It's too late now to scream. Too late to struggle. Too late for anything. It's all decided. There's no going back.
I lie here helplessly, stripped naked, chained to a bed, in an alien state, in a foreign country, four thousand miles and five years from home.
There's nothing I can do. Nothing I can do any more. No way of turning back the clock.
I'm theirs. Completely theirs. Entirely in their power. All three of them. Not one of them I could say no to.
All three could have me, all three would take me-separate or together. Tonight they'll have their way. Tonight I'll finally surrender. Tonight they'll take me, and one of them will have me and there'll be no undoing it.
Why have I let it happen this way? Why did I ever get started? Five years since I first lost my head; two years since I let them take me away from America where life was safe and my future secure. Two years they've had me here now in this country where the plumbing is bad and the telephones don't work and the natives claim to speak no English. Two years in the city of sin and temptation. Two years of desire and degradation. Two years at their mercy, at everyone's mercy.
They're here now, all three of them and there's nothing I can do. I'm powerless. I can't resist them. No one can. They can buy anyone, charm everyone, get their way with anything.
And they're here now, all three. I can't struggle and I can't scream. The tall one pulls the gag from my mouth, then stuffs it in with his fist and I don't even have the strength to bite. The worldly one unties my wrists but holds them in his powerful grasp so that I can't push back. The third one unties my ankles and starts spreading my legs, spreading them wider and wider and forcing my knees up and my thighs up until I lie entirely exposed, entirely defenseless in front of them.
They paw me shamelessly. One tweaks my breasts. Another bites at my nipples. One forces a brutal hand up into my cunt. One tries to tear me apart at the buttocks. My mouth is forced open; I clench my jaws but fingers press at the hinge and force them apart. There's something between my lips, something long and hard, thick and rounded at the tip, firm and intrusive, gagging and choking, being forced in deeper and deeper. I know what it is but pretend that it can't be. I want to bite down hard but I'm mortally afraid. I'm gagging for breath. I thrash with my shoulders to try and break away.
My legs flail and kick but it's hopeless. I'm held too tight and my legs are spread too wide and there's someone between my thighs, pushing my knees apart with all his strength and tearing me open and preparing his way and then he drives in, drives in against my will, in against my resistance, in without mercy, deeper and deeper, right up to the hilt, tearing me and bruising me and making the flesh tear and the tissues bleed. He's upon me. His weight is on me. He's driving me down-crushing me, pushing me, breaking me, mauling me. One sits on my face and squashes me: coarse hair in my mouth, coarse hair in my nostrils, human sweat and human desire breathing into me, a massive gag choking me to the roof of my mouth.
I can't move anything except my hips. I can just move my hips, twisting them and turning them from side to side. But it doesn't help. The more I move the more I help them; the more I struggle the deeper they get; the more I squirm the stronger their passions.
They're pulling at me now, all three together. Pulling me over on my side. Still holding me as they've held me before. One still inside me between my thighs. One still on my face, gagging me in the throat. And, now they've turned me and one of them is on my back, tearing my thighs apart from the back, parting my flanks, digging in.
Oh God! Oh God!
They're tearing me apart. They have no mercy. They all want me. All three of them. All three together and each for himself. Oh God! Oh God! What can I do? How did I ever get here?
He's in me now. He's rammed me from the back. He's tearing into my gut. He has no shame. He's ripping the tender skin with his cleaver. He's raping me, deep inside me. They're ramming me, all three of them.
God, Oh God! Holy Jesus! Holy Mother of God! Save me! I'm being choked. I'm being killed. Don't they have one spark of decency? Isn't there any way to escape from this nightmare? Why are they all after me? Why all three of them? Wouldn't one have been enough? What can I give to three? What have I done to them? Why have I deserved this?
No! NO! NO!
But I can't scream.
And three men are on top of me and raping me and degrading me. One between my thighs ramming me with his prick, pushing it in and out without letup, without thought for me. One is on my face, sitting on me, choking me with his weight, strangling me with his massive penis that's pushed right against the back of my throat. One is humping me from the back, driving his cock into my back, up to the hilt, up to my guts, tearing me apart.
I'm bleeding all over-where they've torn into me and scratched at my skin and beaten me and bitten my skin. I'm broken entirely, not a bone left that's whole-shattered and torn by their lusts and their passion.
God! God! Make them stop! Make them stop!
But there's no stopping them now. Not even God can stop them. God won't stop them. Not now. Not after what I've done. And they're right in a way. They were right to do this after what I've done to them. They all want me and I didn't dare stop at one. I encouraged them all and now they're all after me and all on top of me and all together tearing me to pieces, each wanting me, each having me. God! God!
I can't take any more of this. I can't take it. I'm going to die. I'm going to explode. I'm bursting. I'm being torn apart. And they won't even listen to me. They just go faster, and faster, and faster. Until I'm ready to burst. They're out of control. The whole world is out of control and I'm going with it, torn into a thousand pieces. God! God!
And suddenly they all burst together. Shattering me and splattering me. Drowning me in their flow. Choking me, strangling me, killing me. I'm bleeding all over, flooding all over, oozing all over, coming all over and nothing I can do to stop them from having their way.
And they've had their way, all three, and as quick as they've come they've gone. Gone and left me. Left me entirely alone, sobbing and gasping and bleeding and oozing.
There's no one to comfort me, no one to soothe me. My flesh is burning and my tissues bleeding. My mouth is open, gasping for breath. My hands reach down between my thighs to try and staunch the flow. They come away wet, dripping wet, oozing wet. I try to caress the pain, the ache, the agony that's burning down there. My hand is in there, two hands are in there, to stroke and caress and to ease away the pain.
And I sob with the memory of what has just passed and sob at the thought of what is to come. I sob and I thrill to the pain and the ache that awaits its fill. I ache for the pain and fulfillment. I ache for the reality that is to come.
My hands come away from my bleeding crack. I press them to my lips. I smell them. I look at them. They're wet it's true, glistening wet, but not wet with blood nor wet with come. Wet only with me. Wet only from me. Wet from desire, wet for longing, wet from waiting, wet from burning in ache for him to come. Wet for the one who's to come, who's to take me, who's to love me. The one of the three that will have me. The one of the three that I want for tonight and tonight and for every night. I can't wait. Make it quick. Oh be quick. Come to me now.
And here he is now, coming to me, coming to my bed. His glorious self. His wonderful self. A Greek god of a lover, a man just for me, a boy of a man and a man of a boy. I love that man, I love him, I do.
I laugh and he laughs and he runs and he jumps and he's right next to my bed and on me to hug. "Oh, honey!" I moan, so glad that he's here, so relieved it's all over, that I'm safe with him now.
"Oh Cathleen!" he says, and it's love in my ears.
Then he straightens by my side and I see him full height and his prick is full size, standing proud, standing firm. What a prick! What a prick! What a wonderful prick!
And all mine to take. Priapus himself with a wonderful prick. Priapus himself, my own beautiful god.
They used to have streets like that in every Greek town. A whole street of gods, all with stone pricks. Imagine a street lined with statues of him, a whole line of pricks, a whole line of gods, my lover in row upon row upon row.
But the Greeks only had stone and I have the real thing to love. Oh love! Oh love! I love him, my man. I wouldn't trade him for any god or any statue. Or any Greek for that matter. They weren't that hot, either. There's a vase I saw once-at the Louvre it must have been-with Greek maidens playing about with dildos. "An abandoned maiden with olisbos" the catalog says and what it means is she was abandoned by her lover and had to console herself with a poor leather whang of a substitute. Poor Greek maiden, poor young girl on an oinochoe holding an olisbos with which to dildo-diddle her abandoned cleft while her man was off somewhere playing with the boys. At least she had an olisbos which is more than Lysistrata and her sisters had-the silly Greek maidens who went to war against love with their men, without first laying in their stock of hard dildos. Foolish Greeks, foolish girls.
But I've got my dildo. My own, very own dildo. My own olisbos. My own Priapus. The very real thing. Real flesh and blood, his wonderful prick. His fat brown stubby cock. His chewable, juiceable, kissable cock. My own olisbos, my very own.
My own, right now.
I won't hold back. I can't hold back. My mouth gapes wide, I turn on my side, I turn to him, I swallow his cock. His lovely cock. His juicy morsel. I stifle, I gasp. The roof of my mouth is touched to its very womb. I am filled with his cock. The tip of his cock is at my tonsils. I run trills down its shaft with my tongue. Oh, so soft and so silky and yet manly and bold. And I'm tilled, all of me. I'm a mouth, a big mouth, a vase, a jug that holds the fill of my love.
One moment I've been carried away by my excitement, building up in my excitement, losing all reason. Nothing is rational. I am entirely abandoned to the sexual passion. The present is obliterated-even the present reality of the present fuck-and wild fantasy takes over. My mind goes wilder, reels, rises, floats away. Any moment, I think, my senses will take leave of my body. And then....
And then: calm, repose, self-control, logic. I become perfectly aware of everything that goes on around me. With heightened awareness I become aware, too, of everything that goes through my mind I am an outside observer, totally uninvolved, yet with complete access to everything going on inside. I am omniscient.
I observe myself here, slightly chilled, naked, and raised on one elbow to the height of his cock which is now deeply implanted between my happy lips. I feel joy, a multiple joy. There's joy for my observing self, somewhat outside of me over to my right and slightly above, and that observing self rejoices at the joy that is experienced by the participant self down there on the bed, through imparting joy to the object of its love.
All cocks are delicious, but this one produces raptures. The texture, first and foremost: soft and silken, overlain with slippery slitheriness. Soft lips sliding over soft skin while that skin is itself slowly and gently gliding on its own shaft. What delights for the lips! There is nothing mortal lips can touch that is half a patch on a rampant phallus. The lips themselves become detached, a soft, foamy cushion of sensations, suffused by tender wisps of touch; light and frothy which no souffle, no creme, no culinary delight by the most accomplished chef, could match.
And hard underneath it is joy number two: the rigidity, the firmness, the arrow-straightness of it all, directed against me, right into me and through me, impaling me at any opening I choose to present. It is miraculous this hardness; what was once so soft and play-inviting-almost pity-evoking-a toy, suddenly becomes engorged and round, firm, straight and proud. This is the miracle whereby a woman makes a man of a boy, again and again, a proof and a test of her power.
And joy number three? Why, joy number three is the capital, the crown, the tip of his prick. Pulpy and soft and slightly smothering, slightly spongy-a texture like nothing else in the world, quite different from the soft silkiness of the skin of the shaft. The sensation lies not so much in the surface texture as in the shape and the underlying resiliency. The shape I think of as best described by its action, its sound: gulluph-mm. It starts off stubby, then eases to let it slide, then enlarges again to the wide and flaring rim, a temporary resister to deeper intromission. But once the opening has enlarged, once that rim has been admitted, there comes the happy, easy rush of non-resistance. Ph-mm. Lips or vulvae relax. The point has been make, the apex admitted. Gulluph-mm. And as it comes out again, gulluph-mm. First distension, then slide, then last minute reluctance to let go, then ph-mm. Relax. How delightful that firmness, that pliant resiliency underneath that most remarkable of shapes. In out, in out, just the shape could be its own delight.
Not that I would ignore the surface texture. Like manna it adapts itself to any purpose or desire. Firm, ridged and rough when dry; smooth, slippery and creamed when moist. It can be distended, engorged, bursting red; it can be soft and gentle and light as a dumpling. It can glide or it can rasp; the choice is mine. On this, the most remarkable instrument possessed by man, I, woman, play the tune according to my mood or wishes.
Joy number four is the prodding, the ramming, the filling. Take it all or take a part. Caress the tip or swallow the stem. Variety itself is a joy, the capacity to take it is a joy. The joy of being choked and breathing free, the desire for more and the desire to let go. The pleasure of being reduced to nothing but an enveloping mouth, an adjunct to a penis, a mouth to a prick, a woman to a man. To be nothing by herself or to herself but to hold and contain-and by virtue of this fact to be, to be and to love.
These are the joys of the woman on this couch. These are the joys that I from above can watch. These are my joys. Call me Fellatrice, a nice Italianate name, fit for an opera: Fellatrice di l'Anima-amore.
And I, being calm and above it all, watching and observing from above, decide that this woman needs more. Though the one there below could suck and lick and suck and lick indefinitely, oblivious to the tired aches of jaw and tongue and lips, this one above, who watches calm and uninvolved, has decided that her mouth deserves rest. Let him do the work from now on. Tonight, my lover, you'll fuck me.
A final pull. A last gulluph-mm, drawn out rather sadly; and with a last final flourish, a last joyful and triumphant ph-mmm, it is out, waving undecidedly in front of her mouth. The jaws relax, the lips formed into a pout. The preliminaries are over. My head falls back on the sheet. My legs are parted, my knees are raised.
He stands above me, towering at my side, all one-hundred-and-sixty-six pounds of him, ramrod straight, proud in his nakedness. And then he's up, a hand each side of my shoulders, his knees between my thighs raised high, kneeling, waiting for the signal in my eyes.
I leave my perch and re-enter my earthly body at the very moment that he enters too. A perfect introduction.
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CHAPTER ONE
One thrust and he's in. Pause. Then he pushes rhythmically forward, hinged from the waist and with elbows like struts to keep me from his crushing weight, three lunges in and three lunges out while I raise my hips and tilt my pelvis, three times up to meet him, and three times down to free him. It's a little ritual of ours, adjusting the fit, making sure it's in well, round peg perfectly centered in oval slot. Bull's-eye; we're right on the target. Smile and relax.
We've made it again, the mechanism still works, the magic is still there. Pause.
"Hello!" he says to me with his eyes. "Hello!" say I with mine.
I purse my lips, he purses his, they meet, open, tongues dart. He relaxes his arms as I crush his weight to my breasts.
How wonderful! How wonderful a man! A man all mine. Mine to hold and to love and to fuck.
Strange to think how much a man can mean. Strange to think of the time when there was no man in my life.
Not so many years after all. When I was eighteen I still hadn't had one, didn't know what a man meant or why. A man was something to end up with when you're grown up, something that would make strange changes in your life, give you a new name, a new ring, a new personality. A man turns a girl into a woman and a woman into a mother. A man is the end of childhood and the beginning of resignation.
And there was Cathleen, all of eighteen, never been properly kissed (and certainly not improperly) desiring a man and not knowing what she wanted, Catholic Cathleen, in mortal fear of mortal sin, afraid of the good sisters and afraid of the good fathers and afraid of her mother.
Afraid of herself.
Afraid of a man, every man, any man.
But most of all, afraid of herself.
A freshman in college, safe with the sisters where no man but the priests might enter to threaten. Safe until her roommate, Millie, had introduced her to her brother, an end tackle not twenty miles away at the men's college, a gorgeous hunk of a man with a cracked tooth in a cracked smile, so big and strong and so gentle and soft besides. Chuck McKenna, Chuck the end, the living end. The first man who'd ever stirred her-there. Chuck whom she'd watched and admired from the bleachers after Millie pointed him out to all the girls, for whom she'd blushed when they shook hands before they all went off together to the local watering hole for hot chocolate and yummy layer cake with frosted icing and all the trimmings, whose big powerful knee had brushed hers under the marble slab of the table.
She'd withdrawn, disturbed and unsure, but his knee had followed and again they touched and she drew away still further. But then he smiled. He opened his lips just a little, a cracked, uneven lick of a little, set in a trusting boyish face. And his eyes had smiled, a trusting smile, and his hand reached out and pressed her hand on top of the table and then, not knowing what she did, she had pressed her knee back, ever so slow, ever so timid, trembling and fearing that perhaps when it got where his knee ought to be it would be gone.
But it wasn't and she pressed his hand in full view while her knee pressed his where no one could see. And as she pressed she knew she had sinned for no mortal can aspire to such an overwhelming sense of rapture without sinning, and she knew it was the Devil himself, for who but the Devil could make a girl blush like that? And like it, too.
Everybody must be watching her. All the tweedy collegiates and all their friends. Everyone in the drugstore. They must know what was going on between her and the man whose hand she clasped, must know whom she pressed under the table, must know how she felt in her privates, her secrets that showed on her face as plain as you'd wish for all to see, her shame her sin, her secret exposed.
She was sweating. She wanted to let go his hand but he held too tight. She wanted to pull away her knee but she couldn't; her knee it was that pressed too tight. And in her groin, her secret place, such a twitching, such an itching, such a sweating, such a heat. She thought she'd piss in her pants. She felt wet. She thought they'd all see the drops forming on the floor into a puddle. She blushed and froze and all her perspiration turned to clammy cold, even down there. To clammy cold, to pricking icicles, digging into her, hanging from her lips and brows and digging into her. Icicles....
She pulled herself up. "I'm sorry, got to go." And she was gone with a hundred pairs of eyes on her, to the powder room where she burst into the first free stall with bladder bursting and passages burning, relieving herself of the pressure and the shame.
At the basin she splashed cold water on herself. Her eyes, when she dared look in the long ornate mirror, were red and-rimmed with guilt. Cold water. Icy water. Wash it away, for shame.
She had come back to the table at last, convinced that she was being stared at and laughed at, mocked and pitied and shunned. Her chair was still vacant, right opposite Chuck, but she couldn't go back there. "I'll just sit here at the edge of the table if you don't mind because I have to go soon if anyone can offer me a ride I'd be very happy and I'm sorry to be leaving so soon I don't want to be a party-pooper but I've really got to go there's a paper I have to hand in and I haven't even started and my French too so if anyone is driving back now I'd be awfully glad if they'd give me a ride if you don't mind, it was really nice seeing you all."
All in one breath to hide her shame with a torrent of words. Amy, good old Amy, offered to leave. Cathleen rushed her good-byes and left at a near-run and didn't speak a word the whole ride back.
There she was now in her room, the books piled in front of her dissolving into strings of letters that she couldn't form into words. She felt hot in the cold November night and she threw open the window (with the shades down) but the heat persisted. She took off her sweater but she was still hot. She turned off the light and took off her skirt but she was still burning. She took off her blouse, her shoes, her garter belt, her petticoat. She sat down on her bed and pulled off her panties. She was still hot, but now the burning seemed to come from inside her. It had become so strong that she felt she might die. Realizing now that the sensation was coming from between her legs, she pressed her thighs together to smother the fire. It was useless; there was a roaring in her groin, and, moaning, she rubbed her legs together. Her body fell backwards on the bed, and her hand, drawn like a moth to the flame in her loins, moved over her stomach and through the tangled patch of hair. One finger poked down to seek out the small protuberance below. She gasped and began to stroke it with a gradually accelerating rhythm.
She continued caressing the bud of her clitoris with one hand while the other explored her breasts, first one and then the other, stroking and kneading. And while she burned down there, a burning that no amount of massage would relieve and no amount of massaging of her breasts would ease, she knew she was burning, burning in hell, but she couldn't stop, wouldn't stop, far better to burn in the future than to burn now. Better one fear in hell than one terror now. Better one hand in the bush and her hand went in, exploring the cleft she had always so carefully tried not to touch even when bathing. Her hand palpitated all the mysterious folds, raising her heat even further, an unbearable heat, a fire bound to explode, that had to explode, that had to be satisfied. One finger found the opening to her vagina and then another and another. And so she stroked and pulled and teased, one hand on the clit and three fingers up the twat (for she knew the names that she'd never dared utter but now that was all lost anyway, she might as well use the words that so fitly described her unspeakable self) and her body heaved and her lips moaned. She was about to burst. She dreaded it, she knew it would happen and she prayed it would, if only to release her from her torment-but nothing happened. She didn't burst, her torment was still with her. She wanted to bite herself, to scourge herself, to scream and to burst and she almost did but then, once again, she didn't, she couldn't. So she had to keep on massaging and rubbing to ease her passions.
And then she knew. She knew what she knew she had known all the time. Only a man would cure her. Only a man could do for her what she needed to have done. Only a man could satisfy her and release her. If sin she must, sin she would to have a man. A man to hold to her breasts. A man to embrace. Chuck McKenna to love and to kiss. She pressed her knees together, squeezing tightly on her active hands, squeezing tightly on her aching parts. Squeezing, squeezing. The knee was not hers but Chuck's and inside her she had not her fingers, not even Chuck's finger but Chuck's....
She couldn't bear to face the word even in thought. But she knew what she wanted even though her fervid imagination distorted the object of her longing. A man's organ she needed. She saw it like a dog's: pointed, glistening, pulsating, red. Darting inside her where her fingers were now. Obscene and disgusting, a darting spear, a dagger digging into her, stab-stab-stabbing her. The Devil's own spear, the only thing that could allay her fire.
But all she had to put in there were her fingers and her fingers could afford her no relief that night.
She crawled under the sheets at last, exhausted but unsatisfied, only moments before Millie returned. She fell into a troubled sleep, waking up repeatedly, burning, shamed, startled and shocked; and each time she woke her hand was busy in her cleft, and each time she drew it away guiltily. She finally placed her hands firmly under her pillow to keep them from her sin but they kept working their way out of this unnatural position as she tossed and turned, and each time she woke there they were again.
She was too sick next morning to get up-feverish, her head thick, her stomach sick. And just as well, for tomorrow was Sunday, and Sunday was Church, and Church was Mass, the Body and the Blood and since she could neither accept the wafer nor reject it, bed was the best place to be. Poor little Cathleen, so full of guilt, so completely lost, so full of sin and shame and lust and ignorance. The one thing that could have made her happy was to be full of man, but she didn't know or didn't admit, and didn't dare. Poor little Cathleen, so long ago, a stranger to me now, stranger by far than this man in me now, in me now, in my belly, at my womb, push it in, do it now, in me now.
And in and out and ... slowly now. Don't rush, it's smooth. In and out like a practiced oarsman, long sweeping action from the tips of his toes to the tip of his nose. A slightly rolling motion as his muscles ripple wave-like, up one leg through the thigh and pelvis to his shoulder, with a twist to the straight column of his proud neck turning his head so his nose brushes mine, then rippling wave-like down the other shoulder down through his waist and torso to the toes where the motion transfers its waves back to the other leg.
And as his hips rock in the waves they impart a twisting, yawning motion to my thighs. I rock on my butt, from right to left, and I twitch in my twat, grabbing his cock in my lock, in a circular twist hinged on my butt, a circle of cunt impaled on cock, going round, gently round, gripping tight, letting go.
A long lithe greyhound loping through the grass; a fast sleek swordfish cutting through the waves: a streamlined swan swathing its wake; a diving cormorant impaling its prey-that is my love as he gently moves his limbs, moving me, moving him, moving us. Fast and clean and light and free; his skin sweeps over mine, his muscles over mine, his shaft into me, in and out, around and around. I concentrate on the myriad pleasures and sensations on skin and in bone, on legs and in breast, on thigh, on hip and, above all, right in the cunt. I feel each side, each fold, each lip of the labia, feel his short curling hairs, feel the pressure on the mound, the rub against bone, fee; each stab into the dark, the tip gliding in, gliding out: gulluph-mm, gullump, the shaft, the cap, the firm, the soft. Feel it in and feel it out. Feel it as it goes around and around at the top of the stroke, going round with the knees and the thighs and the hip. It's so good on the clit, so good, so good.
And then ... slow!
Slow down, my lover, slow down. We have all the time in the world. Don't waste it now, don't spill, don't rush. Slow and keep it in. Don't come too soon. How sad to come too soon.
Harold, poor Harold, how he suffered! So soft, so kind, so lost like a child when he lost his seed. Couldn't hold it in, not his love for me and not his guilt for his sin that his father dinned in. Not a man for himself but what his father said he could.
Fathers murder their sons, Doctor Freud; you and Sophocles have it all wrong. Indict Laius, not Oedipus. Fathers are jealous of their sons. Fathers create sons in their own image and when they grow up and out and seek independent existence, kill them.
Our Father which art in Heaven. O Jesus, O Jesus Christ, a man trying to spread the message. Son of God who dared to be like His Father. Forgive us thy trespasses, O Father, for Thou hast trespassed against us. For God so good gave us His only Son Jesus-and took him away again in jealous rage.
Poor Jesus! Poor Harold! Son of a father whose word was power, robbed of his potency by the potency of his father. Did God rob Jesus of His power? Could the love of a woman have saved Jesus as the love I had for Harold saved Harold? I have saved Harold by loving him. I recreated him in the image of man that God had intended for him. My love has made Harold into a man, virile Harold, handsome Harold, Harold who knows how to fuck-at last!
I met Harold through Roger and I met Roger through Paul. I'd walked into this dive with Paul, expecting to find Virginia, and Paul said, one of his favorite catch phrases, "Christ! What sort of a joint do you call this?" Long pause. ("Putting Jesus back into Jeepers," he calls it. "Use not the Lord's name in vain but if you've used it, then by Christ! you'd better make good use of it.") And the punch line to that particular one was: "As Saint Joseph said in his carpentry shop, surveying his son's first attempts to put a chair together."
It really was one hell of a joint. "Au Plumassier" it was called for no reason I could ever figure out. It was a combination bar, dance hall place, room for perhaps a dozen dancers and a dozen tables, with a half-dozen whores always at the bar. I don't know why it became popular with our particular circle, the non-conforming anti-nonconformist expatriates. I think it was the air of genuine decadence, because it was precisely the sort of place it was expected to be, smoky, garlicky, boozy, very French, thick with genuine "atmosphere," thick enough that is to draw a limited group of Americans and other foreigners with perverse tastes and yet not enough to attract a crowd and spoil it. Virginia liked it because anything might happen to her there and often did, and when it did she could feel safe knowing she could always count on at least one friend being there.
I wanted to get Paul and Ginny together. This was about two months, perhaps three, after Paul and I had become lovers; I'd been planning for quite a while to get them together but Ginny at this time was seldom home. Then Paul was away on an assignment in Berlin for a week and he came back suddenly just while I was having my period. It seemed as good an evening as any to get him and Virginia together. Except for the fact that I couldn't find her in any of the usual places, not even at the Plumassier. There wasn't anyone I knew from the regular crowd either. But Paul, who'd never heard of the place, recognized someone he did know. "It's Roger!" he said, advancing on a conspicuously well-dressed man sitting at a table with an American tourist and a marcelled girl. "By Christ, Roger, what the fuck brings you here?"
Roger half rose in greeting, introduced his friends and beckoned with his hand to another couple dancing a few feet away. "I'm showing them the town," he explained and winked.
"Looks like you've come to the right place. Going to get any action out of it? How come you don't have a girl on your lap yet?"
Roger curled up his nose. "From here? Not my type."
"No such thing, Roger. They're all your type."
"Too much clap around."
The American couple gazed at the three of us open-mouthed. They'd come for atmosphere and they were getting it.
"Since when does a little bit of clap scare you? Look, if you're worried, why don't you try my girl? She's clean. Guaranteed." He squeezed my bust to prove something.
"You haven't introduced me yet."
"Oh, hell, I forgot. I don't even remember her name. Doris, Dora, something like that. She's Dutch. Hardly speaks any French. They won't give her a permit to work so she's happy to turn a trick for anyone."
Roger said, "Enchante," and smiled. The Americans both showed their teeth, reached out their hands and said, "Delighted to meet you."
I smiled back.
