There was no visible sign on the outside of the Angel Tip Nails salon at the mall. It was just another steel number in a row on the endless concrete one-story building. The place looked slightly sinister because of the dark glass front window with drawn blinds, and the even darker glass door, but Celina had been unable to resist the impulse to open it one day and step through. Inside the smell was overpowering; it was like being hit by a chemical wave. Running the length of the room, on either side, were rows of giant white lounge chairs with padded, drooping vinyl armrests. From sets of controls women adjusted the recline angle, the auto massage, and the temperature of the water jetting into foot basins at the bottoms of the chairs. Small Korean women in purple polyester aprons rolled across the linoleum floor on stools only inches off the ground. They moved quickly from one set of feet to the next without stopping; rolling and rubbing, washing, scraping, and polishing toes.
Celina hurried past them to the waxing cubicles at the back. Although their walls did not reach to the height of the main ceiling, they managed to hold back some of the smell. Her waxer was a woman whose name tag read 'Lisa.' Celina hinted once that she would like to call her by her Korean name, but Lisa stared blankly at her, and when Celina laughed, Lisa turned sharply without answering. During their first session Celina learned that Lisa's son was going on a class trip to Washington. He would see the White House and meet senators and congressmen. She spoke excitedly, as if her son had organized the trip himself. On her next visit to the salon Celina asked about her son, hoping to hear details.
"You have good memory," was all Lisa said.
Celina noticed Lisa's smooth and hairless arms and asked if she did her own waxing. Lisa looked surprised, even indignant. She explained that Koreans had almost no body hair.
"We eat very spicy food," she said proudly.
"And that makes sure you don't have any body hair?” Celina asked in disbelief.
"Yes! Yes!" Lisa nearly shouted at her. "No body hair!" and slapped her own arm.
Celina was deeply ashamed of the hair on her body. She had been teased at school and the horror had never left her. When her arm hair or leg hair grew too long she felt dirty and humiliated still. She had panicked as a girl if she wasn't able to cover her arms with long sleeves, or her legs with knee socks. She never understood why she had dark hair growing in places where other girls had none at all.
A year after her husband's death there were still workmen at her house. Even without him it was a work in progress. In the mornings she lay in bed, eyes shut and curtains drawn, listening to the music their voices made, as the rhythms and cadences of their accents intersected. The men were re-shingling exterior walls. The patter of their pounding and pausing moved closer to her bedroom every day. As if they were creating a melody line out of strokes and taps and ringing metal that she could feel piercing into her from their everyday life. Once, they startled her awake with their chatter right outside her window. There was an Irishman; a Russian, she supposed, because his name was Boris; and a South or Central American - she tried to be accurate in these things - anyway a hispanic accent. They spoke about fishing and then of tile deliveries that had almost broken their backs. When they laughed she was moved. They were that close, nothing separating her from them but an artificial geometry, made of wood and plaster.
It was possible that these were the same men who had built the house ten years earlier, who had looked at her the way men do when a younger woman is with an older man. During her quiet inspections of their progress she tried to steady her swaying hips. She felt their stares from across the boards they planed, their thick glances through dusted goggles, and their sideways grimaces at the precise angle of the cuts on their saws. They watched as her pale hands slid up unfinished railings, as her feet moved through the plaster and saw dust, and her heels wavered on the lips of steps. She wondered if she would ever be able to invent a self that was neither female nor male, a self oblivious to their glances.
She suspected she had a part in it, that some piece of her wanted them to build her into their fantasies, and cement her, block by block, into the mistress of this house. Now she was still a young enough widow to start again, capable of slipping through the small cracks in her habitual self and taking a chance if one presented itself. But as a widow now alone in a house with five bedrooms the distance between solitude and abandon looked impassable. She tried to imagine herself the kind woman who met each of these men in turn, and could pull them into pantries and closets with her. Could she take each by the hand into a different bedroom on a different day, and at their climax, make them cry out in their mother tongues?
In the waxing room Lisa prepared a padded table with a fresh sheet of long white paper. She heated transparent amber cakes of wax in little stew pots with temperature gauges. After Celina laid down on the crackling paper Lisa used a wooden tongue depressor to spread the molten wax across her skin, quickly and rhythmically spreading, and dripping, then tapping the edge of the pot, and scraping her legs with a hiss. She ripped pieces of heavy cotton into strips, smoothed them down firmly over the sticky wax, and pulled them away against the direction of the hair growth, ripping it from the follicles in one brisk stroke.
