A Glittering Chaos Read online

  It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the foot rubs; she loved the attention and she found whole thing wonderfully sensual and relaxing. She wondered how many men put that much effort into taking care of their wives and Hans was beyond skillful; he brought her to ecstasy.

  “It’s really quite orgasmic,” she had said to Ana, some months into her married life. “The way he does it, my whole body vibrates with pleasure.”

  Ana had looked skeptical and Melusine had dropped the subject, feeling disloyal to Hans for having said anything to Ana about it at all. Right from the start, the foot rubs were a private, almost sacred thing between them.

  Even Jonas had been taught not to disturb his parents when his father was rubbing his mother’s feet. As a toddler, and later a teenager, he had known to leave them be, with their dim lighting and their soft classical music; his mother’s feet in his father’s lap and her head resting on a cushion.

  Hans had forbade Melusine to have pedicures in any of the local nail bars. “You could catch all kinds of communicable diseases,” he’d said.

  So Melusine pedicured her own feet, becoming so artistically adept that she began to do Ana’s feet also.

  “If you ever give up your day job,” Ana joked, “I’ll be your most regular customer.”

  Melusine took to rubbing Ana’s feet and the look of bliss that crossed Ana’s face made her laugh.

  “Ha!” Melusine said. “You see! How good does this feel?”

  “It’s better than sex,” Ana said, “don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. Hans does this to you three times a week?”

  “Two at the very least, but usually three.”

  “Dear god,” Ana said. “The man is an angel.”

  Hans had won a convert.

  But as great as the foot rubs were, Melusine had, over the past few years, felt a growing disinterest and separation from the intimacy of the moment. She could no longer completely relax into a state of mellow happiness but mentally ran through a list of chores or contemplated a menu for a dinner party as she lay there with her eyes squeezed shut.

  And, these days, as soon as Hans was done, Melusine would leap up and resume the thread of her activities as if she had enjoyed a mild but quickly forgotten distraction.

  Lying in her bed in Las Vegas, she pulls the gold satin comforter off her feet, and examines them, recalling the great distance they’ve walked the previous day and she wonders how many calluses she’ll have by the end of the holiday. She does not care a whit.

  She feels sleepy and has a nap, then she goes out for a slice of pizza, excited by the prospect of the night ahead. She feels like a teenager getting ready for a party that would be banned by parents, if only they knew. She joins the crowd of women forcing their way into the nine p.m. show of The Apollo Boys.

  There are all kinds of women jostling to get in; every age, size, and ethnicity is accounted for. The women are all clutching large drinks and Melusine has hers, a long red bong-shaped container filled with vodka and orange juice. The women are dressed in a wide range of fashions from über-conservative to slut-maximized, and the make-up is thick and heavy.

  Melusine’s nostrils close, objecting to the many warring perfumes, not to mention the overpowering chemical stench of strong hair spray that fills the tiny corridor as the women file into the theatre. A woman’s yellow feather boa floats into Melusine’s drink and she plucks it out and wonders if the small corridor wouldn’t be considered a safety hazard in the event of a fire. The corridor finally leads them to the theatre door.

  Well, pseudo-theatre. Melusine’s not sure what she was expecting but this conference-like venue is not it. The cavernous room is filled with rows of tables that remind her of the cafeteria at university. She had imagined herself sitting in a curved velvet banquette, with privacy to enjoy the show. Instead, she has to squeeze into one empty seat in between two groups of women, the one group evidently celebrating a divorce, and thrusting bare ring fingers at the bachelorette crowd opposite. The bride of the party, resplendent in a frothy veil and tight white mini-skirt is shouting insults back to the divorcees that Melusine is grateful she cannot understand.

  She takes a sip from her giant-sized drink and hopes that the alcohol will help get her more into the swing of things. She has no idea whether it is the raucous screaming women or the banquet-of-plenty seating arrangements or perhaps it’s the harshness of the spotlights but she feels alone, bobbing in a sea of strangeness.

