When he woke up, there was a powerful exotic smell of perfume around him and it was a minute before his head cleared sufficently for him to realize that he was the source of it. His body felt weak and womanish. As his hands moved reaassuringly over it, they encountered silk. He sat up with a groan.
As he did so, the girl they had called Martine came forward with a mirror and he was unwillingly staring at himself. Herself. Himself. Her.
"Come, darling," said a deep voice, "come to us."
Two such heavy wonderfully strong men. "Take off your nightie for us."
INTRODUCTION
By Leonard A. Lowag, Ph.D.
Stephen Hammer's The Itch brings to mind two other outstanding novelists, both of whom were highly criticized for their frank handing of controversial material. .
Jules Verne, a French writer living between 1828 and 1905, turned his ingenious mind toward inventing situations and achievements so weird and supernatural that his public considered him well to the left of complete insanity.
The second, American contemporary James Patrick Donleavy, has written works which have been described as "often inelegant, even coarse," and many modern critics feel that his Ginger Man, as well as his other novels and plays, should have the censor's lid placed on it in the interest of "decent" literature. Donleavy has been linked with the beat generation; nevertheless, his writings have left an impression of perturbation on the thinking of our time, and there are those who deem him a distinguished humorist. Suffice it to say that these two creative individuals, especially and obviously Donleavy, have much in common with the author of The Itch.
Stephen Hammer's characters emerge from the printed page and implant themselves in one's imagination whether one wills it or not. His uncanny skill at drawing his reader into a situation catapults one into his scenes, and the reader is compelled to feel all the emotional upheaval of the characters. Hammer's colorful descriptive pictures are alive; he has a way with dialogue to encompass speaker and spoken word into the same mold. In a word, he is dynamic, bold, and at times shocking to the sensitivities of those not prepared for the onslaught. Nonetheless, when one is conditioned for this linguistic patois, he will begin to appreciate the superb adaptability of this young writer.
There is little doubt in my mind that Mr. Hammer is writing from the viewpoint of one who has been the victim of gynecocracy, or domination by an aggressive woman, for throughout the book the desire of man to dominate and degrade woman is clearly evident. Throughout all of the deviant practices, it is the woman who suffers more severely and is debased to a greater degree. The surprise ending, wherein the heroine interchanges sexually with the hero, points up the same wish-thought turned inside-out, and therefore has the same psychological connotation. This male resentment of the female and the resulting fear of her replacing him in society has existed throughout time; the Amazons ruled their men with an iron hand, and it was no less than Socrates who married the overbearing Xantippe, a shrewish individual who spent her life dominating and tormenting her husband.
Freud once remarked that the Western world was turning men into women and women into men, and this indeed seems to be coming true when we look at some of our young people. It has always been the role of the male to dominate. In the animal kingdom, the cock pushes his mate's head into the dust and degrades her before he struts to a nearby pinnacle and crows his victory. The tomcat plays the same game, and in addition bites deeply into the neck of his lover while he is grinding her into the earth. It is little wonder that woman rebels at the role she is compelled to play in life's strange drama, for whether it is hers to bend beneath the conqueror because of man's fear psyche or for some other unknown reason, a female born with intelligence and feeling finds it hard to bow throughout life to the phallus-image of man. The root cause of many nymphomaniacs can be traced to feelings of rage and bitterness over the predominant male position in our society.
This often accounts as well for fiercely demanding mothers, particularly on their young sons. Often a boy reared by such a domineering mother, or in the absence of a father, will resent the position of authority the woman takes over him. He will react in one of two ways: he will either marry an overbearing woman to take up where his mother left off, or will spend his life degrading women, sometimes to the extent that he turns into the path of homosexuality.
One case I knew concerned a young couple; she came to me in tears because her husband refused to engage in intercourse in the normal manner. Instead, he teased her without phallic entry, and finally soiled her outer body with his orgasm. Research revealed that he had desired his mother, and being unable to copulate with her, took his revenge on the woman he married by denying her his seed.
In The Itch, the two principal characters, man and wife, have begun their young lives together imbued with all of nature's blessings, and have come to Paris, presumably to exist as long as monetarily possible. The story is set amid the narrow streets and colorful bistros of the left bank. Here we find the scholars, the artists, the writers, the many little bookstalls and countless markets. Hammer shows you Paris in the most risqu� manner: the crowded houses leaning one against the other, filled with parasites and perverts living for wine, sex and thrills. The group is made up of self-made philosophers, each embarking on his own particular theory of life, with always the ultimate end the nothingness of body and soul.
It is said that those who come to Paris from other lands cannot escape becoming Frenchmen. They arrive steeped in their grassroots, Paris sees and conquers, and they emerge French throughout. This strange metamorphosis takes place in the lives of Martha and Viney. Without quite knowing why, one sees these two normal individuals becoming victims of their own passions, lust, and greed. Viney, who entered the marriage in an attitude of love, emerges a sensuous, unfeeling maq (French whoremaster) who sells his lovely Martha to the highest bidder and becomes himself a practicing deviate.
The story of Viney and Martha revolves about a third character named Rourke Magnum, a man of means and supreme imagination who devotes his life to the indulgence of sexual pleasure both for himself and for as much of the rest of the world as he can entice into his web of vice. I found myself wondering where Hammer conceived inspiration for this satyr, for the personality is clear-cut and well defined, and one feels that he has actually known Rourke Magnum at some time during his life. For a considerable sum of money, Magnum draws up a contract wherein he buys Viney and Martha-body and soul, so to speak-for a period of one year. I seriously doubt that the young couple would have traded their freedom for silver or gold had they been able to envision their fate for the next twelve months.
Many have said that existence in Paris is not always the gay, pretty life that is painted in books and plays. Charles Peguy spoke of it as the City of the Body and Mind, where vice is sold freely and prayer offered even more freely. The undercurrent of morbid sexual desire goes eternally on; one dabbles in it or bathes in it, and perhaps is destroyed by it, but the stream never seems to end. Martha and Viney fell headlong into this current, and rode the rapids together in this perverted world.
Never between the covers of one book have I encountered so many branches of sexual pathology and manifestations of eroticism as in The Itch. Throughout the book and embroidered into the plot so as to hold the reader's interest, we find the following sexual practices: Sexual vampirism, or the desire to bite and draw blood during intercourse; verbal sadism, in which the sadist finds sexual satisfaction in heaping abuse and obscene expressions on his sexual partner; algolagnia, which includes both sadism and masochism; algesia, or extreme sensitivity to pain, pederasty, or anal coitus; the androgynous personality, having the structure or desire of both sexes; the nymphomaniac, or and romania, wherein the desire in women for sexual intercourse is excessive to the point of psychosis; coprolalia, the utterance of obscene or vulgar words during coitus; cunnilingus application of the mouth to the vulva and clitoris of the female; defloration, the rupture of the hymen by the first sexual intercourse; dippoldism, sadism of men toward boys; bestiality, or coitus with animals; the Don Juan personality, wherein one who seduces does so not so much to enjoy the act as to express the feeling of victory over the female; dyspareunia, pain experienced by some women during the sexual act (the pain is at times severe enough to make intercourse a torture); incest, sexual intercourse between near relatives; precocious sexuality, prematurely awakened sexual desire with prematurely developed sex organs; undinism, a perversion in which sexual pleasure is connected with the act of urination; urtication, flagellation with nettles, done as a perversion to increase sexual desire; satyriasis, abnormally insatiable sexual desire in men, corresponding to nymphomania in women; ipsation, or masturbation; Lesbianism, female homosexuality; sex intra mannae, or between the breasts; misogynia, utter hatred of women; mixoscopia, or voyeurism, sexual excitement from watching sexual acts; sexual neurasthenia, a condition of general bodily and nervous exhaustion based on abuse of the sexual organs; the pander, or pimp; passivism, a form of sexual perversion in which there is a subjugation of volition to another; pathomania, moral insanity, a morbid desire to indulge in vice (Rourke Magnum); eonism or transvestitism, assuming the dress, carriage, and general habits of the opposite sex; the epongeur, a pervert who derives sexual pleasure from smelling the opposite sex; the essayer group, those males who copulate with females in front of visitors to induce sexual excitement in them; exhibitionism, consisting of exposure of the genitals to the opposite sex; fellatio, coitus wherein the mouth is used as the vagina; use of the godemiche, artificial imitation of the penis; Hellenic love, which is known as Greek love or homosexuality . . .
I could go on, but know that by now the reader is tired of this professional jargon. Please know that these terms are not listed for profundity's sake. The above terms of deviation are given to indicate the all-encompassing scale of sexual practice covered in The Itch. Even after 20 years of research, this writer was a bit awed with the depth of entry into the field of eroticism found in this narrative.
Aside from the erotic, however, I feel that the author of this book has a definite literary flair. The actual key to the writing of this book may be seen in a verbal offering by Viney; seated in a sidewalk cafe and in a philosophical frame of mind, he retells the story of Adam and Eve, ending with, "For, let us make no mistake, Eve, the day's death, is no less ours; He harnessed us to perdition, dealt out a double itch and sat back to chuckle at his neatness."
During the reading, I identified with the peculiar splendor of Paris, where one can dream uninhibited in an atmosphere of romanticism or raw, crude sex. live the lavish life of the past, feel the passionate fervor of the disciples of the arts, and experience the world existing solely for man's enjoyment and excitation.
As a psychologist dealing with sexology, one encounters all phases of the sexual spectrum, the psychology of the sex drive, love, perversion, and the origin of the sex instinct. Strangely enough, the word "sex" is an old Roman theological term, being derived from the Latin word meaning "six," and Sextus, or the sixth commandment, regarding adultery (the seventh, in some religions). The word has now been accepted as denoting all that concerns the genetic functions of nature, and to me a primary function of our time (along with others) is to research various branches of sexology for enlightenment. The rational being considers sexual ethics in the light of civilized human beings who have freed themselves from traditional superstitions and aim toward human happiness. This does not mean that we should lean always toward the obscene; yet, withal, exploration sheds light. The idea that sexual immorality including perversions is more prevalent in our age than formerly is grossly erroneous. The savages, as well as the Greeks, Romans, and Jews, were far more immortal than we of the Twentieth Century.
If you desire the headiness of life flowing through your senses and creating the illusion of an eternal love affair with the bizarre, you will get a great deal from the reading of this book.
-Leonard A. Lowag, Ph.D.
I
He was a short strongly-built young man with curly black hair through which he pushed a hand as he swung his legs out of bed and looked discontentedly over to where she cleaned her teeth and spat into the chipped hotel basin.
"Your ass wiggles," he said sourly. "It shifts with each spit."
She rinsed her mouth and let the cloudy water fall out of her mouth in a long dribble.
"You prefer them not to? You like a still ass?"
"You know what I like," he said.
Her pink morning lips went loose and actressy.
"Non," she said, "dis-moi, cheri. Dis-moi des cochon-neries."
"Stuff it," he said.
He got up, shuffled into sandals and took her place at the basin. His thick brows hunched hack at him in the flecked mirror. He had a good growth of beard that hollowed his cheeks. His fingers reached down and turned on the tap marked chaude, a joke he scrupulously observed, waiting for the cold water.
To help him, she came up behind him and put a soft hand between his hare legs.
"No," he said. "Wash. You wash, I wash. And I am hungry."
She left her hand where it was, mildly preoccupied, and put her chin on his shoulder. In the mirror he watched her mouth moving.
"It's a pity," she said, "such a pity. "We have no money."
"Ob, no," he said. "Again?"
"No," she said, "not again. It has been like that for thirty days, remember? I should have married & provider. A man altogether taller, older, with a brain and things."
She reflected a little.
"Wrong," she said. "The things you have."
He threw down the soap and, turning, wiped his slimy hands over her breasts.
"All right," he said. "Where will you have it? The ear, the navel, between the toes, over, under, in my lady's chamber?"
Her long tawny eyes went warm.
"like dogs," she said. "Woof."
Viney was twenty-six, Martha twenty. They had been living together in their small high room on Rue Princesse for two years. It was all very romantic. like a story-book. Don't we just envy you, thought said friends passing through, doing Europe in creamy Cadillacs, shaking their heads in nostalgia, loving, just loving the caked spaghetti Viney and Martha cooked for them over a rechaud. They became quite a thing for friends, in fact.
For the first six months they were quite a thing for themselves. After all, here they were, in Europe at last, and not only Europe, but Paris. They were young, so what did they want with money? Just a little eyrie hung over the picturesque rooftops, a glass of wine and thou. Well, they had their view over the rooftops, on good days, when they got their daily ha if hour of sun and they thought to look out of the one thin window: at first they even had their glass of wine and that made a nice change, the real thing after Californian grape-juice at a dollar a crack. Martha had taste and the posters she stole for the walls and the hard red bottle glowing on the simple table made a nice still life. Besides, the wine out of the bottle cheered them up no end. Getting a little drunk was so cheap and wine didn't give you a hangover. Well, not a real one. Not often.
They'd brought a couple of thousand dollars with them. Mr. Gaynor, Viney's prosperous father, had been good for that. After a shotgun wedding he'd thought himself lucky at the price, getting rid of a worthless son and heavy new daughter-in-law at the cost of a signature. It was only well after they'd left, second-class on the Ryndam, that he found out the pregnancy was a pillow and the shotgun had been aiming at him. He should have given his son more credit: why, wasn't he his father's spring and shoot?
Two thousand dollars, and, in francs, on the Mack market, they looked better still. Hand in hand, itching for a bed, Viney and Martha went room-hunting on the Left Bank. And they found it, a perfect little gem, as squalid as Martha's romantic heart could have wished, a dark box on the sixth floor with rose and shit wallpaper and a leaky bidet. All theirs for eight thousand a month, a give-away. Say twenty bucks. They could live there for two years, a lifetime.
Only they got hungry. But, of course, jobs, jobs, they had plenty of talent, they even spoke French, slightly: no, they could safely throw their money around & bit. Money attracted money and it didn't do to starve or cut down on the laundry. In some things, they were fastidious. Particularly Martha.
Martha was eighteen, when they arrived. She was medium height, only an inch or so shorter than Viney. She had the kind of legs that look chubby and biteable in slippers, arched and sexy in black stockings on high heels. Martha was mutable enough to wear both. Her hair had its changes, too. Basically it was long and whiskey-colored, that pale glowing shade, and, really free, curled quickly at the tips into the crevice of her behind. But she wore it for the street all ways, though mostly in, a massed chignon that men wanted to undo. Few men had. To plunge further into her past: she had ripened early. At fourteen, in High School, there had been hoys in poppa's car to play with her, thrusting clumsy fingers around her, pushing dry lips of excitement against hers, wet and long. Something held her in, though. At the climax of the crewcut boy's desire, when her head swam with an abandon she wanted, there was always something that said, there is time, "wait for the next, you've got them running. And she would break for her lipstick, make up a red new mouth, force them to drive her angrily home.
Until Viney, that is. Viney put his long thing into her the first time they dated, she never knew how. And, afterwards, she never asked why.
His long thing. Long and thick. Oh, how she got to depend on it. She wasn't a stupid girl, got good grades still, but all her learning, the theories and dates and formulae she tucked away came to seem like so many proofs of his penis.
So, when he said, this will not do, one day, when he said, licking her nose, we're leaving, I'll marry you, we're running away, what could she do but say, yes, and, do it now please, meaning run away yes and do it now please both.
When they got up again, this time from the floor where she had been crouching, bottom-up, they really felt hungry.
"You never know," she said. "If we went to the Royal, we might see Bertie. He'd stand us a couple of coffees."
"I want eggs," he said. "Food, steaming and live-looking, ham, beef, pieces of animal, hot and cooked."
She tried to laugh.
"Let's try, anyway," she said. "What have we got to lose?"
It was ten when they got there. As they went in through the swing doors, Viney grunted with satisfaction. A tall ugly man leant dreamily against the zinc, chewing a dunked croissant.
"Bertie breakfasts," he said. "Forward. I wish I didn't loathe his metaphysic guts."
The tall man waved a soft hand at them.
"H-h-hallo," he said. "Thi-i-is is a s-s-surprise. How's life?"
Martha smiled sweetly. "Fine," she said on a low happy note. "Okay," said Viney, wondering how they would manage it.
He chanced it and, putting an elbow down beside Bertie's, ordered two cr�mes and croissants.
Bertie worked for the British Council and liked to slum. One never knew with the cultured employed. Martha had moved to his other side, so Viney received his hack. That's the spirit, he thought. His stomach turned over as he looked at the papery brown croissants. He would say he'd left his wallet at home. To hell with what he'd say: he'd eat first. Thank Christ Martha could find the energy to speak to the English moron.
Martha was using her eyes. She was surprised at herself. She had two aches, one in her stomach and one (it amazed her) around her loins. What happened? she thought. It was all there, hard as ever, God knows I came. Perhaps he needs meat. Perhaps I need meat. Bertie has eyes like a tired monkey, circled with pink skin. They are looking at me very attentively.
Their coffee was slid onto the counter. Viney grabbed his while she sipped hers, looking up under long dark lashes at Bertie. She thought of a dirty thought. Bertie is manifestly a prick: that is why he stammers: all pricks stammer.
When they had finished eating, Bertie suddenly broke into clear coherent speech.
"You look hungry," he said. "I don't believe you eat enough. Man cannot live on love alone."
No trouble with a single consonant, it came right out.
But he stopped at that. It had been promising, but he didn't elaborate.
Viney made a decision. "Bertie," he said, "can you.. . ? "
"No," said Bertie, "I can't. Why should I? I work for my money. Look, we've been through this before. I don't I-I-like working any m-m-more than you do. It's a hard life, chum."
Viney's wife pouted delicately. Her mouth glistened like a darkened room with reflected lights playing around the sleeping furniture.
"I must go and pee, "she said. "You gentlemen will excuse me?"
Her hand brushed Bertie's as she turned to go. They all saw it. It was quite deliberate. Then she went tap tapping down the stairs.
There was a moment while Viney plucked a pile of crumbs from his saucer and swallowed them with a dry throat. Then Bertie went pale and followed Martha down the stairs.
He went up to the woman in shiny black silk who sat over a basket of cigarettes, Cerberus of the two doors. Without a word, he looked around him, took from his wallet a five thousand franc note, handed it to the lady, and passed through to where Viney's wife was smiling at him as she pretended to fix her hair in the mirror. "Quickly," she said.
The three cabinets were mercifully unoccupied. Few feet away from home at ten on a Sunday morning. They found themselves in the end one.
When she had undone his flies and it prodded into her curling palm, she was surprised to find it was bigger than Viney's, and surprised even more to find she was pleasantly surprised.
They acted without speaking. She stepped out of her drawers like a tentative cat, not wanting them to stain on the wet marbled floor. Then she motioned him to squat across the seat. How well her mind was working! Lightheaded from lack of food? This is the first time I've been fucked by another man, she thought as she sat down onto the taut head of his cock. It filled her like a flesh-gloved fist. I don't even like him, she thought. Look at his monkey-eyes.
Oh, but no, they drew her. She did like them, she adored it, she had to, she kissed his thin lips as she shifted up and down on him. I'll tear the hot sperm out of him. And I'll make him pay for the pleasure he gives me. Don't let him see it, then, you fool, she said to herself in a daze. Ouch, the soft hard push of it, swelling and jabbing. God, how I like this.
The first thing Viney did as they came together up the stairs was smile. After all, wasn't this what he'd warned? She knew all about the easy way out of their difficulties. They'd hedged around it for weeks now.
She's painted her mouth again, it looks very fresh and glittering. Or did they kiss? Or did they in fact do anything? Bertie's just the sort of man would have constipation. They've been gone twenty minutes, all things are possible.
She came shyly up to him, slipped her warm arm through his.
"Darling," she said, "we've just had a lovely fuck. And look. Bertie's given me ten thousand. I think that makes me a whore."
Before there was time for more words, the lank Englishman, color on his cheekbones, ordered three double fines.
Viney pushed his fists down into the tobacco-strewn pockets of his coat.
When his voice came out, he was surprised at it. So calm and amused.
"Let's drink to it," he said. "Good for you. That makes me your mag. A new relationship at last."
"Yes," she said, "we'll have something to talk about again. And it does make a nice change."
"You're vile."
They looked round in astonishment at Bertie, who was holding his head weakly in both hands. His face was working unpleasantly. Was that my lover? Martha thought. He looks as if he wants to be sick. She had never felt better in her life, "How can you just stand there and talk about it? Do you realize what just happened?"
He pushed his long horsy face close to Viney's.
"Yes, yes," said her husband impatiently. "Cheeis." And he drank off his brandy. An idea occurred to him.
"How much money does he have left?"
Martha smoothed the rusty ropes of her hair and her lips broke open on a whore's smile, a smile of complicity.
"Darling," she said. "I don't know. Why don't you ask him?"
They could talk like this, because Bertie had his hands now over his ears and was crooning softly to himself. Anyway, it didn't matter if he heard.
Viney bent over and whispered something in her ear. She nodded slowly.
"Bertie," he said. "Drinks are on us. This is going to be a great day."
The brandy sang round in Viney's head as he locked the door of their room. It was the word maq that had suggested their present situation to him. A maq, the mackerel or pimp of Paris, keeps control over his woman partly by never allowing her to spend the night with a customer. What Martha had done with Bertie had to be re-done under his auspices. He would be ringmaster, crack the whip that joined and unjoined them: and they'd milk Bertie for every sou he'd got in the process. Martha had come glowing up the stairs by Bertie's side. That had been the moment of danger. Well, if necessary, other men could make her glow from time to time, but the glow would always be that of the fire she kept for him, Viney.
She was soothing Bertie like an experienced whore.
The sweater she wore had a thin row of buttons down the back. It was a very simple black wool sweater that showed the firm surge of her breasts. She had always liked clothes that showed her body.
Bertie had had four cognacs, they all had, it was now half past eleven on a sunny morning, and he swayed about the back of her sweater like a steamy adolescent.
Suddenly all the buttons were undone and the sweater fell off.
Her breasts shocked, springing so whitely into view in the small room. A beautiful pair, thought Viney, they always arouse me. But, for the moment, they were not his to handle.
They were Bertie's. She turned and, pulling the Englishman's head down, kissed him long and sexily. Viney could see the little muscles shifting in her cheeks as her thin pink tongue explored his mouth. Bertie's hands moved up and grabbed a breast each. He had short grubby-nailed hands that plucked and stroked sluggishly.
Martha broke free, panting, and even Viney could see that she was beginning to get excited herself. It doesn't matter, go ahead, he said to himself grimly, poppa's here.
"Suck my nipples," she said.
He agreed to give us another twenty thousand and I've got ten of it in my pocket now. Viney found he couldn't stop talking to himself. Twenty thousand and I've already got ten of it. Ten in the Royal. Thirty altogether.
He saw blood spring into a bite Bertie's teeth had made on the swelling undersurface of his wife's right breast. She didn't make a sound.
Then Bertie let his wife go and brought up his head like a dog surfacing, his eyes goggling. He looked unseeingly over at Viney, who sat on a table by the window, swinging his legs and counting.
Martha's hands had gone wild and were chasing each other round Bertie's clothes. He was dressed, as always, respectably, like a club Englishman. He shrugged off the neat gray coat himself, wrenched at the striped club tie. But she was concentrating on essentials.
There is a little run of blood from her tit on his shirt, thought Viney, mesmerized. Shall we have to wash it out? Is that part of the service? He tried to forget his own body.
There was a big bulge at the front of Bertie's also gray trousers. Martha's slim fingers were picking the flies open neatly, pulling down his white slip. The man's cock dandled stiffly in front of him. He made as if to bend down and untie his shiny Oxford shoes, but Martha forestalled him, her eyes shining.
As she finished slipping off his shoes and straightened up, she found herself on her knees, openmouthed before his blushing stem. Of course, thought Viney, what could be more natural? it is like a play watching it advance towards the soft opening pulps of her deep red mouth. It seemed for a second as if she really wanted to swallow it. Bertie thrust convulsively, as if he too wanted to be swallowed utterly, kept there. Then she drew her flushed face back off it, her lips coming wetly together from a lip stick painted o as they left it. But she wasn't going to desert it like that. She would string him up to more than ho had ever managed, make it grow and grow.
Her mouth closed over the cobra head again, slithered back, advanced, slithered back again. It happened extremely slowly. Bertie had a clumsy hand in her bunched hair and it was coming free from its bonds, till, just as she pulled her lips back from the whole length of him and stood giddily up, it curled and cascaded in a yellow-brown rush down to her buttocks.
"Wait!" she said. "My skirt."
She wouldn't allow his gauche hands, she was suddenly in a great hurry, stepping out of the tight heavy material, leaving him only to tear off the transparent triangle that held in her bushy sex.
Viney slipped off the table and went over to look out of the window. Two or three colored cars nosed cautiously down the narrow street. A pretty girl in blue jeans idled along, a black head and a hand with a filet full of shopping, no more. He heard them move over to the wide divan bed and, by the time he turned round again, impelled by the noises, Martha lay flat on her back, legs spread splittingly apart, and Bertie was fucking her hard.
Thirty thousand francs, he said to himself. Why don't I just pull up a Simenon and have a nice read? Perhaps there is something on the radio? Then he went unsteadily over to the bed and looked down into his wife's twisting and rolling eyes. He saw the whole point then, and then only, what she was and what it was all about. Quietly he undressed himself and stood there, waiting. He stood there like a pointer, pointing at the bucking pair of them.
She always made noises like that. Sucking contented noises, then husky cries and admonitions, a kind of commentary on her pleasure. He had never heard them so clearly.
Bertie was treating her roughly. He had shoved her legs up round his neck and her weight lay heavily on her shoulders. His hands were holding her breasts so hard that his fingers were almost buried in their flesh.
"Oh, come," she shouted, her voice thick and unnatural.
And she jerked once and then again and again, uncontrollably. Viney couldn't take his eyes off her. A second or two later, the Englishman's long ribbed body collapsed and stayed on her while he poured free. It didn't take long and, when his body was quite still again, he levered himself up and went to pee in the basin.
But Martha didn't move, didn't move, that is, beyond a further convulsion as he came out of her, when she too relapsed into shut-eyed flushed peace. Viney looked down at his swollen sex. It seemed to be throbbing so much that he fancied pale concentric rings of blood floating away from it, out into the room. Then he looked down at the glistening hairs and slit of his wife.
First he stooped and, bringing back his hand, smacked her hard across the face, .to wake her up a little. Her eyes shot open and her mouth shivered. Tears welled gently at the corners of her eyes. They have a strange light, thought Viney, perhaps she will even enjoy this. But he didn't wait to find out.
Her legs were just coming together again as he forced them wide apart. He went down on her and slammed himself in as if he were trying to wound her.
"Oh, no," she cried, her head shifting from side to side. "I can't. Wait, darling. Oh, please, wait." She began sobbing brokenly. "It's too much. Darling. Darling. Oh, don't." Her voice rose sharply and he raised his hand and caught her another crack across her whimpering mouth. He had a moment of coolness.
"You'll be amazed," he said, "astonished what you can take."
This is the first time we've done it without her wanting it as well. She'll learn. Then he was mastered by anger and lust. Her tearstained face swam beneath him. Her thighs and breasts seemed richer, larger, but he too seemed bigger so that the rubbery moistened lunges of his cock went deeper and further than ever before. What she felt was of no interest. He was using her for his own purposes. To burst a swelling.
It was incredibly enjoyable and he wanted, somewhere in his head, to protract it. He found he had withdrawn and was offering it to her to lick. She was slow to understand and he hit her again. Then her mouth closed convulsively over it and he watched in fascination, half kneeling on her breasts, as her painted oval lips .mumbled him obediently. He felt himself too near ;;nd took it out.
"Thank you," he said. "Now open the legs again."
She was beyond tears.
"You like it," he said, "don't you?"
When he finally abandoned her, it was trickling sluggishly out from between her thighs, hers and his and the Englishman's. She was kissing him helplessly, thanking him, loving him.
He returned her kisses tenderly and got up.
"I didn't realize that was part of the bargain," said a voice.
Bertie was standing a couple of feet from the bed, staring in front of him as at a surrealist painting he could never hope to understand. He looked extremely gentlemanly and hopeless, thought Viney. Having just stamped out Bertie's tracks, he felt a certain tenderness towards the Englishman too. It wasn't everyone that could preserve such an air without a stitch or shoulder-pad to support it. He realized that much of Bertie's distinction lay in the new erection he was carrying. He excited me and I excited him, fair enough.
"Would you like to go next?" he said politely.
Bertie hesitated a second and then a genuinely understanding smile broke over his face.
"You are very kind," he said. "But.. . " He gestured delicately towards the snail-tracked whorl of hair and skin that rose and fell on the bed.
"You are right," said Viney. "We'll have her wash. She seems full up. Though.. . "
"Oh, as you like," said Bertie, not to be outdone. "I'm sure we shall manage very well as things are. A help, if anything." He continued his smile.
"And it might be interesting to see how much.. . " said Viney.
"Yes," said Bertie. "Good. Martha, my dear, will you move over onto your side? I'm sure you must be quite breathless."
She tried to move from the bed in her outrage, but they were too quick for her.
"Darling," said Viney, "sugar, do as he says. I'll make it up to you after."
Bertie made to hit her, but he wouldn't have that.
"No, old man," he said, "you can't buy everything." He restrained Bertie's hand and tsktsked. "She's only doing it to excite. Aren't you, dear?"
He thrashed her buttocks with the back of his hand till she agreed. She lay now quite passively, the long curving line of her body turned towards them. Bertie made her pull her legs up towards her chin, so that she lay like a foetus. Before be laid himself down beside her, he turned apologetically to Viney.
"Of course, this is the hazy man's way."
