Introduction to Spellbound with a Kiss

Spellbound with a Kiss

By Cuirbouilli

Introduction

“Do you see that woman over there?” my friend asked me.  

He gestured toward an attractive woman across the crowded room at a birthday party we were attending. 

“How old do you think she is?”

It was March of 2003.  My friend and I were both twenty-nine, thus we still judged appearance through relatively young eyes.  I observed the lady he spoke of for a moment.  She was slender with shoulder-length brunette hair, high cheekbones, and a radiantly smooth complexion.  She was buttoned in a collared blue silk blouse and a black skirt sheathed her shapely legs to the knee.  She was a beautiful woman in my opinion regardless of her age.

“Maybe thirty-five?” I guessed, recognizing her young aspect while accounting for her mature demeanor.

“No!  Dude, you’re not going to believe it, but she’s over fifty!” he exclaimed.

Needless to say, I shared his amazement at her youthfulness.  The woman was his aunt by marriage and this sole glimpse I got of her was remarkable to me for reasons my buddy could not guess.  Had I seen the woman slip into a long leather coat before she left, which she definitely looked classy enough to wear, my impression of her would have immediately transformed to fantasy.

It was sometime in 2008 when my memory of this woman inspired the context for a fictional character named Cassandra Harper.  I quickly drafted some plot sequences.  However, I could not solidify exactly who I wanted Cassandra to be among the various ideas I had for her.  Having little time to devote to creative writing, I put this story on the backburner in deference to other things.  I picked it up again in 2011 and since 2013 I have pecked away at it steadily, line by line, amid the constant interruption of daily life. 

My relentless motivation to write this story, as the reader will quickly discern, is the adoration of the beautiful woman.  Cassandra Harper is but one incarnation of this siren who has haunted my imagination for as long as I can remember.  My vision of her outward appearance has changed little since I was a child.  She has forever been an elegant lady of exquisite, sensual loveliness, invariably buttoned up in a formal blouse and a luxurious, full length black leather coat.  

My fixation on an idealized woman in this particular outfit developed at a very young age.  Gorgeous Jaclyn Smith on Charlie’s Angels was one of the first women to dazzle my prepubescent mind as she removed a motorcycle helmet and tossed her hair back, clad in a shiny black leather jacket.  JCPenney catalog pictures of pretty models in leather coats captivated my boyish fancy during the early 1980s and left a lasting effect on my subconscious that I cannot explain.  Women still wore wonderful leather coats from the 1970s when I was seven and eight years old.  I had no idea what the pleasant stimulation was that I felt whenever I was near them, but I later realized that it was sexual attraction in its most innocent form.

The resurgence of leather fashion during the 1990s perpetuated my fetish while I was a single young man cluelessly trying to meet a girl.  The unattainable lady, resplendent in her sleek, black leather coat, smirked at me from the pages of newspaper advertisements, in office hallways, and on city streets as I struggled to get a date.  I never feasibly expected to achieve a relationship with such an intimidatingly stylish woman and in my frustration I characterized my muse as vain, selfish, and even cruel.  If I succeeded in finding a serious girlfriend I was certain she would be too humble to ever flaunt such opulent fashion.

Happily, I was wrong.  Not only did I meet a beautiful woman in 2004 who was confident enough to dress like my daydream-come-true; she proved that such a lady could be warm, kind, and loving.  Suddenly my fetish was no longer a dark secret, but embodied by the vibrant lady I was bursting-proud to have on my arm.  She buttoned a black lambskin maxi coat over a silk blouse and leather skirt for several shining years; accessorized to ultra-feminine effect with pearl necklaces, scarves, cardigans, blazers, gloves, and often topped off with a wide-brimmed hat.  Her supple leather coat creaked while she sat in the passenger seat next to me, squeaked against the straps of her patent leather purse, swished about her long legs as she sashayed in her tall boots, and felt like butter on her when I held her tight to kiss.  

We married in 2007.  To this day my wife has no inkling how much magic she has conjured for me through the years even though I have frequently told her so.  She is more than I ever hoped for; and yet, I cannot banish the immortal succubus of my fantasy.  As fashion trends convince my wife to abandon her leather coat to the closet, the sleek, seductive vamp continues to strut through my imagination and manifests herself to me in this particular story as Cassandra Harper.  

Real life experiences with my wife are, without a doubt, my greatest inspiration for the virtues and aesthetic appeal I portray in Cassandra.  My wife truly is a caring, modest, and generous lady; the good woman Cassandra espouses herself to be. 

Cassandra’s character pays homage to my perception of many other women as well.  She is the classy model from a Chadwicks of Boston catalog strolling along a scenic lane.  She is the wholesome housewife, layered against the chilly autumn in freshly-pressed clothing while shopping for holiday decorations at an outdoor pumpkin festival.  She is the working woman in a skirt suit and heels whose long leather coat creaks distractingly in my ear as she reaches for something on the shelf at the grocery.  She is the rich wife of the CEO mingling at a charity gala with a salon-coiffed hairdo and designer label gown.  She is the immaculate middle-aged woman who still wears red lipstick regularly and always pops the collar of her crisp white shirt inside of her black leather blazer, confident that the infirmities of old age only affect other people, not her.

