They are the perfect couple. The couple which gets their weddings photographed in magazines, and all the people around the world look at them and wish for what they have. Their story is the continuation of every cheesy American teenage movie, the continuation you just do not see. They are the sweet country girl and the hard-working city boy. They are the ugly-but-with-potential artsy-fartsy girl and the school leading goal scorer. They are the sexy model couple; they come packaged and delivered to you in every commercial, every movie, every magazine, and now, in this story.
They’ve been together since they were 16, and six years have passed, neither of them looking at another person, finding the whole universe inside each other’s eyes. You’d think they’d have names like, Romeo and Juliet, Khalil and Dumma, Kays and Leila, Tristan and Iseult etc. They got engaged, they got married, their families rejoicing by their children’s perfect all-loving relationship, their light love, initiated like a well structured symphony, like old Arabic poetry, perfect meter and perfect rhyme. Their wedding was full of smiles and bright lights, full of water and cake and perfect order and timing: three hundred people were invited, three hundred people attended; all the food was eaten and no one felt the need for more; it started at 8 and was done at the stroke of midnight. The bride wore her ten-thousand dollar snow-white floor height, sleeveless, silk dress; the best hair and make-up designers ornamented her like Nefertiti. The groom wore his double-breasted shawl-collared tuxedo, a cotton shirt and a silk bow tie, all from Ralph Lauren, covering a muscle-tuned, all shaven body; his hair, made by a female hair designer, forming a pompadour Elvis Presley-rockabilly hairstyle.
The wedding ended, they entered the limousine while the three hundred attendees waved and threw rice and clapped and hugged each other. The perfect couple drank champagne on their way to their hotel suite and cuddled and kissed of soft kisses and drowned in each other’s love, black tinted glass veiled them from the outside world and the driver who was smoking and drinking red wine as he drove.
Their hotel suite smelled of red roses. Their bathroom smelled of Gardenia. They saw the heart-shaped bed with red covers and white sheets and they hugged each other and released themselves on the bed. They made love and fires of wild incantations sounded from their chests and pumped from their heart. The right amount of blood came out of the precious bride. They drank more champagne and made love once more, merging like hot wax in a lava lamp.
Their limousine driver died in a car crash after dropping them off at the hotel.
The ceremonial order of their lives went on after their honeymoon, after they moved in together into one home, after the husband defecated in the bathroom and the smell of his feces permeated throughout the whole house and even after the wife’s menstrual blood stained the sheets. They made love almost every night. They transformed themselves into twin fires dancing around each other. But heaven is never forever, and bliss is just a blue sky forming in the sleep of a spent storm.
One night, the husband came staggering drunk on wine. The wife did not know what to do. Her husband’s intoxicated breath revolted her. He was shouting and dancing and stripping. He held his wife and started getting excited. His wife felt his erection and tried to move away. His hands wrapped around her like the two serpents enveloping the staff of Hermes. They formed a Caduceus: his hands becoming serpents, his penis the staff, and she the winged bird, spreading her wings, trying to escape. She screamed and slapped him, and he kept smiling and moving his eye brows up and down. Completely naked, he started following her and laughing loudly, she was running away and weeping; he was Dionysus in pursuit of Amethystos. He called her name desperately after he tripped and fell on the ground. She came to him, like a loving wife, kissed him, and they made love, or did they?
The next morning they woke up, both on the bed, his wife’s feet facing his head; they slept in a 69 position, hardly aware of it when they slept, wildly aware of it when they woke up. They were both embarrassed, both felt estranged from their seemingly animalistic position. Did it happen? They looked at each other not daring to ask the question. The husband went to work and the wife went to her mother’s house, both did not speak to each other, both in a hurry to get away from each other.
That night, they had their first fight and for the first time they did not sleep with each other. The fires were not dancing with each other anymore, but fighting each other. They both felt like they were undergoing surgery without anesthesia. The pain of their apparent estrangement from one another created a gap between them, and they only saw this gap after the tightly formed circle of their relationship reverberated as a result of the husband’s intoxicated shouts. The husband saw no solution and neither did the wife. They sat together but apart in the living room, watching a cheesy American movie which gave them a retrospective look at what they once were. Both were disgusted by the dreamy suggestion of the movie that love can succeed the way it is shown. Both were angry.
They exchanged looks that blamed the other, and they both understood them. Magazines on the dinner table showed photos of their wedding, a photo of them smiling at each other, a light in between their faces showing their jovial features, blurring out all the other extravagant faces. But the husband could not look at it anymore, it was a faded dream, he thought, this is not real, none of what he felt was real, it was all how it was supposed to be, how the world wanted them to be. The wife looked in dismay at the memories of the wedding, at her mother’s clown-smile and her father’s proud look.
Their silence could go on no longer, and so they initiated a conversation. They asked each other questions about their day. She asked about his job, he asked about her girlfriend, she asked about the condition of the car, he asked about her daily chores. But beneath all these question, in the tone of their voice, was the important one: What do we do now?
The interrogation continued monotonously, like a game show, both answering correctly, both asking correctly, until, until the wife mentioned the wine. He told her that his boss invited him to a dinner with his buddies; that they went to a pub afterwards; that his boss ordered a hundred-dollar bottle of imported Bacchus wine. He could not refuse the gesture. She rolled her eyes and looked at the ground in disappointment. He looked at the ground in shame. They saw their shadows meet at the head and then they looked at each other, she was angry with disappointment, he was angry with shame. They came towards each other and they slapped each other. She smiled and he smiled. He laughed and she started running away laughing as well. But they knew that their act would be incomplete. They hurried down, went to the nearest liquor store and bought two bottles of red wine. They drank them and they fucked. They drank more and fucked a second time. She no longer thought of her mother and her father; he did not think of how they were supposed to be; they did not think of the wedding and all the distant memories. This is how they are. They were supposed to be making love, but they were fucking, she was drinking wine from the grail which is his mouth, he was pouring wine all over her body, making her white marble skin turn to purple crystals. He fingered her and she played him like a rusty trombone. From anal-strawberry-shakes to S&M fetishes, every night, they indulged in each other’s bodies more severely, the twin fire burning all coyness and all order, squeezing vines and blowing flutes, dancing madly upwards, enjoying their orgiastic existence in an exuberant manner, their inflamed bodies became moving, living statues of their own creation. With every fuck, every night, their love will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction in Dionysian ecstasy.
His name is Denis. Her name is Arianne.
No comments:
Post a Comment