"Why don't you take her out on the dance floor?" Paul suggested. "You can feel her up as much as you want. Find out if she's your type. I'll entertain your friends while you're gone."
I was beginning to enjoy the joke. Partly because sooner or later I always get to enjoy Paul's jokes and partly because of the American tourists. They were so much like the people I'd left back home, so much like the people I'd have been associating with if I'd stayed, that it felt as if I was spitting into the teeth of all the petty nasty narrow-minded middle-Western memories I was trying to shuck off. When Roger held out his hand I gave him a silly smile, got up with a suggestive waggle that snaked from my rump to my breasts, and joined him on the floor. Roger was really a cipher for me. I didn't care whether I pleased him or teased him. He was too polished-not really a person, not someone I could either like or despise.
He held me tight but I held him tighter. He was rather a good dancer but I didn't give him much of a chance to prove it. I stuck my thigh right into his groin and I could feel his prick stiffen almost immediately so that he had to slow his dancing and limit his movements.
"Vous etes un homme formidable," I told him with what I hoped was enough of a Teutonic accent to hide my American one.
He beamed and drew me tighter.
I released my right hand from his waist and let it wander down his buttocks, squeezing. I could feel his prick pushing harder.
"Vous avez une machine la-bas," I said. "Un canon. Une Grande Bertha."
I don't think this sort of thing had ever happened to him before. "Vous "etes tres jolie," he said, which sounded rather lame under the circumstances.
"Vous etes Americain?" I asked.
"Oui."
"Richie?"
"Assez."
"Bon. J'aime les Americains. Vous surtout."
I put my hand on his trouser leg and started feeling his prick through the fabric. He bent down to try and kiss me. I drew my face away as if in disgust.
"No," I told him in French. "I don't kiss people. Only very good friends."
"Aren't we friends enough?
"Not yet." And I smiled at him to suggest that my friendship could be obtained if he went about it in the right way.
He started making conversation, plying me with questions. Where was I from, what was I doing, how had I come here, how had I met Paul and so on. I told him I was from Nijmegen, that I'd been married to a Belgian who'd abandoned me with a child that I'd had to put in an orphanage and that I'd come to Paris looking for the kid's father.
"And Paul, how did you meet him?"
"On the Boulevard des Batignolles. He stopped to speak to me and invited me for a meal. He bought me these clothes too; do you like them? He's very nice your friend, tres gentil, and he likes me to be good to his friends. Do you like me?"
He indicated he did. It was getting hard for him to speak. From his sense of agitation and from the feel of his prick through his pants, I realized I was going too far and too fast for the moment. I didn't want him to spoil everything by coming then and there on the dance floor.
"I'm thirsty," I told him. "Let's go back to the table to meet your friends."
He seemed both reluctant and relieved as I led him, hobbling awkwardly with his massive protrusion, back to the table. The other American couple had already sat down. They were almost completely indistinguishable from the first couple.
"That's a crazy girl you've brought along," Roger whispered to Paul, just loud enough for me to be able to hear. "First thing she did when she got me on the dance floor was make a dive for my prick."
"You don't have to whisper. She doesn't understand a word of English, do you, cocksucker?" The last words were addressed directly to me. I smiled back at Paul and then at Roger as if I took the words for the supreme compliment.
"She's a little weak in the head and soft in the twat," Paul continued. "But her heart's in the right place. What did she do? Blow you?"
"Are you crazy? On the dance floor?"
"I've known her to try it. She does better sitting on a barstool, though. You ought to try her."
The four tourists were staring at us, from Paul to Roger to me, with undisguised amazement and not a little excitement.
"She'll do anything for a piece of cock," Paul continued. "Wouldn't surprise me if she made a grab for your fly right under the table."
I didn't grab Roger's fly, though. I grabbed that of the nearer of the two Americans. His cock was already hard, just from listening to the conversation. I undid the buttons easily and pulled it out. He started speaking, very rapidly, to cover up. Something about his hotel and the quality of the service and the rudeness of the cabbies. Every now and again he'd throw the conversation to his wife or girl friend or whoever she was, with a "Isn't that right, dear?" but she wasn't willing to assume the burden of the conversation and threw it back with a simple and authoritative, "Absolutely, just like that." My right hand was pumping away like crazy and my left hand was fingering my cigarette and all the time my face went around and around the table, smiling at each of the six Americans in turn, pretending to show my gratitude and appreciation for being allowed to sit in such wise and witty and distinguished company. After about four or five minutes my victim came; he held his hand in front of his face as he did so and pretend to collapse in a paroxysm of coughing that had everybody thumping him on his back and his wife trying to pour some Per-rier down his throat. I wiped my hand on his trouser leg and smiled prettily as I withdrew.
I was dying to share my amusement with Paul. Fortunately he invited me to dance almost right away and I was able to tell him. He thought it was a great joke. "Let's fix them all," he said.
"Would you like me to play with their wives, too?", "Hell, no. They don't deserve it. Besides, you'd never get through their corsets."
When we got back, Paul arranged for me to sit across from the other American. I had his prick out almost before I'd sat down, but I found it very hard to give him a stand. His wife was nuzzling him affectionately and that may have had something to do with it. But I managed in the end and I almost got him to come, too. Then suddenly he pushed my hand away, shoved his hard prick back into his fly and stood up. His face was white. "I have to run to the men's room," he announced quickly. "Don't feel well." And he hobbled off, to relieve himself in private I assume. His wife looked very concerned.
I winked at Roger. "Danseavec moi," I suggested.
He got up with alacrity. We danced for a few minutes while I groped for his prick, then I steered him into a corner of the bar, close to the piano. His prick was already well prepared. He sat on a barstool, I opened his fly, pulled out his prick and took it in my mouth. The pianist was playing blues, rather incompetently, for the benefit of the American guests. I sucked Roger's prick in time to the music. When I found it was too slow I rubbed the shaft in double time and eventually he came. I swallowed as much of his jism as I could and asked him for a handkerchief to wipe my hand and mouth. Then I helped him button his fly, gave him a quick peck on the mouth. He didn't seem very interested-probably revolted by his own taste. And we went back to the table.
I wasn't allowed to join in the conversation, of course-it was boring anyway-and I was getting desperate for something to do. Should I blow Paul next? Should I strip in the middle of the floor? Should I feel up the wives after all, despite Paul's warnings? I couldn't decide and filled in the time with vacuous smiles all around and an occasional foolish question in my "Dutch" French.
Suddenly I heard an unmistakable voice. Loud and unmistakable and inescapable.
"Cathleen!" it said. "Cathy! How long've you been waiting here?" I sunk my head between my shoulders and tried to disappear, hoping, hoping Virginia would ignore me but perfectly certain she wouldn't.
"Whassamatter, Cathleen, don't know me any more suddenly. Why, hello! Roger. Didn't know you and Cathleen knew each other."
Paul was laughing hysterically. Virginia looked around the table at the seven of us with a look of surprise and amazement, the look of someone who's walked in on a practical joke and doesn't quite know what to make of it. Roger was acting with aplomb.
"No, I didn't know her till this evening, I'm sorry to say, but we've already become fast friends. Very fast."
"Cathleen was practicing her French on us," Paul said. "I'm afraid she still has a very strong accent. Rather Dutch if you ask me."
"Do you really understand English?" the wife of the man who wouldn't let me jerk him off asked me solicitously. "I'm afraid we said some very unkind things about you."
"Not at all," I told her. "They didn't bother me. It's all true, anyway."
"Oh dear, I'm sure it couldn't be. You seem such a very nice girl."
Her husband coughed and looked at his watch. "It's getting rather late. We should be getting back to our hotel." Roger half rose. "No, don't bother," the husband continued. "We'll find our own way. We'll take a cab. With four of us they wouldn't dare overcharge."
The four of them shook hands very stiffly all around, left a generous tip under the ashtray and paid at the bar on the way out.
"Well, I hope we ruined some good business connections for you," Paul said to Roger after they'd gone.
"They're dispensable. And I was really very tired of them. They've been like leeches since they came."
"I brought Paul here to meet you," I told Virginia to change the subject. She knew all about Paul, of course, and my affair with him, and she'd been as eager to meet him as I'd been to get them together.
"Well, we've met at last. The great lover. The great joker. Can you live up to the buildup Cathleen's been giving you?" Ginny asked.
"He can live up to anything," Roger told her with obvious admiration for his friend.
We spent another couple of hours or so at the Plumassier, drinking and dancing and talking, and then we took a cab to Roger's apartment on the Avenue de Wagram. Roger, I had meantime discovered, was a charming, witty and erudite person. Seeing his apartment I learned that he was also wealthy and had impeccable taste. We had already more-orless paired off at the Plumassier and in the cab; when we got to his apartment there was no need to discuss arrangements. Roger showed Paul and Ginny into one of the bedrooms, then he led me to his own.
"I'm afraid you've got the worse part of the bargain," I told him as I was undressing. "I've got the curse and I'm bleeding like a pig."
"Do you mind screwing with the period?" he asked.
I confessed I'd never tried it. "Well, in that case, you're going to have a new experience. Only don't expect me to reciprocate what you did for me at the bar, Cathy. My tastes may be perverse but not that perverse."
He was a good lover, a competent lover, a considerate lover-if somewhat conservative. He didn't arouse my passions but he certainly excited my admiration. Roger is one of the finest men I know. A gentleman in the finest sense of the word. A man as close to perfection as it is possible to find. A man of even temper, of infinite patience, of unbounded goodwill. I've never stopped loving him.
I certainly couldn't be angry with Paul for having introduced us, nor could I be angry for the way he did it either. Paul has a perverse sense of humor; that's one of the things I love about him. Paul can get me to do anything in the world. He can make me a Cathleen that I couldn't recognize myself. That's another thing I'm grateful for. I don't become his creature, but at Paul's urgings I can become the deep down, earthy, sensual, sexy me that I crave to be. One day, perhaps, I'll have the strength to be myself even without him. But I probably won't. I'm too conservative, too middle-class, too American. Still, life with Paul has brought me a lot of fun.
He can be cruel too. He is cruel often without even realizing it, just in trying too hard with his jokes. Like the time Christine came to him for advice about an abortion. She was desperate and everyone knew that whoever the father was it wasn't her husband, the poor sad little poet. Paul, who never knows when a joke is out of place, said: "Holy Mary! What you gonna tell your husband?" Pause, tense pause, no one guessing what might come next, and then it came: "As the Archangel Gabriel asked in consternation."
Christine, pauvre Christine, burst into tears and two weeks later she was dead of a perforated womb and peritonitis.
O sainte Vierge qui a concu sans pecher, laisse moi pecher sans concevoir.
Holy Father, Holy Jesus, Holy Fisher of Men, how much hast Thou sinned by making us think it sin when we love! Why must we sin in loving? Why conceive in sin?
We love because we love. I love my man because he is my man, for this moment at least. I love him and only him and there is no one else in the world when I love him, not even God, for when I love him he is my God. I also want to love my child; I want to make my child in love and not in fear. How can I love my man when I fear my God? How can I love him when I fear a child? My love is a man and my man is a cock and his cock is inside me and please don't take it out!
Lord! Can I not love without fear? A child is love and you hang it over my love bed as a threat. Would you have me fear it and despise it even before I have conceived it because it spoils my love, the love with which Thou hast endowed me?
Did Harold's father hate him because he was conceived in the sin of wanting to withdraw and needing to leave it in, wanting to shoot, squirt all the way to the very last drop? Thus Harold was born, feared by his Pop, regretted by his Mom, the squirt of a moment to become the love of my life.
When I have a son he won't be an artist, a painter, a poet or a writer. He'll be a doctor, a scientist, an inventor. He'll invent a little pill and all the women in the world will take one on rising and another when they lay them down to fuck-and no one will ever fear again. Every woman who's swallowed my son's little pill will know for sure she can't conceive.
Joy! What a boon that will be for all mankind. Throw out the condoms, throw out the pessaries, good-bye the rush to the bidet. One pill and relax in love, the whole night through. And when you want a child, really want him, really want him now because the choice is yours, you take that other pill and make love with your husband, real love, both together, love for the child you'll create.
One miracle, Lord! Just one miracle.
Jesus Christ, what loving there'd be! "Jesus Christ, what a screw!" Paul again, irrepressible Paul. " 'Jesus Christ, what a screw!' as Mary Magdalen said, caressing the limp limb from which the soft warm fluid slowly oozed. 'That's not a screw,' He said, glancing down sadly from His cross. 'That's a bloody nail!' "
Forgive him, Father, forgive Paul for his blasphemies.
Paul is a lover. Paul is my lover. All men are my lovers but Paul is special. Jesus Christ, what a lover!
Jesus Christ. Could I love Jesus? Had I been Mary Magdalen, would I have loved Him? Would He have loved me?
I am a fishermaiden from the Sea of Gennesaret. My hair is dark and long, blowing in the wind, my eyes are deep and flash with fire. I have fished in the water and now I have done; my creels are full by my side. The sun is low, my shadows are long through the trees by the still water and I am weary and dusty. The water is cool. I dip in my feet, cast off my sandals, pull up my skirts and wade in deep. I throw myself in, plunge in, cool off. Caution to the winds, gown in the water. I cannot swim but I can dive. Cool. Fresh and cool. All toil forgotten.
And then to shore. My simple gown clings to my flesh, my thighs outlined in clinging cloth. My breasts stand firm, the nipples clear through taut gauze. Folds of fabric cling to my waist, grip my breast, outline my neck, mold my rump, sheathed in wetly. I run and I turn in the joy of my folds, catching the slanting sunbeams, holding the ripples from the lake. I turn and I prance and I glance and there's a man on the water, walking gently on the blue with the sun like a halo, a silver cloud around him chiaroscuroed on the skyline.
It's himself. Holy Jesus! Jesus Christ!
Right out of the pages of the family bible. Absurd! Gold-flaxen tresses down to his shoulders, long wispy beard, shoulders broad but soft, a gentle walk. Face pale, far too pale for this sun, and blue eyes, dark blue eyes, penetrating eyes, and the smile of a man who knows all but forgives.
He's moved out of the direct sun. His cloak has fallen and so has his robe, and his loin cloth if ever he had one, and he's a man, no question but he's a man. This is silly. It can't be Jesus. Jesus would never do anything like that. Besides, Jesus has been dead a long, long time. I want to ask him who he is and what he's doing there, and why he's looking at me like that, and how is it he has not a stitch of clothes on his back, or on his front where it's much more important. But the cat's got my tongue-which doesn't really matter since he has relieved me of the need to ask by asking first: "My daughter, my child, why are you so wet?"
His voice is like a breeze in the corn. I melt in his gaze. I lower my eyes to my shift, holding the edges in my hand. "Because I walked in the water instead of on it." Listen, mister, anyone who calls me a child will get me to talk like a child.
"That's why you got wet," He says. "But you are wet because you haven't taken off your clothes to dry in the sun."
"If I took them off, would you help me dry?" I ask roguishly and before I know it my clothes are strung on a branch of the trees and here I stand and he's right next to me with some sort of a veil, a very little veil, and he starts wiping me dry but he starts at my breast and you know I can't say no when you do that to me. I'm in His arms, in His radiance, then I'm down on the ground.
And we kiss.
Holy mackerel does he know how to kiss! Jesus Christ I am lost! I reach out my hand to touch him. He's circumcised, of course (St. Luke wouldn't lie). He's a man, not a doubt. And so gentle, a lamb of a man. In my arms, between my legs, in my body. Oh Christ! Oh Christ! It can't be! Son of God! Holy Mary, behold Thy Son! Hold me, hold me, fill me, love me! Blessed is He that enters and she that admits. Lord Jesus, I'm Thine, I'm Thine. The Holy Ghost be upon me, in nominepatris el filius et spiritus sanctus.
Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus-fucking-Christ!
God, forgive me! Father have mercy upon me! Lord forgive me for I have sinned. I have lechered. I have been wanton. I have been blasphemous. I have sinned.
But if I have sinned, this time in my thoughts, I have sinned for the greater love of Jesus, ad majorem Dei gloriam.
I hold my man to my breast. Man, son of man, now lying in my arms. Man who is boy and rises again in ever renewed miracle for the love of his woman, to be a man, into the fray once again, a man to love, a man for love.
CHAPTER TWO
My thoughts may have wandered but his hands have not been idle. One under my buttocks, one finger in my ear. That finger in my ear is a special matter, just a little finger, the littlest finger, digging gently inside. Sometimes, I swear, I come in my ears. Aural sex. A little finger, fingering inside or a pointed tongue tonguing me while I'm getting fucked, and when I come, I come not only in my cunt and at my clit and all over my body but right there, right inside my ear, in my cockleshell ear, going right through my head. Transport me to heaven and there I'll find me two cherubims to flutter on either side of my pillow, each equipped with the daintiest of pricks just big enough for me, one for each ear. Fuck me around and around, in and out of my ear, and I'll ask for nothing more.
He's doing it now, tongue-lapping my ear. I roll my head in delight. He's speared my ear. I pivot my head on his tongue to spread his pleasures to every part of my mind.
Do men have sensitive ears? I often doubt it. Did Beethoven? He was deaf. Peter llyich Tchaikovsky? Yes, but he had his problems trying to make it with women. Nicolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov? He claimed to be a lusty lover; did Sheherezade blow him in the ear? I fear it was all fantasy: Sheherezade could have been a Greek lad on a Turkish caique for Constantinople out of Sevastopol. Name me a composer who lusted for women: I'm counting on all ten of my toes. And haven't found one. Oh yes, there's Chopin, Frederic Francois, loving it up with Mme. Dudevant, six years his senior and passing by the name of George. What does that say about her? Was Mme. Sand his "English governess"? "Keep practicing those chords, Fre'deric, or you'll feel the slash of my whip." Poor Fre'deric Francois, poised over his polonaise (with his Francaise poised over her Polonais) hour after hour, fingering his exercises, composing mazurkas, gavottes, minuets and schottisches, not to mention sonatas, nocturnes and serenades.
If it was me I'd have him call me Charles. Charles Stone, firmer and more solid than Sand. "Frederic mon chou."
"Ouima folie."
"Frederic mon brave."
"Oui ma cherie!" He looks at me, devoted smile, craving approval. I have waited for this. Lash, slash, whip, smash. On his back and on his chest, deranging his pretty curls, slash, smash. "Dammit!" I yell. "Play on, play on!"
He cringes, the little boy. Sensitive boy with sensitive ears. A spaniel's ears and a spaniel's eyes, begging to be petted-or whipped. I chose the latter. I'll make a man of him yet. "My hands!" he begs. "My hands!"
"Fuck your hands," I say, lashing red welts on the white ivories. Fuck his hands indeed, the jerk-off artist. It's the only thing he fucks with any style. Fuck all the men who love their own hands more than they love me. Fuck all the men who love their sad little eyes, their sensitive ears, their puppydog tears. Fuck you and damn you, you pansy pianist, I'll make a man of you!
You need the whip, don't you? Say yes when I speak! Say yes and please call me madam. Crawl here on your knees, your hands held in prayer. Let's see your tongue, good dog, stick it here, right in here, get to work. I like golden curls brushing my thighs right inside my thighs. Golden spaniel, gold retriever. Point! Here's your bag, use your nose for the scent. Worry it with your jaws. Loll out your slobbering tongue. Grip with your teeth. Good dog, good puppy! Just there, right in there, hold it now, hold it!
Hold him by his ears so he won't get away. Sensitive ears pricked up for the hunt for the cunt, jug handles for me to apply him to me, to glue him to me till I come.
Pant, pant! Drool, drool! But all that I hold is his sensitive ears. Goddamm sensitized ears; I'd rather have cock.
There really was a piano player once, a year ago perhaps, after I'd got my own studio. Anonymous now, forgotten in far limbo. A long time ago. Not too long-for then I would have settled for anything, a virgin taking even crumbs. Nor recently, not after I'd met Harold, for by then I'd learned patience-and to be sensitive. A wishy-washy man, passionately impassioned with his own passions, he played pianissimo when I wanted fortissimo, flat when I wanted sharp. Gutless passes and murmured platitudes, grateful gratitudes when I admitted his existence. Hesitantly he puts an arm around my waist pretending it was casual so he could deny he'd intended anything if I brushed him away. Admiring my eyes with sheepish glances and stuttered words. Kissing my fingertips, that being the furthest he could get from where he wanted to go; I should have told him where those fingers spend eight hours of every night, soaking deep in quim juice. Would he have kissed them more enraptured had he known, or proceeded henceforth to my toes? After two hours of languorous glances I finally lose patience and turn to the attack, undo his fly, stroke his cock and scratch his balls. But even that's not enough; I have to personally pose the question.
"Would you like to sleep with me?"
Stammer. "I really shouldn't. I don't sleep comfortably except by myself."
"I don't mean to sleep. I mean to fuck." He's shocked by the term but when imprecision, as now, leads to confusion, I have no choice but to call a spade a fucking spade.
"I think...." he starts.
"Well, take your clothes off, then. It's rude to fuck all dressed." I shuck off my blouse, off with my skirt, down with my stockings and pants and all. And he....
He disappears and returns five minutes later from the bathroom, clothes folded neatly over his arm, towel around his pale-faced waist, shoes in hand. He selects a chair, lays out his clothes, hangs up his coat, puts the shoes by the bed, takes out the arch support and lays them upside-down at their sides, left by left shoe, right by right, straightens the laces, straightens up, crawls under the sheet, fumbles and gropes and throws out the towel. He kisses me hard, breathing hard and perspiring on me while I stroke his prick back to life. And in a leap he's out of the bed.
I'd been keeping back my laughter but I suspected it showed. Now I feel instant remorse. But no, he had a specific purpose in mind. With prick wrapped again in towel he paddles up to the chair, lifts his pants, extracts his billfold, replaces the pants, all neat and square. Extracts a package and closes the billfold, replacing the billfold, then replacing the pants. Then opens the package, extracts a smaller one, extracts the billfold to replace the package, returns the billfold and replaces the pants.
Surrealist landscape, Dadaesque doddery, is he crazy or am I? No, poor man, he's super-efficient. He opens the smaller package and removes small object. I squint and then smile. It's an article sanitaire en caoutchouc or capote anglaise, which is funny in itself since it's a French letter to the English. I pretend not to peep as the stretches and pulls, examining minutely. He blows into it, then twists its neck and examines again millimeter by millimeter to make sure there's no room for one sperm to emerge-or one spirochete to intrude. And suddenly he rolls it up again and I think, God! now he'll put it away in the package in the billfold in the pants on the chair and start all over again until he finds one he likes, but, Merciful God! this one will do. He lifts up the towel and spreads the rubber slowly like a salesman in a Fifth Avenue glove store, easing it gently and smoothing the wrinkles; thank God his prick is still stiff or he'd never have done it. But it's on and he's cellophane-wrapped, daintily sanitary packaged, and I wait.
I'm a bitch. Why do I do this? What did I want from the poor man for a start? Not desire, for sure. A wish to become closer to an accomplished and vaguely famous musician. I'd allowed him to escort me home because I enjoyed his gallant manner and I encouraged him to stay because I was intrigued to see what would happen and how. But now he's turned absurd, should I lie and let him fuck me when I know I don't want it? Is dishonesty to myself worse than a low blow to his soul by telling him to pick up his socks and his arch supports and his tie, his scarf and his overshoes and to get the fucking hell out of here? No, I won't be that bitchy. I've put him through his paces, poor shadow of a man, and he expects at least his intromission and I can't say I'm bored. I really want to know how this will turn out; that's excitement enough at this hour of the night to persuade me to let him stay.
I really have no desire to get fucked by this man, or by any man for that matter, tonight. But, my legs once spread, I hate like hell to close them on a void, not to speak of personal vanity. Goddammit, then. Let him start. Here's my cunt and here's my clit and get in there or we'll never get done and I'll never get to sleep.
He starts, bless him, positioning himself on his knees, equally placed, directly between my thighs. His shiny rubbered prick is rampant in his hand. He thrusts, he lunges. Aaaargh! The idiot! He's hit my urethra and he's trying to sperm my bladder, the blithering fool.
"I'm sorry, dear. Did that hurt?"
What do you think?
He tries again. This time the place is right but not the condition. Had he really expected me to cream, after all that?
"You won't get it in. Here, let me wet it for you." I spit on my hand and lather his rubbered cock in my own spittle. With this jerk you have to do everything yourself; what I should have done was just spread my legs and work on my clit and let him watch and hear me oooze when I come. It would have saved a hell of a lot of time. I spread my lips now to make sure he'll find the right place, and in he comes, not bad, quite firm, a couple of shoves, and now he starts.
My God! With his shoulders!
He squats there on his haunches with his prick in me and he wiggles his shoulders from left to right and right to left. Does he have a prick attached to his chin? Doesn't he have any idea of anatomy? Is this how he plays the piano: low note, THUMP! high note: THUMP! low note: THUMP! Perhaps he's a conductor: with a ONE and a One and the STRINGS and the DRUMS. Left, right, left, right, shoulders working in a frenzy. I try to change his motions with my hands but he manages to resist me and all I can do is let my arms work piston-wise in cadence to his absurd rocking. Perhaps if I was Chinese and wore my cunt in the quarter-past-nine position his approach might work. Perhaps that's where he learned to screw, in a Japanese whorehouse of the mind.
It seemed to go on for hours, his prick not quite in and not quite out, his shoulders bouncing, his legs doing nothing and his hands even less. But his eyes were upon me and his mouth shaped into a question: Don't you think I'm superb? Have you ever seen anyone like this? Finally, after hours and hours of his shoulder to the grindstone, he got up. A silly what's-it-matter, I'm-a-man-of-the-world twitter, and he's off me with a little leap and bounce and another shrug of his shoulders. "I guess this just wasn't my night, ha! ha! But there'll be other times, I'm sure...."
Not on my life, buster! Not if I can help it. Never again.
He goes through the ritual of finding his socks and putting them on and he's about to put on his shorts when he discovers that his prick is still vulcanized in its redingote, with not a drop inside to show for all the effort he's expended with his shoulders. He rolls it up daintily and I await its ritual redeployment among the store of other preservatifs, ready for the "other times," but he places it instead on my nightstand. Then he dresses, puts his arch supports inside his shoes, puts them on and, turning for a final time at the door, waves to me with a fond merci and an au revoir that's an invitation for me to reciprocate with something that can be taken for an invitation and I give it to him:
"That was an interesting experience, I'm sure." I fling myself on myself to finish the job he's hardly begun, but I can't do a thing when I'm angry and the more I jab and grab and stab the angrier I become. Oh what a wasted evening! Why did I want him? What did I need him for? To prove I can have him? Because I wanted someone pianissimo-sensitive to make up for my anger to Paul. Then why so bitchy? To show I can out-Paul Paul? But I'm not bitchy enough for that; had I gone the whole way, the Paul way, he'd long have been reduced to a pool of flaccid tears.
Paul is tough. Paul is earthy. Paul is body. Paul is sexy. Sometimes, just often enough so that I can forgive him all his faults, Paul can be soft and gentle. He can also be insufferably nasty. Paul is one of those rare persons who is not one whit ashamed to be himself, to be selfishly himself, to care for nothing but himself. And I enjoy that. His pleasure is my pleasure-even when it hurts. Paul is mastery and I adore mastery. Paul is everything I wanted to be as a young girl, everything including a man.
