No Placeholder for You, My Love

No Placeholder for You, My Love

By Nick Wolven (excerpt)

Claire didn’t see him again for a thousand nights.

It felt like a thousand, anyway. It may have been more. Claire had stopped counting long, long ago.

There were always more nights, more partied, more diversions. And, miraculous as it seemed, more people. Where did they come from? How could there be so many pretty young men, with leonine confidence and smiling lips? How could there be so many women arising out of the million chance assortments of the clubs, swimming through parties as if it could still be a thrill to have a thousand eyes fish for them – as if, like the fish in the proverbial sea, they one day hoped to be hooked?

Claire considered them, contemplated them, and let them go their way. She dated, for a time, a very old, handsome man whose name, in some remote and esoteric way, commanded powerful sources of credit. His wealth opened up new possibilities: private beaches where no one save they two had ever stepped, mountain lodges where the seasons manifested with iconic perfection, pink and green and gold and white. But they weren’t, as the language ran, “compatible”; they were old and tired in different ways.

She met a girl whose face flashed with the markings of youth: sharp earrings, studs, lipstick that blazed in toxic colors. But the girl’s eyes moved slowly, with the irony of age. Theirs was a sexual connection. Night after night, they bowed out of cocktail hours, feeling for each other’ hands across the crush of dances. Every exit was an escape. They sought the nearest private roome they could find: the neon-bright retreats of city hotels, secret brick basements in converted factories. The thrill was one of shared expertise. Both women knew the limits of sex: what moves were possible, what borders impermeable. They cultivated the matched rhythm, the long caress. Sometimes Claire’s new lover – whose name, she learned after three anonymous encounters, was Isolde – fed delicacies to her, improbable foods, ice carvings and whole cakes, a hundred olives impaled on swizzle sticks, fruit rinds in paintbox colors, orange and lime, stolen from the bottomless bins of restaurants. It was musical sport. Isolde perfected her timing spacing each treat. Claire eased into a langour of tension and release, one by one, they flickered immediately into nothingness – gone the instant she felt them, like words on her tongue.

A happy time, this. But love? Every night they were careful to say that magic phrase, far in advance of the midnight chime.

Claire and Isolde. Par Christian Louboutin, Christian Louboutins, Louboutins, Loubis... The famous red soles… Every girl’s fantasy?photo by Elena

“I want to see you again.”

“I want to see you, too.”

And so the nights went by, and the dates, and the parties, spiced with anticipation.

Soon, Claire knew, it was bound to happen.

The end came in Eastern Europe.

“We could have been compatible, don’t you think?”

They were reposing, at that moment, in a grand hotel with mountain views, somewhere west of the Caucasus, naked in bed while snow flicked the window. Isolde lifted a rum ball from a chases steel tray, manipulation it with silver tongs. She touched it to the candle, collected a curl of flame, brought the morsel, still burning, to her mouth, and snuffed it out of existence, fire and all, against her tongue.

Claire clasped her hands around a pillow. “Do you think so?”

Isolde seemed nervous tonight, opening and closing the tongs, pretending to measure, as with calipers, Claire’s thigh, her knee.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we are compatible. I’m only talking about, you know. What might have been.”

Beyond the window, white flakes swarmed in the sky, a portrait of aimless, random motion.