Then he was thrusting up at her from the back. The penetration's better like that, thought Viney. One of my favorites. She-likes it, but you have to play with your hand at the same time, otherwise you miss the lovely clitoris. Still this is the fifth time for her today, quite a busy morning. Bertie's being very slow about this one. He's taking it a long way out each time. And he's paying for it, what a stupid bastard. He felt a fraternal contempt. God, but she has a pretty body. Funny to think I was getting bored with it
Well, she's not going to have an orgasm this time, that's certain. She's started whimpering again. Wonder if it's hurting, shouldn't do, she's well oiled. She'll be full as a Chianti bottle after this. He's a hog with tits, that man. Englishman, Oedipus complex. Back to the womb. Well, man, he's digging back the shortest way. He just can't stop grappling them, can he? She's getting some nasty bruises. The bite's bleeding again a bit. And on and on he goes. A nice slow fuck. Very relaxed. Ah, his spine's tightening.
Then Martha began to move as well. Neither of the men was expecting it. But, as if dragged, her bottom began to move backwards, an inch forwards, hack again. She was pushing him deeper into her and gradually her rhythm quickened and Viney could hear how heavy her breathing was. Then she tried to turn over onto her front and Bertie went with her. She had now his full weight on her sinuous back.
"Let me get on my knees." It came out strangled, but there was no doubt about what she'd said.
It was dripping down from her as she crouched with the man's pole wedged in her from behind. They both began to move like a lubricated machine. A momentary sag, his hands came round her hips and held her steady, a stab, a sag of the white hips and abdomen, then the sluicing of his plunge. Bertie couldn't hold himself back any longer. He whipped at her in a fury and then came in a series of gasps and strong movements of his loins. But she couldn't let him go.
"Leave it there, oh, god, leave it in me."
She worked against time, dreading his shrinking. And she did it. There was a sudden high wail of pleasure, her torso shook and shook, and she subsided heavily on the overworked bed. He slid out of her as she dropped.
Bertie had an appointment, he thanked god not with a woman, and left as soon as he was dressed. They arranged to meet in a couple of days' time. He spoke vaguely of more money then.. Viney felt very content with the morning's work. He had made Martha get up to kiss Bertie goodbye, believing in these small sentimentalities. Bertie had taken the opportunity of a last feel at her breasts which looked swollen under his hands. She could no longer smile or pretend, but stood there limply, letting herself be handled. When Viney had closed the door on him, she sank back on the bed and closed her eyes.
Well, there's a dirty bitch, thought Viney. Look at all that mess on her bowels. And she doesn't even wash. So he took a towel and grabbed off the worst in a handful.
She moved her lips sufficiently to say she hated him.
"Don't be silly," he said, sitting down beside her. "You talk like a child." His fingers played desultorily around her thighs, tapped out a little tune. He was thinking.
"Are you tired, honey?" he asked.
"For Christ's sake, leave me alone."
"What you should do," he went on, "is get up. I'll heat you some water. Then you have a nice wash. You'll feel much better. It's no good lying there like that. What's done is done." His voice was very solicitous.
He went over and filled a pan with water, lit the rechaud and put the pan on it.
"Nice warm water," he said, coming back to the bed, amid all the perfumes of Arabia. It'll be just as if nothing happened. You'll see. Then we'll go and eat at the Dome. We're rich." She grimaced.
"To hell with you," she said. "I'll need two pans of water."
"That's better," he said. "That's Martha."
He was now very careful not to touch her. He even got up and pulled on his shorts so that she wouldn't be so aware of him.
"What's the time?" she said.
He looked at his watch, amused to find he still wore it. "Half one."
"Are you crazy? It's stopped." He listened to it and repeated: "Half one."
It seemed to cheer her up. She rolled off the bed until her small feet touched the matting on the floor. Then, with a slow twist, she put her body's weight on them and was standing up. Her hair fell damply down her back.
"Here you are," he said, taking the bubbling pan off the rechaud.
She filled the basin and ran in a little cold water.
"Heat me some more. I need a stand-up bath."
She began to, soap herself slowly, wincing in places as she touched the soft flesh of her breasts. The warm water reassured her body gradually. A great torpor came over her and she raised her arms and stretched, sprinkling water. This was better. Thoughts began to chase lazily around in her head. I'm coming alive again. Men, such strange bastards. Children.
But not. Why want to hurt so? Would have killed him. Both of them. Bertie. His eyes. Ugly. All ugly really. How could I have? And no desire now. Never more desire? She finished washing her face and the upper part of her body, dried herself lovingly. And Viney. He. To treat a poor girl so. He is quiet, in a corner somewhere. Sits in shame. Shall suffer then. Withhold her person. A woman has ways. Beg, Viney, beg for Martha, there's a good dog. I have him now. Viney will suffer. But talk lovey-dove. Fool him.
"Pour the other pan in the bidet, honey, will you?"
He obeys, comes from his corner and pours, with bowed head. Turns about, sits, disappears.
She rode the bidet, separating her hair on either side. Gingerly she soaked the threads and clots of their love out of her to wave in the water. So much of it. Perhaps I should shave there. Less sore after.
She got up, her buttocks marked whitely by the rim of the bidet, and stuffed a towel gently between her legs. She didn't want to rub herself there. When she felt the moisture had been absorbed, she opened her legs and powdered herself richly with talcum. Much better. She was getting herself in nice shape again. Her body glowed, but dully. Not with desire. Never again that, she told herself.
She had an urge to make herself pretty for the street.
"What are you going to wear?" Viney said abruptly.
He had that knack of knowing her thoughts. She warmed a little, a very little towards him.
"I don't know," she said.
She began to open drawers, turn over sweaters and blouses in a kind of hurrying despair. He sat and watched her. It was always like this. A marital scene, he thought. Hubby waits.
She had one long severe dress that held to her body like snow, white, a pure blinding white, stippled down, the front with ten green buttons. It was that she chose finally. How symbolic can a girl get? she thought, And yet it was what she needed to put on, she knew it, she wanted the trappings of purity for an afternoon. She lay it out on the bed and took from the cupboard a pair of stiltheeled green suede shoes. Then she paused.
"Viney, honey, I wonder if you'd brush my hair a little?" she said.
"Sure," he said, moving easily over to her, taking up a brush.
Usually he would touch her body with it, spanking her here and there as he drew it swiftly down the thick whiskey silk of her hairs. But now he was very circumspect. A hundred times he stroked it, and then fifty more, till it shone like glass. Then he stepped away and she thanked him demurely.
He's on the run, she exulted. I've got him by the halls. Won't let him. Not till I want it. If ever.
She stood in front of the tall pier glass and, taking her hair in two hands, piled it up on the top of her head. He looked at her chubby pink buttocks, the long duskier sweep of her back, the few fluffy hairs springing away from the rest at the nape of her neck. She enjoyed herself, posturing there, having her body to herself. Quickly she arranged her hair like that in a kind of fine crown.
Now my face, she thought. The dress is pure, hut the face shall be diabolical. Lips, eyes, teeth. She smiled at herself. Her teeth were as even as ever and very white. But her lips seemed too muted a pink. She ran her eyes over a battery of lipsticks. A dark, almost black, red, like the fleshy shadows in the curled center of a rose. She pouted her lips forward and painted them with infinite care, once, and bit into a Kleenex, and once again. Her mouth had a heavy sullen invitingness now. I must bring up my eyes. She scraped in a little box of paste and shaded the lids a barely perceptible green. The fat quivering tip of her tongue came out as she concentrated on herself. Viney watched.
Then she stiffened her lashes with a tiny black brush. When she had finished, she turned towards her husband with a smile of contentment.
"Okay?" she said.
"Fine," he said, oh the right note, a husband's proud approval.
She turned then to the bed and put on the pale green underclothes she had also laid out. Then she covered her head with a piece of cloth and shrugged insidiously into the white dress.
A last check, a tug at the skirt, stocking seams, a hand touching her hair. What had she forgotten?
But of course. She took up another small bottle and touched gently behind her ears, at her temples, with the stopper. She liked to smell good. Really she felt she had outdone herself.
"Viney," she said sharply. "Hurry and get dressed. I'm starved."
He heard it, the American woman's voice, telling him confidently what to do, what she wanted. "Urn," he said.
She had taken up her pocketbook and stood in front of him, swinging it a little, getting angry. I think I am exceptionally lucky, said Viney to himself. I think there are few men would not consider me a very lucky guy. The touch of anger was all she needed. There is that faint flush that animates the whole breathing doll. She is there, clean, brushed, polished, smelling somewhere deep down with the distant promise of sex, her mouth is a ripe dark pout, her breasts force slightly against the smooth white linen, is that the outline of a nipple that I see before me, the handle toward my hand?
"Come, let me clutch thee," he said, moving over and locking the door. Then he slipped off his shorts and kicked them away with a foot.
"We're not going anywhere just yet, my dove," he said, "not for a few hours."
She couldn't believe him. She couldn't believe the strong rearing penis that looked with an evil eye towards her. She stood where she was, incapable of movement. "Put your clothes on," she said. "For God's sake." Viney was meditative. Well, there it all ia, it could win a contest. So what are we going to do with it? How take it best? "Give me time," he said, half to himself. The corners of her full mouth went down. "Of course," he said. "Yes. What would you say to a little fuck? You attract me."
Then he moved swiftly on her, put a hand at the neck of her fresh white dress and ripped buttons, from top to bottom. The fabric itself tore here and there. She swung at him, wild with rage. But he had moved back, trailing the dress with him in one hand, and was looking at her again quietly. Such a warm voluptuous trull, her mammaries heaving and her pudendum a sullen bulge.
"Take off your pants," he said, "the rest you can leave on."
"You shit," she said, beginning to cry helplessly. Too strong. He has me. But will not enjoy. Will not let. My dress. Perhaps to mend. And I hurt there. Too many times. Even while I dressed he planned this.
"Here, let me help," he said. He wanted her very badly now. He caught her round the waist, hands slithering on the green silk, lifted the lacy hem, put in three fingers and eased them down to her knee-hinges. The dark hair felt soft and curly where she had washed and dried it.
"Now step out of them," he said. "Bless me, you're slow."
His hands held her firmly against him and she sobbed on his shoulder. But, horse-like, her spiked green feet pawed up and the flimsy pants fell free.
He makes tracks on me with his thing. I feel the wet. Stained.
"Don't snivel," he said. "You spoil your face. Or is it waterproof? Now turn round and touch the floor With your hands."
"Fuck you," she shouted. "I'll see you.. . "
"Down," he said. "All over soon."
He cuffed her ear. In her brilliant teary eyes the pupils dilated.
"I can't take any more. It'll kill me. Please, Viney, let me suck you. Just a little. Perhaps I'll feel more like it then."
Crafty. Her will against mine. She will stay on me like a valve until I lose it. So she thinks. But this good training for her. She pouts her lip fruit forward. I see its redness and think on soft depths. Her sense-itching scent.
She didn't wait for him to agree, but fell to her knees and took it in her plump palms with every sign of lovingness. Dutiful wife. Patient. He watched the bobbing coif of hair, the powdery nose, and then the oval gape of mouth. Slowly her tongue creeps out and dabs it. Withdraws. Good. Now again it creeps, further, and rests wet under the helmet. A god-given gift. Now she opens wider and envelops me. I throb hard at her tongue root. Immaculate lipstick. No telltale stains on your men friends, guaranteed game proof. What a beautiful thing to do with a lady's mouth. Ah, now she begins. The mock fuck. Hold tight. Held tight. Though hot veins pulse as she sucks. Not another drop, madam. All for another place. She rocks with her head, a real limpet. And to let her take the jet on her palate, swallow? No.
Her teeth came down on its rim, gentle but firm.
"Naughty," he said. "Thank you, we're ready now." His voice trembled. She hung on, oblivious. All passion breathed in her spiraling plunging pulps. A fleck of dribble grew on her clean chin.
"Out," he said, and pulled. It was painful, she bit even, but it came. He watched her conquered shoulders heave. Her last chance gone. Then he went to a drawer and took out vaseline. She saw nothing. The tube lay curled in the palm of his right hand. 'Now you bend," he said.
She got up, turned round dreamily, and hinged down. He put out his hand and gathered up her slip, bunching it round her other way neck. She shivered.
"You'll be dry," he said. "L don't want to hurt you." Said with such tenderness. Does she suspect?
His free hand squeezed vaseline into itself. He reached under and planted a packet at her lips, moistened it gently in. But his hand, dragging back, touched, as if by clumsiness, the tight bud behind and left there too some unguent. The two so close, a natural slip of the hand.
He squeezed out more as she swayed, arms drooping loose. With this he covered his cock, keeping a little back to place there, just at the small slit, silently.
Then he took her square by the hips and brought close the stiff arrowed rod. He placed it there and was in an inch before she cried and struggled to wrench away. But he had her locked, arms clasped round her belly. Her knees began to buckle, too late. They sank together to the floor and their falling stabbed him another inch in.
Pain. This no one did. I am broken, bleeding. My dress. Dome, Bertie, the strong flesh jammed there. Day gone wrong. We dream. Pain. Hand grease thick in my cunt. Viney's hand. Viney. His black hair. When be smiles. Thrust. Down my legs, blood, I know it is. After to die. Fingers slither my clitoris.
I flutter. All going in. Too long. Destroy me? Oh I stretch. What strokes there? How could I pleasure? Do not. Such hurt. Viney. Fills me.
Inch by inch it went in. He was amazed that such a gripped hole could give so. Its strange own softness. Each hand under grasped a pored bunch of breast through the smooth of her shimmy. No fear she would slip him now. He knew himself there. And his buttocks tightened as he drove in and out, seeming to go in more than he ever came out. Her bubs flattened in the claws of his fingers, his hand backs scraping on the floor.
After thirty, forty, rest a second, feel the moist clench all along me. Think of her so, Martha, reluctant, abased. That which was clean. And painted. What will the sperm do there, oh there, what will the sperm do there?
His hands left her saucered breasts, slid down to meet in twined four fingers at her long front slit. They entered raucously and stabbed like a toy man. His nose buried in the bunch of her coiled hair. He smelt it. His body stiffened along her as he ground with his loin bones against her separated buttocks.
"Aieee!" she sobbed. Killing me. No.
His linked fingers were subtle and brutal. They followed the rhythm of his raking rod. And he felt her opening up, the lips plushing back hopelessly. Room for an arm, an army. But oh how differently he was squeezed at the back, not a millimeter to spare. The hard-soft pressure was utterly new. like a too tight glove that will stretch with wearing. He began to tease at her new hole, ironing it out, making it habitable, usable. The veined length of his cock he drew out but the swollen head he left an inch or so in, twisting it round a half-circle one way, shifting his belly and legs so that he lay crosswise upon her.
His hands. How many fingers now? Six, ten? I drip without meaning. Never so open. Where is Viney? I am done to. Who? Any man. The angry bar. I shall split. Pain? Yes. But helpless, not my fault. Tamed, beaten, destroyed. Her head reared up then and hair came undone, showering round it.
"Harder," she screamed, "push it all in. You sod. Fill me."
He had. It was oozing out ten minutes later. He had washed and dressed and was standing above her, looking down.
"Get up, honey," he said. "You'll catch cold." But she lay as if dead. The last paroxysm had almost killed her. He waited for her to come back.
Where does she float? he wondered. It seemed that the two years of their life together, carnal enough god knew, had been years he had read about in a book. They'd wandered, daily more and more uncertain, through Paris streets and nights, going to bed and getting up, looking at films and books, talking, talking endlessly. A pretty pair, favored by the Gods. Even those who dis-liked them liked to look at them. And nothing, no one, had come between them. Perhaps that was why, finally, more important than their penury, had become their mutual boredom. Their relationship had to change.
It's done that, he thought, watching with some relief as she prised herself up off the floor.
We always talked tough. Now we can act it too.
We? Oh yes, she too. She's up, isn't she? On her feet, though weaving.
Her hair was tangled about her shoulders. Pink tired eyes, the little slopes below streaked with mascara. Lips slackly together, tired too, but rich, full, still painted. Her flesh finger marked everywhere.
She tame limply over and kissed him full on the mouth, hung round his neck.
"There's a good whore," he said. Then he disentwined her arms and went out of the room, locking the door behind him. Later he came back with another man.
II
Viney kept his wife in the room for a week. By the third day she was a voluntary prisoner. A large part of the day she spent in bed, sleeping or working. It was not difficult to find men to come. The time they had spent in cafes in the quarter and in Montparnasse had made them many acquaintances, some not poor. Bertie came every day.
At the end of the week, they called a truce.
"We've made a hundred and forty-five thousand," he said, "minus twenty for Ginette." Ginette was the shriveled femme de chambre who had realized what was up soon after they began and told them so, grinning yellowly.
"Not bad," said Martha. "Let's go and spend some of it. I need some clothes."
Viney looked at her. Unmarked. A brothel of a girl. If anything, more appealing. And hardly one she hadn't enjoyed herself. Seven days of orgasms. Seven days of bucking racking leg split surrenders. None keener than those he inflicted.
She was always made-up now. A real fleshy adaptable whore, his wife. She lay nude on the bed in long black stockings, scratching gently between her legs.
"Know what?" she said. Her eyes closed and she pushed out her arms and yawned. "I'm bored. We can't go on living like this, in this sordid little room. And the police'll be getting after us some time. I don't trust the patronne either."
"F.. . the patronne," said Viney.
"You might try that, but it's a bit drastic. No, honey, we must move."
"Look," he said. "Put a sweater on and we'll go talk this out at the Dome. I can't think straight here. Looking at you, my mind fills with whips and instruments and I promised you a holiday. Quickly."
But she had grown languorous. One pink foot touched the floor, then the other. No further movement. She sat on the edge of the bed, her breasts hanging heavy and her hair flickering around.
He began to tap a tune on the table. She didn't move.
"You disobey," he said, half-humorously.
She swore at him.
"All right," he said. "The carrot."
He had made her walk like that, down Rue de Rennes, along Boulevard Raspail, a tidy walk, in the coming twilight: she wore a loose red topcoat, but she couldn't stop shaking with rage on her high heels. It was not pain quite, not that any more, once it was in, it was in, irrevocably. But her buttocks clenched instinctively to reject what she couldn't and he had forced it in so cruelly, without preparation, saying, there is room for improvement there, you'll keep that there till I tell you to take it out. Viney was in great good temper.
"Just what we needed," he said, "some fresh air. Regard the trees, the trees here are really fine. God, I'll drink forty beers. It is a night for beer and talk."
She straddled along beside him, sullen and unresponsive.
They crossed the road. The terrasse was littered with people. Cries greeted them.
"The heavenly twins! Thrones, thrones for the children!" This was Masson, a bearded bad sculptor. He was holding a glass aloft, sprinkling pastis in milky drops, his cornucopia, his gesture suggested, a baby bacchus. Everyone knew Masson, his phoniness was a neon to paper moths, there were merry inane faces all around him.
"We will sit with you, Masson," said Viney. "We will even buy you a drink."
"Oh Christ," said Masson's woman, a dwarf with white hair, "we were just going to eat. We haven't eaten since yesterday morning. I'm sick of the lot of you." She began to weep silently.
Martha sat down beside her in a spasm of womanliness and winced.
The men ignored them. The men, the men, their derelict pretty women scattered among.
Viney was talking. He had downed three beers in gulps and ordered more. The talk came bubbling out. He talked of woman. "God made the world," he began. "Hear, hear," said someone.
"So runs the myth," Viney continued. "Our concern here is not with monkeys, but Adam. In a fit of genius, he gave man ribs in superabundance. Adam, to put it crudely, limped, was lopsided, and God had decided on symmetry.. . "
He had paid a round and nobody moved.
"So. the offending rib was removed, spat on, and became the archetype, the mammiferous mother and sister, of our doom. For, let us make no mistake, Eve, the day's death, is no less ours. He harnessed us to perdition, dealt out a double itch, and sat back to chuckle at his neatness. But enough of myth."
"You are winding yourself up?" asked someone politely.
"Yes. I jump several chapters and come to the cunt."
He paused to drink and there was a small burst of cheering. The people at the next table got up and left.
Martha was keeping pace with his drinking. Why will he talk so? What need? And yet he excites. All are dead here and he twitches them. Flushed his face and eyebright. Out flock the fleshly images. Have heard them. Though, no. That is new. Oh, a good talker enough. A self-entertainer. Masturbates language?
". . .returning in spasms from where we came, cutting a new thread in the shrunk tube, shriving the refolded rose with our anger and strength. Gentlemen, I give-you the new toast, a pokerwork platitude to hang in your over cosy hearts that by our energy and ingenuity, by new arrangements of our limbs and wives, we shall pluck from this jejune slit and its fellows the bugle rose, random blossom and clear crocus, joy."
"Blimey," said Masson.
But, at the same moment, someone else had said: "Bravo!"
Their dulled heads turned towards the new voice.
Its owner was seated to the right of their sprawling group: a clean fat man of indeterminate age. No one was surprised. They were used to tourists who found them amusing and even, on occasion, tried to join their groups. They were used to seeming romantic to the poor rich. It could be profitable and sometimes they allowed such intrusions, sometimes they didn't.
"Thank you," said Viney politely and raised his glass in salute.
The others took their cue from him and put on vague smiles, only Masson's woman, who was a miserable bitch at the best of times, scowling.
"I wonder if you'd care to join me for a drink, me lad," went on the fat man, in a spooned-out brogued voice.
He looked exceedingly rich, thought Viney, running quick eyes over him, and made his decision. He got up carelessly and went to sit at the man's table. The way he set his back to the others indicated to them he expected their conversation to continue without him: they knew they'd know what it was all about later.
About fifty and his shiny shaved cheeks exuding a delicate smell. Hard black eyes in pouches, short chubby red lips. Moonfaced, strong-shouldered. A black Melton coat, eyes without warmth or friendliness. Seductive edgy voice, low-toned now.
"You like women, eh, me lad?" it was saying, without preamble.
Viney raised a leer.
"But naturally," he said. He waited.
The fat man picked a fleck of tobacco from his lips.
"Forgive me," he said, "a poor ignorant Irishman. You like talking, too?" His tone was faintly insulting.
Viney smiled, less winningly.
"Yes, I suppose so. But.. . "
"Pretty girls at your table," went on the fat man. "One of them yours."
"The longish blonde."
"Of course," said the fat man. "She is cleverly built." A mauve tongue gentled out of his mouth and licked around. He tipped the ash from his cigar.
"And what do you do, me dear?" he said.
Viney didn't know how to take this, but it didn't occur to him not to reply. What do I do? I live here, he wanted to say. Or, I sell my wife. Or, I am an artist. Why was this man impressive? A soft-suited tourist. But satiric. Tough. A thing that got what it wanted. He decided to find out where its wants lay.
"Screw," he said, as vulgarly as he could.
"Ah," said the fat man. "Then we can come to terms. I want to make an investment. Of course, at a reasonable rate of interest. I am not a philanthropist."
"And yet the generosity of the Irish is proverbial" said Viney waiting.
"Ah, yes, but I like to drive a close bargain. One of my smaller joys. As to my others.. . " The fat man lowered his voice slightly. "I am a very rich man," be said. "What do I see? Two young people, sitting in a cafe in Paris, a little sad, very romantic. Pretty young people.. . " His voice drifted out. Then: "I have an acquaintance who collects little Arab boys. They have to be a certain color and height, he matches them against a model he had made. But why do I tell you all this?"
He called the waiter and ordered two more beers. "I will give you and your wife a million dollars," he said.
Viney leant back and laughed.
"Thanks," he said finally. "Mephistopheles, I presume?"
"Rourke," said the man, correcting gently, "Magnum Rourke."
Viney stopped laughing and said oh.
Then he looked at the man again, more closely. Mr. Rourke was an Irish-American then, oil and whiskey and a string of motels. Viney knew because Time had run an article on his recent trial for tax evasion. Mr. Rourke had sat through the proceedings bike Buddha, imperturbable, ungesturing, buzzed around by his successful lawyers. For Mr. Rourke had got off, got off triumphantly even, with a word of praise from the fuddled judge for his comportment during the unsavory affair.
And Viney suddenly knew he was talking to this man.
He had never met a millionaire before and was impressed despite himself.
"Very glad to meet you, Mr. Rourke," he said.
Mr. Rourke pouted and smiled.
"I'll buy the pair of you," he said. "I'm taking you both over for a year. We'll have a proper contract and I'm giving you a million. It should be the year of your lives."
Viney's mind lurched. He struggled to think.
"What would be the terms?" he said.
"That you spend the money making the world a happier place. That you sleep with whom wherever and in whatever way seems pleasing to you. That you devote yourselves to certain research I'll suggest from time to time. And that you'll permit me to do with you, say once a month, exactly as I wish. Short of murder." Mr. Rourke dismissed his little joke with pudgy hands. "Short of murder, of course."
"And the first payment?" said Viney.
For answer, the fat man reached into an inner pocket and took out a check-book. He opened it, wrote briefly, tore off a piece of paper and handed it to Viney. .It; was a pay bearer check for fifty thousand dollars.
"You must meet my wife," said Viney. His hand closed convulsively round the check. "She is a woman of moods and talents."
Martha swayed angrily over to their table at a nod from him. Her anger made her full red lips curl dewily.
Magnum Rourke looked her over as Viney performed the introductions. "I'm taking her away for a few days, Viney," he said, his voice stroking the words like cheap silk. "Come along, me dear." He began to lever himself up from his chair.
Martha's eyes pleaded with her husband. He said nothing, but took from his pocket the crumpled check and showed it to her. A timorous smile grew at the edges of her mouth.
There was a great black Rolls with blinds, just round the corner. As they left the terrasse, it drew silently to a halt before them. They bundled Martha into the back and Viney closed the door on Mr. Rourke's bulk.
Then he remembered and rapped on the glass. The window slid back.
"Excuse me," he said. "I completely forgot. She has a carrot up her ass."
"Excellent," said Mr. Rourke shortly, "excellent," and the car purred away, leaving Viney to finger the check.
Viney had gone back to Masson and the others. The group had now grown to about fifteen, writers, painters, bums and their tousled doxies. He was certain there was nothing rubber about the check: that Magnum Rourke had spoken truth. That left him with over a hundred thousand francs in his pocket to spend as he pleased before the banks opened in the morning.
A vast young negress, Betsie, was in the group. She had her arms round a golden-haired young tourist who had strayed over to their tables. He was explaining to everyone, in a drunken lisp, that he came from Cambridge, England, bad come to Paris for the first time during what he called the long vac. Someone asked him if he had a very long vac, was it true that Englishman's vacs were not only long but could turn corners.
Then Betsie's huge saucer-eyes and redbrown lips settled all over him, "Don't be afraid, boy," she roared. "I'm no Mau Man."
Waves of good humor. Them laughing. Everyone suddenly fond of everyone.-
"Hey," said Viney. "We're going to have ourselves a party at Masson's place."
An echoing dilapidated studio, sloping yards of dusty glass, plaster, stone, cushions, two divans, a double bed.
They burst into it. There were twenty of them now. They'd raked the quarter in taxis, on the humps of Vespas, buying bottles and food. Viney had appointed four gang leaders, giving fifteen thousand francs to each.
A pickup began to turn and Eartha Kitt to sing like a diseased choirboy. Monotonius. . Crazy, man, crazy.
Betsie whooped and began to strip her brawn in the middle of the chalky floor. She was a big girl, but well-proportioned, better naked than hung with sweaters. Her sepia shoulders and belly rippled with muscle. But all eyes turned over bottles and glasses to the great fleshy bowls of her breasts, dark stalked watermelons.
Betsie dances.
Her English boy was throating down gin from a bottle when she started. He felt himself several drinks behind: her voracious kisses had scared and incited him. Now his fright was going, they saw him feeling stronger. She was dancing for him. A rat-faced girl with prehensile carmined lips had moved over and was slipping the buttons of his shirt.
Pink-nailed hands over each firm breast, Betsie rocked the roll of her belly. She tangoed it, quickstepped, settled, crooning through her fine mouth, on a slow slow blues.
The rat girl had finished with the shirt, found a zip lower down, pulled it. Something sprang out of his pants into the blue light.
Scattered applause. The girl paled.
Betsie kept on dancing, roared at her Englishman: "Fuck her for me, darling, we've got a long night ahead of us!"
Viney knew the busy fingered girl, Helda, a thin itching Norwegian who couldn't get it enough, they said. Well, for all his lisp, the fair-haired boy was frighteningly equipped. A thing like that could do damage.
Masson lurched forward and got a grip on the girl while the Englishman took off his pants. Then Masson left them to it. The boy was angry about something. He put a hand in Helda's sleek blonde hair, making her cry out with pain. Then he unbuttoned her with the other. His eyes looked glazed. She had a boy's body, tiny pipped breasts, a few fair hairs on her slight mound.
There was a moment while the Englishman looked uncertain what to do with her. Bodies round the room, recumbent, drinking, chewing, shouted encouragement, suggestions even.
Helda was shivering. She had stopped twisting her head about under his large pink hand. The tears stood in her eyes from the effort. It was as if inow, so utterly had she given up all struggle, that his hand alone prevented her from sinking to her knees. Then his other hand came up and prevented her from sinking even more effectively, slamming between her thighs hard into her small crotch.
Viney was pleased to see Betsie coming over on padded feet toward where he sat, chewing a sandwich.
"Good party," he said, forgetting it was his. "What're you drinking?"
"Got any crocodile's blood, man? Hey, why the clothes?"
She turned round and howled at the room. "Everybody strip! Don't you know it's bedtime, you jerks?"
Then she watched her Englishman rubbing his hand backwards and forwards along the Norwegian's mons veneris.
"Christ, he's slow, ain't he? Let's have some action, jack!"
"Leave them be," said Viney. "Your blood is impetuous. Come here."
He had his trousers off by now, though he left his sweatshirt on since he didn't find the studio over warm, yet. Betsie came there, teeth flashing, and a length of tongue moved out of her mouth and swept interestingly around his abdomen. She had sprawled across him, most of her resting on the floor. He looked down at the shiny jet corrugations of her hair. It struck him that her buttocks began higher up than other women's. Fine malleable buttocks. Her tongue seemed to erect as it found the harsh tangle of his hairs. Betsie's tongue was almost another organ. As if she had taken his reproach of her impetuousness to heart, she went leasingly. With each sweep of that mottled pink tendon, grazing now and then his increasing stem, he felt a pulse heat and he quickened with the expectancy of nearer caresses. But they didn't come. She was teasing him all right. "You're a cow, Betsie," he said.