Her calves were done first, then her thighs, and her bikini line was always waxed last. With her eyes closed Celina envisioned the entire transaction as a kind of fractured embrace broken up by small bursts of violence as Lisa curled herself around Celina to do her job. To her the waxing process was cruel and beautiful. She honestly never felt much of the pain that others complained of. The tearing of her hair was savage enough to satisfy her shame, but soothing as well. Lisa's deliberate movements, the pressure of her hands, the passing of her breath over Celina's skin were enough to lull her almost into sleep. Obviously there was something a little bit wrong with her.
When it was time for the bikini wax Lisa wrapped one of Celina’s legs all the way behind her neck and Celina laughed at the absurdity of her situation. Lisa didn’t laugh. Now she paused before she applied the wax to blow on the wooden applicator and cool the wax before drawing it gingerly along the thin strip of tender skin just outside of Celina's vagina.
Lisa balanced herself on top of her, with the weight of her torso against the back of Celina's thigh. Celina made sure to keep her eyes closed as Lisa exhaled in long hisses through her nostrils. The spices from her lunch filled the close space between them and she could almost taste the garlic emanating from Lisa's breath and skin. They both held their breathing shallow and were close enough to faintly feel the other's pulse. Then she felt tentative brushes against her exposed parts as Lisa leaned back and forth between the wax bowls and the cotton strips. Celina felt tingles when their skin met, and she wondered whether her goose bumps betrayed her thirst for touch.
In these tender places after she ripped the cotton strip away, Lisa laid her free hand immediately against the new bald area to ease the pain. Today she rested her hand with more pressure than usual, and longer than usual Celina thought. Her touch ignited something bigger, a streak of pure silver that pierced her, and a molten plume which wound its way up her spine. Celina withstood this intense shock of pleasure, willing herself to contain it.
In her everyday life she didn't miss skin-to-skin contact. She forgot about it altogether until moments like these, when an abstract contact reminded her body of deeper things. Might she become one of those lonely women who call male masseuses on sleepless nights? She reminded herself that she had never been lonely in her life. She didn't have the vaguest idea what people were talking about when they asked her if she was lonely. She suspected 'lonely' of being one of those words that people used to stand in for any number of things that they didn't want to discuss. Of course there were times when Celina felt that she had become fractured, untethered, and might float away, but this feeling had been familiar for as long as she could remember, and didn't alarm her.
Celina was startled by a sharp slap on the thigh - the waxing was finished. She sat up slowly, running her hands along her newly slippery legs. She marveled at the transformation, at her smooth, pink, hairless skin. As evidence of her powers Lisa held up the heavy piece of cotton that was impressed with a long smear of yellowish wax and the dark hair which drew the geometry of the curve of her most inner thigh. Lisa only held up the pieces of her most intimate parts to show her, like an accusation, or like some strange Rorschach card. As if to accuse her by saying: see what I found?
As she dressed she watched Lisa move in an institutional way, removing all traces of her. The soiled paper was crumpled and thrown away. She removed the sticky wax from her fingers with a cloth, in little jabbing motions. Lisa worked quickly with her head down, her bifocals balanced on the bridge of her nose, the chain dangling around her neck. Lisa looked as she always did: her black eyes hard, her flat lips set.
Outside the salon on the pavement Celina turned back. The afternoon streaked faint patterns of sunlight and shadow through the blinds onto Lisa's face behind the high front counter. She thought it was a noncommittal face, exasperatingly so. It wasn't fluid. There were only two expressions that Celina could recall. By the time she reached her car, and the chemical taste re-emerged from the back of her throat, she reprimanded herself. Why did she assume that a Korean woman, raising a boy alone, working six days a week in a salon filled with acrid fumes should be expected to show Celina any more than a couple of expressions? There must be a place where Lisa laughed, surrounded by people she knew, a place where she danced even.
On her next visit Celina made sure to put on underwear, and a bra underneath a her skirt and blouse. She even wore the ruby earrings her husband had given her. Soon after undressing and lying back onto the table, she felt a light touch on both her ears and she opened her eyes. Lisa held the red stones up on the tips of her fingers, and then let them fall back to dangle off Celina's lobes. Celina slid the gold loops out of the small holes in her ears, and handed them quickly to Lisa, who placed them on a shelf.
"Beautiful things," Lisa said.
Lisa slapped her here and there, as usual, to indicate in which direction she was to turn on the table. In the middle of the session Celina felt a shiver as the back of Lisa's hand brushed lightly against the front of her underwear. And then there was another brush with her arm, done very delicately, but she thought deliberately. Celina winced at the pleasure. She wasn't sure Lisa had seen it, but there was a heavy pause.
"Too hot?" Lisa barked.
Celina opened her eyes and looked at her blankly. Finally understanding that she was talking about the wax, she blurted out, "No!"
