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Bad, Bad Love Walks the Walk of Shame

We’re back, and we brought junk food for your brain! Id est, Installment XVI (oh, sweet sixteen…) of our serialized novella, entitled The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), wherein stockings are ruined, flights nearly missed, and altruistic plans for saving sisters placed in grave peril. For those who might be missing witchy Wanda, you’re in luck–she’s back, too. Sort of.

What about the guy? That’s what you’re really here for, admit it. You want to know what happened with the guy. Well, you’ll find that out, too, Bad, Bad Lovers, just scroll on down. 

Now, if you were good last night and went to bed, sober and alone (or at least with the person the law says you’re supposed to bed down with), at a reasonable hour, and need a little catching up, this here link will take you right back to the very beginning, from whence you can either dive in or find your place.

NB: this installment contains mention of pay phones. If you’ve never seen one before, ask the Google. Or maybe your mother. Also, if there are no smartphones, paper airline tickets suddenly become much, much more important. Obvi.

~

More Rick

Livia’s mouth was paralyzed; it no longer answered the feverish movements of the tongue inside it. But–Livia’s mind was theorizing. But. Rick’s reaction, even if it had been the most violent one she had ever known the tarts to produce, had been one of pleasure. He had certainly tasted nothing bitter. Wanda’s warning had not mentioned ecstasy brought on by extreme pleasure. She had only cautioned Livia against manifestations of disgust over an inexplicable bitterness, bitterness in something the man had expected to find sweet.

The tarts never lied,Wanda had said. “Te lo juro por mi madre“– I swear on my mother’s grave. What had happened in her own mouth was, indeed, inexplicable, but Wanda had not warned her about her own reaction to the flavor of the tarts; the only reaction that counted, Livia deduced triumphantly, was the man’s.

Rick’s hands were opening the buttons of the black jacket. His lips followed them, both stopping briefly to caress her neck. Livia’s muscles tensed, but the lips, the hands, bypassed the hollow at the base of her throat (it throbbed faintly). Exultant, Livia decided that she was safe.

One hand moved lower, toward a hole in the silk stocking which covered the flesh of Livia’s right leg (it must have caught on the bar stool; Livia never would have worn stockings in which she knew there to be a hole). The hand was not content with simply making the hole larger. The hand kept right on going, until Livia’s stocking was open down the middle, as if it had a zipper. The skirt next, the jacket, the corset, she was naked.

The air inside the antique shop was unbelievably hot; Livia wondered at not having noticed the heat before. The heat, however, was not unwelcome or unpleasant. Nor was the sharp heat contained in Rick’s lips and tongue when they returned to her mouth, filling it, again, with the taste of roses and chocolate.  Livia was no longer capable of reasoning about its origins; her delirious mind could only register the fact that the taste was there, that it had returned, and that its source was Rick’s mouth. She wanted more.

Which she got.

After which he was asleep, immediately. How could men do that?

Livia smelled chocolate and tasted roses, and she knew that she must disentangle herself from Rick’s body. She had promised herself to return to the safety of the fruit trees, the birds, the bower of Livia the emperor’s wife, before midnight. But she would rest for five minutes. She wasn’t on his bed, she reassured herself; she was on the chaise-longue.

She would count, to make certain she remained conscious. One, two. Still conscious. Three, and then four, and then five. Which would be the final number she would, on the morrow, remember.

Somewhere between five and ten, Livia fell deeply, irrevocably asleep.

~

Breakfast

Livia’s consciousness hovered on the blurry frontier between sleep and drowsy wakefulness. She smelled flowers; maybe she had fallen asleep in a field, or in the woods somewhere. Maybe she was behind the aunts’ house, in the garden, among Pearl’s flowers. She had sometimes taken naps there with Danae…the aroma…what was it? Roses, that was it. Pearl’s roses.

There were feather-light brushes of something soft against her forehead, her cheeks. Livia stirred, sighed, murmured something. The brushes moved lower, along her jawline, then lower, down one side of her neck. Grass. There were long blades of grass in the jungle behind the house where she’d last seen her father. The grass was waist-high on an eight-year-old girl; once she had fallen asleep among the grasses in the jungle. She had woken up because the grass was tickling her neck.

There was a light pressure, a presence, in the hollow at the base of her throat, followed by a surge of the most intense pleasure Livia’s startled body had ever known. The pleasure moved in waves, hot and delightful, out from the shadowed hollow toward the ends of her extremities.

Livia bolted upright, flinging the unfamiliar weight from her naked body. Naked. Her body. Rick’s face moved into her field of vision and she remembered. Her hand was pressing painfully over the hollow at the base of her throat. That was why it hurt, because her hand was pressing it.

“Oh, my God, what time is it?”

“Early.” The voice was lazy, and Ophelia liked the laziness.

Livia, on the other hand, was panting, madly searching for her clothes. She found them. They were neatly, perfectly folded, at the foot of the bed, Rick’s bed. Livia’s stomach tightened and churned. She was hung over, that was it. A hot, nasty hangover. Though not nearly as nasty as she deserved.

“Oh, God. I have to go to New Orleans today, to help my sister.  My plane’s at twelve…Oh, God. Oh shit. Oh fuck.”

Rick was standing. His body was dreadfully beautiful. Livia forced Ophelia to look away. She was buttoning the jacket. Where were her panties? She then remembered that she hadn’t worn any.

“Ophelia…Ophelia.”

Rick’s hand touched Ophelia’s arm. Livia felt his hand through the sleeve of the jacket, as though it were touching her bare skin. She withdrew her arm, with the pretext of securing the deadly chopsticks into the messy beignet she had made of her hair.

“Ophelia, don’t panic, it’s only a quarter to eight. You have plenty of time. Let me make you some coffee. Then I’ll get dressed and go out and get a taxi for you…wow.  Your stockings are ruined…Sorry. There’s a drugstore just on the corner. I think they open at eight.”

Livia, no, no, Ophelia. Ophelia wouldn’t meet Rick’s pale blue gaze, wouldn’t look at the curious angles of the beautiful temples, the tendrils of blond hair. Livia refused to allow it. Livia rummaged in her bag and saved Ophelia the pain of looking at that face.

“I have to go by my friend’s before I go home…there’s something really important I have to pick up. She lives near here…”

She was dressed–they both were, Livia and Ophelia. Livia began to push Ophelia toward the door; Ophelia resisted. Ophelia wanted to drink coffee on the chaise-longue, wanted to feel the intense, unbearable pleasure again at the base of her throat, but Livia directed her pitilessly, implacably, toward the door. Rick was calm, lazy; he had fallen back onto the bed. His eyes were there, pale blue and beautiful, waiting for Ophelia’s when Livia turned, despite herself, to look at him.

The eyes reached right down to Ophelia’s soul.

“You have my card. Call me when you get back.”

Livia nodded, raised a protective hand to her throat and hurried into the darkened shop. The door that opened onto the unknown street, thankfully, was unlocked.

~

At the corner, Livia saw a storefront she recognized. The unknown street spat her out onto Seventh Avenue. She had her bearings. She headed south.

Wanda’s studio was in a commercial building in Chinatown. It was illegal for Wanda to live there, and her studio had no buzzer. Livia would have to call from the pay phone on the corner. She felt in her bag for change, extracted some coins and deposited them with a shaky hand. She dialed Wanda’s number. Four rings. Livia’s heart sank as Wanda’s answering machine picked up. There were thirty seconds or so of tango–Carlos Gardel–then Wanda’s curt, “I’m not here.  Leave a message.”

Livia looked at her watch; it was only eight fifteen. They had agreed on ten. Maybe Wanda was still asleep.

“Wanda…Wanda…Soy Livia…Wanda, ¿estás allí?”

Silence; the tape would still be recording.

Livia’s heart dropped into her bilious stomach. She had endangered her soul. She had slept next to the man–to Rick, that was the worst part, now he wasn’t, could never be again, `the man’. He was Rick. Maybe that was because his soul–which she knew to be similar to hers, despite the tart–had acted on hers during the vulnerable oblivion of her sleep.

Much more gravely, however, she had endangered her sister’s well being, by jeopardizing the effectiveness of the filter Wanda had prepared. Livia, had she truly been concerned about Danae, should have been chastely channeling her own energies toward Wanda’s expenditure of hers.

Wanda was out. It was Livia’s punishment, castigation for sins committed the night before, a lifetime ago. The plane left in just a few hours. Her ticket had been delivered the day before. It was at home. Whatever Wanda had concocted to help her rescue Danae was inside the studio and Wanda was either out or asleep. If Livia waited for her, she would miss her plane. If she left the filter in Wanda’s apartment, there was no point to her trip.

The impossibly blue eyes filled with tears. In her heart of hearts Livia, no, Ophelia, no, Livia, was also perfectly aware that she had just wrested her soul out of the arms of its lost half. The pulse point at the base of Livia’s throat throbbed painfully.

She hung up the receiver and turned toward the street. She would take a cab home, collect her things, cab it back down to Chinatown and hope to find Wanda at home. She prayed that her plane would not leave on time.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia here.

The post Bad, Bad Love Walks the Walk of Shame appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Takes the Weekend Off (and heats you up some leftovers…)

Happy Black Friday, Bad, Bad Lovers, happy happiest of happies! This week Livia the Badass Chef is off. Shopping, she says. With chocolate tarts in her handbag. Whatever. At any rate, Installment XVI of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen) is currently marinating, and will be en su punto, as we say in Spanish, ripe for your delectation, exactly one week hence.

In the meantime, Livia’s recommendation is a second helping of 21 September’s installment, “Bad, Bad Love Has a Plum Cobbler Apotheosis,” which is set on Thanksgiving Day, and which you can access right here. Or if you want a window into why the author of these posts is such a freak as to have been working on her novel on said national and quasi-sacred holiday, turkey-less and all alone except for her two beloved and egregiously spoiled pet rabbits (much kale was had by all), she wrote a post that addressed that very issue in a slanty sort of way, almost exactly a year ago, and she’s still pretty proud of it. She totally stands by it, and she’d be happy for you to read it, by clicking right here, and if you like that, you can then go here, where her obsessive, unhealthy,co-dependent, bad-boyfriend relationship to writing is detailed.

And if you’ve just stepped in out of the cold and have no idea what all this Bad,Bad Love/Will of Venus palaver is all about, it’s easy to rewind this party right back to its virginal, aperitif phase, by clicking right here. Alles will there be made klar. As mud. But we like mud, right? Mississippi Mud Pie? Who doesn’t like Mississippi Mud Pie?

 ~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

The post Bad, Bad Love Takes the Weekend Off (and heats you up some leftovers…) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Unwraps that Chocolate Tart and…

Your serial is served! In the form of Installment XV of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), garnished with chocolate and a sprinkling of rose water, for your guilty-reading pleasure. Livia gives him the tart, he eats it and he likes it, so he’s safe. Right? So say Wanda’s instructions, which Livia has followed to the letter, but something tastes…off. Good–really good–but…off.

