July 27, 2004
Fiction
Skin Flute
I never realized I had a musical penis until my third date with Angelina D’Ambrosi. The third date; that all-expectant societal road sign that if sex is going to happen, it should happen here. And yeah, I had to admit, I really wanted to take her to bed; it had been four years since the last time I’d had sex, and I was frankly ready to pop. It wasn’t as if she oozed sexuality like the other girls I saw in the clubs; a whole generation of women wearing hip huggers that revealed thong underwear, strange chemises that had no back but were tied up in bikini straps, or skirts so short that buttcheek was visible. Angelina wasn’t like that; she tended to wear more normal clothes, but man could she wear them. Britney Spears on her best day couldn’t look this good.
I took Angelina to a showing of Amélie at the art house theatre near my apartment that night, because it was romantic, but also for the similar features she shared with the movie’s lead, Audrey Tautou, about whom I fantasized sometimes. She had the same big brown eyes, the slender figure, the great kissable lips. Angelina’s breasts looked slightly smaller from the quick glances I managed to catch when she wasn’t looking, but that wasn’t a big deal; I was an Ass Man.
“How many times have you seen this now?” she asked me.
I blushed in the darkened theatre. “Seven.” I turned and Angelina was smiling.
“So you are a goofy romantic.” She squeezed my knee, then wrapped an arm around mine, leaning into my shoulder. The heat from her petite frame radiated into me, and I hoped I wasn’t going to start sweating. It had been a long time that I’d even gotten to a third date with a woman; the ones I’d been physically attracted to had nothing in common with me, and rarely even had anything interesting to say. I wanted a woman I could connect with physically, emotionally, and intellectually; a big challenge.
We’d met in a chat room for those into Irish music. That first night of our cyber-meeting, we talked until two in the morning about The Chieftains, Kornog, Altan, The Corrs. And as it turned out, we both even played a little; she said she was pretty good on the tin whistle, and I could manage not to sound too horrible on acoustic guitar. Our first in-person meeting was nerve-wracking; I’d had some bad experiences in the past with this, where women I’d talked to online were completely different in person. I got to the Java Jive ten minutes early, and paced outside, my palms sweating and my heart pounding. But once she got there and smiled that beautiful smile, I started to relax. Our conversation ranged from Irish music to literature to films to philosophy as we sipped mochas and listened to Nordic fiddle music gently drifting down from the speakers. Her favorite authors were Poe and Kafka. She liked well-written independent films. She was perfect.
Back on the screen, Mathieu Kassovitz kissed Audrey Tautou on the neck, and Angelina snuggled into my arm. This was her first time watching the movie, and I envied that first viewing. She was getting the story fresh, laughing and experiencing it with innocent eyes.
After the movie, we walked the short block to Pallas Athena, my favorite Greek restaurant in town. I ordered a gyro and Angelina got a souvlaki. We split a plate of dolmades, and at her insistence, took turns feeding each other the stuffed grape leaves. Soon, both our lips were shiny from olive oil.
We worked off some of the dinner strolling back to my apartment, seven blocks north, talking about Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s other films, and his eye for cinematography and color. The apartment appeared before either of us realized it, and we both became as nervous as before our first date. She waited expectantly for me to say something, and all I could manage was “So, here we are.”
“Yep,” she said. “Here we are.”
We’d kissed goodnight after the second date -- a nice dinner at the swanky La Bisque restaurant — a hurried brush of the lips that had made me smile all the next day. Angelina looked around briefly, stuffing her hands in her pockets, and I could tell from past experience that this was the moment she’d say something like, “Well, I guess I should be getting home . . . ” I thought of Amélie and her fear of taking risks.
“Would you like to come inside?”
Angelina’s face brightened, and her smile made my legs feel rubbery. “Sure.”
I took her hand and led her up to the second floor. My keys tangled, but after a moment I found the right one and let us both inside. I had cleaned in the event that she would actually be coming in, and felt the better for it. Angelina glided around my living room, taking in the framed prints and Ansel Adams posters, while I turned the stereo on to NPR; I’d planned our getting home to coincide with Thistle and Shamrock, the hour they played Irish music.
“All right,” she said, “no Satanic altars, no remains of old girlfriends,” she peered at my CD tower, “no top 40 bands. Good.” She stepped over and hugged me tight. I squeezed back and inhaled the peachy scent of her shampoo.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“Oh, no reason. I’ve just been wanting to do that all evening.” She pulled back to look at me, her hands still locked around my back, and I nearly lost my identity in her brown eyes. My breath quickened, and I could feel the stirrings of an erection. She was so beautiful.