I'm happy enough, now, to be a woman. I have everything I want, and more than a man, for I can have a prick, every man's prick, whenever I want it (or almost) and no problem about where to tuck it between fucks. Paul's cock is my cock, and Harold's is mine and Roger's (when he can spare the time) too. I'd thought the piano playing prick would do when Roger was busy and Paul was on my shit list and Harold was still a stranger. Thanks to Paul I knew how to be brusque and bitchy, and thanks to the poor incompetent and long-since-anonymous piano player I learned to have patience and worked out all my bitchiness and was the better woman for it when I met Harold.
Thank the piano player for giving me a miserable night when I couldn't even play with myself and spent the whole night getting my bitchiness out and my remorse in so much that next morning I might even have forgiven my piano player and run after him to begin again unhitching, but when I woke up all bleary-eyed and mad, there on the night stand where he had left it, memento mori, stretched neatly on a lace doily, fish-bladder white and long and smelly, was piano player's late abandoned under-utilized condom. And that I'll not forgive, no, never in my life. I couldn't even bring myself to touch it but gingerly picked it up in its lacy doily and, holding it at arm's length, I flushed it down the cabinet where it proved stronger and more unsinkable than the Titanic. I pull at the decrepit chain and it gurgles down and floats back up with accusing eye, and I pull and it gurgles up again and I pull and it keeps gurgling up accusingly till I'm almost out of my mind and finally I poke it down with the broom handle and keep it down until having flushed again and again it finally no longer reappears. But next day I needed to call the plumber to unstop the bowl and there, nestling in the lacy folds of the doily, is that sad rubbery souvenir.
The old memory angers but the present calms. The present is a tongue in my ear, and a cock in my cunt, and a lover on my belly. To hell with dead yesterdays; today's here and my lover's near and he's dear, and he knows how to fuck.
He knows, he knows. He knows how to fuck.
He taps my left shoulder. It's a sign in our well-rehearsed unspoken language. Words we keep for speaking the trappings of love: "my sweet."
"my honey."
"my cunt."
"my prick," or all the sudden words of pointless sounds that mean so much. To indicate a desired move, a scene shifting behind the curtains, a wordless touch will usually do; often there is no choice for how can you say "come lick my cunt" with a mouth full of prick and no wish to let go?
I touch him with my knee to show I'm ready. We hug tighter to maintain our hold. I dig in my heels, firm up my buttocks and roll my shoulders. He anchors with his feet, pulls me, rolls with me. A one and a two and a three and we've made it undivided. A short pause to check out the parts. All legs in place? All arms, all organs? Prick in cunt, cunt on prick? Me on top and he below? All checks out.
Then I start pumping, imitating the male. My knees are between his, his knees are raised. Up and down and up and down and in and out and in and out. A prick glides smoothly between us. His prick? My prick? No, our prick. Where does it start and where does it end? I don't know. I know it glides, glides firmer and harder and drier, presses more strongly than when I'm down and he up, presses better on my clit, hard against the pubic bone, bores into my fleshy folds. It makes the two of us more one. We're interchangeable now. Either is fucker and either fuckee, both are one and one is both. Feel my prick, feel my cunt, feel the feel, it's all us, all me.
I raise one leg, one thigh, like a dog about to piss. Another of our unspoken signals. My legs open and his close. My palms push on the pillow, I heave myself with his help. A wrench, another tricky moment when all might come unstuck. But God is with us and Dame Fortune smiles and I sit up, impaled on his cock, my legs on the outside, sit athwart his groin. I smile, he laughs. This is good!
And now I gallop, riding high on his shaft. Boy, is it slippery! Boy, how it glides! It's fun now, pure fun, pure joy, pure fuck.
I tense my knees to raise my butt and slide up his well-greased pole, twisting and screwing as I do. I grab his crown in my spasmed quim, grip it and grind and roll around it, then spiral down the pole again with long jabbing turning grinds, down to the bottom of the shaft where my fiery lips dig into his curly hair. Wham! Slam! I lower myself on my elbows and encircle his beautiful head with my hands. I reach forward to let my breasts dangle-glide along his smooth belly. Just the tips, just the nipples, hard firm tickle-nipples, light as the breeze but soft and firm. And my hair cascades on his face, brushing his lips and his cheeks and as my eyes reach his, there's a smile, a smile that's been waiting for me, a smile and a soft moan, an Ah! of contentment, an Oo! of repose, of little-boy joy. My lips to his and we kiss, wetly and hungrily. My tongue in his mouth, gently at first then twisting, curling at the end dives in deep, juggling around to receive all his thrills and impart mine to him, then corkscrews out, lingering here and there while his lips, puckered small, play the reluctantly releasing twat to my cock-playing tongue.
Up again with my rump. Up and up on that incredible pillar, twisting as I go, gripping and slithering as I go, dripping quim juice all the way, sliding up and up and up, feeling my hair slide down again on his lips, feeling my nipples tickling once more on his chest, feeling, really feeling, every inch and millimeter, feeling every part of his now wet and slurpily slippery cock, spiraling up and up, rising higher and higher, hitting the ceiling and beyond it the sky, supported incredibly on that incredible shaft, higher and higher, right through the clouds.
I hold on for dear life, clamp myself around him, clutch his cap, hold and squeeze. I sit at the top, serenely on the top. Like Saint Simeon Stylites, I'll be a hermit here forever, surveying the world, praising my maker. How long can I hold it? How long could St. Simeon?
The logistics of it always puzzled me and I once asked one of the sisters and she told me of food donated by the good Christians below that was hauled up on the end of the rope, and of other saints and hermits who were fed by crows and lizards and by sundry supernatural beings. But that didn't answer my real question which was: How in hell did he piss? And, even more to the point: Where did he crap? Did he lower his chamber pot twice a day for the good Christians down below to empty (and later enshrine the saintly relics)? Did he stand up straight on the top of his pillar and, while thousands gaped, shoot his stream in a graceful arc off into the desert (where a revered tamarisk now grows)? Then how did he crap? Squatting on his capital, ass over the edge, fingers gripping the forward edge, teeth grit through constipation (ker-plonk as a hard lump hits the sand far down below) or diarrhea (splush-splash all down the fluted shaft, his piss for the next two weeks conserved and directed to washing off the odorous stains)? Perhaps his column was equipped with tout le confort, a hole down the center, draining out at the bottom until, post and drainpipe undermined, the whole smelly convenience collapsed with the martyred Stylites dead in the rubble.
Rubble dubble bubble. What scatological nonsense! I'm riding on my lover's prick, feeling his body with my thighs, feeling his column with my inner lips. Co-prology is of no interest at such a moment. Is not ... was not....
Was not, because is now. His hand has reached out beyond my thigh, rounded my hump, smoothed my butt, sent feelers into the valley, and now one finger, spearhead of a mightier force, has gained the wrinkled brown of my asshole. Ah, oh, ah! It's so lovely, so forbiddingly, ridiculously, inappropriately, laughingly, ludicrously lovely. Just one finger pressed to still hard-and-dry wrinkled asshole. And now I plunge, plunge slowly again, curving again, twisting down his column, my cunt grasping tightly as I go, my sphincter tightening too and thereby tightening everything, only my hair is free and my breasts are free as they sweep up his belly and up his chest until my mouth meets his and my eyes greet his again in bliss and my cunt hits hard shaft's bottom while his finger, probing finger, hurtfully tries to force the passage to the rear where, hinge unoiled, the door fails to open.
His finger slides forward to the soft, tender membrane that is still dry. Now it's on the edge of my cunt, the rear edge, right where his shaft is situated. There's lubricant here, the oil of love, wet and slithery, enough and to spare. His finger takes, retraces its step, slides up along the tender membrane which immediately becomes deliciously soft and silky moist, and touches again the crinkly tissues now swelled and eager. Back to the watering hole for more quim juice, spread it around my arsehole, around and around, deeper at each turn of the helix, then back for more, this time tracing the spiral around the column of his cock. I have to raise myself slightly to make it easier. Around and around his finger goes, following the curve of my cunt, once oval but now forced round to accommodate the stubby brown cock. Finger at the front, detour to the clit, around, the shaft, back to the rear of my twat and back to my anus, back and in, in like a bee heavy with nectar and dew, in to refresh it, in and in.
I rise up his shaft again, shuddering, twisting, gripping, rise to the very top while his finger, fixed in space, traverses the divide, circles my cunt, reaches my clit just when I'm on the top. And this time as I spiral down, his finger moves right up my arsehole, up and up and in and in, spearing me tight, revolving as it goes, the nail (he keeps it short just for this) scratching painfully pleasant against the tender lining. The cream brought from without has stimulated the flow from within. All is soft and open and accepting, and joys branch out, darting here, flowing there, spreading and spreading, up through my bowels, up through my guts, a flowing, liquid, that spreads effusions of pleasure and love. I shudder all over: my toes, my feet; my calves, my knees; my thighs, my hips; my cunt, my ass. Rolling and twisting and shuddering, and my breasts shudder on his broad chest and my head shudders and muzzles, and my face in spasmic contortions from side to side, envelops and strokes his, caresses and soothes against his, my hair brushing his cheeks, my ears aflame, my tongue darting and lapping, my lips engorged with love. Oh what a shudder of pleasure is there. Oh what a tremble of love. I'm helpless with love, paralyzed in my mind, uncontrollable in my lust and joy.
He saves me. His knees are masterful. His legs are under mine, they turn, lever, prod, raise me up, make me rise and turn and twist. The shanks of his legs, his hairy shanks, turning under my silky thighs, raise me high, raise me to raptures, force up my behind, raise me just there. Just a slight turn of his manly legs and my whole body moves at his command. My lips slide down, my tongue makes a new path, my cheeks and my hair, glide down his chest. My breasts move together, silkenly stroking the hairs on his chest. My belly glides off his belly, my cunt rises majestically to the heights of his prick. My soul sails away in celestial flight.
Four fingers now, two in my ass and two around my quim, stroking and pulling and teasing and groping. Around and around and around, waiting for the ultimate, the majestic, the unbelievable, the unutterable, as his legs turn once more, turn just a wee, an arc of a minute or less, just enough to make me slide, slide down, and suffer the spearing, two fingers in my ass spread out where they've passed the circlet, two in my cunt one back and one front to add body and strength to the thrust of his cock, widening out and spreading my hole. And a thumb, an incredible thumb, a rubbery tip of a down-filled thumb, pressing so hard on the tip of my clit as I fall to the floor of his shaft.
Then up and then down. Up and then down. No movement by me, just rising and falling. Up and down with my hips and my thighs, with my cunt and my ass. And forward and back with my head and my tongue, with my hair and my breasts caressing him there.
I'm gone from my body and hover right there, hover to watch and to see and to bless. I am outside of myself, beside myself. Oh what a way to go! Oh what a way! Up and down and around and around and front and back, rocking together, two lovers entwined, joined by the length of a prick.
A prick, a prick! Is there anything more joyful than that?
The first prick I ever saw was a black one. I can't remember much, my mother made me rinse out my mouth and likewise my mind with strong laundry soap after I told her, but he was black, a big hunk of a black and I must have been six and he might have been sixty or twenty or twelve or even eight. To me he was big and strong and black and free and he pulled out his whang, his all-black whang with the greyish-pinkish meat at the head, waving at me and staring at me, and I, not knowing better, ran home screaming to my mother to tell her of my terrors-when all that the good man (or boy as he might have been) probably wanted was to piss. Or, perhaps, he wanted to tell me when I was still young and hadn't yet learned to misunderstand: "Look at me, I'm a man. I'm a nigger to you and your sisters, but I'm a man. I have a prick, a fine, hard and stiff prick. That shows I'm a man, right?"
I still dream about him. I dream about a black man with a black prick. Sometimes the man is white but his prick is black. It comes as an exciting tingle to me. The perfect lover, suave and sophisticated, a blend of Paul and Harold and Roger, Oh so prim and right and proper, the lover I can take to bed and to heart and to marry. One that even my Mom and my Pop would approve of. We're about to make love and then ... thrill! Joy! Thrill upon thrill! His prick is black, jet black, glistening, gleaming black, a twelve-inch whang of oiled black leather. What a tool! What a prick! What a mouthful as I nibble on it! What a ram as he spears me with it. And then I wake up and find it was only my finger, and a white finger at that.
One day I want to screw a Negro. A real black Negro. Perhaps I should do it soon, before I get married. Perhaps my husband-to-be will agree. If I could do it now, who would it be? I don't know many: an American jazz-trombonist, an Indian philosophy student (a Dravidian from the south, black as the ace of spades, blacker I think than any Negro I've ever met, but he doesn't qualify, being Caucasian or Aryan or whatever they claim), a Moroccan (dark, too, but ethnically Semitic or Berber so doesn't qualify either), and a Senegalese, economics student at the Sorbonne, suavely French, accomplished poet (lyric French), a man who'd rise high if only he could give up his French veneer and embrace the beauty of his own blackness. It's the poet I'd like to take to bed, it's the poet I'd like to love, but I doubt he'd have me and he's too French besides, a Frenchman whose skin happens to be black, whose hair happens to be curly and whose lips are sensuously soft and big (Isn't that what I want, a white man who happens to be black, a white lover with a black prick?). No, the Negro should be a black man from the jungle or, failing that, a black man in my own image, an American, an American's black man-a U.S. nigger. Just like the one whose black prick stared me down some sixteen or seventeen years ago.
The trombonist is light brown but his heart is black and his soul is too. He'd take me by force-his jungle heritage still strong-and I'd struggle. Struggle-not to escape but struggle to make him fight. I'd have him beat me and scratch me, drag me by my hair. A giant of a man, six-foot-six or more, with shoulders to match and biceps like a horse. He'd reach out one palm at the end of that incredible arm and catch me in the crotch. Catch me and pull me, lift me and take me away, my weight supported through my crotch on his hand while the other hand, just for the hell of it, pulls at my hair to keep my head in the right place.
He drags me like that for mile after mile. My clothes are in tatters from the struggle. My lungs are exhausted from the screaming. My eyes are red with tears. My cunt is sore, Oh so sore, so sore! Sore from his pulling and mauling and from the pent up fires raging to burn. I flail at him to no avail. He drags me down the road where people stare, and turn away. He drags me through my town where no one recognizes me. "A dirty white slut," they say, going back to their business. "A nigger-lover getting what she deserves." I am, I am, a nigger-lover, that's me. Getting what I deserve, if only I might deserve as much.
He pulls me through his village, a colored village, and shows me to his friends. My clothes are torn, my panties rent, my gash is pink and white and bleeding and he holds me up for all to see. They come running.
Children throw dirt at me, the women raise my skirt the better to see, the men finger my cunt, a hundred black fingers, pawing and spreading. They spit at me and the spit mingles with my tears and my blood and my sweat and my quim juice making thin white rivulets that run down my legs and my face and my breasts, thin white rivulets that dry to a tautening crust. And while I cry and scream I laugh inside at the delights they give me.
He takes me down to the river and there, on a bed of banana leaves spread out on the river mud, he fucks me. With the crocodiles staring open-mouthed from the muddy stream, with the jungle birds wheeling overhead in wild excited screams, he fucks me, he rapes me, he tears me apart. His massive hands spread my legs like feathers, his twelve-inch whang pierces me and tears me, in and out, fast and furious, while I come and come and come again. I am dripping all over from his loads, overflowing from his come, white come from a black whang, welling down my thighs. Then he takes it out, black prick enslimed with white, black leather whang heavenly iced with sweet sugar topping, and he shoves it in my waiting mouth. He squats on my face, all two-hundred and fifty pounds of him, and I suck at his prick for all I'm worth, extending my jaws, pained from the stretch, take in what I can, it's never enough. So I lap him and bite him, lick down the length of his black prick, take his black balls, pink tongue on his shaft, pink tongue in his butt, reaming him out as deep as I can.
He turns around, still lying on top of me and his beautiful lips, his thick black African lips, fasten themselves to my cunt and suck out my life and his from there. His pink tongue darts in; his nose broad and fleshy is like a cushion of love as he laps up my life from my cunt.
He has a whip, too. He ties me to a tree with jungle climbers. He fastens me, spread-eagled to a tree, my hands tied to two branches high above my head, my feet spread apart and tied to the mangrove roots. He whips me with his lash, across my back, across the back of my thighs, across my buttocks, raising big angry red welts, cutting across the welts to cut them until the blood flows. I shake in spasms at the joy of the pain. His whip lashes and curls, curls into my crotch, into my open slit, lashing and flaying. One whip, two, lashing and flaying and cutting. Lashes on my breasts, torn open and apart, nipples bleeding, bleeding but hard. Lash, lash, lash while I shake. Lash, lash, lash as I come. I turn my head and he lashes my face. My body trembles as he lashes again.
Then he puts down his whip, no need for a whip. His prick is hard, his hands are strong. He grabs my cheeks, my bottom cheeks and pulls them apart. He rams with his cock, rams in, rams in, and I'm down on the ground, with him on my back, getting humped in the ass, getting buggered in black. Rammed in and reamed out. My body's torn, my mind's flown. Beat me, beat me, punish me, bugger me. Harder, harder, harder you bastard! Whip me and flay me with your big black staff. Ream out my insides, gut my gizzards. A pile driver, relentlessly driving, heaving and hoing, three hundred pounds a shove. Beat me, beat me, beat me till I scream with the joy and the frenzy of my punishment and pain. More and more and more than I can take until I explode all over, my limbs scattered wide, my guts inside out, my cunt is my mouth and my mouth my cunt, and he, having come, takes out his prick, black stained brown and dripping with blood mixed with his come and mine and all. I grasp with my lips, use my tongue as a swab, and wipe it all over from base to the tip and from glans to the hairs, wipe it and lick it ... and then I am free.
Would Harold understand if I told him? Harold understands all but I wouldn't ask him to understand this. Roger couldn't see it at all; Roger is practical and sensible. If I told him I wanted to flog a Negro he might be astonished but he'd think of it as a quirk like anyone's quirk: nothing wrong with it as long as you can exploit it with no harm to yourself and not too much harm to others, without too great an expense and, above all, no scandal. But if I told him I wanted to be raped by a Negro, flogged by a Negro, his mind would gape as wide as his mouth.
If Roger were my husband and I told him I wanted to take a lover he'd probably take it very calmly. "A lover," he'd say. "Anyone I know?" he'd ask, half out of curiosity and half from a sense of propriety: he wouldn't like me to screw with someone who didn't measure up to his concepts, which would rule out anyone more than a couple of rungs below his own class. That would definitely rule out almost any Negro. The Indian would be permitted: after all, Indians are British in a way, even more British than the English at times, and the man isn't a Negro-only black, and a philosopher to boot. Quite a distinction, old boy, what? The Moroccan, being an Arab, is out. The Senegalese would qualify if he ever became a member of the senate. The American only if his band became very famous: Roger has a warm spot for successful bootleggers and such like; a colored American might qualify under that rule. He'd want only successful people to be my lovers. He'd like them to be good lovers so that they could bring me pleasure when he is busy, good but not competitively great, a bit more vigorous than he, a bit more dashing would be fine-Roger, after all, has preoccupations other than sex.
Roger is so considerate a person and a good lover, too (the two go together). I love him a lot; when I'm with him he becomes the greatest lover in the world (though I might let my mind wander freely to roam over all my other lovers, real, imagined or desired). Marriage to Roger could be perfection superlative, lacking nothing. I could indulge all my interests, follow all the seasons, meet all those who mattered, continue painting in a distinguished way and achieve moderate success thanks to the critics and collectors who fawn on him. And I could continue my affairs with Harold and with Paul with Roger's perfect blessing and encouragement.
Paul? In a way he's the complete opposite of Roger. Not that I'd ever go hungry with Paul, not for food and certainly not for love or for excitement-though the excitement would often be painful. I could see Paul choosing his mistresses with a deliberate eye to teasing me. I could see him leaving me for a month at a time-and I'd be waiting every minute for his return. He'd choose my lovers for me: lovers who'd give me thrills and lovers who'd give me pains, lovers to elevate me and lovers to humble me, always his choice, his proxies, his surrogates. He'd let me keep Roger, of course (who mightn't have time for me once I was married to someone else) and Harold (who always would). Not a dull moment with Paul.
With Harold life would be something else entirely. Sex aplenty, exciting not so much for its acrobatics or its inventiveness but deeply satisfying, even electrifying, for its emotional undertones. I have confidence in Harold and faith in his talents; he won't abandon his principles. In Paris he has sought to build a new life, rejecting the past that crippled and emasculated him, the past that enslaved him with the promise of money and the tyranny of power. When I first met him he was only a little way along the road; I helped him along, helped him to accept himself as a man, helped him to build confidence in his talents, helped him to take pride in his new-found masculinity. His father had crippled him; I helped restore him to health. He is his own man now, his talent is his own, his future his own creation. His ultimate fulfillment is now only a promise; no bookmaker would give odds on him, no banker arrange a mortgage, but I have faith in Harold. His potential is unlimited, his love unbounded, he would never lack in the resources that would produce joy and satisfaction every day of his life.
I've had my lovers, I have my lovers. My mother should see me now. My neighbors would call me a slut or worse. My friends (of old, if they still are) would call me Bohemian. A Bohemian is allowed to screw, is expected to screw. She's a creature in a different world following different rules, judged by a different god. A Bohemian is a character, a scapegoat, an actor on an unreal stage living out the fantasies and desires of the audience. I'm a good Bohemian by their lights; I've screwed enough to make a thousand girls back home cream in their panties.
According to the rules I should die of the pox like Ibsen's hero (his heroine wasn't even worthy of a noble death on stage) or of hunger and a running nose (disguised as consumption) like a frozen-handed Mimi. Your male Bohemian can become a respected writer, playwright, artist, sculptor, musician or just layabout; the survival rate for female Bohemians is supposed to be zero.
A pox on playwrights and novelists and maiden aunts! The only Bohemians I know are the touristy sort, the tender American girls with too much money and not enough ideas who come to Paris to live it up for three months before returning home to speakeasies and bathtub gin and Wall Street bridegrooms. I came to Paris to escape them. I came to get away from mothers who try to mold you in their images and from friends who think that by putting a label on you they've defined you.
I came to Paris to get away from Cathleen who couldn't to Cathleen who can; from Chuck who wouldn't to Paul who's a man. You don't find many men like Paul in America-and you don't find many women who're as free as Cathleen either.
Chuck was the first man I wanted, the first man who happened to be around when I first discovered the need for a man, the first man to make me cream, the first man to drive me to tormented finger-frigging. Eighteen I was and a virgin and Catholic to boot. He was the first to hold my hand that way, the first I touched his knee that way, the first man I ran away from and wanted to catch. Chuck! as fucked up a Catholic and a virgin as myself. (His other guilty fucks didn't count, of course; those were whores and I was supposed to be a good girl.) Millie had guessed my torment (and perhaps Chuck had also confided in her) and within a week of first meeting Chuck McKenna, the love notes and billets doux were flying back and forth, while night after night I tried to stifle my hunger for a man with a finger tearing at my slit, with my lips trying to caress my nipples, with my hand stroking the soft mound of my belly, with a sweat-soaked pillow stuffed between my thighs to stop up the hollow emptiness.
I learned a lot in the next few months from the girls in the dorm and the girls in my class. I learned even more about myself, feeling myself, creaming myself. I daydreamed of things I would do with Chuck and followed them up at night by pathetic little essays on my own lonely body. But I learned to loves-if only myself-and I learned to accept sex-if only the little I was capable of giving myself. I learned, too, how to sin and accept my sin with grace, to confess with full contrition in the knowledge that I would sin again that very night, to approach the communion rail and refuse the wafer. I learned how to want and not to want. I learned to be devious and cover up.
I stayed with Millie McKenna at Christmas. I sought out Chuck whenever I could, taking the initiative. I stole kisses from him, passionate deep tongue-and-soul stirring kisses, torrid embraces, heated gropings. I asked Chuck to take me for a drive and in the moonlight I made him park and there, all expectancy a-tingling, I attempted to seduce my first man. I opened my shirt-waist and let him see my full round breasts. I led his fingers to my nipples, and showed him how to squeeze, I took his head and made him kiss on my breasts, I bunched up the flesh and made him suck and swallow. I stuck my hand in his fly and held my first prick. After I'd got over my amazement I massaged it to make it stand.
And Chuck, football-hero Chuck, was like a little boy in my hands, a shy, unsure boy, grateful for every advance I made that took away the need for him to make an advance. I held him for an hour in the moonlight, pressed to my breasts, running my fingers through his tousled hair, stroking his cock, kissing his ears while he sighed and slobbered with joy.
And my cunt, what was my cunt doing all this time? Aching and paining, hurting and pining, lonely and burning. I levered my legs over the stubby knob of the gear shift. I hoisted my skirt well over my knees, I spread my thighs on his lap, but he seemed not to notice. Finally I took his hand, a hand that had been vaguely and shyly wandering over my back. I took his hand and firmly guided it to where no one's hand had strayed but mine, not since my mother had stopped diapering me and bathing me (and I doubt that she'd allowed her hand to touch me there even then). I guided his inexperienced hand to my knee, and up the inside of my thighs, the soft white silkskin that marked the way to my secret joy. I guided his hand, urging it on, but holding it back too to prolong the unbearable expectation. I held his hand between my thighs and squeezed, then I opened up and urged him further.
I don't think Chuck had any idea of a woman's anatomy. I don't think he had the vaguest idea of where he was or what I had there. I was stroking his rampant joystick with one hand and guiding his hand with the other and I brought his hand right into the cleft where the crotch-piece of my silken pants had been drawn thread-thin into my creamed crack. I brought his hand there, right on the flesh, right by the crack and I squeezed my hands together to let him feel and to make me feel the better.
And, suddenly, recognition must have dawned. Suddenly, wisdom and understanding must have reached his passion-fogged brain. For suddenly, just when his fingers were lingering at the wet slit, just when I was poised for his magic touch, the ramrod in my hand collapsed, shrunk to half its size, half its diameter, shriveled, flaccid, a lifeless lump. The excitement had been too much. Women, good women, weren't supposed to have slits down there, and men, good men, weren't supposed to use their cocks the way God had intended them.
My woman's native instinct coming to my rescue, I bent down my head and took the bit between my teeth. God knows what would have happened if I'd given it any thought-after all, I'd never even held a man's prick before that evening. But I didn't think and nature taught me what to do. I tested his cock with my lips, licked it with my tongue, stroked the base with my fingers, sucked at the little slit in the top, chewed at the foreskin, ran my tongue into the groove, kissed it and sucked it and mauled it and teased it. Once in a while, I managed to stiffen it by ten percent and lengthen it by twenty, but my success was only transient; as soon as it made the slightest move towards manhood, as soon as it made the most feeble attempt to raise its proud head, Chuck, playing father to his son the prick, reined it back into the fold and made it conform to his flaccid principles.