So, Bad, Bad Lovers, what would you do? Head home, right? Leave the guy there and do the responsible thing and head home. Just in case. Because you have a big day tomorrow. Sure you would. Ehem.

BTW, if you’re a new arrival to the party and you’d like to know how Livia got herself into this…er…situation, click right here. There’s a rhyme to the reason, a method to the madness. Sort of.

~

Rick (cont.)

Livia touched her bag like a talisman; the chocolate tart was inside. Soon she would have to invent a way to get him to taste it. Livia sighed, inwardly, a sigh that only she could hear, and admitted to herself that she would not be surprised if Rick’s mouth wrinkled in disgust at his tongue’s first contact with the chocolate. The flutterings were darting through her chest toward her heart. She was intensely conscious of the hollow at the base of her throat. It did not hurt, but Livia was more aware of its existence than she had ever been before.

Rick was reaching into the hip pocket of his jeans, to extract a card from his wallet for Ophelia. Rick was sure that he wanted to see Ophelia again. Livia said nothing; she smiled into her bourbon glass.

As Rick’s hand returned from its journey to his pocket, it made inadvertent contact with Ophelia’s left hip. Livia started as though the light touch had been a blow. Her hip burned (Livia remembered her fingertip against her tongue the night before) but the burning was pleasurable. It lingered for a moment, then fierce possession of her belly, her chest. Livia looked up.

Her impossibly blue eyes met the paler blue ones, under the slightly differing angles of imperfectly arched brows, and she knew that the contact with her hip had produced an intensely pleasurable sensation in Rick’s right hand, which still held the card. His left hand rubbed the back of the right one, protectively, as though to preserve the sweet burn.

When Rick asked if Ophelia would like to see the antique store, it was just around the corner, Livia accepted, though she knew, deep down, that she shouldn’t. Wanda would disapprove–she had not yet proffered the chocolate tart. She would do so, she promised herself, as soon as she crossed the threshold of the store. And be ready to renounce the certain pleasure of further contact with Rick should his reaction suggest the least objection to what she herself knew to be a nauseating bitterness.

~

The shop was on a tiny West Village street; it connected two larger streets. Sometimes the tiny streets, like the tiny streets that had so fascinated Marta on her one and only trip to New York, are only one block long, and no one even knows their names. The shop was a long, narrow space; it surprised Livia with its depth. The studio, Rick informed her, was at the back. There was a garden behind the studio. There would be ivy, Livia imagined, perhaps a small fountain.

The shop was full of layers and layers of things, all old, and all beautiful. Victorian. The interior of the shop, glimpsed in its totality, immediately suggested that particular word to Livia. She appreciated the sensuality of the Victorian aesthetic precisely because it was secret and controlled. The colors reflected those of her own apartment, of whose walls Ophelia was the centerpiece.

There was terracotta, the color of Italian earth (Livia had learned to prepare sauces in Milan and Siena, tiramisù in Rome. She had brought her love for that color back with her to treasure within the hidden interior of her being), shades of brown (shades of French earth. There she had learned about bisque, different grades of butter and tiny partridges in paper bags), the covert greens of the dried vines, thick and difficult to manage, that made up the baskets where she kept her onions and garlic.

Rick’s colors were Livia’s colors. She knew the shop, knew his things (no, she was drunk); she had been here before. She didn’t know when, but she had.

And she should leave.

Rick took several minutes to light the candles placed at random on spindly-legged tables, on the mantlepiece and high atop armoires. Livia was seduced by his selection of pieces–she would have picked the very same items. There was a Japanese screen (possibly eighteenth century), a chaise-longue covered in peacock-blue satin (the color of the sky at dawn, a sky whose varied hues Livia, because of the chocolate tarts, had come to know intimately), a wicked cupid, a sly shepherdess, some busts.

There was an ornate bookshelf behind the desk, floor-to-ceiling, filled with the orderly spines of leather-bound volumes. Rick informed Livia that he also dabbled in rare books. Livia would have examined them had she not come with the purpose of the chocolate tart.

Of whose presence in her bag she was now terribly conscious. Her guard was up; Rick’s clear predilection for the Victorian, so similar to hers, reminded Livia of other similarities (the complementary blues of their eyes, for instance, and the bit about the deconstructionists). Those similarities were reason for caution. Wanda had not mentioned earthly, physical similarities as grounds for concern over the possible similarity of souls, but Livia’s instincts informed her that her soul, the jealously guarded hollow at the base of her throat, and her heart were taking grave risks by remaining.

But she stayed.

“Ophelia?”

“Sorry, I was just looking at your stuff. You have some great pieces.”

“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. Perhaps he was nervous. But the Van Eyck skin and the jarringly beautiful angles betrayed nothing other than a relaxed calm. “I was asking what you’d like to drink. I have a couple of Scotches, some Calvados, some pear brandy, Frangelico.”

“Let’s have the Frangelico–goes with dessert.” She must speed things along; it was getting late. “I brought something for you to try. I’m a chef, remember? I made these today at work…” As she told the lie, Livia noticed a faint taste of roses on her tongue. She summoned saliva and swallowed, extracting the midnight-blue rice paper package from her bag.

Rick opened a cabinet just behind the desk. The liquor cabinet. Livia’s spine stiffened and her head felt suddenly clear, her mind lucid. She was being silly. He probably brought women here all the time, three or four a week. Maybe he even had his own personal ad. The liquor cabinet at the ready, placed conveniently near the silk-covered chaise-longue…an alluring scene for seduction, scoffed Livia’s mind. That way he wouldn’t have to change his sheets every time he got laid. The irony made her feel invincible. She clearly had nothing to worry about. She tossed the tart impudently in her right hand.

“On the rocks or up?”

“On the rocks,” Livia answered. She wanted to see where he kept the ice.

But she was disappointed when Rick had to disappear into the back of the shop. The refrigerator was in the studio. Livia’s fragile defenses crumbled and the taste of roses returned, triumphant, to her tongue. Rick had put on music. German. A lovely feminine voice. Lieder. The stereo, too, must be in the studio. Her theory about Rick’s promiscuity was thus rendered even more questionable.

And the similarity of souls even more likely.

Livia had cultivated a preference for the sober sounds of requiem masses, stabat maters, Bach fugues, or the delicate cadences of sixteenth-century lute music, probably, Livia had theorized long ago, as an antidote to the theatricality of her nature (similar to Marta’s, to Danae’s), which she had successfully learned to control. Deep down, she loved Wagner, though she rarely listened to him.

Rick informed her that he was fascinated by the lyrical, gigantic worlds, the mythic realities, of Wagner. He disdained Verdi, but he had sat through the entire Ring Trilogy, alone. His pale face revealed satisfaction. Music was his drug. It transported him. Livia was overtaken by an absurd impulse to run out and buy a pair of tickets so that she could listen to music with this man. Wagner, if possible. Her vulnerable senses were assaulted by a voyeuristic desire to watch his face as the music insinuated itself into his soul. Livia reached for a cigarette.

Rick had placed their two glasses on the spindly-legged table in front of the chaise-longue. A shade of the invincible irony returned to accent Livia’s gestures as she took up her glass. At least she had been right about the chaise-longue.

He sat close to her; his thigh almost touched hers. As though from a distance, as though it weren’t really happening to her, Livia felt a strange throbbing in the hollow at the base of her throat. She knew that she should stand up, recover her bag and her composure, make an excuse and leave; her heart thumped against her chest like a frightened animal and Livia stayed: he hadn’t tasted the tart yet.

Rick lit Livia’s cigarette before she could do it herself, with a match instead of her lighter, his hand like a beautiful dove (even his hands were beautiful) cupped around the flaming match head. Livia was thankful for the burning ember at the end of her cigarette–otherwise, she might have given in to the magnetic pull of that hand and buried her face in it.

Time for the tart

Livia straightened and pulled away. She handed him the midnight-blue rectangle and held her breath as his fingers untied the black ribbon. If the paper had stuck to the tart, it was probably ruined. But the paper had dried completely; it separated from the flaky crust with barely a sound. Livia’s eyes were now riveted on Rick’s mouth, on the curiously angled lips, as his teeth sank into the moist, chocolate center of the tart. His lips closed and Livia clenched her fists into knots of unbearable tension.

For a few seconds, the almost-perfect face was still; the eyes remained closed. Then, slowly but unmistakably, an expression of pure joy, unadulterated and exquisite, transformed that expressionless near-perfection into the very embodiment of pleasure.

He took another bite, and then another. He chewed slowly; Livia watched the sensuous motions of those jaws, mesmerized, unable to believe her good fortune but not wishing to question it. Ready to get down to business.

Then the curiously angled mouth emitted a low, guttural sound, like a moan. Rick’s hands grasped Livia’s face, no, Ophelia’s, and pulled it toward his. Livia’s (no, Ophelia’s) lips were parted, her mouth penetrated by a warm, moist, masculine tongue. She felt the tongue as it examined her front teeth, the interior of her lips, her tongue.

After a few seconds, Livia realized that that tongue was filling her mouth with the taste of roses, as though the very essence of roses, of all roses, were dissolving in slow motion right there on her tongue. Her saliva glands worked feverishly, filling her mouth with the rose-taste, like the rose tears.

Then, to Livia’s complete astonishment and intense dismay, the rose taste was tempered by the most heavenly flavor of chocolate she had ever, ever tasted.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here .

The post Bad, Bad Love Unwraps that Chocolate Tart and… appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Has a Good, Good Blind Date

Installment XIV of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), has been serialized for your guilty reading pleasure, and is hereby served. Livia, in a bar, with a witch-doctored chocolate tart, a bottle of bourbon, and a man.

Don’t try this at home, Bad, Bad Lovers, do NOT try this at home. But do click right here, if you’d like catching up on previous bowls of serial. It’s all right there in the fridge, waiting for you.

~

Chocolate Tart Rescued

Entering the potpourri-scented powder room to change, the chocolate tart cradled in her left hand, Livia congratulated herself. The midnight blue rice paper felt crackly and dry against her palm. Good as new. And, most importantly of all, she hadn’t forgotten it. Her composure was fully recovered.

~

Rick

The bar was tiny. And it was really more of a restaurant with a bar, Livia mentally corrected Rick (although she was inclined to excuse his imprecise terminology–such distinctions were much more apparent to people in the business). Livia felt instinctively comfortable in the place; she liked the furnishings, the walls, the mismatched tables, the wood (as opposed to steel) of the bar. Everything looked old, used. Livia loved old things; she much preferred them to new ones.

The bar ran along the back wall of the restaurant, directly opposite the door; all of the stools were occupied save one. The unoccupied stool was beside a slim-but-muscular back clad in faded denim. Despite the ponytail of pale blonde hair that reached several inches below the collar line, the back belonged, she judged, to a man. The sleeves of the denim shirt were rolled up; the hands and forearms were definitely masculine. The empty bar stool would be for her.