“Do you do massage?" Celina finally managed to say, but was sorry the second after she said it.
"They do!" Lisa gestured to the rest of the salon. "Sometimes special foot massage—extra—you get deluxe pedicure for that."
"I've never had a pedicure," Celina said quietly.
"No!" Lisa stopped, mock-gasped, with her eyebrows up, and her mouth shaped into a dark open 'O'. She inspected Celina's feet with a soft dismissive touch, letting each foot drop after she had peered intently at its toes.
"I’m doing for you!" Lisa exclaimed.
When her waxing was finished, Celina waited patiently in the back of the salon. She looked down the rows of pedicure chairs, and it happened again; suddenly she was a separate thing among the rest. An observer in the midst of a loud and frantic business, taken seriously by all involved. Either you were the observed or the observer her husband had said. He asked her if she could see that there were no in-betweens, no merging except for brief moments. And even then each turned the rest of the world into their backdrop or their audience, depending on their temperament. Each was separate in the midst of others. She had been young enough to agree with him then, to want to please him. And she had asked him the same question she asked herself now: Was it always so?
Lisa's temperament was colder among the others in the main room. She pointed and nodded to Celina where to go and sit. When Celina misunderstood, she only gestured and nodded more aggressively, like a mother at the end of her patience with a child. When Celina was settled into a large white console, a young woman squatted at the base, and lifted her feet into the foot bath. When Celina realized that Lisa had turned her over to someone else, she blushed hotly with shame she hadn't known she could feel.
A chemical blue liquid rose slowly in the basin, warming Celina's feet and ankles. The jets produced a white soapy froth on top. One at a time she lifted Celina's feet out of the water and rubbed them roughly until they were pink. She pounded them with little plastic, accordion-like hammers, which squeaked when they hit Celina's skin. The girl scraped Celina's calluses down with what looked like a nutmeg grater, then pumiced the hard skin with a porous stone. She cut her toenails, and pushed the cuticles back using a special wooden tool with a sharp, flat end. Finally she polished her toes with a pearly purple that Celina picked from hundreds of varnishes on the wall.
All of this was executed while her pedicurist spoke Korean over her shoulder with her colleagues. In the ongoing conversation the women shouted, and sometimes turned their heads in order to be heard over the music, the hum of machines, and the whirl of the room. Their purple-aproned bodies moved in graceful obedience, while their other selves maintained a world of talk and society. ‘An island among us' Celina thought.
The other customers sat trance-like on their thrones, ignoring the women who waited on them. Perhaps they didn't recognize the wonders occurring below them; the agility of the women working on their feet, their ability to be two places at once, perform two functions, speak two languages, and all of this at the speed of an assembly line. Celina could not tell whether any of them were experiencing silently the pleasure she had felt under Lisa's hands.
At the front counter where Celina paid her bill, Lisa did look up and into her eyes briefly when she accepted her tip, and nodded nodded down into a soft bow. Outside, Celina leaned against a cool cement pillar in the shade of the overhang. She couldn't catch her breath. Her lungs smarted from the salon fumes in the damp heat. She dropped her bags to the ground and rolled her back flat against the concrete. Before she knew it something happened which she had always dreaded.
When she opened her eyes she was lying on her back, and Lisa was standing over her with a strange smile that Celina thought looked stuck onto her mouth. The warm cement underneath her was calming. The woman in the dark suit, who seemed to run the salon, kneeled beside her and made little slapping sounds with the back of her hand against Celina's cheek. She looked up at them and couldn't help smiling. She felt so good; she really felt quite comfortable exactly where she was.
The women sat Celina up on the sidewalk and patted her head with moist, cold towels. They touched her arms and stroked her hair, as though they were girls whispering together in a schoolyard. The proprietress put Celina's straw sunhat on her own head, and grinned strangely back at her. Although she felt perfectly all right, and told them so, the two women each took an elbow and lifted her up and walked her slowly around the building to a back door. Their fear was evident to Celina as they guided her gingerly down a set of iron stairs to the basement level of the building. Lisa's backless shoes smacked loudly against the metal, announcing their entrance.
Below the salon was another world. Lisa had said that they all lived in 'The city', and Celina had assumed that meant one of the outer boroughs. But now Celina wasn't so sure they didn't all live in the dim basement below. Florescent ceiling fixtures flickered in an unknown code. They sat Celina in the foyer as girls came and went, in and out of rooms. She heard doors opening and closing, and the sound of running showers. There were men too. A group of them squatted comfortably on their haunches, eating steaming soup from huge plastic bowls. This smell mingled with the nauseating odor of a strong disinfectant.
