A Woman

Do you see her? Isn't she stunning?

She's everything a man could dream of...she's--wait, you don't see her? What do you mean you can't tell what she looks like? You don't know the color of her hair? Her eyes?

Ah, I see. Allow me to help. Or, rather, let my newest author find help you out.

The Act of Love, Howard Jacobson

 Marisa took off her jacket—beautifully tailored it was, single-buttoned with wide lapels and a peplum that graced her hips—she told me all I needed to know about myself. I was gone. In fact a waiter helped her out of it, a test of confidence in itself, but she responded to his movements—leaning into him and then shaking herself free—as though men had helped her out of jackets all her life.

Under the jacket she wore a filmy, lovesick satin shirt that seemed more to haunt her body than to clothe it. No cleavage. She was not, as I was to discover, a cleavage type. She owned nothing low cut. There is always something desperate about women who want you to look down into their breasts. 

Marisa carried hers with a full-on assurance, knowing that the beauty of her chest was frontal not abysmal, a matter of the harmonious interrelation of thorax and abdomen, of arms and back and shoulders, not the mere shape and protuberance of her mammaries.

I stress this because I have never been particularly moved by breasts as discrete objects, to be enjoyed independently of the woman to whom they belong. It was the way Marisa carried her chest as a sort of introduction or frontispiece to herself—at once soft and sculpted, the breasts themselves not large, though the general effect luxurious—that moved me.

At the moment of her sitting down, anyway, I had to look away. It was that or go blind. Whether that was why she laughed I couldn’t tell, but she was one of those women who know they must laugh at the disturbance of which their voluptuousness is the cause. And hers was a rich contralto laugh, full of depths, like everything else about her somehow material and evanescent all at once, evoking the laughter of summers long gone or summers yet to be.

***

THAT, ladies and gentleman, is how you write a woman. Now can you see her?

 Isn't she absolutely stunning?

Chowder