And then, something happened. A shimmering of air, maybe, or the greasy Greek food playing tricks with my senses. Because in that moment, she not only resembled Audrey Tautou, she was my cinematic fantasy made flesh. The way the light bent toward her face, the subtle arch of her eyebrows, the fullness of lips, the eyes wide as a doe’s. Even her hairstyle shifted to that recognizable Amélie cut, part Cleopatra, part 1920’s flapper, part pageboy, part pixie.
Stepping back, I could see that her body was also different. Her breasts were slightly bigger, and she seemed to be taller as well. Angelina/Audrey smiled, and even her imperfect teeth were perfect.
“What’s going on?”
“Oui, c’est moi,” she said, her accent spot on. She turned in a circle. “You like?”
Despite myself, I nodded. “But I don’t understand.”
“It is simple,” she said. “I am your fantasy. It was so obvious, your reactions during the movie. You lust after her, though you know her to be a construction, unreal. You wish to have her as Nino had her in the film. You want to ravish her, and have her do things to you. She is the perfect woman for you, yes? You wish to have her all to yourself.”
“But how?” The blood had rushed from my face, and the room swam, as if I were about to pass out. I licked my lips, my mouth suddenly dry.
“The how is not important,” she said. “A great opportunity is being presented to you. Will you take it?”
I cleared my throat and nodded.
“No matter the cost?”
What would she ask for? Indentured servitude? My first-born child? The little toe on each foot? I looked at Audrey’s beautiful face, her body the altar at which I could worship for the rest of my days. I shivered with pent-up lust, and realized I would give anything, my very soul, to be with her.
“Yes.”
“Very good,” she said, the statement lighting up her face.
Audrey pulled me to her, her touch invigorating. I felt strong, and my body quivered with the abrupt rush of energy. I leaned down and kissed her soft lips deeply, inhaling sharply through my nose at the sudden arousal. She pushed her tongue gently into my mouth. Her fingers twined in the short hair at the nape of my neck. I sank into the kiss, loving the feel of her mouth on mine, the taste of her breath: mint mixed with Greek food. She moaned lightly. My cock strained inside my jeans. I squeezed her buttocks, and mashed her crotch against mine. Though the air conditioning hissed, the room was inconceivably way too hot.
Her skirt dropped with a whisper to the floor, and I pulled her blouse up over her head. I planted little kisses from her earlobe down her neck and over her red lace bra, proceeding downward further to lick at her wrinkle of a belly button. Her slender fingers stroked my scalp and messed up my hair as I pulled at the waistband of her panties with my teeth. She smelled of lilacs, and of sweat, and of longing. I wanted her so badly that I was afraid my heart would explode within my chest.
Audrey pushed me down on the couch, and told me to strip as she stood over me, hands on slender hips. I yanked off my shirt and was fumbling with the zipper on my jeans when she said, “Non, mon amour, do it slowly.” She wanted a show as well.
The belt escaped the loops on my pants with a hushed whisper, dropped to the floor. Unbutton, then unzip, a flash of very unsexy grey boxer-briefs, along with a slowly-spreading come stain. Wriggle the hips and arch the pelvis, and the unmistakable intake of breath, Audrey getting turned on by my fumbling striptease. I pushed the jeans to the floor, and slowly moved down the boxer-briefs, my erect penis springing to life, free of its cage.
In contrast, Audrey whipped off her bra and panties as if with a gun to her head. She stood there glorious, the light playing over her beautiful naked body, her nipples dark as chocolate, her breath of pubic hair trimmed into a neat triangle.
Audrey seized my cock in one hand, climbed on top of me and guided me inside her. She was already wet, and I slid into her easily — the other times, I had to work a little more for this, spend twenty minutes or more on foreplay. We both gasped at the sudden connection, the insertion of part of my body into part of hers. She rested her hands on my shoulders and slowly raised, then lowered, herself, squeezing lightly with her pubic muscles. As she moved on top of me, I matched her rhythm, pushing into her deeper and deeper. Each time she came down, I died and was reborn.
I grabbed Audrey by the hips and slowed her down. “We’re unprotected,” I said. “I need to put a condom on.”
She smiled lazily at me, her eyes sly as a cat’s. “You did not think I was that irresponsible?” She still slid up and down, keeping me inside her. If she didn’t stop soon, I’d be done. “I never would have let it go that far,” she purred, and abruptly clambered off of me, my penis springing back with a slap, leaving a spot of lubrication on my stomach. Audrey knelt down and gripped my red and aching member in her hand, squeezed a single drop of semen from the tip of my penis, which rolled down over her knuckles. My penis was crying. “Besides, mon cher,” she said, “I want to taste you.”