Lisa led Celina by the arm down a long hall. In the room at the end, the lights had been lowered, incense lit, and a massage table prepared with fresh paper. Lisa gestured for Celina to get onto the table and lie down, bowing her head in jerky movements meaning 'Please,' Celina gathered. Before leaving, Lisa stood framed in the doorway, her palms together against her cheek, her eyes closed, her head to one side - the universal sign for sleep. She closed the door behind her, and left Celina in the dark.
A relationship was built from the ground up her husband had told her when they were newlyweds. From the ground up, just like a house. He took her often to the building site to watch the progress of their new home. Celina hadn't asked him for one. The fact that she didn't have a home as a child wounded him more than her. She thought he must have seen a vast well of absence in her, like a dark, silky pool that he could dip into endlessly for comfort. He had stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and treated her softly, as though her past was a thing that could be alleviated by bricks, carved moldings, and precious fruit-bearing trees. When the ground had thawed in early March the bulldozers rumbled onto the crest of their hill. They dug the stumps of felled trees, whose roots were as big as their branches when they were finally pulled from their grasp in the earth. Footings were laid for the foundation and cement was poured. It roared out of the giant turning tube in a luxurious pudding of gray froth.
In her mirror the next morning something was different, but Celina couldn't figure out exactly what. While she was dressing she realized that her camisole didn't catch when she pulled it over her head. Celina felt for her earrings, which were gone. Fear ran through her. A small hot coil in her chest began to glow and spread down her spine, through her navel, finding its true home in her groin. It was indistinguishable from the feeling she got from Lisa's touch.
As she drove back to the salon she smiled at her reflection in the car mirrors. Her excitement was irrepressible. She locked the car and her hand trembled on the automatic button. She pushed the salon's glass door open with no hesitation, but felt her legs shake with anticipation as she sat down. She waited in the soft, low leather couch by the cash register, and watched the salon's bustle of activity with pleasure. She located Lisa half way down the line of manicure tables. The way her strong brown arms pushed her tight sleeves up to her elbows, her straight proud back and her sullen expression, her way of rising, her way of walking; it all interested Celina very much. Eventually Lisa stood, woodenly, and walked toward the front desk. If there was a precise moment when she realized that Celina was watching her, Lisa showed nothing of it in her face. When Celina passed the desk and approached Lisa within a few feet of her station, she could see the rubies dangling from Lisa's ears like dollops of blood against her smooth neck. Again a dark pleasure rose inside of her, a terror that incited her and grew. Celina flushed. She apologized for fainting the day before. She stood and rummaged through her purse to avoid Lisa's steady eyes. When she asked how much a massage would be, Lisa shot a quick look at the manageress in the suit, who pointed to a chart behind a Plexiglas frame screwed to the wall.
"You want full massage?" Lisa asked with her eyebrows up.
"I don't know..." Celina's voice trailed off, her eyes trying to make sense of the chart.
"Full massage—seventy-five dollars," Lisa said. Her mouth stayed open in mock incredulity, as though warning her customer about the excessive cost of this unnecessary procedure. One half hour was the amount of time; they informed her, no special techniques, only hands and arms, no feet and no stretching. Lisa could not accommodate her until four o'clock, but Celina felt she was lying. She merely glanced at the appointment book and then laid her hand over it when Celina looked down.
The earrings had been given to her by her late husband. They were set with large teardrop rubies. They were simple; that's what she liked about them. If they had been made of red glass they would have been just as fine, finer maybe. They didn't draw attention toward themselves, but rather to the wearer's face; once Celina's and now to Lisa's. They were just small drops of color hanging below each ear, but they lent an absolute air of royalty to Lisa's face.
To have the earrings taken from her wasn't especially disturbing; other than the value, she had never felt this sort of thing to be personal. As a girl she had stolen, small things mostly—nail polish, earrings, candy bars. This situation could be explained by a cross cultural something or other, which was very complicated, she remembered, from her trip to Japan, where if you looked at a thing it was given to you, and if you refused, it was very badly understood. There were people who didn't believe in property, to whom thievery was an unknown concept. Then others, fanatical Americans, where everything was under lock and key, making even leaving the house so complicated that it was exhausting. The problem, though, was that the earrings had been in her husband's family for generations, buried under a bank of the James River and dug up after the Civil War.
At four o'clock Lisa rose from her position behind the front desk. She motioned with her arm and Celina followed her through the salon to the back. When she opened the door to the waxing room Celina stopped.
"Here?" Celina asked.
"What you want?" Lisa asked coldly.
"No—I—..." Celina stumbled.
"You want downstairs?" Lisa asked, hands on hips.