I sucked him for perhaps fifteen minutes. It seemed like fifteen hours. My inexperienced jaws ached. I sought relief. When I raised my head to catch my breath he immediately buttoned up his pants; when I tried to resume our embrace I found him as stiff as his cock was soft. I reached out to kiss him and he drew away with such frightened shock, such undisguised revulsion, that I knew immediately the situation was beyond salvation. I adjusted my clothes, sank into the corner of my seat and asked him to take me home.
Chuck went back to college the next morning, three days early, without even waiting for me to come down for breakfast.
It was my first intimation of what cowards men are.
I haven't heard from Millie for years. I wonder whether Chuck ever learned to fuck a woman.
Thank God, I have a real man now to take to bed.
CHAPTER THREE
Our ride has come to an end. My lover's shanks are at rest, his fingers have slipped from my anus. He grasps me firmly on the rump, insinuates both knees under my thighs, and signals with his shoulder. I hold on to him for dear life and we start a slow roll that brings me down from my high horse. We lie side by side in embrace, and pant. His hand reaches for my crotch, his fingers curl languidly in my parsley. My hand weighs his nuts. Why are our sexual organs associated with food? I remember those jokes about the nuns with their tomatoes and melons and cucumbers. Did the sisters know them too? Did they tell dirty jokes in their cells? Did they have wet dreams?
"A penny for your thoughts," he says. He must have sensed my silent giggle.
"I was wondering when you were going to eat me." It isn't really a lie, the thought was only a mind's beat away. I must remember to ask him for the promised penny in the morning. I love getting paid for a screw; it makes me that much more the whore.
I don't have to wait for my present reward. I spread my legs as fast as I can, barely fast enough, for he's on me with a leap and a bound, his knees between mine again, my thighs raised high and resting on his shoulders, his face in my twat. My beloved is gone down in his garden, at last, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. Thy mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee. The Song of Solomon. An allegory, so we're taught, of the love of Jesus for His Church.
Solomon knew how to say it. Look what we've lost through two thousand years of Church and Christian prudery. Solomon could say it all: "The roof of thy mouth is like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly." Who else could say it so poetically? And who but the Jews would make it part of their sacred books? "A bundle of myrrh is my beloved unto me. He shall lie all night between my breasts."
He shall, indeed, I'll take a poet any day-or any night. Shakespeare's one poet I'd have; I don't care if he went for boys too-he's man enough for any woman, most of the time, and if his attention sometimes wandered in his sonnets, well, what's an asshole more or less between friends?
I wouldn't find it hard pretending to be one of his actresses, a boy acting the part of a girl who masquerades as a man most of her time on stage. I'd tie down my bosom (and pad it again for the stage) and tie my hair back and walk very straight. I'd wink at Great Will from the stage and meet him after the play at the Bull and Boar. I'd have to play it clever, then, fighting for my male equivalent of virginity to preserve my secret, pretend I've never had a man before, that my taste runs just to girls and breasts and twats, taking his prick-first in my hand and then in my mouth-with great reluctance and surprise. I'll fight him off with every stealth I know to keep him from my crotch until I know his passion is so roused he wouldn't dream to stop. Only then will I let him undo my breeches and my hose, unpin my breeches clout, remove the cod piece and....
Surprise!
No prick!
Only a hairy cunt, that's all. But then I'll give him so much loving, so much kissing, hugging, tonguing. I'll doff my doublet and invite Old Will to kiss my breasts. I'll stroke his pate and run my fingers through his fringe. I'll calm him soon enough, I'm sure, and excite him more as woman than I could as boy.
Into my breach, dear Will. Into my cleft, fuck me right there. Ahah! I have you now, my friend. Fuck on, fuck on!
Fancy getting humped by Shakespeare! Speared by a literary giant! Funny, I'm rather disappointed with this role: I find I'm interested more in his fame than in his fuck. I can see myself coming home after it's over and boasting to my friends: "You'll never know whom I met today." I'd tell only the trusted few I'd actually got to fuck the great celebrity. Green envy all around. I'd become a literary lion myself, by contact and through screw. My profs in English Lit., and Drama I and Drama II would envy me; they'd flock around me asking me to tell them all I know: How does he look? How does he speak? What thinks he of the book I wrote? That variant reading in Act II, third folio ... What did he get Marlowe to ghost for him? Is it true about Bacon? Who's W.H.? And who T.T.?
It's hard to fuck a man when thinking of his fame. I should have blown him first; with my mouth stuffed with cock, my mind might have been gagged to silence. So this is Shakespeare. That bald head, of course, with the high dome and the fringe of hair-it reminds me of nothing so much as a fine prick with the foreskin drawn back. His skin is very white and he's rather overweight. Also he sweats a lot. But he fucks with skill and energy if not too much imagination. His imagination, I assume, is all directed into his plays. He doesn't really arouse me but if he has enough stamina to keep on, I'm sure I'll come in the end.
Oh no. I won't. Not now, I can't. He has his boots on! He still has his boots on! That's something that I can't allow. That's one place where I draw the line. Not boots! Not even socks unless I'm fucking in the great outdoors or under some unusual circumstances (like on a train, eh?). And Shakespeare with boots might as well be Shakespeare with the pox. The whole dream collapses. I try to call it back but can't. I shall never see a Shakespeare play again, or hear a Shakespeare line, without thinking of the great man in bed fucking with his boots on. Too bad, William!
Funny, this sort of thing doesn't seem to bother men. On the contrary, they get quite a charge out of being fucked by a booted woman. Stockings, of course, are almost de rigueur for some men. Whores specialize in them; their customers seem to idolize them.
Like the whores in the brothel I had got Paul and Roger to take me to one. Roger had wanted to take me to one of the top select ones in a lidtel particulier near the Porte Dauphine but I told him I wanted something really sleazy, some degenerate run-of-the-mill sort of place, the sort of place that I'd end up in, if I had the guts to go the whole hog and turn whore. So we went to a place that Paul chose behind the Conservatoire, not quite as run-down a place as I would have liked but good enough.
Paul got some men's clothes for me; off a corpse I would guess, judging by the musty smell, rather loose on me. And the shoes were two sizes too large. The madam didn't pay too much attention to me when we turned up, though I must have looked highly and most suspiciously androgynous, to say the least, but she didn't seem at all put out. "She doesn't mind how eccentric her clients are if they're either wealthy or Americans," Paul explained. "But she won't allow anyone to bring in a women. She reacts as if you were taking a picnic lunch to the Tour d'Argent. She made me pay her for the three of us even though I told her you weren't interested in a girl yourself; she said you could have something special but I told her not to bother."
They had two girls waiting for us in the room when the maid finally took us up. A fin de siecle room, not so much by design as by neglect and old age, I assume, brocades, fake period chairs, dusty chandeliers. The girls looked like something from the chorus of The Merry Widow-in heavily boned corselets with frilly garters and long black stockings and lace-up boots.
"Your taste in fashions?" Roger asked Paul. "Style of the house," Paul explained. "I try not to stand out."
They had some warm and rather flat champagne for us and, in less than five minutes, Paul and Roger each had a girl on his lap.
"What about him?" Roger's girl asked, pointing to me with some sort of pity. "Why don't you ring down for another girl?"
"He doesn't need one," Paul told her. "He's got special tastes. Doesn't care for girls."
"Perhaps he's never met a really nice one," Paul's girl contended. "If he met a really nice one he'd probably find it very nice. I bet I could make him feel good and like me too." They both sounded like rather dumb and inexperienced country girls.
"You shut up and mind your own business," Paul told her. "You're with me, not with my friend, Albert."
"But it isn't nice to bring him up here and just have him watch without doing anything," the other protested. "You're not being nice to your friend. Why did you bring him if he doesn't like girls?"
"He likes watching what we do," Paul said.
That seemed to satisfy the girls. One of them put on some records and they started dancing.
"What about me?" I asked, feeling rather bored and left out of the whole thing.
"What about you?" Paul said. "You wanted to watch. That's what you're doing. If you don't like it you can always go home." He had one hand pushed up his girl's buttocks between the corselet and the fleshy thigh; the other was getting through the lacing at her waist. Roger was dancing crotch to crotch with his girl and his face was muzzling her between the neck and her bare shoulder. It seemed a very dull way to spend an evening. I began to wonder what could make men want to go to brothels; I'm sure my father could have had more fun even with my mother than this. I decided to liven things up a bit. I walked over to Paul to get him to dance with me.
My unmistakably feminine walk and my equally unmistakably feminine jealousy were no more than what Paul's girl would have expected of me. If she'd known I was a woman she might have raised no objection, but she wasn't going to let herself be upstaged by a fairy. She hissed at me like a furious cat, she scrunched herself deeper into Paul, she held on to him like crazy. When Paul disengaged his left hand to pat me, she said archly: "What, you too? You also prefer boys? What are you doing here with me, anyway?"
Paul told her to shut up, that he was doing the paying and that if she didn't like it he'd ask the madam to bring up a better girl. It didn't mollify her, and when he danced a couple of records with me, shamelessly necking and kissing and feeling my crotch, she became livid with fury.
I let him go back to her in the end, to try my luck with Roger. His girl was obviously the brighter of the two: instead of trying to fight me she decided to win me over. She smiled at me, winked her eyes at me, thrust out her breasts at me and tried everything. "Hell," I thought. "Why not?"
"Do you mind if I dance with her instead?" I asked Roger. The idea amused him. She came into my arms readily; she was wearing a smile of triumph-directed at her colleague.
I don't know what was more important to the whore I was dancing with: showing up the other one, showing that she was irresistible, or converting what appeared to her to be a faggot to the beauties of heterosexuality. She tried everything with me and I-I had to struggle back. Not because I found it unamusing or uninteresting or even unexciting but because I didn't dare get found out. I couldn't let her grind my crotch too much, for instance, in case the absence of a penis made itself too obvious. I couldn't, for similar reasons, allow her to hold me too tight to her breasts; my own breasts were bound quite flat for the occasion but they were unquestionably too plump and bouncy for any male figure. But we kissed, open-mouthed, and I pawed her breasts and her buttocks a bit while she led me through a very unorthodox tango; it seemed to satisfy enough of her needs for her to be most happy and willing to get back to dancing with Roger.
Paul's girl wasn't going to be upstaged, of course. She'd managed to get off Paul's jacket and his shirt and now, as she was dancing with him, she was making stabs at getting his pants down. First one to get the pants off wins the whores sweepstakes.
I decided to help her along. "I'm so glad you're with Paul," I told her, putting my arms around the two of them as they danced. "He's a lovely person and deserves someone like you. Here, let me help, I know just what Paul likes." As she held on to him, firmly and stubbornly, I undid his belt and slid his pants down and off each of his legs in turn so that he didn't have to break step once in the dance. Then I eased off his shorts. "He's got a beautiful prick, hasn't he?" I said to her, holding his rod and his balls in my hands.
"Evidemment vous ites un expert," she said haughtily, trying to get his jewels away from me.
"Of course I am," I told her. "I have the real thing. You have to make do with a dildo."
Paul gave me a nudge. I'd been going a bit too far; the girl and I were only moments away from a no-holds fight.
I sat down on a chair to watch the next stage. Paul's girl got down on her knees and started blowing him. He kept rocking to the music as she sucked. When the record came to an end I put a fast quickstep on the turntable. It helped to speed up the action. Paul got his girl to strip off her corselet and then he put her down on the big bed, got himself between her legs and shoved his prick up her cunt. She locked her boots around his waist and pumped away vigorously with her hips and thighs. Roger and his girl were both nude by now; they'd been dancing very close together but when they saw that the main action was beginning they came over to watch. It was an interesting show. I especially enjoyed watching Paul's prick go in and disappear, then come out, slitherily glistening, before it went in again. He had an amusing and entirely unexpected way of winking with his buttocks as he humped; they'd open wide into a kind of vertical grin as he drew up, and then they'd tighten into something that could pass as a frown of concentration as he pushed in again. It was fascinating reading the other side of his character from the expression on his ass. I felt an urge to stroke it; his whore, who obviously didn't know about his erogenous zones as well as I did, wasn't doing him any good there at all. I put my hand on his bottom softly, intending to scratch around a little. Immediately I got smashed on my hand by the girl's sharp heel. I pushed her heels back up where they belonged, kept them there with one hand and tried to locate his asshole. She struggled violently with her legs, kicking Paul without doing any damage to me. Paul didn't seem to mind at all although she kicked more and more frantically with her boots the more I tried to restrain her, and the more urgent Paul's humping became. Finally I withdrew from that part of the activities; the girl was getting too dangerous for me and Paul didn't seem to be caring what I did for him anyway. She continued flailing at his back nevertheless, more and more urgently, and he was getting more and more worked up. I drew close to Roger and his girl and we watched them work their way up to the climax like a group of fond relatives seeing off the wedding couple at the station.
"Now it's your turn," I said to Roger. His girl was already on the bed with her thighs wide. "Let me get you ready properly," I suggested and got down on my knees.
"Don't go too far," Roger said. "I've engaged hired help to do the heavy work."
I munched along the length of his prick a few times, scratched his balls, popped them in and out of their sockets, and then let him mount his girl, well prepared and lubricated. She was much nicer about things than Paul's girl; she even stroked me occasionally as I perched at the edge of the bed and watched events from close up. I took her hand at one point and showed her just where to hold Roger in his crack; she seemed to appreciate my superior knowledge. When I saw he was well taken care of in that department I went for his back, biting little kisses into it and letting my nails trace out erotic patterns. When he came it was a long, drawn-out come, not as loud or as boisterous as Paul's, but a relaxing and satisfying one; the way, I assume, a gentleman should come with the hired help.
I let them get their breaths back, put on another record, and went over to watch Paul on the other bed.
He was apparently preparing for a second round. His prick was long and red but it really wasn't hard. The girl was stroking it, then she kissed it, then she took it in her mouth. Paul lay there flat, with a bored expression on his face.
"You're too tired still?" the girl asked him.
"Me? No. What's to have tired me except having to do all the work?" he told her. "I'm ready now for a proper fuck if you'll do your work."
She muttered something about his friends and bent down to her task, biting and teasing his cock and playing with his balls. I knew he was deliberately feigning an indifference and he was probably using his energies to keep his prick soft rather than to get it hard.
"I don't think she knows the right way to make a cock hard," I said to him in French. "Perhaps you'll let me show her."
"Did you hear that?" he said to her. "Albert is right. He's much better at this sort of thing. Let him get me ready while you watch, and then I'll use your hole again." He pushed her aside and I took her place between his legs. She was shooting poisoned arrows from her eyes.
It was a warm, comfortable feeling to be back again in the right place between Paul's thighs, munching on his cock. My imagine attire dropped away, the brothel disappeared, Roger and the whores had gone. There was just Paul and me and I was feasting on his prick and squeezing my head between his thighs and luxuriating in being his and being owned by him and giving him all the pleasures he was capable of receiving. His prick was rock hard in an instant, its veins and arteries were throbbing, his thighs kept squeezing me with delicious warmth and comfort. My lips fed on the gentle glide, my teeth enjoyed the soft munching, my throat enjoyed its gagging fill. His legs were around me and my arms were around his body exploring everything and experiencing everything and I was creaming just from the joy of being with Paul, just me and just Paul, just the two of us off on a ride together. I could sense that Paul was about to come and I was hoping and thinking that this time I might be able to come too without even being touched in my cunt. The feeling was building up there, fire and drum rolls and coursing sparks. It was going to be good. If I squeezed my thighs a little tighter, I'd come, right together with him.
Then Paul started his last stage, the five-second bit that proceeds his come, when he becomes frantically wild and his timing becomes uncoordinated and his hips heave like crazy and his prick throbs like a bursting tiger. Any moment now-I could already feel it-the tip was pulsing. He started pumping and exploding and I took in a deep breath to swallow his come in one gulp. But then, just as I was hoping and expecting and thrilling to come myself, a hand groped me in the twat, wrenched at the fly, pulled at the curly hair and then clawed furiously. And then a scream burst out from behind me than which Hell knows no greater fury.
Fists were flying, boots were kicking, voices were shouting and I was being pulled between Paul and his whore with Roger and the other joining in for good measure, everyone trying to restrain everyone else or goad them on, adding to the din and confusion in the act of trying to calm it. Paul's whore, having discovered that I was an impostor, a smuggled-in rival, a woman in fag's clothes, wasn't going to forgive me or anyone else for the trick. And then the door burst open under the weight of the madam and a bevy of bouncers with a whole chorus of half-dressed whores and half-undressed clients looking on, and charges and countercharges in a bedlam of confusion, a hundred people shouting and screaming and gesticulating....
All except one and he, stark-naked, was standing in the middle of the room heaving and panting and writhing in a paroxysm of hysterical laughter, ignoring the tumult around him and completely absorbed in the joke he had perpetrated and fallen victim to. For a moment I was disturbed; his hysteria seemed more like dementia than laughter, but then I saw his red whang describing limp circles as he rocked in laughter and I had to start laughing too and drew him to me to enjoy the joke with him, and Roger, who'd already slipped into his clothes to preserve his decorum, put his arms around the two of us and joined in our laughter.
The bouncers eventually restored order. Roger practically emptied his billfold for the madam. Paul managed to get back into his clothes. Then the madam, not stopping her disparagements about our characters and our ancestors and our sense of decency had us hustled down the back stairs and out of a side door. It was only when the chill street air hit my middle that I realized that Paul's girl had ripped open the crotch of my pants from the waistband almost all the way round to the other side. I borrowed Roger's hat to hide my embarrassment from the front and Paul kindly patted my backside to keep the chill winds off there. And so we stood-three men out on the town-for ten minutes or more by the entrance to the brothel, waiting for a cab to pick us up so that I could get home for my clothes.
I don't know why that scene in the brothel should suddenly come to mind. I sometimes think there's something terribly sick about me. I'm lying in bed with one man and I dream of another. Not just one but a hundred, some real, some imagined, some live, some long dead. Am I insane? Am I insatiable? Am I incapable of fidelity to one man even for one minute? How long is a screw, after all-the average sex act between two people who already know each other fairly well? From intromission to orgasm it should be ... uhuh, ten minutes ... five if they're particularly excited or don't care too much. Say an average of seven minutes. Four-hundred-and-twenty-seconds filled with humping and screwing and sucking and eating, biting and heaving and feeling and coming-and I find the time to let my mind wander twice around the world in space, and three times around it in time. Faster than the speed of light on a cold loveless day. Do I love my lover any the less for it?
I don't think so. I sum up all the love I can remember, all the men I have loved and tried to love or wanted to love, and make that love part of my present love. That only adds to what I can give my lover; it takes nothing away. I build up my current love on the bodies of lovers past and future, the whole wealth of experience, real or imagined.
Sex resembles death in that it is a dissolution of the mind from the body. It is union with the universe, a return to the primordial, total surrender. They say that a man, if conscious at the moment of death, experiences an erection; that men ejaculate when hanged. I understand that now. Death is the ultimate experience; it can be welcomed like a lover.
A drowning man is said to see his whole past flash before him as he dies. That is what happens to me, drowning in total abandonment of the self, in total surrender, in a bliss of separation of mind from body. In this ultimate moment I live, exult, die, and am reborn-and during those brief moments, those four-hundred-and-twenty-seconds that terminate in the ten or twenty seconds of the penultimate passion, I condense every thought and every memory that bears on the present. Those seven minutes are devoted to sex; what would you have me think about if not sex?
Wake up, Cathleen! Concentrate on what's happening here, below. He's eating you. You know what that is? He's got his tongue right inside your twat, fucking you with his tongue. He's got his nose pressing against your clit, sending you to ecstasies with every touch. He's got fingers in your cunt and around the edge, stroking and massaging, and he's got fingers up your ass doing the same thing, and he's got other magic fingers all over the place doing every conceivable thing to you. His just-unshaven-enough cheeks are tickling the insides of your thighs. Sometimes he moves his tongue a bit, laps around your hole, snaps like a chameleon's tongue and laps that tender skin around your anus and then he moves again and clamps his teeth around your clit, biting it with love.
And while he does this you lie there and think of all the other fucks you've had or like to have! Have you no shame? Well, do something!
So I do something. I push him up and away with a signal. He kneels up, I turn him around, push him on his back, and mount him soixante-neuf, my quim above his face, his stubby cock in mine.
I dive on it, tease it, devour it. This oversized piece of meat jammed into my mouth is a gag of pleasure. He scrunches his thighs together, crushing my face. I luxuriate in the pressure, prisoner of his body, forced to his will. With all I own I set myself to bringing pleasures to his organs: tongue and lips, teeth and gums, nose and chin, hands and fists, nails and claws, all tease and pull and chew and maul wherever I can give him the greatest joys.
And I, in turn, am being tongued and reamed by him with love. He chews my clit and brings me ecstasy of joy and pleasure, precisely seasoned with the right amount of darting, biting pain. His touch at the soft divide between twat and butt adds an extra bonus that sends shivers through my limbs, darts through my guts, fires my mind and body. The tongue wetly and softly around the rim of my anus provokes an ecstasy that words cannot describe nor experience circumscribe. It is ... it is ... I know what it is and yet I don't: a superfluity of ecstasy, a supremacy of pleasurableness. There is nothing so moist, nothing so silken, nothing so creamily, softly, electrically firing. The excess of feeling is so intense that I cannot experience it all. I am radiating it, bursting with it. I soak it up, storing particles in every cell and nerve, converting experience directly into memory, to be stored up for later dispensation. It goes from one set of cells into the other, directly, and all I can do is observe, an outsider attempting to describe in language or experience something that is beyond both.
What then shall I say when his tongue daringly darts right into my anus? Was ecstasy ever before raised to this exponent? What is lighter than light? higher than high? holier than divine? greater than infinity? What more can he add to my pleasure? He has sent me a message more precious than any sensual joy: by the laying on of his tongue he has sanctified me, he has elevated my very asshole to the level of his tongue, his lips, his speech, his mind. His tongue in my twat told me he loves me for my sex; his tongue in my anus tells me there is nothing in me he would not love.
I want to do as much for him as he for me. At least I'll try. I steel myself. I take my fill of pleasures from his cock, pleasures enough to last me on my trip. I kiss the glans good-bye and wander down the stem. I love that prick. I know it well. I know it when it's hard and when it's soft, and why, and what to do about it when I wish.
But then I come to his scrotum and that's another matter entirely. I don't understand it. Sometimes it dangles low and jocular, the skin thin and soft. At others it scrunches up into itself, a tightened, thickened, coarsened bag, a super-prune. I don't know what it means or what to do, and, adding to the mystery of his sac are the testicles inside, hard cores with soft outsides, slippery source of joy that one false pinch can send into a scream of agony. To remove their potential threat I try to make them disappear. I palpitate one between thumb and finger while the little finger locates the socket that is its sometime home. I guide the ovule soft and gently until I reach its hole and plop, a satisfying plop, I feel it enter. One home and safe. I leave one finger at the entrance, a guard, then guide the other into its own home. Two fingers now, one on each socket, separated by the solid trunk of prick, press down his balls to keep them safely there.
With testicles out of the way, I feel more secure; but a scrotum hanging limp and empty is an empty prize. What can I do with such a useless sac? I can kiss it or chew on it, stroke it or lick it, but it is not the same as a well-filled pouch, I release the nuts slowly, feeling them plop! plop! in succession, have them reach my lips, enter my mouth through their scrotal covering. If I do it well, my reward is a series of low moans and murmurs. I roll them around and plop! plop! them in and out between my lips. He must like that slippery squish inside that I can only dimly sense. But I can't say that I thrill equally to the feel of his skin in my mouth; if I were God, if I could make man to my wishes, I'd make his scrotum of soft kidskin or stretchy, shiny rubber. I don't like the odd hairs in my mouth, either. The pubic hairs are fine, bushy, curly, springy; they belong, they are in the right place, but these odd random hairs, long and flailing, entirely useless, that serve only to tickle unexpectedly on nose or chin or cheeks, remind me of my grandma's chin. I do not like his scrotum but I stay awhile; I like the next stage even less.
I love the taste and smell of cock; I love it even better when it's glistening soft and sweet with quim juice from my cunt. Quim juice does more than simply grease; it cleans the tissues, takes away the smell, arouses sexual tastes. No matter how I sweat or how stale I smell, my lover only has to stimulate the flow and soon his hands are moist with slippery quim juice that he can spread around my cunt, around the hairs, between my thighs, and into my ass, taking away whatever dirt or smell was there, and make me fresh again. I wish that men had similar sources to refresh their taste. I wish I had enough juice of my own to wash out all his smell and sweat. I've tried all sorts of things-talc, perfume, brandy, wine. They can make the balls and the hairs more palatable!-even interesting-but one place that they can't improve is the anus.
I shut my eyes. I take a quick trip back to his cock to fortify myself with pleasant thoughts and then slide down his shaft again, pause, and dart out with my tongue, like a bather testing the water with his toes. I make a quick stab for the hard curled hole and dash right back before I've so much as sensed its taste. I rest a moment, steel myself, and make another mad dash to his hole, staying a moment longer this time. Then I return and take a rest.
I know what's wrong. I haven't really paved the road there yet. I use my fingers now, I touch him lightly, curl them round, press harder, draw them back, press in again. One finger's in; the others keep on curling round. Now two. He's opening now. And creaming, too. I know it with my intellect but I can't quite accept it in my mind. Of course he creams, just as I cream too. When he buggers me in my asshole I cream, don't I? When his cock comes out, all slimy with his come, I sometimes pounce on it and lick it off. It has the fishy taste of come, a little bitter as it always is, but added to it now is a strange sweetly musky taste, mysterious, forbidden, that enchants me for that reason. I feel his asshole getting slippery now; I know it's mucus from the rectal skin, but what I feel is that something is slowly dripping down from his bowels. I have visions, fears, terrors of his splashing me with shit. Part of this feeling comes from my own experience: when he buggers me, when I feel his hard firm rod inside, I can't tell at first whether he's coming or going. My nerve ends tell me there's a hard lump grasped inside my sphincter; a hard lump there means only one thing: I am about to shit. And so I suspect that when the mucus flows inside his anus he too is about to shit.
He moans and sighs with pleasure. I listen with great joy-and then I hear a rumbling in his belly and, again, I fear the worst. I take my fingers from his anus and press them to my nose. I know that musky, forbidden-thrilling smell, but to my nose it's ... shit! I've got to do this now. I've got to tell him how I feel. I have to ream him with my tongue. I have to brace myself by stages. Before I lick his ass out with my tongue, I'll taste my fingers taken from his ass. There! That's not bad! It's something I could learn to like. I know it isn't shit ... but could I take it?
Lord, give me strength to do to him as I would have him do to me.
I love this man. I love him more than any man I've ever loved before, in my entire life. I want him for myself, for always. He knows I love him too. I've told him that I love him more than any man I've ever loved. He may believe me, at least I hope he does. And, crazy as I am, carried away by an impulse that says the time for decision has come, knowing that marriage is for fools and freedom for the gay of spirit, I have decided to throw in the sponge. I want to marry him. He is to be all mine. He is to be my lawfully wedded husband.
