FINGERING: A Short Story of Seduction and Abuse
Copyright 2009 by Andrew Berg
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition 2009
Cover Design: Andrew Berg
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As he talked, Vivian watched Joel's right pointer finger trace the base of the bottle of cabernet between them. She knew from experience the sensitivity vested in that finger, as it had run similarly gentle lines along her body over the last 8 years. Vivian liked the things Joel's right finger did and hated that for which the rest of him was responsible.
As they tried to enjoy dinner at The Lotus, Joel wrestled with a vicious tirade concerning the premier of his most recent play, The Big Man. The only redeeming quality these rants held for Vivian was what the finger did during them. If one were to witness only the finger during one of Joel's pompous speeches, they would think the man in command of that finger was in a state of relaxation. Only the lines of fine sculpture or exquisite engraving matched those the finger could draw while Joel raged.
"The second act, the lead is supposed to be light-hearted. He's supposed to be insatiable, and by the third he's supposed to be drunk. Did you notice any difference in his, his..."
Joel had once again lost the word. As was their routine, it was Vivian's job to find it. Although he was the writer, Vivian's vocabulary was considerably more on cue than her husband', which came in handy for a man that was constantly losing words. Over the course of their relationship Vivian had filled in the countless blanks of Joel's plays and spoken sentences. She did this if only to allow the finger to continue. In truth she hated watching her acclaimed playwright husband stumble for language. It made her feel as though he was drowning in a sea of his own stupidity, and the embarrassment she felt for him was unbearable.
Even in company, Joel would search for a word like a senile old man trying to remember the name of the ship he was on in the Navy. It annoyed Vivian that people found his need for accuracy in speech to be a wVivian academic thing. His long pauses and stutterings gave him an air of intelligence. He understood that, and liked it very much. But there were times when Vivian wanted to scream that he was not selecting the most suitable word from a vast vocabulary, but rather had completely lost any word that might fit within the context of what he was saying.
Earlier that night, while they were talking to the director after the show, Joel had stammered for the simple word 'appearance.' During an uncomfortably long pause in the conversation, Vivian had to fight to control the urge to scream the thousands of words she'd added to his plays. She wanted to scream, "Righteous, Platform, Laconic, Uptight, Broken and Solidarity!!!" Instead she dutifully served him the word 'appearance' and ended up looking like a prop girl who was useful to some slight degree.
At dinner that night, she offered, "Disposition?"
"No."
"Personality?"
"No, no."
"Tone?"
"Yes, tone. That's it! Did you notice his tone? Or shall I say monotone. I mean fuck!"
*
Vivian had described The Big Man to a friend as a 'caustic, male-dominated diatribe with a penis sticking directly out of the middle.' Her friend had laughed at her description, but it depressed Vivian that her critique of Joel's play was simultaneously a description of the play as well as how she felt about Joel.
In contrast, The Grass Grows, Joel's breakout work, was an excellent play. Even Vivian thought so. The Grass Grows was in fact the reason she had approached Joel at a party 8 years ago, and ultimately it was the thing that had lead her to his finger. The Grass Grows had heart. It had won a Tony. Vivian didn't know Joel when he wrote that play, but she was sure that there had been no one at his side to come up with any lost words. The Grass Grows didn't have any lost words.
*
"You know," Joel was saying as the waiter set a plate of roasted garlic and warm bread next to the wine between them, "I've never understood directors. I've never understood their acceptance of mediocrity. They think too big. They think final product and damned with the parts."
He was looking at her with his dark blue eyes, waiting for some acknowledgment that his thoughts were heard and agreed with. Vivian didn't look at him. She turned her gaze to the plate of bread, selected a piece, bit into its steamy center, then withdrew it and examined the red stain of lipstick she'd left just above the bite mark. She could listen to him for days, she thought, so long as there was bread, and wine, and most importantly, the finger.
*
When they met, Joel was writing his second play, How High the Moon. The success of The Grass Grows, as well as the cocaine that went along with the scene a kind of confidence he'd not previously known. Before The Grass Grows, Joel would have never even considered a conversation with a woman as beautiful as Vivian. Though Joel didn't remember her when she approached him at the party, Vivian had actually auditioned for a minor roll in The Grass Grows.