Celina wondered whether she would cross a line if she said yes, if 'downstairs' was where everything happened that couldn't be mentioned. Celina said nothing, hoping the moment would pass. She stepped in and Lisa closed the door behind her.
"You can take clothes off," Lisa said, handing her a stiff white towel and leaving the room. Celina removed everything but her underwear and climbed onto the cold, padded table. She laid the towel over her front and shivered under the florescent light. When Lisa re-entered the room Celina saw that she no longer wore the earrings. A flash of excitement bolted through Celina's body, and she tried to keep her teeth from chattering.
Lisa motioned with her hands and Celina turned onto her stomach, the back of her body exposed and waiting. She heard the sounds of tissues being pulled out of a box and Lisa's hands rubbing together. She heard the squirt of a bottle releasing itself not a second before she felt the cold shock of the liquid snaking up her spine.
Lisa's hands warmed the liquid as she moved them over the contours of Celina's body, alternating the pressure and texture of her touch, working the tension down from the neck and shoulders, through Celina's back, buttocks and thighs, out of her calves and even the soles of her feet. Lisa turned Celina onto her back and placed the towel carefully over her middle while she continued working Celina's skin with the rolling pressure of her hands until her shuddering was replaced with a warm, fluid essence. When Lisa rolled Celina over again onto her stomach, she began to pound lightly on Celina's back, thighs, buttocks, and calves with the sides of her hands and then in a harder motion with her fists. Celina's body produced a deep hum, as if she were hollow. The sound reverberated faster and faster until it rang into her bones. When Lisa slowed to a near stop, she did something sudden, reaching under Celina's towel, between her legs, and grabbed Celina with her right hand. Even as Celina clamped her legs together, Lisa kept her hold on her, tightening the grip. Then, just as suddenly, she relaxed her squeeze, and as Celina unclamped her legs, the hand slid away. There was a heavy silence as Celina sat up and pulled the towel around her. Without wanting to, she looked up and met Lisa's eyes.
"Half hour," Lisa said, and turned to wipe her hands.
Celina thought she might ask Lisa something, or demand something, or offer her another bit of instigation, but Lisa had left the room and closed the door behind her.
At home that night Celina studied herself in the mirror, trying to untangle what might be seen in her through another's eyes. She shifted her body from side to side, letting her hair fall over the edges of her pale and somehow unformed face. She let the straps of her nightgown fall over her small shoulders. What did Lisa see? What must Celina look like to her, lying in her different prone positions, one leg or the other suspended in the air? How could a stranger's touch produce the same sensations in her as her husband had in the first years of their marriage? Where, in the architecture of her body, did this feeling originate?
Her husband had never touched her roughly, or spoken harshly to her. He had certainly never hit her. His touch had grown so familiar over time that it was almost indistinguishable from her own. In the end it had lost the power to surprise her. She had felt undone by his touch in the first years of their marriage—a brush of his arm or lip could raise gooseflesh over her entire body, which surprised her. There had been little on the surface of either person to indicate they held such an ability to lose themselves inside each other, to untie themselves in the other's presence. She never turned her husband down, not because of some agreement, but because she was ready for him the moment they met, like a lock for a key. They moved together silently, intently; they satisfied each other. Then he would hold her head in his hands, pressing the hard and damp surface of his forehead against hers.
Now the gardeners, the handy man, Hortense, the regular woman who came to clean, all gave her grave glances. She had thought at first that they avoided her eyes out of respect for her mourning. Slowly she felt their dark evasion was a revelation. With her husband's death, another transaction had been made. Her own movement through the house's long corridors became suspect to her, as if she were being watched, as if she had stolen something. The real inhabitants of the house were those that cared for it, moved through it and across it with purpose, caressed it with dust cloths and brooms and wax, shingled it, clipped and trimmed, washed and powdered, cooked and cleaned.
The next week Celina walked back through the door of Angel Luck Nails and explained in a low voice to the woman behind the desk that she would like a 'deluxe' one hour massage in one of the rooms downstairs. She requested Lisa as her masseuse. The appointment was made. Celina smiled and walked out into the August heat.
Closing her eyes until the parking lot stopped spinning, she walked carefully to her car. She sat inside with the doors locked and the cold air on, her fingers gripping the steering wheel. It was only one hour in a room with a woman, who treated her roughly, and stole her ruby earrings when she fainted; and this, she pleaded with herself, couldn't possibly make the slightest difference to anyone. She glanced at the glass on the front of the salon, and then up at her eyes in the car mirror. She was still the woman that her husband had married; still the same pale-looking, slightly anemic woman who rarely asked questions, had barely enough courage to wear the clothes in her own closet.
