Tusk!

photograph by les roberts

 

A one act play with no dialogue.
Scene: A stall at a busy city flea market.
 

The moment she saw him, felt his eyes on her and looked up at him, she wanted to reach out for her husband.  It was like that moment when a great jetliner first roars and rushes down the runway for takeoff.  Exhilarating and frightening and right on the very brink of feeling out of control.
 

That was the moment when she would always grasp her husband’s hand and squeeze it, drawing from him that predictable answering squeeze.  He always smiled then, a condescending kind of smile, as if to say it’s all right dear it’s all perfectly normal but I will squeeze your silly little hand anyway.  If he only knew that she just needed something deadly dull to hold on to, not for any kind of comfort but to keep her from audibly gasping out her carnal excitement at the dangerous but irresistible thrill of that wild overlapping rush of noise and speed and mad vibration.  It was the only part of the whole flying experience that she liked, anticipated with quickened breaths and secretly curled toes.
 

And now here it was again, in the steady gaze of this strange man with his brown gypsy skin and his white teeth and his long dark hair still damp and dragged back and tied behind with a scrap of scarlet cloth.  Her toes curled and her breathing shifted.  But there was no dull hand to squeeze this time.
 

He moved his own hand across his body, slowly and theatrically like a stage illusionist, two fingers slowly unfurling, eyes holding her still, pinning her from across his display of beautiful hand‐made leather belts.  Her own fingers stiffened.  Oh please somebody hold my hand now.  Anybody.  Anybody perfectly normal.  But there was nobody.  Only this dark man, and he was as far from perfectly normal as could be, further than she had ever been and she knew it.
 

His extended fingers reached down to a portable stereo on an upturned wooden crate, trailed lazily across the row of black buttons on top.  Paused, his pupils widened a fraction like some predator creature that knows the decisive moment, and the fingers stabbed down.  Click. 

[faint sounds of conversation. 

An odd rushing noise. 

A voice suddenly exclaiming something unintelligible.]

His eyes narrowed.  Just wait, wait, wait, they directed her.
 

[12 seconds … 

Drums began, quickly swelled and grew. 

  A rhythm, a primitive repetition.]

His head nodded fractionally in time with it, seeming to transfer the rhythm to her through this terrifyingly frank eye contact.  She knew this music; Tusk by Fleetwood Mac.  A strange, twisting, formless, voodoo thing that rises and falls and writhes and won’t stay still.  She felt her stomach muscles and the muscles of her thighs begin to shift slightly and she realised that it was happening in time to the drums.  Her eyes widened, why are you doing this, there are other people all around, where are you taking me?

[29 seconds … 

the bizarre lyrics begin, over the pulse of the drums:
“Why don’t you ask him if he’s going to stay?  

Why don’t you ask him if he’s going away?”]

Oh God, her husband.  This man knew!  About the jetliner takeoffs and about all the rest of it too.  He knew!  How could he know?
 

His other hand slowly swept back the edge of the curtain screening the small space at the back of his stall.  His office?  A standing‐room‐only office. He nodded, just the smallest movement, but she felt as if he had flung back a long cape and bowed to her.

[50 seconds …

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? 

Why don’t you tell me who’s on the phone?”]

She went to him.  All in one breath she followed herself past the table with the belts, past his arm holding the curtain, and stepped to the side of the small space against the back of his tent.  He watched her all the way, never loosing her from the hold of his eyes, as if his gaze were some kind of insulating blanket, enfolding her and holding her in isolation.  His body remained still but his eyes moved with her, and when that movement was all used up,
his head turned at the same pace.  Then he turned, stepping inside the tiny secret space in one easy movement, the curtain falling closed behind him.  The drums, the rhythm, seemed to grow as he looked steadily at her and she felt her fingers curl at the armrests of an imaginary seat.
 

[1 minute 10 seconds … 

A bass line began in the music, 

a throbbing, teasing, fluttering thing, tugging at her, 

adding another layer of engagement, 

discarding another layer of resistance.]

She lifted forward to him, yet didn’t physically move, as if her internal organs were determined to escape the restraint of her skin.  The runway rushed past her, the vibrations became alarming, and she hung for a delicious instant at the edge of a heart‐stopping balance between flying and crashing.

[1 minute 22 seconds ... 

“Why don’t you ask him what’s going on?

Why don’t you ask him who’s the latest on his throne?”] 

                               

How did this man know?  Why did he ask her questions that terrified and thrilled her like this?  She did not want these questions asked, let alone answered. 