More specifically and to summarize the following story:  Cassandra Harper is a sophisticated, respectable lady of curiously uncertain age who beguiles a young man for a mysterious purpose.  

Cassandra possesses a supernatural aspect that has been an inseparable part of my fantasy lady’s character since the very beginning.  In her most immature, primordial state my enchantress is the Wicked Queen from Snow White with the pointed collar of her cloak rolled up to her chiseled cheek like the iconic statue of Uta von Naumburg.

The following story is told mostly from the viewpoint of the young man, Nathan Goodman, whose name pays tribute to the dark romanticism of author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his tale “Young Goodman Brown” set in Puritan New England.  Nathan’s experience with Cassandra changes his perception of people around him and alters the course of his life.  I express many of my own personal preferences through Nathan; foremost being his infatuation with lovely Mrs. Harper.  Historical reenactment is my main hobby and I participate in events similar to those I describe Nathan attending.  I am a history buff in general and anything, or anyone, with a connection to the distant past fascinates me.

It is not on a whim that I set this story during the fall season.  Autumn is my favorite time of year with its orange leaves, brisk weather, and dramatic skies.  Before the advent of online shopping and the decline of women’s leather fashion over the past decade the pages of catalogs and newspaper ads between Thanksgiving and Christmas were laden with anticipation for the reasons I allude to above.  My historic interests provide me with a strong appreciation for old world Gothic and I enjoy celebrating Halloween traditions tremendously.  I have decorated my yard many years with jack-o-lanterns, hanging skeletons, and a creepy graveyard presided over by a pumpkin-headed scarecrow.  I usually don a suit of armor or a “witch hunter” costume and pass out candy from a cauldron for trick or treat.  

Witches and vampires were demonic creatures in the traditional stories I read as a child.  Witches were ugly, cackling hags indelibly personified by the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.  If a witch appeared beautiful her alluring visage was ultimately revealed to be an illusion to disguise her evil nature.  Treatises for the prosecution of witchcraft such as the Malleus Maleficarum written in 1486 and Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World written during the Salem Witch Trials in 1693 detailed that a witch gained her diabolical power from Satan.  Despite the real-life tragedy of the mass persecutions committed during the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the witch remains an evocative villain for many.

Before the sympathetic whitewashing of modern literature and film, vampires were undead monsters that preyed upon unwary mortals in the night.  Old black-and-white “Hammer Horror” films were televised in October when I was a kid.  Dracula was the ultimate vampire and the iconic scene of Christopher Lee crumbling to dust in the sunlight filled me with terrified wonder.  As an adult my interest strayed more toward Dracula’s brides; the so-called “sisters” that feed upon Jonathan Harker.  It would be far more difficult to resist the charms of such fiendishly enticing women.  Bram Stoker vividly describes their seductive nature when Van Helsing finds one of the brides in her tomb.  

“She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and… fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion." 

In addition to Dracula’s brides, Sheridan Le Fanu’s languid Carmilla defined the insidious, sultry nature of the blood-sucking female clear through most of the twentieth century.  Since ancient times women have been accused of being attracted to the Devil and more susceptible to the temptation of witchcraft and vampirism, not only as a means to wantonly preserve their youth and beauty, but also to gain power over their own lives otherwise forbidden to them by male-dominated law.  Until the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s the serenely repressed, domesticated housewife idealized by western society was entirely dependent on her husband to provide for her.  Most women had no choice but to accept this arrangement as their lot in life, but some were clever enough to use it to their advantage.

As the reader of this rambling introduction may guess, the following story takes place during Halloween and therefore contains elements of fantasy and horror.  Nathan is a well-intentioned young man grounded in science and logic who finds himself trapped in an unbelievable nightmare that threatens to haunt him for the rest of his life.  Cassandra is my own version of a “Stepford Wife”; a perfect homemaker who runs her errands bundled up in a long leather coat.  She is envied for her sheltered, affluent lifestyle, but none would guess the decadent motive buttoned inside her demure bosom. 

Although I would like this story to reach a wide audience, I realize that my ameteur writing style is probably too saturated with fetish detail to appeal to the mainstream public.  Regardless, it is those precise, perseverating particulars that make it stimulating to write.  Beware!  There are small bits of eroticism best reserved for mature readers, but nothing overly explicit beyond a red-blooded appreciation for feminine beauty.  

Spellbound with a Kiss is one man’s expression of goodness and purity confronting evil and corruption.  I hope the time and effort I have devoted to it have not been wasted, but I could not resist putting it into words.                                                                                                       -Cuirbouilli