Claudia’s eyes were lost somewhere between reality and dream.  Her heart wandered lost and bewildered through a maze.  Her feet followed it in random meaningless paths across her bedroom floor.  One hand caressed the air in front of her on occasion as if to feel his phantasmal flesh.

            Disrobed of her finery Claudia looked more the woman and less the girl.  She was still of an age where it was possible to travel seamlessly between the two.  Now in her white nightdress, parts of her flesh only partially shielded from passing eyes, she looked startlingly mature.  Somehow she seemed to own and understand the body she was in and not wear it as a garment of its own.

            Perhaps this is the essence of girlhood- first you are not aware in the least that your flesh has any meaning and then suddenly it become like a toy with which to beguile.  The break between a woman and a child comes when the body merges with the self.  And in her nightdress, revealed innocently and without intent to draw attention, she was at one with her flesh.  It was the flesh of a woman and not a child.

            Her thoughts too barred her from at least the first stages of childhood, though perhaps not the latter ones.  For he, her Bennett, was all she saw.  Not once had he looked at her.  Not once had his eyes more than passed over her.  Somehow though she knew that they were meant to be everything to each other he didn’t even realize it was a consideration.

            Yet, it can be said for Claudia, that her reaction was not as girlish as would be supposed from a girl of her upbringing.  Claudia had not retreated to her room and wept.  Nor had she thrown things.  Instead she plotted solutions and in its own way her conclusion was sensible.

            Swiftly Claudia transitioned between her pacing and useful action.  She blew out the candle that lit her room.  Then instead of going to bed she drew one a cloak from her closet moved to her window and threw it open to the night.  Then she through her legs one after the other over the ledge and hooked her bare feet on the trellis.  She rotated and slipped from the window.

            Out in the night now Claudia felt disoriented.  Her whiteness disappeared in the black.  She was swallowed into it.  Her hands and feet groped at the slender wooden bars, meant only to hold vines and flower not full grown bodies.  If she fell into the night would she simply fall forever until she reached the domain of the devil?  Could one literally fall out of God’s grace.

            Because certainly God knew what she intended and every step led her closer to her own damnation.  Yet perversely her hands and her feet moved.  When the trellis began to groan at her weight she would slide in one direction or another.  After what seemed and age her slippered feet reached the earth. 

            She stood allowing her eyes to adjust to the dark in her father’s garden.  The night birds called out, their harsh voices seemed to accuse her.  She ignored them.  The air was warm and pleasant against her face as she began to walk.

            The streets seemed new and beautiful under the stars.  Claudia mused that despite what the preacher would say she was walking to salvation.  How could anything that God did not intend be feel so perfectly wonderful?

            And certainly some divine presence must have been beside Claudia that night.  The city streets were hardly safe for a lone woman armed only with a vague notion of love.  Nor had Claudia ever walked so far.  That she did not get lost on the streets could only mean that something was serving as a guide.  That she was not injured by one of the dark lurkers or apprehended by the police was only further proof that Claudia had some unseen aid.  For she certainly made no effort to conceal herself.

            Her cloak was a pale grey, her shift beneath it white.  She stayed in the light where she could but did not shy from unlit roads over which rats scuttled on their own night errands.  Her slender silk clad feet were eyed by the rats.  Their beady gazes hungry and angry.  Yet the rats and a few yowling cats were all that Claudia encountered.

            Claudia’s feet were sore and a pain nagged at her side before Claudia reached her destination.  She stopped then in front of Philomela’s house and stared up.    Only then did Claudia realize how frail her plan was.  Faced with the dark house the assurance that had brought her thus far cracked and broke.  She did not even know where his window was.  She could not get in and in any event had no proof that he was home.

            In this momentary break she heard the sounds of the night around her.  She felt the chill of the air and the damp of her feet.   The heard the silence of sleep.  She heard the night softly laughing at her.  Then after a brief moment, that seemed to last forever, where she knew she had failed Claudia heard something else.  She heard footsteps behind the fence on the garden path.

            She slipped over to the fence and peered through, not toward the house but into the garden.  Seeing the only thing that she thought she would see, she opened the gate and slipped inside.

            He didn’t hear her soft footsteps across the ground. She moved silently to take her prey by surprise.  He was walking the path in front of her, having turned around the moment he reached the gate.  Something had driven him out into the night to pace.  It did not occur to Claudia that something was bothering him, or that he might feel as cramped and repressed in Philomela’s house as she did.  She saw his presence in the garden as proof that they were meant to be together, here, tonight.

            So she followed behind him until they were in the rear of the garden, invisible from the road but lit by a window on the second floor.  There she called out to him.  She was amazed at her voice which had surely never been so beautiful.

            Bennett turned.  He lowered his brow as he saw her and took one step forward.  “Do I know you Madame?”

            “You have met me, sir, but you do not know me.”

            He took another step in her direction.  His wonderful eyes studied her.  Finally they had found her and not drifted away.  “You are incorrect, I do know you.  Go home.”

            This command did not upset Claudia nor did she obey.  It would have been silly for her to go home so swiftly after all she had done to be where she was.  She would have been a fool to fly the moment he saw her.  First she had to convince him he wanted to continue to see her. First she wanted from him the thing her body demanded.  She had no name for what she would demand but she would not retreat until she had her fill.  “I am yours.”

            “If I recall correctly, you are affianced, and not badly.  Go home.”

            Claudia took two steps forward and reached out to place her hand on Bennett’s chest.  She did not feel his heart beating but she knew it was there and she knew that it beat.  “I am as you say.  It means nothing.  I want to be yours.”

            Bennett took this with a quizzical expression. This was not how young well bred girls behaved.  Even if he had been the rake the young girls thought him, which he was not, he might well have been offput by this behavior.  A lion does not lay down before the hare, nor does a rabbit decide its high time to feast on live lion flesh.  So he chose his words carefully, unsure of which way the world was going to turn next.  “How did you find your way here?”

            “I walked.”  Claudia turned her face up to him.  She wanted to press her lips into the curve where his neck met his jaw.  She wanted to cover his mouth with hers and drink in his next word.  What’s more she wanted their clothes gone.  She wanted her back pressed into the ground and him on top of her.

            Some of the animal hunger in Claudia’s wide eyes must have showed because Bennett took one step back.  “I will walk you home.  It is not safe for a young lady to go alone.”

            Claudia smiled the predator still. “I accept your offer, but first…” Claudia let her cloak slide from her shoulders.  She stood there for a moment feeling his eyes on her like the brush of fingertips.  She knew every inch of flesh they alighted on.  Little was hidden in her night shift.

            “What is your game?” Bennett asked. He already knew.  He was willing to play.  It was there in his voice and his body.  He never stood a chance.

            “Give me what I wish and I will return home.  Tis no game, Bennett.” She bridged the gap between them and standing on her toes she kissed his mouth.  He tasted of the bitter alcohols her father drank.  He tasted of himself.  She drifted back away from his mouth and her hand drifted down until it rested on the member she desired, still covered in cloth.  “I want you and I will not leave till I’ve had you.”

            Bennett took her then in his arms and pressed her against the wall of his sister’s house.  He was a man and had only ever been half a gentle one.  So he would give this pretty woman-child what she desired.  How her innocent hands knew the things they did he did not understand; nor did he care.  What mattered was her warmth against him.  Her willing mouth, clever hands, and her firm young breasts as his hand moved over them.

            So Claudia discovered that she did like this secret thing that people did once they were married.  She discovered she liked it more than she’d dreamed she would.  And she found this on the lawn of her piano teacher, in the dead of night.

  Title Reference: *Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “Crime And Punishment” Bantam Books, co 1866: 57