[1 minute 37 seconds …

“Don’t Say That You Love Me!”]

                                                         

Out of nowhere, this whispered shout.  Don’t say that you love me!  Of course not.  She could not love this man; a stranger she would never see again.  And yet he said that to her, or his music had:  Don’t say that you love me!  And she knew that she did.  Impossible, absurd, but in that moment she did love him.  

Her lips parted, a sharp inwards breath that made her tremble with the shock of it.  His hand brushed her thigh, his wrist lifting the folds of her layered skirt.  Then his fingers were on her skin, soft and shockingly high on her leg and she felt his touch radiate up into her, into her core.  Her toes curled inside her shoes and she involuntarily contracted, knowing that his nearby fingers must sense the movement within her.

 [1 minute 48 seconds …

“Just Tell Me That You Want Me!”]

                                                 

Her breath now gushed back out over her teeth, her eyes wide and desperate.  Oh God I do, I want you!  I do!  Forgive me, please forgive me, I do!

He smiled.  He heard!  She hadn’t spoken it (had she?) and yet he heard her.  He nodded slowly, giving his permission, releasing her from all her fears and restraints.  His fingers moved on her and he touched her, touched her warmth and moistness through the thin cotton.  Everything surged and the mad shuddering rush suddenly ceased.  The wheels left the ground and lifted, everything lifted into amazing flight.
 

Her chest rose with the first full breath she had taken for nearly two minutes, and his fingers drew her upwards to her toes.  She hung there, a ballerina relevé, and then slowly, nearly reluctantly, her body subsided onto his hand.  His fingers moved, found her and split her easily, and she eased herself down onto him. 

[1 minute 56 seconds …

“Tusk!”]

                                                                     

She was impaled, pinned like a butterfly to a board.  Her eyes closed and her head slumped forward, chin to her chest, shoulders dropped, her spine slightly hunched back and then arched hard forward, driving this thrill deeper.
 

[1 minute 59 seconds …

“Just Say That You Want Me!”]

                                                         

She hung there, a doll, a marionette in his sway.  She felt, heard him move and opened her eyes, looked at him.  He had used his free hand to loose the scarlet cloth and now his hair fell long and wild and dark onto his shoulders.  She felt a great shock surge through her, knowing that this was the most deeply erotic and intimate act she had ever seen, ever experienced.  As if he had ripped open his chest and showed her his beating heart.  She responded immediately with a chaos of savage contractions and tremors.
 

[2 minutes 11 seconds … 

The drums suddenly lost their insistent rhythm and 
descended into an unrestrained, formless urgency.]

                                  
She felt this new disconnected sound match her own internal decent into chaos.  She could not catch herself; her body abandoned itself to this madness, to this arrhythmic fluttering feeling.  Her eyelids closed and flickered half open again, and she saw only impressions of a world she had left; glimpses of his dark, swaying hair; his shoulder bare and wet where her desperately sucking mouth had pushed his shirt back to bite into him, marking his flesh.
 

She was aware that he had not come with her; she was in this place alone.  He was the conductor and also her instrument, but she, and only she, was the music.
 

[2 minutes 22 seconds …

The lost rhythm abruptly clicked back into place and reformed itself.]

                    

She matched herself again to the resurrected rhythms and returned to him.  Now she moved against his hand in repeating waves, like sets of breakers in the sea, arriving seven at a time.  He held, patient and attentive, as each successive set of her movements abated and was replaced by a lesser set.  And in this way, by way of these diminishing circles of passion, she gradually regained herself.  She became aware of the music again, rather than just the rhythm.  She heard for the first time brass instruments playing a triumphant fanfare, some musical salute to her journey and return, and she felt the familiar relief as the jetliner regained the earth with a gentle jolt, aligned itself square with the runway with a small sideways slew, and began to slow to a more bearable pace.
 

His hand moved away as she accepted her own full weight again, and she looked up at him.  He held her eyes, his own eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled for her, and then his fingers lifted and found his own mouth as he first tasted her and then toasted her with a small gesture as he lifted his moist fingers from his lips to in front of his eyes.  His free hand reached back and drew the curtain aside.
 

A woman looking at the leather belts glanced up briefly and then away again, disinterested.
 

[3 minutes 35 seconds … 

the music had repeated and faded with her, or she with it, 

but now it was gone into nothingness.]

                                         

She walked out past the curtain, past the display of belts, past the disinterested woman and into the passing throng of shoppers.  And she never looked back.  For she feared that if she did, he would be gone.  Or even worse, that he might not be gone.