Tiger in the Bonsai Garden

Elena grew up in a university town somewhere in the Midwest of the United States, but she was born in Venezuela. Her father was a professor of classical guitar who, in his youth, had received private lessons from one of Venezuela's most eminent composers, only few people outside of South America had ever heard of the composer.

Of course, her father wanted her to learn classical guitar, but her mother wanted her to learn piano. That's because the classical guitar has never been held in the same esteem as the violin or the piano. "The piano is more respectable," her mother said.

However, her father didn't care about respectability. Latin America and North America are guitar cultures. From North America, you get the blues, country, and rock and roll — all of which make heavy use of the guitar. From Latin America, you get bossa nova and dozens of other styles of guitar-oriented music. The piano is for sissies; it isn't macho. What's more, pianos are harder to keep tuned in the Amazon rain forest and the Andes Mountains.

So Elena started taking guitar lessons, because Elena's father was the boss. Her first guitar teacher was her father, who taught her the scales and how to read music notation, but she needed another teacher after a few years, because it's very difficult for a musician to teach his or her own child. Her second guitar teacher was a rock musician in his twenties with dreams of rock stardom who taught guitar students by day and played gigs at night. Thirty years later, the rock musician is probably doing the same thing; nobody has heard of him since.

Though Elena was fourteen years old, she looked older, because she had big breasts and was on the tall side of average rather than petite. Her teacher, Randy, probably could have taken her out to bars, if he had wanted to. With a good fake ID, she could have convinced any barmaid or bartender that she was legal, since the legal drinking in most states at the time was eighteen, not twenty-one.

Elena had a crush on Randy because, in her adolescent mind, Randy was a guitar virtuoso because he could play Jimmy Page's licks note for note. Randy liked Elena's breasts; he also liked to eat pussy. One thing led to another. After he got her to remove her blue jeans and her panties, he told her to sit on a wooden chair in one of the practice rooms of the music store and spread her legs. When she obliged, he dropped to his knees and exposed her to the joys of cunnilingus.

The problem was that a secretary heard Elena and informed a manager. The manager interrupted them and fired Randy on the spot. Then he called Elena father, who came down to the music store as fast as he could. "I'm sure you can press charges, Mr. Romero," the manager said. "After all, your daughter is a minor while her teacher is over twenty-one..."

However, both Elena and her father were really embarrassed. The last thing either one of them wanted was for people to know, because they lived in a small university town where people knew each other. If there was a trial, it might even make the front page of the town newspaper and create a scandal, though Elena couldn't be mentioned by name. While a conviction for statutory rape ruined many a rock star's career in the 1950s, this was the 1970s: it might have actually helped Randy's career. He could have even written a song about it and possibly have a hit record. But Elena? She would have had to endure the taunts of kids at school. Therefore, Elena's parents decided not to press charges. They were sure she had learned her lesson.

Before the incident with the guitar teacher, Elena had been playing guitar for three or four years — long enough to actually start to get good at it. She had a repertoire of about twenty songs, ranging from classical to pop. However, she couldn't pick up the guitar again; it always brought back the memory of her humiliation. Nor would she let a man eat her pussy. Sometimes, her lover got started, but after a certain point, the memory of the music store manager barging in on her and Randy always came flooding back. She didn't seem to understand that people usually had sex behind closed doors without being disturbed. Or, rather, she might have understood it in her head if somebody had told her, but she didn't feel safe enough to relax.

While she was at university, she met an undergraduate student from Canada named Alex, who wasn't a musician — though he had dabbled in the Black Art of playing guitar as an adolescent. He was studying to be an engineer, so Elena felt that it was safe to fall in love with him and get married. Once he got his master's degree from a polytechnical institute somewhere on the east or west coast, he would be earning an income in six figures or more. He might even start his own company some day, once he saved up enough money. He didn't need to be a rock star.

With the temperament of Munro Leaf's Ferdinand the Bull, Alex conformed to the positive stereotype of Canadians being nice and polite. That is, he preferred to take the time to smell the flowers thrown by the señoritas in the Plaza de Toros rather than charge at matadors full tilt. Whenever Americans called him a Canuck, he rarely took offence; his standard response was: "No, the Canucks play hockey in Vancouver..."

However, he also conformed to Conan O'Brien's negative stereotype of Canadians being boring rather than sexy. That's to say that Elena soon found that he was no better at playing a woman than he was at playing a guitar. So he took offence when he heard O'Brien call Canadians boring on American TV. He angrily flipped the TV the bird, because he, Elena and the kids were in a Toronto hotel at the time; he was being "dissed" in his home and native land.