At the front counter at 2:00 Lisa was filing her nails absently as she leafed through a magazine, and at intervals she popped something large and round into her mouth. When Celina entered she lifted a Styrofoam tray toward her.
"Try—this special Korean!"
"Sweet or salty?" Celina asked as she lifted a whitish blob off the tray.
"This? Dessert! Dessert!" Lisa laughed deeply.
Lisa nodded as Celina put one of the sticky balls into her mouth and chewed. It was sweet, but a strange mixture of flavors and textures that she had never imagined together. When she finally swallowed Lisa seemed satisfied and walked her quickly toward the back of the store, the loose straps of her purple apron bouncing against her buttocks like a tail. Celina followed her out the back door into the blinding sun, and then down the steep metal steps, which Lisa slapped in her descent, producing hollow, ringing notes. Once inside, Celina adjusted her eyes to the flickering fluorescents overhead. Lisa stopped at a hall closet and removed two fresh towels. Each simple action looked ominous to Celina today, a code which would only be deciphered later. The door of the last room was ajar and Celina hesitated, turning toward the smell and the unmistakable sizzle of frying.
"Come on! Come on!" Lisa commanded from inside, slapping the table sharply.
When Celina closed the door behind herself, she was trembling again. Turning her back to Lisa she carefully undid the three buttons on the wrap dress she had chosen out of her closet that morning. She hadn't worn it since her husband's death. It was made of a cool maroon silk that moved easily, sliding against her body as she walked. She was suddenly self-conscious. Nevertheless, with her back turned to Lisa, she opened the dress and, for a moment, lingered there in the way that a stripper might in an old-fashioned routine. With the fabric falling away from her shoulders, she held it in place. Then, letting it drop, the silk slipped to the ground.
When she heard Lisa winding up an alarm clock, she moved quickly to the table where Lisa handed her a towel and gestured for her to lie down. She positioned herself awkwardly face down against the cold vinyl table, pulling the towel around her back. Her nipples were freezing and hard against the thin paper cover.
"Full hour?" Lisa asked.
"Everything..." Celina said in a whisper, "Whatever it is, Deluxe, or, however you call it,” she stumbled, almost imitating Lisa's broken English.
Lisa raised her eyebrows as if she had never heard of such a thing. She slapped Celina on the buttocks gently, "Full hour you turn over."
Celina rose up, and she felt her towel slide to the floor, but she made no move to retrieve it. Her heart was beating so rapidly and loudly she thought Lisa must see it jumping out of her chest. But she regarded her gooseflesh clinically, moved to a near wall and stretched a large metal apparatus over the table. It took a few moments for Celina to realize that she had turned on some kind of ancient heat lamp. It hissed and hummed and its light was a deep amber color, giving the room a sinister, stage-light glow.
"Am I going to get a tan?" Celina asked, and Lisa stared at her blankly.
Celina closed her eyes, tilted her head back and put her arms out in front of her as if she were lying on a beach, rubbing imaginary lotion on her arms, pointing to the light.
"AAH !" Lisa finally exclaimed. "NO—you don't!" she laughed, "You pay extra!"
Lisa laughed one of the first real laughs she'd ever allowed herself in Celina's presence, and her laughing face looked oddly childish under the lamp. When her laughter died out, she pushed Celina's shoulders down until she was again on her back. Celina watched Lisa's eyes moving across her figure. She felt her gaze was clinical, but that she took a new view of her as a whole body, instead of separate pieces of skin to be handled swiftly.
Lisa bent and picked up the towel from where it lay on the dark floor. She shook it in both hands with a snap, and draped it ceremoniously over Celina's torso. She folded it down in pieces until it covered only the thin section across Celina's pubic bone.
Lisa massaged musky oil into the skin of her arms and legs, which she lifted in turn, and let fall when finished. Celina closed her eyes and let the heat and Lisa’s movements lull her. She felt herself falling, shelf by shelf into another place. It seemed like a long time had passed and just when she was on the lip of sleep, she felt a hand tentatively under the front of her towel. It brushed against her and then withdrew. Celina did not react, but waited. Lisa's hands returned to their task, prodding more deeply into Celina's muscles. But soon her hand returned under the towel, and touched Celina's sex lightly but unmistakably.
Her body jerked from just such a slight contact, but she did not open her eyes. Lisa’s fingers moved across her again lightly, repeatedly, matter-of-factly. Even though she was flushed with fear and she did not pull away from Lisa’s touch, but instead let her legs fall just slightly further apart. Now Lisa's hand returned, moist with new oil, and continued to touch her in a measured stroke, until Celina let go of a long shiver. Then the hand withdrew.