"Take off your shirt, you lug," she said, her thick voice smothered, "it's impolite." There was a cry.
Helda was threshing about on the dusty floor. For a moment, Viney was afraid they'd missed the best bit, but no, it was just beginning. The Englishman's body almost obliterated hers, his legs lying longer, his bead up like a snake's a foot beyond the girl's, so that she was futilely biting at his chest in her agony. The boy reared up and they were able to see the stage things had reached.
Despite herself, she must have become excited, because her loins glistened and he had got the head of it in. Then it was she had cried.
Viney got down on a cushion beside Betsie and they squatted, watching. Masson had taken his prick out and his wife was dutifully masturbating him. She worked conscientiously, her connubial experience of Masson telling her she had a long pull ahead of her.
The Englishman had lost much of his reserve. One would have said he enjoyed their several eyes. He sank four inches in pushfully and grunted. Helda screamed. Her head banged against the floor. He levered himself from her by placing the large palms of his hands over her little tits. Then it began to work like a veiny piston. More and more of it disappeared, emerged glistening, dug hack in again. Suddenly he rolled over so that her dirt-smeared back came into view and she was on top of him. She might even have been able to escape had she wanted to. Is was hard to tell now whether he went into her, she down over him, or whether, in fact, they moved together: a delicate speculation.
There was still some of the Englishman to enter. Betsie forced herself from the floor beside Viney like a fat puma and stalked to the heaving bodies in. the center of the room.
"Enough of this love-play," she said. Neither of them appeared to hear her.
"Dahling, I'm so tellibly tellihly tialid," she added in an English accent and, passing a vast hand back across her chocolate brow, sat down on Helda's buttocks.
Some blood welled onto the Englishman's thighs, ran down darkly to make mud on the floor. He had gone in with the force of a fist.
Betsie's fatigue deserted her at the same moment and she stood up, giggling naughtily. The impaled girl had howled too loud and the others began singing drunkenly to cover her cries. She was being socked up and down by the Englishman, gone animal. It wasn't enough for him. His arms looped out and caught her at the joint of her knees, then lugged. Both knees scraped, bleeding, she was crouched, destroyed, over him, and he was quite, quite home. His lips went back from his teeth.
"Oh, no, my honey," said Betsie, "no, you don't, my dove."
She took the girl hy the scruff of her neck and picked her off the man with the easy strength of a crane.
"Uncle Viney will take over," she said to the weeping puppet she held. "Here, catch!"
And Helda came, giddily spinning, to fall at Viney's feet. Viney examined her gravely a moment, straightened her out, straddled her and put it in. He had enough control to leave it there while he watched Betsie at work. It surprised him to find that there was such squirmy action around his cock. Helda wasn't dead, wasn't dormant even, acted like a ferret sniffing rabbit. Within the core of her pain, something stirred, however she unwilled it. He bit her jutting lips.
"Relax," he breathed. "Big fuck coming."
Betsie hung over her Englishman, pink-brown pads of hand massaging his obelisk. A crooning dribble of words came out of her lips.
"It's a beautiful thing, it's big as the Statue of Liberty, I'll buy it, don't trouble to wrap it up, I'll eat it here."
She thrust her mammoth legs apart above him. He lay in a lazy daze, his snake charmed. Her slit was a smile in her belly, a long brown hairy smile. In we go.
And in it succulently went. She sat and swallowed it. With a grimace of pleasure, because Betsie, though capacious, bad limits of skin.
Betsie began dancing again.
A hand of genius changed disks.
Botch botch botchame my baby, Clooney crooned.
Betsie's black belly shone in the glare like the front of an oven. She danced with her spread bottom and thick thighs, up and down, on the lying Englishman, Botch.
Up she rose, like a whale from the waves. Botch.
Down, down, like a fireman on fast call. Botchame my baby.
And she flounced her rolls of dark flesh around him like skirts, in spinning circles.
There were few left to applaud. The music, the drink, the fine example, had gone to their heads and only Masson and his laboring wife watched the thing through to the end. Only when the rest were drawing apart, panting, in pairs and threes, did Masson find the relief he sought, spurtingly, in his pale wife's mouth.
Viney had certainly stopped looking. Having hit small beads of blood from Helda's thin thrusting lips, he had passed a moment licking them clean while she whimpered at the smart. But the unwilling squirm went on at her soft core. She tugged, oh gently enough, as if all time lay ahead, but she tugged like one of those plaited fingerstalls that hold your digit the tighter the harder you try to free it. And Viney wasn't trying to free himself. He was going to keep it there a while yet. Until she showed a little decent gratitude.
It doesn't take so much to make me happy, thought Viney, moving .benevolently. Life on the up and up. Every day we get bigger and better in every way. The more you do it the more you want it the more you can. The world well composed. Woman a good thing to put on the end of a man.
He took it out for a moment and looked at it, very happy and pleased.
"Look," he said, offering it to her, "isn't that nice?"
She answered, her eyes bulging like crocus bulbs, by taking it in both small hands and helping it home again. That was all he needed. She was so slim, such a ready itcher, he had never been in a woman so diminutive. Frailty, thy name is woman. Of course.
Thought stopped. Strength, the need, the plush and pluck of his swinging rod in her tight moist hole. He seemed to part curtains of flesh at the end of each stroke, elastic draperies that moved back into place as he drew himself back a notch. He made out a word or two, I like it, I like it, he wasn't saying it. He went on, growing perhaps, because at a certain stroke, an open sesame, the curtains stayed back, he was there. A side to side, then, he didn't withdraw any more, but rocked on her dry hips, till she began squealing again.
"Lover," said Betsie, fighting for breath, "lover."
The Englishman had turned her turtle. He lay, hanging away at the mass of her while her black shoulders powdered themselves with stonedust. No one ever knew his name, but he was doing a good job. Perhaps he'd been saving it for years. Because he really tore into her. They were snapping about like a couple of forked cats. His blond shoulders were slashed with blood where her sharp teeth came and went. And solwly the whole nordic frame of him began to tighten with the approach of spasm. He was cutting along her like a white log bouncing in a dark weedy sea. Their bodies, so strangely contrasting in color, glistened, with their efforts. He was driving her to bedlam with every slide of his horn, his big horn, filling her. His fair hairs curled into the black shrubbery of hers, hybrid ivy round the door.
Betsie's heated thighs suddenly came wildly apart, she was kicking her legs out sideways as if she wanted him to spit her, come out perhaps the other side. But there was plenty of wet confused flesh clutching him before that would ever happen. There was her soft bivalve sucking and sucking at the massive end of his probe. They hadn't stopped moving since she had taken her carnal seat. A broken alarm clock kept ticking beside a statue of a satyr. Its small nag could have timed them, their movements whipped up so.
Then, in her big modeled face, the generous scarlet-dark mouth gaped open on a noise and she shuddered and shuddered with further noises while her eyes rolled, heads spun, and he felt the first pump and the others shooting into her.. .
Viney didn't know why. The tears streaming like slow traffic in the rain down Helda's face, the small white blob of that face holed by a stretched howling mouth, the spikes of yellow hair damp on her forehead, the bitter nubs of her breasts nuzzling him, everything about her, infuriated him. He-in the sunk heart of his desire-knew he would' have to hurt her more. She hadn't stopped sobbing and crying out for the last five minutes and the rigidity at his loins would never find peace like this.
He lifted his head and looked dizzily around him.
There.
Over by the big sack hung window sat a lonely Chinese boy. He was drinking by himself in sips, his slanting eyes inscrutable over a chipped glass.
"Hey, Li," called Viney. "Come and help me out."
The boy grinned with square white teeth.
"More than you can handle?"
He spoke politely, as he always did.
"Thank you. It would give me pleasure. It is weeks since I have enjoyed that part of a woman."
By the end of this short speech, he had stripped off his jeans and was presenting no mean member in their general direction. A hand came up from a tousle of shadows and tried to close round it as he came towards them, a white face loomed up and the anonymous mouth opened: hut he kept straight on, banging aside the hand, the face with impassive belly.
His eyes glinted like a cat's in the flickering candles.
Watching him approach, Viney took Helda's buttocks one in each hand and flattened them apart. He fell to one side so that she lay, his big cock up her, tilted across him. He had stopped whipping his gimbals. The scene was almost peaceful.
Li was standing over them.
"Is she clean, do you think?" he asked Viney. Li was supposed to have a fetish for cleanliness.
"I don't know," said Viney. "Why don't you ask her?"
"Are you clean, my dear?" said the Chinese boy.
The heavy tears welled quicker down the girl's cheeks. She wouldn't reply.
Li sighed and knelt down gracefully. So far as Viney could make out, he was engaged in a patient examination of Helda's little rose. He dabbed a hand down and she let out another of her screams. Finally there was a pleased grunt and Li said yes, she was, really, very clean indeed. And, so far as he could tell, even a virgin there. Li's voice had risen a pitch.
Then Viney felt an increase in the weight over him and he was in Helda so far that the lips of her sex spread out like a sea-anemone round his stem. At the same moment, she let out a high squealing wail running quickly into the great bawl of pain that suggested Li had found admittance, after his fashion.
They swung solidly onto their sides then, a thick sandwich of pleasure. Her they forgot about. Two of their hands came together comradely, levering up above their heads her left leg so that she did a one-sided rampant splits. This eased things for them. Then they went to work, plunging massively in and out, towards each other obliquely, tearing her almost apart. But the flesh is pleasingly solid. Nothing quite broke or tore. Everything stretched and kept on stretching.
Her pupils had rolled up into the top lids: for the moment she was mad. Beyond the dreams of nymphomania. And yet. And yet.. For yes-Viney felt it-yes, she wasn't hindering, not even Li's hurtful ramrod, she wasn't welcoming yet either, but her cries were changing. For the two men, the presence of the other seemed to have the effect of protracting their powers, There was an air of timelessness about their strong dreamy plunges.
It wasn't until heir thin body went stiff as a tightrope and her flanks and thighs began pounding like lunatic vices around the two poles and the words of agonized pleasure, demand and suppliance poured from her dribbling lipa, that they found their true desire again and fucked her till she bled and then got up and left her, buddies, to have a drink.
The party broke up the following afternoon. By that time everything had been drunk, everything eaten, everyone used. Helda and Li went off together, Viney waving an ironic goodbye.
Then he left with Betsie to find an hotel. She had lost her Englishman during the night, no one knew how. Masson's wife suggested later that she had reverted and eaten him in the heat of the moment.
They found a room without much difficulty and, with Betsie's cushiony hand cradling his depleted genitals, Viney fell happily asleep.
They woke up late that evening, went out and had a meal with money Betsie suddenly had before coming back to make slow sleepy love for an hour or so. I'll be sorry to leave the quarter, thought Viney, they're a goodhearted crowd of slobs. And women like Betsie will always be rare. You don't, you can't hurt the Betsies. They're built for modem warfare. But she bores me already. And duty calls.
He had suddenly remembered the check.
"Christ," he said, "my wallet."
He jumped out of the broad flowery bed and thrust a trembling hand in his coat. The wallet. The crumpled check.
"Crazy, man crazy," he said and, replacing the check, went back to the welcoming darkness of Betsie's yawning arms.
Next day they parted with smiles and he rushed to the bank. The check was good. It took half an hour of pacing about and stares from the staff, but the manager couldn't have been more astonished, the check was good: very good, his new servility suggested. He counted out the bills himself.
"A la maison, James," said Viney, settling himself in a taxi.
"Tu rigoles?"
Viney's hysteria arrested long enough to remember where he lived. And Martha?
"What will have happened to the little wife, the queen of sluts? O what a fine poke. Mine, all mine. Unless. Let's see. Left her a a day or so ago. She went off. Rolls Royce, carrot, Rourke. Swallowed in its upholstery, Venus sinking, not rising. Martha. To suffer for me. Or is she happy? H not to be happy, we are doomed. Doom? said Viney, rolling the word around, tasting it. Oh no. Not yet. With fifty thousand in my pocket and promise of plenty. Hardly doom, he concluded.
"You look good," he said.
"Thank you," she said.
"A little tired, perhaps," he said.
"I am, a little," she said. "Rourke is fantastic."
She was lying, propped up by pillows on the dingy bed, reading a science fiction. Her clothes were the same she had left in. She had obviously combed her hair recently and her make-up was fresh, but she was apparently die same Martha, no cuts, no external bruises.
"Have you been back long?" he said.
"No," she said. "An hour perhaps."
"All right," he said. "That's enough. Let's hear it."
He went over first and kissed her and she returned his kiss with cool expcrtness. Distancing. But friendly.
"Don't worry," she said. "I'm not breaking up the partnership."
"Romantic little fool," he said, hamming it up.
"My sheik," she said.
He sat down on the bed and she told him what bad happened.
"He was very quiet on the ride. And I was angry as hell. That carrot gag threw him a bit, I guess. By the way, you won't be needing it any more."
Viney raised inquiring eyebrows.
"No," she went on. "But I'll tell you about that in a minute. Well, we rode stonily on. For quite a while. No good asking me where we finished up, coz I don't know. I think I must have slept a bit towards the end, the car was so big and gorgeous I felt about six months."
"like a large baby carriage," said Viney, "and Rourke daddy."
"Yes," she said. "But I don't want you to think that lasted long. I got woken. Oh, yes. The car had stopped in front of a big place, bit Disneyland for my taste. You know, turrety, Baskervillcs baying. No moat. I guess we might have been Rambouillet way, but I couldn't be sure."
"We can check," said Viney. "Hard for a man like Rourke to have hidey holes."
"Honey, you're just one of Nature's pimps, aren't you? No thought for my fate? No remorse?"
"Continue."
"The chauffeur picked me out of the buggy and stalked off with me. Strong. I wondered for a minute if I was being given to him as a Xmas present. Alas! He was just taking me into the house. I pretended I was still asleep. He took me straight in, through a passage, up stairs, and dumped me down on something large and soft."
"Magnum Rourke?"
"Listen," she said, suddenly very angry, "will you shit in it? I'm playing it as cool as I know. I got hurt."
"Aha!" said Viney.
"I was on a square bed, a very expensive and foamy bed. Rourke came in almost immediately. He told me to take off my clothes and I did While I was doing this, he lit up a cigar and watched the ash grow. He spent more time over this than I did with my clothes. The room was warm and I began to get sleepy again. He looked so directorish I couldn't be scared. I felt like some damn comic strip secretary. It didn't seem he'd be much trouble. I went over to him and took the cigar out of his mouth. The ash broke.
"He slapped me very hard and I fell back on the bed. I can still feel it, the bastard. But he made me get up again. 'Stand in the middle of the room', he said, still fussing around with his cigar. 'Over there, where I can see you'. There was nothing else to do. "Now bend down', he said. I did. 'Straighten up'. I did. "Now touch your toes and stay like that or, by Jesus, I'll kill you'.
"I suppose he saw what you put there sticking out a bit. I'd almost forgotten it by then. Anyway I heard him pad over to where I hong. I heard him stop. Then nothing except his breathing. Then his fingers getting a grip on the end of it."
"Of the carrot," said Viney. "Don't be so mealy-mouthed. A fine sturdy vegetable."
"He twisted it round once or twice, then I felt it come right in and I kind of swallowed it. It hurt. But not as much as when he pushed the lighted end of his cigar after it. That was wracking pain, a terrible searing sizzling cutting pain."
Warm cuddlesome Martha, recumbent on the bed like a Varga girl, her rouged Bps pouting, the swells of her thighs apparent through her tight skirt. And this had happened to Martha, two nights ago?
"I must have fainted. When I came to, someone was putting some sort of ointment there that took away the pain. I was on my stomach. I couldn't see who was doing it. It wasn't Rourke because he was standing in front of me, wearing a bathrobe. Tfou'll feel better in a minute', he said. 'A fine capacious chit you'll be after it all'. He snapped his fingers as he finished speaking and a soft looking hand reached over my back and offered him something.
"'We're going to finish off what your husband began', he said. 'See what a lovely job we're giving you'. It was the model of a penis, about twelve inches long, with a head like a boy's fist. I don't know what it was made of, some kind of very hard rubber, I think, but with a slippery smooth surface. I suppose I began crying. I said it would kill me. There was a low pitched laugh from behind me and the soft hands anointing me pressed gently, almost like an encouragement. I was weaker than I expected, hat I managed to twist round.
"At first I thought it was a woman. He had a smooth oval face, a delicate painted little mouth and extravagant sweeping eyelashes over green eyes. His hair was short hut lay in a silky fringe on his forehead, fine black, almost blue hair."
"Cut the literature, for Christ's sake," said Viney viciously. "Who d'you think you are? Scheherazade?"
"I thought you were enjoying it," she said, her eyes as angry as his. "All right. I'll cut it short. It was a beautiful pansy. Wearing nothing except a kind of fake bra, transparent panties, and a lot a of make-up and crimson nail polish and perfume. Under the panties he had a little worm about the size of my index finger. It didn't look damaging. He smiled at me very sweetly and, like a bloody fool, I found myself smiling back. He was really very good looking, even his body which had a soft neuter sort of quality. 'Don't worry', he said. 'We'll be together for a while. I'll get Magnie to let me look after you. For a girl, you're quite pretty'. Then he turned me gently over onto my belly again and his hands went back to their doctoring. Magnum was laughing now, in great good humor. 'Here, darling', he said. 'Put it in now'. The boy was evidently darling, because something changed hands over my backside and, before I had time to cry out, I felt the great knobby head of the thing sliding slowly in. It was too much, a colossal sensation of over fullness.. . "
Viney got up and began walking up and down in the small room. He felt restless. Her voice kept on steadily, the words falling like drops from a leaky 'faucet.
"Why do men want to do these things to us? That was what I was thinking under all the pain and humiliation. Because, though I was scared at first the thing was too big, I thought it would harm me-I found myself in a funny way accommodating it. I didn't like, I hated it, but I accepted it, It was all in. The queer's hands seemed to help me. They came round me. He was binding a belt-like piece of cloth round my buttocks and thighs, to keep it firmly in place, I suppose. Then they made me get up. Oh, I can skip a lot. After that it was simple for a while. Magnum rang a bell and two girls brought in food, set up a table, and he made me eat, like that, naked and speared. I was terribly thirsty and drank a lot of wine. Then I don't remember. I must have just gone off to sleep. I had what seemed years of strange horrible dreams, at the back of them all a niggling excitement. It was the thing pressing on me, I suppose."
"Why all the supposition?" said Viney. "You know, don't you?"
"Yes, I know. You're right. When I woke up, I thought I must be in a hospital for a time. You see, there was morning light and the boy was washing my face and body tenderly. Something felt wrong, like bandages, but I couldn't locate what it was. Not till he turned me over and pulled it out, inch by inch. He stopped now and then to kiss me, weak womanly kisses, on my dry mouth. When he had finished, he showed me where I could go to void myself. I was very big there, it wouldn't close properly any more. And another funny thing I nearly had an orgasm. I wasn't as sore as I'd expected. Well, I went back to the room and got into hed again and the boy brought me a very good breakfast. I don't know where he'd spent the night, with me perhaps. If he had, he'd been up some time before I woke because his paint was as impeccable as ever and I really had quite enjoyed his odd kisses.. . "
She was looking at her husband with something like amusement in her eyes. Viney struggled between disgust and fascination. Obviously his wife had spent a lively day or so.
"I finished breakfast. "What's your name?' said the boy. 'Mine's Shima.' I told him. 'I have to make you pretty now,' he went on. 'You're going to have a visitor soon.' 'Magnum?' I said. He nodded and touched one of my breasts almost shyly. I laughed, I couldn't help it. 'How do you get your kicks?' I said. 'You're a strange one.' He laughed a little too, but didn't reply.
"I sat at an ornate full-length mirror for half an hour while he worked me over. He certainly knew his job. I watched my eyes go brighter, my hair grow lustrous and wavy, my lips redden and glisten. Then he gave me a pair of very high-heeled slippers and a kind of sari of the sheerest gauze. I noticed he had wet himself and began to understand him better. 'Do everything Magnum tells you,' he iaid. "You'll be so happy.' I doubted it. Still, there it was. I wouldn't have known how to escape, even if I'd wanted to, and my will seemed to have gone completely. And there was this peculiar mounting excitement in my breasts as I sat and looked at myself in the long glass. I almost envied Rourke his luck. I was heavy, fresh, sultry, prepared for a man.
"He came. Dressed very neatly, crisp white collar, as if he were off to a board meeting. How that man exudes money! His fatness wasn't so offensive any more.
"'Good morning, Martha, my dear,' he said. 'I hope you slept well.'
"He might have been my husband, coming in from the Cornflakes on his way to the office. I felt a sort of crippled warmth towards him. I got up and went over to him.
"'Thank you, Magnum,' I said, 'very well.'
"He didn't touch me. 'Take off,' he said, gesturing to the gauze.
"I found myself doing as be said.
"When I stood before him, quite naked except for the shoes, he surveyed me coolly before inviting me to unbutton his trousers. I did as he said and, at a further word from him, took out what I found there. It was big, though still dormant. 'You will reserve your kisses for that today," he said. 'Kiss it good morning.'
"I worked him over for what seemed like fifteen minutes, at least, it was incredible. You couldn't account for such growth. Every time I made to stop, his hands screwed in my piled-up hair, and he was right in his way, because he wasn't at what must have been full steam until the seams of my mouth were sore and I thought I'd have to gag. Then his hand swung me away by the hair and went down to scratch at my front which was now itching horribly. I was very open. But he had something else on his mind. I might have guessed after all the preparations.
"Now turn round and do toe-touching exercises,' he went on. 'Begin.'
"I had a terrible spasm of fear, but what could I do? I'd been sold and his voice snicked like a whip.
"He was into me like a ram, almost before I'd bent. And then, as I sagged, stuck there, he called for his little pansy. The blood was leaking down to my head, but I heard what he said clearly enough. His voice sounded thicker, let's see what she can do with that sad doodle of yours, Shima,' he said. 'If she can't make you happy too, we'll have to punish her, won't we?' Then he started lurching breakingly into me, my powdered buttocks spliced apart on his neat black pants. He supported himself with heavy hands on the small of my back.
"Shima had sashayed forward from behind a screen where he'd probably being touching up his lipstick. He looked sinister now, as if he hated me, hated me as woman and rival. But he was obedient too. There was a crippling blow on my spine from one of Magnum's fists and I shot out a crazy band into the queer's skirts. The. whole time Magnum kept up a searing pushing that was beginning to excite me. My bead swam with colored lights and bloodshot tattered globes, vile images, as I dug out the fag's winkle and tried to swallow it. He didn't try to stop me, not positively, but he wasn't helping any either. Then there were more crashing blows on my back, in the kidneys, the immense cleaving of Magnum's, lust, and I suppose I went mad. I got a couple of spiked fingers up the boy's hole and felt him tighten against his will in the tired pulps of my mouth. They both came at about the same time, after I'd stopped crying and was going on like a machine, the me broken.. . "
Martha's low voice gave to a whisper. She'd been talking for quite a while. Her eyes followed the ups and downs of her story, had winced, flashed, the thin shells of her lids fluttering like a fruit machine. Now, as she saw where she'd been, doubly polluted, some hours before, her eyes lay dead as pebbles in her beautiful skull.
"Forgive me," said Viney, "you seem to have suffered. Yet I believe you said at the start that Rourke was fantastic. Perhaps I misheard."
"Fantastic?" said Martha, the pebbles beginning to glow from within. "Yes. I meant that. I said that. Oh, my nasty love, he left me then and I bathed. Then Shima came back with a tame giant who held my arm and the queer gave me a shot. Shima giggled. 'It's all right,' he said. 'Quite harmless. Just keep you warm and sleepy till Magnum gets back.' I suppose they weren't sure of me, didn't want me wandering about looking for doors and windows. Anyway the rest was drug dreamy. I slept. Then I woke and I woke to Magnum being fantastic inside me, it seemed to go on all night, if it was night. He seemed to be taking my itch and fingering it out into separate fragments and then, one by one, crushing them, blowing them away."
"Very graphic," said Viney, fighting with something he wouldn't name. Fifty thousand and the balance over a year. This was only a beginning. He managed to smile.
"A good bottle and' a long lunch," he said. "We're just beginning."
"Yes," she said. "O.K. buster. Fantastic, uh."
"Uhu," he said.
III
The frilly fresh faced maid trilled in and pulled back curtains. Singing, she left and, singing, returned with a tray which she set down beside the bed. "II fait un temps magnifique," she announced and departed.
Viney had been watching the proceedings with a lazy eye. His wife half-emerged from the sheets and began a series of opulent stretches.
"The whole joint," said Viney, speaking carefully through" the layers of old hearthrug lining his mouth, "is better than true. And the service is straight Come-die Francaise."
Martha was moving her eyelids up and down tentatively, trying them out for daylight.
"There is breakfast," continued her husband, "there is a bath instead of a bleak basin. In which," he added, "there will be probably be mermaids. There is, last and best of all, us, living it up."
"There are times," he said, receiving no answer, "when I think I like you tolerably well without make-up. It's terribly sexy."
Martha woke at that and smiled. She eased the warmth of her body round against his. The double thrust of her bosom said good morning to the hairs of his chest.
"This is heaven," she breathed, as he went effortlessly into her. "Let's make it last for hours. Let's.. . "
The rest futtered out as her small white teeth sank into his shoulder. An outside observer (and there was none, since the staff of the Charles V knew better than to interrupt a corps-a-corps; was skilled in every grunt and creak) might have discerned a mounting turbulence of blanket and bolster in the wholesome domestic hour that followed and, further, have derived some moral satisfaction from these external signs of a wife being thoroughly swived by her husband.
"Now the bloody coffee's cold," said Viney finally.
Martha lay back, her face flushed and bright, breathing contentedly. Her lips stirred.
"Darling," she said, "you're a good good lover. Why did we do all the other?"
He didn't reply immediately. It wasn't an easy question, not on a morning when yon woke to silk sheets yellowed by a fingering sun, hot by the flank of a fine chubsome lay.
The fortnight, begun in desperation and finished on Magnum Rourke, still lodged undigested in both their systems. Their strange strange systems, Viney thought.
Typical American kids. Us tiny apes swinging from fretted dollar signs through a jungle of cadillacs. Crazy, cool, letching the swell-stockinged spam and caviar legs of the bulging ads, the smoky cleft of the creamy tits of the Young Mother who Gave them Grimey's Peas for That O So Important Dinner. Sex on Dunlopillo, on the plastic tiger skins of rear seats of convertibles, on Lake Shore shores, while pickups moaned. I took her to be my lawfully bedded life, seeing the Elizabeth Allan lips smiling above the Saks foundation garment at my Countess Mara tie. Please, he murmured, this is my marriage day, no commercial. And what pleasure in that night, those nights, tumbling and opening and entering without so much as a knock. And the need to say all this, make with it for mankind, about the bad tidings that a world's wit was diseased so that doctors could diagnose. About Martha, reclaim-able, being mine, my whole hole, holy till I felt the need to spit. And why to spit? Why to share her hole, her holes, now, he reminded himself grimly, why : whore her and whore me too, because that it will come to? Takes two to tear a tutu, her tu and my tu always to be too two to be one again? He moved restlessly in his misery. "There's a bell somewhere," he said. "Ring it, honey. We'll need more coffee."
"Isn't this the berries?" she said. "Let's never be poor again. I swear you make love better in silk."
She seemed to have forgotten her question of a moment before. A woman is a short stunted tree, she has roots but I misses the surrounding country, planted low in her I moment of land. Has Magnum faded from that pretty I box, her mind? Do I and Charles V so blot out?
"We're together now," she said abruptly. "The rest won't matter."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, we go on. We follow the contract. I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't lose interest in a month or so. Anyway, he said he wouldn't he seeing us again for a while."
She doesn't know what she says, her warm fingers along my thigh.
"We could escape," he said. "There's still a lot of that fifty grand."
"Where would we go?" she whispered. "The Magnums have armies.
"Besides," she went on, "you know how you are. You'd tire of me after another week of this connubial bliss. We both have this drive."
"Itch," he corrected. "The retarded child's itch for self-destruction."
"A lovely way to die," she said, turning to kiss him closely.
When they broke apart, his head seemed to have cleared.
"All right," he said. "We'll go through with it. But we'll have to live together, always. The rest will be sorties. We'll be gods who land occasionally to copulate with the mortals. After all," he said, "we're strong and beautiful."
She laughed. "Yes," she said, and recited it after him like a spell, "we're strong and beautiful. It should be a full year."
Mr. Rourke had been undemanding. After (that is) the somewhat extravagant demands, and improvements, he had made upon Martha on the occasion of their first encounter. A week after his Rolls had deposited her hack at the Rue Princesse, they had received a short note from him: it went as follows-
Thank you for the satisfactory week-end. Take a suite at the Charles V. Stay there for a month. I may contact you during this period. Remember one thing: any instructions I may give you at any time in any place are to be carried out to the letter. I think you will not find me too difficult. Enjoy yourselves and whoever else takes your fancies.. .
Magnum Rourke.
When the maid came in with the fresh coffee, Viney looked her over with a less jaundiced eye. She was very young, not more than sixteen, he guessed. She seemed in no great hurry to leave this time.
He nudged Martha, who was unconcernedly displaying two ripe tits above the bedclothes and scratching gently.
"What do you think of the serving-wench?" he said. "An honest opinion."
The wench in question appeared to have a bosom if anything better developed than Martha's. She blushed as she stood by the bed, waiting for further orders. Her short hair came forward in a glossy black cap almost to the small lines of her eyebrows. She had a round rosy mouth and creamy skin.