The difference between Alex and Elena (besides gender, of course) was that Alex was an intellectual while Elena was an artist. Men like Alex approach making love to a woman as a series of intellectual problems that need to be solved. Number one, how do you get her to go out with you? Number two, how to do you get her out of her clothes? Number three, how do you get her to put her clothes back on the next morning and leave? While a woman is a mystery who speaks primarily the language of emotions, guys like Alex approach a woman as a crossword puzzle: what is a three-letter word for affirmative rather than a two-letter word for negative? Guys with high IQ's and few people skills find mates and reproduce, however, because these are the people who build bridges, design data bases, and come up with the cures to diseases like the mumps; their intellectual skills are in demand, so they bring home the bacon.

So Elena kept moving into a series of bigger and bigger houses with Alex and their two children — all the while more and more sexually frustrated — until one day, Alex announced that he had found a job in Victoria, British Columbia. Like most people, Elena preferred her native country — which was the US, not Venezuela. However, she didn't think that moving to BC would be such a big adjustment. Like most Americans, she thought that Canada was just like the US. Except for recent immigrants and those who live in la belle province of Quebec, everybody spoke English. As well, Alex was as tickled pink as Canadian bacon at the prospect of starting a new job in Canada.

Victoria is situated in the southwestern corner of Vancouver Island, which is arguably to Canada what Madagascar is to Africa. This is not to say that Vancouver Island has flying lemurs and five species of baobob trees that are found only on that island, like Madagascar — not at all! Rather, Vancouver Island's flora and fauna are exotic because of their sheer abundance, not to mention the fjords on the windward side and the relatively uninhabited mountains in the centre. With so much Mother Nature and so few people, Vancouver Island has the elbow room that Canada's neighbours to the south crave but seldom find. Most of the island is forested with Douglas fir, sitka spruce, and red cedar, among other species of trees. Every spring, you can see the grey whales and the killer whales make their migrations south, without mentioning seals and sea lions, and endless varieties of sea birds, like puffins. Pacific Salmon come to spawn in its many streams, the carcasses of which draw bald eagles and black bears. And at dawn or dusk, the sighting of a black doe and its fawn by the road is by no means a rare occurrence. However, bears, being the scavengers that they are, make no distinction between a carcass and someone's untended garbage. They don't see very well, but they have a keen sense of smell.

Most of the people live to the south of the island, though the island is about 460 km long and has an area of 31,284 square km. What's more, Vancouver — the largest city in British Columbia and the third largest city in Canada — isn't even on the island, but across the Straight of George in BC proper. Therefore, Victoria, the capital of BC, is the largest city on Vancouver Island, with a mere 33,000 people.

Upon arrival in Victoria, Elena found that Canada wasn't quite like the US after all, or at least the part of Canada where she was living with her husband and children. She found Victoria to her liking, a beautiful, family-friendly city. Victoria is one of the most unique cities in all of Canada — sort of a combination of Seattle and London. Like Seattle, Victoria gets lots of rain, well over 150 cm a year, since the northwest Pacific rain forest extends well into British Columbia. Vancouver Island pays for its greenery, you know.

However, the British settlers who first came here brought with them a bit of Olde Engelande. The centre-ville looks pretty much like it did in the 19th century, with the red brick streets of Bastion Square and all the buildings with red brick façades. Then there's Craigdarrach Castle, a Victorian Gothic castle wouldn't be out of place in the moors of Scotland. There are the double-decker buses and telephone boxes that make Victoria rival only Auckland, New Zealand, as one of the most distinctively English cities in the world, since London got rid of the double-decker buses and the phone boxes after the terrorist attack of 2005.

Elena and Alex bought a a big house on the outskirts of town whose architectural style might be called northern Californian. It only had a small backyard with a privacy fence, but it looked to be designed by Frank Lloyd Wright or one of his disciples, with high red cedar ceilings, red cedar walls, and red cedar floors, built with the idea of blending in with its natural surroundings. Because the windows on the east and west sides of the house were wide and spacious, about 2.5 m x 6 m, the house was seldom gloomy, even when it rained, but well-lit. You got a clear view of the mist-shrouded mountains to the west, particularly in the morning.

Now forty-two years old, Elena sublimated her repressed sexuality into her home, raiding antique stores for mahogany tables, chairs and armchairs with voluptuous legs, like the calves of a dancer, from the Victorian era. In the master bedroom was a big brass bed with a quilt for a bed spread and a skirt around the box spring that almost touched the floor. She preferred sombre but warm colours: dark green, maroon, tan and brown — earth tones — because she was an earthy person.

