I left Bourbon Street, and moved back to San Francisco. To find this man I looked through other men; money received for evenings in hotels with Chinese businessmen, traveling, needing the warmth of company. It filled a curious desire, but like moments lost, I knew it was just to find the one moment with him. I accepted the proposals; only from those that reminded me of him, perhaps the elegance was more or less there, the polite gestures, maybe the inflection of the soft voice slightly similar. They paid for our evenings: dinners in shiny red dining rooms among a background of laughter, exotic language resonating against the lacquered walls, blurring my mind with the memory of him. When the waiters spoke Mandarin or Cantonese, or some other dialect, to the man I was with, was it to say, nice catch, the white woman, lovely anyway?
Years have passed since; I married, then the children were born, and I moved into another life. Another life outside of the one I knew, the one I led at the Desire Club.
But I knew that he was what I was searching for in them, back then. My body, asking each man, Where are you? Where can I go to find you again? Longing for the man I met in the darkness; the man that knew the secret code of my body, tattooed with his invisible calligraphy. To him, I answer, yes, as my voice whispers this, softly fading, like falling rain.
By Ava_Pavlova (artiste)
Copyright © 2004 by Ava Pavlova.
It is the memory of him that stays within me. When I try to imagine him, I see his face as if I am looking at a photograph in sepia. His face: luminous as warm porcelain, smooth as lychee fruit, his eyes questioning. Chinese eyes, full lips, a sincere mouth, a luxurious mouth. He is beautiful, unreal almost. But I will never again see his face. I can only find him through the dark clouds of my dreams.
He exists in this memory, where I can look at him: tall, in a gray suit, red and blue lights curving along his elegant silhouette, in the dimly lit nightclub where we met. Here he appears, as if out of a vintage photograph, or a 1930’s film noir. His slender hands are exquisite, His hair; thick, black as the ink-dark night outside. Then his face appears, like the moon from behind a cloud, so beautiful, that if its full light fell upon me, I would shatter into a sky of desire.
I was a nude dancer in one of the nightclubs in New Orleans.
I was twenty-two. I had moved away from my family to live my own story. My face held the wild beauty of gypsy immigrants; long, dark hair, eyes the muddy color of a river. They held a secret; my eyes, my smile. My family had splintered apart from divorces, then distance, moving apart like the earth. The fragmented, dry ground of California crumbled underneath my feet, so I left to find a place where the earth was soft, where I could take root and become someone else. Yet I have come to expect that things do not last, not even the solid earth. The earth fractures, erodes.
How I became a dancer at the Desire Club on Bourbon Street is another story; a story that does not belong to this memory. It is that other story, though, that brings me to this place, this moment I am telling you about.
There I am: a young woman, in silk, nude underneath my red dress, nothing else but the dress. My body as a blossoming flower, magnolia-white. The silk dress falls away, revealing my nakedness, standing in front of him, in high heels. Stage lights spilled over my skin, sticky with humidity, desire. He watches my body move; smoking a casual cigarette, holding his gaze upon me. It is then our eyes meet. Others that watched me as I danced on stage fade into shadow. I don’t see them. In that first moment of seeing his face, it glowed with a mysterious light, surrounded by spirals of haze in the smoky room, as if he emerged from a dark cloud.
Like a blossom wrapped in cellophane waiting in a market, he chose my body. After the stage, back in the silk, the red silk gown that I wore that evening. What if we had met somewhere else, I thought in that moment. I could imagine us in a another place, where the story changes. Where he takes me with him, somewhere far, to another life. But in that that night garden, fragrant and beautiful, he chose me-- pollen dusting his lovely hands, and for that moment, far away, nothing in the world but those hands.
I am there to show my body, for his pleasure, for others.
“Please, will you dance for me?” he asked, looking up at me as I descended the stage steps. His voice was pleasant, the scent of him was warm; a faint, warm scent of sandalwood cologne. He seemed eager, like a college student; he could not wait to ask for me.