Livia approached the bar stealthily. Rick (for Livia was certain of his identity; two years of meeting strangers in bars had given her an infallible sense for these things) conversed lazily with the bartender; they appeared to know one another. She felt entirely unjustified pricks of jealousy as she seated herself on the empty stool. Her stomach fluttered and, with a clarity that left her breathless, Livia realized that she was now seated next to the owner of the voice which had, with its remembered undercurrents and pauses, so implacably prevented her sleep the night before. Several seconds passed before Rick noticed her presence, seconds during which Livia listened to her heart race. She should probably leave.

Just as she was reaching for her bag, the bartender turned in her direction. His eyes lingered on her face, objectively appreciative of female attractiveness–the prerogative of a bartender–as he announced,

“Looks like your friend’s here.”

Rick kept his elbows resting comfortably on the bar and turned his face toward Livia. She froze and allowed her bag to drop back onto the floor. She should leave, but she was definitely going to stay.

Rick’s face fell just short of being perfectly beautiful, a Fra Filippo face with the skin so exquisitely pale it couldn’t possibly resist even under the slightest touch. Fra Filippo’s tour de force was his veils, the way you could see the flesh beneath and between their folds, each one rendered with disturbing, transparent clarity. The almost-perfection of Rick’s face was diaphanous, difficult to grasp or define, almost unreal. The face was framed by a halo of pale blond hair the color of young wheat, fine like spun silk, like a spider’s web, Livia imagined, fragile but surprisingly resilient when you tried to break it.

The forms and volumes of the face were cuttingly perfect, yet there was a tension, a subtle discomfort, in their combination. The face seemed as though it might have received a jarring blow (a bouleversement–Livia tried to remember French words as often as she could. She didn’t want to lose her French), as though something had permanently shaken a once-perfect composition of hills and valleys. Harmonious and symmetrical in its original state, the symmetry was now distorted, but only ever so slightly, disrupted by some cataclysmic spasm (maybe an orgasm, his first, adolescent orgasm) that had left his face’s perfection gently skewed. Like a portrait of a woman by Picasso, Livia thought, with the wide-set eyes slanting upward at slightly different angles and, because of the slightness of the imbalance, fascinating and disconcerting all at once.

Rick’s eyes were pale blue and surrounded by blond, just-visible eyelashes. The brows above those eyes were also pale, barely detectable and therefore more unsettling in the perfection of their arches. Each eyebrow was perfect in its solitude, but their angles were different, vaguely out of time with the slanting of the eyes. Livia’s own eyes were deep, royal, ocean, stained glass blue.

She had an unbidden and inappropriate thought–what color would be obtained by mixing the blue of her eyes with the pale blue of those of the man on the stool beside hers?

“Ophelia…”

Livia started, then contained herself. She was Ophelia. She had forgotten again. The name had been pronounced by a mouth also disconcerting in its nearness to perfection, all the greater because of its just failing to reach that mark (if something is perfect, then it has nowhere else to go, nothing left to which to aspire). The mouth, as it smiled, inclined upward in a manner which did not coincide with the angles of the rest of the face, cheekbones, temples–never before had Livia seen a man with beautiful temples.

The combination of the angles was just off, like a priceless instrument that needed tuning. The effect was discreetly shocking to Livia’s eyes.

They exchanged greetings, commonplaces. Rick introduced Livia, no, Ophelia, to the bartender. His name was Brian. No mention was made of the way in which Ophelia and Rick had made their acquaintance, for which Livia was grateful. Rick offered Ophelia a drink (“Whatever you’re having”). Bourbon.

As Livia rolled the first sip around on her tongue, she noticed a whisper of the taste of roses, which reminded her, in a troubling way, of the rosewater tears. She looked for the bottles of bourbon behind the bar, for a brand with which she was not familiar, but saw only the old standards. Rick was speaking to Ophelia. Livia could think about the bourbon later.

The contained, rough sensuality that ran just beneath the smooth surface of Rick’s phrases reminded Livia of the state in which that voice had left her the previous evening. She endeavored to formulate questions which would entail long answers; she wanted to listen to that voice, to observe that face, for as long as possible.

Rick had, for a long period during his twenties, been a genius painter in Georgia. Or at least Rick had been convinced of his own genius. That was the most important ingredient of any sort of genius, he added. Didn’t Ophelia agree? Livia merely nodded, mute before the terrible spectacle of the almost-perfection of that face. She was smoking a cigarette, already her sixth for the day.

The most important part of any genius, Rick said, of any creativity, was for the creator to be convinced of the vitality and importance of his or her creation. How anyone could be a genius painter in Georgia would have been beyond the ken of most gallery owners and goers in New York, but there Ophelia had it (a crooked smile that resounded in Livia’s lower abdomen like a blow from a well-aimed arrow)–he had been a genius painter in Georgia during his twenties.

Until he’d tired of his own genius. Or perhaps he’d simply lost conviction. Maybe also lost faith in his premature marriage to a graduate student in linguistics who never tired of discussing Barthes, Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Discourse.

Livia caught her breath. She remembered Erik in front of Ophelia’s lovely, drowned face. Erik and Discourse. Both Livia and Rick had been deeply wounded by the French school of deconstructionists. So many things in common–eyes, wounds. Livia wondered if she should be concerned about souls and, in her heart of hearts, she knew that she should be.

“My wife even tried to deconstruct my paintings,” Rick was saying.  “Criticize, she called it.”

The voice paused. Livia felt the flutterings. One or two had reached up into her chest, but Livia chose not to think about that. She took a sip of bourbon; there was the taste of roses again. She hadn’t slept at all, and her senses were suffering because of it. She was following the steps, as she had done before on any number of occasions, toward the proffering of a chocolate tart to a man with whom, the test having been passed, she would have sex.

If he detected the bitterness masked by the luscious chocolate and buttery pastry, she would leave. It was simple, just as it had always been. That, she reminded herself, impatient at her fascination with the rose-taste that did not want to abandon her mouth, was why she used the tarts in the first place, for the sake of simplicity.

“But–my poor wife–my paintings were invincible to deconstruction. They were classical. Terribly figurative and classical. It’s kind of hard to deconstruct something with so obvious a group of referents…. but she tried, oh, how she tried.”

Rick’s favorite painting was one of the Three Fates. His wife, for some reason he had never divined, had taken that painting with her when she left.  He hadn’t missed it for a week, and then it had been too late. Maybe she was going to try to deconstruct it alone, Livia thought to herself, away from his nearly perfect face. The invincibility of Rick’s figures to her deconstruction had wounded his wife, Rick told Ophelia, in the most intimate flesh of her soul. But she had stayed, or at least her body had, until a mere five years earlier.

“Imagine, Ophelia…” The pale blue eyes found and held the deep, pure blue of Livia’s. Of Ophelia’s. “Imagine, living inside the dead shell of a marriage for ten years, barely even remembering why you got married in the first place. How stupid we are when we’re young. I thought maybe I was dead until she left. Then the studio, the store, everything, became mine again, and I realized I was still alive. Older, but still alive.”

Older. Livia looked again at the face. There were lines, very definite lines, at the corners of the pale blue eyes, but the skin appeared separate from the lines, as though the lines would have no consequences, like the translucent skin of one of Van Eyck’s solemn figures, a donor, or perhaps a saint.

Rick’s slimness and coloring denoted a fragility which Livia was not accustomed to associating with masculinity, an ethereal quality that intrigued her. He would be like a river, frozen in winter, but whose currents continued to flow beneath the deceptively solid surface of the water. Those currents, if they were to crack through the ice, would startle you, take you by surprise, maybe even drown you. Livia would have to be careful.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here .

The post Bad, Bad Love Has a Good, Good Blind Date appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Cries When She Chops Onions (Don’t You?)

Do you cry when you chop onions? Sure you do. Everyone does, Badass Chef Livia included–this week she cries us a river and an ocean, because she has to make French onion soup. But these tears are strange tears, and they do strange things to everything they touch. I know some of you are thinking Como Agua Para Chocolate, or Like Water for Chocolate if you read it in English. But I swear to god I wrote this before Isabel Allende’s novel was even drafted. I just got distracted by life and very, very lazy about trying to publish it… At any rate, Installment XIII (thirteen! throw that salt over your shoulder, right now, doesn’t matter which one) of our serialized and salivationary (just made that word up) novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), is served, wherein things get even weirder in the kitchen. For one, a chocolate tart almost drowns.

In case you missed out on the prep-cook phases of this party, you can get all caught up by clicking right here, and remember: don’t lick the spoon and then put it back in the pot. Livia’s watching you.

~

Rosewater

But there had been other unexpected turns of events during Livia’s shift which were not so easily remedied. Livia had brought along her black canvas bag instead of the usual, economical backpack. Inside the bag were the two-piece black suit, the corset, the sandals, the garter belt, and the silk stockings. Also, one of the chocolate tarts that Livia had prepared late the previous evening.

The tiny cabinet beneath her workstation was full; there was no room for the cumbersome bag. Livia turned back toward the changing room. The air there was stagnant; it was hot. Since it was only April, the Hungarian owner had not yet brought down his mismatched collection of ancient electric fans. With some regrets (Livia wondered about the effects of the heat on the pricey makeup with which she accompanied her clothes for sex), she stashed the bag in her locker.

As she was returning to her workstation, Livia remembered the chocolate tart. It would melt if it hadn’t already. She retrieved it. Never mind the makeup–without the tart, the makeup was pointless. Livia would keep the small, midnight-blue package at her station until she began to cook when she would remove it to the walk-in where fruits and vegetables were kept, during the two or so hours she would require the four gas burners. Then she would, she swore to herself, remember to return the package to her station. It wouldn’t do at all to forget it.

~

Livia fretted as she peeled and chopped onions for French onion soup. Why should she have to prepare French onion soup today, of all days? Her eyes were already sensitive (they had hardly closed the night before), and onions made them fill with salty tears, clouded her vision. Livia kept a box of tissues at her station for that very purpose–if you touched your eyes, or even the skin around them, while chopping onions, the results were always disastrous.

Predictably, after two or three minutes of chopping, the pungent fumes found their way to Livia’s eyes. After another minute or so, her eyes began to tear. The tears were surprisingly abundant, moreso than Livia remembered them ever having been before. They filled her eyes before she could even put down the knife; as the metal blade clicked against the white tiles, the tears had already begun to roll down her cheeks.

But there was something curious, something not right, about those tears, which had reached the corners of her mouth. Her tongue, expecting watery saltiness, was shocked and then inexplicably delighted by sweet, cool water. The tears tasted vaguely of roses. Perturbed and intrigued, Livia reached for a tissue. Her eyes were still filling with sweet, cool tears that replaced those that slid gently down her cheeks; the new tears blinded her again, and it was several seconds before her groping hand located the tissue box. It was empty.