Eeny, meeny, miny ... Harold, Roger, Paul. I love them all. Each would take me for his wife if I said the magic word, "yes." I'll say it tonight, I'll tell him I love him, I'll tell him I'll marry him. I'll have him know I mean it. But not now. Not when I'm excited. Not when he has his tongue in my ass and his nose in my cunt. Not when he thinks I'm saying what I say because of the love of a moment, the thrill of the present. Not now when my tongue flicks down his prick and my lips chew on his balls. If I said it now he'd be surprised, he'd be happy, but he wouldn't believe it. He'd think I was carried away by the nerves in my tongue and in my clit. He'd think I'm in love only with his prick. He'd think I'm simply bribing him to fuck me even harder.
But marriage is more than a fuck. Marriage is the twenty-three hours-and-fifty-three minutes between fucks, all the days and weeks between fucks. Marriage is also the slowly coming apart after the fuck, the smile of happy exhaustion, the unspoken "thank-you" to my lover, the sign of contentment, the cigarette slowly inhaled after, the lying back on the rumpled sheets, the drawing up of blankets over tired bodies. Marriage is the wiping off of suddenly icy jism, pulling out odd hairs between teeth, the turned back, the casual good-night kiss, the turning off of lights, the drink brought from the kitchen, the smoothing out of blankets, the crawling back into bed for a final hug.
I shall tell him tonight, when his back is turned, when he's ready for sleep, when his prick is soft and small and dry once more, when his mind is on love and not on passion, on rest and not on ecstasy, when he contemplates the days ahead and not the seconds passed. I shall tell him then, when his mind is on the future and not on the past.
"I love you," I'll say. "I really love you. I want to marry you. I want to be your wife. Will you have me?"
He won't doubt my meaning then. He'll know I've never said this to anyone before, I'll never say this to anyone again. "I love you. I really love you. I love you more than love itself. I want to be your wife."
I want you, I want all of you. I love all of you, everything. EVERYTHING.
I release his testicles and pull away my face, oblivious of the hairs at my nose. No hesitation. Determined. This is the moment. I dart straight for his hole, no stops on the way. He starts in shock, his hole is dry again. I lick it, I savor it. I wet it and smooth it. He starts up from my cunt, trembling moaning, sighing. I have him now. I point my tongue and dig it in. I taste nothing and smell nothing. I think only of my love, my love for the man who'll be all mine, the man I'll marry, the man to whom I'll be wife.
My tongue is in his anus. In the asshole. Right in the asshole. I lick him with my tongue and kiss him with my lips. He sighs, and moans, he shivers with delight. I've fired him. Was there ever such love? I love him now, entire. There's nothing in him now I cannot love, nothing I do not love. I love him all. I am at rest, at peace. My tongue is firm and pointed, a little prick just for him. I push it in and out and around and around. I bugger him with my tongue; I lap him, love him, lave him with my tongue.
With my tongue I've said it all (he not knowing what I've said): "Yes, my love, I love you all, all, all, ALL! I want to be your wife."
And he, with his moans and sighs, his shivering and trembling, his joy and his pleasure, his gratitude and surprise, has told me (not knowing what he's said): "Yes, Cathleen, yes. I know, Cathleen, I know. I want you too. Now, now. NOW!"
CHAPTER FOUR
I've come a long way. From Chuck to now. From first arousal to consummation, from consummation to satiation, from satiation to discrimination, from discrimination to matrimony. I'm worried by this last and final step. In a way it will be a step backwards, to the concepts and values prized highest back home. But my matrimony and theirs won't mean the same thing. Mine will be liberation through personal commitment, not enslavement through adherence to convention. I'll no more be a slave to marriage than I'll be a virgin at the altar. When asked to forswear all others, I'll keep my fingers crossed. Faithful and loyal, yes, but I won't swear off any other man I might come to love.
My husband won't mind. He'll agree in this as much as I'll agree with him. Nothing makes so sad a spouse as one who's prisoner to obligation, looking through the bars of matrimony at the green pastures on which she may not graze or lay, bound to her husband not by the joys of love but by the bonds of Thou-shalt-not. I wouldn't want my man to love me only because somewhere in the distant past, somewhere in the sonorous profundities of the church or the pretentious Ionics of the mairie, he had made an oath that he dared not now break for fear of God or me (or M. le Maire). I wouldn't want to limit his joys and experiences. I love him and love him; I want him to love and be loved, as much as he can, wherever love may be found. I want to know that he loves me, each day anew, each day because he wants to-not because he has no choice. When he comes to me it must be me that he wants, not a maid to serve him, not a bosom to mother him, not a cunt to relieve his stiff prick. I want him to choose me, each day anew, because it is me, the present me, the me he loves.
And I, myself, want to be free to love him. Not bound to him. Not imprisoned in my love, not limited in my choice. When I return home, having just loved another, I want him to delight in the delights I have known, transmuted by me into love for him, passing on to him the love I have gained from others. Love, by those who don't know how to love, is assumed to be a finite quantity. You can love one person; if you love a second you must take from the first. They'll have you believe that if you love (or desire) another just a little, just long enough to reach orgasm, just for the ten seconds of intromission, even just to glance or think of loving another, your passing love for the second has destroyed your love for the first, the love of perhaps ten or twenty years.
If they only knew, if they only knew! The more you love, the greater love becomes, the more you can love and be loved, the greater each moment of love becomes and the deeper the meaning of that love. Learn to love more than one and you'll observe love becoming free, no longer part of a bargain, no more saying: "I'll love you if you'll love me," which, ultimately, paraphrases into: "I'll let you put your unspeakable organ into my untouchable one if you promise to provide me with food and clothes."
What mother could be disappointed when her son is happy with a girl who makes him happy? What father would think he's loved less by his daughter because she's taken a husband or lover? (All too many, I'll admit, but at least we all pretend we'd love our children to be loved and to love-even Harold's father pretended.) Why then shouldn't a husband be happy that his wife is happy with her lover, and a wife rejoice that her husband is happy with his sweetheart?
I'm fortunate. I have three lovers who all love me intensely, neither cloyingly nor restrictively. They love me and respect me and give me the freedom to be myself; by giving me that freedom they affirm my right to love and be loved. Three lovers with any of whom I might be happy. Three men: one to be my husband and father to my children; two to remain my lovers. Three lovers without a trace of jealousy.
I'm not really wanton. I'm not really depraved. I'm not really sex-crazy. I enjoy a man and his love and lying back in his love. I'm really rather conservative about sex-when I'm cold and sober, when there's no twitch in my twat for forbidden thrills with frills. Only Paul can get me to do anything, can get me to thrill to everything. It was he that got me to my first orgy, and into the second one. And I'll bet my bottom dollar that it'll be Paul who'll talk me into my third one if ever there should be one.
My first one was on a hot summer weekend in August. Everyone, of course, was out of town, and those who weren't were bored, bored, bored. It was hot and it was muggy. There's nothing quite as deadly as an August weekend in Paris with the temperature up there and the sun itself so exhausted that it won't even show itself. On days like that thoughts turn to suicide-or its stand-ins.
The orgy started late Friday afternoon in the Mont-parnasse atelier of an arriere-garde Dadaist, as a boozy, impersonal, desperate party. I think the party was planned to serve as a starting point for the orgy, a consolidation and pre-indoctrination and sifting out of candidates, a warming-up for the later heated heats to follow. I think Paul knew why we were going to that party; he didn't tell me directly what was going to happen but he must have dropped some hints because I was wearing a fevered glow of excitement which overcame the sweaty lassitude that had been gripping me for days.
The nihilistic, irreverent, iconoclastic setting was ideal, in a way. Skeletons with wigs and foam-rubber breasts and with bunches of hair hanging from the pelvis; toilet-bowls with realistic faces painted on, suspended from the ceiling; coffins for seats; a stuffed horse, full-size, wearing skirts around its flanks; a doorway, heavily padded all around in hot pink sateen, with a rim of lank horsehair in inverted pyramid shape over portal and around jambs, looking (and meant to look) like the mother of all cunts, through which one entered, squeezing past the shiny quilted hot-pink "lips", into the bedroom beyond that was decked out in pure Paris whorehouse style, mirrors and black hangings and little frills and bows.
The heat was a good excuse for drinking too much and the drinks, combined with the heat, were a more than adequate excuse for disrobing. There were some models there; they, of course, needed little persuasion to strip. A very faggoty Englishman was next-but he stripped only out of his business suit into silky camisole, corset and silk stockings. He got into a fight with a woman who claimed he was wearing the wrong kind of undies or something and she stripped to show him and got into a hair-tearing match with him. Two limp-wristed faggots went into a corner to kiss and neck. A bald paunchy man who looked to be in his fifties went off into the bedroom with a little girl with a very short skirt and no breasts, and people drifted off through the cunt-like portals in twos and threes to watch and cheer. The host, whom everyone called Le Bon (which probably wasn't his name), or Le Bonbon (which suited him better for his cloying stickiness) was going round with a sneaky sneer on his face trying to get couples together, thinking himself no doubt to be the next best thing to le bon Dieu but revealing himself to be nothing but a dirty-minded amateur ma-quereau.
Le Bon's first effort was to introduce me to Paul, which made us both laugh. Then he introduced Paul to a very sexy-looking Englishwoman who seemed impressed by Paul's manner and looks, which made me very angry. I kept drifting around until I met someone I knew, who happened to be Rene, le Turc. Rene sort of gloated at finding me there-we hadn't seen each other for months and months. I can see it now: a man who's been turned down by a woman sees her turning up at an incipient orgy, looking desperately alone and in hungry need of a screw. Even though he no longer shared his apartment he must have known I was screwing regularly with Paul; the grapevine among the artists and hangers-on in Paris is, after all, well developed and verdantly growing. Perhaps he saw me somehow cheapened by being there.
"All alone?" he asked, a leer in each eye and a mock on his lips.
"With Paul." Laconically, this.
"But Paul's not with you." As a smile of Schadenfreude lights up his face and causes one corner of it to lift with the chin in the lead, directing my gaze to where Paul is certainly not with me but draped all over the seductive body of his new English friend.
"Here we're on our own," I say.
"From now on you're with me." He is still trying to ape Paul's air of self-assurance. He thinks it will work with me. I'm inclined to show him that things haven't changed, but then I think "What the Hell!" There's no one here that I particularly like....Better the devil you know....Rene has a reputation....Men always gather around him hoping to pick up the leavings....There are worse people to be with and I hate wandering around with a drink in my hand waiting for someone to speak to me....If I can only get him off the cynical triumph bit, I'll probably find him quite entertaining. I believe in honesty:
"Look, Rene, I like you. I've got something good going with Paul and I certainly don't intend to leave him. But I could enjoy your company now. If I stick with you at this bash it isn't because there's no one else and it won't be because I love Paul any the less. If you'll just lay off the smirking, I think we could have a very enjoyable evening together. Be nice?...." I ask it with an arching of the eyebrows and a pouting of the lips.
"It's a deal!" He clenches my hand harder-he hadn't let go of it from the moment I'd encountered him-and plants a suave kiss on my lips.
"Cathleen," I say to myself. "You've got yourself a boy friend for the evening; you might as well do the right thing." I'm surprised at how comfortable I find his kiss. My tongue reaches between his lips, seeking out the past, wondering what has changed, whether memories can be recaptured. His arms expertly around my waist, his chest pressed to my breasts. O.K. you bastard, you win. I can feel it in my cunt. It's heated up as quickly as it always does. He's a charmer, so accomplished, so easy to be with if all you seek is erotic adventure, the ever-ready lady's man and ever-rampant cunt-stuffer. I feel giddy and lightheaded. I'm going to screw him before the night is out and to Hell with that. His arms around me, feeling me up, my body is pressed to his, so tightly that I can feel the hard rod growing down his pants leg. That's for me; he's getting it hard for me.
Rene drags me to a canopied chair that seems to have been some bishop's throne or abbot's chair in centuries gone by. A moline cross has been carved into the rich dark wood of the high back. We scrunch down on the torn upholstery. Rene's hands are all over me. He has put down his drink on the arm of the chair; I have knocked mine over. His hand under my blouse, another under my skirt, one lifting my thighs, in public, too, one tugging at the elastic of my panties, one squeezing my breasts. You're a rat, Rene, but I like what you're doing. I'm going to get fucked right here and I'm going to love it.
His shirt is unbuttoned and his fly is open. He pushes me down to kiss his prick. Hello, again! Long time no see. His prick has a familiar face that seems to wink at me. Nice to eat you, old boy.
He won't take off his pants, the bastard. The most I can do is rip open his shirt. His belt is undone and so is his fly and his pants have slipped down perhaps six inches, the waist band is around his buttocks. His prick and balls stand out, out and up, and I am up. Straddling his lap with my skirt way up and my blouse right off and my breasts in full sight against his hairy chest.
He's lolling back in his bishop's chair, this bastard of a fucker; he's impaled me with his cock, has my thighs around him on the seat, and he wants me to fuck him. Fuck you, you bastard, fuck you.
Yes, I'm all worked up. I want to be fucked, fucked right here with everyone looking on. Let them see me, let them look. Let Paul look. Oh God, I want Paul to see this, he brought me here, I want him to see me getting fucked and I hope he won't be able to get it into his girl. I hope she won't let him and he'll see me getting thoroughly fucked, screwed, balled, laid, rogered by my old friend Rene from whom Paul thinks he has rescued me. I want to be fucked with the whole drunken world of Paris layabouts looking on, but I'm damned if I'm going to do all the work.
Rene has his mouth glued to my left breast. I have to lean over his head and try to shout into his right ear over the noise of the party: "Don't just sit there! Do something! Bounce me on your cock!"
He has his hands cupped under my buttocks and he tries to bounce me up and down. His hands aren't enough; he uses his knees, too. I bounced a bit but it doesn't work. His trousers are too far down, tying his legs together. I let go of his neck, riding perilously, and tug at his pants to pull them lower. There must be quite an audience around us now. A male voice from the crowd announces in English with a marked German accent: "You're a lazy ass, Rene." There are tugs at his feet behind me that threaten to throw me off him. I cling around his neck for safety as his legs are raised one by one and a dozen hands divest him of shoes, socks, trousers and underwear. There are only two articles of clothing between the two of us: his singlet and my skirt (plus a garter belt and silk hose but those don't count). I am riding his prick. He uses his thighs to great effect, opening and closing them, lowering me on his prick and raising me to the top as he does so. He's got a good steady rhythm going. His hands on my buttocks help things along; I use my knees and thighs pressed into his side to add to the leverage, and help myself up with my hands around his neck. His mouth seeks out my breasts, or my lips, as the imagine takes him. Up and down and in and out. I could go on all night like this. I've really drunk too much to come either quickly or well; meanwhile in my boozy state I can enjoy the various sensations, the giddy ride, the firm pillar inside me, the grabbing and sucking at my breasts and mouth, the cupping of my buttocks, the pressure on the membrane, the good tight grip between my thighs. One-and-two, and one-and-two, and one-and-two. They've started clapping behind us to the rhythm. They're urging us on with obscene songs and shouts; they're clapping a cadence. A one-and-two, and one-and two. This is hilarious, like a fair gound ride. I'm giddy and I'm enjoying it and I don't ever want to get off. I'm having too much fun. I'm on the roller coaster, being fucked on the roller coaster, fucked on the bishop's high-backed throne that's a roller coaster at a fun-packed, crowd-filled fun fair. Fuck-fair fun fair. Fuck her, fucker. Fucker, fucker, fuck me fucker. Fuck me faster, fuck me, fuck me. I don't know whose voice is calling and whose voice I'm hearing and what voice I'm making. The clapping is faster and faster and we're humping faster and faster and now I think any moment I'm going to come.
And then, suddenly, he stops. Stops, just like that. I want to tear out his hair by the roots. "Fuck, for Christ's sake!" I yell. "Fuck!"
"I'm not wearing any protection," he tells me above the din. "I'll have to ask someone to lend me one."
I could kill him for that grin on his face. I could kill him for his consummate control. He's doing it to spite me, to teach me some sort of a lesson. He knows I couldn't stop now, wouldn't stop now.
"Fuck me!" I yell at him. "For God's sake, fuck me."
"But you'll get preg-"
For answer I slap his face. I slap him hard as I scream, slap his face first with one hand and then the other. I'm screaming like wild fury. I claw at him and tear at him. My frenzy excites him. He's humping again, wilder and wilder. He can't hold back now. His thighs open and close and his knees rise and fall and his hands lift me up as I slap him and scratch and bite at his ear.
And then I scream, I scream louder than I've ever screamed before, I scream as if my whole world is exploding and my body is coming apart. There's a big hole in my belly and it's spreading and blowing me to smithereens and all the bits and pieces that are left, legs and knees and thighs and breasts and cunt, above all, cunt above all, are being bounced at an incredible speed on those crazy flailing knees of his and I have the world's most world-shattering come there's ever been, a never-ending come of a come.
With the whole world watching as I tear myself to pieces on Rene's prick.
I want to rest now. For God's sake let me rest. I've got to rest now, do you hear! Got to, can't breathe, must pull myself together, must get all those pieces together.
But Rene won't listen. Rene won't give me a rest, won't give me a moment's peace, the fucking bastard. Hasn't he had enough? Won't he ever have enough? Let me down, you fool! You'll kill me, you will.
But he's only going faster, runaway engine, completely out of control. There's a screaming in my ears, an earth-shattering yell as I feel his come spurt up my cunt, spurt and spurt and continue spurting while the momentum of his insane frenzy carries my shattered body with him. And then I fall over him and bang my head against the carved arm rest.
I hear a shout. "Well done, Cathleen! Well done!" It's Paul's voice, the filthy fucking bastard. "Congratulations, Rene, you fat old Turk! You've made her again!" I could kill Paul, oh how I hate his guts now, oh how I hate everyone here, every single one.
I jump down, grope for some clothes, push my way through the crowd, run for the bathroom. There's someone in there, I pound on the door. "Let me in, do you hear? Let me in!"
There's a lot of shuffling as I keep on pounding and then the door is suddenly flung open. My clenched fist is waiting to come down once more on the door so that I almost fall into the bathroom. I run to the sink and grab handfuls of cold water from the tap to throw at my cunt. Eventually I calm down, with water and jism all mixed running icily down my legs. A girl is retching miserably into the toilet bowl. A half-undressed couple is jerking about in the tub. There are piles of discarded clothing everywhere.
A girl's head with bee-sting red lips all mussed, and shingled red hair, appears above the rim of the tub. "You don't have to use cold water," she says. "Le Bonbon has provided everything."
I assume she's talking to her boy friend. It must be some esoteric new way of getting his fucking thrills she's talking about. I have visions of a huge rubber dong filled with hot water that Le Bon is going to send spiraling up her twat.
"You!" she says. Her voice is American. "You there! If you want to douche, Le Bon's laid on everything. It's on the shelf above the bidet. You should have come in here before you started fucking. It's always safer if you take precautions first." It's obvious now that she's been speaking to me.
I pick up my bundle of clothes and find I've got Rene's shirt and socks but nothing of my own. There's a bidet in a corner with cigarette butts and some indescribable film of leavings and droppings, floating in it. I turn on both taps to their fullest and pull the plug. Over the bidet there's a shelf laid out, with tubes and boxes and packages, like a pharmacist's case. Some wit has labeled them, in French and bad English: "Precautions for the Beforehand" and "Safeguards for the Afterwards". I am not amused.
Luckily, my period is due in a day or two. I knew it while I was fucking with Rene. I'm glad that I remembered; I'm glad that it's the safe time of the month. I don't know if I'd have had the self-control to break off right then and dash to the bathroom. Anyway, I'm safe. There's an enamel douche pot still half full. I wash it out thoroughly, fill it with warm water and a few drops from one of the bottles, wash out the nozzle, and squirt myself well and deeply up the cunt. I fill the bidet with warm water, soap and bath salts and squat down low, immersing myself, almost from waist to knees, in the refreshing water. Then I dry myself on Rene's shirt. I hadn't taken off my skirt and it's soaked and stained all down the front. To hell with that. My garter belt is cold and sodden. My silk stockings are torn to shreds. I take them off, garter belt too, and throw them in a corner. At the basin I splash my face with cold water, adjust my makeup, brush my hair. I feel better now, ready to face the crowds that are waiting for me, fully dressed.
In bare feet, skirt and makeup, I walk out of the bathroom and into the studio, holding my head up proud like a grande dame making her entrance. No one even notices. They're all too busy humping and fucking or watching and talking. I slump down into a chair, ignore anyone who talks to me, and shut my eyes.
A lifetime later I hear Paul's voice. "Come on, honey, let's get out of here. This party is getting deadly. We're going on to Pascal's." He's found my shoes and my blouse, God knows how. The sexy-looking English bitch is nowhere in sight. I let him steer me outside, down the stairs and into a cab.
Pascal has an elegant apartment on the Faubourg, with enormous rooms. It's in an indescribably filthy condition with junk everywhere. There are endless rooms and corridors, all packed with half-naked guests. Half the crowd from Le Bon seems to have preceded us. It is almost as if nothing had changed during the taxi ride except the decor, as if while we were gone they'd simply changed the walls and furnishings of Le Bon's studio and left the guests intact in their deshabille and their disarray, just as we'd left them.
Pascal's is as busy as the Gare St. Lazare with a boat train in, and the crowd is even more varied and confused. I don't know who is what and what is who or why. Things are happening in every room, the drinks are flowing like vin ordinaire, they're smoking kif and opium and God knows what poisons. There's a band in one room; two girls are vying as to who can strip the better, waving it and baring it to the cheers of the onlookers, money thrown at them by the handful, soutiens-gorge and garters flung back into the crowd, wild gyrations, flaunted fannies, obscene gestures, twirling tits. Prancing queers lisp around; women in high boots, women in corsets, wasp-waisted, black-lace undies, painted faces, whores or flaming queens. Twosomes and threesomes and foursomes. Rooms with beds and rooms with nothing but mattresses but all covered with writhing bodies interlocked.
My downfall is that I'm a horny bitch. I'm vain and I'm selfish and I love the idea of men panting for my body. I'm a sucker for any man who wants to lay me-and if that happens to be all I want from him and he promises good sex but won't deliver I can hate his guts like the cattiest bitch. I'm vanity personified when anyone admires me, but when his lack of skill or lack of interest proves itself through a lousy lay, I'm going to hate him for it and hate myself for going through with it. I still feel guilty about my sexual drives and I suffer from the delusion that the only way to be restored to a state of personal grace is by endowing each experience or experimentation with some higher and nobler quality that gives it post fuck-facto sanctification.
I fuck, ergo I love, seems to be my motto. If I don't find even the pretense of love or interest, the man must be at fault and then I hate him and hate myself.
I'm driven by my urges. I'm here now in the middle of an orgy and I want to get fucked and I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts and insatiably want more and more, and I'll hate myself like hell when it's over and the more I enjoy it the more I'm going to hate it later.
And since I know I'm going to hate it, and since I know I'm going to go through with it anyway, and since I can't see any point in wasting any time.
I stand in the middle of the most crowded room and take off my blouse and fondle my breasts and lift up my skirt and stick three fingers in my twat and start playing with myself.
But not for long. A circle has opened up around me to give me room and gain perspective, and a mass of spectators has simultaneously crowded in from the corners of the room to tighten up the circle, so that I am surrounded by a bunch of gawking observers, and the first brave daring one steps out of the ring and into the circle and embraces me with a tight hug and a sensuous kiss that sends a hot tongue shooting and darting and digging deep into my mouth.
And wouldn't you know it? The first daring, dashing lover, the first one with gumption, the first to fall to my seductions, the first one of those thirty would-be fuckers, the only one with balls, is ... a woman. A beautiful woman, a soft woman, a cuddly woman with a full bosom and rich ripe red lips and long blonde tresses. A woman that any man might fall in love with. A beautiful feminine woman making love to me. And I am making love to her, for as much as she kisses me I kiss her, and as much as she fondles me I fondle her. She has one slim-skirted thigh pressed hard into my bare groin and I have one bare groin pressed just as hard and urgently into her skirted groin.
My hands are impatient. It's not enough just to feel her breasts through her blouse. I must get right through to them. I tear impatiently at the buttons at the back of her neck and when I find my fingers are too impatient I simply seize her blouse at her narrow waist, tug it out of her skirt (revealing the soft milky-whiteness of her flesh), pull it up and over her head and, in the same instant, clamp my hungry lips firmly on her fine round breast.
My first female breast in over twenty years. A feather pillow of joyous softness, a bolster of generous flesh, soft and sensuous, warm and loving. Twenty years of lost opportunities flash before me, twenty years of rejection of the breast and of Woman-all women-for whom it fronts. A large wrinkled nipple, a soft prune-like nut, growing bigger between my teeth, bigger and firmer and longer while the soft skin around it puckers and gathers to add length and fullness to the nipple.
My hands fall lower, enclasping her slim waist and the full hips that curve out below it. I feel her soft womanly hands playing rhapsodies on the keyboard of my spine. I feel the thrill of her love. Like upon like, she against she, equal to equal, love against love. She strokes my cheeks with love, gossamer fingertips over my brow, then she jerks her shoulder and moves her arm and cups her hand to gather her other breast and shove it and push it sideways and bring that one, too, to my lips. Two nipples between my lips, one firm and big, one baby-soft and infant-small, my tongue darting from one to the other, flicking and licking, comparing two sizes and two textures until the moment when one is as big as the other, as hard as the other, as firm as the other, as urgent as the other.
My knees soften, my ankles give way, I'm clasped in her arms and she in mine as we subside on the rug, sitting or squatting together while still locked in embrace and then slowly falling or rolling down to lie in one another's arms.
There may be a world around us but I see only the lovely girl in my arms. I open my eyes that have been open all the time and I look at her with words that I haven't spoken and then I open my lips and I say:
"Hello!"
Just one word.
And she smiles at me and makes reply with her eyes and puts her little coral tip of her lip between her ruby pouting lips and says:
"Hello!"
"I'm Cathleen," I say.
"I'm Maureen." Like a girl on her very first date, all shy and prim.
We've said it all with those few words, all there is to say. The rest is commentary.
She presses her lips to mine, to stifle or to swallow anything else I may superfluously want to say. We kiss again, a passionate kiss, a kiss full of meaning such as no kiss with a man has ever meant before, a kiss that sums up twenty years of deprivation and alienation from the caress of a woman. Her hands roam all over my body and mine follow the curves of her. Somewhere, somehow, between the standing position and the horizontal, she has lost her skirt. I feel the soft curved mounds of her buttocks under her silk pants, so different in shape, so different in meaning, from the flattened shape of man. She claims my hand, stays it, gets me to pull at the elastic. She wriggles each thigh in turn, turns her buttocks a twist, pulls up her knees, and lets me lower her pants right off her toes. She still has my hand, she guides it to her groin, to the silken hair, the curly hair, the warm cave, the moist soft line. I need no further urging. Her pubis is grasped in my cupped palm, pressed hard. A strange shape. Hard, firm, springy under its matted covering, perfectly rounded, complete in its completeness and, at the same time, excitingly incomplete. A roundness, a flatness, and no urging of mine will ever coax forth a masculine rod, a rampant arrow. She is complete in her flatness, and in her flatness and completeness she assures me of the completeness of my own body. Her groin is female perfection; mine too, I realize now for the first time in my life, is perfect too, complete. I exult in the knowledge that there is no loss in the loss, no absence in the absence, no incompleteness in the incompleteness. I am whole, perfect, a woman. No need to envy my baby brother's wee-wee, no need to envy my lover's tool, no need for shame or regret. She is perfect and whole, a complete woman; and I am her mirror image.