“Yes,” I answered, my voice softened by the music, by the roomful of voices; men laughing, drinking, carousing at the round cocktail tables surrounding the center stage. I gave him a reassuring glance.
Up the stairs, his hand leads mine, up into the darkness. I stand before him in the space where he waits, for my body to charm him, moving with the rhythms of the music. He sits and watches me in the private dance room, hidden only by a small velvet curtain. With the music, I move my hips like a belly dancer, slowly, my body guided by eroticism. I turn my back to him and look over one shoulder. His hand reaches delicately to caress the curve of my hip. I stop. His touch is not allowed, a club rule, but it possesses me. Somehow, I cannot tell him not to, like the others. The feeling of his hand upon my hip resonates through my body, setting off little fires through my veins. I can hear the blood rushing into my ears, the soft explosions of desire.
I begin to undress again, as I did before, onstage. He stops the dress from falling; his hand reaches, carefully lifting the silk, pressing it against my skin.
“No,” he says. “Please, leave it on.” His eyes follow along the slope of my back, pulling up the straps, a continent of mysteries to him. As I turn to face him, he holds my gaze, looking at me intently; a gaze that touches me all over. I am drunk with the scent of his skin, like incense, only half my arm’s reach and I could run my hand along his shoulder, the bare pearl of his shoulder underneath the gray suit as I imagine it.
Gray silk, scent of tea leaves, wet grass, scent of damp earth, heat of his mouth. He fades away when I reach for him in this memory. When I linger in the sensory remembering, he returns. Then I see the stage, a whirling pool of neon shimmer. I see the curve of his cheekbone, and the gray suit. I recall the feel of his hand when it first touched my hip.
“Stay with me,” he asks, as his long, willowy fingers select the carefully folded one-hundred dollar bills like delicate leaves of origami paper from his wallet.
“Please,” he says, “stay and talk. I want to be near you.”
I did not try to know this man from China, elegant, smelling like fresh linen. His face searched mine. But I did not want to be known. I was not there for that. He mentioned he was traveling. When he spoke of this, he seemed lighter.
“My family lives in Wu-han where I grew up, but now I live in Hangzhou.” Then he lit up a cigarette and looked downward. “That’s near Shanghai.” he remarked, waiting for a response. Not knowing where it was, only the name, I smiled softly, and said nothing. My thoughts drifted along maps and the expanse of a land far away. Then I thought, he could be a rich kid passing time, or on a business trip, busy and seeking escape. He did not tell me his real name, or if he did, I don’t remember it, only that part of it meant Dragon in Chinese.
“Where are you from?” he asked. “Not from here?”
“No,” I reply. A small smile crosses my face. I look at him. I am not sure of what to say. He is searching for words between us, but the space, it fills with a river of longing. We just stay there like that, looking at one another as if we are the only people left in the entire world; in the half-lit room with the velvet curtain, red walls, color spinning around us. He turned his face to me as if to say something, but drifted somewhere else, and mentioned how beautiful I was. I placed my hand gently in his; skin touching with the softness of leaves falling.
Rain, warm and soft, fell inside my body. His hand closed around mine, pulling me near. He drew my body toward the center of his parted legs.
“Will you dance for me, again?” he asked through the continuous music, a hypnotic rhythm. My body swayed like sea-grass in the tide. Slowly, he pulled me against him. His soft hands stroked the silk dress, barely so. My arms looped around his neck, the spill of my hair surrounded his face, a cloud. Then, like a sudden rain, he kissed me. A kiss; barely touching mouths, the sweetness of his breath against mine. He traced with his mouth, kissing along my cheek to my ear, and whispered, “May I touch?”
Through clatter of rain falling somewhere outside, through the rising voices, the music in the club, an answer from my body was heard through the storm. For a moment, I forget who I am. I forget and give my body over. “Yes,” I answered, his mouth upon mine, melting into the heat of his kiss.