Livia was furious; she still had three dishes to prepare. She must continue chopping, tissue or no tissue. She picked up the knife with one hand and wiped at her eyes with the palm of the other, steeling herself for the results. But the contact between her hand and the delicate skin around her eyes did not produce the stinging sensation she associated with chopping onions. The touch was like a caress; it sent darting spurts of pleasure into the tips of her fingers and up her arm, across her shoulder (there was a thumping sensation in the hollow at the base of Livia’s throat) and into the usually tranquil region of her torso, the area that surrounds the heart.

The rosewater tears now fell from Livia’s eyes in such abundance, with such rapidity, that they were forming a pool on the cutting board, moistening the onions, and threatening to spill over onto the floor. The smell of onions, generally so overpowering, had been drowned by the sweet scent of roses. The soup would be ruined.

Two dishes ruined (or, at the very least, compromised) in one shift was too much–her reputation stood in grave danger of suffering. She opened the drawer above her cabinet, yanked out a handful of precisely folded dishtowels and then removed the cutting board, with its burden of onions and the knife, to the ledge beside the empty tissue box. The tears continued to spill from her eyes, making the cutting board just a slightly darker blur against the white tiles.

There was a high, ringing metallic sound as Livia’s knife fell from the cutting board and clattered onto the tiles. Her sense of balance was off, she scolded herself. And hurrying never solved anything. She stepped back and drew a deep breath–get hold of yourself. Then she saw the knife, her best and most expensive knife, which she kept carefully, meticulously sharpened. Her best knife floating (but wasn’t it too heavy to float?), bobbing gently in a sweet-smelling pool of rosewater tears. Livia’s hand shot forward before she could thoroughly consider her actions and grabbed the knife. What Livia, in her rosewater blindness, judged to be the handle was, in fact, the blade.

Livia had barely grazed the edge of the blade with the fingertips of her right hand, but that light brush had been enough to part the soft skin of two of the fingertips. Small, ruby-like drops appeared in the openings made by the knife blade, but she had (although she was aware of her error, and of the ruby drops threatening to drip from her fingers) as of yet, experienced no pain.

Livia grasped the knife again, this time by the handle, and replaced it onto the cutting board. She looked down, ready to wipe up the rose-water tears and get on with her soup, but her eyes were mesmerized by several ruby-red drops that had that fallen into the sweet-smelling pond. The rubies dissolved into the rosewater, making strange patterns of dying red against the white surface. Livia’s eyes were then drawn to another strong color, dense and pure against the stark white of the tiles. Midnight blue on white. The chocolate tart.

“Fuck!”

Livia’s expletive was in English this time; she sliced both beginning and ending consonants with furious clarity.

The pool of rosewater tears had reached the low wall of white tiles, against which she’d placed the tart. The bottom of the tiny package was soaked; the thin layers of paper were almost black.

Livia’s right hand closed over the small, midnight blue rectangle in the following manner: the palm, first, curved protectively over the top of the package, tensed. The four fingers, cupped, formed an inverted basket and scooped up the package, now doubly fragile because of the rosewater tears it had absorbed. The tips of the fingers, from two of which ruby-drops of Livia’s blood were just ready to fall, folded back over the package, protecting it. The ruby-drops were saved from falling by the midnight blue package, and absorbed, first, into its wrapping, which was wet, and then into its contents, where they dissolved into the buttery crust of the chocolate tart nestled inside the paper.

Livia methodically dried the white tiles of her workstation, trying to recover her equilibrium. She’d lost precious time; she would have to step up her pace. The onions, thankfully, appeared not to have suffered from their bath in the rosewater tears. And their pungency was beginning to assert itself over the delicate scent of roses. She had chopped more than she’d thought–some would serve in the base for the basil-cream sauce she was planning, the same one that would, hours later, so delight the Russian gentleman’s tongue.

Such was her preoccupation with the tasks she had yet to perform, that Livia gave no further thought to the tiny midnight blue package. The heat from the burners would, she hoped, dry it out.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here .

The post Bad, Bad Love Cries When She Chops Onions (Don’t You?) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Cooks Like She’s Possessed (And She Is)

Badass chef Livia takes her troubles to work. Like a lot of us, she tries not to, but sometimes it’s hard to keep the compartments separate. In Installment XII of our serialized and savory novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), the irrevocable forces set in motion last week continue along their irrevocable course (“irrevocable,” as habitués of this petit quoin of guilty-but-oh-so-delicious reading pleasures will remember, is a favorite word of Danae’s).

But it’s all good, some very delicious accidents are produced in the process. If you need catching up, we’ve saved you samples of past feasts–we’re even keepin’ ’em warm in the oven! Click right here, and remember: leftovers are best enjoyed alone, in the dark, leaning against the kitchen cabinet, and eaten with your fingers.

~

After the Breeze

After the visitation of the breeze, Livia was unable to sleep. She had, she reminded herself, hastened to relight the candles, first the yellow one, to temper passion. She had left the candles burning even after the tarts were wrapped in their midnight blue rice paper, while she made preparations for bed.

But Livia had not slept, not even, she was certain, a wink. She’d finally resigned herself to sitting vigil, in wait for the gray shadows of dawn, and spent the remaining hours of darkness theorizing. Even if the candles had gone out, it had only been for a moment. And she was absolutely certain that the six drops of Wanda’s liquid had reached the chocolate mixture. Quite likely even more than six–her right hand had shaken; the sudden darkness had startled her. The drops were the key to the tarts’ effectiveness, ergo extra drops would simply make them more successful. Even if Rick’s soul proved to be the proverbial Platonic lost half of hers, she was safe.

At six, when the gray shadows arrived, she rose. The fruit trees and birds on her walls looked eerily real in the tenuous light of dawn.  Throwing on her jeans and a tee shirt, she hurried down the stairs to the coffee shop on the corner. The Dominican owner looked confused as he consulted the clock; he was not accustomed to seeing Livia at such an hour, dressed with such negligence–the jeans, he had come to suppose, were for much later in the day.

Livia ordered two cafés con leche; she would need them. After drinking them at her kitchen table, she decided, since she clearly was not going to sleep (unlike Ophelia, who–damn her–still, still slumbered), to usefully employ the morning hours that stretched lazily between her and her shift.

First, she would choose her apparel for her meeting with Rick. After some deliberation before the open door of the hall closet, Livia settled on the two-piece black suit she had worn on the occasion of her first successful endeavor with the chocolate tarts. The silk stockings, the corset, the sandals. She sometimes had recourse to that particular combination of clothing for sex when she was inexplicably apprehensive with respect to a meeting. The ensemble was talismanic, symbolic of invincibility, and a sure-fire shortcut to consequences once the ritual consumption of the chocolate tarts had been enacted.

Once the clothes were chosen, she decided to clean her apartment. Cleaning, Aunt Cornelia had always said, was a Godly way to occupy idle hands.

~

The kitchen sink was thoroughly scrubbed. The chipped, white surface of the stove top shone with unaccustomed brilliance, and the wooden boards of the floor purred after their warm, soapy bath in Murphy’s Oil Soap. Livia turned to attack the shelf above the stove, where she kept the dishes for her passionate and tempering candles. It was dusty. There were heavy deposits of wax-drippings around the area where she kept the candle dishes. Livia was forced to scrape at them with a knife. Finally, after several minutes of scraping, the tempering yellow drippings gave way. They peeled off in one amorphous glob. She threw the drippings into the trash can.

The passionate red wax proved to be more difficult. Livia scraped and scraped, but the wax clung to the blue-stained wood of the shelf as though its very life were at stake. After more and useless scraping, she glanced at the clock. Twelve-thirty. Late again. Livia threw the knife into the sink. The wax would have to stay where it was.

~

Improvisation

As she hurried toward the subway, Livia was vaguely aware of the unaccustomed heat. The sun was bright, brighter than was the norm for the showery, new-leafed month of April. There were, she noticed with distracted surprise, fully bloomed flowers in the window boxes of some of the buildings on the sunny side of the street. The flowers–petunias, snapdragons, even some geraniums–were not the violets, daffodils, or pale-tinted, tiny irises she associated with spring. These blooms were drenched in the saturated colors of July heat and lethargy.

She would have sworn (although, in her sleep-deprived state, the sensible Livia would never actually have sworn to anything) that the seductive blooms had not been in those window boxes the day before.

Maybe they were in for an early summer–Livia recalled suffocating heat in her apartment the night before while she’d prepared the chocolate tarts. And she remembered, puzzled anew, the burning sensation in her fingertip after she had lightly touched her tongue.

At work, Livia was distracted (lack of sleep, as she had had the opportunity to observe during the owl-eyed month she’d spent following the inauguration of the chocolate tarts, was detrimental to one’s concentration). The white-tiled surface of her station was inexplicably disorderly, implements scattered in disarray across it. The irritated Livia rearranged them and set to work.

~

Following her return from New Orleans, Livia was informed that she had been given a raise and promoted to sous-chef.

“Za first voman to haf here zees position…”, the pot-bellied, red-nosed Hungarian owner added, rubbing his enormous belly portentously with his small, chapped hands.

The raise and promotion were given because of the heavenly delectability of everything Livia had chopped, diced, filleted, marinated, simmered, sauteed, seasoned or even touched during her shift on the day of the evening she met Rick.

That evening, at the very moment in which Livia extracted the midnight blue rice-paper package from her bag, one of the restaurant’s most wealthy and regular clients experienced a spasm in his mouth shockingly similar to those spasms which generally occur only in regions below the waist, between the thighs. The spasm, he avowed, had been brought on by his tongue’s first contact with the heavenly sauce that moistened the giant al dente pasta shells stuffed with garlic-sauteed spinach and farm-fresh ricotta on the delicate china plate in front of him.

The Hungarian owner was summoned from the white-tiled world behind the metal door. After some ten minutes of florid compliments, batted back and forth like a badminton bird (the client was Russian), the gentleman asked to be presented to the chef.

The portly owner informed the Russian gentleman, proudly, that the hand which had created the sauce that had produced so indescribable a sensation against his jaded tongue was a feminine one (“a beautiful voman”). The hand’s owner, unfortunately, was unavailable to receive his compliments; she went off at eight.

Iron-grey eyebrows shot upward into shocked, inverted v’s that opened the Russian gentleman’s bulging eyes even wider. His booming voice lowered to a purr and his fat hand crossed the Hungarian owner’s square, red palm; there was a crackling sound. A crisp, one-hundred dollar bill made its way into the cramped space of the Hungarian owner’s pocket. The crisp bill was for the angel who had created the heavenly sauce. On his next visit to the restaurant, the gentleman wished to be presented to its recipient.

