The Elementals Read online

  “You gave me so much pleasure,” I said. “I want to do something for you but I’m scared I won’t do it right.”

  “There’s no right or wrong.”

  I sat up and turned to face him. His hair hung in his eyes and his cheeks were flushed.

  “I want you to show me,” I said. “Please show me.” I took his hands and pressed the palms together, kissed his fingertips. Then I gently moved them down onto his groin.

  “You want me to touch myself?” he asked. He sounded shy. I felt my nipples tingle.

  I nodded.

  John’s eyes stayed focused on mine as he took himself in his hand and stroked lightly, then more firmly and quickly, his thumb moving back and forth over the underside of the tip, other hand working, too. I was wet again, feeling the slickness even in the surrounding water. I licked the drops of water off my lips and kept my gaze on his face, then let it drop to his moving hands.

  “Will you kiss me?” he asked. He shuddered softly and his eyes rolled back.

  I slid toward him and took his face in my fingers, brought his mouth to mine. He suddenly seemed so helpless. It scared and excited me; what was this I felt—power? I kissed him harder. He sighed like a girl and whispered my name.

  When he came I could feel it rocking my own body from the inside out, even though only our mouths were touching. Relief coursed through me. It felt, again, as if I had been waiting for him forever but also as if my own body had been pent up, holding semen that was only now being released. I had forgotten who was who.

  We rested in the bath for a while and then we got out and wrapped each other in large, soft towels and dressed. I wore a white shirt of John’s with my jeans. We entered the parlor barefoot, our hair still wet. Perry and Tania were sitting on the couch. The evening light through the windows had a white glow, against which the branches of the trees looked stark and black.

  “There you are! We made dinner,” Perry said. “No more malnourishment for you, young lady.”

  “Shall we eat outside?” Tania asked.

  We took our vegetable curry, samosas and cucumber raita out into the garden. I hadn’t been there in the light before. It looked much less haunted than the night I had stood naked before them. There was a small table set up in the gazebo of worn latticework, under the cascading wisteria and trumpet vines, and we ate there. Berkeley in the spring smells like flowers—roses and jasmine and fruit blossoms. The air was almost as delicious tasting as the food. I looked around at the ornamental plum, persimmon and lemon trees, up at the sky starting to twinkle, and I realized that this was where I would be living, in this house, with them.

  “How do you grow plants like this?” I asked them.

  Tania grabbed Perry’s hands and held them up. “Old green thumb, here.” So that was what the green nail polish was. I should have known. “He can make flowers bloom with a wave.”

  Perry wiggled his fingers almost lasciviously at me until I laughed.

  After dinner we sat on a blanket on the mossy ground drinking our wine and Perry took out a joint and lit it, passed it to me. The smoke was smooth and fragrant in my lungs.

  “This will help you through finals,” Perry said. “We’ll give you a stash.”

  “You guys think of everything.”

  “Here to serve.” The look John gave me made me feel like he had slid his hand between my thighs.

  “So you’ll be our roommate?” Tania asked.

  John took a hit of the joint and smiled at me, then stared up dreamily into the branches.

  “I’d be honored,” I said.

  * * *

  Perhaps, you may say, it was the wine (grapes, sugar, yeast, pectin) and the joint, or perhaps it was Perry’s magic, but when I woke from a brief doze, something had changed; the fairy lights were on, the air smelled of vanilla and candy and the night garden was filled with flowers—fragile white ones, dripping golden angel trumpets, soft purple blossom clusters, spiky cactus moon blooms—I had not seen before.

  20. Whatever I could retrieve of his soul

  I promised Jeni I would return to my search after I had settled into the house. There were things I had to attend to—getting through finals, telling my mom that I was moving (in with Bean—who had broken up with her boyfriend), packing up my few possessions.

  I didn’t pay attention to much that week but there was one incident that stood out.

