Hekla

HEKLA

I see her first at a street corner, standing tall and straight, oblivious to the light rain. I use the rain, and her lack of an umbrella, to talk her into having drinks together. The girl calls herself Bee, her real name tucked away in its Nordic strangeness. Impromptu meetings are rare these days, and I think we're both charmed that we didn't first meet online. I choose a quiet Brazilian restaurant in the West Village where I go sometimes to eat dinner alone. It has dark wood tables, white walls, and tall windows that are always open to the elements, even on rainy April evenings. Bee is dressed like she anticipated being on a date, creamy white blouse with grey slacks, and red lipstick to make herself look older than her nineteen years (as for myself, I'm old enough such that the descriptor "promising" can no longer be applied). She is strikingly pretty, with ash blonde hair to her shoulders and large grey eyes, slim and soft in a way that only young women can be, but you should never compliment a pretty girl on her beauty. Instead I tell her I really like her voice, which is strong and sonorous but soft, so you have to lean in a bit to catch what she's saying.

The two of us walk to a leafy park after dinner, passing a Marlboro back and forth, and end up making out on the street.

************

We have our second date at Perry St, because I'm trying to impress her. The restaurant is upscale but somewhat empty, with a weird vibe like I'm in a David Lynch movie: white furniture accessorized with silent, beautifully ugly people in resplendent clothes. I tell her about my college and law school days. I also tell her I may be taking a job in London after the summer. She tells me it's hard for her to make female friends. She tells me people don't take her intellect seriously because she's pretty.

After dinner, I hail down a cab to take us back to my apartment. We have not spoken of sex, or even danced around it like new lovers sometimes do. In fact we had not even touched all evening. But it was on my mind, and I was sure that it was on hers -- the latter a surety of faith like transubstantiation, or the efficiency markets hypothesis.

It's raining again, and the storm clouds send occasional flashes of illumination across the New Jersey side of the Hudson River outside of my window. I turn the lights off in my bedroom and light a candle so we can see the storm more clearly. After a while in the silence, I slowly take her clothes off, spread her legs, and kneel down between them to taste her. I hear her sharp intake of breath when I flick her clit with my tongue. Her scent is sharp and tangy, her thighs are soft and fragrant, and she locks them around my head so that soon all I can hear is the tempo of my blood pounding in my head and the distant thunder of the gentle spring storm. In no time at all she shudders and announces her orgasm, sharply and clearly like a clarion. She cups my face and guides me up, then with a smooth movement of her hips and legs, turns herself over and straddles me. She looks at me, clear eyed now, and whispers something that I do not hear but nonetheless understand. She is lonely, at times desperately so, and wants to make love to an older boy whom she finds funny and kind and had no plans for her at all. I feel the weight and wetness of her settle on my bare cock. I look at her with a silent inquiry and she tells me softly and urgently that she is on birth control before sinking herself down fully, eyes and mouth wide open with that little shock every girl experiences when taking a man inside her for the first time. She raises and lowers herself rhythmically in a motion that immediately discloses to me both a vast lake of desire and a level of experience that can only be accumulated by girls her age through an unhealthy amount of recklessness and trauma.

I can only take so much of her measured, agonizingly tantalizing pace. Pulling her hair back sharply elicits a sharp moan from her, and I turn her soft blonde body around so that she is beneath me, my cock still embedded fully inside her. She looks at me with eyes wide in both lust and alarm, growing wider as she feels me thrusting into her with growing pace and urgency. She takes my hands from her breasts and places them around her throat. I tighten them and in turn feel her pussy tighten around my cock, already straining to not burst.

There comes a moment in passion where the merely ardent crosses to violent, and we both feel, and see, and hear that line being crossed, her slim pale legs trembling with each shock of penetration, her hands alternating between caressing my chest and pushing back futilely against it. Finally she manages a breath to cry out, in a voice small and young and frightened --

please don't cum inside me, please don't cum inside me

. A part of me wants to ignore her, a large part. And not just ignore her, but to contradict her, to enact a desecration as monstrous and consequential as the worst suffered by Lucretia. I pull out partially so that the head of my cock rests just inside her tender folds, and with one more smooth thrust, I cum in rhythmic bursts, syncopated to her own involuntary spasms of orgasm triggered by the feeling of my seed deluging what that small part of her had desperately tried to protect.

I'm still hard inside her after but eventually pull myself out. I see tears in her eyes, flowing rather attractively down her cheeks. She looks down and sees my cum running out of her. Casually but deliberately, I take her body and turn her over on her hands and knees, letting her feel my strength over her. I use my hands to spread her cheeks apart and take her again, not as virginally tight as the first time, but still snug and much wetter. Without having to face me, Bee is much more vocal in her pleasure, adding to the obscene sounds of our sex squelching with her wanton moans. I imagine her body reciting the lines of Persephone's letter:

you saw that the ichor that resides in me demanded its own throne

. Thusly I justify giving her body no rest that night, filling her over and over again, and Bee has neither the will nor power to resist my appetite for her, instinctively opening her legs to me when she feels me, half asleep, turning over on top of her to take her until the faint blue light of pre-dawn.

************

One evening I get into the city late. Bee is coming back from Connecticut on a late train as well, and we have dinner almost at midnight on a Monday at The Eddy. If you don't fall in love in that place under those conditions you're not human. Later in the night, we make love and Bee moves my hands to her neck, and I squeeze with my right hand until I see red flushing her face and down her chest. After, we lie together entwined, and I doze in and out of sleep listening to her steady breath and feeling her fingers tapping on my arm. The candle had extinguished itself now, and she starts speaking softly in the dark room during one of my dozing periods such that I wake up mid-sentence. Bee is telling me that she was violent raped when she was thirteen years old by the older brother of a friend during a sleepover. He tried to drug her but ended up drugging his own sister. Failing that, he locked her up in the room, attacked her, and in the process stabbed her in the leg with a pen knife. When morning came, Bee convinced him to let her out of the room, and took the train, bleeding, to the hospital. She does not tell her family. The guy killed himself a few months later. I hold her silently and echo the desolate emptiness in her voice.