~

Livia, when she learned of the success of her sauce, was shocked. The sauce had, in the short space of four days and nights, become legendary; it was to be incorporated into the restaurant’s standing menu. The sauce, however, had been a harried improvisation. The clams for the marinara sauce ai frutti di mare on her list of things to prepare had failed to appear with the morning seafood shipment from Biloxi, and Livia had been loathe to devolve the sauce into a simple tomato one. She had searched the storeroom for pasta shells and had found several boxes, forgotten and dusty, behind a large case of fava beans. She’d asked one of the delivery boys to get her two kilos of fresh basil and set about chopping garlic.

She should have been exhausted, lethargic. But the sweaty, nervous energy of the night before had not diminished, despite her failure to sleep, even one wink–instead, it had visited a fevered, inchoate, and brilliant inspiration upon her in a moment of extreme crisis: basil-cream sauce with the slightest touch of cayenne pepper.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here .

The post Bad, Bad Love Cooks Like She’s Possessed (And She Is) appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Knew She Shouldn’t But She Did

Badass chef Livia has been instructed by Wanda to stay far, far away from Bad, Bad Chocolate Tarts until she’s back from saving her sister’s butt in New Orleans. But, as we all know, ladies, if one is smart enough, she can rationalize pretty much anything, and be convincing about it… even to herself. In Installment X of our serialized and salty little tartelette of a novella, some irrevocable forces are set in motion. We’re kind of into the dinner phase now,  but no worries, if you missed drinks and hors d’oeuvres, you can go back to the very beginning by clicking right here.

NB, for what follows: That thing in the picture? It’s a phone. Really, it is.

~

Telephone

After her conversation with Wanda, Livia took the train back uptown. On her way from the subway stop to her building, she stopped at a deli. For chocolate and flour. She shouldn’t, she knew—Wanda had told her to suspend all chocolate tart tastings until after her return from New Orleans. But the flour jar was low, and she was almost out of chocolate. She was merely following Pearl’s example.

There were no messages on her answering machine. She dialed the other number; she had one new message.

The message was from a man named Rick. He was forty-two years old, he had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in philosophy, he now owned an antique store, and he was bored with meeting women in bars (that was what they all claimed–Livia was never sure she believed any of them, but this was not about integrity. This was about sex). Rick claimed to be six feet, three inches tall, slim with long blond hair, which he wore in a ponytail. He assured Livia, no, Ophelia, that he owned a motorcycle jacket. Livia, in her no-nonsense laying-out of the qualifications–both physical and intellectual–necessary for even a phone call, had named the possession of a leather motorcycle jacket as a sine qua non.

That stipulation virtually assured her the avoidance of frumpy men: very few frumpy men would dare to appear in public in a black leather motorcycle jacket. In fact, very few men, having heard the dispassionate tones of Livia’s voice warning them against exaggerating their physical appeal (“I will eventually see you “), would dare to claim a full head of hair if they were bald, or to tout their broad shoulders and flat stomach if they were pudgy. Livia had thus far been satisfied with the results of her severity.

As to Rick’s calling her Ophelia, it was a precaution. One didn’t want the chocolate tart tasters, by some clever machination (after all, she had specified intelligence as one of the necessary criteria), obtaining one’s phone number, or divining one’s place of work, once the chocolate tart had been tasted, once the prickly warm desire between one’s silk-stocking clad legs had been satisfied, and the consequences consummated. (“No, I have yours, I’ll give you a call…”  Livia often wondered how long they waited).

Sometimes, she told the men her name was Marta.

~

Rick had said that she could phone as late as two. It was barely twelve. She reached for the telephone, then paused.  Wanda had cautioned her against having anything to do with the chocolate tarts until her business in New Orleans was completed. But, Livia reasoned, she had successfully handled the matter of the ad and the chocolate tarts for two entire years. On the one occasion when danger had been terribly close, Livia had reacted quickly, superbly, almost professionally. Wanda didn’t give her enough credit. Livia knew that it was because she wasn’t really Latina.  Despite her perfect Spanish and her address, Livia, with her pale skin and blue eyes, would never be anything but a gringa.

And it was time–she hadn’t offered chocolate tarts to anyone for more than a week. The previous Sunday had been Easter, and Livia had worked many more hours than was her wont during the week preceding the holy day. For the past forty-eight hours, stabs of desire had asserted themselves with annoying insistence at the most inopportune of moments. That very day, while she was engaged in preparing delicate potato latkes, to be served with light sour cream and Russian caviar, Livia had allowed her mind to wander into dangerous territory. The smell of burning batter alerted her to her to the fact that all of the oil in her skillet had burned away. Soon she would have had a fire on her hands.

Livia could take care of herself, thank you very much. She would call Rick. She was doing the only sensible thing: her mind would be much freer to concentrate on Danae’s situation if she took care of her baser needs first.

There were five long rings. A click, a few seconds of silence, or maybe it was only one. Perhaps Rick had been sleeping.

The voice, when it answered, was a careful voice, a precise voice, the tones measured. It was a fully American voice; Livia thought that perhaps she detected the hint of a Midwestern accent, maybe Wisconsin. Livia’s ear, after two years of planning chocolate tart tastings with unknown voices over the phone, had become sensitive to the slightest nuances of cadence and timbre. She had been known to end a conversation after the exchange of only a few phrases: sometimes a mere “hello” was enough to induce Livia to rapidly replace the receiver.

But she liked this voice. Rick’s voice. In addition to the hint of a Midwestern accent, there was a certain roughness. Beneath the roughness, something carefully controlled. Livia wanted to know what that something was.

“Is this Rick?”

An amused, contained, interrogative, open-ended “Yes…?”  The voice waited for her to identify herself.

“My name is Li…Ophelia…” The contained something had almost made her forget. “You left a message in my voice mailbox.”

There was another pause, then the voice, contained; again, Livia suspected a hint of amusement. “Yes, I did.”

A short silence, with which her interlocutor appeared not to be in the least uncomfortable. For some inexplicable reason, the silence was terribly arousing to Livia. “I guess it’s late. Did I wake you up?”

There was a laugh. A low laugh. Livia liked the laugh.

“No, and if you had, you would be perfectly within your rights. I told you you could call as late as two. It’s only ten past twelve.”

~

Breeze

It was after one when Livia replaced the receiver into the cradle. The conversation had been, on the surface, pleasant and innocuous. Rick had talked about his childhood and adolescence. He had moved a lot–California, Michigan, Wisconsin (Livia had been right), which had turned him into something of a loner. He had finished coursework for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale, but had dropped out before orals.

“I’ve never understood why you have to look like you have a broom up your butt to be an academic.”

After leaving Yale, he had come to New York (a logical choice). A short laugh. He’d worked in bookstores, art galleries, a restaurant. He’d opened the antique store with his wife. They’d separated. He’d bought her half.

Livia could have listened to Rick’s voice for hours; it wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest what he talked about. And there were the pauses and the short silences. He listened, considered, before responding to Livia’s statements or queries. Even as she’d enjoyed the pauses, she felt that they had been designed to test her, perhaps even to make her uncomfortable. As though he were tempting her, encouraging her to foolishly rush to fill them. The discomfort his pauses might occasion seemed to give him a mildly perverse pleasure.

Livia approved of perversity, as long as it was not carried to extremes. Perversity, judiciously employed, excited her. She wanted, very badly, to know what lay behind the pauses.

Given the violent effect of Rick’s voice and its pauses on her body, Livia had considered postponing their meeting until after her return from New Orleans. Wanda’s warning rang in her ears as they deliberated on a suitable place to meet (“don’t fuck with this, Livia…”). But Livia assured herself that she would scrupulously follow the rules of the chocolate tart game, to the letter, that she, as in the previous case of successfully averted disaster, would flee with due haste at the first hint of similar souls.

Rick suggested a bar near his antique store (he lived, conveniently, in a studio behind the store). They agreed on nine o’clock. The entire process could even be over in an hour or two: a drink, the tart, the consequences of the tart. With any luck, she would be sleeping peacefully in the embrace of the walls of her bower, decked with Wanda’s illusionistic tour-de-force, by midnight.

~

Immediately after her conversation with Rick, Livia began to prepare the chocolate tarts, vaguely conscious that it was hot in the kitchen. She felt sweat gathering under her arms and along her hairline; the sweat started to trickle in warm, salty rivulets down her sides toward her waist. And it kept getting hotter, and hotter, and still hotter in the kitchen until her body felt as though it were on fire. Livia reasoned that it was getting on toward the middle of spring, that she had gotten home late and the windows hadn’t been open all day.

The air in the kitchen was sweet and close, redolent of something heavy and dense, probably chocolate, reasoned Livia. And she must have set the oven too high–that was it, it was too hot because of the oven and the window, and the heat made the smell of chocolate stronger than it normally would be. Overpowering, actually, Livia admitted to herself as she swallowed a mouthful of hot, chocolate-heavy air. But no, the oven dial read a moderate 350 degrees.

Livia made herself a strong vodka and tonic, with extra cubes of ice. And extra vodka. There was a fizzing feeling, a hissing sound, as the cold liquid made its first contact with her tongue; alarmed, Livia raised a finger to her mouth.  Her hand jerked sharply as she shook it; it felt as though she had burned it on an iron. Was she feverish? No, that was silly. She felt fine. Her forehead was cool. Perhaps she was drunk.

At a convenient moment in the mixing process, Livia ran across the kitchen to open a window; almost immediately she felt better. A sharp breeze had come up. It entered the kitchen window happily, as though it had been waiting for her to open that window, so that it could playfully caress her neck, the bare skin of her shoulders, her stomach (Livia had felt so uncomfortably hot in her black jeans and her man’s shirt, that she had removed them. She now stood before the kitchen counter in bra and panties, diligently stirring the chocolate mixture.)

The breeze played with a strand of hair that had escaped the loose beignet-speared-with-chopsticks at the back of Livia’s head. She reached up, annoyed, to tuck the mischievous strand back into the beignet and, while she was at it, to wipe the sweat from the back of her neck. At that very moment, as she completed the tucking gesture with her left hand, Livia’s right hand was occupied in administering the six drops of Wanda’s liquid to the chocolate mixture.

Suddenly, the room was dark. Livia felt blindly for the light switch, cursing in furious Spanish. The wind had blown out the candles.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

The post Bad, Bad Love Knew She Shouldn’t But She Did appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Turns Chocolate to Her Purposes

So what happened when Livia took those Bad, Bad Chocolate Tarts out for a Bad, Bad Test Run? Well, you can probably guess. But much more fun to read about it. Which you can do in a hot minute if you choose to consume Slice IX of our serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known as A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). I must advise against trying this recipe at home, and certainly against taking your creations out to the neighborhood bar, but if you do these things, Bad, Bad Lovers, which you might, given who you are, the rest of us want to hear alllllllll about it. Live-stream, maybe? And if you missed the prep-cook phases of this culinary masterpiece, you can go back to the very beginning by clicking right here.

