Paradise - Part One (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant) Read Free Page B

eyes, lending the scene a supernatural, transcendental quality it did not have before. I feel at once that I have met my first soulmate, and in this act we have reached a summit—a form of completion—by traversing intimacy as far as she can be traversed in every direction. There is nothing else to do now with this beautiful girl, we have reached the heights of ecstasy together. With this sense of finding an end comes a vile intruder, an integral part of the experience of this world—the part called time.
     
    I put on the 1978 horror classic I Spit On Your Grave (original title, Day of the Woman ) while I packed my suitcases. I packed the essentials: a week’s worth of dresses, pants, shirts, and so on. I packed some films and books. Occasionally, I glanced at the screen to see Camille Keaton running nude through the forest or sitting astride a man in the bath, parading her glorious tits in full view—furry muff—about to kill him. Many of the original viewers of the film found it contemptible but I found it liberating, a pro-feminist statement in the extreme. Keaton was a towering image of a woman scorned and crazed into the ultimate course of vengeance.
    Julie was gone when I left. I had made sure of it. If she was at the house as I was leaving I wouldn’t have been able to go. Already doing my best to put despair at bay, it was all I could do not to lapse into tearful remembrance of times past with her . Of course she would come visit me and I would visit her, but distance always puts a stick in it to some degree and I was not consciously ready to detach myself from her. I left in a hurry, without looking back. Though as I write these words it hits me and I can’t hold back the tears any longer. Perhaps I’ll send her this journal at some point in the future, though I don’t know when. She’s the only one I’d let read it.
    In the SLK I plugged in my iPod and played “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye and Kimbra. With the wipers on high I rolled onto FL-20 Eastbound and punched it despite the heavy downpour.
    Along Cinnamon Beach it was near hurricane weather, palm trees bent low by high speed winds. I hydroplaned for several seconds on that road and had to slow down. Lightning struck off the coast over the sea. There was no one in sight for miles and I felt alone. I felt that I was crossing over. Not in the sense of physical death but it was a kind of death and there were the early pangs of rebirth, of landing on a new shore. There was a high electrical charge in the atmosphere like that which accompanies the transmigration of souls. A new life hung in the balance waiting to descend upon me, a product of the feelings and ideas I held at that moment like an undeveloped photograph in my mind. There was nowhere to go from here but headlong into a new life as an explorer, into the lives of Mark Stafford, Isabella Gardner, and Baby Savannah, whose soul was as pure and translucent as her father’s smiling eyes.
    I saw that the gate was open at the Stafford dacha and assumed the storm must have knocked out the power. I parked under an overhang near one of the mansions, left all my belongings in the car, and hurried inside. The sound of a large generator whirred without and I saw a few lights on inside. I had picked the right mansion, for Anna was there and she took me immediately to Mrs. Gardner. The old maid, standing at the top of a winding staircase, looked down at me with an expression of rigid consternation and bewilderment. I could only think she knew I was coming and wondered what it was all about. Was it about her husband? A kind of portentous jealousy? Was it nothing to do with me but rather in reference to some abstract thought? The more time spent with her, the more I learned that I would probably never get close enough to the woman to know something of her. If I spied on all her communication, I’m sure I would know nothing about her. Why not? Did she have no sex life to speak of? Was she