Under the silk gown, his long fingers, gentle, caressed my leg, along the inside of my thigh, up to my sex. Hesitation. The wandering tips of fingers: one, then, two, scarcely touching my sex, not entering me, just heat from his hand, hovering like a hummingbird. My clitoris became a stamen, circled by his touch, a camellia, my sex yielding. I shuddered against him; the intensity of pleasure rushed through my entire body; rippling, waves undulating throughout each limb, through my hips, stomach. As though by surprise, every part of my being had longed for that moment of awakening. I would have allowed him anything. With my eyes closed, I felt the heat of his hand, like water, like waves.
The surface of my body held in a great liquid heat, as a volcano. The touches of his hand caused the molten world within me to awaken. Everything blurred around us, with fire, with longing.
He simply stayed this way, touching my sex, butterfly-soft. He translated every trace of my response by touch, and lingering there, he waited. His hands held my body in an erotic suspense, where every motion was a whisper, another language. Inside that moment of hesitancy, with a barely audible sigh, he trembled. Then he slipped his hand away, smoothing the silk of the dress against my hip, as if to say, that is enough.
With the heat of his body against mine, through the crisp fabric, through the gray silk, the mysterious hardness of his sex pressed into me. He desired me, his hands damp, searching along my hips. My excitement enflamed; a current of feathery vibrations rushed through my body from his touch. I held his hand and led it back, under my dress. With a surge of intensity, he kissed me deeply, slipped his fingers along the little sea-shell of my sex, and slid them inside. Dizzy from his hands, from his touch, the wild little sensation arose within me, as everything swirled and disappeared into clouds. In the colored spotlights and strobe lights, time dissolved, pleasure drowned everything.
From his wallet, more one hundred dollar bills, carelessly handled, fell into my hands, into my purse, bringing us back to where we were: in a stripclub, on a street named Bourbon, with red neon signs of desire drenching the night in its pomegranate stain. The red-orange light on his face, the flick of a lighter, the click, the smoke rising into curls of obscurity. It really meant nothing, the money, just paper. Just leaves falling from wind, scattered.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “No, I shouldn’t ask you that.” He paused, watching the end of his cigarette burn. Then he looks at me, searching my face, and says, “I wish I could take you with me.”
“Where would you take me, then? Not back to Hangzhou,” I said with a tender look.
He smiled gently, yet behind the smile, was sadness, like something lost, a cracked surface of his reserve. He looked down into the shadow. “I would like to,” he said, “take you with me someday.”
I forget how we parted, for it is just this fragment I have in my mind. I didn’t know how I would long for the man from Hangzhou; a dragon-cloud vanishing into the night. In this memory, I hear him say, “I wish I could take you with me,” his voice, echoing somewhere inside this lost place. That moment, elusive as reflected light upon water, beautiful and never again tangible. Only the light of the memory.
I tried to forget about him. I left Bourbon Street, and moved back to San Francisco. To find this man I looked through other men; money received for evenings in hotels with Chinese businessmen, traveling, needing the warmth of company. It filled a curious desire, but like moments lost, I knew it was just to find the one moment with him. I accepted the proposals; only from those that reminded me of him, perhaps the elegance was more or less there, the polite gestures, maybe the inflection of the soft voice slightly similar. They paid for our evenings: dinners in shiny red dining rooms among a background of laughter, exotic language resonating against the lacquered walls, blurring my mind with the memory of him. When the waiters spoke Mandarin or Cantonese, or some other dialect, to the man I was with, was it to say, nice catch, the white woman, lovely anyway?
Years have passed since; I married, then the children were born, and I moved into another life. Another life outside of the one I knew, the one I led at the Desire Club.
But I knew that he was what I was searching for in them, back then. My body, asking each man, Where are you? Where can I go to find you again? Longing for the man I met in the darkness; the man that knew the secret code of my body, tattooed with his invisible calligraphy. To him, I answer, yes, as my voice whispers this, softly fading, like falling rain.
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