She traced the track of the semen trail up to the hole, her licks achingly slow. Every muscle in my body simultaneously contracted as she closed her lips over the head of my penis, then slowly took me all the way into her mouth. I was extraordinarily sensitive, and had to grip the sofa pillows and grit my teeth as she sucked me. Her head bobbed faster and faster, exposing every nerve ending in my body until I could feel even individual molecules in the air. My cock was on fire. I cried out at the moment of orgasm, losing myself in the oblivion of the little death, scattering my identity to the winds. Several long moments, later, I came back to myself, breathless and aching.
“Wow,” I exhaled.
“Yes?” said Audrey, smiling. Her bottom lip and chin were shiny.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was amazing.”
She stood up slowly, letting me see all her muscles moving against each other, then padded back to the bathroom. A brief hiss of water from the sink, then a low gargling. I tried getting up from the sofa, but all my energy was gone. My penis remained erect, refusing to soften back to flaccidity, and it beat lightly along with my pulse. Audrey walked back into the living room with a predatory smile, and I started to shiver.
“How was I?” she said, almost as a challenge.
The skin at the base of my neck crawled and I desperately wanted to move, but was pinned there on the couch like a nightmare. “G-Great,” I stuttered. “You were p-perfect.”
“You know,” she said, kneeling down between my legs again, “not all men get to fuck their fantasies. You should feel very fortunate.” Audrey squeezed my penis and I groaned, still aroused despite my fear, or maybe because of it. “You got your wish tonight, mon brave. However, if fairy stories have taught us anything, it is that wishes are granted at a price.”
Audrey placed her lips softly on the head of my penis and I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. She inhaled lightly through her nose, and blew into my urethra. There was a moment of discomfort from the entire lower half of my body, then a faint middle-pitched note sounded from far away. She glanced up at me, grinning around the head of my cock, then blew another note while squeezing the vein that ran along the underside of the shaft: a different pitch. The Irish music on NPR, which had faded into my subconscious as we fucked, started up “The Minstrel Boy.” She positioned her fingers in the places where the holes of a tin whistle would go, and played the slow melody along with the radio.
Audrey leaned back up, admiring my musical penis like a piece of jewelry. “Good tone. Durable. Pliant. I will take it.” She squeezed harder and began to pull, and I knew that if she kept tugging, it would come right off and I would most likely bleed to death. My flesh screamed.
I grabbed at her arms, but her skin was live wire, molten hot and full of electricity. The contact threw me back against the couch, twitching and shivering. Her grip increased, slowly tightening like a vice, and I tried to push her away, slap her, even punch her in the face, but my strength was gone. The air had also fled my lungs; I couldn’t even yell for help.
“Wait!” I whispered, frantically trying to remember every fairy tale I’d ever read. “I’ll bet you for it.”
She stopped pulling but continued holding my member in a death grip. Her eyes had turned purple, as well as her nipples, and she no longer smiled. “You have nothing of value I would wager against.”
“What if I play you for it?” It was the first thing I could think of, my guitar, dusty and out of tune in my bedroom closet. “We play, together. First one to stop, loses. The winner gets to keep my thing.”
She pondered for a moment, then lightened her grip on my cock. Her smile was feline and contained no humor. “Very well. The bet starts now.” There was a small dizzying lurch, as if the world had just shifted out of phase with itself, and my small Spanish guitar rested on my stomach.
Audrey or Angelina or whatever her real name was, glided over and deftly turned off the radio, then dropped back down and settled her lips into position on my musical organ. Her eyes drilled into me over the body of the guitar. “‘The Drunken Sailor’,” she mumbled. “Ready?”
I sighed. Of course I wasn’t ready, but what choice did I have? I leaned up, finally able to move again, and clutched the guitar by the neck. It had been a year since I had played it last, and the calluses on the tips of my fingers had softened. After twenty minutes they would hurt; after an hour they would bleed. I flexed my fingers, settled them into the D minor chord, and said, “Ready.”
once read all of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and got shot at in the same afternoon. He was born in Brooklyn, but has called North Carolina home for the past sixteen years. His fiction has appeared in such places as Fantastic Metropolis, Intracities (ed. Michael Jasper), Electric Velocipede and the Serbian fiction magazine Znak Sagite. He is the co-author of Four Seasons in One Day (2003) and the editor of Scattered, Covered, Smothered — an anthology of fun foodie fiction to be published in December 2004 by Two Cranes Press. Lundberg is a graduate of the 2002 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and is currently at work on a novel. In March 2004, he was married to artist and writer Janet Chui, whom he met at Clarion, and they live in Cary with their pet dwarf hamster and many books. He maintains a website and online journal at jasonlundberg.net.