Her hand is on my twat, a soft hand, gentle, calm, soothing, patient. I let the lips open and feel a gentle finger running arpeggios deep inside me, lilting and trilling at the entrance, but echoing and booming through my womb and bowels. My fingers are less patient: one finger, then two and then three force the entry. They sink into the gentle softness, become drenched in silky moisture, slide slowly, tingling, teasing, slippering and sliding and turning and twisting and I can see in her eyes the reflection of those fingers. As if driving a car in reverse, I look in the mirror of her eyes and correct my steering, more to this side, too much, over this way. Aaah! just right, a bit more, easy now, easy, cut in here, just a touch, lightly, more gas, clutch, Aaah!
I love her so much this woman who is me, who has made me find myself in woman's form and find myself in female reflection. I want to devour her, eat her, swallow her, absorb her inside me, assimilate her to me and me to her. It is a fiery experience. My mouth hungers after hers, hungers, opens, closes, takes, hungers for more, slides down, down her face, down her lovely throat, down to her breasts, swallowing them whole, one after the other, like two giant clingstone peach halves, swallowing the slippery, syrupy, squishy softness, filling its cavern, going on for more.
She has the most exquisite waist. Her ribs are prominent, poking through her skin, but the rib-cage tapers to define the waist, a narrow waist, a flat and hollow waist, pale white with just one perfect dark-brown beauty spot four inches above, four inches to the left, of the dimpled hollow of her navel. I kiss that spot, a landmark in a sense, a pointer to something. I dig my tongue into her navel, a sweet-and-sour little spot, a taste I can't quite define, a little like a good berry, not too ripe.
I am lying with my body on her thighs now, stretched out, her knee rather than her hand at my crotch. My face is nestled into the soft cuddliness of her belly, my hands press her noble rib-cage. My face and my nose roam around and around that belly as if seeking support, a last-minute anchor, seeking a reason for staying but also courage for the next move. I linger longer but then must go, flexing my knees, raising my butt, sliding my face, encountering the first hairs, the tickling hairs, that cause another delay for stocktaking.
And then I plunge ahead, with enthusiasm unbounded, do it now or forever be damned. My face courses from side to side, rapidly, ecstatically, scratching up a storm, demanding the rasps and tickles of that hair, demanding to feel it and sense it entire, on my chin and on my cheeks and on my nose. And already my tongue, like my tongue in my recurring dream, stretches out by the root, stretches out to be the first. To find. To enter.
And reaches her twat and enters her twat and opens her twat, and licks and sighs and probes and darts. Sucking I follow. Sucking for air. To breathe in that air. To swallow her whole. To wallow. Her hole. Not enough tongues. A dozen I need. One for each lip and each fold and each hole, for each part, and each parcel, and each other. Oh, I want her so much, want her to want me, want her to be me. To swallow and be her.
She heaves, she turns, she raises her knees. My hand under her buttock. Holding her rump. Holding her up. Up to my lips. She bucks and rears under my lips. Her head thrown from side to side. Her waist twisting. Almost wrenched from my arms. But I'm gripped by the feet she has clasped round my waist. And her thighs hold my head. And my lips hold her cunt while my teeth hold her clit. Rearing and bucking. Head thrown back, spine arched. Her bottom bounces up and bottoms. Up and down and up and down while my mouth hangs on for her dear life. A moan. A scream of a moan. A piercing yell of a scream. A scream as of mortal fear but my lips won't let go and my tongue won't stop, only my fingers work tighter, tighter, squeezing, nails digging in, in the firmness and softness of the ass under my hands.
And then she bursts and explodes. Her arms flail out and her legs release me and all limbs thrash around, thrown off and out, like a lizard's tail when the lizard's in fright. Disembodied and disconnected. Flailing on her own while the trunk heaves and heaves until it subsides, and the ripples of muscles in her cunt keep on throbbing like a chicken without a head that flutters and flutters long after life has fled and blood is drained.
Until finally she collapses into a heap, only slowly and limply heaving in the final last memories, and I collapse on her crotch with the spittle running down my face.
Whereupon she reaches down her hands in welcome, grasps my head in mother love, urges me up, to meet her closer, first by the cheeks and then by the arms and then by the waist until again we are face to face and hug once more and kiss.
And she looks at me with her eyes and says "Hello!"-a different hello, to a friend newly met.
And I say "Hello!" with mine.
So that we both laugh and embrace for the fun that there's been and that's to come. For she hugs me tight again and holds me tight and rolls with me, on top of me and works her way down, from my lips to my twat until she reaches that heavenly spot. But I won't let her have it alone. I won't let her be the only one. I'm determined. I pull with my hands. I push with my thighs. I turn myself as far as I can until she understands.
Until she turns around herself to meet me from the other end, to straddle me. So that her twat is above me, just four inches too high where my tongue tears at its roots until I can pull her down, right down to my mouth.
And then together. She together and I together and we both together. Sucking. Biting. Licking. Scratching. Chewing. Chomping.
We come together. We scream together. And dig deeper into each other in desperation to be together, to be one and to merge the one in the other, the one into one, the two into one. I into Maureen and Maureen to me. Cathleen and Maureen now one. Now ... one. Now ... one. One ... One....
But when I wake up there's just me. Lying there. My cunt is wet and there's a stranger's face on it and a stranger's long blond hair spread on my thighs. And a stranger's body pressed to mine. And cruel imprisoning legs grasping my head.
And in my face is a hairy thing. Itching. Dripping. Alien. Frightening. Smelling.
A cunt.
A woman's cunt.
In my face, in my mouth, in my nostrils.
Let me out of here. I want to get away from here.
Oh my God! What have I done?
I scream. Push frantically. Throw off this strange depraved body of a woman. Throw her off my body to the ground. Stand up and try to cover my breasts and my groin with insufficient hands. Insufficient hands to push through the crowds. Get away from here. Out of here. Forget the nightmare. Let me get home.
Knowing while I push that I am prisoner of myself. That I'll push but not too hard. Push against the men who imprison me. Until one takes me in his arm. His breath of cognac and cigars and garlic but a man. He holds me to him, and slaps me when I struggle and I go down again, glad to sink down into mindless sex. Glad to sink down where my mind has flown and only my cunt has a thought in its head.
And I let them all come, one after the next, two is they're desperate, three at a time. Men and even women. Whoever wants me. Whoever needs me. I'm there to be wanted and needed. And used.
A public whore. A public receptacle. Fuck one, fuck all; come one, come all. In cunt and in mouth and in butt. And when the pressure is great and all holes are filled no holds are barred. Between my knees. Or the back of my knees. Or with my toes. In my armpits. The crook of my elbow. Under my chin. Between my breasts. In my ears. In the hollow of my tooth.
Hour after hour they come and they fuck. An unending line and I'm willing for all, just to he used. Actors in a crowd scene, they march through the room, then out through the flies, changing character as they go to come back renewed. Around and around and around.
Day after day and week after week and when I'm too weak they strap me to a beam with my hands over my head and my feet in fetters. And there, spread-eagled, they beat me with ropes and lash me with chains and lacerate my back with whips. Great angry welts of whips, each one making me want to come again and again with the scream of my blood. Lashes and beatings unending. Sinister men in cloaks and masks, and evil women in spiked boots and wicked leather breeches and venom in their teeth. They lash me ever after. My God, won't it end?
Will it never end? Never? Is this my fate? Is this my original sin, for which I am bound to sin on and on?
God! God! Christ! Loving Jesus! Holy Mother of God! Holy Fucking Jesus! Let me out from this round and I'll never go back.
Until next time.
God! Take pity of my fate. Take pity!
CHAPTER FIVE
Pity me! Hold me!
I cling to him, my body naked in his arms, cling to him in horror, cling to him for comfort, for assurance, for life. I curl into his side like an infant in its mother's arms; he smiles at me, a father protective of his daughter, and bends to kiss the teardrops from my eyelids. He mistakes them for tears of passion, for tributes to his strength. He thinks me strong, determined. He doesn't know how truly weak I am.
I need his strength and love. I need him to guide me through my weaknesses. I need him to save me from my passions. I'll be his wife, I'll be secure, I'll never roam again.
But of course I will. That's me. I need to fuck and screw, to play the whore, to know all men lust after me, create an image of woman strong and sure that hides the me, the real and honest me that's really weak pretending to be strong.
I'm human. We're all alike. We're walking lies afraid to be exposed. Even Harold, poor Harold, especially Harold.
Harold is a man-now. A real man. I helped him be a man. I restored him his manhood through grace of being woman. I helped him be the man he wished to be but couldn't.
I loved him from the moment I first met him. I saw the gentle honesty of his soul through the braggadocio he wore as part of his Yankee uniform in Paris. From our first meeting I took him to my heart. I brought him to my Montmartre studio to undress the painted mirrors of my soul before his eyes. I took him to see my Paris, to show him what it meant to me and why. Not your Select and Dome and Coupole; not your Louvre or Pantheon or Sacre-Coeur, but the Paris of people, of real people, the Paris I love of the people I love. Walks with Harold arm-in-arm along the quais with a fine drizzle falling from leaden skies and the booksellers huddled into their glistening mackintoshes raising the tarpaulins to let us taste their wares. Old prints, quaint didactic books, from generations dead, that once had meant so much, with spidery notes in margin. Devotional books, sermons and admonitions, guides to conduct and religious faith, devotional readings to assuage the soul through its travails, studed by lists of births, baptisms, godparents and officiating priests, and lists of death, of those felled in their lender years, fatal disease, where buried, who had borne them to their final rest and who had mourned them "to eternity."
I cried to see this book, crying for those whose names meant nothing to my eyes, and Harold kissed me and then bought the book. I have it now, enshrined on top of the closet, a heavy tome lovingly bound in wine-red leather, and every now and again I take it down and leaf through its pages like a lama spinning his prayer wheel, as if by opening it and airing its memories I could help some little Parisian soul dead these sixty years or more before it was even old enough to talk, and speed it on through purgatory and limbo to the celestial abode where it deserves to rest. My love for Harold is built in part on tiny bones rotting at the bottom of an ornate coffin in the Cimetiere des Batignolles.
With Harold to the Place du Puits-de-l'Ermite and that splendid modern-day surprise, a Moorish village with mosque and minaret, a patently artificial Alham-bra, the muezzin calling the faithful, the noisy Moorish market with the guttural bark of the Maghreb, then lunch in a little whitewashed restaurant, couscous washed down with harsh Algerian wine. And then back through time and history to the anachronism of the ancient arena, and forward into stilted nature in the botanic gardens with their labeled specimens, the glass-fronted vivariums and the implausible labyrinth.
Or a late summer evening with Harold in Belleville after an afternoon of running and kissing and laughing in the Pare des Buttes-Chaumont, of getting splashed by the waterfall and racing each other across the bridge to the island, and of kissing under the portico of the little ornate temple in the middle of the lake. A sauntering walk to the Porte des Lilas (the magic of the name so incongruous for a site of such grim desolation where the finest imagination could not bring forth even a vision of lilacs) and then threatening showers which made us scurry through the narrowing streets. A stop to pick up wine, a bread, a dozen eggs, olives in a paper cornet, a hunk of cheese, then running in a huddle with Harold's jacket Walter-Raleigh-like over both our heads to seek shelter in Ginny's apartment.
On the sixth, trembling, winding floor. Along the dark cabbage-smell hall, a knock at the door and tumbling over ourselves into her room before she'd managed to open the door-which was impossible for her, anyway, since she was pinned down on the bed by a pair of pumping buttocks by someone I couldn't recognize, not until I heard a loud bellowed: "For chrissakes, if you've got to stand and stare at least have the decency to shut the fuckingporte and keep the wind off my ass." Paul!
They fell out of bed together. We'd interrupted the action for them in too distracting a manner, and for once-and only once-I saw Paul unable to keep a stiff prick. They got vaguely dressed and we sat down to eat while outside the mansarde windows the sky of Paris lit up with flashes of lightning, all the way from the Telegraphe to the Tour Eiffel. We had lots of things to talk about and lots of things to laugh at, and Paul had to show off his knowledge of Paris and of Europe and the whole wide world. To show off even more he got me on his lap with his shirt tails wide open and nothing underneath and kissed me passionately, saying all the time: "You're not jealous, Harold, are you? Your Cathleen is just like a little sister to me, there's nothing more to it at all." The fucking liar!
Harold took it in good part, and he didn't require Ginny to sit on his lap "to make up for it" as Paul suggested, either. We kept drinking and smoking and talking about the world and its problems and especially Paris and its problems and most especially American expatriates in Paris and their problems, of remittances, jobs, studies, studios, rents, mistresses, pregnancies, clap, husbands, abortions and painting. Ginny drew Harold out about his writing: he was reluctant at first, as reluctant as he'd been with me, but I gave him encouragement and he opened up, telling us a little about his father and his feelings of inadequacy and the paternal pressures that had driven him from home, of his desires to get away from the New England traditions his family swore and lived by, his rejection of the family wealth and the family pressures, of his attempts to establish himself as a writer, creating a new life for himself and a new style, of being his own man, his own creation, bound to no one and indebted to none. He'd budgeted himself strictly, he explained ("the last lingering trace of my New England heritage"), both in terms of money and of time. He'd either prove himself as a writer within that budget or he'd ship back home and let himself be reabsorbed by his family's hungry tentacles. We were drinking rather heavily, knocking back a bottle of Armagnac Paul had brought: it made me sentimental, Paul crude, Ginny giggly and Harold maudlin. "I have to express the real me within me," Harold kept stressing. "Not the me that my father tried to force and not the me that my teachers and professors tried to create by cramming me with facts. The real me is hidden deep down; the only way I can get it out is by writing. There is no other way."
Paul interrupted his monologue. "Have you tried screwing? A fuck's the best way I know of getting out what's deep inside me."
Harold's face took on a pained expression. Ginny noticed it; Paul certainly didn't.
"Fucking's the best way to get deep into a woman, too," Paul went on. "And I don't mean just with a prick. A fuck's the greatest truth machine ever invented. When you're in there banging away at each other you can't tell lies. I wish I had a typewriter down there where my balls are to take down every thought that pours out from my prick. That's where the real truth lies: not at the end of a gun as some fucking idiots try to tell you, but right at the end of your prick. That's where it is."
Paul, drunk, tired, and resentful of our having interrupted his little bout with Ginny, was becoming objectionable. Ginny tried to calm him and at the same time keep Harold from getting angry at Paul. Harold didn't know how to take it. He became mawkish, he began to talk about his problems compulsively, telling more and more about his hatred for his father and his need "to find himself' by coming to Paris and writing.
Paul, who'd been kept from interrupting only by continuous and concerted efforts by Ginny and me, suddenly could take it no longer. "Why'nt ya stop that fucking piss?" he thundered drunkenly. "Why'nt ya stop all that fucking crap? Why'nt ya grab Ginny's ass and haul her off to bed and give her a good fuck?"
Harold turned white. I thought it was with fury.
Ginny put her arms around Paul and tried to kiss him-anything to cut short this outburst-but Paul flung her aside and pulled me to him in almost the same grab. "You don't want to fuck Ginny because you don't have the balls for it, is that it?" he snarled at Harold with contempt. "Well, how'd ya like to watch me make it with your dame, ha?" And with that he pulled up my skirt and started pawing. I gave him a resounding slap in his face and disengaged myself.
Any other time I would have been happy to take up the suggestion. I've always enjoyed screwing with Paul; to do so now, with Harold for audience, would have added extra interest. The idea of sharing my lovers and having them share me has always fascinated me. I want to know that my lover not only doesn't resent it when I'm fucking someone else but really enjoys it too; I guess it's part of my revulsion at the thought of being "owned". Had things worked out properly that evening, we could have had a real ball in Ginny's apartment, the four of us snuggling in a heap on her enormous bed sunk into the mauve-lit alcove under the sexy-black walls. That thought had crossed my mind the moment we walked in and found her and Paul together, and the only thing that had given me any doubt was the fact that I hadn't fucked with Harold yet and that it mightn't work out too well with Paul holding a hundred-fuck advantage over my most recent conquest-to-be.
Now, with Paul reduced to insults and innuendos, I knew catastrophe was only minutes away. I went to the dormer window and announced, (lying): "Look, it's stopped raining. Come on, Harold, let's go. I'm tired and I want to get to bed."
Paul made some feeble protestations. The standard drunkard's vocabulary of how much he liked Harold and we were all such friends, weren't we, and stay for another drink, you're my best friend, you're all my best friends, just a quick drink, we're all good friends, no hard feelings. I ignored him, adjusted my clothes, and steered Harold out of the door.
There was a lot of patching to be done. I didn't know what Harold was thinking of me now, and I very much wanted him to think well of me. I wanted desperately to sleep with Harold that night and I feared I couldn't get him into the right mood after the scene at Ginny's.
"Hey," I said cheerily as we reached the steep street. "It's only a little drizzle. I love walking through wet streets late at night, don't you? We can always get a cab later."
We walked hand in hand like little children. We were still a bit tipsy. I took off my shoes and splashed through the puddles. We stopped under a street lamp sanctified by a halo of raindrops, and Harold kissed my eyes and licked the raindrops off my nose. We sobered up gradually along the Boulevard de la Chapelle and got to talking seriously about ourselves, and our thoughts and hopes. The little contretemps at Ginny's had passed and been forgotten. We were starting off again with a clean slate. I felt good with Harold. He had his arm tight around me and I had my head resting securely against his shoulder. I squeezed the hand at my waist. It was good, I could tell. He's my lover. I'm going to fuck Harold tonight, after all.
I brought him up to my studio, gave him the model's wrap to wear while his clothes dried before the gas ring, made coffee, poured out a pous se cafe, and before we'd managed to down it we were down on the mattress on the posing platform with our clothes off.
Harold was tender and loving. He kissed me so gently. I felt more loved than I'd ever felt before. There was something in his manner that told me there was more in it for him than just the fuck, that I was more than a body and more than a conquest. He was a genuine man, he genuinely loved me. He was playing neither the conquering hero nor the needy boy begging to be loved. He was a man who wanted to know me, a man who wanted to get close to me. He was the first man I'd known who neither wanted to conquer me nor wanted to be conquered. No tricks, no game, not even the game we all like to play of showing who was the more exciting and who the more excited. It was calm and natural and real. We just lay there and stroked, and hugged, and kissed, and whispered.
It must have been an hour before I even noticed that his prick was still soft. I'd been toying with it the whole time but it hadn't become a special aim or object for me, just a tender part of him; now that I was beginning to notice my natural urges and tenderness for him he hadn't what I needed to put inside me. It was time to interrupt the gentle talk and gentle kissing; we could continue with that later, after we'd fucked. Right now I wanted him to fuck me. I needed his prick right now. It became an object I had to have, hard.
I played all my tricks on it. I stroked it gently. I pumped it hard. I scratched it lightly. I twisted it between my fingers. I pulled at the loose skin in opposite directions and let it snap back. I curled back the foreskin and fingered the tip. But it remained soft.
And Harold was breathing deeply. With anguish.
I sat up and took his prick between my lips. It stayed soft. I bit it. I stroked it. I swallowed it whole. I licked its length. I played with his balls. I stroked his thighs. I pushed the tip of my tongue in the miniature cunt at the tip of his prick. His prick stayed soft.
I sucked hard to draw him out. I blew into it to infuse it with life.
Harold's prick stayed soft between my lips.
Suddenly he sat up and pushed me away. "It's no good," he said sadly. "It's never any good. It never works. I'm crippled. I'm sorry for what I've done to you but it's no good pretending. I was hoping this time it would be different. I really was. I was sure it would be different. But it isn't. It never is. There's something wrong with me and it won't work. Please let me have my clothes back. I have to get home."
"I don't want you to go home," I said. "I want to sleep with you."
"But what's the good? I can't be a lover to you. Please let me go."
"But you are my lover," I told him. "You love me, don't you? I know you do. I love you."
"But I can't. I...."
"Yes you can. You're loving me now. You love me by just being with me. Please stay. All I want is to be with you, near you. The fuck itself doesn't matter. I want to sleep with you. I want to curl up in your arms and feel your body next to mine and dream about you and wake up feeling your arms around me. I've been fucked often enough since I've come to Paris not to miss an odd one here and there. Tomorrow'll be another day."
"But there won't be a tomorrow. There won't be anything. Don't you see? I'm impotent, I'm maimed. I'll never be any good to you. I'll never be any good for anyone."
"That's absurd. You've got a perfectly good prick and there's no reason why you won't get it up with the right person when you feel in the right mood. As for being good, you've been very good to me and for me. I want you to be even better for me. I want you to stay here with me and sleep with me, that's all."
Wild ideas were going through my mind. I'd drug him with a nightcap, and while he was asleep I'd go out and get whatever was needed to give him a hard-on. I'd buy a hundred grams of Spanish fly. I'd rent a gaudy whore. Two whores, and have them put on a circus for him. Two whores and a mule. A couple of pretty boys. A young girl in a nun's habit. A big black giant with a whip. A bitch-woman with spike heels and leather breeches. A wet nurse with a forty-five-inch projection. The hat check girl from the Moulin Rouge. A chorus girl from the Bal Tabarin. The whole chorus line from the Folies Bergeres. A sex spectacular. A dirty movie. The entire cast from a dirty movie. All served up with Spanish fly.
"I ought to go home," Harold said.
"If you're any sort of a gentleman you won't walk out on a lady at this hour of the morning," I told him. He was already putting on his clothes. I gently undid the half-tied knot of his tie and calmly placed it over the back of a chair, unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it over his head, pulled off his singlet and was about to pull down his drawers when, rather than let me humiliate him, he did so himself. He had surrendered. I had won the first round.
We went to sleep like brother and sister, the only difference being that we were naked and had our arms over each other's body. "Good night, Harold," I said as I gave him a last kiss on the eyes. "I think you're a wonderful person, a wonderful, honest, open man. I think I'm falling in love with you."
I couldn't sleep properly. Image chased image across the retina of my mind. I'd see Harold, a tiny man I could hold in one hand, growing bigger and bigger as I kissed his head, six feet, seven, eight feet tall, and then sprouting a cock, a beautiful firm, straight, brilliantly glossy cock getting bigger and bigger, six inches, seven, eight, nine. As big as my arm, as big as my leg, as big as me, as big as a house. An overwhelming prick that I longed to kiss and held myself back from kissing, afraid that something dreadful would happen if I did, finally unable to resist, but just as I approached it with my lips, not really close, only barely touching, it went Pppshhh! and collapsed like a surrealist souffle leaving Harold fist-sized in my hand, a tiny manikin until I blew him up to size again with another kiss.
The dream repeated itself endlessly. I was caught in the groove of a phonograph record of the senses. I wasn't asleep. I couldn't sleep. Each time my eyes closed I saw Harold shooting up in my mind, and each time he collapsed I woke again. Finally, in desperation, I made up my mind to cheat. I'd dream away but stay awake while dreaming and when I was about to reach the recurring moment I'd do something different, manipulate the needle in some way to force it into a different groove. This time while I dozed, I thought of Harold getting bigger and bigger and of loving him even more and more but I didn't wait until he was too big. Just at the moment when he was the right size for me I crawled down under the sheet, searched out his soft prick and stuffed it into my mouth.
The ruse worked. Harold stopped growing. He stayed exactly the same size, life size, and his prick didn't grow either. Nor did he take the souffle route either. It stayed soft and chewy and gentle. Soft and kind. Lovable as a little cherub. A little baby that would never grow up and be spoiled. All mine, to kiss and fondle the whole night long.
I woke up to feel Harold's fingers running gently through my hair. His prick was still in my mouth. His fingers kept stroking me with his own brand of electric magic. With fingers like that Harold doesn't need a prick. With fingers like that he can make me come anywhere: on my neck, behind my ears, even from the bridge of my nose. I love him so dearly. I love him for his uniqueness and his gentleness, yes, even for the unique gentleness of his prick that never gets hard and angry.
"Thank you, sweetheart," Harold murmurs. It is I who should have said "thank you" for what his fingers are doing. "It makes me feel good," he says.
I let go of his prick with my mouth and fondle it in my hands. "You make me feel even better, Harold. With your fingers," I tell him. "Will you do something for me, Harold? Will you stroke my cunt the way you've been stroking my hair and face?" I stretch out at his side, head to toe. His prick goes back into my mouth as I trace his thighs with my fingertips.
I think he's never stroked a woman's cunt before in all his life. He doesn't seem to know quite where to begin. I sense him exploring, going down one path, scouting out the way ahead, treading carefully in surprise, backtracking, seeking out a new route. Everything surprises him. He must have known to expect hair; he'd certainly seen it. Was the gash a surprise for him? Did he know it was soft and moist? Was that start of surprise his discovery that I was creaming? Has he lost his way among the folds? What does he make of my bud? It was small when he first touched it; he goes away for a moment, comes back and finds it bigger. One finger explores it and then another. They pinch it, squeeze it, try to take its measure. An impossible task; it grows more the more it's measured. The larger finger retreats in dismay; the smaller stays behind at the clit, on sentry duty. Now the scouts have found the cave. It's warm in there and close. The roof is low and the walls narrow, covered with soft lichen oozing moisture. The walls palpitate under the probing finger, palpitate and gently widen. Now two are inside and now three. The sentry leaves his post and joins in the exploration at the tunnel mouth. A second hand brings in reinforcements. His explorers are all over me now.
And then comes a new one. Out of the blue, entirely beyond the dreams of elation, comes his tongue. A virgin tongue that never before a twat has touched-and yet, unerringly, finds it way. Oh Harold, Harold! you gorgeous man, you wonderful person, you generous lover. Oh Harold! Harold!
He's so good to me. He's doing such wonderful things to me. I'm so lucky. I stuff both cock and balls into my mouth. I try to swallow the entire man. My fingers make for his asshole ... then stop. It's his prick, I want, his prick. I mustn't divert his attention. I mustn't spoil it. I leave my fingers just behind the balls, at the soft spot where he's most sensitive, at the Achilles heel of his prick. I roll my chin on his groin and bring his legs together around my head so that I may sink closer into him. My own legs curl themselves around his beautiful head, sucking it deeper into my vortex. I love him, Harold. I love him, love him.
His tongue is so wonderful, and so are his lips, and his fingers roam over my body, one at my breast and one at the soft of my body. He's going to make me come yet, even without a screw, even without a hard-on, just by his love. Just with his tongue and fingers he's going to make me come. I can feel it now, getting closer and closer. Waves rolling over me and under me, lifting me, floating me on their crests. I begin to jerk. It's so good. It's going to be one of those slow comes, gentle, slow, building up and up from plateau to plateau, each seeming to be the peak but each uncovering an even higher peak that can be reached. I float away with Harold. I clasp him the tighter with my legs to make sure he won't get lost, and make an even greater effort to contain his lovely cock.
