She is lean and compact and sinewy in a way that some men wouldn't fancy because her hips are narrow and her breasts are small, barely there, but to me she looks like a puma, a wild thing that suggests power and movement even when she is standing still, a cat with skin the color of cinnamon and a wavy black mane and the smallness to dart out from under the grasp of any hunter, she has a kind of lithe athleticism, she is latent energy straining to become kinetic and obliterate the senses of anyone foolish enough to look directly into her eyes, she would melt them where they stood or suffocate them by taking away their breath like she takes mine away for that instant when she takes off her clothes and my heart is in my mouth and I know true and perfect desire. Had you seen her you would know, but you would have to have seen her, because the photographs of her that exist are such pale representations, like a sun-bleached Polaroid viewed through a dirty window in the failing light of dusk, they are nothing like she is in life and they are more than enough for most but not for me, because I am right there when she takes off her clothes to play, and I am changed by being there, I am more and I am less than before because I see so much and lose so much more in seeing.
And there is another time I see her, when we are both on a beach and she is lounging naked in a hammock and I am watching her from a rattan chair on the veranda, I cannot stop watching, because I have never seen skin that undulates like the grain of polished mahogany, skin that is the color of mahogany as well, it doesn't make sense, because she has a man and he is not here, I have my life and it is not here, either, but dreams are like that, aren't they, and then she is sliding out of the hammock and moving toward the jungle beyond the edge of the grounds and I am following her, but too slowly, she is running because she has to run, someone as lissome as she must be in motion, and I cannot keep up, I stumble and pant after her dragging my clumsy, thick limbs that will not obey, and she is moving with such agility that she seems to barely skim the ground, she is not just in the jungle now but of the jungle, and I am rooted to the earth, sucked at by mud and clutched at by creeping vines that do not want me to reach her, and she recedes from view, and as I lose sight of her I know.
The terror that leaves you lost and looking for a sign, a clue that tells you what direction to go, because you are upended, your sense of self is stripped from you and you no longer know where you begin and where you end, every moment is compressed into the present, and the present moment is infinite, everything happens at once and lasts forever, this is what occurs when the fear that you have compacted within your guts becomes irreducible, it can contract no more and you explode outward into a million fragments, atomized as it were, torn apart, sure of nothing anymore except that.
The artist has been hired by her man to paint her portrait, to domesticate the feral with oils and pigment and cage her in light and shadow, when she holds the finished work she is shocked to see that the painter has not painted her features and he has not painted the light, he has painted the agony and confusion that burn in his chest and pound in his head when he looks at her, but when she looks up from the portrait he is gone, hurrying down the front steps and lunging into the passing crowd in an effort to disappear because he has revealed himself, he has said too much, the old fool, he cannot bear to receive her awkward thanks laced with pity, and so he gathers his shame about him and flees, because the only thing worse than being a fool is being a coward and he is both, so he disappears into the multitude and into the fathomless depths of his desire and mortification, and he—I—learn once again the lesson that must be re-learned every minute of every hour of every day: there is no beauty without pain.