"She looks healthy," said Martha cautiously.
"Doesn't she?" agreed her husband.
Martha suddenly put a hand down under the bedclothes. The little maid shifted from one foot to the other.
"Oh no," said Martha. "At least, drink some coffee first."
"I intend to," said Viney. "Apporte-moi mon cafe, ma petite."
The child brought it round to his side of the bed with trembling hand.
He drank it slowly, gravely, keeping his eyes on hers while he did. Her eyes slowly dilated and began moving from side to side in her head as if they were trying to escape. Neither Martha nor Viney had found it necessary to put on any nightclothes before retiring and the girl was very conscious of the fact that only a sheet and a blanket shielded their naked parts from her serving eyes.
"I suppose I pour my own coffee," said Martha, "since we are about to make a rapid descent among the mortals. She could be a virgin. You'd better take it easy."
"It'll be easy taking," said Viney out of the corner of his mouth, handing the cup back to the girl and getting out of the bed.
"That's all very well," said Martha. Her husband had taken the child lovingly into his arms and was kissing her startled mouth hard. "Fine," went on his wife, beginning to stir angrily under the clothes, "but what do I do in all this? Clap?" There was no reply.
The country child is troubled, she struggles, mumbles against his mouth. Because he presses that rod into the front of her hotel dress? With it stain, hard to explain? Is it real revolt, or nymph and satyr?
He let her go and one of his hands thrust down into the tight bosom of her dress. The child didn't have to move away, stood there thunderstruck. Mais monsieur, votre femme.
Viney clenched the breast he was bringing out, awkwardly, into the sunlight.
"Ma femme, c'eat toi," he said. "The other lady will help you undress."
"The hell she will," said Martha.
Viney pulled the child to the edge of the bed and sat her down. Then with his free hand he peeled back the silken sheet.
"Surely you are as pretty as that," he said kindly to the girl. "You will notice," he added, inserting his thumb in Martha's vagina, "that we have been engaged in making love between your two entries. My wife loves me, I love her, I love you, and so will she."
His thumb helped his first and second fingers in and he began to caress fondly. Martha made no show of resistance either. The girl quivered as Viney left his hand to its private business and fitted his jutting lips across her squashed breasts.
After a few minutes of this charming tableau vivant, Viney felt his hand slide out of its slimy nest. Martha had changed her mind.
At the same moment he fell forward with the child under him across the comfortable ample bed. She groaned a little under his weight. One of her hands crept round his neck and forced his greedy head against her.
Martha stood up, stretched with infinite happiness, and yawned. Then she extended her body beside the crumpled heap of chambermaid and sucking husband. He wouldn't be able to do much damage like that, she thought. The child still had her clothes comparatively intact, let alone her virginity.
She leant across and slapped Viney's bottom.
"Get up, the pair of you," she said. "Let's get this thing organized."
Viney got up almost immediately. The child stayed where she was, the mauve nipples sticking up from her exposed breasts like fruits talks. Her black cotton skirt had dragged up into the vee of her legs. Her face was darkly flushed.
Martha patted her husband on his strongest point.
"Now," she said, "get thirty thousand francs out and give them to her. We dont' want to get slung out of here yet and one never knows with minors. Besides, they may stimulate her."
Whether the sight of so much money did excite the child carnally, they never knew, but the fact was that, as soon as she saw the handful of bills extended towards her, something strange happened to the corners of her full little lips, something approaching a smile, and she stood up without troubling to straighten her dress or replace her milky tits in their holders.
They stripped her together, their hands moving over her, under her, around her, like a pair of felt slippered window dressers.
Her body was not a disappointment. Shorter than
Martha, she had no lees abundance of flesh, but the bouncy young masses of her chest and the rich out swirls of her thighs were balanced by the merest of waists. It was as if some giant had caught hex' up one drunken day and squeezed her in his lust between huge hairy hands, leaving her so, two proffered bunches of breast and mound. For her silky-haired maidenhood heaved under the downslope of her belly as if it had Me of its own: private lungs. Her youth showed in (only and deliciously) the tightness of her skin and its extraordinary texture, pure rose and cream. She was an asking young morsel as she hung there before them, sullenly smiling.
"Let me first," said Martha suddenly. Before Viney knew what she was up to, she had caught the child lasciviously to her and their two soft mouths were joined in a passionate kiss. Viney wondered for an instant about this latest development and then decided it delighted him. He watched them with great enjoyment.
Was the girl too bewildered to notice the man had been replaced by-his wife? Or had she a natural lewdness that allowed her to swallow all, even this womanly softness now forcing a plump knee between her parting thighs? Their four lips hung together like thrusting buds: he could guess at the soft swarm of their tongues.
The exaggerated hourglass of the child's body began to shake as Martha's hand moved down to replace her knee. His wife's fingers spread and hovered an instant before pouncing. Their fine tips now held the juicy dark-haired mount of pleasure, held and shaped it, little by little, a delicate stroke at a time, prized open the unused sticky lips.
Viney changed position to watch better. People had been known to pay for this sort of exhibition. And here the protagonists were not two bored whores, scratching each other for pennies, but his steaming wife and the beautiful hot-blooded body of a young fresh girl. I can wait, he said to himself, plenty of time.
He approached the shivering pair of them and knelt down. His eyes narrowed onto the work of Martha's busy digits. White dwarves, sinewy, at the black-bushed hummock, the wet rift coming, then quick glisten of the child's swelling thigh. And Martha was pushing her insidiously back, back, toward the bed, their mouths had sprung apart, the child (Hortense, Marianne, Genevieve?) was giving out with a staccato rush of small cries. Was she scared again?
The child's legs met the bed edge and hinged abruptly. Martha was on top of her in a second, her rosy knee cruel again at her excited zone. Hovering over her, dominating her with the sensual richness of her womanhood, she let the stiff nipples of her breasts, as they slung down, brush and bruise at the mature stalks of the child. Then she licked out her tongue and, swooping down, savaged it between the other's separated lips, their creamy san spattered paps crushed together, two sweating eyes of moist powdery female lust, Martha's head jerked back and she glowered down at the child's working face. Then, with the speed of a trained acrobat, their positions were reversed and her red lips closed like a sea-anemone on the new fruit between the child's legs, Viney wondered how much longer he would he able to put up with development, as he listened to his wife's noisy sucking.
A tangled skein of blonde silk, her head wedged deeper and deeper into the forbidden cleft. The child's thighs had shut convulsively, like a fat bound book, and her eyes stared dumbly in their rollings at the downy struts of Martha's inverted legs. Her body had caught a tremor that threatened to inundate her, she was losing control. Then, as if she had seized the meaning to some enormous riddle, her head jerked forwards in turn, she gripped the soft flesh of Martha's hips, and only her halfclosed eyes showed now above the glowing bisection of the other woman's buttocks. Her rosebud mouth, her pinky tongue, were engaged elsewhere.
Viney watched them go off into the bathroom after their tremendous release with mixed emotions. He could hear them talking in low tones through the half-opened door. That he had controlled himself so far, he suddenly knew, could only mean that he had promised himself, at the back of his mind, some final greater gratification than any interruption of their preliminary sport would have been. For, of course, he had just been witnessing the preliminary bout. He hoped Martha realized this. It was. slightly strange she had dragged the child off like that, without a word to him. Don't say she had really taken a imagine to the poor nymph? He need not have worried.
Martha had been busy with the child's appearance as well as her own. They both glowed and gleam with the pristine seduction, of the most subtle of maquillages as they came back into the bedroom, the child's hand shyly through Martha's. If the child had been attractive before, now, after the deep cosmetic of love and the knowing ministrations of Martha, her succulent mouth and white perfumed body shouted for the plunge and rake of sex.
His wife smiled. She herself, as she well knew, was looking radiant and ready for all they could invent. The unconditional promise Viney, in his nudity, was now strung to offer, delighted her, roused the tickling depths of her itch again.
"She's a virgin, all right," she said. "Bonne chance."
"A quick learner," said Viney, moving forward.
"A good teacher," said Martha, shrugging gracefully.
"A little cruelty," said Viney.
"As you like."
He took hold of the painted child by her erect breasts and squeezed hard. Guiding her by them, he got her rapidly onto the bed.
He then opened her legs as wide as they would go, but he had scared her and she fought against him a little.
"Come here," he said, over his shoulder, to Martha. "This may sound complicated, but I hate you to be left out."
His thumbs were involved in testing the child for general mucosity as he continued to give his instructions. By firm pressure, ignoring her cries, he managed to create a satisfactory breadth of aperture. It never failed to intrigue him how far the rigid bounds of skin could be stretched.
"Now squat with your hack to me over her head and hold her legs tightly hy your sides."
"like rowing," said Martha, amused. "You'll kill her, my dear, if you have her like that."
Viney didn't reply. He had taken the child's legs up under the knee joints and shoved them forwards so that she lay on the soft hoard of her back. Martha realized that, if she did as her husband suggested, she would certainly not be left out of the sport. The child's mouth would be perfectly free, and better blocked.
He drew back and examined the effect. An admirable opening for an up-and-coming young man. The inner pinkness of her delicate whorled slit, so soon to be roused to a richer red, held him momentarily. Far better this, far better me, than, some rustic in and out; he thought to himself, what good I do unknowingly! She will never be the same after this. I am opening a whole new world of sensation to her. He began to tell the child something of this as, taking himself in one hand, he aimed.
And so the head went in. Not with a bang but a whimper, as the Christian poet has it. There had been a pleasing slime that coated its partial entry. But, even with her mouth glued to her mistress's practiced vagina, a whimper had made itself heard. He was in and could now hold back the barrier of her limbs himself. So much Martha made clear by subsiding forward on her own pleasure-seeking, rebanishing the mouthing girl's ankles.
Then total frenzy took him. He tightened his buttocks and rammed at her with all his strength.
A breaking, a suffocated scream, and be rode her at his will. What a warm gem he had mined! Whether she struggled for lack of breath, for pain, for despair, or simply because a raped girl was expected to, at least in the initial stages, he didn't ask himself. The whole thing was a new experience to him and there was no time to waste now he was anchored. His pulsating stem snaked and snaked again until the envelope of her lips was splayed back on her belly. He sensed dimly above him that Martha had clutched up the child's sleek black bead and was bending it willfully into her aching crotch, forcing her to probe. Martha. At the approaching height of his delirium, an idea made him pause. He slackened his whipping pace, down, down, gradually, and then, with a grimace, withdrew.
Martha's floury buttocks quivered before him. Magnum Rourke's fat body leered in his mind's eye. Very well, he thought, you shall really enjoy yourself, my honey. It's a long time since I've allowed myself this liberty. We've never really established if you enjoy it or not, have we? The pleasure-pain complex.
Before his wife could be aware of the change, he had levered apart her two nether globes and was cruelly imbedded in her enlarged rose. It was her turn to yelp. But, thanks to the chambermaid's laving love fluid, his maleness had made an easy enough entry and her cry could have been as much one of surprise.
"You bastard," she said, "you low dirty bastard." The words came out gruntingly: he wasn't wasting his time in there. And, comically, now near stifling under their double weight, the maid's little tongue didn't relax its frantic pittering caresses at her other hud. This was what she must do, she supposed, so they had ordered who was she to stop before they told her? But why, why had the strange good-looking man who hurt her so chosen to stop his hurting? She missed, oh fifteen-year-old (for that was her age) Rosalie (and that her name) missed her young master, yes, she missed him and his new kind of hurting very much. Perhaps if she kept on bravely with this hairy game of licking, he would be good to her again.
He was being very good to his wife.
Their three heaps of limbs shifted and swelled like a turbulent sea. His brown torso smacked with delight again and again onto, into the white ass of his missus. He had his hands round, wound in her whiskey hair, horse-like, a rider, reveling in the streaming curling mane that covered her back now and tendrilled his stem. And then the joy of the bulby chibs of her buttocks, greeting him at every return of his board-like belly. And the sweet sour smell of her, painted as if for a ball, the frantic heave of her dusted shoulders. And the dear hard hold she had on him. The un-nameable suction. Oh mortal, what fools we gods be, he thought, beyond thought. I enjoy myself too much, there must be a limit. Where is the hand to snatch me up, put me to bed without seeing the circus? Aah, I swell to all cock. And the little maid under all who shall have it all yet. Martha grows loudly obscene. Sich langwich. I remonstrate with my rod. Ride, rode, ridden. To Banbury Cross, an 'English rhyme, my breasty New England nurse, the snob. Ticktock, the mouse ran up the clock, ticktock, that shooting maiden tongue helps me to twitch her into ticktock madness. While I grandfathercock her. Pussy's in the well, pussy is a well.
Martha's greened eyes screamed at the wall as her head jumped hack. There wasn't a howl left in her. She came and came like a broken dam, a flotsam of shuddering wreckage. He thought she would snap him off as her behind reamed round and round on him.
"You bitch," he announced, withdrawing, "I've lost a little of my valuable semen, go and wipe yourself."
His amiable wife made no move.
"Magnum did a good job," he added. "You are serviceable there. And I would guess you enjoyed it. But a feast is as good as enough. Good Christ, the child is still licking you."
He pawed Martha's corpse impatiently aside. The boulder removed, blinked in the sunlight a squashed girl with bursting breasts. Her mouth was a mash of rouge and spittle. But his eyes were elsewhere.
Not a moment to waste or a drop of the life-giving fluid. Once more into the breach, dear friends. Once more.
This was a sweetness. After the angry wrong jerks in the other hole, how lushly he slid through the virgin legitimate grass. It was a snake that grew from his loins, blindly heading out of the light into first darkness. He was so much there, so much was there, he could halt and regard her.
He even leant down and kissed the round of smudged lips that panted on ohs and ahs.
His hands loved her strong panting breasts.
"Ah, ce que c'est bon," she breathed. "N'arrete pas, je t'en prie."
He felt Martha shamble off the bed and leave them to it. Not for the first time he had occasion to admire his wife's tact. She had caught him in a moment of tenderness with the child and such infidelities were better conducted without witnesses. For the first time, however, he was free to examine the present object of his passion.
He ran his arms round behind her damp back and linked them. To lift her from the bed was not difficult and he stood near the discreet windows, high and monastic with white net, at bull strength, with her warm fatty legs gripping his thighs. Her arms safely around his neck, he transferred his palms tc her buttocks.
"Move yourself, my darling," he said to her in French. Ride a cockhorse, he sail to himself. Merrily we jog along. Jog along. Jog along. Jog jog jog and her girlie's crotch splitting like an orange as their dark hairs mingled over his presented arm. Rosalie was crying a little from the pleasure she gave herself with every athletic bang of her young wild abdomen. Que e'etait profond!
And it went profounder yet, further than she had ever dreamed, up and in with that bad rubbing life of its own, until suddenly, one day, it burst bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang and she was shouting out something that didn't make sense and, as she raved, she fell softly from her private murderer to the thick hotel carpet.
Flicked again by Viney, washed and combed by Martha, the child left, clutching her thirty thousand francs tightly in a pocket and promising to return that evening.
"If she doesn't blurt the whole great morning to Uncle Charles the Fifth," said Martha.
"Who cares?" said Viney, shaving. "With the money we have, we could skip to the Azores tomorrow. Look, angel, we are nicely-dressed, pleasantly-spoken American tourists with money in our purse"
"You forgot the gum-chewing, comic-book-reading bit," said Martha.
"Oh Christ," said Viney. His razor checked. "And the man called Magnum. We've still got a couple of weeks to ran here."
"If every day's like this, you'll never stand up to it, my pet," said his wife sweetly.
Viney continued with his shaving, thoughtfully.
"You know," he went on after a minute, "we're not being very sensible about all this. We should cultivate a little more Olympian detachment. For instance, that Rosalie child. Now she came in and I took her just like a baboon. A sudden need, a whim. That sort of thing can happen any day of the week."
Martha began brushing her hair with long careful strokes.
"What do you expect us to do?" she asked. "Sit down and draw up a list of sexual projects? Darling, you can be desperately cold blooded at times."
"It's not such a stupid idea," he said, turning to look at her. "A ho tblooded decieion can lead to a mighty cold evening."
"What have you in mind at the moment, then, genius?"
"I don't know, apart from continuing little Rosalie's initiation. I shall have to think. And, of course, Magnum may contact us any day. Do you know, I wouldn't mind so much if he did. I imagine he's got a fertile brain."
"You could say that," said Martha, dreamily knotting her hair around her head. "Yes, he gave me that impression."
There was a moment's awkwardness between them. She broke it.
"You probably know," she said, "that the fat Mr. Rourke rather fascinated me. He's so disgusting."
"To hell with him," said Viney.
Martha laughed.
"I wouldn't be surprised to hear he owns that too," she said.
They were dining quietly by candlelight in their suite that evening, tailing restfully like two very married people, when there was a tap-tap on the door and Rosalie slipt into the room.
"Bonsoir," she said cheerily. "Bon appetit."
She came over to the table and kissed Viney on his chewing lips. He pushed her gently away and kept on chewing.
"Well, well," he said to his wife, and they both turned to look at the intruder.
"Tu m'as dit de venir ce soir," she began nervously, her confidence waning. "Tu m'as dit de venir vers neuf heures. Eh hen, je suis venue. Comme tu m'as dit. " She sketched an unsuccessful smile.
"Oh look," said Martha. "It's put on its party frock."
Rosalie was still wearing black, the basic shade of her profession, but it wasn't exactly a uniform she had on this evening.
Her boyfriend Raymond never tired of pointing out to her a resemblance to various stars of the Italian movies and her heated imagination had suggested to her certain improvements on the simple dress she had bought at the Samaritaine some weeks ago.
The dress had been tightened so that it clung to the precocious curves of her figure like a wet bathing-suit. Below her brilliantly over-madeup face, two white halfmoons rose from the lowpulled front, threatening at any moment to become full. Her fingery nipples stuck through the filmy silk like baby menaces. The strange and wonderful dress swerved in, by some amateur miracle of stitchery, to fondle the basin of her fat belly and its buslistudded portal. Her fingernails were painted a startling vermilion.
"Oh bravo," said Viney.
"Uhu," said Martha. "Pass the celery."
Viney complied gallantly.
"Think of the ferment going on under that fabric," he said, ignoring Rosalie. "Think of the desire teeming in those itching loins, alas, so lately deflowered. What shall we do with her?"
"Tell her at least to sit down," said Martha. "Poor little bitch, she's breaking her heart."
"Assieds-toi," said Viney, continuing his interrupted meal.
The child's dark shadowed eyes grew misty as she went to sit on the chair he had indicated to her. Something had gone wrong.
"If I were to stretch her other hole," said Viney pensively. "Frankly I don't feel up to it at the moment. I had visualized a quiet night with you, one of those relaxed genial fucks we do so well."
His wife was swallowing and there was no reply. They drank some more and pondered the problem.
So it was the waiter, coming to clear away, who offered the solution. He was a big man with stooped shoulders and an unsuccessful moustache. As he scooped together the dishes, Martha noticed his yellow eyes settle on Rosalie, looking smaller and smaller in her corner. The man started slightly and dropped a spoon.
"Tell him to come back when he's returned the dishes," she said to Viney. "I want to talk to him."
Viney was puzzled bat did as she said. "When he had left, Martha told him what she had in mind. It wasn't complicated and, full of affectionate admiration, he patted her band.
He called Rosalie over to the middle of the candle-flickering room. She got up quickly and came to stand before him, not daring to touch him or even speak this time. She had heard her master's voice.
As he looked at her, he experienced a small movement, unexpected and vivid, at his loins. Her bright plush lips were so crestfallen in her sexy child's face. It was the contrast between her teenager sad eyes and smoldering big body that drove him to it.
The waiter returned.
Martha rose immediately and, taking him confidentially hy the sleeve, went with him into the next room.
"Tu es belle ce soir, mon ange," said Viney to the girl.
Her face leapt with pleasure. For a second she was almost beautiful. He burned still within her. Her wet lips moved imploringly.
"Tu vas me prendre main tenant, n'est-ce pas, monsieur? Tu sais, c'est pas le fric.. . "
H it wasn't the money, as she insisted, Viney was tempted momentarily to ask her to give it back. That would be a twist. But, no, she'd deserve it yet.
He kissed her softly on her open mouth, running the winy roughness of his tongue round its contours. She sagged onto him. Her heavy breasts lounged against his jacket. He put a hand round her head and tugged the shiny black hairs at the back of her neck so that her lips went back with her skull and she started a protest of delight. An ear, fat pink mollusc, he toyed with. It was as if the whole play of sex lay in the swirl and savagery of a face. Her perfume Was not bad at all, he was pleased to note. How they would plow her!
As soon as his wife returned with the big man, now relieved of his white tunic, he relinquished his hold on Rosalie.
"He seems rather taken with the whole idea," murmured Martha from the doorway. "Apparently he's noticed her for sometime, but she belongs, in an uncamal sense, to another, younger, waiter called Raymond. Our one he says his name is Armance would be only too happy to.. . " She left where Armance's happiness would lead him unsaid.
"Goody," said Viney. "Drinks all round, yes?"
There was a bottle of fine tawny cognac on the table and he splashed some in glasses. Two he offered to the leering waiter, the confused Rosalie.
"To Pan," he said, without translating.
"To Henry Miller," echoed his wife.
All four drank.
"Bottoms up," said Viney, translating. The glasses emptied.
At a sign from Martha, the waiter unbuttoned the front of his trousers. Then be stood and waited.
Viney turned to the prettied child and explained what was expected of her.
There was a bulge in the big man's underpants. Rosalie didn't seem to be able to get her eyes off it. Then she found a voice.
"Ah non," she said. "Je veux pas. C'est sale, sa. Non, je veux pas."
She started to move slowly backwards towards the wall.
Viney said "Allez-y, Armance," and the big man moved. She couldn't go any further. There was the great white expanse of wall and her outlined against it, a black flattened silhouette in the shivering candlelight.
"I told him to behave as he liked," said Martha, coming to hold her husband's hand.
"How did you reassure him?" asked Viney. "About what?"
"Oh, rape, the wrath of Raymond.. . "
"Don't worry. I found a way." Their words stopped.
The big man was on her. His frame covered her for an instant and there was a ripping sound. Then he moved back a foot and they saw the eggwhite bulbs of her body breaking through the poor torn dress. She had come without undergarments, come to her tryst prepared.
The man's hand swung back and caught her a sidelong blow across her mouth, crying with rage and fright. Not a noise more, arrest of her shaking, a check in time after the crash of his limp hand.
His paw groped out, as in sleep, and the rags of her dress fell away. Curled on her impotence against the shadow-flecked wall, she gave up. He gathered her to him without another murmur from her. They followed him into the next room, the bedroom.
"You don't mind, I hope," said Martha. "The lower classes are so bad at doing it anywhere else."
"But, my dear," said Viney.
By the time they got there (they stopped to embrace), the man was telling her to take off his clothes and going into detail about what he proposed to do to her and the number of times. Rosalie would never be able tc complain of any lack of eXplicitness on the part of her lovers.
Before she obeyed, she threw a desperate glance behind at Viney's amorous wife. She said nothing, but her eyes spoke. Martha went up to her and stroked her between the legs. "T'en fais pas," she said, "you'll learn to enjoy it."
"With which, she withdrew to her husband.
The great blunt member moved like an omen into the girl's little hands. She could hardly span it. Shaggy
Armance seemed in no way embarrassed by his audience. If anything, one would have said he relished it. Understandably, since under the exterior of a seedy waiter, a creature of trays and tips, lurked another damaging Armance, the genuine article, the crusher of woman flesh. Dark hair lay in a mat across the meat of his chest.
"Je chie sur ton Raymond," he growled. That was the one memorable thing he said during the evening. The words out, he became the ape of his fathers. He picked her up and slung her onto the groaning bed as if she had been a sack of feathers. She fell awkwardly, her creamy legs flying open as she landed. Before she could scissor them together, he had dropped his bullet head between them. Martha and Viney took two chairs and settled down to look and listen.
Her crunched fists were beating futilely at his cropped graying hair. Once he broke out, snorting like a boar, and, his moistened lips snarling back, thumped a half-closed hand into her face, and her new resistance stopped almost as soon as it had begun. There was blood trickling down from where a plump cheek had split slightly across the bone. Her eyelids were shut tight as if she were trying to obliterate nightmare. But in vain.
She knew well enough when the round bristly skull ground out of her loins and his weight lumbered onto her. He'd opened her all right and, big as it was, he screwed it home without recourse to a driver. His gray back was hairy too and they watched in fascination as the beastbones rippled under the beastcoat, as the huge solid hack and body bored and bored back into her forced tearing hole.
"She's making too much row," said Viney at one moment.
"Don't be a moron. They'll think it's me," said Martha, who was leaning forward with avid glistening lips. "Listen to that crazy bedcreak, man. Do we get music like that out of it?"
"I never listened," said Viney shortly.
Poor little Rosalie, he was thinking. Hurt so, And ghoulwife rejoices. Well, every god has its day. But she came for a party, in partyfrock and a cloud of love. Eh Lien, we must take our pleasures where we find them. Poor little hardfucked Rosalie. He could have wept if he hadn't been enjoying himself so much. So great to wait in peace and quiet till one's own turn came. And Marthawife caught in a haloglaw from the sport, he bet she dripped everywhere now, eyes horned out like a wild snail.
"What's the time?" she asked then in a thick voice.
"Half ten."
"Um." She relapsed into silence. "Why?" he pursued. She shrugged.
"Well, if you want to know, I thought we might be going to bed ourselves. To be frank with you, Frank, this is killing me."
"No, cow, wait. There you go with that jukeboxsatur-daynight mentality again. Use philosophy."
"I'd rather use a.. . "
He sighed.
"Leave it to me, my angel. All manner of things shall be well. It is a promise. Grapple with the itch. Fight that demon. Watch the television. In color, too."
He was referring to the red growled month of Rosalie, the prinked snouts of her globetits, and pale biscuit flesh being probed by the purple rod of bigman. The good child had been racked rigid. If it hadn't been for the great manweight, she would be making a fat parabola, a heelandhead flesharch from the mattress. But he ground her down into the down with the pusbfull throb of his pride. It didn't seem-likely he would be stopping. Speed he had, but a dreamy speed, a piston lubricated to plunge for a week of overtime. There was no finesse, not a caress to spare, not hand-tickle or earbite, nothing but the disappearing fist of flesh and sinew.
"Ah," said Martha suddenly. "That's it. She's enjoying it. Listen to that."
A one-two-three of come again cries. There was no mistaking them. How little Rosalie had fallen! And what a kick it was giving her! She hadn't the words now to ask for all she wanted. Her schooling had stopped at fourteen. Her primary schooling.
Her legs swung up and clung savagely round the waiter's hairy back, the knobs of her heels pommeling him to bring things to a head. Then she let out a great rent noise and another and another and her teeth were biting into one of his crumpled ears in an animal delirium. For a minute or two more, his beas bulk kept on marauding her broken oozing hole, then he too came, letting out a flood of obscenities, their double body, the white and the grey black, shuddering slowly to a halt.
She was kissing him with little pecking love spasms as her anguish subsided. But he had finished with her. His eyes had dulled and, deliberately, he put two paws down on her sweat stained breasts, pushed and levered himself free of her.
"Ton petit Raymond ne t'a jamais fait ca, hein?" he said gutturally. There was a kind of satiate hate in his voice. Then, ignoring her, ignoring Martha and Viney, he lumbered his heavy relieved corpse out towards the bathroom.
Viney sat on with his thoughts. It wasn't until some time had passed that he realized his wife was no longer sitting by his side. He smiled grimly and went over to the girl on the bed.
Martha had followed the ape into the bathroom. Something had been working uncontrollably under the silk folds of her skirt ever since the graying waiter had so coolly ordered Rosalie to take off his clothes. When he had gone into the child, she could have cried out herself with vexation and jealousy. She knew so much better how to accommodate those vengeful thrusts, had so much more need of their abrasive cruelty.
He paid no attention to her as she stood near him. He was looking at himself stupidly in the mirror. She moved slightly so that her reflection came stand beside his. Beauty and the Beast? He lowered his eyes and began to make water into the basin. Watching the thin yellow stream curving free, she felt so faint she had to clutch onto a towel-rail for support. When he had finished, he washed himself cursorily. But she was still hanging over the towels.
"Pardon, madame, il faut que je m'essuie," he said through a thick throat. He wouldn't look at her.
What an idiot the man was! Or didn't he really desire her? Had he exhausted all his potency on that ridiculous hippy child in the other room? Well, she knew how to get what she wanted.
She excused herself and, as she moved away from the towel-rail, allowed one of the folds of her skirt to brush against his long dripping penis. He had reached out for a towel and was drying himself cautiously, but she had seen the change take place. He was more renewable than he suspected.
Standing directly in front of him, she forced him to look at her. With the greatest simplicity, one of her red-clawed hands crabbed down and began to scamper about the bulging front of her skirt. Then, desperately, the other tugged madly at the side zip and, in a second, she stood, her feet in a cascading pool of black silk. The towel dropped from the man's hands and he was quickly on her as she dropped to the tiled aseptic floor. Her arms came out, her mouth opened, to welcome him.
Viney could hear her familiar noises, confused and high, as he lay beside Rosalie. Strung up to breaking point, he had slid himself into the gaping girl just as she was coming to from the monster's assault. He had to do it and quickly. But his wife's sound of pleasure broke in on the act. So he contented himself for a while with brailing his hard hands round Rosalie's pumped body. She stayed, spitted on his core, moving gently now and then with a sigh, gone into some lost island of sheer animal satisfaction. A few more pupils like this and I could start a brothel, he thought. Independent means. Hard work, though. Responsibilities. No.
Rosalie's eyes fluttered open.
"Ah, tiens," she said, "enfin, c'est toi. Tu n'es pas chic. Tu m'aimea pas."
"Love," he said to her. "Oh, I love you all right. Hold on tight."
