Orb Weaver

— Can we just sit by the water and not say anything? she asked. She was content to stop at the kiss. The kiss was illicit enough to be good material.

The writer’s knees cracked as he lowered himself onto the creek bed. — Come here, he said. He pulled her into his lap and slowly undid her braid. She stiffened and watched the water. What did his fingers think of her hair? Didn’t he feel her desire to sit in stillness with him? To be still, like a painting? To be silent?

The writer licked her earlobe. He urgently nibbled the back of her neck. She was getting wet, becoming the thing in his arms being kissed. At the same time, she felt entirely detached from the scene. She noticed a box turtle swimming under the surface of the water and had an impulse to smash it with a rock.

The writer cupped her breasts from behind. She noticed a pine cone being carried downstream. The writer pinched her nipples through the cotton of her summer dress.

— Your breathing just changed, he narrated.

Had she quickened her breath to excite him or was she genuinely excited? She didn’t know. Whatever the case, a growing wetness spread between her legs. She pondered this.

— Turn around, he told her. She obeyed. He pulled her against his groin. She wrapped her legs around his thick middle and hooked her ankles at the base of his spine. She noticed their long, four armed shadow working itself over the exposed roots of a fallen tree. He ground into her and groaned deeply, like a bear might groan. Swiftly, he stood, carrying her up with him, his hands supporting her rear. He rocked her from side to side, to prove her lightness.

— Little girl, the writer said. He buried his face in her chest and for a moment she thought he was crying.

Then his back spasmed. A dying pine creaked in the wind. He put her down.

— Are you all right? she asked.

He put his finger to her lips. — Shhhhhhh, he said.

He slid his right hand under the skirt of her dress and up her inner thigh. He cupped the mound of her crotch as if he owned it.

— You’re dripping, he whispered.

He snaked his right hand under the elastic

of her panties and slowly inserted his first and second fingers. He was skilled at this. He scissor-kicked his fingers and rotated his thumb knuckle over the bud of her clitoris. He did this for a full two minutes, troubling the carpal tunnel syndrome in his wrist. When she moaned and trembled, he fisted her unloosed hair and jerked her head backwards to bare the chords of her long brown throat.

He wanted to watch her face contort when she came. — Come for me, he said, kicking his fingers inside her, faster and faster.

She pretended to, and in pretending halfway did.

A woodpecker castanetted its beak against the trunk of a nearby tree.

— Feel how hard you make me. He grabbed her wrist and placed her hand on his erection.

His penis was smaller than that of other men she’d been with. He pushed her hand down his pants to touch that disappointing bulge of flesh. Repulsed, she pulled back. He undid his belt in a hurry and exposed himself. It couldn’t be avoided. She witnessed its violent pink color thrusting from a mass of brown hair and knew he expected her to suck it. It was pointing at her, the color of an earthworm after the rain, with one white drop of pre-come glistening at its tip.

Feeling a little sick, she knelt before the writer. A twig snapped under her knee.

— Say it, he said, withholding it from her mouth. His testicles had given in to gravity. — I want to hear you say it.

He is the cliché of a lecherous man, she thought.

— Say it, he begged.

She did not say anything. She thought, Why should this be a story about a black woman kneeling before a white man in a muddy summer dress?

It was cold for August. His penis began to shrink into itself. She watched it become a snail.

— If you won’t say it, I will, he said, gripping her shoulders. — I love you, he lied.

It was a terrible word choice and they both knew it. The young woman pitied him now. She was outside her body, participating in the scene, but not in the first person. She wasn’t really there, except that there was a speck of something in her eye. A fleck of dust. She tugged at her eyelid.

He tucked away his penis. It had gone soft.

On the way back she held her elbows. She studied his back, in front of her. How many students had he brought into these woods?

— What kind of animal would you be? she asked, a little meanly. — A wolf?

— An eagle, he spat.

Yes, she thought. An eagle. That is the kind of vision you need to be a writer. It occurred to her that she had walked into some sort of story about the writer’s fear of getting old.

