The white, chipped wooden double doors at the top of the stairs were ajar, providing a peek at what she was leading me to. I recognized the hall as an old hall. The halls found in members-only buildings, Shriners, Odd Fellows, or the odd group beginning with "The Fraternal Order of." They were usually big rooms on the top floor of discreet buildings rented in cash to low-budget weddings or high school dances. The wood floor would be worn by traffic, faded after generations of chairs and tables being moved across them. I expected to see paneled walls impregnated with the smell of stale cigarettes, pipe smoke, and beer. The room had seen endless bingo games, high school hearts broken, or worse, fulfilled.
This was not the bingo crowd.
The hard, fluorescent lights were off, leaving the room lit by the weak corridor light announcing our arrival. The obtrusive beam reached a short way into the room before being swallowed by its darkness. Strewn across the floors were bed-sized risers of different heights. Dropped across them were hundreds of Persian rugs. Every inch of the worn, tired floor was hidden from view. The different patterns of the rugs, varying from vibrant rose reds, turmeric oranges, and turquoise blues to deep chocolate browns, created a warm, sultry alien landscape that dipped and fell into the dark of the room.
Atop the risers, laying on the rugs, among ornate beaded pillows were naked and half-naked bodies. Light, caramel, brown, and dark skins. All deep into the presence of their single and multiple partners with them. Some intensely kissing their partners, one mouth, then another. Others were whispering, languidly caressing naked skin with the tips of perfectly manicured fingernails. There were couples, triples, and crowds.
No, not the bingo crowd.
The doors closed behind us, cutting off the light from the hall and leaving us in its belly. A string of cheap Christmas lights threaded between the risers, safely navigating Strina and me through the room without disturbing the many beds of the different inhabitants.
She wove unhesitatingly through the room. Her dress, its adornment of roses, blazed through the dark. The smoke was a cloying mix of cardamon, cinnamon, tobacco, and chocolate. It hung thick, almost liquid, in the air. I spotted one or two huka, their ornate, tentacled pipes pressed to a man's or woman's lips. The light embers from the shallow bowl holding the tobacco atop the ornate vase emitted a warm orange eye of flame. Other eyes peered at me through the dark as I passed, winking brightly, then dimming, hidden by the exhale of thick smoke from its pleasure seeker.
The perfume of the room filled my throat, almost choking me. Honey-rich and intoxicating. My eyes lifted to meet one of a passing bed's inhabitants. It was a woman with older, deep-set, dark, tired eyes pinched with crow's feet. Her face was intelligent, someone who would report to an international committee how the GDPs of the foreign country in question were impacting global imports and recommending embargoes against them. She looked like she was sleeping quietly and alone in her bed in a faraway palace. Her naked body, flawless coffee skin, splayed across the rug. Three manicured men attended to her. Their dark, thick hair was bound in tight, round buns atop their heads. They held her sides, waist, and legs with long, manicured beards and gold-tipped fingernails. One gently kissed the tips of her nipples, returning to cup and kiss her breasts with his lips wetly. Another lightly caressed her waist, pressing his face against her nave, the tips of her hips, then back down the delicate cleft to her tummy and navel. The third's head was bobbing up and down rapidly between her legs. Her tired eyes opened sleepily, looking at me as I passed.
I heard men groaning and panting together, uttering phrases that popped like firecrackers in their passion, sounds from deep in the room's darkness, a gasp choked off, a mouth muffled and moaning from being worked. An animal groan, a surprised cry, and then a blissful wail of encouragement.
The rhythmic chanting of Middle Eastern music dizzily rose and fell. The singer's voice pleaded and begged, making the room swirl, bent, and tip to one side and then another.
I walked carefully, picking where I stepped along the dim pinpoints of the Christmas-lit path taking extra care not to step on a hand or brush the top of a head. If I did, it didn't seem unreasonable I would be killed and my body to disappear. I had no doubt this crowd would kill me. In my life, I had never seen these people. They were far from any circle I traveled. From the bodies lounging, writhing together, fucking, topless, naked, none were overly thin or overly fat. Their dark bodies still were adorned with decorations of their day lives. Opulent, expensive watches, thick ornate bracelets, clutters of rings, fingernails tipped with glittering white or gold. Some bodies, amid the roots of arms and legs, were frosted with gold dust or encrusted in gold leaf. They had come to give in to their lusts, their unspoken, unproclaimed desires. Their humanity. Queens, CEOs, Royalty, the highest paid, and most inhibited during the day, here secretly, discreetly for pleasure meeting their station in life. Tomorrow, they would return to their palaces and return to changing worlds.