As they sat sipping whiskey on an expensive couch, Joel's miraculous fingertip had traced figure eights on the back of the couch. Vivian had been almost immediately enthralled. Had the finger not been what it was, she probably would have chatted with the new playwright on the scene and then drifted off half drunk and wanting to go home. But the finger before her, with its perfectly manicured nail and refined cuticle was as exquisite and playfully arrogant as an autonomous and gracefully articulate penis performing a complex ballet. It so overshadowed the man to whom it belonged that Vivian had believed Joel was privy to some sort of Voodoo magic wherein he used the finger to seduce and hypnotize unsuspecting women.
After a night of more powder than one man, hit play or not, should help himself to, Joel's finger began doing reverse eights on Vivian's shoulder. When their conversation concerning the economics of theatre in New York had finally been exhausted, Vivian helped Joel back to his apartment, where the pointer finger tickled, cajoled and caressed her to his bed.
*
"Maybe I could break that guy's legs, get the understudy in there," Joel was saying as he spread a clove of garlic across a piece of bread, then smeared the entire thing in a skein of olive oil and stuffed it in his mouth whole.
Joel was a small man and the thought of him breaking anyone's legs brought to mind for Vivian words like implausible and impotent. On those nights, when he'd reached beyond his usual 3 drinks, he'd cower in the over-stuffed mint-green chair in their living room, running his finger around the rim of his glass of whiskey. He believed the chair was a good place for an artist to brood, but it was so "over-stuffed," that when seated in it he looked even less of a man than the mouse he already was.
Vivian was of the opinion that the success Joel enjoyed after the The Grass Grows was nothing more than a fluke. As an actress, Vivian didn't consider herself a professional critic of the plays in which she found rolls, but she knew when they were good, and when they were bad. The last five plays Joel had written were mediocre at best, most of them entering into the territory labeled schlock. They had nevertheless gotten rave reviews. Vivian supposed his staying power was almost entirely due to those lonely critics who had trumpeted the praises of The Grass Grows so loud, and with such flourish, they simply had to allow him an arc of descent if only to save the relevance of their own pathetic opinions.
As Joel went on dissecting the entirety of the horrible performance they'd just endured, Vivian fixed her attention on the finger as it made its rounds about the silverware and glassware. The finger was selective of its stages. The napkin, for instance, was not suitable territory for its entertainment. Joel's glasses, which always sat to the northwest of his plate at meals, were too familiar and left nothing fresh for the wandering digit to discover.
A week earlier Vivian had watched the finger finesse the pattern of a friend's couch. The arm coverings of the couch were paisley, and the conversation had something to do with chaos theory, something of which Vivian was sure no one in the room had more than a cursory knowledge. On that occasion she had only been interrupted for the recovery of two words in the course of an hour-long conversation. She considered the arm of that couch to have been the finger's masterwork to date. It was evident that as the quality of Joel's writing declined, the artfulness and sensitivity of the finger seemed to rival each previous performance with something more moving and unexpected.
Vivian's obsession with her husband's nimble right finger was something she kept to herself. She was afraid that if Joel knew about her fetish, this knowledge would somehow be passed on to the finger, revealing itself in the kind of self-consciousness that can bring about career-ending stage fright. She often wondered how aware of the finger Joel was, and in the end realized that he was completely oblivious to its talents--thus the exquisite rightness of the digit's style and grace. The finger was an individual operating in the infinite space of the man's subconscious.
*
Though Vivian's interest in the finger remained veiled, she wondered how Joel felt about her insistence that he pleasure her manually, with his right hand, during lovemaking. The dismal situation that was their sex-life had become a flat-line of lifeless movements carried out in the neon glow of the bedside alarm clock's perfectly kept time. There were occasions Joel would try to use his tongue on her, but she would shut him down, and demand that he use his hand. Sometimes he objected and would resume the lame flapping of his incapable tongue until she would close her legs on him in a vice, locking his head there, letting him know that the hand was all that would satisfy her. When he finally complied, which he always did in the end, she would get him talking about the play he was writing. Even during sex he couldn't keep himself from talking about his writing. That was the beauty in it, because as he talked, the finger would take on that other persona with a mind of its own, a mind that carried her again and again through shuddering, successive orgasms.
When the finger had finished strumming her through ecstasy, she would allow Joel to take her and do with her as he pleased. As he hammered away at her, she would find the finger beneath the covers, often times taking it in her mouth, and on occasion grasping it and bending it with such need and vicious want that he would scream in pain as he relieved himself inside of her.