Another plateau of ecstasy, and another even higher with a never-ending vista. I'm going to come but I can't because I'm choking. I'm gasping. I can't breathe. There's something inside me and I open my mouth to breathe, I claw at his legs to pull them aside so as to take a fresh breath at least and when I close my lips I find Surprise! A cock!
A hard cock, growing and growing and growing. Firmer and firmer and ever firmer. Straightening out and rearing up and bucking proudly. A young stallion waiting to be let out to romp, a young knight stiffly arrayed in armor waiting for his first joust. My lips go back to caress him but he's a stranger now, a man where once sat curled a little child, a man I wouldn't recognize any more, well hardly now, goodness how you've grown, your daddy must be proud of you.
It's so exciting, I forget to come. I don't give a damn about not coming. I've forgotten I was ever going to. I've put my whole cunt out of my mind. It's his cock I'm thinking about, only his cock, nothing else matters, such a beautiful cock now. I press it with my tongue to test its hardness. I slide it between my lips to measure its length. I press lightly with my teeth to prove it isn't just an inflated dong that punctures and deflates. I taste it for its flavor, tongue it to feel out its landscape. It's a beautiful prick. It's one hell of a wonderful prick. It's all mine. I was the first to discover it. I was the first to nurse it. I was the first to have it. I am its mother; its father planted it in the womb of my mouth and in the womb of my mouth it gestated, and now that it's born it's all mine. I want to slip it into my womb now, my real womb, my cunt for which it was conceived and for which it was nurtured.
I couldn't keep it back in my mouth if I tried. It's too big for me. It's man-sized now. I can't hold it. I slip it into my hands; it takes two to hold it. It's more than a handful, it takes both of mine and sticks out beyond them at either end. I can barely close my fingers over it. I pull back a little to get a better look at it. "Hello there, nice to see you!" It's the image of his father. It's young Harold himself. Harold Jr. It's nice to know you. I'm in love with your father young Harold and you're a proud son for him to have and for me to love.
And Harold himself, Harold Sr., Harold on my bed, Harold-who-couldn't, Harold my lover is laughing and crying. He's hysterical with laughter. He's so happy he's got to cry. "Cathleen," he says, choking as he laughs on a sob. "Cathleen, it's...." and he doesn't know what to say or how to say it.
"I know, Harold, I know, it's...." and I can't say it either. We're flailing about in happiness and we fall into each other's arms and hug and laugh and cry together. Harold, oh Harold! It's good. Everything is good. I love you! I love you so much I can't utter a word because I'm choked up with choking sobs of laughter but I know what you're saying though you're saying nothing but sobs. It's so good to be with you, Harold.
Would we dare forget him? Junior is there, knocking at my belly, pushing up to remind us he's a big boy now. He's got a key to the front door now. He wants to be let in. Yes, Junior, yes! Come right in, come right in. I'm dilated to receive you.
I'm on my back. My legs are spread as wide as they'll ever go; wide enough to take an elephant's trunk. Here, let's welcome him together. My hand is out in welcome. I grasp and lead him to the door, a bride carrying her groom to the threshold. Who said Harold didn't know how? He knows his way as if he's been fucking women all his life. He's perched in precisely the right place with his knees. One push and young Junior is right inside. How good it is, how good, Harold's cock slipping right in. The walls close in to hold him, my knees together to hold Harold.
And Harold starts humping and I hump back, both choked with amazement, a one and a two and a three and....
Good Grief! Tragedy!
Junior's in trouble, he's throbbing, he's writhing, he's spurting out his life-fluid. I'm flooded inside and Junior lies lifeless inside me. It's the end. Poor Harold, his first fuck. How must he feel! Poor Harold, I love you, don't let it trouble you. He'll get well again, he'll grow big and strong. It's only your first fuck, Harold. You did very well. You'll do better still. I'll be your teacher. I'll train you to be a champion.
A tear drops to my cheek. A tear from Harold. He's taken it badly. I mustn't let it happen. Like a young rider thrown by his first horse he must be made to mount again before he becomes horse-shy. I must go down on Harold and breathe new life into Junior, limp, sad, exhausted from his first venture. I bend down to kiss and see a final tear seeping from Junior's open eye. I lick it off, Junior's last drop. My tongue reaches for more, for the taste of Harold mixed with the taste of me. I lick around and around, sweeping along the shaft and cuddling the bloated softness of the glans, curling my tongue under its limp cap. It may be soft but not the way it was, big now and gorged, only worn out from exertion, simply resting and waiting for the right moment.
Which arrives before I know it, a surprising comeback, Junior's bounced back on his feet and he's standing straight, his fists clenched, he's waiting to return to the ring. Harold wants to make haste but I slow him down. We have time, all the time in the world, all the rest of the night though there's dawn in the crack of the window, all the rest of tomorrow and all the tomorrows thereafter. Slow, Harold, slow. Don't rush the lad. Ease him into me gently. There now, feel the nest. Let him get used to it, slowly. There, you don't have to fuck me straight away.
I keep my legs apart so as not to put on too much pressure. I allow my lover only a few lunges at a time before I make him slow down. I encourage him to explore the rest of me with tongue and with fingers. He likes my breasts. I show him seventy-one varieties of pleasure he can bring me there while allowing his big dong a rest. There are a hundred and forty-four ways to scratch my back, two thousand ways to tickle my cunt (eight hundred and seventeen of these being special exercise for my clit). Not to count kisses in my ear and bites on my neck, caresses on my eye and all the other myriad raptures he's long been adept at. I provide him with a guide to his own flesh, all the spots where his spirit delights, that he hadn't known existed.
"A man has breasts and nipples to be chewed?" I hear him ask in silent amazement. "A scratch is sexy? A pinch passionate?" Yes, Harold, there's much to be learned and I shall teach you. He's back at fucking again. He fucks well, there's energy in his limbs and enthusiasm. He reaches deep and reams me out. I teach him to rotate his hips and to vary his speed. I rub my thighs along his own to hint at sensations he might have missed. I hold him to my chest to let him hear with his heart the heartbeats of my breasts. He's fucking me well and fast, too fast. I urge him to a stop and while he's slowed I teach him new tricks. Your asshole, for instance, you didn't know that was good, did you? Concentrate on it; take your mind off your cock and get fucked through your ass. See how good to have my finger there, try it on me and watch me react.
And so it goes. A dozen thrusts and then a pause for new experiences while Junior cools off. A dozen more and rest again. Explore me all. Explore yourself. Explore your body and your mind and live each thrill to its limit. A dozen trips, starting and resting, and each trip becomes more urgent and more pressing. But this time you can hold back. Until the very last. I'm so thrilled with you my lover. Man and boy. All of you. Harold. I want you, I'm ready. I wouldn't stop. I won't stop you. Come on. Pump on. And on. And on. ON! DON'T STOP! FUCK! FUCK!
WoW! WoW!
You're great, Harold. You're the greatest! Who would have thought it?
We were never out of each other's sight for the next three days. We went from my bed to the cafe to eat, and from the cafe to his room to screw and back again for food and up again to my studio. In three days Harold gained the experience of a lifetime. He learned every refinement of the art of screwing. He learned to find every hole where a woman can be fucked. He learned to use every tool with which a woman can be entered. He discovered every button on a woman's body that may be pressed to charge her with life. He had a good and competent teacher, who had herself learned the art from good and competent masters.
At the end of the three-day cram course, Harold could be classed as "skilled-to-experienced" on the aptitude scale; quite a high rank, promising much for the future. I gave him his passing-out examination with my heels and shoulders on the bed. He'd remembered all the tricks. He'd invented some of his own. He showed off his knowledge of positions seven through thirty-four. And then he did a virtuoso impromptu voluntary complete with brass bands and shot off a fireworks display that remained suspended in the air for all of eleven minutes before it exploded between the stars. Then we glided down slowly on our separate parachutes and he disentangled himself, put on his clothes and went home to recuperate.
I had given Harold love and confidence. It made a man of the boy his father had crippled, and he repaid me the favor a thousandfold for, in accepting me, he made me more of a woman. He gave me strength. He helped wipe out the memories of my own sadness that a thousand fucks hadn't quite wiped out and another thousand won't wipe out completely. I was repaying to him a debt that I owed to the men who had saved me from what I had been, a cripple like him. I passed on to Harold some of the love and some of the confidence and, above all, some of the acceptance of my own body that I had learned from Paul and from Roger and from Rene le Turc and all my other good lovers. I passed on also what I'd learned from my (too many) incompetent lovers: from them I learned not to expect too much and to be satisfied with little, to reject physical performance as such and look beyond it to the man. And in Harold I found a lot.
Who were my teachers? Chuck of course, and from him I learned that men, even football heroes are shy. Chuck was followed by other Chucks whose names merge together as do their faces and their smiles and their bumbling. I offered myself, in the limited way I knew, and they, in their limited ways, took what they could-and left me my virginity. Carl was the only one who stood out and that only because I wore his ring for two months. Carl was an education major; I hope I helped his education; he didn't further mine. By carefully scheduling our trips back to college we managed to spend one night together at a hotel. I think he was able to get an erection; my fifth or my sixth "man" and I still couldn't properly tell what an erection was. Anyway he couldn't, or he wouldn't penetrate me and I, too, was scared to do much more. Our engagement, inevitably, broke up a week later. To heal my broken heart (as I told my mother), to get away from my succession of Chucks and Carls to which I seemed chained, I went to Paris.
American girls in Paris are fair game. You'd think it's easy to get laid in Paris. But French lovers have good taste. French lovers like their women wise and witty and mature. Only those who can't compete for the best will settle for the sort of girls who can't compete for the best in America, and my sad lot was to fall in with those who sought confidence in those from whom failure might be expected. I found few French lovers willing to deflower me. I found Americans and Englishmen galore. I went to bed with three or four. With five if you count Elston. We did all sorts of things together. A lot of fingering and a lot of kissing. Perhaps my hymen was set back deep and none of them went deep enough to pierce it. Perhaps it was too tough and none thrust hard enough to tear it. I assumed I'd been deflowered. I assumed I was no longer a virgin. I went around believing myself an experienced woman and the charm must have worked because Rene took me up on it and Rene was known to be an experienced wolf and a wow with the women.
In fact Rene tried to make me a few times and I turned him down. And then one night we had a party Virginia and I in the studio we were then sharing in Montparnasse-and Rene was playing court to me for a change, and I was bored, deadly bored with everyone else, and Rene was exciting though I didn't believe a word of his flattery, and when he asked me to come home with him to his apartment I surprised him by saying yes, catching him in his unpreparedness while he was readying his next reassuring sentence that all he really wanted to do was talk with me and have me listen to some new jazz records on his Victrola, and sample unique liqueur that his roommate had brought back from Greece or Turkey or somewhere.
Rene was Belgian and the national attribute tacked on to his name was simply tribute to the legends he tried to weave about himself. He worked in some mysterious way for a travel agency where he met foreign tourists who were the main interests in his life; he'd have taken that job even if there'd been no money in it and, for all I know, there wasn't and he lived only off the dinners and shirts and ties and fucks he managed to get from his clients. But he was a good and imaginative fucker.
I enjoyed the preliminaries. So smooth, so practiced, so flattering-and so superfluous: solicitously helping me off with my wrap, kissing my hand and my neck, admiring my clothes and my hair (which he had to stroke, naturally), and my good taste. Then he put on his records, thinking that as an expatriate modern American, the way to my heart was with a lot of jazz. He went to the kitchen and returned with a mixed drink which, he assured me, was mostly orange juice and which I knew to be mostly gin. He told me elaborate stories about himself, weaving in tales of international intrigue and involved arms and drugs and spying, with suggestions that he had participated as a lad in the Turko-Greek conflict (on which side wasn't quite clear) with tales of the sack of Smyrna and fires and midnight flight, all very dramatic but hardly furthering my main interest, which was to get fucked.
Le Turc must have interpreted my somewhat sleepy impatience with his tales as an indication of my unreadiness for his next step. Accordingly he brought in his biggest gun. "Do you know who my roommate is?" he asked. I didn't of course.
"It's Paul Cannock," he told me, waiting for my breathless thrill of recognition. He was disappointed.
"Paul Cannock," he repeated. "The writer. You know." I confessed I didn't.
"Don't you read the Tribune in New York?"
I confessed that not only didn't I read the Tribune but I hadn't spent more than a week altogether in New York City in my entire life.
"He's a very famous writer. He's away much of the time, traveling around Europe and collecting material for his newspaper. He's very famous and very gifted." He brought out a scrapbook to show me clippings with his friend's byline and, then, seeing that I might still not be fully impressed, he led me into Paul's room and showed me framed photographs of Paul with the semi-famous, each with an autograph in a corner. I was thoroughly bored with the whole charade and decided to force the issue.
"He must think very highly of you to want to share an apartment with you. You must be an exceptional person yourself." I looked up at him with the admiration shining from my eyes and moved close to his chest. He placed his arms around me gently and folded me to him. I found his lips and let him kiss me. I got him to steer me to Paul's bed and let him pull me on to it.
He must have drawn an extra measure of assurance from the power that emanated from Paul and, by association, from his bed. My clothes were off in a trice, and his own too, and he started making love to me. Now, at last, he was in his element. He was good. He stroked me gently. He showed me spots where no one else had yet tried to reach me. He kissed my breasts and bit my nipples. He swallowed each breast whole. He kissed my belly in a charming way. He nibbled at my toes and worked his way up my legs on the inside, up one leg to the knee then down the other to the toes and back again to reach my thigh, working his way to the inside where he'd already prepared the way with light little tugs and pinches and tickles and scratches with his fingers. I was amazed at how much a man could do to please a woman without even touching her cunt. He gave me a new understanding of what fucking was really all about. I was sure neither my mother nor my father nor ninety percent of my classmates had any idea that a fuck was anything more than a succession of kisses and then a prick shoved up inside and shaken about and when it's over, good night, go to sleep while she goes out for a quick douche.
Then his finger went into my cunt and I knew that something new was starting in my life. His fingers worked their way around expertly. Wow! That hit a nerve! That made me jump. That made me feel. This was something new. This was the real thing. This is what I'd wanted and never even knew existed and now that I had it was better and bigger than anything I could ever have dreamed of.
Then his tongue reached my cunt. I didn't really believe it. I knew he was kissing my thighs but now there was something new teasing my cunt and it felt different and better and it couldn't be his fingers because he had one hand on my breast and one on my buttocks but I couldn't see his face because it was buried between my legs.
I didn't think men really ate women that way. I'd heard jokes about it, of course, as I'd heard stories of farm boys fucking sheep, but I didn't believe that any man in his right mind would want to go down on as dirty and smelly and unsanitary-and, yes, vile-a place as a hairy twat. But Rene did and I knew he was doing that, knew it without a doubt when I felt his teeth close on my clitoris. And then his tongue shot deep into my vagina and started licking it out while his nose rubbed my clit and his chin diddled me somewhere lower. He made me push up my knees and he locked his arms around my thighs and worked on my clitoris from one end and my arsehole from the other and I climbed way up into the clouds where everything was forgotten and reality was lost and I had wings that made me fly.
And while his tongue worked deep in the hole and a bunch of fingers stroked my labia and tweaked my clit and another bunch worked at the back of my cunt and around my asshole-I came. And I came. And I came.
It was the best and the most perfect come I'd ever experienced in my entire life.
Which wasn't perhaps as remarkable as it sounds because it was the first time in my life that I'd come with a man. Even though, in the strict meaning of the word, Rene hadn't even started fucking me yet.
But he started soon enough. I still didn't have my breath back when he straddled me and entered. He drove forward easily, like an athlete, riding atop rather like a jockey, towering above me and looking into my eyes to read the ecstasy there. I couldn't have disguised it even if I'd tried.
"Have you ever been fucked so well before in your life?" he asked. He was a man badly in need of reassurance.
"You're magnificent," I told him. And I meant it.
"Wait, you haven't seen anything yet."
He pulled at my legs, first one and then the other and lifted them into a vertical position. Then he grabbed me under the ass and put a curve into my back and then he pushed in his dong, but hard.
I screamed.
"It's too big for you, isn't it?"
I nodded with tears in my eyes.
"Don't worry, honey. I'll be gentle. I know how to do it right." He had his knees on either side of my hips and he continued shoving at me with his prick, grasping my tail with his knees for leverage.
"I think you're tearing me," I warned him. "You're really hurting me. Please take it easy. Ouch! Please, honey."
That pleased him. A real man in his eyes was someone whose prick could make a woman cry with pain. "I'll try another way," he said.
He made a imagine maneuver with his body. He forced my right leg down on the bed and wormed his way around my left side and after a few tricks worthy of an Olympics star he had me sort of lying on my side with his right leg under my right leg and his left leg between my thighs so that from the waist down he was lying beside and behind me but from the waist up he had me twisted round so that I was facing him. And all this without letting his prick slip out. Quite a sportsman, tres sportif ce Turc-lh, hein? Perhaps I ought to clap or, at least, say bravo.
"This is a very good position," he assured me. "I don't put my weight on you, we can both lie down and relax, I can kiss you easily and play with your breasts. I can get to your clitoris" (he pronounced it clytoris) "and give you extra sensations, and you can get to my testicles likewise. And at the same time we can fuck."
It was all very true. I felt I should show my appreciation of his skill by playing with his testicles as had been suggested (read "ordered"). He was doing all the other tricks just as he had enumerated them. I thought of one of those vaudeville musicians who plays a mouth organ, a drum, cymbals, a Jew's harp, a triangle and a banjo all at the same time while dancing a jig and singing a ballad. He banged away at my drum for quite a while, raising sensations that were, unquestionably, quite pleasant, and his efforts neither hurt me nor tired me.
"Another good thing is that in this position you don't have to pull out when you want to sleep. We can sleep both together like this all night."
"Do you want to sleep?" I asked, thinking he might be dropping a hint.
"Oh no. There's still much we can do." He proved it right away by withdrawing the leg he'd been keeping between mine and forcing my torso away from his. "You see, we can also fuck from behind. This way I can hold your back to my chest and I can kiss the back of your neck and hold your beautiful breasts in a very natural position." Which, naturally, he demonstrated.
"Or we can make like the animals." He pushed me around again and made me lie face down on the bed and now he was lying on top of me. His prick was still deep inside my cunt, and he was fucking me, as promised, from the back. Which was also quite pleasant. It seemed to reach areas in my cunt where he hadn't reached before and I liked his weight on my buttocks and I liked his fingers digging at my clit where he'd forced his hands, between my thighs and the bed.
"Is this how the animals fuck?" I asked.
"No, not yet. You must come back like this." He pulled me into an all-fours position with his knees between mine and my buttocks raised to hold his prick. Which hadn't slipped out yet. "Like this I feel like a dog and I make you feel like a bitch in heat. It's good, that, isn't it? Every woman wants to feel sometimes like a bitch."
"Am I supposed to bark, too?"
He laughed. It was a good and generous laugh. I suddenly realized that I really hadn't heard him laugh at all since he'd started the big seduction scene. He takes his fucking with deadly seriousness, I thought.
We were both laughing now, boisterously, hysterically even. It marked the end of the tension, and I was very relieved.
"You know," I told him. "I'm really enjoying this. I mean not simply because it's a good fuck but because it's fun being with you. You're very entertaining.
He laughed some more. "I am a dog and you are a bitch and I am going to bite. Oua-ouaV He took little playful bites out of my neck and my back and he scratched, somewhat more seriously, at my flanks and tweaked my breasts. It hurt, not entirely unpleasantly, and it amused him no end. He roared with laughter, laughter interspersed with barks, and we found it all so funny that we rolled over and over on the bed and eventually what all his artistry and experimentation and adroitness had failed to bring about, happened. His prick slipped out.
Eh bien," I said resignedly as if I'd suddenly discovered a flat in my car and had to get out to fix it. "Monsieur a une panne do moteur."
"Oh no. Not at all. This gives me the opportunity to show you another position." So he made me ride his cock while he was sitting on the edge of the bed. I straddled his lap and placed my legs on the bed and he bounced me up and down on his prick by opening his thighs and closing them. Then we went over the same thing again only this time I sat on his lap with my back to him. Then I had to lie back on the bed, with my legs sticking out horizontally over the edge and my buttocks raised with cushions, while he entered me from a semi-standing position. From which he picked me up (still keeping that connecting link implanted in my twat) and walked around the room with me speared on him like a huge limb projecting out of his belly.
Finally I called enough.
"Are there many more positions you know, Rene?"
"Oh many, many. I've only just begun to show you. Fucking is a real art in France. And I've learned many very secret tricks from the Orient. You Americans are like machines, like very simple machines. You do very little and you have no imagination when you fuck."
"Would you like to keep some surprises for next time, Rene? I really very much want you to fuck me. I mean properly, the ordinary way that everyone does it. I've been wanting you to fuck me all evening. In fact I wanted it since I first met you but I was too shy to approach you."
My flattery worked. Rene placed me on the bed, spread my legs, tongued my twat to get it in the mood after all the athletic distractions, mounted me and fucked me.
He was direct, strong and determined. No romantic nonsense, no show-off displays either. He fucked me now because he wanted to fuck and because I needed to be fucked, a very simple and mutually satisfying, no-games arrangement. While he fucked he occasionally kissed me in the mouth with tongue and lips, occasionally bit my neck or ears but he didn't overdo it. All very efficient, nothing to distract me from the directness of the fuck. There was a prick inside me, moving in and out like a piston, and a man on top of me rocking me like a pendulum; that was all I sensed. I could concentrate on all the wonderful sensations of being competently fucked, of having the clenched fist of my cunt massaged by a good stiff prick, of having my clitoris and mons veneris firmly agitated by the bony hardness at the base of his cock, on having a man press me down with his weight and press me up to his sex. I wasn't distracted by any romantic twaddle of whether I loved him or he me, nor by concern whether he was good enough for me or I for him. All I was concerned with was that cock doing its job, and the only part of me that was interested in that cock was my cunt.
I was a cunt all over.
He was a cock and I a cunt and the only thing that concerned me-the-cunt was what he-the-cock was doing to me, which was something very good, very good indeed, and getting better and better. Just a cock in a cunt, but what a cock! And what a cunt!
My cunt was growing bigger and bigger and his cock was growing bigger too, bigger perhaps than my cunt, so big that it was forcing my cunt to grow with its pressures. My body was swallowed into my cunt, and my mind too, until the whole world was nothing but a cock pumping away inside a cunt.
Until even the cunt couldn't keep up, and the cock kept on growing, and burst open that cunt, which exploded throughout the whole world swallowing all the stars and galaxies in its path while that cosmic cock continued its inexorable trajectory through the heavens.
My cunt never did come together again. Rene had changed it. Not only the physical part of it because, as I later deduced, he it was that finally broke through most of what was left of my maidenhead, but-and this so much more important-because he showed me how to fuck without sentiment, screw without intellect, separate body from mind and cunt from heart in the best traditions of the Bill of Rights. I learned from him, right in the beginning of my existence as a sexually liberated female, to judge a fuck as a fuck and a man as a man and not to confuse the two.
For this lesson that Rene taught me I shall be forever grateful. He liberated me from the feeling that the man and the fuck, the mind and the prick, the love and the screw are in some mysterious, divinely commanded manner inextricably connected.
From this one fuck (and I've never fucked Rene again unless I count that one brief episode in the middle of the orgy) I learned to love myself, accept myself and respect myself-quite an achievement to come out of two hours of body-to-body combat. From that base I have built further. Because of my expert initiation at Rene's hands I was ready to accept Paul and later Roger for what they were and what they truly meant to me. Because Rene taught me the dignity of being myself, of being all woman, I was able to render to Harold his dignity as a man and my love for him as an individual.
All my lovers in fact, and all my loving since then-yes, even all my fucking when there was no element of love-have given me the wisdom and the confidence to know myself and to know others, to separate sentiment from reason and horniness from love. And now I'm ready, ready now to commit myself to the man I love, into marriage and into eternity.
CHAPTER SIX
He lies here. So quietly, so peacefully. He might be asleep.
But he isn't. He's awake and sensing. That's another thing I've learned about fucking and, by extension, about life. You don't have to be up and doing all the time. A fuck isn't necessarily better (as Rene seems to believe) because of the number of different positions you go through, and it doesn't depend on the intensity of the action, or its speed, or its duration. A pause in the middle of a fuck isn't a waste of potential thrills; on the contrary it adds to the meaning of thrills past and thrills yet to come. A quiet, restful fuck can add up to more than can a loud, energetic one. A muted glow of pleasure is sometimes better than a violent and prolonged orgasm. A personal fuck in private is essentially more joyful than a public orgy. In life and in love and in bed the axiom of today's avant-garde artists often holds true: Less is more and more is less.
The rests between the notes carry the melody of the mind. The pause in the fuck transports the thrill to all the senses and to all the sensors of the mind. Lying back after the screw to gaze in each other's eyes, sitting up to share a smoke, dozing off in embrace, chatting in the kitchen to savor the memory once the ardor of sex has been put to rest-that is the true climax of the good screw. A rest in the middle gives an added climax of the mind, relives what has gone and builds up strength for what is to come. Let him rest in my arms as I rested in his. Let him feel safe in me as I felt safe in him.
Let me think about this fuck, let me think about my lover. Let me clear my mind of all thoughts except my lover and my fuck. I owe it to him now. I owe it to him to concentrate on this fuck.
This is absurd. I can't keep my mind still. Not even now. I can't think about a fuck without thinking of the me that goes into that fuck, and this me is the totality of all the memories that have put me together and all the fucks that have led up to this.
I think ... I ought to think ... Strange how little thought I give to Roger. Roger, above all, at this moment, at this time, at this juncture, deserves to be remembered. He means so much, he gives so much, I love him so much. And yet....
It's always been that way. I admire Roger for his patience, his sense, his stability, perhaps his wealth. I admire him for the many fine and good and admirable qualities that I lack. I admire him for the sense of security he can give me in his solid, comforting common-sense manner. And that, too, is why I resent him deep down somewhere, envy him and fight him. That I must stop. I'm so unkind. The only one of the men I truly love to whom I am ever unkind and, I guess, disloyal. The only one, with whom I can afford to be unkind and be disloyal and ungrateful and forgetful and all the other negative things that I am, because he, of all the people I know, is strong enough and content enough not to be hurt.
There is little excitement in Roger, but there is excitement to be gained from being around Roger. With Roger one can meet the most fascinating people, travel to the most fabulous places, be exposed to the most fantastic experiences. And Roger, strong and firm in the midst of it all, smiles benignly, offers his indulgence, and promises a safe haven to which I can return. And that is a quality in Roger that gives him an excitement of his own.
Did I betray him that time on the train? Was I unkind, disloyal, a bitch? Or was I, as he allowed me to feel or I deluded myself into feeling, carrying out his wish and desire, of love defined as the greatest good for the greatest numbers? Yes, but I wasn't motivated by goodness; I was motivated by perversion and by the deliberate need to spite him. That, in my mind, makes me evil although my evil was later overlain by compassion and my spite for Roger was turned into gratitude and admiration.