He steered her to a yellow cottage, one in a row of quaint yellow cottages. Two aspiring writers swung in a hammock, drinking bourbon from the bottle and examining the porch slats with great attention, as if to make sure they were straight.

— Do you know how ridiculous you look? the writer asked them.

— Come see, they slurred. — The spiders are being born!

The sun’s last light played off a cobweb insinuated in the porch railing. Spider

hatchlings glinted on the strands of the web, each of them tiny and translucent, with all eight legs perfectly formed. The young woman lowered her face in front of the web. It formed a lace curtain between her and the world she used to inhabit. Something had shifted. Someone on the other side would judge what she had done in the woods as bad. She could smell her own musky odor. It did not please or displease her. She noticed it, was all.

— Come, said the writer, pulling her to his room on the first floor.

One of the aspiring writers pronounced the word slut under her breath, but with perfect diction.

The writer carried the young woman over the threshold like a bride. — I’m not finished with you.

His bed was badly made. The untucked sheet hung at a diagonal beneath the light blue blanket. A cardigan hung limp on one of the bedposts. She noticed the geometry of little rosebuds on the wallpaper. She noticed the writer’s reading glasses on the bedside table next to a half eaten roll of antacid tablets, and that the window shade was not completely drawn.

A writer might easily spy him kissing her. She sensed he liked this and she wondered if she liked it too. Here was her chance to excuse herself from the seduction and simply leave. She could have said no. Instead she imagined the picture the two of them made on the other side of the window frame. Better to be a slut than to be boring, she thought. Better to be honest than to lie.

— Why did you choose me? she asked, re-braiding her hair.

— Because I like the way you see, he answered.

— And because you like the way I look.

— Yes.

— Because I’m black.

He traced her eyebrows with his thumbs. — Maybe, he admitted.

She put her palm on his chest. — Because I’m black.

The writer fingered her full lips. — Yes, he whispered.

— Am I really a good writer? she asked.

— You really are.

She lay down on the bed then, lifted her dress and told him to kiss her.

He noticed her musky odor. She smelled like the mason jar of filthy pennies he’d kept beneath his bed as a boy in Duluth, he thought. He catalogued this sentence in his mind as he kissed her inner thighs.

She closed her eyes and saw the spider. It was imprinted in her memory because of the thing she had done in the woods with the writer, and because of what she was about to do. The young woman would remember the spider’s swollen abdomen, the way she hung face downward in the complicated architecture of her web, and the bands, like a tigers’ stripes, on her elegant legs.

The dinner bell clanged outside the dining room at the Bread Loaf Inn.

She put her hand in the writer’s thinning hair. — What kind of spider was that? she asked. — Out on the porch?

He looked up at her and said, — An orb weaver.

Then he rose to stand between the V of her legs and pulled out his erection for the second time. It couldn’t be ignored. Just as a gun on the stage of a play must go off before the curtain closes, the woman knew she must put him in her mouth and satisfy his need to be adored. This need was not any more pitiful or less human than her own. She sighed and got on the floor.

The woman watched her reflection sucking the writer in the cloudy mirror above the antique dresser, his hands circling the stem of her neck. This is a story about an orb weaver, she thought. I am going to be a great writer.

— Do you want me to come, baby? he asked. He had heard that somewhere, he had said it before. He liked to say it. It worked for him.

She nodded, working her tongue over the short shaft of his cock.

He closed his eyes. — Do you want to drink my cum? he asked. He pushed against her soft palette, her molars, her uvula.

To stop herself from choking, she spoke to herself in the second person:

Writer! Don’t let the ‘I’ get in the way of your seeing. Your task is only this: open your eyes until you forget you have a throat. You are not you. You are an eagle writing the wind. What do you see? Down by the creek, the fox is washing his face. Out in the field of wasting hay the pit of the peach you ate is already reentering the earth. Who you were when you ate the peach doesn’t matter. What you are doing doesn’t matter, whether you want to or not, whether you kissed him or he kissed you, whether or not it is happening at all.

Far more enchanting is the orb weaver, poised like a diadem in the eye of her web, letting her spiderlings balloon away from her on strands of silk to land in the dark vegetation of Frost’s woods.  n°

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