And, thanks to Martha's extra-marital activities in the bathroom, he loved her until she screamed for mercy and her cries and Martha's cries rang a diapason.
IV
Pretty Martha and handsome Viney sat on two high stools in the hotel har and scowled into their Martinis.
"It's screwy," said Martha, "just plain screwy."
"I'm beginning to think," said Viney, "that we're bad for each other."
She swung her torch eyes round on him, smoothed her skirt over her knees.
"I was wondering the same thing," she said. "You know what it is, I think? All those dreary months together in the quarter. We got used to thinking small. How much of the dough's left?"
"Hell, most of it," said Viney. "We've hardly scratched it. What have we bought except a few clothes, a bed and meals? We make me weep."
They Were both a little high. The impassive barman hummed a time as he shone glasses. He knew all about them. Lucky Armance. Wouldn't have minded a stab at the girl himself. Funny thing, women. Little pure Rosalie couldn't get enough now. Poor Raymond growing thinner every day. The child would be getting them both the boot. On the stairs, in cupboards, wherever she could contrive a meeting. For the time being, she was sticking to her first love, but it wouldn't last. She was killing him and her eyes looked puzzled. Drole d'histoire. Depraved lot, Americans. No culture. Drank too much. And what drinks! Rien que les drys. A bucket of gin and a spit of Martini, he thought disgustedly as he mixed two more for his clients.
While they were sipping them, a messenger boy came up to Viney and gave him a letter. Martha watched as her husband slit the envelope. There were two pieces of paper inside. One Viney glanced at, then handed to his wife without a word. It was another check for fifty thousand dollars. He was reading the letter that accompanied it.
"Listen," he said. "This does it. We're on our own. 'My dear children,' he begins, 'unfortunately business will keep me from you for longer than I had hoped. You are therefore free to do as you like, go where you like, for the next three months. I will know where you are and you will receive monthly payments of 50,000 dollars as agreed. I must ask you, however, to display more imagination. Your efforts to date have disappointed me. Why don't you take a holiday from each other? Magnum'. "
"He reads minds," said Martha. Her eyes were glazing over the zeros on the pale green slip she held. The barman had caught a glimpse of it and was impressed, despite himself.
"So we split up," said Viney. "And we get out of tins goddam city. Where would you like to go?"
"Good question," said Martha. She felt a swift upsurge of excitement at the thought of being on her own. Where would a girl like herself go, traveling for love with a wad of money? Her eyes caught a name on a barcard. Venetian Flip. Of course.
"Venice," she said. "And I'll buy me a buggy and drive down. What about you?"
"In the days when I read books," he said, "I read a book about the East where the guy said the women were real gone. My way is clear, A touch of anthropology among the Japanese."
Martha threw back her head and gurgled.
"Man, I love you," she said. "You're just an adolescent boy at heart."
"Yeah," he said. "A poor twisted kid. And what about you, for Christ's sake, scampering off to get your ashes raked by a gondolier with a long pole?"
Their drunken faces hung towards each other like pale pumpkins, lit only by flaring eyes. For a moment, it seemed they might have had something to say, that there were words and reasons to stop their story of infidelities. Where, she was thinking, will I find a guy to do me the way he does me? who else can melt rny bowels thrice-nightly? But I've got to get away from him. Round every corner lies a new lust curled.
His voice was thick.
"Come on," he said. "Now we know where we're going again, I've got something to do to you."
He thought she had never looked so damnably beautiful as she slipped off her stool and clicked her high heels pertly, tipsily, by his side on their way to the elevator and their room. That night, there seemed no end to their tearing at each other. When they finally slept, morning light filtering in, they lay like oak and ivy.
The jaunty MG had been following her for the last thirty kilometers. Every time she slowed up and took a look in the mirror, there it was, small and red as a barnyard cock, glued behind.
It was late afternoon and the sun glowed through trees, spattering the good road with shadow.
She was wearing a light tan jacket with a horsy neckscarf clutching her throat. The colors threw up the confused rich tints of her glinting hair, emphasized the tangerine lips and greeny eyes that laughed together with the joy of escape, at speed, in the creamy open Cadillac she drove with two poised fingers.
Such contentment in the periphery of her woman's body! The sun, the country air caressing her like knowing bedfellows, biding their time. And now this, the absurd cat-and-mouse of the following car.
But it was beginning to irritate her. She had made ou the dim features of a man, a young man, she thought, but it was impossible to be certain, since he never drew really close, slowing and accelerating as she did.
The jerk, she thought. Just like those demented drips who saunter after you when the movies turn out, block after block, playing games with their courage and going home to play games with themselves just when vou're certain they're going to swoop, at last. To hell with that! Her ear was certainly faster and she. could shake him easily over a few kilometers.
So why was she slowing and stopping?
She was getting out of the car as he drew level. A screech of brakes and rubber and the red MG had swung into the side of the road, just in front of her. There was something ludicrous about its cocky dwarf body beside the spaceship opulence of Martha's open roadster.
He was a young man in a tweed cap, smoking a pipe. He looked deucedly embarrassed. Not bad, thought Martha, lounging her pelvis round the tiny tug of desire. In fact, definitely appealing. Just the boy for a magazine story. He deserves a happy ending. Pipe and all.
"Having a spot of trouble?" the young man said, emitting a small screen of smoke.
And, bless his soul, of course, a Limey. Very Oxford. Think quickly. He is conscious of my body, those wellbred soft eyes are having a helluva spree with my breasts. Young dog.
"I wonder if you'd have a cigarette?" she asked gently."So stupid of me. Here we are, miles from anywhere, and I'm dying to smoke. Would you, by any chance.. . ? " And pray God he doesn't offer me a drag at his pipe.
He got a pack of Players out of his tweedy pocket with more or less success and shielded a match. Her pouting lips left a smear of purposeful rouge on his hand.
"I'm so sorry! How clumsy."
She took out a handkerchief, licked it with a flickering inch of tongue and wiped his imprisoned hand clean.
He barked out a laugh.
"Well, I'm 'damned," he said. "You're a most extraordinary girl."
She appeared to be revolving this in her elegant head, as if it were some fabulous witticism and she wanted time to savor it. But he really was a goodlooking boy. Just shy like all the public-school English. All that early toying with boys, she thought. But I'd be surprised if this one's gay. Not with a pipe like that, all leather and fretwork.
Cars broke the peaceful silence by whizzing past now and then, going somewhere. They smoked, she at her ease, he as if he were sending out signals, in strangled puffs. How? how? how? spelt each ascending spiral of smoke.
"All right," she said, with a smile of diabolic sexuality, "why don't we drive our cars off the road into that convenient field I see over there?"
He didn't say anything, but his eyebrows went up slowly. Then, with the same fine phlegm, he removed the pipe from his satyr mouth and knocked it out deliberately on his heel. You never could tell, she thought. He's rather fine suddenly. Not a lewd snigger or smile of triumph. Just surprise and acceptance. I bet he's a good driver too.
He led the way through the rutty path and he was. The whole operation took three minutes, when the creamy mother car and the red son sat stabled in the shade of two heavy oaks. He led the way too to a nest of dry hay nearby. Of course, thought Martha, only Americans would have used the Caddy.
It wasn't until he kissed her that she saw how in experienced he really was. It made her feel incredibly vicious and old, his stumbling lusty lips. But it touched her, oh she felt the fire fan up and she hung onto him like a floating spar and forced her parting mouth harder on his and stroked the short hair that curled on his neck with knowing fingers. The longer the kiss went on, the more she felt herself purged of everything she had known before, the men, the abasement, the ugly needs: she had saved it all for this she felt.
It was so warm. Everything was so warm.
She pulled him down onto the hay. His eyes had closed like a child's. But his hands came up and found her after so much knowledge of brutality. She grew knew them by little pressures that were a delight to her after so much knowledge of brutality. She grew impatient and so did he. Emboldened, his hands were forcing the jacket off his shoulders. She let one of her pale palms slip, as if by the accident of contiguity, into the fork of his trousers, the bloodred nails at the end of creamy fingers like ladybirds on straws.
"Darling," she said, "oh, darling, there is a zip on my skirt."
Then her mouth closed again over his.
She wanted to protect him from the shock of her words.
But he didn't appear to be shocked. The centipede metal of the zip ran smoothly to terminus and she knew a gape of blue nylon shimmered in the sun. Her belly wriggled and his hands were tugging down, knocking her shoes off, severing her from skirt. Then they were back again and, while she felt herself dreamily feeling around his pant fastenings, her tight sweater skeetered over her belly, jerked over the peary shelf of her tits, was suffocating her, she was free of it, breathing in gusts of air. The warm pollenheavy air. Her lungs couldn't get enough.
Sprawled back in her shimmy and panties on the soft hay, she ran a finger down his crotch, breaking open the flies. It was as hard as steel, a snake in a fit of catalepsy.
"My name's Martha," she said, through tight lips.
He lay with his face buried in the hay beside her, letting her stroke his rigid manhood. She could hardly make out his words.
"Terence," he said. "Terence Leigh ton. Male virgin."
Then she realized, with a delicious shudder, her belly melted with it, that his voice was so indistinct because he was crying like a child.
"Oh, no," she whispered. "No, darling. Honey my love, don't. You must be happy. Love me. Oh, love me!
She slipped off her filmy blue undies. At the same moment, he lifted a reddening face towards her. She noticed the curly separate threads of his eyelashes, webbed with stray tears.
"Come, darling," she coaxed. Her hand squeezed convulsively round his thick root. "Take off those stupid clothes. It's so hot."
She thought she would die, this agonizing itch under her moist bush.
"Touch me," she moaned. "Touch me all over."
The boy was looking at her as if he couldn't believe his eyes. Suddenly a strange radiant smile creased his face.
"But you're beautiful," he said. "Beautiful Martha."
He took her wrist gently and loosened her feverish hold on him. Then he stood up, swaying, and began to undress as composedly as if he were going to bed. His chest was hairless but shone like fine marble in the rays filtering through the oakleaves. He had long muscular legs and slim hips. And the extraordinary bow-strung penis that thumbed through the air to her as she lay there, lost in her opening lust. When he had stripped, he stood motionless for an instant, smiling down at her like a friendly hunter, before dropping to his knees beside her.
Her arms swung up and grappled him to her. His body had looked so cool she was amazed at its heat, and the quick hard beating of his heart. Their mouths came together, the painted full lips of the woman quivering under the boy's increasingly urgent caress. It was so good here, two and naked under the warm summer sky, the buzz of the earth in their ears. She loved the timorous prick of the hay. She loved him, touching her as she fiercely ordered at every spot. His bowed hands groped over the cream-and-cherry of her bosom. She felt the soft divisions of her chest swell and grow under his inquisitions. She was bowelheavy, the earth's center, the womb and tomb of the man.
Oh, how sullen and bulging her thighs!
An animal, he. Beneath the tweed and suspenders. This thin curled god. To cut me like a knife. Oh, soon, please soon.
In the haze of her desires, she felt his knee smack crudely between her thighs, herself rolled onto her back.
Then a pause.
Her powdery legs bracketed apart, the hairy beast, her reddy hair free on the hair. Savour your abandon.
And then oh then the hurtful delicious rodding. He had split her beast, his hood was robining her.
It may have been the first time for him, but there is never really anything to learn for some people.
"What do you do, darling?" she said. Except that, she thought.
They were sitting warmly inside her car. The sun had begun its slow climb down and the double mold in the hay was springing out.
"Oh, nothing much," he said. How she loved his quiet stuffy English voice. If only one could get at them, the English, young enough, there was something to be done with them after all. She thought dreamily about the distant group in Paris, the overgrown kids of the quarter. Englishman weren't really very popular, you didn't find many among the Montparnasse hopheads, and the few you did find cried down their country, talked of doom and the suburbs. Apart from Bertie and, remembering him, comparing him with this new Terence-god, she felt a spasm of distaste.
"All right," she said, and laughed. "I won't ask you any questions. Oh, honey, how good you make me feel!"
She put forward her freshly painted lips and kissed him.
"I'm not averse to yon myself," he said carefully when they had separated some minutes later.
They talked in such a way for some time longer until
Martha knew that something was shifting around again inside her. He was so clean and new, this boy. What was it, this strange sensation of doom she felt as she drew away and looked into his longfringed eyes? I won't be good for him, she thought bitterly. So to hell with it. It's too late. There's fate in it.
Too late to turn back too. My lover, she thought, and shivered slightly.
"Look, my love," she said. "We can't sit here all night. Let's get going and stop at the first decent-looking inn. I've got plenty of money. Stay with me, please."
He looked at her in turn, for a long minute. "Why not?" he said. "I'd be delighted. But I'm not poor."
"Then we go?"
He nodded and took his cool hand out of the front of her jacket.
"It's heaven," said Martha. It was a good room, with a great antique farm bed, three or four rafters, and floral curtains.
She had come up by herself to tidy up. While she combed down the shiny lengths of her hair, looking at the expanse of bed in the mirror, thinking of the boy's body and long taut thing. I'll fuck him to death, she said softly to herself.
He was warming his hands at an early fire as she came down the stairs. Whenever I leave him, he will be lost to me. These attitudes he finds in himself, be goes away from me as quickly as he can, even on the hay, when I pulled and tore the third time out of him, he had witlidrawn in his spirit it was hody that split me again. He doesn't lay my itch, he incites, it.
"Hi, lover," she said, in a parody of calm.
"Oh, hallo," he said, turning towards her. She saw his eyes surprised again at her heauty. Indeed, she looked maturer, now maturity was demanded of her. Ripe curved Martha in a lownecked shimmer of cloth, with her glowing hair combed down and free.
"Dinner's ready," he said. "You look nice."
I could eat you now, untrussed, she thought.
She never knew where they had stopped that night and the next. It was absurd not to have asked, but there was never time and she didn't really look at anything except him. Nor did she really want to know. This was out of time and place, and better that way.
Again the dribbling talk as they ate. Was it a good or bad meal? That she couldn't say after, though she remembered candles and a curled-up dog by the fire. They seemed to have the place to themselves.
"Tell me something about you," she said after the second glass of wine.
"Not much to tell," he said. "I'm about two years younger than you, I imagine.. . "
"How old?"
"Twenty-three."
Martha laughed abruptly.
"Have it your own way," she said. Jesus Christ and me twenty. Ain't that awful. And he was being polite, he thinks I'm thirty. Heigho.
"So?"
"Oh, you know. Comfy family, comfy life, too late for the war, Cambridge, a little beagling.. . "
"A little what?"
"Beagling. One wanders after rabbit and hare and stuff. With dogs. And guns."
Poor thing seems embarrassed. Cheer him up. Rip off the swaddling. Winkle out the manikin inside. But gently. In the presence of nobility.
"That must be great," she said. Her eyes were enormous in the flames. Her plump ankle, jutting out, grazed his neat trouser. He went on eating, chewing slowly.
She wanted to scream. They must drink more, that would help surely. She drank at a speed that called for another bottle. It came and he drank, too. A slight flush moved onto his face.
"But what were you doing over here?" she insisted.
He put down his knife and fork at this. There was a pause while he finished his mouthful.
"That's a good question," he said then, as if he'd come to a decision. "I'm rotten at explaining, but I've got to try, I suppose. D'you know about feeling useless?"
Martha didn't know what to say. What was the dumb child on about now?
"No, that's silly," he went on, "I told you I was bad at this. I mean, here I am, in other countries, a man chuntering about with a lot of nothing. I barely exist, there's nothing I can do, there's nothing, d'you see, I want to do. I didn't grow up and there's no way out."
He took a gulp of wine.
"You'll think it's idiotic. But even what I did with you, though in a way, it was wonderful. And it was, you must see that. But it wasn't it. It wasn't what a person has to be here for."
They were well into their second bottle and, cunning though she'd been, Martha had drunk a substantial amount of the first. His words went weaving over her curling breathing hair and body into the place that waits for pointless words. A poor mixed-up kid, she thought ironically. But that wasn't right. It was more than that and she knew it. I don't care, she thought. I don't give a horrible damn. I've got him. I've got him more than momma and poppa, more than beagles, more than his pipe. He came here for something and I'm it.
Going unsteadily up the stairs together, his arm supporting her leant head and waist, she said to herself again, I'm it, I have to have this kid. Little Martha.
"Come here," she said.
Moon all over the walls. They must have been long over dinner. Her head revolved but not unpleasantly. So kind this cool light. So kind to her inflamed body.
"Listen," she said, as she stood before him. "I don't give a fuck. I won't pull a thing with you any more, you need the truth of here and now. I think you're magnificent. What you think you are, where you think you're heading, doesn't matter. But, honey, my dove, as long as you're with me and you're going to be with me a while yet, you're going to do as I say. For Christ's sake," she pleaded, as his brow darkened, "it doesn't matter. You're lost as you stand. Let me take over with you for a while. What are you anyway?"
They were both fully dressed but her mad hands had begun to run about his rigid body. Suddenly she felt him as it were melt, give somewhere.
"Another good question," he said. "What am I, indeed?"
"Get undressed," she said. I'll show him an answer to that fool question.
When he had all his clothes off, he threw them onto a chair by the bed this time without folding them, she saw that be didn't want her.
Little Martha schemes in her fury of loim.
He got into bed without a word, peeled back the-sheet aad slid himself in like a letter into an envelope. A dead letter.
To work. To work.
But no, she took her time. One by one, she disconnected her garments from her splendid self, tidied them, found hangers even for them. Then she stayed for a moment in front of the speckly glass of the wardrobe, looking at herself as if she were taking an inventory in the sexy moonlight.
Then she went, to the basin, poured from the porcelain jug and washed. There wasn't a scrap of makeup clinging to her when she'd finished her deliberate ablutions. That was what she wanted. There she rocked, Martha, less and more than that, X she was, she swayed as X, she, no, woman, swayed like a white corrupting cobra before the glass.. .
Now she was ready to go to bed with her god.
He didn't move as she wrenched back the covers.
For a second she saw the stiff sculpted outline of his body, washed in blue light, as something unreal, the sleeping raised statue of some old tcmb. It was eerie. It seemed a blasphemy to do what she did, touch with a warm hand in the shadows between his legs. Still he didn't move. His eyes were open and stared straight up at the raftered ceiling. Then she saw the lids flutter and a small sound, between a sob and a sigh, filtered out of his mouth. All the time she stroked around the heavy sack of his virility, scraping the chickenskin underneath with a small nail. Now the rod was thickening. She joined finger and thumb in a ring round the root and began to run them up and down. But there was no need for any more play.
The boy turned onto his side, towards her, in one movement, so that his cock was prodding into her belly. With a cry she swung her legs apart like jaws and had him imprisoned there before he could move. She let the bulging glans go in. I'll send him as mad as he sends me, she thought. When he tried to push in further, she closed her thighs. It was so good to have just that, swelling, vibrating with blood, in her slimed lower lips. The bed was downy and their bodies had sunk together in the middle. He had his eyes tightly shut now.
To make him scream.
Tickle the wet glove round it.
Shifting my hips, softly jerking buttocks.
How tender and big! How he bluntnoses it! Has he understood the game and does he enjoy? She reached down and caressed his flat abdomen with her fingertips, never halting the slowmotion rock and retreat of her thighs. It. was such a delicate business, a matter of slithery millimeters. Somewhere below them went on this lunatic conversation of their sexes.
Unexpectedly she cried out. Oh, God it was flooding her, the wash of fine electricity, she was starting to come already. Now he must come into ber, now, oh please. She needed it so badly. Her arms gripped his waist and the vice of her thighs parted. There was such a length of it to swallow, how long men were, she'd forgotten in the game. But, as he came wholly into her, it went wrong. With a groan he was jerking, jerking, and it was just too soon now, she needed more than that, he should have held on, the jerking fluid inside her infuriated her, he would be weak and she needed all his strength and oh now, so badly.
He had stopped moving. In desperation she flurried her thighs and belly around him, trying in frenzy to bring herself off.
"For Christ's sake, move," she wailed.
He tried. But suddenly there was a sensation of appalling loss at her crotch, he had shrunk to a useless toy. And she knew it was too late and groaned in her desolation and anger.
For a while Martha lay there, her breasts heaving damply, feeling him ooze out onto her thigh. He's mine, she thought, and he's going to satisfy me. Why doesn't he speak? He's like a dead man. Then, as she turned her head to look at him, the desire welled up in her again and she felt an overpowering shock of energy coursing through her. I'll make him make love to me. I'll take his misery and make it my triumph. I'll make him a man, whether he wants it or not.
With her feet she pushed hack the crumpled clothes to the end of the bed. She could see the glistening corpse of his love sagging on his marbly leg. If it takes me all night, she thought.
Her tangled hair fell in a screen over his thighs and the pink lips of Martha gobbed at his dormant penis, took it in and warmed and moistened it. She opened her mouth and let it drop out, then licked at the bags of his balls. When he had been in her month for five miniates, his hood was beginning to choke her.
He pulled it out and spoke to her.
"All right," he said, "open your thighs, you fucking tart."
She gave a cry of surprise and his head swooped down and he was biting her lips to shreds as his new jock broke into her again.
This time it lasted for hours. They swung about the soft bed like two mad things, one position giving way to the next, always stapled together at the core. He plunged it in and out of her as if he wanted to kill her with it and it alone. And he didn't stop to rest. The fiirat time she came only seemed to increase his madness. And she, lying spread-eagled, wanted him still, she had to come, yes, but it didn't curb her appetite either, there was always something there in reserve, a point he had yet to touch and deal with.
"Let's make it go on all night," she said once.
And, a little later-
"Isn't life worth living now?"
But he didn't seem to hear. The sweat was pouring from him ae he labored in and out of her increasingly creamy furrow.
Now he was lying on his back and she was sitting on it, but still he kept up his vigorous prodding. And she, oh she was smacking herself from side to side, stretching her rose to the hilt. She came again and fell brokenly forward across him, but he didn't stop as she moaned and dribbled into his face. Although he had opened his eyes, they weren't looking at her or at anything that she could see. It occurred to her suddenly as she was reared up and down, raked incessantly right through and out of her orgasm, into the start of the next, that he had really gone mad.
She didn't have time to dwell on it. And if he had, what did it matter? Matter to Martha, the man-mad?
In the swimming room their contorted limbs were at it still. The bedclothes had long since gone to the floor, lay there in chalky folds.
As she came again, weakly but going on, a long spinetickling erosion of her flesh by delight, he withdrew from her. She was shocked by the lack of him. But, as he squatted over her neck, his right hand went back and he thrust down more fingers, clumped together, into her bereft cunt than she thought she could take. There was no doubt about what he wanted her to do and she wanted it too, was ready and eager to worship the real master with her soft adoring mouth.
She eucked strenuously on him, tasting herself, tasting him. Her hands clasped the stem and she worked at it like a fleshly pump. That nearfist he had buried below in her was forcing deeper and deeper. He has slim hands, she thought crazily, and, as she thought it, his five fingers had got into her. It was agony and delight. Her mouth worked in convulsions and when she despaired of ever bringing it off and was skeetering on the brink of a torn orgasm, he lost it all in her throat, pump after pump from his held stem, and she came and swallowed him, came and swallowed and came, crying round the root of stiff jetting flesh.
"I'll talk now," he said, when they were extensed side by side, glowing and freed.
"Oh my love," she said.
"Yes," he said. "You are right. There is nothing else for me to do. And I won't really satisfy you. That's the way the world's made, you know. But as long as we're together, we'll make love."
"Of course," said Martha, wondering.
"No," he said. "I don't think you understand quite. I mean that's all we'll do. We won't eat and we won't stir from this bed. When we do, I'll leave you."
Martha heard him. He was insane, then. But oh so dear to her. If he had only laughed, she would have seen a lover's boast in what he said. But he was terribly serious, there wasn't a spark of humor in his face or mind.
"Fine," she heard herself saying. "Who cares about food?"
Terence, her strange Englishman, didn't.
He'd gone on to say that she was to provoke him in any and every way she knew whenever he seemed to be flagging. Then he'd taken her in his arm? and started to kiss her as if she were the last woman left on earth. She felt a dampness on her cheeks and wondered about it. What sadness, she thought. Are all the young English like this? Did Byron weep? She couldn't imagine it. But perhaps he had.
He tells the truth. I'm not finished with him tonight, she thought. There's still the place in me he hasn't got to. How has he missed it? where does it lie? Other men have found it.
Then his breathing became more regular and she felt his arms slacken a notch around her and he was asleep. For a time she felt she too would sleep. She stretched her limbs out, taking care not to wake him. But the sleepy contentment wasn't in them. She wasn't ready to sleep.
She lay quietly, thinking about him. His mansmell came to her nostrils and disturbed her. God, how attractive he was. Then why? Why this sense of uidulfillment? 'You're to provoke me in any way.' Poor Terence, she thought, hardening as the spasm twitched her, I'm afraid I will. And now.
Very gently she got between his legs, her calves softly separating his, so she was over him. I drip and that is good. One hand goes down and takes his sleeping sbldier, the other crabs me apart. Can I do it? Even now he is not little, there is something to work on if I have patience. Wait though. There is cream in my pocketbook. She got off the bed stealthily and fetched it.
As if the rich Mrs. Ponsonby slept in a beauty parlor, with such tact did her palms dab the oily cream onto him. With herself she was cruder, more lavish. How could we not now? she asked herself.
He had stirred but appeared to sleep still. Again she lowered her soft belly down over his mystery of hair and gristle. Perhaps her itching touch had turned the course of his dreams, because already he was more a man as she watched her tentative fingers lever it up and delicately, easily, slip it in. Wriggling herself closer, she had the small thing home.
She loved herself, covering him with the pneumatic slopes and cushions of her body, her pippy tits screwed down, her mousy loins gently agitating. She loved her power to work over this dozing mortal. She loved the fishbite over the entering bait.
When he hardened, he woke up. Perhaps he was never really asleep. She had been clenching on him with hard muscles under moist flesh, she had nibbled until the worm swarmed in her.
"Jesus, you're so strong," she said. It was more and quicker than she had hoped.
"I'll be there," he said faintly. "I told you. Until we separate. I like this fucking. I sometimes wonder how I was conceived. By accident, probably. Perhaps we'll make a child." The thought seemed to please him. "A love-child," he said.
Martha couldn't stop the raucous laugh from breaking out.
"Don't be crazy," she said. "I can't have children. And who the hell wants them?"
Before he got sad again, she whipped her belly with its slit against his a fury of times. His eyes closed and the strong heaving started from the small of his back.
There wasn't a limit. And there should he limits.
After that time, they slept, both of them, for an hour or so. But it was he that woke first and when he did it was still night. He looked at the rosy hody, dappled with blue and gray light, that lay curled up at his side. One of her hands cupped her mound as if she cherished it, even in sleep.
He continued to look at her, trying to remember every pore of her body, but if he thought anything, his eyes didn't show it.
Then he bent his head and, sucking one of her winy nipples erect, woke her.
A day and a night later, Martha was driving towards the Italian frontier as if all the hounds of hell were after her. Her face, under the deep layer of make-up, was haggard and her thickly painted Bps trembled.
That wasn't what she'd wanted. He'd been mad, certifiable. She ought to have realized. A bridge shot past, a cyclist wobbled to the side of the road, cursing after her. Oh Terence, Terence, she moaned. The god in my womb. This is hysteria. And what if they find him?
But gradually the purr of the engine was calming her, the lines settled out of her" face, it became sullen, heavy.
So much, so very much love. like a quota that had to be filled before the clock chimed midnight. He was mad, she said again to herself, and this time it comforted her. "Why even now, she thought, it is as if he had never taken me. My body is used, but wanting. Even as I last saw him, he left me with this incredible desire. This pulled her up short for a minute.
I would have used his corpse, she said to herself with horror. But you did, said another voice, you never had anything but that, that was what he was trying to explain to you, he had never known how to live. Else why all that Junatic scrabbling in and around you? Why, he was crying for you to give him life, and for life he was ready to kill himself in you.
But the blood, she thought, the blood.
He was sick, it wasn't your fault. He committed suicide. And blood is jam. A child washes its sticky hands, the red goes down the sink, it is child again, unsmutched. You are Martha, driving to Venice.
I won't forget him, not ever, she muttered. Oh Martha, poor Martha, you will.
Holiday. And the swirling bright crowds in the Piazza San Marco. She sat, tapping a foot, at a small table. They had told her at the hotel that Florian's was the place to go and she was in the mood to go the places one went to. She saw what the long-lashed boy behind the hotel-desk had meant. Already she'd recognized three or four bronzed gesticulating American movie actors. It was nice that they gesticulated more than the Italians. This was the life, all right.
"Buona sera, signorina," said the man, bowing and smiling.
"Bwano sarah," she said, smiling back.
He was pretty. That was the best way of describing him. His crinkly hair ran back from a high forehead in long black waves. And he was tallish. And his teeth and suit were good. It was late afternoon, she'd arrived that morning, slept a couple of hours, bathed, and now rared to go. Oh she was dogged up in a cute curvy suit she'd fallen for at Fath's and really the shadows under her eyes had gone and she looked the intelligent whore she was.
"Je ne parle pas l'italien," she said. There was a pause, while he remained standing, swaying gracefully over her. They both kept up their smiles.
"You americano," he said, but with such a good accent, like an American speaking English, that she caught on.
"Look," she said, "I don't know who you are, bub, but I'll lay odds you can speak English."
He put back his head and roared with laughter.
"Oh, you American," he said, "such charm, such franchise. Yes, I speak your terrible tongue. May I sit?"
"Park," she said, aiming at vulgarity and succeeding. He laughed again, a polite ripple, and sat.
"But you have no drink," he said. "That is terrible." And he turned to a waiter and said something rapidly in Italian. "This you will like," he went on, turning back to her, "verry Italian drink. Typical."
They didn't speak, just sat and regarded the people pass and re-pass till the dry Martinis came.
"Very funny," she said, "a great laugh."
But it wasn't a drink you could object to and she admired his knowingness. Further, as her mouth lipped the frosted glass, she recognized a good Martini.
