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Fiction Short Story

by Kay Sexton

Klimt's Kiss

The traveling library lady volunteers surprised Anna with a lunch at 'Pilgrims' for her forty-seventh birthday.  She ate butterfly chicken and strawberry cheesecake.   When the meal was finished, they gave her their combined gift of a silk scarf depicting Chartres Cathedral Rose Window.  Her birthday card benefited a minefield-clearing charity and was signed by all the team. It showed The Kiss, by Klimt.  She set the card in the middle of the table while they sipped their coffee and planned the next month's rota.

"I'll take Tuesday and Thursday at the hospice, as usual," Anna said.

"Mmm uuh..." offered Jennifer around a mouthful of carrot cake. After she waved her hand to indicate she wanted to swap, she swallowed convulsively and said, "If you do Wednesday for me—the sheltered housing day, I'll take the hospice on Monday instead?"

Anna nodded, but Jennifer hadn't finished, "Wednesday is supposedly when John plays squash after work.  I want to grab the chance to make sure he really is at the club."  Anna continued to stare at her card, she didn't want to catch Jennifer's eye and have tales of Jennifer's husband's infidelities spoil her birthday.  "I found a business card from the Purr Club in his sports bag last week, and we all know what that means, don't we?"

"What's the Purr Club?" Anna felt she had to ask.

Jennifer laughed bitterly as she picked up cake crumbs on her finger and popped them into her mouth, "Oh, that new lap dancing club where the old bingo hall was.  Apparently most of the girls there are Russian; big silicon bazooms and long blonde hair.  The rotten thing is, lots of men go there as part of their business—they actually take clients to lunch at the Purr Club.  Isn't that awful?"

Lunch finished, she drove past the club, though it wasn't on her route home. The grey windowless building had a large pink neon cat jiggling its curvy rump around next to the entrance.  She parked in the big, half-empty car park and watched the cat run through its limited neon repertoire. Two wriggles to the left and one to the right, one to the left, and back to the beginning again.  It was as predictable as long blonde hair and surgically enhanced breasts.  Surely it became boring to have such a limited and predictable menu to choose from?  But then, perhaps she had presented Colin with a limited menu for twenty-three years.  Compared to the Klimt—coloured gorgeously, full of the tension and richness of desperate love, what was she—or indeed the entire Purr Club?

Anna wondered why she felt that only a woman would have chosen Klimt's Kiss for her birthday card.  The card Colin had given her this morning had flowers on it.  It always did.  No man would have chosen it.

But why not?

Wasn't it full of wonderful sensuality and rich erotic detail? She remembered Jennifer's words, 'big silicon bazooms and long blonde hair'. Was that what men found sensual? Or was sensuality only important to women, while men wanted sexuality?  What would Colin say if she asked him?  After twenty-three years of marriage, she might have expected to know the answer, but she didn't. 

Did Colin visit the Purr Club?  Did she care?

The next morning she should have driven the library van to the Old People's Home, but she rang and said she was unwell.  She sat at her computer, with the Klimt card and the rose bedecked card from Colin perched on top of her CPU.  After an hour browsing the Internet, she went upstairs and threw up.  She had never known how boring, how futile or how mundane pornography could be until today.  It seemed evil to her, made even more so by its repetitive similarity. There were hundreds of women—and some men—displaying their perfect bodies and empty emotionless faces to the viewer.  She had seen deeper into some of those bodies than she had into her own but she'd found nothing that came near the erotic, mind-spinning desire in the Klimt painting.

After an hour spent weeding the garden with cold ferocity, she went back indoors and visited the chat rooms she'd seen mentioned on the pornography sites.  They were worse than she'd imagined.  Nobody talked about love, sensuality, flowers or golden backgrounds to glowing kisses.  It was all screw, screw, screw.  Some of it was new to her such as fisting, rimming, anal, threesomes, pearl necklaces and who knows what else.

Carrying the Klimt card in a taut, white-knuckled hand, she went upstairs. She chose a floral blouse from her wardrobe; Klimt's woman wore flowers. She put on her lipstick, staring into the mirror at a face that had never been kissed like Klimt kissed.  She drove back to the Purr Club and paused in the car-park, the car in neutral, to kick off her shoes.  Klimt's woman was barefoot.

She drove at the wall of the club, hitting the neon cat at forty miles an hour in third gear. Her bare feet flew from the pedals as her lipsticked mouth kissed the top of the steering wheel.  Afterwards, there was silence, except for the gas hissing from the shattered glass tubes of the cat.

After a minute, Anna sat up.  She wiped the blood from her split lip, located her shoes in the foot-well and satisfied, drove home.


About the Author
Kay Sexton is a Jerry Jazz Fiction Award winner, with a column at www.moondance.org. Her story, "Domestic Violence," was runner-up in the Guardian fiction contest judged by Dave Eggers, Tats earned an honourable mention in the Desdemona's Erotic Fiction contest. Sarah Hall (The Electric Michelangelo) has just chosen Acorns and Conkers as the runner-up in the ESSP short story contest and Kay's work appeared in seven anthologies in 2004.  Her website, www.charybdis.freeserve.co.uk, gives details of her current and forthcoming publications.  Her current focus is 'Green Thought in an Urban Shade' a collaboration with the painter Fion Gunn to explore and celebrate the parks and urban spaces of Beijing, Dublin, London and Paris in words and images.