NB, for what follows: The story transpires in the ’90s. You could still smoke in bars then. References, likewise, are made to ‘personal ads’. For those of you who only know Tinder, or (god help us) E-Harmony, these were saner, better times. Trust me.

~

The Consequences of Chocolate Tarts

On the first night, Livia dressed in clothing chosen, after a lengthy process of deliberation, from the hall closet. She took a cab downtown. It was just after ten. She seated herself at the bar of a stylish Soho venue for cocktails; she ordered a martini. The bar was steel, the stools were steel, and there were lights behind the shelves (also steel) where the bottles were kept. It looked like a stage set. Livia smoked.

After half an hour or so, she felt a presence at her right. She half-turned. It was a man. A beautiful man. A tall, slim, beautiful man with longish, dark-brown hair, unstyled, the way she liked it. The hair fell across his thinnish face, into his dark eyes. There were creases around the eyes; the man was probably around forty. That was fine with Livia, she had no time for the inexperience of youth. The man’s face was squared off by a strong jaw. There were harsh lines beside the mouth where dimples would appear if he smiled, which he had not yet done, at least not for Livia.

Neither had his eyes met hers; they were fixed instead on her legs. As well they might be. Livia had fantastic legs. Most of the time they were hidden beneath the rough denim of her black jeans, the delicate ankles encased in the black boots, the beautiful feet unseen beneath a daunting and very protective camouflage of black leather.

But that night Livia was wearing black silk stockings. Real silk. Clothes for sex, Wanda had said. Livia now possessed an entire closet full of clothes for sex. The stockings were so sheer you barely saw them. They made subtle black shadows along the contours of the fantastic legs, around the knee, where the legs were crossed, over the pronounced dips and hollows of calf-into-ankle. Livia was wearing black patent-leather sandals with very high and very pointed heels.

The nails on her feet were painted red, and she was wearing a two-piece black suit with a very short skirt. She had forgotten the designer’s name, but the suit had been expensive. Under the suit (the man’s name was Benjamin. She had a few surprises for Benjamin) was a corset and garter-belt set. Livia was wearing makeup, but she was not wearing panties.

Convincing Benjamin to eat a chocolate tart was child’s play. When Livia produced the midnight blue rice-paper package, explaining that she was a chef and that she had been particularly pleased with the way the tarts had turned out (these were for a friend, but no matter, he could have one), Benjamin enthusiastically changed his order from scotch to a pricey Sauterne.

“Dessert wine for dessert,” he quipped. He had very white teeth.

Benjamin was an actor. Livia took this into account in her assessment of the moans of pleasure Benjamin produced as the silky-smooth chocolate slid down his throat. Even allowing a large margin for exaggeration (Livia was familiar with actors; she had only to think of Bretton), it seemed as though her soul was sufficiently dissimilar to Benjamin’s for copulation to be advisable. Livia felt desire, and was pleased to note that desire’s effects were confined to the regions below her waist. Livia smiled guilelessly, sweetly, and turned her blue gaze toward Benjamin’s forefinger, with its clean, square nail, as he noisily licked a smear of chocolate from its tip. This one was definitely safe.

~

Success

Very early on the first morning following the first night, Livia climbed the stairs to her apartment and unlocked the door just as the sun was beginning to invade her kitchen. She had a café con leche in her hand and she was elated. The black silk stockings were ruined (Benjamin hadn’t wanted her to take them off–as a matter of fact, the only clothing she had removed was the suit). There had been no talk of exchanging phone numbers, no lips pressed to the forbidden spot at the base of her throat, and no regrets as she’d closed the door on the thunderous sounds of Benjamin’s snores half an hour earlier.

Livia had allowed herself a cab home in celebration of the chocolate tarts’ success. She removed the suit, the corset, the stockings, the garter belt. Lingerie into the bathroom sink, foaming bubbles of Woolite. Shoes into the hall closet, suit into the pile for dry cleaning, Livia into the shower.

~

Some Consequences, As Usual, Are Unforeseen

The only problem with the chocolate tarts was that they were addictive. To Livia. Following the evening of their maiden voyage, she hardly slept for an entire month. The Dominican owner of the coffee shop on her corner received almost daily visits from Livia at five, six, seven. Livia dressed in her clothes for sex. He had taken to looking at her in a suggestive, knowing way, his dark eyes resting openly on her lips, her throat, shoulders, legs.

Her work and her social life were suffering from the chocolate tarts; one day she caught herself up short as she was about to add a tablespoon of flour directly to a just-thickening Alfredo sauce. Something had to be done.

At six o’clock on a Wednesday morning, the third since the feeding of Benjamin, Livia’s kitchen was still somnolent under the timid grey shadows that visit this world only briefly each morning, softening the edges of things and making them sweet, poignant (even the most familiar of objects–a kitchen table, a shelf whose contents one has memorized). The apartment slept in absolute, hushed silence. Ophelia, too, above the kitchen table, seemed to sleep, her young chest rising and falling in time to her sleep-breathing with motions so tiny Livia couldn’t see them.

Having returned home some twenty minutes earlier, she’d just finished a religious performance of the ritual which Wanda had dictated must follow the consequences of the chocolate tarts. The black velvet cocktail dress with the scandalous slit up the side had become a small pile of liquid folds, with lights and shadows whose varied tones would, with the added depths lent them by the gray morning shadows, have delighted any lover of chiaroscuro.

When Livia had set out from her apartment the night before, just after ten, that dress had covered a cherry-red silk half-corset-and panties set. The back of the corset laced up–real eyelets sewn together by a red satin ribbon. The man–Livia, who hadn’t slept more than four consecutive hours for over a week, was, at that particular moment, having difficulty remembering his name–hadn’t quite known what to do with himself when he had seen the corset. Livia had informed him of exactly what he should do.

Sitting at her kitchen table in her clean underwear (her own underwear, not the underwear for sex), sipping her café con leche–her second; she needed to be awake so that she could think clearly–Livia decided that the problem was the manner in which she was going about obtaining tasters for the chocolate tarts. The procedure was not particularly efficient; a lot of time, in fact, was wasted. The baking, the getting dressed. The taxi ride downtown (she’d soon learned not to ride the subway while dressed in her clothes for sex), the choosing of a bar (she was careful not to choose the same one too often). Not to mention waiting for the man, once she’d identified him to approach her.

This, in fact, was a particularly thorny problem. The “rapprochement.” Because some men were shy, they couldn’t believe that Livia was really looking at them. Once, it had taken a man two hours to get up the nerve to ask if he could buy her a drink. Then another hour of desultory conversation, at the end of which both Livia and the man were sloppily drunk.

The man had asked for her phone number–maybe she would like to go out on a date sometime. In response to this, Livia had placed her hand suggestively on his thigh as she offered him the chocolate tart. The man’s face had turned bright red. He’d paid for his drink and left the bar.

But at least, with that particular specimen, conversation had been possible. Some men’s conversations were so distressingly inane that, despite their beauty, they just didn’t seem worth the waste of a chocolate tart. Frustrated, she would change bars, and the selection process, and then the waiting, would begin all over again. Sometimes it was three o’clock before the midnight-blue rice paper package was even opened. And then there were the nights when Livia went to the trouble of dressing, of paying a cab driver to take her to Soho (which also entailed a tip), of buying herself a martini (yet more tips, one per drink), only to find her chosen venue, and the next, and the next, devoid of even the most remote possibilities for chocolate-tart consumption.

Halfway through her third café con leche on that Wednesday morning, Livia had hit upon the idea of a personal ad. Her hands were trembling; perhaps this was due to lack of sleep, perhaps to the amount of coffee she had consumed on an otherwise empty stomach, or perhaps the tremor was to be attributed to her elation over the certain success of her idea. The wording of the ad was terribly important, as was that of the message callers would hear when they dialed one’s box number. But Livia was equal to the task: she had learned from the mistakes of others.

One of Livia’s friends had placed a personal ad the previous summer, with disastrous results. Lara, dazzlingly blonde and one inch over six feet tall, was a former photographer’s model with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. The unfortunate Lara often had difficulties in the field of romance because, it seemed, she intimidated most men. At the time she placed the ad, she had not had a date for two years and three months. But when she complained of her loneliness no one ever believed her. Wanda and Livia were Lara’s only friends.

Women she met or worked with were afraid to invite her to parties because, they reasoned, once their boyfriends, husbands, or prospects, got a look at Lara, they might as well forget it. And they would never, ever be caught dead going out for drinks with her–it would be, opined one of Lara’s co-workers with a Catholic upbringing she had never quite shaken, like going to confession with Mother Teresa. The lovely biochemist, though, could have reassured her:  more often than not, once she opened her mouth, male predators headed for the hills.

At her wit’s end, Lara had decided to place an ad. Certain that her impressive qualifications would not fail to draw a large response from equally frustrated men, Lara had been so intent on accurately describing herself that she’d failed to be specific in her requirements for a suitable partner. The response to her ad had, indeed, been overwhelming, but Lara had actually confessed to bribing a cook, on one occasion, to let her out the kitchen door of a restaurant. The cook had then tried to kiss her, upon which Lara had speared the top of his foot, in its soft shoe, with the heel of her stiletto, and fled into the night.

At the end of an entire summer of unsatisfactory first (and last) dates, Lara had reconsidered her ad and changed the wording. She was harshly specific, in her voice-mail greeting, about what she would and would not brook in the way of physical and intellectual shortcomings.

The results of Lara’s second ad had been much more pleasing; Livia would follow her example. She would even place the words “attached o.k.” at the end of her cryptic solicitation for masculine company, thus doubling (perhaps even tripling) her possible selection of chocolate tart tasters.

~

Success, Again

In general, the ad had proved an admirable solution to the problem. Now, when she chose her clothes for the evening from the hall closet, Livia was virtually assured of her efforts being worthwhile. The chocolate tart tastings could be scheduled in advance, and activities leading up to the consumption of the delicacies (as well as their consequences) could be begun at a decent hour, thus assuring Livia of the requisite number of hours of sleep.

Only once had the proffering of a chocolate tart resulted in a narrow escape from the treacherous consequences of similar souls. Livia, to tell the truth, had not been surprised by the rapidity with which the man–a composer–spat the barely-chewed contents of his mouth discreetly into a napkin. When she’d first glimpsed him, from the door of the bar, she had already felt the prickly warm sensation between her thighs. She had also been alarmed by desire’s insidious climbing, after the first drink and half an hour of electricity, up into the regions above her waist, dangerously close to her heart.

The man, after spitting the bite of chocolate tart into a napkin, reached for his glass of water and gulped its contents (with consequences against which Livia might have warned him; she, however, had been intent upon executing her own escape). The man had immediately excused himself to the restroom and Livia had fled–the man could pay the bar tab when he finished his business–only resuming normal breathing once she was safely in a cab. She raised a tentative hand to her neck; the pulse point in the hollow at the base of her throat was throbbing painfully.