  It was Tania, on campus, walking along with a small group of freshmen. She was wearing a printed 1950s sundress accessorized with rhinestone jewelry and very high black peep-toe pumps. The students were animated, trying to get her attention, but her face was quiet, composed. Among the groupies I noticed Ian Larsen. Tania didn’t see me but, at just the moment he passed, Ian turned his head. And then turned quickly back to her.

  The next day I went to Ian’s room. He was packing his suitcase.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “You know Tania De la Torre?”

  He frowned at me. “Yeah.”

  “How do you know her?”

  He rocked back on his heels and pushed his glasses up on the narrow bridge of his nose with his middle finger. “Why? What’s up?”

  “I saw you with her on campus.”

  “Yeah? She’s my psych T.A. She’s doing an experiment with us. Why?” For the first time he sounded impatient with me.

  “I’m moving in with her,” I said. “What kind of an experiment?”

  Ian’s usually narrow eyes seemed to widen. “You’re moving in with Tania De la Torre?”

  “What kind of experiment?”

  “She’ll tell you about it if you’re all BFFs. It has to do with how people react to substances depending on who administers them. Basically, if Tania administers them everyone feels all good and shit.”

  I wondered what this meant but more importantly I wanted to experience again what Tania had made me, and could supposedly make everyone, feel (“all good and shit”) if she chose to do so.

  * * *

  John came in the evening on the last day of school with a U-Haul attached to his car and we loaded up my things. On the way to the house we stopped at the copy store and made more Jeni flyers, which he promised to help me distribute.

  Later that night, back at the house, John showed me to the room with the draped bed.

  “This is yours,” he said.

  “What about you?” I was hoping he would stay with me. Hoping wasn’t the word. My body was so heavy with desire for it I could barely move.

  “I’ll be in the glass room. It’s nice in summer. It stays cool.” I couldn’t ask him to stay; he had already turned toward the door. “Make yourself at home. The only room that’s off-limits is Tania’s storeroom in the basement. She likes to keep it locked.”

  “Why?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. She likes to create this aura of mystery around her. She says it’s part of her thesis.”

  “Her thesis?”

  “Magical thinking, parapsychology, magic and influence. I can’t ever keep up.”

  “Never a dull moment in the House of Eidolon.”

  He came back toward me and my heart beat faster with hope that he’d stay but he just kissed my forehead and said, “Let me know if you need anything.” Then he was gone before I could tell him even one of the things I needed from him, let alone list every part of his body and whatever I could retrieve, even briefly, of his soul.

  I got in bed and shoved my hand between my thighs, just held it there, not moving, afraid someone might hear me. Moonlight shimmered over the garden like white fruit blossoms and the trees themselves made long shadows—the legs of giants. I closed my eyes and breathed myself to sleep.

  I woke some time later to feel a body sliding into the bed next to me.

  “May I put the lamp on? I want to see you,” John whispered.

  I could tell he was naked. His skin was cool at first and he pressed up against my back as if he were trying to absorb the warmth from
me. I scooted back so that my haunches were tucked into his groin, his hardness heavy against me, and he smoothed his hands over my hips, slipping one into my panties. I arched back and turned my head to kiss him. His lips were ready, moist and parted the way it felt between my legs. Every orifice was waiting to receive him. We kissed and stroked each other and as we did I saw a girl with sad, dark eyes and wisps of brown hair watching us.

  But what of me? she might have said.

  21. When couples married and drank mead

  One afternoon in late June, the light honeyed, the air smelling sticky with plums, I came home from class and they were all up waiting for me in the front room. I could tell by the way they were dressed—the men in white tuxedo shirts, Tania in a white silk 1960s dress printed with red roses and hemmed short to show off her tan legs and red cowboy boots—that they were ready to go out, although they rarely were awake or even left the house by daylight.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  Perry grinned. “Solstice, you silly sylph. We’re going to the city.”

  But they hadn’t said Golden Gate Park. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known we were going there.