Lisa moved to turn on a rotating fan that added another kind of white noise hum to the room. For a long minute Celina felt the cool air rush across her skin, and then away. She opened her eyes and saw Lisa looking quietly over her with a vacant face. When their eyes met Celina felt Lisa's expression change into something hard and immobile, but it may have been the angle of light falling over Lisa's features, making her eyes disappear into shadowy sockets. In spite of herself, Celina gasped.
Lisa began to twist and turn her limbs, to push and then pull, as if Celina were an exercise in cosmetology school, or a medical experiment. Her hands did not return under Celina's towel, but came as near as possible up her thighs, and backed away again. Celina squirmed on the table when the sensations inside of her became too great to contain. She wanted to touch something, anything, real. She reached out blindly and grabbed Lisa's neck. Lisa paused, but did not back away. Celina moved her hand slowly down over Lisa's apron, underneath the bib, and placed her palm over her breast underneath. Lisa's hands dropped to their sides.
Now she could feel the shape of her breast fully. They had been impossible not to notice since Lisa didn't wear a bra, and even under her apron they had escaped at the sides, pressing against the wild patterns of her tight viscose shirts when Lisa moved back under the circle of orange light. Celina could see the sweat beading on to her upper lip and hairline. Her nipples sat high on the globes; even under the heat of the lamp they poked sharply through the thin weave of polyester.
"Turn!" she called out when Celina didn't move.
Lisa began a much harder technique on Celina's back, using her elbows and her knees to apply pressure. She climbed onto a low stool and leaned into Celina with all her weight. She did not forget to slip her hand between Celina's legs intermittently, so that her arousal never fully died down.
Out of her regular parts Lisa was building her into something wholly new, that moved in new ways filled with different desires. When Celina craned her neck behind she saw Lisa's high, brown breasts, bare in the orange light, but it couldn’t be so. Lisa pressed her back down onto the table, pinning her there with what felt like her knees. She couldn't be sure which parts of Lisa were touching her. She felt her feet raised back and pressed against Lisa's breasts. Again, she strained to look and to make sure what was happening was real. Lisa pushed her head back down onto the table and pulled her thighs apart. Celina heard herself let out a moan, and just when Celina was ready Lisa slid something inside of her that caused her so much pleasure she was frightened of what she might become. How could Lisa know what she needed?
Then there was nothing, no movement, no sound except the whirr and caress of the fan and the hum of the heat lamp. Celina dared not move or open her eyes. Her body trembled both with fear and with desire. Were there cameras concealed in the room? Were there perverted men in Korea willing to pay top dollar for scenes like this? Would they drug her and force her to perform more and more hideous acts until right and wrong, good and bad, pain and pleasure, all distinctions became blurred, and she smiled lasciviously and dog-eyed into camera lenses?
And then the thing that took up all the space inside of her was removed and she cried out, but Lisa returned to the massage. She worked slowly at first, but then it felt like she moved from all directions at once. It couldn't be just Lisa. She felt pinpricks of nipples brushing across her back, hands pulling and kneading her thighs and buttocks. She was unable to catch all the small pleasures blowing through her. Drops of Lisa's sweat fell from her forehead and chest onto Celina's body as if she were being forged into some new kind of alloy. She longed to taste Lisa, to see if her tongue would burn against the spices escaping from her skin.
When Celina grew exhausted from chasing her desire, she thought she might jump for her pleasure, like a shipwrecked soul jumps onto a helicopter ladder swinging in the air. If she could reach the bottom rung she might grab on and climb, terror by terror, to her retreat at the top. Again something foreign entered Celina at the moment she reached for the bottom rung. What Lisa pushed into her was too large to be human, and colder than anything could be under the heat of the lamp. Only the coldness of stone could be so right, so hard and smooth that Celina's body had to swallow it. It took up all of the unknown space inside of her; it eliminated all doubt. Was she perfectly fitted for it, or it for her?
Lisa used the stone gently at first, pushing it slowly, the more Celina needed it so that Celina's pleasure only grew, even when she thought it couldn't possibly get any wider. Celina heard her own breath grow rapid and hoarse. She was determined to turn her head back and look at what Lisa had put inside of her, but each time she tried, Lisa pushed her head back down with more force until Celina swore there was a third or fourth hand. Like an Indian god or goddess, Lisa had split into a many-headed and many-handed creature.
"I did not ask her to do this," Celina whispered to herself, "this is what she does, this is what she does."
Finally in her climax when the stone was pushed to its limit, yet another hand covered her mouth, holding back most of her sounds from escaping through the thinly patched sheetrock walls.