When she’d later recounted the near-miss to Wanda, her friend had responded, as she fired up both their cigarettes, using her personalized lighter adorned with her initials and two skulls, “¡Bien hecho, niña!”

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

The post Bad, Bad Love Turns Chocolate to Her Purposes appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad, Bad Love Whips Up Some Chocolate Tarts

It’s all the desperate phone calls, Bad, Bad Lovers (on pay phones, yes, pay phones), and allllllll the witchy chocolate tarts, in this week’s dose of Bad, Bad Love. Administered in the form of Installment VIII of our serialized millefeuille of a yummy little novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen). You can either jump right into the intrigue and the chocolate high, or, if you like, go back to the beginning of alllll the trouble, by clicking right here.

~

Desperate Measures

Wanda answered on the second ring.

“She’s going to take laudanum, Wanda. Laudanum!”

This was the first time since that Christmas night five years earlier that Livia had pronounced the word aloud. It sounded almost ridiculous.

Wanda listened in silence as Livia talked about Danae’s telegram, Danae’s jerk of a husband, her sister’s fascination with laudanum, her certainty of her sister’s intentions.

“Pero Livia, that sounds so…bueno…so theatrical. She can’t be serious. I don’t even think you can get laudanum anymore.”

“Oh, she’s serious, all right. And, yes, you can get laudanum. She’s already got it. She’s really done her homework. That’s what worries me; it’s not like her. You don’t know Danae; I haven’t really talked about her with you. We don’t have much in common.”

Livia deposited another quarter and pulled out a cigarette. She was exceeding her limit for the day, considerably, but she considered her excesses, in this case, entirely justified. She felt in her pocket for her lighter. How to explain Danae to Wanda?

“Listen, Wanda. The whole thing’s about aging, okay? She’s already had liposuction. Which she did not need. And collagen injections. She had her eyes done last year. I know, because she came here to do it. Her beauty is all she has, and she doesn’t think it has any power anymore, at least not over her husband. He’s fucking a twenty-year-old college student. Her name is Crystalle…” Livia’s voice dropped. This was embarrassing. “Accent on the last syllable…you know,`l-l-e’…”

Wanda’s laugh was loud and strident. Livia held the receiver away from her wounded ear. “Pero Livia, you can’t take this seriously!  Crystalle!! ¡Ay, por favor! It sounds like a screw-top wine-cooler!” A snort, followed by a guffaw.

“Wanda… Please. She’s my sister!”

“I’m not laughing at your sister, ¡coño! It’s men…they’re pathetic! Hombre, when they hit mid-life crisis, they don’t even have taste anymore –they don’t care where they stick it, long as it’s too young for `em!” More snorts, more guffaws. “What’s she look like? Wait…don’t tell me. She’s a cheerleader! He’s fucking a cheerleader!”

It was true. Crystalle was a cheerleader who had auditioned the spring of her freshman year for the role of Ophelia; Bretton had been producing Hamlet for the following fall. Her round face with its turned-up nose was all wrong for Ophelia, but just right for Bretton. Crystalle had been Bretton’s personal assistant for two years. But Livia wasn’t of the humor to share the bit about the cheerleader with Wanda. Maybe later.

“Wanda, please, this is serious. She’s cheesy as all hell, está bién, but she’s still fucking my sister’s husband, and my sister wants to take laudanum because of it, well, because of a lot of other things, but she’s not helping. He even brings her to their house to help him in his office…she’s his personal assistant.”

There was a stifled snort of disgust through the receiver. It turned into something like a sigh. “She should leave him…¡que se vaya, coño! What’s she doing with a shit like that anyway? She could find another man.”

It was Livia’s turn to sigh. “You don’t know Danae. I can’t explain it…She doesn’t look for men–she doesn’t know how. They look for her. She’s like my mother. I never talked to you about my mother, either. She died when I was twelve. Actually, it was more like an apotheosis…”

Silence.

“Wanda, Danae isn’t like us. We do things, we make things, we have things to think about when we get up in the morning. Danae… doesn’t. She’s never had to. She just is; it’s like she’s there for men to adore or something.

If she doesn’t have adoration, she withers…I know, I know. I wouldn’t exactly describe her as a feminist, either, and the whole thing’s at least partly her fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’ll do it. I know she will. She’ll probably be sorry afterward because I don’t think she really realizes that you can’t go back, but by then it’ll be too late…and she still loves Bretton if you can believe that. Or she thinks she does…

I don’t want my sister to die, okay? Don’t think I haven’t tried to come up with another solution. I had almost decided to poison him, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life in prison. You have to help me.”

“Bueno.” A definite, prolonged sigh. “When are you leaving?”

“Friday at noon.”

“Okay, Livia, but this isn’t going to be easy. I’ll have to go to the santero. I can’t have you go, this is too complicated, and he’d never give you all the stuff. I’ll need at least a day…But I can’t give it to you tomorrow night; the night is too powerful, and this will be potent stuff, te lo aseguro. Come to my place at ten on Friday morning, maybe on your way to the airport or something…And Livia?”

“What?”

“You know the other stuff you’re doing? No lo jodas. Don’t fuck it up. Be really careful with that right now. You probably shouldn’t even do it between now and then. And you’re going to New Orleans, all sorts of shit can happen there…If you have two spells going at once, if you’re not careful, things can get pretty weird. Cuidado, ¿okay? Nos vemos el viernes.”

~

  Chocolate Tarts

Livia had carefully considered her choice of a recipe into which to mix Wanda’s liquid. She chose the chocolate tarts for two reasons: first, she had never met a man who did not like chocolate. Second, the tarts could be made in individual portions, wrapped in rice paper, and taken along in her bag (so could cookies, but cookies were not seductive). The tarts were like condoms. One should always have them at the ready.

The first time she prepared the chocolate tarts, Livia made the mistake of tasting one. That was how you cooked, you tasted as you went along, to see if the pastry dough was too salty or too sweet, to see if the chocolate had somehow acquired that dreaded burned taste that meant that you had to throw the whole lot out and start over. Aunt Pearl would never serve something she herself hadn’t tasted, both during the cooking process and once it was finished. Livia religiously followed her example.

When Pearl died, she left her tasting spoons to Livia. The tasting spoons were a perfectly matched collection of small silver spoons, five, of perfectly graded sizes. Livia kept them at the restaurant, in her cabinet, beside the bottle of brandy. She always washed a spoon as soon as she had used it for tasting, both for hygienic purposes and to neutralize its surface again. Silver was porous–it absorbed flavors and smells. What you were tasting at one moment should never be colored, nuanced, by what you had tasted ten minutes before.

Livia had brought the tasting spoons home especially in honor of the occasion–her first batch of chocolate tarts. The tasting spoons were her talisman; they made her think of Pearl. Pearl had never ruined a dish because Pearl had never been perturbed by men. As she rolled out the pastry dough which would eventually cradle six equal portions of the chocolate mixture–in effect, six nights of emotionally safe sex–Livia wondered if Pearl would have given in to her biological urges if she had lived in Manhattan among so many temptations. Livia felt sure that she would have, and she felt sure that Pearl would have thought the idea of the tarts ingenious.

The candles were burning–a red one and a yellow one. Livia had placed them on the small shelf above the stove, in two cheap plates she had bought at a discount store for that purpose. Wanda had said that you should be facing the candles while you cooked. She wasn’t surprised at the bitterness of the drop of chocolate mixture she licked from her tasting spoon. There was no sugar in the mixture; the bitterness was not a burned one (she hadn’t burned the chocolate), but one which lacked sugar. Livia removed the stopper from the tiny green bottle and added six drops of Wanda’s liquid to the dark, moist mixture in the bowl.

The liquid had no smell. She stirred the mixture, portioned it into the six tart shells on the baking tray, placed them into the oven. They would require forty-five minutes of baking time.

After the tarts cooled, Livia ate one. The pastry was light, flaky, buttery, perfect. But when the chocolate mixture, now fully cooked, made contact with her tongue, a bitter taste immediately filled her mouth, a taste so nauseating, so overpowering, so indescribably horrid that she spat the mouthful of tart onto the floor–she hadn’t even made it to the sink. Instinctively, Livia reached for a glass and filled it with water at the tap. She drank the water without rinsing her mouth first. The water carried the bitterness into her stomach.

Seconds later, Livia was hunched over the toilet in her very clean bathroom, her thin body racked by spasms and dry heaves. She vomited her supper, she vomited the water. The water in the toilet bowl before her disgusted (but fascinated) eyes was bright, electric green. Nothing that Livia had eaten for dinner would have turned the water that color, even in the middle of the digestive process. No, it was Wanda’s liquid. Livia flushed the toilet, washed her face, rinsed her mouth.

Her hands were respectful as she wrapped the remaining five tarts in rice paper–midnight blue. She tied the tiny packages with black ribbon, like gifts. She was no longer wary of trying them out: if any man’s soul were similar enough to hers to place her in danger of love’s vulnerability and blindness, she would know it instantly. She smiled to herself as she tied the last ribbon around the last packet and blew out the candles.

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

Connect with Cynthia on Twitter, Facebook,  Goodreads , and  Instagram , find her book  Birds Of Wonder   here  and learn more about Cynthia  here . 

The post Bad, Bad Love Whips Up Some Chocolate Tarts appeared first on Cynthia Robinson.

Bad Bad Love? There’s A Spell for That

Installment VII of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen)! Yes, oh yes, oh, yes-yes-YESSSSS! I know, you’ve been holding your breath since last Saturday morning. But you can let it all out, Bad, Bad Lovers, right this very second, because our little moment of serialized-novella-narrative fun is here! This week, Livia the Bad-Ass Chef gets herself mixed up in some serious santería.

And before you go all like she don’t know what she’s talking about, she’s not From There, let me assure you that I absolutely do know what I am talking about: I had a close friend, Puerto Rican, who was wayyyyy into this stuff and I have seen some things that would make your eyes pop. Many of which found their way into this here little story we are telling… If you’re just recently arrived to the party, welcome, welcome, pour yourself a drink and get comfortable. You can either dive right in with the rest of us or, if you like, go back to the beginning, by clicking right here.

~

Wanda (cont.)

When she was thirty-three, Livia had been living with a painter of Chilean nationality. Rubén. Rubén (at least according to Rubén) was a genius. His genius entitled him (again, according to Rubén) to fits of angry silence, disappearances lasting up to three days (Livia was never to invade his privacy by asking him where he had been; artists needed space), and women. Younger women (Rubén had been thirty-nine at the time. Livia had been younger than Rubén but, apparently, not young enough. Young, according to Rubén, meant twenty. Maybe twenty-five). Livia should try to understand, those girls were just for sex, they got him hot and made him want to paint.