  I faced Jeni’s palace of whiteness and glass filled with rooms of rare blooms and humid air. John put his arm around my waist and I leaned into him, unable to forget the words written in her loopy script. Live here someday. I wished I hadn’t come. But what was I supposed to do? Avoid places like this forever? Stop living my life? Maybe, at least until I knew what had really happened.

  I stayed close to John’s side as we wandered through the rest of the park—banks of rhododendrons, camellias, magnolias, succulents, groves of trees, meadows, rose gardens, herb gardens, the Japanese tea garden with its pagodas and bridges and mammal-sized koi, the moon-viewing garden where pink petals drifted down like the tears of dryads into the shallow water.

  “You should shoot your film here,” Tania said as we made our way along a path under the tree ferns of the cloud forest. I had to film a scene from a Shakespearean play for school and I had chosen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Tania as Titania, John as Oberon, Perry as Puck and myself as the fairy.

  “‘How now spirit/wither wander you?’” Perry said, tousling her hair.

  She pulled his curls and he howled and chased her down the mossy path. She stopped under a tree, ignoring his caresses, and raised her hands to the sky. The soft, misty light made her hair, which was now bleached platinum and had grown out beyond her shoulders, glimmer like pale feathers.

  “And through this distemperature we see.

  The seasons alter …

  And this same progeny of evils comes

  From our debate, from our dissension;

  We are their parents and original.”

  As I watched her, John Graves grabbed me in his arms. I smelled him and felt his heartbeat through my thin back. His cheek scratched against mine. He brushed his nose against me, nuzzling. And then the cloud forest became his lips and he kissed my mouth as if we were alone, while Tania continued to recite, Perry tackled her, the strange mists drifted and the trees listened.

  “There’s a Solstice party tonight,” John told me and the rhododendrons, camellias and magnolias as we were walking back to the car.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet any more of their weird friends, especially after being shaken by our visit to the Conservatory of Flowers. But they all seemed so excited and I didn’t really have a choice anyway.

  We drove to the sea and parked along the cliff. A swollen-looking moon hung low over the dark waves. The word I thought of to describe it was effulgent—radiant in a full, pregnant-sounding way.

  “Honey moon,” said John. “The first full moon in June. When couples married and drank mead.”

  He took my hand and we followed Perry and Tania down a steep, rocky path to the sand. Since I wore only a thin sweater I was glad for any protection, even the shield of my backpack thumping against my spine. The cool, salty air seemed to be seeping into every part of me. A breeze whipped my hair around my face and the grasses at my calves so that my skin stung. Down by the shore four people were beating hand drums and dancing around a bonfire. The flames leaped with them, silhouetting the graceful flail of their bodies against a burning backdrop. When they saw us they all ran up, whooping and with their arms open. Four of them again, like the four in L.A. Two men and two women. They were mostly half-dressed—the girls in silk slips in spite of the cool, the boys in ripped shorts—with flowers in their hair and wreathed around their necks. They hugged Tania and Perry and John and then they threw their arms around me, too. Their bodies were warm and wet with sweat and they smelled like crushed petals and like fire and ocean.

  I didn’t really feel like dancing but they pulled me in with them and I couldn’t say no. After a while I was glad of it. The flames bathed my face in a hot glow and the salt-chill evaporated off my skin. When I looked at John moving his spine in a sinuous way, eyes closed, mouth in a half-smile, I couldn’t tell if the heat was coming from inside me or out. A voluptuous young woman with black curls danced up to me and put a large garland of spicy-smelling flowers around my neck.

  “Solstice we wear flowers to protect from evil spirits.” She laughed and her eyes slanted elvishly under lashes so thick I wondered if they were real. She had piercings in her regal nose and all the way up the cartilage of her ears.

  There was a tall young man covered with intricate tattoos that I couldn’t fully make out in the darkness; he passed around a polished drinking horn, threw back his shaved head and howled from his throat, but his voice got lost as the waves crashed against the shore.