"I had a good, how do you say it, line," he went on. "I was going to pretend you were some film star my little boy wanted to sign his book. Good story, nor
"You have a little boy?" she said.
"Oh, no. That makes the story better, don't you think? But what do you do here? You are artiste?"
"Oh, no," said Martha, in turn. "I'm.. . " She stopped. Why tell the lug everything? There would be time enough for that later if she wanted to. Cultivate a little mystery. " I'm here to look at the fashions."
He eyed her narrowly and she saw his eyes were good too, black and liquid.
"Your suit," he said, "from Jacques Fath, no?"
"Bull seye," she said and explained when he looked puzzled. There were limits to his idiom, after all.
"And you, what do you do?" she asked.
He smiled almost too much.
"I talk to beautiful ladies who look lonely," he said in the end. "To pass the heavy, heavy time."
"So I buy you dinner, " she said suddenly, adding him up. "Then what?"
It was a wince, that dragging together of the flesh above his brows.
"The war," he said and shrugged. "You cannot understand. I was not like this before. I had lands."
"You have a title, of course," she said, gauging him.
"Evidemment," he said. "It is easy to laugh. And you make a mistake. I would have invited you in better times. You are very beautiful. I do not do this from other motive than pleasure, with you."
"I know," she said, warming to him a little, "I believe you."
"You are belle," he said, mixing tongues as he was always to do with her, "and I will tell you I desire you. I think with you it is stupido to hit around the hush, no?"
"Yes," she said. "All right, Jackson. The evening's yours. Just keep me laughing, that's all."
Black. Liquid black. Liquid noise of black. And the orange lanterns. Japanese lanterns, she thought with a squirt of amusement, recalling Viney without a pang, "It's a grand canal," she said.
"The Grand Canal," he said, correcting her gently, missing her small joke.
She liked his toughness and his smell.
There was more room in a gondola than she'd imagined. Here she was, little Martha, in an eye-tallion gondola. If that wasn't something to write home about. Oh Terence, she thought, I killed him. So she reached out a lacquery hand and pulled her new man down to her.
It was a different embrace.
I'll write a book, damme if I don't. Me on the French, English and Italians, lover-boy husband on the Japanese. "Latins are Lousy Lovers," she thought, remembering the Esquire article: oh, sure, lousy, no idea.
His mouth, a mouth like others, had curled into hers as if he meant to possess her with that alone. In a sense, he could have. The fine sensitive surfaces of her lips were on fire, and the edges that ran under into her generous mouth. She couldn't believe that a mouth and tongue-tip could have got her so going.
So going that her skirt had moved up to her breasts in the Venitian moonlight. And the soft old water slapped by the pole, running away on either side of their gliding room, that helped too, no doubt of it, "Mario," he said, "my name is Mario. Martha and Mario. It is fate, no?"
She wanted to say, no, it's my itch. I just killed a kid with it, but nothing could get through her lips, taken so securely by the man she'd picked up four hours ago at Florian's.
And his long hands were going over her.
She smiled up. It had occurred to her that the gondolier could see them when he wanted and neither Mario nor the boy who poled them through the coming night cared, it was natural. Natural.
That her skirt came over her head. That her panties were dragged down over her shoes. That her bra was torn off. That teeth were sunk around her swollen tit.
At least there was the cloth hood over them.
And the star-pricked sky.
She hadn't seen him make a gesture towards his own clothes so that the sullen pipe of flesh that strutted into her hands came as a shock. I like to be shocked by him, she thought under the wine fumes. Mario.
"Will you always surprise me, Mario?" she asked stupidly.
His member seemed to throb between her fingers.
"I will try," he said and laughed caressingly.
His artist's finger-tips brushing the white meat of her thighs, swirling nearer and nearer her hot fur. There came a moment of revolt and she found herself struggling to break free from his arms and legs that wound her, touched her so insolently. Even he treats me like a whore and he's no more than one himself. Why should men always win? She felt herself plush open wetly and, at the same moment, ceased to trouble about the answer.
His long black hair flipped forward into her' face. He had caught her under her ass and, with a furious movement, jerked her onto her shoulders. Then he mounted her like a rearing horse. Only his pleasure counted. His brown prehensile fingers were digging into her flesh and the blunt weight of his still-clothed belly was forcing her thighs further and further apart, so that she felt she must split somewhere. But it wasn't pain, this searing fuck she'd been wetting her pants for ever since he'd stopped, with a smile of white teeth, at her table. It was good to be taken like a mare on heat, without mercy, on the leathery cushions. She whinnied her delight. The stars, green, yellow, pink lanterns whirled about her head, there were great guitar chords and laughter over the water, and the bestial grunts her lover gave as she snapped, rolled, sliced with her gaping teeth at him. She bit on air, he was never there, never, in a sense, visible to her, like a winged horse sweating into a nymph in rut in an old print, the truncheon lunging that burst in and out of her slimed sheath a mammoth gift of the shooting stars she saw.
She was sucking his lips frenziedly. He had thrown an old blanket over her satisfied white limbs and lay composedly beside her, caressing her, murmuring softly in Italian. The gondolier stirred the black water deftly with an immense pole and they floated along, past walls draped with shadowy weed, under cool dark ridges, arched like delicate eyebrows over the love-drunk pair, on and on through the quietening night until the boat lurched, the silence became even more profound and they had stopped, the jerseyed man was mooring, by a drowned night of stone steps.
"Where are we?" said Martha, breaking away from her Italian.
His hand continued to mold her breasts under the rough blanket.
"I thought we might stay here tonight," he said, apologetically. "It is not the most luxurious of residences, but it might amuse you to see a genuine palazzo."
She accepted it, as she had accepted him, as part of the lavish preparations Fate had lined up for her vacation. Her senses were acutely alive, but she refused to will anything. She needed to be taken over for a spell, shown how to live. He helped her to dress while the boy who had poled them to this lapping spot turned and gazed romantically into the middle distance.
"Be careful," Mario warned. "The steps are slippery. It is long since we have used this entry."
She was still a little drunk, the wine and him, and decided to leave off her shoes and stockings.
"I'll walk like this," she said breathlessly. "like a cat back from fishing."
The slimy stone was delightful to the soles of her feet. A hand guided her from behind, poised subtly in the part of her buttocks, but she didn't need it. All she needed was what she had. Man, a place to sleep, a night like this.
Then they were both standing, she shivering slightly, on the paved walk above the canal. The gondola was already drifting away. The pillared lines of a great building loomed before them.
"My!" she said. "Is all that yours?"
He looked amused.
"Why, yes," he said. "But you'll see it's not very exciting. Space is not exciting. Constriction, rather."
His English is good, she thought, hardly comprehending what he said any more. He had taken her under the breast, always these close intimate touches, and was steering her towards a porticoed door.
They went into the great moldering palace.
As soon as they were inside the rising walls of it, her cold feet squelching on the tesselated floor, he thrust his hands under the waving bunches of her hair and brought his lips, in a spading kiss, against hers. The rounded mounds of her body seemed to sink and melt into his hardness. It was so much what she wanted.
"Let's walk," he said, feeling her body loosen like a rag doll's.
They went along corridors till they came to a dimly-lit rectangle. It was a large vaulted room and they entered.
"I usually live here," he said. "There is a bed, water, the brute necessities of life."
"Now take off your clothes," he went on. "And decorate your face a little. It bores me."
"Hey!" she began. He caught her by the shoulders and shook her till her teeth vibrated in her head. She couldn't believe it was the same man. He had sorely grown, swelled towards her in the sparse lamplight.
Not until his fist punched her in the midriff did she know he was profoundly serious. It was a desperate fight, this getting her breath back in great heaves of her doubled body.
He had begun to strip her before she had come to herself again. Oh, laughing romantic Italian Mario! There were pinched white lines at his nostrils. His nails scraped over her titties as if they were made of perishable dough. I
He went over to the far wall, the light was so dim she could hardly see what he was doing. When he returned, he held a quivering black snake in his hand. There was a sort of dusty divan near them. He sat down on it.
"Now," he said. "Paint your lips and eyes. Perfume your breasts."
She found her pocket-hook. Without a mirror, she did as he said.
"Come here," he said, when she had finished. "No, you have done it badly there." The whip swished in his hand and came, like a bad deed, splicing down into the soft meat of her buttocks. The pain was so acute she didn't think to scream.
One of his fingers reached out and the pointed nail scuffed off the redundant rouge. It was insane, this beautician's care for her finished appearance. But she understood it. She thought of the warm times she had sat, pleased and sexed, before a glass, the last touch put to her face and powdered body, the scent sprayed clingingly on, the languorous hair lying down her careful back. But the blood springing out of the whiplash, that was harder to take.
"Bene," he said, "go to the bed and turn over."
Martha heard the whip hum through the air before it slashed into her back, had what seemed years to take in the sound of it. This time she screamed and screamed. Each cutting lash. Laid with such precision. Never quite the same place. A pattern of agony on her panting flesh.
Then there was a long silence, broken only by her sobs. There was a rustling noise, then silence again. She didn't dare to turn her head but lay on with her teeth digging into the pillow. A man began whistling softly, a catchy little tune. Mario. She remembered where she was and what he had done to her. Her buttocks throbbed in bars of pain: they felt wet. She must have lain like that for ten minutes while he went through a series of musical snatches, now humming under his breath, now whistling. What was he doing? It didn't occur to her that he might be doing nothing, nothing, that is to say, but stand a foot away from her red-splashed body, his muscular body naked, his penis jacked out in front of him and cradled by his hand. Then, suddenly, she felt a gush of some sticky liquid jetting onto her wounds, and again, and again, some nine spurts.
Her mind filled with disgust. Or do I, after it all, feel loss, regret the waste? Because the painful flames of my poor ass are nothing to the fire that consumes my holes.
She moaned. "Oh, Mario, please take me. I want you so badly." There was no reply. Had he gone away? To leave her. so. in a drafty palace, with ripped buttocks glittering with sperm. No, he was still there, Hands shoved her roughly over onto her hack. Her exposed belly heaved away from the coarse blanket.
"Open your eyes, my dear," he said. "I want you to watch me. You miss half the fun."
"Please," she implored. He had become so strange: it wasn't the same man: something had happened to him since they had left the swaying gondola. She must humor him somehow. Play with his sagging member maybe. Anything to stop that terrible impersonal gaze plumbing her sweaty flesh.
The hiss and the knifing pain coincided. His arm moved up and down with the regularity of a machine and she felt? as if the soft parts of her belly and thighs were being torn apart-by rusty needles. Behind the skin-tense hurt was something deeper, a conviction of demoniac strength against which all struggle or evasion was futile. Martha the done-to. Her whole flayed torso began circling crazily, faster and faster, on the axis of recurrent remorseless agony. Instead of hunching her knees to take the brunt, she suddenly let the length of her legs go loose so that the wicked end of the thong cut impartially into her swollen hubs, thighs and clitoris. Crueler than any lover, that snaking lash, and more searching.
"Aieee, aieee, aieee.. . " The noises must have been hers. The arm wielding the whip speeded up and the pain became almost unbearable. Something must give. Stupidly she wondered "why did he make me prepare myself, as for a honeymoon night? why put on lipstick to bite a tawdry mouth into his bolster?"
He had stopped. His arm was tired and the black menace drooped by his side, trailing damply into the dust. He looked away from her a moment, to it, then, with a quick graceful jerk of his wrist, hurled it away from him into a far corner.
"Poor little darling," he said, "what a shame to punish her so." His eyes had calmed. She wanted to scream and scream again at the odd tenderness in his voice. It was worse than anything. He speaks to me like an accomplice, she thought drearily. Her head was airy. Thinking came easily, high over the dying red hum of the pain. He didn't seem to know what he wanted with her now. Pencil lines gouted blood all over her white mushroomy body, joined in tiny rivulets to soak into the bed-coverings. Then he. must have decided. As she watched him watching her, she had seen, as in a dream, the sag of his manhood slowly stiffen, the head bloat powerfully. It seemed, for a second, that she heard a noise from somewhere else in the great high-ceilinged room. Rats, she thought. The place smelt of poverty and something worse.
He had settled down on the edge of the narrow divan-bed and was gripping her maimed breasts, pushing them into each other with a shaking hand, the suffused nipples sticking up between his fingers. She still, it was unthinkable of her, but she still wanted to think of him as a desired lover. Her eyes closed and she pretended the hand caressed her, ignoring the salty smart. And she succeeded. The rosy tips of her breasts were stiffening, too, she wished his lips would come down and suck at them again.
To hurt me so, how badly he must need me.
Mario moved. Now the dusky mysterious hags of his sex hung from between his opened legs, down over her face with its mask of make-up. Heir mouth fell open and the bland knob of his gender went into the painted hole. She had begun to gobble disgustingly. Flecks of spittle glistened on it as he withdrew only to force hack even deeper. She concentrated completely on her task: she would have liked to take it down, down the rabbit-hole of her throat, down, down deep into her moist red inner parts and let it stir her around there. In her pain-fevered imagination it grew and grew till it was a ribbed monolith of godly gristle her sucking lips and gums worshipped along. Swollen, veined, with a slow beating pulse. A salt fish-god.
Then she noticed the shy excited face staring down at her from the. cover of Mario's shoulders. How long the gondolier-boy had been there she couldn't tell. He had been the rats, then. 'Was it pre-arranged? What was he doing here? Her throat clenched as the rigid thing came close to choking her, her lips and nostrils were teased by the rough wiry hair around its root. But it was only for an instant. Some vestige of common sense must have told him he would kill her. It had been enough to make her forget the boy. As he withdrew some inches, her month stretched open .like a torn balloon as she tried to gasp down air around it. Her only thought was to make him come now and end this torture. Rather the whip again than this stifling ramrod.
Then the boy had said something in Italian, and she was liberated, left with an idiot's slack mouth, drooling. Mario had rolled off her and was standing, in unconcerned conversation with her saviour.
The hoy was still dressed in the striped jersey she remembered from earlier in the evening. He was shorter than Mario and reminded her, with his slender yet powerful build, the dark mat of hair growing low down over his forehead into a peak, of Viney. His eyes were liquid with long brushed-up lashes. All these things she registered like a weighing-machine: once the nickel of a man's appearance dropped, she wouldn't have known how to stop the mechanisms with her since high school. The two men weren't arguing. The boy even smiled once, his face lighting up and teeth flashing. Then the man she had picked up (was it only that afternoon?) rocked round on a heel and was speaking to her.
"He also thinks you are very beautiful," he said. "He is a great friend of mine. He wonders if he could make love to you. I said I would ask you since you are a guest. He is a very great friend. He is also very young, not yet seventeen, and I think a little over-excited by the marks on your body."
There was no questioning the threat in Mario's voice.
"I can't.. . " tried Martha, but her words stuck in her bruised throat.
"You can't accord your permission?"
"I can't.. . decide. I I hurt. Perhaps if you could let me sleep a little, wash maybe.. . " The effort was almost too much for her. Was this really her voice that she heard, this pathetic broken soprano, pleading so abjectly?
"Unfortunately, my friend cannot stay long." She watched him wander over to a distant corner and stoop down. When he straightened, she saw the bastinado curled in his hand. Her eyes scurried from him to the boy. Her bowels were a mixture of fear and desire. Even the sight of the whip again seemed, in some strange way, to have increased her excitement.
I must get up, she thought, and cast myself on the boy's mercy. Perhaps he will be an ally against this lunatic. Somewhere Pre got to find the will to move from where I sprawl. Aach! She cried out. She had swung herself up too harshly. The blood from hex .buttocks had dried into the blanket and, in moving, she ripped open the fresh wounds again. But she steered an unsteady course towards the boy, whimpering as she did.
"Bellissima," he said, his great eyes melting at her approach. "Mar-r-rta, bellissima." His tanned face was smiling down. The pain of the oozing cuts diminished in her need for him. She put her arms out tentatively, stretched out and stroked his face with a quivering sweep of fingers. He let out a noise, a great sigh of contentment, and crushed her naked flesh to him. He was licking her eyelids, his month possessed hers. Hands lifting her, delicate against her sore places, carrying her effortlessly, she was back on the bed, her fingers busy now at the string round his coarse trousers, his arms swept up and unjerked his sweater over the black curls.
But, for all his eagerness, it was Martha, hurt and bleeding, who steered his young member between her legs. It was she who guided the fresh tip between her insatiate membranes. No sooner did he know himself there than he began rutting like a dog, quick strong jerks in unbroken succession till she could have screamed at the terrible friction. Was it the first time he had fucked a woman? She couldn't believe it, such a beautiful lover, such stag-like strength. And the agonizing soreness of her plum jesses scrubbed again and again by the wool blanket, indissociable now from the sweet pain of his screwing. She knew a rose-black tide mounting in her, threatening to engulf the pair of them, her eyes were filmed with blood and her body about to float off, no, drown, then, with a soft gush, she was opening, opening, round his boy's pole, her own golden gondolier whipping up his thrusts, delighted in the eyes by her paroxysms, stirring her deeper than any dark canal, down to her final weed and beyond, and then he sprayed it in and in and she knew it had been his first time in a woman. She wound her aching legs around his in an agony of gratitude.
Unskilled in the niceties of love-making, the boy withdrew and stood up as soon as he had voided his vibrating penis.
And someone was talking to her again.
"Bravo!" It was Mario, of course: she didn't want his intrusion now, while she floated still on the great receding waves of her orgasms. The voice was insistent. "A very entertaining performance. My dear, you are a virtuoso with the instruments of others. I must congratulate you. Did you enjoy it?" The question caught her unprepared.
"Oh, it was wonderful!" she breathed. "Wonderful!"
There was a chuckle.
"Bene," continued Mario's voice. "Now I think you should really sleep a little. Good night, my little whipped love, and sweet dreams."
There was the sound of feet receding quietly over the long floor, a door opening and shutting, then silence. Painfully, she reached out and drew the rumpled blanket over her.
The mornings were always to he so different from the nights that she never fully got control of her vacation. Because, in the end, when she had awoken to blazing sunshine that first morning, had bathed in the very adequate showers Mario had had installed a year or so before, had combed out her tangled hair and put ointment on her wounds, the life seemed a good one. There was no mention of what had happened the previous night as they sat down, she and Mario, looking very handsome, to a late breakfast. They talked of the beauties of the city, the delights of travel, the need for change, and of women's fashions, on which subject Mario showed himself to he surprisingly well-informed. And it stayed like this. Whatever took place in the night-hours, no matter how great the enormity, they preserved the fiction of a cleansing sun, a fresh day, a pleasant vacation with friends, and ignored it in their chatter.
Mario took her on trips round the city the following day. He was the perfect guide and mentor, she thought, pleased that other women so obviously found him as attractive as she did. And he had a fantastic knack for finding the most superb of gondolas whenever they decided to lounge along the sleek old canals.
The reason for this became clear the next night. They had moved her bags from the hotel during the day and the room Mario apportioned to her proved to be something of considerably greater splendor than her introduction to the palazzo had led her to expect. In fact, some twenty of its eighty odd rooms were decently, even luxuriously, furnished, and he had an adequate staff to see to their wants. He obviously wasn't the pauper he had pretended. He took her to her bedroom on their return about midnight and left her at the door without a word. She didn't know whether to be glad or sorry after the brutal treatment of the previous night.
She was lying in the fleecy bed, reading desultorily, when he opened the door and came in.
He was followed by another young man, attired in similar fashion to the gondolier of the previous night. Mario held in his hand the whip.
After she had been in Venice for a month, receiving-nightly visitations from the band of young gondoliers, introduced to her one at a time, and never more than one a night, usually after Mario had whipped her and come on her buttocks, on those nights when he did whip her, sometimes preferring to leave her entirely free to disport herself with the night's new man, after the sunny days, drifting back by gondola through evenings blazing with fireworks, after the incredible routine of the nights, she received by messenger one day a sealed envelope containing a check for fifty thousand dollars. It was signed Magnum Rourke, She concealed the contents from Mario and later, after she had changed it, handed him twenty thousand without a word. That night he whipped her until she fainted. And when she came round, he was" waiting for her with a tough youth who dabbled his squab fingers in her blood and took her anally. Afterwards, there seemed to be an argument between Mario and the young bully and she never saw him again, though by now the others were coming for the second or third visit.
One day, some six weeks after her arrival, he said to her:
"You're a Renaissance woman, you know, cara mia. I knew it the first time I saw you. Your appetites are unquenchable. How long was it before you began to take pleasure in the whip?"
She blushed and felt absurd for showing such virginal modesty. But the subject had never been raised during the day before.
"About a week, I suppose," she said. "I don't really like it now. At least.. . " She stopped and he roared with laughter. In the end, unwillingly, she joined him.
"All right," she said, "since explanations are in the air, maybe you'd tell me why you never take me yourself any more. Why the young men? Are you voyeur? And, anyway, how do you get hold of them? Is there a union?"
"It surprises me that the answer to that has never occurred to you," Mario replied, after a moment. "I wasn't lying when I told you I am poor. And my life is further complicated by the direction of my tastes. I of course only like young men. And the sight of a creature hopelessly at my mercy. Imagine then how useful you and young rich whores like you can he to my schemes. Towards the end of the last ridiculous war I was fighting as a partisan against the Germans. I made the acquaintance of many youths, among them a gondolier with ideas for after the war. The details are not interesting. But we knew there would he many tourists when things had settled down again. Some would need hoys, some fresh virgins, some ducks, some whips: who better to direct their appetites to the appropriate channels than the pretty young men who guided them through the dreary canals of this city."
"Yes, but.. . " Martha was having difficulty in seeing him as a queer. And yet it was so obvious when she came to think about it. A sadistic fag. Well, bully for you, gal, she thought sardonically, you certainly have a flair for picking 'em.
"You see," he was saying, "the Venetian boy is adaptable. Even those who like women are prepared to let me make my kind of love to them after I have given them a chance at you. Barter, my dear, simply barter."
"I think I'd like to leave," she said, suddenly repelled by the whole Machiavellian business. "You've had my money's worth."
He raised those querulous eyebrows.
"As you will," he said. "But Beppo is coming tonight. Why don't you wait a day or two. We might invite him to stay even."
What a smalltime crook, she raged. Magnum could break him with a flick of a fingernail. But oh Beppo, he is so lovely and strong. He was my first real
Venetian lover. Okay, she thought, I've paid me money and I'll take me choice.
"Let's go back," she said. "It's getting cool. But I warn you. I'm quitting you soon."
He had the sense enough to say nothing, or else he was too bored with her, and they were quickly back at the palazzo.
They dined there like husband and wife, a macabre pair, without speaking. Martha drank more Chianti than usual. She was flushed and swayed a little as they rose from the table.
"I'm going to bed," she announced.
"But, of course," said Mario, "I will bring him to you soon, never fear."
"And if you bring that fucking whip near me, I'll run screaming out of this place in my skin."
He winced at her vulgarity. Thank God, she would be leaving soon. But he needed another night with Beppo himself and there was no other way. The boy was extremely difficult.. .
V
Down the shrieking angled street with its crazy jumble of neon-signs, lanterns, mile-high picture-writing, bamboo, dirty beggars, clean whores, dazzled by the glaring lights and shrill chirping voices, putting one western foot carefully in front of the other, went Viney, looking for a woman with a horizontal slit. He was every inch an American tourist, had acquired a tan on the swift dull trip here, wore a light white tropical suit and an apprehensive smile. For, since he had made the drunken decision and booked his planes, there had been growing inside him an awareness that this, at any rate, was something new: he was going, without preconceptions or acquaintance, to the country his fellows had dropped the A-bombs on. He'd bought a phrase-book of Japanese and read a long article in the New Yorker coming over, but these didn't seem adequate preparation for what he proposed to do here: fuck Tokyo to shreds. He smiled wryly. Lounging along this brilliant jungle of a street, he began to suspect he wouldn't need much more than his stuffed wallet to learn the language.
A soft white hand fell onto his sleeve. The nails were polished almonds, red-lacquered. The hand issued from a dropping brocaded robe tightly sashed. She must have been under five feet. Her raven-black hair was swept in stiff shining coils high on her tiny head, stuck with combs.
"Pliss," she said lispingly, "you look kind man. Pletend I not talk to you now."
There were so many people milling around in the narrow street that, now she had withdrawn her hand, back into the deep sleeve, no one could have realized there was any connexion between them.
"Follow me," she went on, "not too close."
Her thick-soled shoes were chopping away from him: he nearly lost her dragoned robe in the confusion of moving bodies. Then he took a Tareyton from his case, lit it and moved in pursuit. The night became full of excitement. He had had long enough to look at her closely and she had been extraordinarily pretty: long surprised eyes, green and tawny: two high spots of color on her doll's cheeks: a round rosebud mouth. What is she, he thought, a geisha? But geishas didn't wander about in the streets like that, leastways, not that he'd ever heard. Or.. . ? He wandered on, never quite losing sight of her, as she turned corners, little and impassive, through the night, oat of the thronged part of town, away from the loud movie posters and whites of the gangs of American sailors. Perhaps someone is following me? he thought. A dark alley of toy houses, a bludgeon on the hack of the neck, a hand relieving him of his Yankee dollars? No, it wasn't that, he was sure of it. She never looked round. Now her tiny steps were quickening. Good, they must he arriving.
She had stopped in front of one of the long low frail houses that shed squares of yellow light along the walk. He drew level with her. Her eyes blinked, then he felt the moth touch of her fingers on his sleeve again.
"We go in here," she said.
The moth was a trembling one, that much he could sense. She was badly scared about something. He began to wish he'd brought a knife, a gun, something more substantial than a Parker 59 with him. His fist clenched inside his pocket as she drew him towards the lighted threshold. There they halted. She crouched down and began to untie his shoe-laces. Of course, he thought, always steal a dead man's boots first. He stepped out of them, however, and went with her into the paper house of many rooms. She motioned him to stop again and shod him with a pair of extremely tight uncomfortable yellow-soled slippers. He stumbled on into a pool of light and a twangy American voice said: "Well, hull-o!"
"My sister," said his tiny companion, effacing herself, bowing backwards, as if her mission were accomplished.
Her sister sat cross-legged on a broad mat, reading a copy of Vogue. She wore a tight green sweater, orange pleated skirt and a lot of make-up. He supposed she was about twenty. Her eyes were like those of the child who had brought him, gently slanted, but she painted her mouth more boldly, overlapping, in an imitation of some American movie star, he imagined, and her breasts were full and heavy.
"Sid down," she said. "I'm Suki. Glad to know you."
"Er thank you," he said. And sat down on the indicated mat.
"She's a pretty lil doll, isn't she?" continued Suki.
"Who?" he said, easing from one ham to the other.
"Why, Hoshi, naturally. You'll be her first guy. Will you have some rice-wine?"
Viney pulled himself together.
"Now, look," he said. "Let's get a few things straight. First, how do you speak such good American?" Good and Brooklyn, he thought.
"I studied there, of course," she said. "Until two years ago. Then my mother was ill, my father dead, and I had to come back. I am new Japan, my mother and sister the old. You will see. Are you very rich?"
"I ain't poor," said Viney. "But what's this about fucking your sister?" She didn't mince words. Let's see how far she'll go. She didn't flicker a painted eyelid.
"It's hard to find well-paid work. And my nature is for pleasure. I am very American. So.. . " She lifted her plump shoulders and let them drop.
"But your sister?" repeated Viney.
Suki frowned and looked momentarily embarrassed.
"Okay," she said finally. She leant forward and extended to him a fragile bowl of wine. "Drink it, it's good."
While he sipped at it, she explained to him that she was temporarily out of action, her last American lover, an air force colonel, had left her with twenty dollars and a dose of clap. She was under treatment. The quiet papery house swallowed money. Her mother had been used to the best. She had made her decision: to train her young sister so that she would be able to support the three of them now and later her mother when she, Suki, went back to the States, as she intended to. Hoshi was frightened and Suki had allowed the child to go out and choose her first lover for herself. She spoke little English, but was a docile and adaptable child. The American could stay here as long as he wished. He would give them money. They would all be happy again. She knew he would be gentle with little Hoshi.
He finished his wine and she re-filled the bowl. He could smell the delicate musk of her breasts as he took it from her hands. He looked about him for the first time. Everything was in perfect taste: simple adjustments of lines and angles, bamboo screens and squares of material, cool colors and warm: the rich and the severe in gracious accord. Only Suki's clothes clashed.
"Why do you wear those ghastly colors together?" he said.
She laughed, a high glad trill. Already she seemed to him less vulgar than he'd thought her at first.
"They're lousy, aren't they?" she agreed. "But you didn't meet my last man, Colonel Ted Rogers. I was his whore and he liked to have me dress as one. I didn't know your tastes. It was for him I spoke
Brooklyn as well. I think with you it will be possible to relax. Have you eaten?"
"Yes," said Viney. "But give me some more of that wine. What do you call it, anyway?" It was strong hooch. Already he felt himself more at his ease than since he landed.
"Saki," said Suki.
It was about eleven o'clock, he guessed. Suki and Hoshi. What a laugh.
"Where's your mother?" he said. He hadn't heard a sound from the other screen-partitioned rooms since he'd arrived.
"She is sleeping. But Hoshi will be awake, waiting for you. Would you like to go to her now?"
There was a well-appointed quite modern bathroom and she left him there to wash and undress, pointing to a flowered robe on the door, running the water for him, before bowing herself out as her sister had done earlier.
She came back for him and took him through several rooms, round bamboo screens, into a darkened space where something fumed in a bowl in the corner, filling the air with a sweet heavy smell. There she left him.
He stood, suspended in the breathing darkness, feeling oddly not himself, in the borrowed silk robe, in the Japanese house where nobody seemed to move. Then his eyes grew' accustomed to the absence of light and he made out a small heaving heap, Hoshi under coverings, over by the thin wall. He moved awkwardly over to it. Then he let the stiff garment slide from him and gently tugged away the blanket. She was wearing some kind of silk shroud as if she had laid herself down for burial. Her knees were hunched up almost to her chin and her black hair was undone, streaming lushly down the length of her curved backbone. As he laid himself beside her, she turned her whole body and a respectful scared face towards him. Her eyes glittered and he thought she must have been crying. She said something softly to him but she spoke Japanese now and he couldn't understand what she wanted.
