triptych tryst
She was painted a triptych of The Coquette, The Ice Maiden and The Slut. That’s what she represented to her three lovers. Not a different personality, not quite. Instead three aspects, brought out by each paramour.
Lover number one: Teddy. 36. Art teacher in a secondary school. Teddy had loved her for years. Loved her from the painful distance of friend until one day she seduced him. Seduced him as his Sweet Coquette.
Lover number two. Suzie. 24. PA. Known her for little under a year when they met through a vaguely mutual friend in a bar. Consummated that afternoon and a routine session once a week ever since. Encounters with the Ice Maiden.
Lover number three: Me. 33. Wandering, wandering through my life. And she wanders in when she so wishes. Wanton, wild, willing, wet. My Gorgeous Slut. She is everything, everything.
She tells me of each incident with Teddy and Suzie. We all know of each other. She says she only speaks to me of them, never to them of me. I don’t believe her.
She regales me with her sensual adventures and I see each of her sexual selves unfold before me.
For Teddy: shy, girlish coquette. Sweet coquette he calls her. Coy, flirtatious, fresh. He would give anything to marry her. Take her home. Meet his mother. Have her birth his children, whom he would stay home and raise so she could have her freedom. He knows that this will never happen.
For Suzie: cold, hard Ice Maiden. Her distant, disdainful frost queen. Suzie is the fire to her ice. They both like it that way. Suzie the hot, horny hellion, attempting and failing on a very regular basis to melt her lover’s frozen façade. She wants never to know her, wants always to have her. No one Suzie knows is aware of their trysts.
For me: hungry, ravenous Slut. Is the definition of a slut someone who gives all or someone who takes all? We can never decide. She does both. My luscious floozy opens like a morning glory for me; every inch of her soft flesh is given to my mouth. My bidding obeyed, she dresses and undresses at my will. When her appetite dictates she devours me. Her gifts endless, endless. Endless hours spent until I am useless: certainly useless for anyone but her.
When we have finally exhausted every possibility, we talk. Talk about her. She never wishes to decipher or define her existence: just illustrate it with each tale of her lovers, descriptions of her various rendezvous, performances of her personae. And I look upon her face, that glorious, unbroken face, and I see her in a ménage à trois with her own selves. Experience. Experienced. She the extra-curricular, extra-polar, extra-helpings, extraordinary woman in three lives, weaving her sex-trap into a web and catching her 3 silly, willing flies.
We all know of each other. We will never have her.
I tidy my bedroom as she leaves, walks out my door and into her deep mystery of between encounters. I change my sheets, soaked from our passions. Hospital corners, straightened pillows, billowing duvet. Turn out the light.
This bed is not for sleeping.
(copyright corinna tomrley 2005)