  “Honey moon,” John whispered in my ear as I drank the mild, sweet liquid. “Honey is considered an aphrodisiac. The couple drank it for a month, one moon, after their wedding.”

  I handed the horn to him and our eyes were drinking each other, too. Honey seemed to be pouring out of me. John danced behind me and I leaned back, resting my head against his shoulder. His hands encircled my waist, fingers lightly touching my hip bones. The world was a spangle of sea and stars and fire and dancing bodies.

  Besides the woman who had given me the wreath and the bald guy with the horn there was a delicate girl with a shaved head, too, and an amber-colored man with dreadlocks. Did all of my housemates’ friends have to pass some kind of extreme beauty requirement? They whooped and danced and banged their drums and drank their mead around the fire.

  Then when we had tired, were nestled in the sand, Tania whispered in my ear, “Show us your magic now, Sylph.”

  If you had asked me at any moment before what I would do, in answer to this challenge, I would not have known. But, suddenly, then, in that solstice moon time, in the midst of these bewildering creatures, I knew. I lay down on my back with my head on my backpack in Tania’s lap and closed my eyes. “I levitate,” I said.

  They gathered around and I could feel their hands on me, gently touching my skin, seven sets of hands, fourteen sets of fingertips. I tried to tell which were John’s—perhaps those on my left, near my heart? The warmest, biggest hands.

  I had done this with Jeni at sleepovers, like all kids, using it as an excuse to touch each other, to play with the mysteries. But there had only been the two of us then; we wouldn’t play games of this import with just anyone. We believed that if we had the rest of our secret “family” we would have been able to float, perhaps to fly.

  Now I believed in it. I had seen Tania’s hands catch on fire. Perry made flowers grow. John turned water to wine. Why not me?

  I breathed with them, listening to the waves so that I felt as if I were floating on the sea, buoyed up, the moonlight skimming along my skin, making me translucent, revealing my very organs to their gaze. Lifting lifting.

  “Sylph,” Tania said gently. I felt her lips on my forehead and I opened my eyes with effort, as if I’d been asleep for hours. “You did it. You are the one. You are ours.”

  As I sat up, just at that moment, a bree
ze blew in like icy breath on my neck and I watched some pieces of paper fly out of my backpack and toward the fire. It took me a moment to realize what they were; a moment was too long. They were the flyers of Jeni. I scrambled after them but when I got to the flames, tripping on the wet, sagging hem of my dress, the papers were already alight, curling up into pieces of fire. I held out my hands, watching them die. I looked at John.

  He took me in his arms and eventually we sank to the sand together, among the group of bodies entwined under blankets, now. When the flames had died down, he led me away from them, to an outcropping of rocks at the base of the cliff.

  I saw Tania raise her head from the belly of the tattooed woman, who, all curls and lashes, was kissing the man with the dreadlocks. Perry was holding the slender bald girl against his chest and the bald guy was massaging her dainty, sandy feet. She had features that all seemed to turn up slightly and I thought of how sorrowful my face in repose must look in contrast to hers. But it had not turned John away from me.

  “It is the time,” Tania shouted over the surf as we walked away. “It is the time, my darlings.”

  * * *

  Sea grass screened the entrance to the cave. Inside the sand was so cool as to feel almost wet, but it was dry. John spread his jacket out over it, then sat, took my hand and pulled me gently down beside him. The sea was glistering with a pewter light seen through the last mirage-like shimmers of smoke from the dying bonfire.

  “Those were Jeni,” I said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. We’ll make more.”

  “I shouldn’t have come. I should be looking for her.”

  “We will. I promise.”

  I stared through sea grass and smoke at the six figures nestled by the fire that had turned Jeni’s image to ash. “Who are they?”

  “Shoshanna, Steadman, Erin, Sage.” He gently tugged his fingers through the wind tangles of my hair.