"Hoshi," he said and, reaching down, scarfed up the soft silk material beyond her belly, over her breasts, around her neck. Then his strong arm went round her and he was clasping her frightened body to his. He could feel his enormous erection striking at her, tapping insistently between her tightly shut legs. She was sobbing now, he couldn't hear her, but he felt the pattering wetness of her tears against his bare shoulder. She was very brave and Suki had coached her well. Her hand crept like shy mice down his alien body and began to stroke him around the meat of his loins. They halted momentarily as they came in contact with his great male member, then they gathered courage and grasped him with watery firmness, learning about him.
Hoshi had her own smell, which he was always to think of as typically Japanese, a sandalwood fragrance spiced with something sourer, more exciting. He slipt his hand through the blue-black masses of her hair, cupping the tiny exquisite skull, and brought his lips down onto hers. It was as if he had taken another bowl of the heady saki. His mind swam at the scared promise of that innocent mouth. The little high breasts were pricking his chest bone.
He wanted her very badly. Yet something told him not to hurt her, that it would be better, much better in the end, if he took her in her own good time. So he ran his fingertips round like fine paintbrushes, coloring his desire with a knowledge of every smooth line and surface of her skin. But, so gradually, he brought them towards the closed vee of her legs. And, as he did so, her hands clenched round the crude bulk of his stem. She was wet there, there were dribbles down the insides of her thighs, he discovered, pursuing his researches. She had begun to pull frantically on him, towards the telltale moisture. Then she went over onto her back and he, following, forked her legs apart and pushed through the trained funnel of her hands and had penetrated her in one easy movement. Not a sound came from her, but he had felt the whole of her tiny frame seize round him and relax like a hand that opens and shuts.
It was a weird splendid fuck, Once he was rogerly there, she didn't move a degree. Her silent acquiescence had the effect of exasperating him and he was less gentle than he had intended. Again there was the dampness of tears on his flesh. Inside her, maybe, under centuries of civilized schooling, there was a huge bawling cry, but not a murmur passed through the round scarlet bar of her lips. When she came on his jutting rod, he knew it though and, as he pursued his lust, he knew it again later. It was a long time before he lost his seed into that fresh bizarre slit. As soon as he did, he found great peace and slept like that, on top of her, for several hours till he woke with a bad taste in his mouth to find he was fucking her again and she was nestled into him as if she had been his slave since the beginning of time.
He woke to find Hoshi, her beautiful hair round her shoulders, standing with folded hands, looking down at him.
"My sister asks if you will eat," she said, unsmiling.
"Why, yes," he said. "Tell her yes, thank you."
Hoshi came back in a few minutes with his breakfast, a disappointingly European meal, with tea instead of coffee. All the time he ate, relaxing his limbs under the thin covering, she didn't take her great sombre eyes off him. He felt wonderful. Why, he might stay here for two or three days, be thought.
She came over and took the tray and her hair broke loose and swept round his face and nose. He caught a handful of it, winding it round and round. It was so silky and soft. He thought she blushed. His desire sprang up within him at the sight of her standing there, so defenseless and submissive, waiting for him to release her hair and let her take the tray away.
He gestured to her. "Put it down," he said. "Then come here."
She came and he stood upright on the mat-bed, kicking off the covers. He stripped her with a wrenching hand and threw her down beneath him, such a small tender morsel. He rammed it in without preparation and reveled in the tightness of her gasping hold. This time she was so unexpecting that he'd pulled little cries from her before she could control herself and by that time it wasn't worth keeping up her pretence of womanly reticence any more, not with this strange willful American, who took her in the middle of his breakfast. He kept her there, wedged under his weight, till there wasn't a shred of lust left to tear out into her olive thighs.
When Suki soft-shoed in, it was early afternoon and she had come because her anxiety for her sister had finally overcome her avarice. She found the man and Hoshi lying side by side, toying distractedly with their two sexes, the man's long and sleepy between her sister's fingers, Hoshi's curled outwards to display the little erecting bud of her clitoris. Neither of them moved and she stole out again after a pensive minute.
It was the second week and Viney still hadn't decided to go, simply couldn't make up his mind to leaving beautiful slavish Hoshi. He had insisted on buying her some dresses and skirts and sweaters, since all her clothes seemed to be severely old-Japan, as Suki liked to say, differentiating everything he saw or felt into the easy categories of the "old" and the "new." But even in her new teenager clothes, taking them off her to make love, watching her put them on before they went out together band-in-hand to wander round bustling Tokyo, she, his bought Hoshi, remained defiantly "old-Japan." Once he had taught her some fresh trick of love-making, the first time for instance he had inserted himself into the lazy bud of her posterior, she never forgot it and would know instinctively when it was called for, the languor of her postures increasing as they made love more and more and she learnt a fierce taste for his cock, but her spirit never flagging in its eagerness to do all, and more than all, for her man.
Viney had given Suki a thousand dollars as a sign of his good faith and she too couldn't do enough for him now, sometimes coming with them on their rambles round the city. And any day now she would he cured.
Hoshi had suggested one day that she should have her hair cut shorter, but he wouldn't hear of it. Suki's short brilliant blue-black cap was right for Suki, he tried to explain in the stumbling Japanese he had picked up, but a Hoshi needed long tangly love-making hair, hair he could wrap round his thighs and bind them together with.
So it was immediately obvious to him what had happened one night, three weeks later, when he padded comfortably from the bathroom to lie beside Hoshi and her tender limbs. The plump legs that wound themselves so passionately round his weren't hers, nor was the warm perfumed mouth that breathed against his, nor the juicy cunt he lunged into while mumbling through his leeched lips: "Hullo, Suki."
It was flattering. He took it as such by a determination to batter her into insensibility with his swollen prick. He'd shoved his arms down under her back to pry open her fat little buttocks and thrust a forefinger in as far as it would go, all the time sponging his rod's bloated head in and out of her soaking hole. She was bigger and stronger than Hoshi, and, he had to acknowledge, more experienced. It took her longer to come to orgasm, though she had come twice before she knew the shuddering spurts of his semen were plunging into her depths.
"I am naughty," she said. "But today I am cured and I wanted to celebrate. Hoshi sleeps in my bed.' "Go get her," said Viney.
There was a movement of surprise beside him the dark. He heard Suki's breath coming quickly.
"What is wrong?" she said. "Don't I make you happy? I know far more than she does. Let me stay just for tonight."
"Go get Hoshi," said Viney. "You can both stay."
He lay back, fingering his balls, and watching the pair of shadowy bodies converging on his bed. No one spoke a word. The two sisters lay down on either side of him. He turned towards the black rush of hair and caressed Hoshi tenderly. She wouldn't move to him, though, until he'd whispered in her ear some sentimental nonsense he'd looked up in his phrase-book for such occasions: "Anata wa watashi no mono desu.' At that, she burst into shrill school girlish giggle pushing her fist into her mouth, and the ice was broken between them.
Suki's shiny black head was bobbing up and down in the entering moonlight as her mouth pumped at his dormant sex. He picked Hoshi up in two hands and with a heave swung her above his head so that she descended with her thighs parted like a hinge and he had buried his teeth into the creamy furrow between them.
Whether her sister's abandon had released some inhibition in her, broken a family tabu, he never knew, but Hoshi was having a ball now. The rush of cunt-juice into his mouth told him that much. And how Suki labored at her self-appointed task. There was a difference about their displacement of limb, a profound abandonment he had never known in Occidental women. Everything in their eel-like torsos made directly for his pleasure. Anemonish sucksuck of Suki's papping mouth on him. Widening furrow of Hoshi's splayed running twat. Two smells of their yellow-olive skins. Watery rubber rub of their members.
He tipped Hoshi off his mouth, pulled his cock out of Suki's.
"Change partners!" be whooped. "Grand chain!"
It went into Hoshi's ass like a dart, daggled around for twenty plunges and withdrew to gleam in air a second before Suki moaningly wound herself onto him and it had sunk back in her more capacious entry. A few stabs there and out again, a hand reaching out, scrabbling on sparse cunt-hair and then into Hoshi's raped jewel and on and on with a socking roll of thighs while Suki's hand scraped his balfbag, till he spermed lustily into the younger.
I can do anything with them, he thought, as he settled back on his eased kidneys. An urge came over him.
Suki was flat beside him, groaning with unsatisfied desire. He arched his legs out over her pretty oval face and sprayed her with his shit. Her mouth opened as if on springs and he watched a long cag of his dung break off and fall in.
He never saw their mother, not even on the day he left, though that was not surprising because he left quite suddenly, without warning either the two charming sisters or himself, getting up one morning and dressing while Hoshi, who had got more indolent, slept, walking out into the apple-blossomed morning and never going back.
Martha, he thought, seeing a thoroughly Europeanized prostitute smile at him as he sauntered along, what's happening to dear old wifey? That was a great party, hut I'd have had to kill them both in the end. Better to leave like that. Learnt a few tricks to try out on old Martha, too. Why not go home and see her? It occurred to him that she would still probably be in Venice. But, even while he was revolving these thoughts in his mind, the bosomy lady with curled glazed hair who had smiled at him smiled again and he made a sign and was taken up for another two perverted weeks.
Martha and Viney had established no sign-language, no way of getting in touch with each other during their vacations. To have written to the hotel, the good old Charles V, where they had agreed to meet in ten or twelve weeks' time, leaving forwarding addresses, would have been possible: but neither of them wanted that. Bather meet, come together again one day there, with two different slices of past to chew over.
They arrived back within a few days of each other, Viney first as it happened. He found that little Rosalie had long ago been sacked for gross misconduct with a new night porter in the revolving doors. Apart from that, disarmingly little seemed to have changed. The frosty reception he was accorded after first, Rosalie's downfall being common property by now, broke down rapidly under the soothing deluge of his dollars.
He might never have been away. He sat around in the bar, making plans for what he and Martha would do when she got back. It never occurred to him to doubt that she would return. More clearly than ever he felt the pair of them bound together as much as if they were Siamese twins, joined by a belt of flesh and sinew. This time, he would break off from Magnum. There was something uncanny about the man's knowledge: he must have spies posted everywhere. One sunlit morning, in his Tokyo suburb, long footed Hoshi bad come in with a letter for him. Inside was another of the checks. No word, just the rectangle of-paper, telling him more than any lines could have. I'll get a job, he said to himself fiercely, go and see Rourke if necessary, say the deal's off. Well, with lil Martha, a man could do anything. Already he was a little drunk, sitting around, waiting for the woman whose memory blotted all others out. He even dreamt of her, bad dreams crowded with snakes and knives doing impossible things over her great swollen body.
Four days later, she came back.
"Christ, what a vacation ! Never again," she said, flopping down on the couch while he tremblingly paid the bellboy. She was forty times more woman than he'd imagined her. He went over and double-locked the door. When he turned back, she was wrestling with her garter belt, ripping it down. They fucked in midair.
Afterward, on the white carpet, limbs linked like a handclasp, they lounged and talked. "Oh darling apeman," she said huskily, "knew you'd he around. We fit like thunder. Ain't no man screws better." All the time they spoke her hands played with his equipment.
"Where'd you get those marks?" he said. "Venetian bedbugs?" He was referring to the faintly pink stripes, shiny and striated, that ran every which way over her breasts, buttocks and belly.
So she told him. When she'd finished, he slapped her hard, reversed her and slithered his length, angry as hell, into her backside. He felt like a stud-bull. But Martha crouched, her snub nose plowing fluff, and howled for joy. When he creamed into her backslot, slopping out untidily over the raw rim, he thought she would snap him off with her ghastly writhing of jelly flesh.
"And what did hubby do?" she asked later. "I know." She wagged a shit colored forefinger. "He cop-ul-ated."
And Viney told her about Japan and really, it sounded pretty tame. Even the skilled whore he'd nearly murdered just before he hopped his plane.
"You know," he said, "I got onto this shitting thing and it has its points. But it got so I couldn't have a pee without her running round under my John with ad open mouth. I began to yearn, my heart, for a good cozy looseat. She did have splendid swingy bubs, though. And a trick with them for making a gentleman lose his load pleasantly."
"like this, you mean?" said Martha and the conversation ended.
He diddled her with several toes and they brought it off together. r
"Her best trick was nearly her last," said Viney. "We'll have to try it sometime. When you are old and gray, my love. She had a big room with a certain amount of elementary gadgets. Straps from the low ceiling. And one afternoon, when I was getting browned off with her, we used 'em. She climbed up and fitted herself into them. Not surprising, since she'd been in a trapeze act till both the men broke their necks. There she was, swinging backwards and forwards, just under the ceiling, happy as could be, her wrists and ankles held by the straps. A nice bulby of woman. I got the idea soon enough. There was a ladder and I climbed it."
"Little athlete!" said Martha sweetly.
"Yip. Then a flying jump and I was smack bang on top of My Lady Hammock. And up her. Once the swinging had started all I had to do was lie there. Got quite giddy, what with her yells and the creak of her joints and the unexpected altitude. A novel experience. But she wasn't much good for it any more after that, although it had been her own idea."
"So here we are," concluded Martha, etching a dirty smile with her red glistening chops.
"Yes," said Viney, and he watched her take his cock into that mouth, "home again."
But after a week of this, they were bored stiff with each other.
VI
"I sent for you because you seemed to be wasting your time," said Magnum.
They had been brought there in one of the closed cars of which their employer appeared to be so fond. The summons had come out of the blue, just eight days after their reunion at the Charles V. A call: Meet me in the lobby at ten tomorrow night, your bill paid. The waiting Rolls, the long expectant drive, them now cozy in deep chairs before an ancestral fireplace.
"Naturally I am aware of everything you have done since we met last," continued Mr. Rourke, "and frankly, I'm disappointed in you. You, Martha, after a promising start with the sad Englishman, relapsed into the most tedious of "holiday affaires in Venice. Hopelessly tourist. And Viney's Japanese escapade might have come out of any late nineteenth century romantic novel. I don't often make mistakes, I can't afford to, but maybe I trusted a little too much to that glib tongue of your husband's, my dear, that first night at the Dome. It annoys me to make mistakes," he said, getting up and moving nervously about on the thick pile carpet. His cigar glowed with its private rage. Viney regained himself.
"What do you mean?" he said, protestingly. "What did you expect of us? Seems to me we didn't make out so badly. What do you want with us, anyway?"
"Something rather more advanced than the rape of a chambermaid, and rolling about in a Tokyo suburb with mealy geishas," snapped Magnum. "I'm afraid there's only one way of showing you what I mean. I find your respective ways of behaving follow a certain pattern. You'll be my house-guests for a week or so, perhaps longer. I hope you'll find inspiration here. And since you seem to have such a deadening effect on each other, I'm forced to separate you until we've made certain changes. In a few minutes I'll introduce you to your personal servants. You will occupy different parts of the building while the indoctrination goes on."
Martha began to shiver despite the fire and the warm night.
Rourke threw his cigar into the hearth and grinned pleasantly.
"Oh, don't worry, my dear," he said. "Its only object is the pursuit of pleasure. You'll soon accommodate yourselves to it. If you're the people I think you are. And you'd better be.. . Oh, yes," his eyes half shut, "you'd better be."
Did they miss each other in the days and nights that followed? A difficult question. There were times when what happened stamped everything from their emptied heads, their homes, their strange life together, even their names. Yet there was something under it all, some complicity, a past of remembered beds, perhaps, that persisted through both the torture and the delight: a double itch.
VINEY
There is nothing else to be done and I say goodnight politely to Martha and Rourke before they lead me away to my quarters. They are unexpected. Six of them, all women. They are dazing by their provocativeness. Are they to be part of the indoctrination? I'll enjoy it all right if they are.
But I think of de Sade as I try to examine them. One on each side of me has taken me gently by a hand, two precede, two come behind. The hands that hold mine are not particularly muscular, nothing of the wardress here, and I could escape from them easily enough if it seemed worthwhile to try. They are all clothed, very tightly. An unusual fabric, some sort of grayish muslin. Their breasts and thighs are very clearly outlined, nothing is actually concealed. They are all painted so that their lips pout and their eyes seem heavy and full of mystery. Their hair has been allowed to grow long and hangs down their backs like Martha's. What is happening to her?
Already there is this slung weight at my loins. If this were a dream, I could clutch and grapple the nearest of these sullen thighed women to me. But they seem almost unaware of my existence. I am not man for them. Why not? I have to say it. They are without exception beautiful. And the youngest cannot be more than twelve. She walks ahead with a black-tressed woman of maybe forty, her small rosy ass swinging up and down. like a child star waiting for the arc-lamps, self-possessed, perfumed and rouged like the rest. Once, as we walk stolidly on, she darts a glance hack at us who follow close behind through the long corridors, an undecipherable glance of mischief, her tongue wetting her little lips, her turned body seeming to contain a giggle.
This is no time to ask questions about where they come from, how Magnum has done it. I begin to believe in his particular kind of omnipotence and, unwillingly, respect it.
"We go through here," says the woman on my left, pulling on my hand.
She speaks English without accent or interest. It is the simplest of statements.
Under an arch, through stiff curtains, and I find myself surrounded by them in a kind of cell.. .
It was simply furnished and its walls were of stone. There was a broad bed on a raised platform against one wall, the ceiling had two hooks hanging from it, and there were various rings imbedded in the other walls. The room was without windows. A medieval torture chamber with differences. The half-circle of silent ladies, for instance.
"Bien," said the slimmish blonde who had brought me here by the hand. The other five women lounged against the walls, eyeing me indifferently.
"Choose which one of us you will spend the night with. You will be woken at nine o'clock sharp tomorrow. I advise you to be punctual. The Master does not tolerate delays. He has a heavy schedule."
I blinked. Then it was a dream. I stuck out a finger at random, wordless. It pointed to the child who had turned round and nearly giggled.
"As you wish," said the first woman. "She is exhausting. Dormez bien."
Before I could find my voice, the others had left, leaving behind them a wash of womanly smells and the stalwart clanging of a strong metal door.
I was alone with the child.
It is the first time in my life I remember being embarrassed by the presence of a woman. And the child was so obviously not a woman yet. There was a virginal peach floss on her checks, a simplicity in her eyes that would have told me, quite apart from her size and the incipient development of her body, that she was still on the other side of the delicate wall that separates child and adult, the immature and the grown.
Yet she was a woman. Under the tricks of the adolescent, giggles and fawnish movements, the dragging foot and the fingered nose, lurked the whole apparatus of feminine sexuality.
She was less than five feet high and the film of her gray swaddlings showed only the growing swirly pips of her breasts. Her thighs were neuter, a boy's, a girl's. Her face was closed on an emotion as she stood there, pawing with an idle foot, waiting for me to say something, I suppose. I could see the flecks of the mauvish lipstick she wore, dryish on her sweet young mouth. Around her thin shoulders there festooned the shimmering braids of her marish hair, a chestnut gold, a shade off Martha's.
"Do you speak English?" I began. She had stopped dragging her toe in the dust.
"Yes," she said, in a child's voice.
"Are you sleepy?" I said.
"No," she said. "I got up at eleven this morning. It's a holiday, you know." She beamed at me suddenly with great friendliness.
"Don't worry," she went on. "Let's go to bed, shall we?"
I coughed. I realized that I was in fact very tired myself.
"All right," I said. She was undressed and curled up in the bed-cocoon before I'd found a place to hang my trousers. I finally threaded them through one of the rings in the wall, it seemed appropriate somehow.
Then I had worked back the few covers and was in bed beside her.
She seemed desperately little and defenseless and I prepared to go to sleep. It wasn't worth thinking about the morrow, about Martha.
Then her body turned round towards me and she was in my arms.
"Lick my cunt," she said, "so's I can lick your cock."
There were all sorts of questions I could have asked, hut the situation was impossible. And I'm afraid I didn't care.
Her baby mouth was ringing me down to hell. It was so unexpected, the pleasure, that I had to do as much for her. Another place and time I would have given her candy. I tickled the fresh hinges of her legs and crotch with the end of my tongue.
It was a cunning suction of my manhood. I was hunched up and seemed to stick straight down into that knowing throat, between those playful nipping teeth. A small hand was toying around my balls, which felt now as heavy and sinister as mercury. I became less gentle and insinuated my tongue at the pubescent swell of her maiden head. Only then did it occur to me to suspect that she, twelve-year-old bed companion, was no virgin. There were signs and portents. She had been wet before the tracks of my tongue softened her. Wet at her baby slit.
And so it was in a juvenile throat that I shot the force of my loins for the first time. She wouldn't stop, though I told her and swore at her weakly, she knew what she did, had been trained from god knows what age, under god knows what circumstances: she took it all with a stretched smile and some swallows.
Then she twisted her head up to me and kissed me, daughter and poppa, very moving. And appeared to go to sleep, one hand over the end of my slimy cock.
I lay for a while, incredulous. Her child smell invaded my thoughts. I pushed back the sheets and looked at her, trying for disgust and sanity. But it didn't work. Not in the way I'd anticipated, at any rate. She stirred in her semi-sleep. One of her hot little less slithered between mine.
I thought, it will kill her, no matter what I must stop here, I am no murderer. Her thin feverish frame lay along me. She was rubbing herself against me, whimpering as if she feared what she was about. Her wet painted mouth had fallen open.
"Oh come on," she said. "Don't be so slow."
Something snapped inside me.
I tried to be gentle, but she wouldn't let me. As I thumbed her apart, her thin legs shot open and she pushed her belly forward as if she couldn't wait another second. She almost bit her tongue with the shock of it. I saw her eyes burst open and two incredulous tears stand at their corners. Then, as she prepared to howl, my head came drunkenly down and my mouth slobbered on hers, tasting the painful tears. I don't remember the sequence of that night after this. It seems to me as if I hadn't been able to stop, something had got a squeezing glutinous grip on a raw itch that thought itself satisfied only to inflame again and again. In the end, I must have let her sleep. Because that was the way we woke, or were woken, the following morning, my great swollen stem still socketed into the cry faced child.
A hand pulled back the rumpled clothes and an oval of red sardonic lips curled a bonjour. It was the black-haired fortyish woman I'd noticed, walking ahead of me with the child the night before. She took in the situation at a glance. I couldn't read the expression in her eyes. Without another word, she slipped out of her gray dress there was nothing on underneath and lay beside me. Compared with the child's, her body was a positive pregnancy of rich solid flesh. Her pear-shaped breasts were tepid against my back. It wasn't hard to see what she had in mind.
I eased myself out of that glove-like nightmare slit and turned to present myself to my new companion.
There was no nonsense here. She had enveloped me in her perfumed mature parts like a soft blessing. Her bowl set up a slow rotating movement, a pneumatic grinding that brought me quickly to a release. After, I lay there as if I had passed a night with vampires.
MARTHA
Well, hubby goes through the door and Rourke and I sit on in stony silence. All the sex seems to have drained out of my body. What am I so afraid of? The draperies in this fire lit room are stifling. I could be killed, who would hear, who would know? What will he do with Viney?
"Where's Viney?" I say, stupidly.
"Gone to bed," he replies and grins yellow around the cigar butt.
I try to sound calm.
"Do you want me?" I say. "K you do, for God's sake, let's go to bed, too."
But I know better than to move over to him. H he wants me, he'll take me in his own good time.
His answer comes slowly enough. It's to reach out a fat hand and tug on a braided rope by the hearth.
The door swings open and a troupe of young men come in.
I can't help it. In spite of myself, my pulse jumps a beat.
I seem to recognize one of them. Perhaps I'd noticed him in the quarter some time. He's a tall Adonis type with square shoulders, a tapered waist, the Superman works. They all wear a kind of St. Germain des Pres uniform, high roll necked sweaters, tight black pants, and sport American haircuts. As virile as a posse of footballers, but not moronic-eyed, no, far from it. There's not one I don't find attractive.
"Your men," says Rourke, selecting another of his interminable cigars. "Just call me Santa Claus." Do I rave or is he sweating slightly?
There are six of them. The boy who worries me comes over and jerks me to my feet.
"We leave now," he says. Dreamy voiced. And an American, or I am mad.
The last thing Magnum says to me, waving from the fireplace, I won't forget.
"I want to check on your capacity," he says.
Then we're out in the corridor, me and the college team.
Well, they take me to a room.
High ceiling, blank walls, a big luscious divan and several camp beds around it. An odd arrangement, I think.
I remember wishing they'd chatter to each other a bit, but not a word, everything happens in silence, well-drilled.
Four of them take off their clothes and get into campbeds, like good boy scouts. One of the remaining two, neither of whom is Superman, alas, pulls off what : I'm wearing. It doesn't take long. So be it, I think.
What are the rest for? To see I don't make a break for it ?
The bare room makes me feel nude as I've ever been.
I can't stop trembling and it maddens me. In a cold anger I catch the head of the boy who stripped me down to my mouth and kiss him hard and long. He makes me aware I like it.
"Go lie down," be says, moving off. "We'll be right there, whore."
I be down, closing my eyes tight like a child wishing itself out of the horrors. The two of them join me together. They don't wait for love play, not them. I'm pierced back and front before I know their clothes are off.
And the double long jabs do me good. I'm howling happy thanks after the twenty minutes they seem to think regulation. My breasts, my bitten lips, my thighs, my swollen apertures, are dealt with in turn and I tumesce like a great white female mushroom, they're so bard and certain of what they do. I am nothing but what they do to me. Then I lie, rich and grateful with their seed and feel them leave. This terrible need to float off into sleep. And the soreness where I must be bleeding a little.
I see what it's about then.
The next two are in me before I hear their breathing. Somewhere, beneath the agony and pleasure, circles of both streaming off into blackness, I know one comes first, leaving the other to his solitary grind. And what a glutton he is! I break my eyes open, but it's not Superman. Yet I can't help this cowed gratitude. Why else am I thanking him with all my lungs? Isn't there a point where I give, am only a hurt thing? This time my spine almost cracks as I lurch np from the deep springs, loving each long swollen spurt. Then I am dying. Oh, these anonymous sluicy rods!
No, I can't. I am dead and these come towards a corpse. I find the crazy strength to try and fight them off. But this time they come to torture. Drill is the word. Even their sizes have" been looked to. I cannot take a member like that. And the bastard shows it to me, a stupid proud smile, as he shows me that monstrous damager, saved for the last. I thought him pretty. He's a freak, a horror. He lets his friend wiggle about in my ass for a time, dandling his hull's thing in front of my full eyes. I try to shut them, but they won't. They'll know that thing till death. When's he good and ready, his friend drags me over so that he lies under me, not troubling himself to move any more, waiting for King Log. In a drowning flash I know my limits: this time will he death. I cannot.
Pain breaks me apart. I go away from the room and reclining men. I am nothing, yes, hut a ring, yes, but a soft ring, yes, but a soft torn ring, yes, hat this huge holding round a battering tree, rubberbarked. My bowels are forced aside, something monstrous and blunt is buried in my vast panting heart, not buried to rest, but going in and out to plane and smoothed every natural cranny and sodden crevice of my gentle woman's slit. Oh oh oh. Let it stop. It's beyond bearing. And then I am no longer anywhere.
I wake up, years ago. There is only the giant hard body above me. My legs have been laced up to touch the bed head. I am a container, the all me, a dripping sheath.
"I hate you, I scream, goddam you, let me alone. My tears and cries fill my throat to suffocation.
Amazingly there is this pause. I feel a withdrawin shudder, suddenly I am purged of him, empty as a cold glove. And I lie there, regaining breath, unbelievin I come back to a knowledge of the cold cell-like room the different pains, the smell of sweat everywhere, stable-smell.
And then I am ringed by their grinning faces. Their mouths split back, their eyebrows dark commas of five men laugh as I hear myself howling for the torture to return and finish the glorious unspeakable death fuck.
Viney and Martha never kept the same time-tables That is to say, while Viney had to be washed and dressed in the garments provided for him by nine o'clock that first morning, Martha was confined to her room 'til three o'clock in the afternoon. There were six strong men and Magnum had been in deadly seriousness when he said he wished to discover her capabilities. By the time they lifted her into a warm perfumed bath, she had been taken, sometimes in one hole, sometimes in the other, often in both at once, no less than nineteen times. No one had troubled to clean her off during the night and morning (though in the cell it had always been night: there were no windows); in fact, she ha consistently been treated with the most complete contempt as a hunk of abandoned flesh and blurt mouth. It was only now that the man detailed to attend her while she bathed showed a surprising delicacy handling her.
She floated like Ophelia among the curdling lilies o their epenn, while her poor thoughts tried to cohere round the dissipating fading image of Viney.
After the bath, she was dried, powdered, taken to another, kinder, room and allowed to sleep. There was even a pretty colored maid to tuck her in. The contrast was so abrupt that she sobbed between the primrose sheets.
"An admirable choice of partner," said Magnum, as he and Viney had breakfast together. "I haven't yet allowed myself the pleasure, but I believe she is very keen. The daughter of a one-time friend of mine. Been here for three years now."
Viney finished his fourth cup of coffee. Some strength was ebbing back and with it a clearer memory of the night. He didn't want to think about the doomed child any more, but Magnum was taking pleasure in elaborating.
"She is probably the youngest drug-addict in Europe," he went on. "We began dosing her with mild stimulants as soon as she arrived. To encourage the appetite, of course. Which reminds me. You're eating very little, my dear fellow. We can't have that. You'll be dying on us."
He chuckled.
"Your wife had a good night, I believe," he went on. "In fact, she's been allowed to protract it a little. We'll be seeing her this evening, I expect. Now, if you're really not going to eat anything more, we'll proceed to business."
They rose from the table and the gray-garmented girls who had served them watched them out of the room with dead eyes.
They were making the rounds of Magnum's establishment. He had taken pleasure in handing Viney a room-by-room plan of it as soon as they were together in the corridor.
