Excerpt from "We'll always have..." from Transit of Venus
© 1995 Mark Seymour

We'll always have...

She had the coffee, excellent as ever, and I had the orange juice. We both had the champagne, once I struggled the cork out, the little projectile from Epernay sailing over the pale pink and white flowers in their boxes at the edge of the balcony.

The arc of the cork's ascent topped the iron skeleton of Eiffel's greatest erection, perching like an Erector-set on acid against the horizon. The curve of its descent preceded a spray of expensive bubbles onto the sea of rooftops below us. A crime to waste Perrier-Jouët on rain-slicked slate, but the two of us were unlikely to finish the bottle.

...

The reason the champagne would go to waste was because she'd put on the satin nightgown I'd found in a little shop in London, the one that looked demure only when she was sitting upright with her knees pressed carefully together. As they were when the waiter rolled in the table covered with the sailcloth-weight drape and the silver pots and Limoge china cups and crystal glasses. As they'd remained through the brioche and croissants and raspberries and juice and coffee and the first glass of champagne.

After the second glass, with the sun burning through the haze, she'd eased off the thick white bathrobe the hotel so gladly supplied, hoping that guests would take it home and enjoy being billed for several thousand francs on their American Express. She, being petite enough, could actually wear it; on me, it looked like a woolly t-shirt. Underneath the snowy robe, the nightgown was that purple that's not really purple; a dusty Victorian mauve, maybe, or Bordeaux grapes silvered with dew. Her breasts forced the fabric into a curve as gentle as Hanauma Bay, her skin as tawny as the Hawaiian sand, the selvage of the nightgown edged with a froth of lace as white as the Pacific surf and soft as confectioner's sugar.

The wind ruffled the discarded linen napkins and the skirt of the gown, carrying the scent of her perfume across the table; entire fields of nightblooming roses had given up their short lives for that smell. On the westerly breeze, underlying the roses, came the subtle pheromones of damp womanhood. They did the work that a million years of evolution had honed them to do: under the tablecloth, I was stiff as anything Eiffel ever built. When I felt a delicate cluster of toes exploring up my leg, I thought she'd guessed as much. When her foot bumped up against my tour passionnel, when she was sure, her face seemed hard pressed to choose between a smile and a blush. Licking her lips won out, a victory I was happy to see, but I could only watch, with what must have been a very silly look on my unshaven face, as she slid slowly off the chair, the hem of the nightgown riding up in a most delicious manner, her long tanned flank revealed all the way to the thin white line, a negative silhouette of her bikini bottom, branded across her hip by the Hawaiian sun.