The sound of the door closing brought Celina out of the dark cavern of her head. A buzzer sounded and she jumped up to turn it off. She found herself again in an ordinary room. She stood naked in front of the small fan, its air passing across her and away again. She dressed slowly. The silk fabric of her dress as she put it back on brought small shivers to her body. She stood for a long while, letting the warm air traipse across her, her dress billowing, and then falling away. Next time she would tell Lisa how her had husband died.
In his last days, Celina's husband held fast to an idea from his childhood that there was something big and soft inside his head that made his ear fuzzy, and sometimes his right eye blurry. No one had listened to him as a child. Near the end, the familiar dreams had come back, where a substance flowed, milky and gauzy out of his ear, or the top of his head. If only someone had listened to him, he had said to her in the hospital, over and over. And Celina had sat beside him.
"I am. I'm listening; tell me now what it is."
She held his hand, stroked his silver head. He talked to her about the house he would build for her when he was well. There was no point in explaining to him that it was already finished, and that they had lived in it for years.
In the hall, Celina saw Lisa's silhouette. She smoked a cigarette with one arm across her chest and one bare foot flat against the wall. If not for the asbestos tiles in the dropped ceiling, the gray industrial carpet and the faint sounds of American T.V. she could have been in any city market, any dark turn down an unknown road. When Celina reached into her purse, Lisa grabbed her arm and tugged her into a discreet corner.
"You pay here. You cash or charge? You cash only—O.K.? Okay?" she repeated.
Celina handed her one hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills and fumbled while Lisa waited, her hand still open. Celina counted out one, two, and finally three more bills. She hoped that one hundred and sixty dollars was enough because it was all the cash she had. Lisa bobbed her head and closed her hand.
"You use this way," she said to Celina and pointed to the stairs. "This way only."
In the parking lot she stood again under the great lamp of the day, but she didn’t feel faint. Her mind was, in fact, clearer than it had been in months, or even years. Thoughts came rushing on her as if they had been assembled in one place and delivered to her whole—simultaneous streams running parallel, intertwining, making sense by direction of their own laws. They arrived like a sparkling city out of the dark place in her head, where all substance comes from, all thought, form and desire. Today she saw the stark contrast between the things capable of emerging from her; the convergence of the flood inside of her body, and in its aftermath, a white, hot swirl of intellect.
She stood some distance away from the entrance to Angel Tip Nails shielding her eyes from the sun, looking back at the banal, dark glass, doubting what she knew it held. Celina found it hard to believe that such a place could contain her desire, a cement and glass box with no daylight, no air. It was only one in a long line of shops at the mall, all exactly the same. A network of fake-looking brick work ran without interruption along the bottoms of the stores, and at the top, above the brown metal-edged walls of glass, were galvanized spikes in a continuous spiraling roll, a fringe of silver sparkling in the sun. 'The desert of American architecture,' her husband called it.
He had shown her other places, cities that had been carved by human minds, not a single turn in the wood or marble or plaster the same twice. But if a person looked deeply into the stone long enough through time, undoubtedly, another story emerged. Weren't such immense beauties always built on the backs of someone else, from the pyramids on, off the sweat of slavery or near enough to it? Celina and her husband had discussed this at length. She wondered if the oppressor always engendered the more beautiful of the buildings. Were the beauties she had seen always built on the backs of someone else?
Seeing that it was just a different side of the same thought she saw herself in the structure of the transaction that had just been completed. Like everything that could be bought here, made from labor from somewhere else, she would never fully know what she had purchased. Where had Lisa learned her trade, and under what circumstance? What relative of Lisa's might live for six months on the money that came so easily from Celina's purse?
With piercing clarity, Celina moved back to her car, ideas roiling around her in the heat like angels.
"They won't be naming any buildings after me," she heard herself say out loud.
As she was fumbling in her purse for keys, they came up in her hand, red and sparkling—her rubies. She slipped them into her ears. Making sure to arrange the silk folds of her dress properly underneath her legs, she lowered herself onto the car seat and turned the key in the ignition.
Wow, what a great story on so many levels, and beautifully written. I wasn't planning to spend time reading today, but your story drew me in and I couldn't stop. I may have to read it again, and I know it will stay with me. So many layers here.
Also, the part about not having her name on a building struck me. Just the other day I saw a social media post or some post on here, which I can't locate now, about how buildings used to be more beautiful and ornate because of patronage or governments putting lots of money into them, and how now, people donate to have their name put on a building, plus all those beautiful old buildings were built by exploited laborers.
So much more to your story than that, but it was interesting to see this come up again.
This is such a masterful piece of work. The excitement, the anticipation of physical and emotional release was so well written in your beautiful descriptions of the shop, Lisa, and Celina. Nice touch bringing in her husband and his inputs. Great work here, friend.