************

Bee does not tell me her real name until weeks after we've met, perhaps anticipating my ineptitude. And she's right, because every time that I try to pronounce it, she laughs and corrects me, her fingers on my mouth to form the right shape. We try to play adults one night and go drinking at a wine bar in Meatpacking. The guy behind me keeps staring at Bee, and she's uncomfortable. I finally turn around and he, obviously drunk, turns his head in the other direction. We go to a hotel afterwards because why not. Bee puts on lingerie and, channeling the confidence that only heels and Agent Provocateur can provide, pushes me down on bed and flashes me a wicked grin. The head she's giving is heavenly, but I want her and we put a towel underneath us because she's on her period. I look down and can see bright scarlet winking every time I open her up. She wakes up once in the night screaming.

************

We make plans to see a play. Bee is running late from a babysitting gig for a friend. She arrives in a cute French sailor top and jeans with sneakers. We go up the elevator with a dozen other guests to the performance space, but the host forces Bee out on a floor by herself. The rest of the group gets out a couple of floors up, and I wander around the place lost beneath my mask, looking for a shock of blonde hair. Finally we see each other and hold hands for the rest of the night.

After the performance, we do a variety of drugs. On coke... out of this world sex. Kitchen counter, sofa, floor, terrifically unsafe sex. I snort lines on her tummy and we burst out laughing at our blatant kitsch. We're young, we're free, and she is like a dancer, fresh upon the field after a gentle summer storm. I envelope her and she in turn embraces me with the wild abandon of a pagan on solstice night. We finally go to bed when the sky starts to lighten. We sleep and for the first time Bee does not have night terrors.

************

One evening we take a walk around the West Village. It is the last time we will meet before I move to London, and she goes to Iceland for the rest of the summer. The twilight is perfect, casting a golden glow in Bee's curls and highlighting her cheekbones. We go back to her apartment. It's on an abnormally quiet block on the east side of Manhattan, opposite a small library and museum. There is a raised alcove past the living room with a white round Ikea table and two chairs. Large windows let in the light in the morning, and in the summer months one can open them to listen to the rustling leaves outside. She has us do an acting exercise there. I almost succeed, and she's ecstatic and kisses me. We're happy. She tells me she took three pregnancy tests last week and they were all positive. I tell her I will support her whatever happens.

We share another cigarette. She tells me she saw her best friend drown when she was sixteen. Preparing for bed, Bee starts having an anxiety attack. Pacing back and forth, her breath wheezing out of her like a kid with asthma, she tells me she understands if I never want to see her again after this. My heart is breaking and I go to her to hold her but she cannot bear to be touched. I smoke half a dozen cigarettes by her window while it passes.

We wake up in the pre-dawn light in her bed and wordlessly I part her legs with my hips and slide into her. She stares up at me wide eyed and lips parted, asking me if I liked her, if I really did like her. I should've told her I was falling in love with her but I don't. Instead I nod yes and she tells me she wants me to make her mine. She asks permission to come and I say no. I take her roughly because it may be the last time we're together and she's looking down at me going in and out of her, hypnotized. I put her hands on her clit and tell her to make herself come. She does violently and with her feet behind my butt I fill her to overflowing and we fall asleep again.

In the morning I bring back two iced chai from the Starbucks down the block and we sit across her white Ikea table. I ask her what she's going to do if she's pregnant. She says she might keep it because it will always be difficult for her to carry a baby to term, for health reasons. I'm surprised at how calm I felt, looking at her with the morning sunlight streaming dappled by the summer leaves outside her windows. She has never looked so radiant. She says there's no way she's pregnant though, despite the tests. I don't have the urge to confront her incredible denial and just nod.

I decide silently that I would keep the child if Bee does not want to raise her. I would go back to my home town, buy a quaint condo close to my elementary school, where there is a quiet seminary high upon a hill, proudly adorned with towers and flying buttresses, and where I used to go sledding in the icy Midwestern winters. And I would take my daughter sledding there as well.

Later in bed, Bee tells me she's not going to get clingy, but she wants to visit me in London at least once after I go. I say of course, visit anytime.

************

Iceland is a geological aberration, a tiny island jutting out from the volcanic depths of the North Atlantic. The whole island is a scene of conflict -- the mountains with the sky, the sea with the land, the sun with the clouds. It is easy to imagine the old Nordic gods being driven west from their birthplace by staid Christians and deciding to settle here as their playground, Odin walking along the icy slopes of Mount Hekla as it erupts, spewing fire and ash into the heavens and disrupting trans-Atlantic air travel for impatient business types.

I'm on a bus touring the Golden Circle at midnight, seeing the geological sites. It is deep summer and the sun only dips below the horizon for a few short minutes each day. I'm supposed to be visiting Bee, but she told me that she miscarried while I was still in New York, the blood still staining her mattress. Hours ago, we had stood huddled together on the balcony of her home in Reykjavik while she told me the news, the air chill despite the summer sun. I lit a cigarette, and I noticed her fingers trembling as she took the lit cigarette from me, inhaling deep and letting out a long cloud of smoke. My eyes never left her face but she did not look once in my direction. We smoked in silence and, once the cigarettes had run out, I left.

The bus takes the group to near the base of the volcano, where a hot sulfur geyser entertains thousands of tourists each year with its bubbling and eruptions. I close my eyes while waiting for the next eruption, and feel a slight trembling of the earth under my feet.