Her favourite dress was a simple multi-coloured one with a long tan pleated skirt; it looked to be coloured with a box of crayons, though it nicely accentuated her large bust line and her other curves; she had always been buxom, even as an adolescent. Other than her large breasts and full hips and ass, her most outstanding feature was her shoulder-length dark brown wavy hair, which complimented her olive skin and dark brown oval eyes. Her facial features were Iberian rather than Meso-American: rectangular face, straight nose and thin lips that curled into a mischievous smile. Her face was pretty, intelligent, ironic — friendly, in the manner of an adulterous woman with a husband who didn't please her.

Late in the spring, she hired two brothers to put in a Japanese garden in the backyard. Their parents was nisei, or second-generation Japanese-Americans who had immigrated to Canada from Hawaii before they were born. It was the younger brother who caught Elena's eye. Fed on a steady North American diet of dairy products and red meat, he was of average height for a Canadian male, an inch or two short of six-foot and 165 pounds. He seemed to cultivate an Oriental mystique, with a canary-swallowing grin meant to suggest enlightenment, though in what, Elena could only guess. He was about twenty-three years old, young enough to be Elena's son, that is, if she had got knocked up in her freshman or sophomore year at college and had to drop out.

For the first few days, Elena talked to neither of the brothers very much. Then she saw the younger one pruning a little bonsai plant at the picnic table. First, he closed his eyes for a moment, then he pruned it to his specifications while Elena watched.

"What are doing?" she asked, curious.

"Practicing the ancient Japanese art of bonsai," the brother replied mysteriously. "You close your eyes, then you visualize what you want the plant to look like, then you prune it. I saw it in a movie once. Would you like to try it with this one?"

He motioned to the plant to the right of the one that he had just pruned.

"Sure," she replied.

Elena sat down next to him, to his right, held the plant in both hands, then closed her eyes. Then she tried to prune the plant according to the mental image that she had seen with her eyes closed. When she was finished, she gave her work mixed reviews. "I guess I need practice," she said, frowning.

"You can always prune it again," he replied. "Plants need constant pruning..."

Then Elena and the gardener introduced themselves. "I'm Tiger," the gardener said, "Tiger Tanaka."

"Tiger's your real name?" Elena asked, smiling ironically.

"My real name is Japanese for 'tiger,'" he replied, "so everybody just calls me Tiger."

Elena bought a few more bonsai plants from the nursery and practiced the art of bonsai on them, then put them in various windows of the house. She would go back to them and prune them if they needed pruning, closing her eyes to get the mental image of the plant that she wanted. She got better at it.

One day, Tiger brought a steel-stringed acoustic guitar and played it on his lunch break while his brother worked through lunch. Elena could tell right away that he wasn't very proficient at it. Then, after fumbling for a bit, he strung together three full-barre chords in succession: A, G and F, at the fifth, third and first frets. He was now playing guitar. For Tiger, it was what the Zen Buddhists call a satori experience, because he had suddenly realized that he could make barre chords in other positions besides the first position at the first fret. He now knew that he could play guitar.

Impressed, Elena went outside to the garden and said to the gardener, "Hey, that's pretty good!"

Tiger smiled politely and replied, "Thank you."

Then Elena said, "I took guitar lessons for a few years. I could teach you a few chords and how to read music, if you want..."

"Sure," Tiger replied.

So Tiger started to bring his guitar every day while Elena gave him lessons. For the first time in many years, Elena began to practice diligently every day. Then they started to sing songs together. Tiger sang "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley while Elena sang folk songs from her native Venezuela. Then they learned to play "Vaya Con Dios" together, with Tiger singing and providing the accompaniment while Elena played the intro and fills with double-stops and voicings, like Les Paul and Mary Ford on the original recording. They seemed to play well together, but Tiger's older brother seemed to look on with disapproval whenever he was present, though neither Tiger nor Elena seemed to notice.

It was late spring. However, the Japanese garden was nowhere near completion, and it was costing Tiger's brother money. Maybe that was why Tiger's brother looked on with disapproval. As well, maybe Tiger's brother understood that something was happening between them, even if they didn't realize it yet.

One day, they sat at the picnic table with their guitars, without playing anything. Then Elena took Tiger's left hand in both of hers and kissed it, then held it against her cheek. Then they kissed, leaving little breezes on each other's faces. Then they locked mouths like two kissing gouramis in a fish store. They had both obviously seen lots of movies, the way they kissed, though neither could recall any movie where a couple had made love on a picnic table.

Then they heard a peel of thunder to the west, over the mountains. "Looks like rain," Elena said with foreboding.

"We get it a lot out here," Tiger replied.