Livia had spent hours contemplating the intensely phallic nature of the paintbrush, the insemination-like penetration of paint into the porous surface of the canvas. Trying to understand the rights Rubén had accorded to himself, trying to convince herself that they corresponded to reality and that if she wanted a man, she would just have to get used to a few things. But she was ultimately unsuccessful. Rubén had to go.

The day before her thirty-fourth birthday, Livia calmly and politely asked Rubén to leave. She was going to work. When she returned, she expected to find him, his canvases, his paints, and his genius, gone. Rubén cried. Rubén threw phallic paintbrushes, loaded with thick globs of paint, at a nearly-finished nude (for which Livia had not been the model). Rubén asked why. Because, Livia responded, I am not happy.

“¿Pero por qué, Livia, mi amor, mi vida?  ¡No!  ¡No me voy!”

Livia’s quiet, steely insistence, however, countered his protests, and Rubén conceded victory to her anger. With disheartening rapidity, Livia had realized as she prepared marinade for perfect cubes of steak an hour later.

But certain positive things had been reaped from her relationship with Rubén. There was her perfect Spanish. When she dropped something at work or, on very rare occasions, cut herself with a knife, she uttered expletives in that language that made the Mexican delivery boys blush.

And there was her friendship with Wanda. Wanda had been Rubén’s girlfriend before Livia met him; they had, for some reason inexplicable to Livia until Wanda revealed to her the secret of her tranquility, remained friends.

~

Livia had not questioned her impulse as she dialed Wanda’s number late on the night she had asked Rubén to leave. She had downed two shots of brandy after her shift; she was operating on instinct. Wanda was sympathetic; she invited Livia to her studio.

“Sí, es un hijo de puta…I could have told you that a long time ago, but people never want to hear that mierda while they’re still trying.  Bueno, ya está… better for you, believe me. You’ve never seen my paintings, have you? I’ll get a bottle of wine; you can sleep here if you like…maybe you don’t want to sleep there all alone tonight…bad vibes, ¿sabes?”.

Wanda was from Puerto Rico. She was tiny, petite, with long black hair and a face like a Murillo madonna. While Wanda opened a bottle of red wine, Livia observed a strange tattoo on the flesh of her new friend’s left arm, just below the shoulder. Livia asked her about it.

“It’s a double-edged ax”, Wanda said. “It represents my saint, Santa Bárbara.”

Livia innocently inquired if Wanda had been born on the day of Saint Bárbara. Wanda laughed a laugh surprisingly big for her tiny body and took a drag off her cigarette.

“No, no, no…I chose her. You know…for, bueno, cosas de santería…”

Livia looked around the studio. Candles and herbs, medallions with saintly faces full of eternal suffering and infinite love. Complicated knots tied into twine, hanging from doorknobs, candelabras, and the ceiling. She was usually much more observant. The break-up with Rubén must be affecting her more than she would like it to. Wanda’s studio was dark, except for the tenuous light of flames from the candles placed at random around the trapezoidal space. There were solemn icons on the walls, interspersed with the somber colors and haunted faces of Wanda’s paintings.

“They’re all self-portraits, de una manera u otra“, Wanda explained. “One way or another. They’re kind of about my father, too. He was schizophrenic, but my mother didn’t want to put him in an institution.”

Wanda’s mother had sacrificed the best years of her life to care for her husband who, often enough for it to have made a deep impression on her daughter, raved madly and had to be tied down. When Wanda’s mother had managed to calm him (whispering words that Wanda never completely heard), she placed him in a rocking chair, una silla mecedora. He stayed there for hours, moving the chair so slightly with his exhausted legs that Wanda sometimes thought she had imagined those minute backward and forward motions. Then, and only then, would she dare to climb into his lap. Sometimes his sick hands held her weakly; sometimes there was no response at all.

Wanda showed Livia a photograph of her father, taken the year before his marriage to her mother. The photograph was yellowed, a corner torn. The torn edge was feather-soft; you could see the individual fibers that made up the paper. Wanda’s father, in the photograph, was a young man of no more than twenty-five, with jet-black hair, longish. The face was slightly elongated as well, with pale ivory skin like Wanda’s.

“My father was Spanish,” Wanda told Livia. “Well, he was the son of immigrants. My grandparents were from Madrid.”

They had eventually returned to the narrow streets and late nights of their homeland, exhausted by the tropical heat and lethargy of the strange and beautiful island where Wanda was born. But Wanda’s father had stayed, and three years later he met Wanda’s mother. Wanda’s brother was born, and then Wanda; five years after Wanda’s birth, her father became ill.

Someone, Wanda’s mother told her after his death, when Wanda was old enough to possess such information, had put a spell on him, that was the explanation for his illness. Well, not just someone–a lover whom he had left after she got pregnant. When Wanda’s father abandoned her she put the spell on him. His spurned lover, in her vengeance, had painstakingly collected the dark hairs scattered on her pillow, among the bedclothes. She found one lying in an exaggerated s-curve on her belly–that one had been the most detrimental to the father of her unborn child. Wanda couldn’t remember him otherwise; her brother, three years her senior, barely could.

The paintings were about Wanda, about her father’s illness, about the foibles of men (not women, men), about the devastating effects of the other magic, not santería, but voodoo. There was an altar-like structure at the back of the studio with three candles, green, pink and white, all lit. There was an incense-burner beside the candles, and a smell unlike any incense Livia had ever smelled. Of course. Santería.

“My mother was into it,” Wanda added. “She was Christian and everything, but down there it’s all the same…catolicismo, santería, everything. One doesn’t preclude the other.”

Why, Livia wanted to know, hadn’t Wanda’s mother tried to find an antidote for the voodoo through santería? Wanda had thought about that, wondered about it, never dared to ask her mother. But she suspected that her mother’s decision not to free her husband from the destructive vice of his spurned lover’s spell was due to the fact that she finally had him, and she wasn’t willing to give him up again.

“If she had freed him from the spell, he would have been right back out there, strutting up and down the streets of the old quarter of San Juan, buying tintos for the washing girls, inviting them to the cine in the late afternoons, wandering home at dawn…while he was sick, she could be sure of his fidelity.”

Livia could think of no suitable response.

The topic of santería had been abandoned for the moment as Wanda and Livia discussed Rubén. He had also cheated on Wanda; he’d left because she had terrified him. Wanda had considered putting a spell on him to render him impotent for a while (despite the possibility that he might, with the proper guidance, undo the spell and turn it back around on her). Once when he was asleep, Wanda had taken the opportunity to approach the vulnerable, prone form softly, stealthily, in order to clip a lock of his hair. Rubén, Samson to Wanda’s petite Delilah, had woken suddenly; he saw his lover’s small, dark form above him, with the glinting scissors held in her tiny hand, the hand outstretched toward his head.

“¡Coño!”

Rubén had run from the studio, taking only his wallet and his paintbrushes (he was afraid she might try to touch his genius through the silky tips). It was after Rubén that Wanda had made the resolution.

What resolution?

“Never to be in love again. To have men around, para el sexo, sabes, but never to give my heart to one of the bastards again. My mother was destroyed by a man. I won’t end up like her. She used to be so beautiful…diós mío, qué belleza…but my father’s illness took all the beauty out of her. And since he died, she hasn’t had the energy for another man.”

“But,” Livia argued, “you can’t just decide that. Every time I lay one of `em more than three or four times, I’m hooked. They can do whatever they like with me…but I’m through with them.” She took a rebellious swig of wine.

“Pero, escucha lo que te digo, you don’t have to do without the sex. Look, it’s easy. My magic–besides santería–is my painting, right? Every time I want to meet a man, I burn sage and rosemary together in an incense burner, and light a red candle. Then I paint. My figures always come out of the paint by themselves; when I paint while the candle is burning, siempre me sale un hombre…always a man. That’s how I know I’ll meet one. And I always do…I know it’s okay if I meet the man within twenty-four hours of the burning. I can bed him, and there’s no danger of my falling in love. Oye, Livia, I can make a formula for you, too, si quieres. I mean, I’m not a santera or anything, but I know my stuff pretty well…”

Livia had thought about Wanda’s offer as she allowed her friend to light a cigarette for her, as she smoked half of it. She didn’t miss the sex yet, but she would, and soon. Then she’d be right back there, letting some loser get in the way of her genius. There were certain, complex sauces that never came out right when she was unhappy with a man. Aunt Pearl had never, to Livia’s knowledge, ruined a dish. Of course. Aunt Pearl had never had a man.

“Okay. Yes. But I don’t want to…you know, to hurt anyone…”

“¡Pero, no, niña!”  Wanda laughed. “Santería is white magic, not for hurting people…at least not permanently.”

They both smiled; they were thinking of Rubén’s very narrowly escaped impotence. Temporary, of course.

“Listen, here’s what you do. Your magic is your food, no?  Bueno. You need to get a bunch of red candles, a bunch of yellow ones, too. But you can’t just buy them anywhere; they have to come from a botánica. The red calls up passion, the yellow tempers it. You should pick a recipe and stick to it, that’s part of the ritual. Let’s say, a dessert. You light the candles and make the recipe–it’s always better if you do the cooking around midnight–but you leave out the sugar. Instead, you put in un poco of this liquid…”

Wanda produced a small bottle from beneath the altar, where the pungent substance still smoldered. Livia started backward.

“Don’t be afraid of it, it’s magia blanca. I told you… White magic. Here’s how it works. Before you have sex with the man, you must make him taste the dessert. If his soul is dissimilar to yours, and there is no danger of love for you, he will tell you it’s delicious. He has not noticed the bitterness, and you can have sex with him. If he complains of the bitterness, never let him touch you.

“And you should never sleep next to the man, even if he eats twenty pieces. Sleep represents the unconscious–his soul can act on yours while you sleep, while you are vulnerable. And you should have a different wardrobe of clothing for sex. You only wear these clothes for sex, never for anything else, nunca. If possible, don’t take everything off while you are having the man–the clothes connect you to your own power.” Wanda lit another cigarette. “And now the most important part of all. When you are finished with the man, you leave, go directly home, and bathe. You wash the clothes–you should never wear them next to your skin again until they are washed. And never, never bring the man to your bed. Ah, y una cosa más. You know that hollow just at the base of your throat?”

Wanda’s small hand, with its surprisingly rough skin, reached out toward the shadowy, secret cavity at the base of Livia’s throat.

“Never let them kiss you here. Whatever you do. This spot is very potent; it connects their kisses to your heart and, in the most extreme of cases, even to your soul.”

Wanda gave Livia three of the tiny bottles, the fluid which was to replace the sugar in the recipe she would choose. Into the paper bag Wanda also placed several candles, “To get you started.” There was a santero in Livia’s neighborhood. Wanda knew him; sometimes she went to his botánica. She would take Livia the first time she needed more supplies.

“Es cubano,” Wanda cautioned. “From Havana. Don’t try to go by yourself at first–he doesn’t trust Chilean accents.”

~

More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.

Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…

Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.

~

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