  The lights dim at that moment and the women’s screams build to a crescendoed frenzy of anticipation. Melusine had thought the decibel level had been extreme before!

  A cocky blonde master of ceremonies struts onstage and speaks quickly and incomprehensibly, eliciting further hysteria from the crowd. Melusine gathers that he has divided the room into two halves, pitting the two sides against one another in a shouting match.

  Hemmed in, she is trapped. She cannot leave even if she wants to.

  Just as Melusine is wondering if the show itself will ever get started, a disco beat sounds a throbbing bass and the first Apollo Boy runs out onto the stage. Melusine thinks he looks like he belongs on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel; his hair is long, brown and curly and he has a soulful gaze. In fact, he is quite unblinking as he faces the crowd. He gyrates his hips, his cutaway cowboy chaps emphasizing that he sports a generously endowed package.

  The women scream and whistle and pound the tables with their fists. The divorcees and the bachelorettes have declared a ceasefire and are united in their appreciation of the Spanish cowboy who has snapped off his vest and chaps and is straddling a chair; one foot on the chair back, the other on the seat. He tips the chair forward and swan dives from the stage onto the nearest table. He slides down the length of the table, scattering drinks as he clears his way. When he gets to the far end, he stands and gyrates his crotch, pulling his pale blue thong this way and that.

  Even from where she sits, Melusine can see that his buttocks are rock hard and jelly bean shiny. Women grab at him, clawing and reaching. The Apollo Boy, clearly more a man, never loses his smile, flashing his ultra-bright pearly whites as he twists this way and that. He makes his way back to the stage, bestowing hugs and kisses along the way. He bounces back up onto the stage and takes a bow next to the MC, and his chest is heaving with exertion. The women scream and pound their applause.

  Next up is a Michael Jackson impersonator who moonwalks and quick-steps. His socks are glaring patches of snowy whiteness against the backdrop of the dark stage.

  “Take it off, take it off,” the women chant, a soccer match war cry. Although Melusine has no understanding, she knows what they are saying.

  Soon stripped to his thong, Apollo Michael calls for a volunteer and a conservative woman in her fifties is hefted up to the stage, aided by the MC and her eager friends.

  She lies down on the stage floor, her long polyester frock seemingly incongruous and her expression perplexed, but she’s trying hard to look enthused. Then again, Melusine tells herself, this could be entirely her own projection of the woman’s reaction, maybe the woman’s having the time of her life. Because certainly, Melusine is not.

  Apollo Michael lowers himself splitsville close to the woman’s face, his crotch inches from her mouth. She lies supine, with her arms stiffly alongside her body; she’s a very still, very wide-eyed corpse. Melusine wonders what would happen if Apollo lost his balance and plopped downwards; would he smother the woman with his balls and penis? That would make for a story back at the woman’s workplace. Melusine’s mind is wandering; she is not concentrating. But the Apollo Boy does not fall, he stays like that, balanced and suspended for ages as the frenzy grows while all the time, the woman lies motionless.

  Apollo Michael finally elevates his legs into a handstand, flips backwards and stands, and he helps the woman to her feet. The woman is all smiles, clearly relieved that her part in the show is over. They hug and the woman is helped offstage to loud applause, clutching the free calendar that the MC has
given her as a prize for her endeavors.

  Melusine wonders if the next act will be more arousing. Because to this point, the boys, okay, men, have been more like sleazy gymnasts than erotic dancers. She takes a long swallow of her drink and wishes that she’d ordered two on the way in.

  The MC seems to be talking for ages. He’s gathered three women onstage: a stout well-endowed middle-aged woman, a skinny blonde in her twenties, and a plump black woman with neatly coiffed hair. There’s a lot of screaming from the crowd but Melusine has no idea as to what’s going on.

  The MC hands the microphone to the skinny blonde who startles Melusine by screeching out a high-pitched orgasm with her eyes closed and her lips close to fellating the microphone.