Elena stood up, smiled mischievously, and led him by the hand to a clearing in the backyard. Then she pulled her dress over her head — the multicoloured one with the tan pleated skirt — and removed her panties and her bra until she was dressed like Eve, while Tiger stripped as well. There they were, on the grass, making love under an ominously overcast sky.

With her hands as a guide, she guided his mouth to where she wanted it on her body. First, she let him play with her magnificent breasts, alternately flicking the nipple with his tongue and sucking it, the right and then the left. Her large breasts soon become engorged with blood and desire, the nipples standing erect. Since she was the mother of two children, there were feint stretch marks on both of her breasts, but to Tiger, the stretch marks on her breasts and abdomen only gave it character.

Then he looked up at her, smiled and asked, "Shall I?"

She smiled and nodded. Then, mesmerized by her sex, his face slowly descended to her mons puberis, nibbling the labia with his lips, then devouring it with his mouth like a succulent fruit. At first, she surrendered to the pleasant sensations that radiated from his touch, then she began to panic, remembering her humiliation as an adolescent guitar student. "Stop," she cried.

"Shhh," he whispered, "it's okay. There's nobody here but us. No one's going to hurt you..."

But he stopped what he was doing because she had asked and slid up until he was face to face with her again. He kissed her on the lips, allowing her to taste herself. Then he inserted the his right middle finger and began to stimulate her g-spot with rapid up and down motions, trying to emulate a vibrator. Then she clutched his finger greedily with her sex, tilted her head back and cried out. She had never had an orgasm like this before, such an intense clitoral orgasm.

Then he smiled at her and asked, "Shall I continue?"

She smiled and let him bury his face in her sex again. This time, she didn't resist. But before he got very far, it started to rain. First, it was only sprinkling, then it rained harder. Eventually, they were in the middle of a downpour — it was raining nails. However, the rain only served to increase her sense of isolation, as she felt the rain drops striking like little water pellets and running down her body and disappearing into the grass underneath her. When she moaned or cried out, her voice sounded far away because of the rain; she felt alone. When her clitoris exposed itself, she first felt little rain drops splattering against it. Then his lips nibbled at it like a little beanstalk, or a little seedling. "Mmmm," she moaned softly, "yes..."

She had a series of little orgasms, then one big orgasm that left her pelvis feeling like it was floating up like a balloon. When she cried out, a gentle breeze seemed to carry her cries to the mountains to the west, since it had stopped raining. Then he drove into her, her sex wet from the rain, his mouth and its own lubrication. He was slip-sliding away inside her — she was extremely pliant, relaxed. When he came, he squeezed her shoulders hard with his hands, his body coiled like a spring, then he cried out before he exploded into her. Then his cock jerked one more time inside her.

She didn't come that time, but she told him afterwards that she still enjoyed the sensation of him sloshing around inside her; she felt closer to him. She didn't want him to take it out right away when he was done, but he had to, so that the condom wouldn't slip off.

They cuddled on the wet grass for a few minutes, but Elena said, "My kids are going to be home from school soon..."

Elena and Tiger had a few more afternoon rendezvous, but always upstairs in the master bedroom. Elena learned to relax and let him bury his head in her sex. She also overcame any aversion she might have had to doing oral sex. For her, tasting herself on her lover's cock was a big turn on; she preferred to do it after intercourse.

Once you memorize something, you never completely forget. Therefore, Elena was able to get back much of what she had learned to play on the guitar as a teenager. Alone in her bedroom after one of her rendezvous with Tiger, she tried to play Malagüeña by the Spanish composer Isaac Albeníz. After two or three false starts, she was able to play it all the way through, though she made few small errors. When she was finished, she raised a clenched fist and cried, "I'm back!"

Finally, Tiger's brother felt that he had to read Tiger the riot act. "This job is costing me way too much money," he scolded him. "When I hire somebody to do a job, I expect him to do it!"

Tiger hung his head in shame and apologized. Then Tiger's brother apologized to Elena for the delays. Elena merely smiled ironically and replied, "That's quite all right, Mr. Tanaka, it's quite all right..."

However, there were no more rendezvous between Elena and Tiger, because his brother wouldn't let him out of his sight.

After the Tanaka brothers were finished with the Japanese garden, Elena decided to give Alex a chance to redeem himself. She smiled slyly and said, "I want your face down there at least twenty minutes..."

Alex's response was a three-letter word for affirmative. Maybe he could learn to play a woman like a guitar.

The next morning, while Alex was still asleep, Elena went downstairs to the garden outside. When she saw the first bonsai plant that she had ever pruned, the one she pruned with Tiger, she sat down at the picnic table and closed her eyes. When she got the mental image that she wanted, she opened her eyes and started to prune the plant to her own specifications.

The End