So complete and utterly satisfying was the finger that she fantasized about cutting it off and ridding herself of the man attached to it. A year ago she had actually sprained the finger during lovemaking. But in the end it seemed Joel was the necessary medium through which the finger was allowed life.
*
The waiter brought their food. Joel had ordered the King tenderloin, and she the Queen, and across each plate were the Lotus' signature wood-handled steak knives. They were over-sized blades, each engraved with depictions of the Buddha in meditation. Joel was so engrossed in a berating of the actress who had played one of the minor parts, he didn't go right to eating, and the tip of the finger began cautiously on the tip of the knife blade.
"It was like she walked off the cover of a JC Penny catalog," Joel raged and rolled the side of the finger's tip along the serrated edge of the blade, down into the handle and along it's smooth wood to the butt.
Vivian tried to keep him engrossed in his talk with a false look of interest, as the finger approached the engraving in the handle. The metacarpals of his hand were long enough to allow the end of the finger ample reach as it meandered up the outline of Buddha's slender body. As it did so, Vivian felt the subtle tingle of electricity spiraling around the base of her spine and then flowing in waves to the crown of her head.
It was painful for her to consider that the one-percent of her husband with which she was so intensely in love, had taken up almost all of her heart's capacity for that emotion. It also bothered her that her obsession with the finger gave Joel enormous bargaining power should she ever slip up and let him know where her true commitment lay. Given the state of their relationship, Vivian was terrified that Joel would leave her, and for the sole reason that she would have to learn to live without his right index finger. It was possible, she supposed, that there were other men out there with talented toes, exceptional eyes, and maybe one or two who had fingers that could elicit in her the kind of response Joel's did, but finding them was a crap shoot at best, and a chance she was unwilling to take.
*
The slightly protruding tip of the nail of the finger was slowly drawing lentil-sized circles above the Buddha's head. It paused occasionally at the apex of the circle, the point closest to her, then turned into another revolution only to pause again at the top as though it were balancing there, flirting with her. She wished constantly for the finger to perform while Joel was silent. His incessant babbling gave her the same feeling she got when cell phones sounded in movie theatres. However, the droning background of his thoughts was the very tune to which the finger tangoed. It was a torturous task to love the finger while accepting the man.
All her relationships had been like that though. Every man she'd ever been with had his faults, his warts and blemishes. There were always things endured for the sake of things loved. But she had never had the whole scale tipped so violently to one side as she'd found was the case with Joel. On one side there were Joel's faults, gruesome and numerous at best. But all of that was disproportionately out-weighed by the 3 1/4 inch pointer finger. When she looked at the overwhelming power it held over her, she couldn't help but feel that it had been imbued with some sort of otherworldly magic.
The most complete and accommodating fantasy she'd had since marrying Joel was that he would somehow become brain-damaged to the point that life support was necessary. Key to this fantasy was that from within the cocoon of Joel's vegetative state the passionate soul of the finger would continue to live independent of its host. Her dream was that the finger, being unfettered of its host's annoyingly strong grasp on life, could continue on into infinity so long as life-support kept his vitals at sustaining levels. Not only would such a scenario offer her unlimited access to the finger, as well as unending pleasure, she would be viewed by those around her as a dedicated and selfless person, caring for her incapacitated husband.
*
"I think the play is strong, don't you? I mean I think it has guts, don't you?" Joel asked, and without thought, Vivian agreed with a nodding of her head. She felt like a lovesick teenager as Joel recognized the steak before him, and the pad of the finger's tip lowered over Buddha's head as if bowing, then slid down the length of the handle to join the rest of the fingers in the mundane chore of a holding a utensil.
Acting in accordance with the rest of the hand and at the whim of the man's conscious mind, the finger's will went into lifeless dormancy. As Joel lowered the knife into the steak on his plate, Vivian wondered whether the finger maintained an internal world as it waited through her husband's waking life. Did the finger dream? Did the finger bemoan those times that it was a slave to its owner, or was it such a pure spirit, living so totally in those moments when it was free that it did not decry the forces that bound it otherwise?
"You know there are times when the perfectionist doesn't stand a chance in this world. The very pursuit of excellence is a farce when you're surrounded by people who don't give a damn about quality," Joel grumbled as he stabbed the piece of meat he'd cut from the steak.