  She grins and hands the microphone to the black woman who responds with a groaning orgasm while she rubs her hands all over the MC’s body.

  The third woman’s orgasm is a series of oh gods that culminate in a piercing catlike yowl.

  The crowd is wild, pounding the tables, whistling and stamping their feet. The three women take their free calendars and are helped off the stage.

  Melusine finishes the last of her drink. She is about to get up and force her way to the door when the next act kicks in: a gigantic blonde man with a huge shaggy mop of hair struts centre stage. He has bigger shoulders than Melusine had imagined possible on a human and he flexes like a bat-winged bodybuilder. He immediately jumps off the stage and heads for Melusine’s table. She is glad she is seated at the very far end. Meanwhile the divorcees and the bachelorettes nearly have seizures of delight. The blonde hunk sashays and flexes his way down the length of the table, stopping a couple of feet away from Melusine.

  He is glistening and tanned; a man sculpted from butterscotch and steel. He drops to his knees and crawls forward on the table and Melusine is treated to an up close and personal view of his cleanly waxed butt crack. She can smell baby oil and antiperspirant and when he turns to face her, she sees that he is far from a boy and that the effort of his exertions are costing him dearly.

  She catches his eye for the briefest of seconds and is reminded of a caged lion she had seen at the zoo when Jonas was a boy. Big blonde Apollo makes his way back to the stage but not before Melusine sees the deep scratches across his thighs where the women have clawed at him.

  She has had enough.

  All of a sudden she can take it no longer and she pushes her chair back and shoves a pathway to the door. She fights through the screaming women and is relieved when she finally reaches the door and pulls it open.

  She stands outside the theatre door, her chest heaving, the whoops and yells muffled and distant behind her. Her heart is pounding hard and there’s a ringing in her ears. She tries to catch her breath and wonders if she’s having a panic attack although she’s never experienced one before.

  She feels disappointed and furious. The show was a rip-off, there was nothing sensual about it whatsoever, it had not even amounted to a cheap thrill; it was irritating and boring.

  She is wired and angry and she stalks off down the Strip, taking every girly card on offer, and again feeling that hot arousal. Why does she get aroused from the cards and not from the show? Once again she’s ashamed of herself. She’s a feminist, she’s always believed that, and yet here she is, feeling sexually aroused by women who are working in the sex trade, surely the most demeaning means of survival.

  Why am I aroused by them? Do I envy them? What could I possibly envy? Oh, I hate this, I hate feeling; it was better when I felt nothing at all.

  The crowd on the Strip grows bigger. Melusine is hungry and thirsty. She stops on a whim to buy a large drink in a big plastic bottle shaped like the Eiffel Tower, choosing it over a soccer ball, gallon jug, and gigantic bong.

  “Tequila or rum?” the bartender asks. She figures out his question and she points to the rum; she’ll have a pina colada. The man then says a whole lot of other things and Melusine just nods and pushes money at him. He hands her the change and the drink.

  The alcohol is raw and strong and she downs a good third of it without even pausing. There is ice cream mixed in it too and she thinks it’s all quite delicious, particularly the bits that are neat rum. Soon she cannot feel the pain in her feet from all her walking and the night-lights host multiple haloes and the whole world moves in a motion blur. She tells herself to take it easy with the drink but she doesn’t want to. She takes large sips and it is nearly all gone by the time she gets back to her hotel. She is quite drunk and has to concentrate on getting through the security gate.

  She leans on the wall beside the elevator, steadying herself.

  In her drunken confusion, she goes to the wrong floor. She stabs the key card into the door repeatedly, hating Hans for his prediction having come true. She cannot face going back down to the lobby and she curses Hans for not being in the room to help her. She is determined to make the card work, and she will not give up, cursing loudly in German, as if that might help.

  She is bent over the keyhole, her nose inches from the door handle when the door abruptly opens and a man looks down at her. “You’re not Hans,” she says stupidly, standing up awkwardly and leaning against the wall with one hand. To her surprise, the man answers her in German.