When I arrived at where Strina stood at the bar, focused on a simple mortar and pestle grinder, I began to understand her role. The room had been waiting for her. What she contributed began with what she was grinding to fine dust in that simple rock bowl.
But time slowed and thickened around me. Standing beside her, watching her hand wrapped around the simple rock tool, my head unconsciously, perhaps uncontrollably, rolled in slow, small circles.
The bar where she was working so intently once had a cheap plastic "beer" sign hung above a staircase of shelves littered with various bottles of bottom market brand alcohol. Now, tiny votive lights dotted the length of the bar extending a single wall of the room. They were among hundreds of small empty, round glasses that could hold no more than a few ounces of liquid. Attendants in all white, their heads covered with white scarves, hands in white gloves held in front of them, focused intently on Strina's progress.
The only other objects on the bar, besides the waiting glasses and candles, was an old wooden crate of white glass bottles - or glass bottles filled with white liquid. A withered, raisin of a man with a shockingly white mustache and white, starched shirt was popping the corks off each with a quick, precise movement.
Strina's one motion from her grinding was to glance from the stone bowl to the bottles, assessing and measuring the contents against the volume of bottles. Her hand moved in a slow, ceremonial circle. The heavy stone mortar made steady circles, grinding something the color of her red nails. Coming to a decision, she reached up to the collar of her dress and plucked another rose from the rose collar of her dress, leaving a space where she plucked the first a bit larger. It exposed a gentle, elegant neck. She pulled the petals apart, dropping them into the pestle, and then delicately scraped the tips of her fingers where the petals had left their color. She exchanged her focus from the methodical crushing and measuring to the number of bottles back to mixing in the pestle. I held on to the bar, not speaking to not disturb her but also to control the softly swaying of the room.
I had always liked being in control, but this night, from Kata taking me out for a drink, to getting in the cab with Strina, to intruding into this room where so many strangers were fucking, I gave up. I let it take me along. My way wasn't working. My wife had said so as well. In a moment of extreme bitterness, after months of exhaustion, trying to make it all work. That fight had been different, no prisoners this time, no feelings trying to be saved, no courtesy after bending and trying so hard between us. The frustration of joining two ends bubbled over. It was deemed impossible and now there was nothing to do but get angry at the precious time lost on a futile task. She screamed at how much she hated me. How disappointed she was in me. How they were finished. And I, at that moment, felt something close to relief and shame.
What had I brought to her over the short time we shared? Was it the same thing that led me here? That said yes to Kata? That was alone in my apartment every day after that moment? Would the man standing here have been at that argument? Or would he have prevented it? Would he even had married her in the first place? Whoever he was now, whatever was cracked, broken, and peeled away from the battles, I wanted to hold fast to it. I wanted to stay as I was because it led me to this ... fantastic place.
The music's reedy tendrils pulled at the pain of my memories, but they were softened by the hazy room, the absolute nakedness of it. I felt the tendrils twist and pry open pain, anger - rage contained by a tight fist over many years. I remembered another painful memory, my face turning unconsciously in disappointment. We had been out to dinner, the "dining dead." Sharing dinner and drinks under the false belief it was time and feelings being shared as well. Another half-hearted attempt was to add a glow to our emotional exhaustion. I was so tired, but I had created a mental list of "safe" topics we could talk about that wouldn't lead to fighting. Plate after plate, I crept out over the thin ice of our relationship to try and find something enjoyable. On the walk back to the car, I heaped layer after layer of compliments thinking enough would make me believe them. They piled so high, they tipped precariously atop one another, straining their height and under their weight. And then I said, "I don't know, I don't agree." It came out, the sincerity, probably from the wine. Presumably, the hope was she'd see me from what I was, stupid in parts, smart in others, fat, balding, loyal, steady, reliable, nonjudgemental, diligent. Not unhappy. Just content with my life.