Vivian nodded with a frown. She'd lost her appetite. Joel reached across the table for the bottle of wine and filled his glass, then hers. She watched Joel for any sign of another speech which might take his attention from his steak, and subsequently reawaken the finger. None came.
Vivian studied her own pale hands where they sat in front of her plate, gripping the tablecloth, the knuckles inching her unwanted food further from her. Hers were ordinary hands that did her bidding. They were not the kind of hands that disobeyed when she was absorbed in conversation, and they could not be taught the kind of skills Joel's finger had known since it was only a nub on a fetus in his mother's womb.
Vivian wanted to yank the tablecloth from the table, if only to infuriate Joel into berating her. The finger would have to come alive then. Closing her eyes she imagined the work the finger had done on her the night before, the strokes it had drawn inside of her. If only it could speak and declare its love for her, as well as its distaste for Joel. Perhaps an arrangement could be reached, the kind of arrangement parents came to with the help of the courts when there were children involved in a divorce. She would agree to listen to Joel read his awful writing while the finger got to her beneath a clean, white sheet draped over her lap.
*
When they had finished dinner they walked out into a night so cold and hard that evidence of their breath hung in two trails behind them as they walked to the car.
Vivian reached for Joel's hand, took her favorite part of him in her tight fist, and swung his arm as they walked. She could feel the warmth of the finger in contrast to the clear freeze that immediately attacked her nose and ears when they left the restaurant. As they walked in silence, she wanted the finger for her own, and without him. She wanted to be alone in a dark place where it could run its course over the entirety of a room in silence. She wanted what could never be and knew it, and Joel was not showing any signs of shutting up.
"I'm thinking this play may be..." He paused, and she recognized her cue.
"Inoperable?" Vivian snapped.
"Christ, not that bad."
"Worthless."
"You're joking."
"Shit without the shinola?" Vivian offered as she tightened the grip she had on the finger. An itch of pain showed at the corner of Joel's mouth. He was trying to pull the hand from her, but she bent it back, paralyzing him where he stood.
He was finally speechless. Steam rolled out from deep in the back of his throat. Vivian felt a smile come across her entire being as her husband fell to his knees before her. She bent the finger further back at the knuckle imagining pulling it from the joint.
"Crazy fucking-"
"Bitch?" She offered before the word could come out of his mouth. It wasn't a lost word, only one she had gotten to before he could.
"Bitch?" Vivian asked again and throttled the finger further back until she felt a tight snap somewhere just above the first knuckle. She imagined herself liberating it from the slavery under which it had suffered the indignity of serving Joel's most banal needs, as well as pounding out so many wrong and awful words
Joel crumpled over on the street, his chin buried in his chest, and his arm sticking straight out above him where Vivian was holding his finger. With her free hand Vivian reached into her coat pocket and felt the edge of a serrated blade. Now her own index finger drew tiny lentil-sized circles above the head of the meditating figure engraved in the handle of the knife she'd stolen from the restaurant.
"In one, very important word, what do you feel right now Joel?" She asked. "Get it right the first time, dear, and I can assure you that 'bitch,' is not how you feel."
Joel looked up at the woman standing above him and wanted to scream nothing more and nothing less than the word she had just stricken from his vocabulary. The pain running like fire through his arm had taken him to an empty, wordless place. He was sure the finger she was holding was broken badly enough that it would fall limp if she were to let go.
Vivian wrapped her hand around the handle of the knife in her pocket. Her actions depended on his choice of words, on his perfection, on his excellence as a wordsmith. She understood that they were both actors, as well as writers, now and involved in a collaborative effort. She felt the finger swelling, and the heat of blood rushing to the break beneath the skin.
Vivian spoke calmly through cold lips.
"Your words, Joel, are all that lies between me and ownership of the only perfect thing I have ever known."
In his eyes Vivian thought she saw something soften, something beyond the pain and anger he was undoubtedly feeling right then. For a moment he looked plagued by a confused curiosity. It reminded Vivian of the opening lines of The Grass Grows. She had read them into a prop phone for her audition.
"I need you right now. I need you to be here! I forgot how much I need you," Vivian said in a monotone.
She was sure Joel recognized the opening lines of his play. Through the thick cloud of their joined breath between them, Vivian and Joel saw the finger pointing to something off-stage and high above. It was a light to which no word pointed, a light at which they were unable to look for its intensity.