  “No, I’m not Hans. What room are you looking for?” he asks and his manner is kind.

  She tells him. He laughs and points to his room number. She is on the wrong floor. She is aware that she is disheveled and clutching her empty Eiffel Tower bottle.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, “and this time of night too.”

  The man tells her he doesn’t mind. She can see he’s looking at her appraisingly, and he is attractive, and for a moment she thinks about walking into his room and shedding her clothes in an act of brazen declaration.

  Then she thinks the only thing that would come of all of that, would be her falling asleep on his sofa. She straightens up and thanks the man again.

  “If you ever need a midnight friend to chat to,” he calls after her, grinning, “you know where to find me.”

  Melusine turns to him and smiles, grateful for the joke. She goes back to her room and wonders where Hans is and what he is up to. She considers the possibility of Hans being a secret gambler, which would explain his reluctance at her joining him on the trip but right now, she does not care about him and she is just glad to be alone.

  She has a long hot shower and climbs into bed naked, enjoying the feeling of the cool and silky sheets against her body. She thinks about giving Kurt the dildo another try but she cannot be bothered. She feels horribly sober and thinks it felt much nicer when the rum was potent in her blood. She decides she’ll have another pina colada for breakfast — she should have checked what time they start serving them.

  She lies in bed, thinking back to her teenage years when she would rush home from school while her parents were still at work, and soak for hours in a bubble bath and masturbate until she was wrinkled and the bath water was cold, and she was blissfully at peace. Boys had been far less interesting to her than her fantasies about abstract love and she had been content to harbor a crush on her beloved author and poet Ingeborg Bachmann, reading her work, memorizing her words and letting them be the voice of her longing.

  For some reason she could never explain to herself or dare approach with anyone, not even her best friend Ana, Melusine had always felt that she did not fit in. She did not fit among the unquestioning people who went from day to day seamlessly doing whatever was required of them while she stood to the side of her own life, a restless ghostlike voyeur, mimicking the actions of others; her movements fragments of seconds behind but faking things quickly enough so that no one ever saw the disparity.

  Melusine had wondered if her distanced view of life stemmed from being the only child of two elderly parents but when she was introduced to the works of Ingeborg Bachmann, esteemed post-war German-language poet and author, she realized it wasn’t that but that reasons didn’t matter anyway — the only thing th
at mattered was that she no longer felt alone. Ingeborg, with her dark Sylvia Plath-like observations, put voice to every flotsam anxiety; she was solidarity personified.

  It was as if Ingeborg had written for an audience of one; written love letters to Melusine by way of poetry and prose. Words that found ways to express the separation between her and the rest of the world, even though Ingeborg herself ultimately felt that she had failed words, and that words had failed her.

  Melusine carried Ingeborg’s books with her, merging her writer heroine with the unnamed protagonist in Malina, Ich, and melding the two into one über-friend who saw the foolishness of sex-crazed pimply school kids and the general meaninglessness of everything.

  Melusine was a virgin when she married Hans. She was twenty-three. It had been a matter of determined Catholic principle on her part; she had been a stalwart churchgoer because it was important to her mother, and Hans had encouraged her sexual abstinence, supporting her purity and purpose.

  On their wedding night, Hans had turned to her. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but I purchased this to help you, it being your first time.”

  ‘It’ was a tube of lubricating gel and she had been both insulted and relieved. “Thank you,” she had said, but he used too much and it was hard for her to feel anything other than the cool snake-like slithering of his narrow cock.

  And the sex did not change in tone, personality or modus operandi in the years that followed: Thursday nights, he would lean over to his nightstand, fish out the tube of jelly, lube her up and pump away in silence until he achieved orgasm. Melusine would lie there, unmoving, her eyes open and her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. When he was done, he would wipe himself off with a hand towel he had placed next to the bed, pull up his pajama bottoms and go to sleep while she would slip out of bed and go and wash up, hating the cold sticky gel and semen running down her legs.