"But it's huge!" said Viney.
Magnum flicked deprecatory fingers.
"A hundred rooms, no more, no less. Plus, of course, the unusual offices," he added, allowing himself a flash of teeth at his joke.
"What the hell do you need with so many?" asked Viney. They were strolling along, taking their time, letting themselves into a heavy day gently.
"WeU, some are cells, in a manner of speaking," said Magnum.
"like last night, you mean?"
"Not exactly. Those we call guest-rooms. There are only five of those."
"You don't have many guests at a time?"
"Never more than four, if we can help it. And naturally we can. We can help anything."
From the plan, Viney could see there were only two floors. But the building sprawled out like, the celled trays of a hive. The bottom tray was divided neatly into two halves, one colored pink, the other blue. The top tray four such sections, red, green, black and white. But these were contained within one another like a maze, so that there was only one filled square, the red one, squatting, like hell, in the center.
A complicated system of passages linked the various cells and every cell had a number inscribed within it.
"Neat, isn't it?" said Magnum, glancing over his shoulder. "Now, as you know, we are at the moment in the bottom half of the plan and, of its two parts, we are patrolling the pink, or female, quarters."
Viney did some rapid mental arithmetic.
"You mean, there are over twenty rooms, each containing a woman?" he said.
"There are over twenty rooms," agreed Magnum. "But things are a little more complicated than that. Some, two as it happens, contain only one woman. Your much fucked wife lies in one at the moment."
He turned to look at Viney, presidentially, a false man-to-man stare. Viney held himself numb. Well, naturally. It had happened to her before. What did he expect? she'd gone to bed with cocoa?
Satisfied, Magnum resumed his explanations of his great toy.
"The other rooms, some of them for guests, some cells, and others plain rooms, contain women in varying proportions. For instance, at this very moment, that room you see, number 17, contains a very fine mulatto, an older lady who is, I'm afraid, a hopeless invert, and two new arrivals, a child of ten and her mother who has, they tell me, remarkable buttocks. It always amazes me how quickly such groups shake down together."
"A sort of League of Nations, sexually speaking," suggested Viney.
"Yes. It could be put like that. Would you care to look at them? It's simply a question of wiring."
Viney was intrigued. "Yes, I would," he said.
Magnum picked up a house-phone that stood on a table outside the door of number seventeen, a solid stone door. He murmured something into the speaker and, before Viney had time to wonder what it was all about, the wall had apparently disappeared.
"The wall isn't made of stone, concealed lights.. . " Rourke really couldn't be bothered to elaborate. He paid others to worry about such details.
From his seat in the stalls, Viney looked at the show. He was at least able to check the accuracy of Magnum's description. There were four naked women.
The fourth wall away, he could see every detail of the set. Whoever the designer had been, he was a man of taste and imagination. It looked very comfortable and, without Viney's being able to put a finger on any one tiling, erotic. The room glowed with pastel shades, the two broad beds yawned warmly under the far wall, plump and inviting. On one of them, he could make out the half-sleeping body of a splendid brown-skinned woman. Her crinkly black hair was spread out over the pillow she shared with another, smaller, head. She had the little girl with her. The child had her eyes tightly shut, hut was obviously not asleep. Her small fleshy lips were parted and moving. It was then Viney remarked that the squab ochreous fingers of the mulatto woman were thrust like crabs' legs into the baby's budding triangle.
But the mother ? Altogether sadder, thought Viney. Someone had beaten her cruelly. She was standing, a thick legged platinum-haired girl of perhaps thirty, in the center of the room, half blocking his view of the bed, apparently lost in horrified contemplation of what was sleepily happening to her child. And, even while Viney and Magnum watched, the latter incuriously reaching for a fresh cigar, the older woman, who completed the quartet, had moved up, behind her and started to give orders. She was rather a ghastly sight. Her thin bitchy face was etched with brilliant make-up, lips burgeoning like a burst flower of sex, and the whitewashed flesh of her body glared in the calm light. You could see the straining muscles under that erect skin: she looked capable of anything. It must have been she, thought Viney, who whipped blondie. And probably drank the trickling blood too (looking at that scarlet mouth.)
The lean hard woman, with her curled gray hair, was leaning against the soft mother now. There was a moment of unwillingness, then, with a last despairing glance at the stirring bed, the shorter fleshy-bottomed woman took full on her mouth the caresses of the other, pressed only the harder against her as the other's hand whipped down and forced between the soft rubbers of her rump.
"I see," said Viney, "Thank you. But is there nothing but lesbians in this part of the house? I don't know. I can't raise much enthusiasm for them somehow."
"Silly boy," said Rourke-and the wall became blank and solid again as he spoke "it's all part of the softening-up process. We aim to kill the troublesome emotions, the pleasure-spoilers. By tomorrow, the buxom mother will he holding her legs open for me if I ask her to. We will proceed."
"Where do the servants live?" said Viney, as they went on, and turned a corner.
Magnum kept silent a moment, as if in thought.
"A good question," he said, finally, "if, as I hope to prove, a stupid one. We are now in the blue sector."
"Men," said Viney.
"Men," said Magnum, more slowly. "Let's have a look at room 49."
He repeated his business with the phone, the wall cleared, the show began.
"But.. . " said Viney, stupefied.
Not one man, but two, enormous Herculean men with swelling muscles and long mauve equipment. They were amusing themselves by playing catch with a contorted lump of limbs. Viney just had time to notice the flowered fabric, the boudoir tables covered with bottles and tubes and sprays before a violent push in the back sent him sprawling forward onto the stage. The wall had really ceased to exist for a second.
He picked himself up, feeling stupid and furious. What sort of a trick was this?
They dropped the limbs, which sorted themselves out into a pretty bruised girl and scampered away to a comer of the room. It's a fairy-story, he thought idiotically, they are two brother-ogres and I jack-and-the-beanstalk. As they caught his arms and twisted them behind him till the tears of impotence sprang to his eyes, he changed his mind. It was a different kind of fairy-story, one his mother should have warned him against.
He struggled insanely. Where was Rourke? Was the stone wall really wall again or was he watching all this, a brandy and soda at hand, a privileged spectator? The room had four walls, no doubt of that. Then his horror grew as he heard the big men speak. "But he's a sweetie," said the first. "An angel," said the second, twisting more decisively. "But you're wrong, Philippe, he's not a he, it's a delicious little neuter-woman-man for Martine to dress up for us. Martine will make it pretty. Oh, I could eat it all over."
"Let me kiss it first," said the other. Viney felt himself crushed against the hairy front of a man and a pair of rubbery male lips forcing against his. Meanwhile, the ogre's companion had dropped down on his huge knees and was ripping off the thin pants Viney had been given when he got up. Disgust mounted like a wave in Viney's throat, but he was powerless. The brute who held him was a thousand time stronger.
Then he was freed, though not before a bulldozing hand had closed over his genitalia.
"See what pretties it's got, Philippe. Little miniature man things."
"Yes." The first man scratched his head. "It won't do like this. I like it, but it's too much a him still. Martine!"
Viney tried a smile as the girl slouched forward. Women were his friends. Between the two of them, they'd outwit these mad Athenians. He was still smiling at the girl when a muttonfist clumped down behind his ear and he went to sleep.
When he woke up, there was a powerful exotic smell of perfume around him and it was a minute before his head cleared sufficiently for him to realize that he was the source of it. His body felt weak and womanish. As his hands moved reassuringly over it, they encountered silk. He sat up with a groan.
As he did so, the girl they had called Martine came forward with a mirror and he was unwillingly staring at himself. Herself. Himself. Her.
The longish black hair had been combed down into a fetching fringe and curled gently around the shell-like ears. A charming lacy night-gown from which the powdered shoulders surged forth. There was this taste of smooth lipstick, the darkest of reds, on the mouth, the sticky beating of the eyelashes as confusion swept up. And oh that so white hand holding the glass now, those blood-red shiny nails!
"Come, darling," said a deep voice, "come to us."
Viney stood up shakily, all body bound and powdered.
Two such heavy wonderfully strong men.
"Take off your nightie for us."
With trembling hands (in fear, despair, eagerness?) the spidery garment lifted head high, dropped softly to the floor.
Then the bigger man, his rank sweat smell against these delicate musky scents, lifting and taking him harshly back to the bed. I am turned over by the rough hand. It goes away, returns, the bunch of creamy slime is worked into me there. How my poor heart beats! What will the big brute do? I bite the lipstick into my arm as his great blunt head sogs into my ass.. .
They allowed him little treats as the morning wore into afternoon. Under the drug they'd hypoed into him, relics of masculinity persisted. When he was used to the shock of the pleasure their brutalizing gave, they let him place his erect member in the tired mouth of Martine at the moment of his keenest excitement and abandonment. After, they both kissed him warmly and bit his scented ears before resuming. He couldn't help kissing and licking into their spread male mouths in gratitude for their splendid raping.
At about the same time as his wife was being lifted into a bath, the drug wore off and he was allowed to wash under their ironic eyes and leave.
"So you see we have no servant problem," concluded Magnum. "Drugs pleasure, painone way or the other, we make ourselves servants. There isn't, as you'll later find, a body in this whole establishment that wouldn't lay itself down for me."
"Drugs are cheating," said Viney, his face his own again, though unnaturally pale, and his lower body in torment.
"You're still a fool," said Magnum in slight irritation. "Nothing is cheating, as you persist in calling it. In love and war.. . you know the proverb. How much more so then in sheer nasty lust? Not that lust is nasty." He hastened to correct himself. "I use your terminology. Besides, let's try for a little honesty. You, my lad, enjoyed yourself hugely while you were being enjoyed this morning."
There was a long pause.
"You don't want to remember it, of course," said
Magnum. "But it happened. And you screamed and kissed and thanked like any grateful virgin. You should thank me who increase your possibilities. A few more sessions and you'll be as adaptable as a two-way plug."
There was still no reply, so he continued as if nothing had happened.
"You're probably wondering what there is in all this for me. Don't worry. You'll get the idea of that very soon. Let's say for the moment that I'm a sexual philanthropist I like to see people happy and adjusted to everything. But I see it's four o'clock and time for tea, an English custom we make a point of celebrating here. It breaks the day up so nicely. You must be starving after your adventures."
He makes it sound like the Perils of Pauline, thought Viney. The wordy bastard.
He found himself alone in the corridor. Magnum had disappeared: did he imagine a smell of sulphur in the air? And suddenly he wanted to hoot with hysterical laughter. The whole business was so impossible, this great nineteenth century emporium of evil and Magnum the red-tailed devil with the cashbox smile.
There wasn't a footstep or cry to be heard in the whole padded house.
What now? he wondered. I can't limp around the corridors all afternoon. What's the next item? His body ached less, but he was violently hungry.
As if in answer, she appeared at the end of the passage. He saw a pale hand raised in the air and beckon him. Are there no ugly normal people here, he thought, no harelips, humpbacks, spots? He began to move towards the lovely woman.
"I'm to take you in to tea," she said as he drew near. "Please follow me."
"Surely," he said. He was almost speechless.
She was another blonde, slender-waisted, wearing a tight gold corset. The uncovered halves of her buttocks swung firmly to left, to right, as she led the way. She wore no shoes on her beautiful feet: the house was thickly carpeted everywhere and she didn't seem to miss them. What it she, servant, guest, nymphomaniac friend of Magnum's? They are all my servants, he had said.
They were to eat in her room, that much was certain. She pushed open a door at the end of the passage and in they went. More and more like a women's college, he thought. Not quite though.
"Sit down," she said, her voice a caress. "Make yourself at home. I'll fix you a drink. I expect you'd prefer that."
Neither English nor American, nor yet French: Austrian perhaps: a care at certain syllables, a tip foot rhythm. Everyone spoke English. Was it a house rule? He found voice to ask her.
"Oh, yes," she said. "With so many of us a lingua franca was necessary. And isn't English the international whoring tongue these days?"
"What's your name?" he asked. Some hold on reality he must keep. Names, dates, pieces of cloth, butt-ends: such things would prove he lived.
"Inga. And you're Viney, of course. Here's your drink."
"Martinis at four o'clock," he said. "Ouch. But it's a good one. Thanks."
She brought him a plate of food, sandwiches, lobster-claws, cold sausages on sticks. After he'd downed his second Martini, he forgot her completely and ate ravenously.
Then, curling up at his feet, she asked him about himself.
He found it easy enough to talk with her hair foaming back over his knees. She smiled, frowned, was a good listener, as he began at the beginning with Martha and their poverty, ended at the end with him and her, his voice breaking off, now.
"Do you think he'll give you the rest of the money?" she said, when he had finished. She got up and put the plate away.
"Yes," said Viney. "I don't know why, but I think the bastard will."
"You may be right." She shrugged and he was aware of her shoulders and exposed breasts.
"And you," he said. "How did you get in here?"
"Ach." She glanced at a clock by the bed. "It's not important. How do you feel now?"
"Much better," he said. "Come sit here. And talk."
Play for time. Sucked dry. The mind says take but the body sits mom. Yet the high throb of those Austrian ski-breasts, pressing out of the cage-corset (a special garment of the house? how it controls the imagined flesh!). And the polished glitter of the zip, running from end to end. Unpeel like a ripe tangerine, the juicy fruit to break forth. The fresh white flesh-bulges.
"I worry about time," she said frankly, coming to him. "There is never enough for me."
"Time?" he said feebly.
Her eyes moved like dancers over his reclining body.
"Time and motion," she said. "You see, you are here till six. It is now half four. Then I give you back to Magnum."
"Oh," he said. "I see, I can lease. Lady, I hate to disappoint you, but.. . "
He didn't trouble to finish his sentence She knew how he'd passed his night and morning: he'd just got through telling her.
"All right," she said. "I tell you my story and about Magnum's house. But we go lie down on the bed. Much more comfortable."
What clothes they had, the curious properties of the maison, they kept on. Heads pillowed, his eyes half, closed, the story came.
"I'm twenty-six. I've been here for two years now. Some have been much longer. It's un-likely they will ever leave now."
She broke off to light a cigarette.
"They've been so knocked about?" said Viney, more to encourage her than anything else.
"Oh, no," she said, "it's not that at all. They don't want to leave. Where else would they be happier? Here they are protected, warm, well-fed, and they accept the rules of the place as for their own good. I too am beginning to see that. But you wanted to know how I came. My childhood is not interesting. I was a pretty child when the Russians came to Austria but nobody offered to rape me. At sixteen I already had a boy who slept with me very sweetly whenever we could shake off my hag of a mother. Papa had been killed. When I decided to leave Vienna and come to Paris I was already nineteen. There was nothing for me to do at home any more. Stephen Grozier had just been transferred to the Embassy here and said he'd take me through in the diplomatic bag. He was an old man and very gentle and dull. He made small jokes. After a while, I became known as his diplomatic bag. I was, in fact, very diplomatic. It is thanks to dear Sir Stephen that I speak such excellent English, better than yours, American.
"So I had a nice apartment on Avenue Kleber and a visit twice a week from my old man who liked me to ride him round the room, smacking his withered bottom. There were also parties, because sometimes the parties were less than official and it was important to have pretty and easy young women to entertain and to one of these Mr. Rourke came. I had begun to take heroin three months before. Stephen didn't know, though he grumbled about the amount of money I demanded from him. Magnum saw through me the first time his flabby hand touched mine. When I left the party for a minute later on, to heat the needle, he had followed me quite brazenly into the bedroom. He didn't say much then. I still thought his appearance rather unpleasant. He offered me a regular supply of H for the next year if I'd let him do as he liked there and then. Of course, I agreed and we shut the bedroom door. He caused me great pain because he insisted on piercing my bottom: fortunately, it was over very quickly. I dressed as best I could and hobbled back to the party, praying he'd be as good as his word. He was.
"He seems to be a guy for ass," said Viney.
"Oh, for everything, my dear. He's incredible. You'll see. No other man co,uld have stopped me taking drugs simply by sex. He did."
"For Chrissake, how?"
"By sensitizing the whole surface of my body. He has laboratories, even a private operating theater here, you know. On the top floor. No, don't interrupt again. I've nearly finished. Sir Stephen was transferred again soon after that party, to Russia, where I believe h: died, his hack broken under the weight of a lady discus thrower. I was thrown on my own resources, which apart from my excellent body, were nil. An Indian prince then took over my care. He had far more money than poor Grozier and was very generous, but an even smaller penis and was very jealous. So I was forced to drug increasingly for want of other satisfactions. One night Ali and I drove out here to a mystery party. I still don't know exactly where we are, to tell the truth. Magnum recognized me immediately as the girl he had been sending consignments of heroin to for having buggered her, and, to my joy, Ali drove off the next day, fitted out with another girl, while I lay face down under Magnum's weight, being fitted for another man. That's all."
"It isn't though," protested Viney. "There's a hundred things you haven't explained."
She rolled over and licked at her scarlet lips.
"Do you seriously want to go on talking?" she asked huskily.
Her flesh was bulging appetizingly over the absurd gold corset. The gin had worked on him. With a cry he crushed her lewd shameless mouth to his. Her body nestled into his and she was rubbing the resilient fruit of her corseted breasts into his chest. The ribbed garment fell away from her. Her hand found the hidden slit in his trousers and had him on her, penetrating her glutinous parts in a second. He felt as if there were a mouth full of soft spittle sucking and sucking at his erect maleness.
Before he could come in her there, she insisted on turning over and taking a hundred thrusts in her backside. When he was finally allowed to come, it was under her armpit.
"What was that about sensitizing your whole skin surface?" he said, as she wiped herself off, with one eye on the clock, afterwards.
"Just what I said. They do it with electrodes, I think. I have had as many as fifteen orgasms in a day. It's my life. Magnum lets me have all the new men. I'm afraid," said Inga, making up her lips with her free hand, as she led him to the door of her room, "that I'm a terrible flirt. Goodbye."
VII
On the third day after their arrival, Martha was lying with her limbs stretched wide by four straining ropes, a square bolster under her ass. The lips of her sex were red, oily and unpuckered. Her eyes were open. Her hands trembled too much now for her to lie capable of her own maquillage, but someone had taken care of it for her and she looked very pretty.
She had been transported to the second floor. It had happened during the night and she had already forgotten about it. There had been so many hands, hairy, smooth, scented, harsh, and they had pulled, plucked, teased, tousled, clawed and beaten so repeatedly that she hardly knew when she was lifted and carted like a piece of merchandise. They were her masters and she their always usable mistress.
Sitting back in a plane-chair he had had installed in this particular room, a very comfortable pneumatic receptacle for the human body, capable of a range of adjustments of angle, suspended some six feet above the body on the bed and the waiting machinery, Magnum thought about the act about to take place like a benevolent deus in machina. The Master brooded, in no way ridiculous, in air. Experience had taught him that the best view of what this room had to offer could only be had in elevation. Not a man to deprive himself of a small pleasure, he sucked quietly at a short fat cigar.
He looked at his watch. It was half past eleven. Outside the sun would be shining with its usual blatant enthusiasm. Here they were lit by his private power-plant, Nor was the illumination discreet. A series of projectors were aligned in the groin of ceiling and one wall so that their brilliant beams fell directly onto the glistening cunt, waxed clean ef hairs, of Martha. He thought of the other hundreds he had witnessed at this particular stage of their liberation. Their babbling mouths, the bubble of spasm forming and breaking, forming and breaking, wrists and ankles lacerated as the bodies arched up against the cutting ropes. His moist lips sucked more rapidly round the cigar-tit. Reclining in his rubber chair, Magnum had had a vision. She wasn't simply one of many, a sexual statistic. He leant over, as if he peered from a low cloud, and totted her points.
She was real. The whole heave of her whitened belly and breasts with the cherry buds, slowly respiring in her own hot world, told him that much. By touching a button, he could have descended and taken her in her excellent splitness. The blood-swollen monster in his creased pants would have reveled in it. Then his sad eyes switched to the pulleys and polished gear. Had he exaggerated the size? Sometimes he suspected himself of a middle-aged man's extravagance. Yet all the reports, those on paper of the doctors, those of his eyes, had been favorable. .
She might have been sleeping with open eyes. Her carefully tied-back hair didn't move. On the wall-white sheets every movement of her curves was as clear as if black lines stressed them. He removed his cigar from between his rosy lips and picked a small microphone from the chair-arm.
"We will begin," he said. "The five-hour first. Seven hundred revs."
No sooner had he muttered into the steel box than something glided down, like a movie camera, from behind his head. It went straight, without noise, and buried itself in Martha's cunt. He was pleased to see there was no blood. True, her lips had folded back inwardly like an edentulous mouth receiving a massive fist blow, but the great shiny-covered rod, thicker than an arm, with a mock lipped head, had entered. He sat back and resumed his cigar, well-satisfied. The cams and eccentrics governing the object's motions were functioning smoothly.
Since Martha's eyes couldn't open at the first impact, they had closed and flicked open again and closed, in close pursuance of the giant mechanical dong. Already (Magnum felt) it was taking on that old familiar life of its own. It slid in and out, going infinitesimally deeper with every motion. He knew it would take a full thirty minutes before imbedding itself completely at every stroke. He glanced at his watch again and set its small alarm before he settled himself for a brief nap.
Viney had been rendered immobile, too. But, in his case, the expedients found were simpler. No rope held him down, no mechanical teeth gripped him. It increased, if anything, the amusement of his ring of spectators that there was apparently no reason why he shouldn't be reacting against what many would have felt a position of some ignominy. Three needle-pricks had brought him to this: one at the back of the neck, one in the base of his spine and one at the root of his sex.
He was crouched, unmoving on the padded floor, his abused hindquarters at an angle higher than his head, staring stupidly down in an attitude of waiting. He seemed unaware of the humans seated thickly round the walls of his cell. A keeper came in, bringing the Russian wolfhound with him. There was a craning forward of heads, marcelled, stubbled, privileged heads that had been adjudged worthy of the treat. It was Saturday morning: children would be going to their special movie shows in England and the States.
What was Viney didn't move. It was astonishing how such a small part of a man could be so completely the center of attention; that wrinkled stretched greased shithole. The keeper bent down and undid the leash. The dog knew its role. It had a substantial quivering organ from which the undercoat had been clipped back. Now it was browsing forward, followed by its uniformed attendant. It had that dazed cozy look of all refined spoilt canines. It slobbered a little, however.
A long mottled pink tongue, spittle dropping, came out of its jaws and touched the crouched American. Then it reared up and the attendant was there, guiding like a human shoehorn, and dog was fucking man.
The bell tinkled on his wrist and he woke up to dry exhausted sobbing.. The artificial pleasurer had touched bottom and Martha was straining against the taut cords as so many others had done before her. It went at an even unhurried pace, gliding back each time till only the javelin head remained sunk in her sluiced twat, gliding forward and losing its massive stem utterly. Her eyes were starting from her skull. He saw that she was about to come to orgasm again. Her second or third, he imagined. Then her belly flipped up, twice, three times, four, forcing her even more cruelly onto its anonymous probe. She was crying out.
"O o o o o o gaddam thing stickitin don't stop never stop!"
Magnum reacted by pressing a button on his chair-arm. For a moment there was no change in the scene. The girl kept on crying, less and less coherently, and the great instrument swishing in and out of her crotch. Then there was a click and its orientation altered slightly. It kept on going back and forth, but another cam had come into play. Now it oscillated at its thick base, conically, so that her dripping bps were eased terribly apart by its ponderous lust.
She seemed to have fainted. Her sweaty painted face was lolling to one side. He looked at his watch again and smiled comfortably. She'd soon come out of that. You couldn't stay in oblivion while your coals were raked by a torpedo. Another three hours forty seven minutes to go. Maybe he'd have her turned over at half time. Depended on how he felt. He stepped up the rate of penetration by a few revs. Ah, that had done it, she was coming out of her trance.
"All right down there, Martha?" he said. Really it was almost sad to have dominated her so utterly. He couldn't see very clearly, since the blinding projectors were pointed elsewhere, but her kowled eyes were without life or emotion.
Noises came back to him, prolonged and suppliant, but he couldn't interpret them. Anyway the writhing body on the special bed didn't know what it felt or meant any more.
Viney woke up out of the drags to find himself being poked by the raw thing of a dog. He tore away with a growl of anger just as the wolfhound jetted its packet into his ass.
He swiveled round to sit down slimily on the floor. He was surrounded.
A change came over Magnum's pale powdered face. His chin began to wobble slightly, uncontrollably, and his tongue shot in and out, moistening dry red lips. Yes, my dear, he was saying, half to himself, oh yes, my dear, yes, my dear.
There was one great room Magnum had not seen fit to mention to Viney, when they had made the tour of his pleasure-house together.
Nor was it, strictly speaking, a room, but a vast auditorium, capable of holding some five hundred people at capacity, with rows of velvet tip-up seats, and a red-curtained stage at the end.
Into this theatre, Martha and Viney were brought, masked, by separate routes. It was evening now and would soon be night. They had been bathed and drugged, drugged soothingly this time into a state of pleasurable quiescence. They wore similar garments, long sweeping cloaks of gold cloth. And they were led, through the buzzing naked spectators, to seats set apart in the middle of the auditorium. Between them sat an empty place.
Then there was a sigh, and a long-drawn-out moan in the strange ranks of watchers, and Rourke strode down the gangway towards his seat. As he settled himself down, the lights went out and the projection began.
Viney saw Martha, unaware that his wife sat near, separated from him only by Rourke's unmoving bulk. Viney saw a greatly magnified three-dimensional Martha, her huge thighs split by a life color king kong of a prick. He saw the prick, creamy as an ad for soapsuds, scrub briskly in and out of those vast, surely over timed lips. That's Martha, the thought thudded at his skull, that's Martha and friend. There were random guffaws around him. Then he realized he was not alone in watching this exciting spectacle: that he was somehow imbedded in a plot of breathing humans, musk and dung, that pullulated all around, had, god knew, their own thoughts about what they saw, witnessed (he knew) the terrible fucking of his wife by several giants. He wanted to rise and die, but the drug had softened his muscles and he couldn't move even so far as to twitch the gold trappings he wore. But his mind wasn't powerless, no, it raced.
My lawfully bedded wife. To have and to hold. Corn gold on the back-seat of her father's car, the early simple screws in my lodgings, the rush and worry of making classes after those nights, the leaving it all, Europe, Paris, the picturesque dirty street, Street of the Princess (now a giant is dandling his immense strutting weapon before her blown-up eyes and mouth and, lustily, she is preparing herself for a big suck-off), then I had to whore her, lend her out to chosen buddies, make me maq to prove I lived. But, always, she was mine, telling me about it, coming home to poppa and what he could give her, I, I, I was always the itch-layer. And she mine, through a thousand St, Germain nights and Tokyo afternoons.
Viney sat there, knowing the spunk sap out of his body. What was done to his great missus, the world's whore and made-up baggage, went on before his straining eyes, and the sound-track was a masterpiece, and the montage, tumbling image after image of Martha's swollen tits, macerated buttocks, she thrusting her wived parts onto the pleasuring anonymous gentlemen who treated her with such obvious' contempt, oh the montage a masterpiece too.
Then they had the morning she had passed with the machine tool.
Martha saw Viney, her lovely husband, First he was unfaithful to her with a tittering vicious child and a mature lady. Then he did other things. Then things were done to him. And then she was seized with an odd strangling spasm that caught her somewhere around her abused womb and climbed into her pointing breasts and warmed her as she saw her spouse so bright and clear transformed into a rosy pretty plaything for two great fuckers with bass voices who plowed and plowed his shaved tail. Beyond proper reactions she let out a bellow of laughter which was caught up in the general mirth. The salle was filled with animal brays, hoots, snorts, high cries and belches of approval.
At the interval, the most complete silence reigned.-Then there was the swish of the heavy curtains, ropes wrenched them up and away, and the stage was an oblong of light and a slabby black altar and nothing else.
So Magnum led them on, the gold-gowned sacrificial pair, Viney" and Martha, and still there wasn't a sound, Then the Master withdrew and leant against the altar. The two creatures, gaudied for the ceremony, turned and looked at each other for the first time in a week of torments. Without a word (the silence was too complete for their drugged voices to have broken it) they moved into each other and kissed like lovers on a tapestry. Their embrace Was long and almost statuesque. Feet could be heard drumming from a back row.
Then Magnum regained the spotlight, his face glistening with happy sweat, and he had pushed them softly apart and was leading them towards the marriage block.
His voice rang out powerfully.
"Do you, Martha Gaynor, take this man to be your lawfully bedded wife?"
"Do you, Viney Gaynor, take this woman to be your lawfully bedded man?"
There was no need of responses. The hall was swept by a great gale of joy.
Attendants moved out of the wings and their two glittering garments fell to the stage-floor.
The man was shaven over the entirety of his body and wore a filled bouncy brassiere strapped to his breast. His body cringed a little under the glaring waves of light. The woman (woman?) had a tight bandage round where her titties should have been, a flatness of bosom, like an athlete's careless scarf, and from those thighs jerked and swayed an enormous dildo.
"The nuptial rites will be celebrated now," said a foghorn voice, dying out in sad vibrations over the immense packed hall.
Viney got down onto the bed which had been wheeled on while the announcement was made. Got down as if he had been schooled and whipped into this particular lesson. Got down with his whitened posterior shimmering up into the spotlight.
Martha slapped her thigh and the belted organ, distended as a French loaf, quivered. Then she walked over to those shifting feminine buttocks, rose up on the slanted bed, and steered her new sex into her husband with a firm hand. Her loins started to whip against his and he Was groaning into the conveniently placed microphone. His supplications could be heard all over the house, a very good wiring job.
An hour later, Magnum came quietly towards the front of the stage. The curtains swished together behind him, concealing the bucking pair, sobbing Viney, simpering Viney, raping Martha, Martha triumphant.
"Eh bien," he said. "The show's over for tonight. Everyone back to Bed." And, at the mention of that word, all his purchased monsters paled and, one by one, retired to their cells.
