Lonely Hearts
She enters the examination room like a ray of light, bearing inward a
rustle of fresh linen and a breath of departing adolescence. Sustained
easily on the breeze of her passage, her silken blonde hair stirs with each
movement, a soundless bell caressing her shoulders, its effulgence framing
the exquisite, doe-like curves and planes of her face. It could be a face
from a portrait by one of the Pre-Raffaelites: passive, inwardlooking,
androgynous. The luminous grey-green eyes reflect only an awareness of
their own beauty; the full lips part slightly as if framing an answer to an
unspoken question.
On the request to remove her blouse and brassiere, her head inclines
gracefully as her slender fingers flutter nervously at the pearl buttons.
The shirt, a delicate shell pink with short sleeves and a suggestion of
lace at the collar, slips from her shoulders to reveal a skin of milky
whiteness, the collarbones birdlike, the chest without blemish, the lacey
finish of the small brassiere cups pressing slightly and exquisitely into
the flesh of her upper bosom. The upper arms reveal their delicate flue, a
faint tracery of blue veins perceptible when she turns a wrist first to
drape the shirt over a nearby chair and then to undo the center hook of the
brassiere.
She parts and lifts the cups from her breasts with an averted glance,
slowly lowering the straps over her shoulders and dropping the brassiere
onto the shirt. Straightening, turning, she lifts her eyes to meet those of
her examiner, a woman, as if to read there the evidence of secrets
unlocked, trusts violated, innocence defiled, but meets only a glance of
frank admiration. Hers is a torso of classic beauty, the musculature of the
abdomen suggested, the breasts small, hemispherical, their undersides
curving gently into the ribs, the pale pink nipples tumescent in the cool
air, a ring of tiny goosebumps defining the edges of the areolas. Above the
left breast, in betrayal of inner tumult, the skin over the aorta pulses.
In response to a gesture from the doctor, she sits on the edge of the
table, eliciting a dry crackle from the strip of shiny paper laid out along
its length. Pulse and blood pressure are noted and recorded. Instructed to
place her hands behind her head and thrust out her chest, she tries not to
shrink from the doctor's touch as the woman places the palm of her right
hand beneath her left breast, the well-practised hand sensing and
cradlingthe lower tip of the girl's heart as it kicks against her chest
wall with each heave of the ventricles. The heart rate is high, the
heartbeats forceful. No vibration is detected, no stenotic thrill, but
every few seconds there is a weak premature ventricular contraction
followed by a pause and a thump as the heart regains its rhythm.
With her left hand still on the center of the girl's back, gently urging
her body forward, the doctor presses the bell of her stethoscope against
the silken skin beneath the breast, beginning at the apex of theheart,
absorbing its repeated message with the ardor of a lover hearing a
villanelle below her window. This time, however, a dissonant element
intrudes itself into the serenade: a faint rushing murmur accompanied by
two distinct clicks with every systole.
This is momentous news to be absorbed at a sports physical; the denials and
entreaties of the girl, informed of her mitral valve prolapse, elicit a
calming explanation of the condition's benignity from the older woman. In
an attempt at illustration she offers the earpieces of the stethoscope to
the girl, guiding the instrument once more along the same valvular
pathways, the hard rubber rim leaving faint red tracings on the luminous
skin. The doctor then undoes the buttons of her own businesslikeblue
oxford-cloth shirt, lifting the girl's hand to her chest, you see, this is
the sound of the normal heart, nestling it between her generous breasts,
the stately, measured rythms of her heart seeming to arise from the frank
femaleness of their contours. The girl cannot shake the hypnotic trance
into which the drumming seduces her, not even when the doctor moves the
hand and stethoscope past the border of her black brassiere to plunge them
both into the fullness of the breast flesh within, the heartsounds
accelerating and becoming ever more forceful.
The cumbersome instrument falls away as the girl, in thrall but moving as
if in the viscous medium of a dream, pushes the blue shirt over the
shoulders of the other woman, the garment falling to the floor in a
shocking rush of fabric. The brassiere is pushed upward in a tempest of
awakening desire, the breasts tumbling out and down to hang before her
lips, pendulous, the nipples red and engorged and shaking to the rhythm of
the woman's now laboring heart. The girl, the back of her head caressed by
the woman, briefly supports each rosy pap with her tongue, daintily
moistening their undersides before drawing them into her mouth with long,
powerful kisses. The white flesh of the woman's breasts trembles and
shudders as first one, then the other is stroked, fondled, touched ever and
again with gestures of barely harnessed ardour.
The woman disengages herself from the embraces of the girl long enough
gently to push her down to the table on which she had remained sitting,
pinning the girl's wrists over her head with one hand and, bending over her
in an attitude of ministration, running the other hand lightly over the
girl's abdomen, the middle finger lingering in the tiny cup of the navel
before skimming the milky skin to brush the lower ribs. Her head, framed by
an aureole of medium-length dark hair, sinks to the girl's chest, her
barely opened mouth alighting in the valley between the breasts, the
sensation of cool skin against her lips giving her delicious reminders of
fresh fruit on a hot day. The puckered pink buttons of the girl's nipples
briefly resist a gentle sideways pressure from the woman's lips as they
brush over them, lighting fires in the girl's womb.
The woman eases herself onto the table, her body half eclipsing that of the
girl as their open lips meet, tongues probing, throats vibrating as those
of purring kittens with the music of their moans. Pants are hastily pushed
down and kicked heedlessly away, lacey panties tugged off with urgent
fingers, elastic snapping in protest. At last warm hands meet secret dark
moistness amid the tangle of smooth, muscled thighs, flesh flutters and
heaves as furred mounds are pressed ardently against each other. The women,
acheiving the primitive rhythm of shared sexual ecstacy, abandon themselves
to the groundswell of sensation that starts in their innermost loins and
spreads to their extremities like static elctricity, charging the hands
locked together now in mutual passion, forcing their mouths ever closer
until their teeth grind together, their bodies now almost motionless with
the intensity of effort, touching off the endless series of overmastering
uterine contractions that herald the arrival of orgasm, a great swelling
deep blue ocean of heavy waves, rolling them, cradling them, boats tossed
and drifting on the bosom of the eternal sea.