I should have been grateful to Roger for taking me on his travels. I should have understood his primary obligations to his business commitments whose profits made my life with Roger possible and whose exigencies had sent us on this journey that was all work for Roger and all pleasure for me. Why do I take from him what he has to offer and castigate him for following the almighty buck? His time in Copenhagen had been devoted to work, mine to pleasure. He was working out deals while I went on a spending spree with his money! In Vienna I would carouse while he would work. And I hated him for it. I told him I'd rather have him poor but free to devote more time to me and at the same instant I was eating the fruits of his labors and enjoying the freedom that his preoccupation promised me.
To reward him for his love I fucked a total stranger. On the train. Because I hated Roger's guts.
I wanted to enjoy the romance of the wagon-lit, the elegance, the mystery, the luxury, but Roger needed a rest for the exertions in Vienna, and before he got his rest he had to prepare all his papers.
"Let's pretend you're a general and I'm a spy sent to worm out your secrets by seducing you," I suggested.
"You're an English lord eloping with his children's governess while her ladyship is taking the waters," I tried.
"You're a Ruritanian prince and I'm a Moorish slave you've stolen from the Sultan's harem." That too failed to interest him.
Instead we had a stolid and unimaginative dinner in the dining car and then hurried back to our compartment without even lingering over coffee or liqueurs. Roger spread his files over the mahogany lift-up table. "Why don't you sit back and enjoy some of those books you bought?" he asked.
I looked daggers at him. "Here, on this train, on a night like this? Fuck you, Roger! I can think of more amusing things to do."
He wouldn't even give me the pleasure of an argument and that made me angrier still. I got into the voluminous leather coat I'd bought in Copenhagen, pulled up the collar to cover nose and ears in mystery, pulled down my cloche as far as it would go, and stalked out of the compartment.
I wanted to be with those people I'd seen through the glass walls on our way back from the diner. Real people for whom the journey mattered, people who had real errands at the end of their journey, assignments, assignations, perhaps assassinations. People who had things to offer and those who had things to hide. People who come to life on a train as they follow the sun to the south and intrigue to the east, people whose lives would never again be the same.
I'm an exhibitionist. My ambition is to saunter down the boulevards dressed entirely in nothing and have every man lust after me and every woman envy me. I dream about it, but I'd never have the courage to do it. I could tell Paul about my ambition and he'd probably know how to subtly get me to do it despite all my hesitations but I doubt that even Paul can think of a way I could get away with it for more than a few meters. There's bound to be a policeman there to fling his cape over me (while he feels me up under its protective cover) before I'd walked twenty meters, and I'd end up in a mental ward and a curt message would be winging its way to the American consul complaining at this transatlantic insult to French morality.
I could become a stripper, I guess. Paul would be able to arrange that. Not at any ritzy sort of place; I'm not enough of a dancer. A crummy, sleazy place with sweaty truck drivers and visiting firemen. Everybody slobbering while I grind and bump and flaunt my tits in their face and throw my garments at them, my panties dripping from the quim juice. And here the idea begins to embarrass me because just thinking about me makes me want to come and I'm sure that if ever I got out on that floor and took off my clothes I'd collapse in a screaming, yelling, earth-shaking orgasm the moment I reached bare-bottom-and I don't think the patron would like that. One day, I tell myself, I'm going to get Paul to make me do it and whether it ever happens or not isn't terribly important because just thinking about it now, in advance, is enough excitement.
Occasionally I strip at a party but I'm never the first and I always make sure I have the excuse of liquor to explain it away. And parties where my friends could or would expect me to strip because their other friends do or might make the whole idea too legitimate; there isn't the thrill of the forbidden and I've never had more than the shiver of a chill in my twat from taking off my clothes at a party. The same goes for posing. I stopped trying that long ago. It's all so correct, all so clean, all so much for art's sake when you take off your clothes in front of someone's easel or his lump of clay, you might as well stay home and do it in front of a mirror; there, at least, you can frig yourself if you get the mood. No, I don't know any good way of acting the exhibitionist. Not one that works. Oh, sometimes I'll leave off my panties and hoist my skirt on the metro to show more than the usual amount of leg, or I'll walk close to a construction site where men are working in a trench, or I'll lift my skirt going down the stairs to the station if there's an interesting looking man on his way up. The trouble is they always think it's an accident and they pretend not to notice in case I become aware and cover up the sight, and what's the use of showing yourself to a man if he doesn't show you any appreciation in response?
No, the only consistently successful way I know of exhibiting myself and drawing people's attention to me is to turn the concept topsy-turvy, on the principle of "more is less." It's fun for its own illogical perverseness.
Instead of stripping my person bare to the public, I clothe myself in mystery. It works perfectly.
I took my time walking to the front of the train. First I had to light my cigarette and stick it in the holder. Then I walked down the first corridor, swaying and bobbing ever so coolly and ever so elegantly with the train, steadying myself on the handrail with one hand while the other maneuvered my cigarette, slowing down as I passed each compartment, to stare icily and to curl my lips frostily and indicate my complete lack of interest with supercilious eyebrows.
Quite frankly, the first-class wagons-lit had little to offer me. Their occupants were either frilly old ladies with lace-doily hair, or rotund businessmen with florid faces, who reminded me of Roger, simply machines for making money. Wherever there was a hint of glamor or intrigue, the blinds had been drawn over the corridor windows and the doors shut (which may have been the sole reason they possessed any glamor).
Second class was better. This was where the couriers sat, the smugglers, the cat thieves, the con-men, bigamists, spies, novelists and bishops incognito. This is where I slowed down to look each one over and weave in my mind the history that best suited him-and project on those who particularly interested me the autobiography I wanted them to accept as real. I walked casually into one compartment after another-even into those marked reserved. An attractive woman finds strangers are happy to accept any explanation; to say I was looking for a seat or a friend or a lap dog was perfectly acceptable. And, in a way, it was true.
I walked right through to the front of the train. Third class, I found, was a wasteland as far as adventure was concerned. I hurried through that section, and paused when I reached the end to go over-in my mind-the faces I had encountered and the eyes I had been able to meet. On the whole train there were only three men I thought it would be worth trying to get friendly with. I tried to work out the order in which I would try them out but finally decided I would leave it to chance, to the order in which they sat.
The first one I had marked down turned out, on closer inspection, to be a faggot. The second one had his head on the shoulder of a pretty young girl in a raincoat. He looked rather good but I decided not to challenge the girl for her man until I had exhausted my alternatives. The third man was asleep in a window seat; the seat opposite was empty. I apologized to the other occupants in the compartment for my intrusion, asked them if the seat was taken, then sat down. I could wait here till the man woke up and if that took too long, I could kick him with my foot.
I settled into my corner, and peered around. Next to the sleeping man was a man I hadn't noticed before. Perhaps he had got on at Kassel. Perhaps he'd been in the diner. Probably I just hadn't recognized his potential. Now that I looked at him I saw the haunted eyes and the tensed lips and the odd way he sat hunched as if one arm was constantly poised to pull out a gun. A serendipitous encounter. He would do.
"It is all right if I smoke, isn't it?" I asked in French that marked me as an American with international credentials. Sadly, I hadn't been able to think of a more original question.
A fat German with a thin moustache pointed to the Rauchen Verboten sign.
"What time does this train get to Vienna?" I asked next. The German replied again but I had already focused my gaze on my quarry. He rose to the bait.
"You are going to Vienna?" he asked, speaking English to show he had recognized me. "You will be staying there for some time? It is a beautiful city. I live in Vienna."
We changed the standard comments one does when trying to explore a total stranger. I learned enough to tell me I might find something fit to occupy my interests for at least part of the journey. "I'm dying for a cigarette," I told him. "I'm going to smoke in the corridor. Would you like to join me?"
I didn't ask him much about himself; I didn't want my fantasies to be shattered by the facts. I told him about myself, an artist in Paris married to a rich American too engrossed in his work to care for his wife. "I quarreled with him and left him in the sleeper compartment. That is why I am here without any bags."
"Children?" he asked.
"With the governess."
"What will you be doing in Vienna?" His question was a clear sign that I had picked the right man.
"You're a strangely intriguing person," I said. "I know nothing about you and yet...."
"And yet, what?"
"You'd like to have an affair with me, wouldn't you?" I came out with it point-blank.
I could see the hesitation in his eyes. He wanted to know if I was teasing him, if I was preparing a trap.
"No," I continued, "I don't think you do. Not in Vienna. You obviously have a wife there and she wouldn't agree." His smile told me I had guessed correctly.
"But you would, here on the train," I suggested and smiled seductively.
"That's not possible...."
"Only because you haven't given it any thought. I could, for instance, kiss you right here and now in the corridor and no one would be bothered." I waited for his response. I couldn't understand it. He seemed poised, ready to spring, as I had noticed before in the compartment, but he made no move toward me.
"Like this," I said. I put my arms around him and kissed him right on the lips. His lips parted and his tongue reached for mine. I stroked his lean and rather rigid back. I was enjoying this. It was more exciting than I had imagined it to be. I held him close to me and pushed my right thigh into his groin. He was already getting hard.
"Hold me," I told him. "I like to be held tight."
A strange hesitation on his face. Then he put out his left arm and placed it awkwardly around my waist. I couldn't understand it-not until I saw his right arm. It was withered and twisted and he was keeping it close to his side. That explained his posture, too.
I wasn't repelled by the deformity. On the contrary, it added an extra measure of distinction, of mystery and intrigue. He was perfectly type-cast for my drama. We kissed hungrily for a long, long time. After a while I started edging him to the end of the carriage. My hand was inside his fly by now and he had unbuttoned my blouse, both of us hidden under the immensity of my coat. In the shadowy alcove by the big brake-wheel we could be more forward with each other. I had his penis out in my hand; he undid my soutien-gorge and kissed my breasts. He seemed pleased with them.
After a while he straightened up. "We must meet in Vienna," he said hoarsely. "Impossible. Your wife."
"She needn't know. I'll arrange something."
"My husband."
"Arrange something. Tell him a lie."
"I couldn't. Tomorrow I'm going to make up with him again. I couldn't tell him a lie tomorrow. We won't be able to meet again. Only tonight."
"I'm going to feel unsatisfied...."
"I won't let you," I told him. "We'll find somewhere."
"The toilet," he suggested.
I gave him a look of revulsion. I have never yet fucked anyone on a toilet and I never shall and I shall certainly never do it on a train with the closeness and the stenches and those silly instructions all over telling you which levers to pull and which not to pull, where they even tell you when you can piss and when you have to stop pissing. I won't fuck in a place where every move is circumscribed by tri-lingual instructions; I'll choose my own place where there's freedom and movement and adventure.
"Wait," I told him. "I have an idea." I looked around. The hour was late and people had stopped walking up and down the corridors in their boredom. I held my coat together in front of me and headed for the passage to the next compartment. My crippled stranger, puzzled, hastily buttoned his fly up over his reluctant cock and followed.
I stopped in the stand-up purgatory between the two cars. Underfoot the two heavy steel plates were clanging in agony over each other. Chill winds were tearing through the gaps in the leather-covered concertina walls carrying the acrid smoke from the locomotive. A light source from somewhere occasionally lit up the shiny rails that could be seen through the gaps in the footplates, and occasionally sparks flew back from the wheels. The noise was infernal. Ta-rat-tat-tat; ta-rat-tat-tat. Repeatedly, like a metronome. Loud but relatively bearable because of the regularity of its beat. And screeches, howls and wails as steel clanged with steel and steel groaned across steel and winds howled through the night. Excruciating and unbearable.
I leaned back against the steel bars of the concertina, opened my coat, pulled up my skirt, stepped out of my panties. I guided the stranger's hand to my gash, which was hot and wet. He was embarrassed by his other hand and held it behind his back. I used both my hands to keep the door handles from being turned. He diddled me for perhaps ten minutes. Obviously he was not a very manual sort of lover and the swaying of the train certainly did nothing to overcome his handicap. I knew I wasn't going to get much further satisfaction out of this.
"Here, let me do it for you," I shouted.
"What?" he shouted back. Over the noise he hadn't been able to hear me. I guided his left hand to the handle, undid his fly, held the other handle with my left hand, and got down on my knees to take his prick in my mouth.
Another surprise. A circumcised cock. A Jew. A one-armed circumcised Austrian Jew on the way to Vienna. I took it in my mouth. Strange, I thought, I'd never fucked a Jew in my whole life. There was something symbolic in this crippled Jew with mutilated cock, spread-eagled and crucified against the steel-rod and leather wall, going from there to nowhere through the windswept night. The Wandering Jew, I thought to myself. I am taking him in my mouth, letting him dissolve on my tongue. Eat, eat his body; drink, drink his jism.
I am down on my knees, straining with one hand on the handle to stop any stranger from breaking in, rocking with the swaying train, shattered by the noise and roar, frozen by the wind, choked by the smoke, doing penance to this Jew for the arm that he lacks and the curse that's on him and the hate that we all share against him. A sad Jew in Europe despised by the whole world. Hep! Hep! Schweinjud! I'm on my knees in front of him, gladly suffering for his sake the agonies of this iron-and-smoke purgatory with the flashing rails and the sulphurous smoke. I'm on my knees atoning to his circumcised prick and if he pisses on me now and craps on me, my devotion will be complete.
I try to take him all into me. I swallow more of his cock than I've ever swallowed of anyone's before. I pull at his hairy rump to push even more of this Jew into my face. I lose myself in the sweaty hairs of his groin, try to climb into his Jewish skin and pump away desperately with my cheeks until finally he comes into my mouth which I refuse to pull away since I must drink him up, to the very last drop. And with his very last drop the train jerks, he loses his balance and falls on top of me, pulling open the carriage door in his fall.
I don't remember picking myself up. I only remember limping back to his compartment with him, disappointed somehow that he hadn't regained the use of his arm after all I had done, and equally disappointed that despite it all I still had full use of each of my limbs.
"I don't know what to say," he murmured. "There's ... One doesn't expect ... I've never been in this situation before. You made me very happy. This is a dream a man has but it never becomes real. I don't think I will believe this tomorrow. Thank you."
"I'm glad I met you," I said. "I enjoyed it too." I pecked him goodnight and then, on impulse, I gave him the lace-bordered handkerchief with which I'd wiped the soot and the sperm off my face after I'd picked myself up. "Keep this for a memento. With this you won't doubt it was real."
When I got back to the compartment, Roger was already stretched out on his berth. He welcomed me back. "I didn't want to fall asleep before you returned, but I'm very tired. Are you coming to bed now?"
It didn't sound like an invitation to share his berth and his off-handedness renewed my anger. "What's the hurry?" I said. "You don't need me."
"I'm sorry, dear." He didn't apologize. Roger has a way of admitting a fault without in any way diminishing himself by it. It's a quality I think no other man possesses. "I know you were bored but I had to do this work and now I really have to get some rest because I'm due for some very sensitive negotiations tomorrow. I only hope you didn't have too bad a time."
"As a matter-of-fact I didn't. I met a crippled Jew and made love to him." I thought he wouldn't believe me but he did.
"I'm sure you're exaggerating. But if you liked him there must have been something special about him to appeal to you." Sometimes I want to kick Roger in the ass for always being so calm and so kind and so nice. Now I could have hugged him. I told him the whole story, down to the last detail.
"He sounds like a very sensitive person," he said when I'd finished. "I'm proud you could make him happy."
I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to think. I kept sitting on the edge of my berth still wrapped in my big coat. My heart was suddenly so full of love for both men, of pity for the Jew and admiration for Roger. I wanted to make love to Roger but I was scared to suggest it because of his patent need for sleep.
"Do you want to sleep with him tonight?"
"Yes, I guess I would. But I don't know how. I felt rather bad leaving him there in his compartment because he might think it's because of his arm or his being a Jew."
"I'd say bring him in here but I'm too exhausted to get up and find another place and I don't think either of you would enjoy fucking in here with me around. Why don't you ask the sleeping car attendant to get you a berth? You could take a second-class compartment if there's nothing left in first class."
There were no unoccupied sleeping compartments at all. I tipped the attendant ten marks and he led me to a first-class compartment marked "Reserved", unlocked the door for me and brought me some cushions and a blanket and put up the arm rests. He left the sign up outside so that I wouldn't be disturbed. As soon as he'd gone I walked down to the second-class section. My lover was asleep on his seat and only a dim blue light was burning high up. I tapped him on the knee. "Get your bags and come with me," I whispered when he woke. He got up and followed me in a daze.
I wish I could say that some divine revelation came to me that night. I wish I could say we had some out-of-this-world fuck. Unfortunately the fuck was awful. The benches were too hard and too narrow. I was completely exhausted form the journey and rather bruised from my fall. The other-worldly elements of unreality that had added exotic glamour to our encounter between the two coaches was missing here.
I felt I owed him some sort of continued interest and he probably thought he should repay me or at least bring me to an orgasm, but obligation is the lousiest reason for fucking I can think of. We spent the whole of the night in a succession of uncomfortable positions, trying to prove to each other something that neither of us believed, and each of us was too cowardly to say the truth. At Linz I finally got up, wished him good morning, told him what a pleasure it had been to meet him, and returned to Roger's compartment to wash up and change.
I never found out the man's name. I didn't even think of asking. It was the symbol for which he stood that I had fucked; it wasn't the man himself.
I seem to have a penchant for fucking symbols. And I seem to have a need for getting back to the well-spring of our civilization. In my mind's eye I have fucked with Jesus and been blessed by the Holy Ghost. I have fucked George Washington, Father of Our Country (a lousy fuck and his wooden teeth kept slipping). I've fucked every Indian chief that ever roamed over the prairies and forests and mountains of my native country from Dangling Balls to Rigid Cock. I've done proud by my Irish ancestry by screwing Charles Stewart Parnell (who got a special kiss for risking his all for my near namesake, sweet Katharine O'Shea). I've fucked with Byron for his gift of poetry and for his roistering nature, and for his joy in incest and buggery and tribadism, and for his rejection of the whole kit and caboodle of sexual taboos (and also, I suspect remembering my Jew, for the lameness that tormented his soul). I've fucked Julius Caesur who crossed the Rubicon and risked all for Cleopatra. I've fucked with Galileo Galilei who stood up for the truth and preached what he believed and wouldn't knuckle under to the Pope. E pur si muove is my motto, too. Everything moves and the world depends on its moving, and to Heli with anyone who tries to pretend it doesn't.
And what is the symbol that all these symbols symbolize?
I know it, but I try to deny it: I want to be the earth mother herself. Nothing less will do. My ambition is limitless. I want the whole world to enter through my cunt. I want my womb to give forth fruit from which the whole world descends. Every man alive must be my lover, every man, woman and child my progeny. Perhaps I'm a throwback to Eve. The serpent is only a symbol for a penis, after all. She truly was the mother of all and she truly was fucked by all men (there being then only one, Adam).
But I need more.
One of the ways is to be a whore. I want to be a whore. I think everyone knows about it but only Paul is willing to do something about it. Once he arranged to bring me a "model" he wanted me to paint. He wouldn't tell me what was so special about her, only that she was a tart he'd met sitting in a cafe on the corner of the Rue Caulaincourt and that she'd taken his imagine. I pretended to believe him, that he was interested solely in having her portrait, but I hoped, secretly, that he had some other design running through his inventively dirty mind. I took special care preparing the studio (my own studio in Montmartre), setting out the canvas and brushes and paints, preparing food for all, making sure there was a clean smock for her to wear between poses, fluffing up the cushions and straightening up the bed.
He brought her up early on a Sunday afternoon. Despite the dark on the stairway I could see a special grin on his face; her face, which I didn't expect to recognize, was shrouded in the dark. I greeted them both warmly, then turned my back and walked ahead of them to the posing platform. And there I first saw her properly.
Her figure was slight and neat. She had a cap of dark hair that she wore somewhat longer than the current bobbed vogue. She had a small upturned nose, gray eyes, full and generous lips formed into a pout. She was a little gamin with a witty look to her, lively and vital. Our eyes met and locked. I caught her smile. Suddenly my jaw dropped and my whole body trembled.
I recognized that pretty young whore.
She was me!
Except for the clothes, I might have been staring into a mirror.
Paul must have told her what to expect, for she wasn't the least bit perturbed. She put out her arms and wrapped them around me and introduced herself with "Je m'appelle Nicole," and gave me a nice buss on the cheek, my cousin perhaps or my twin sister.
But she was me.
It was clear what Paul had in mind. He didn't want Nichole's portrait; he was after a larger canvas. He got her to strip, but not in order to pose. She stripped so that I could admire her body and then he selected some of my clothes and I had to help her dress. She giggled like a little girl at her own birthday party and oohed and aahed over everything she found in my closet, and every few moments she stopped the action to compare similarities or differences. Finally the three of us, all working together and at cross purposes, with clothes and hairpins and makeup, had transformed Nicole into a perfect me. My own mother couldn't have told us apart.
And Paul pretended he couldn't tell us apart, which was quite a joke for a little while with Nicole saying: "Ow do you do? Aye em Gadline. Aye em Americaine," and Paul speaking to her only in English and to me only in French. But when he started ignoring me and paying attention only to her and pretended he couldn't understand what I was saying to him and insisted on calling me Nicole and her Cathleen, I got angry and jealous. And when neither my anger nor my jealousy had any effect and no one was listening to me and no one was reacting to me any more, I suddenly panicked. Totally and completely and irrationally. Suddenly I began to accept their game, that I wasn't really me, that I wasn't really myself. Someone had taken me away and forced me to forget English and got me to speak only gutter French. Someone had made me walk away from my own body and where I now stood was nothing but an empty shell. I was over there, on the other side of the invisible line, the other side of the mirror, joking and rollicking with Paul in French, in the gayest spirits imaginable, and here, where I had been, was a fake impostor. I was nothing, no one, no one at all.
I had been spirited away and Nicole had taken over my body and my mind.
It was the strangest, weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. I was suddenly a little child without a home or a name or an identity, crying, lost, while the other children steal her toys and her sweets and her daddy away from her. And, like a little child, I burst into tears, and my tears shocked me even more.
Nicole noticed it. "But she's so sad, the little one," she said to Paul, probably with the best of intentions but I heard it as a gesture of mockery. "Why are you so sad, Gadline? Don't you like having a twin sister to play with?" And when Paul said to her "That's not Cathleen, that's Nicole," I suddenly found myself going right out of my mind. I had already gone out of my body but this was the last straw. I had to scream. I had to let myself, at least, know that I still existed. I screamed at the top of my voice. "Paul, Paul! You filthy fucking bastard! Make that whore get away from me. I hate her. Do you hear? I hate her! Get that whore to take off my clothes and get her out of here. You're the vilest man I've ever met. I swear to God, if you don't get that whore out of here in two minutes I'm going to beat you with everything I can lay my hands on and I'm never, NEVER, going to fuck you again."
The violence of my voice startled me and brought me back to my senses. Poor Nicole was suddenly crushed and frightened; she stood there in my clothes, worried and lost, unable to comprehend a single word of what I was saying (except, presumably, the verb "fuck"), and unable to grasp what had happened. Paul, too, seemed shocked by my reaction; perhaps it was only irritation that his game wasn't working out the way he'd planned. He put his arms around me and pressed me tight and stroked my face until I calmed down. And all the time-I think the only time I've known him to do so-he kept apologizing, telling me he'd had no idea I'd be so upset and that he hadn't intended to hurt me, only surprise me and amuse me.
Suddenly I wasn't nobody any more. I was the center of everyone's attention. Everyone wanted me to smile again and be kind and allow them to carry on. I held them completely in my power. Without my blessings and cooperation the party would fizzle out. I could tell them to clear out and they'd clear out with apologies. If I asked them to dance a jig they'd do that. If I hadn't just thoroughly scrubbed my studio I could have ordered them to get down and do it on their hands and knees and I'm convinced they'd have done it, too. By being generous and forgiving I had them even more in my power. "Calm down," I said to myself. "Play this right. You're going to be on top."
"I'm sorry I reacted so strongly, Paul," I told him. "I used to have nightmares just like this when I was a little kid. I guess you shouldn't have kept up your game quite so long. Look, I have a wonderful idea. Why don't we pretend we're both me, Nicole and me, the two of us one person. We'll both make love to you together and you can pretend there's only one of us, doing everything possible to you at the same time."
I'd seized the momentum. Of course it was what Paul had planned to do anyway, but by putting it this way I put myself in the driver's seat and from now on everything that was going to happen-that would have happened anyway-would be done under my sponsorship and I would have at least a feeling of control.
I had to laugh now. Nicole really was no problem for me. I overawed her. She was awed by my paintings and by my clothes and the fact that I could speak both English and French and that I had such a respectable lover as Paul. She was much too diffident to even dream of stealing a scene from me. It was rather fun having her, in fact, a kid sister who could be impressed by anything I cared to say or do. I had to show her all my clothes and my photo albums and my scrapbooks, show her how my zip fasteners worked, explain my electric iron, my paints, my Kodak ... just about everything she set her eyes on. She was fresh up from the country, from around Poitiers somewhere, and everything was a source of amazement for her. She was quite a lovable little child, entirely harmless, no threat to me at all.
It didn't take long for Paul to begin the games. He made us stand back to back to compare our heights, then he measured our waists and thighs and chests with a tape and much fondling, and then he had us take off our clothes while he looked at us through the viewfinder of the Kodak to see if he could tell us apart on a reduced scale, and then he looked at us in a mirror to see whether he could tell the mirror images apart. Then we blindfolded him and he had to tell us apart by touch, comparing our breasts and our thighs and our buttocks, and then he had to tell us apart by the smell of our cunts which wasn't so easy because we'd both just washed with the same soap, and when the smell wasn't an effective test he had to use his tongue. Each time he guessed right he got a kiss from both of us and each time he guessed wrong he got a pair of slaps on his bare behind. It wasn't long before we were on the bed, with Paul, his sight restored, busy lapping my cunt while Nicole sucked his cock. Then we reversed positions: I sucked Paul's cock while he ate Nicole's cunt.
And then Nicole stretched out and started eating my cunt.
I've always wanted to suck my own twat, I've had dreams about it since ever I can remember. As a girl, knowing it was the ultimate in sin, I tried again and again to reach with my tongue. I exercised secretly each night in bed, bending as far forward as I could, trying to reach lower and lower while thrusting my hips up to meet my lips half way, extending my tongue to its painful limit, trying in every possible way to reach the forbidden area.
Even now the dream recurs with frequent regularity, akin to my dreams of flying. "Look, it's possible," I say in my dream. "It's easy. What ever made you think you couldn't do it? It's so easy." Spread my arms and float away while mother and father and all the world watch in awe; or lap, lap, lap with my tongue, bringing joy and thrill to all the places I love best, getter and begetter of my pleasures, giver and recipient, lover and loved. I am complete at last, I can really love myself, I am love, all love is mine. I fly, I fly.
"Was it really a dream?" I ask myself as I wake up, a burning between my thighs. It was so real; there must be some truth in it somewhere. My cunt, creamed and waiting, aches for my tongue. I'd sell my soul to the Devil for just an hour in my very own cunt, but I cannot reach there and the Devil refuses to come and bargain. I lie back with my thighs squeezed tight to my breasts, my chin nuzzling my knees. My hands reach around the back to tear at my twat. I rub and pound and scratch and tear, faster and faster, deeper and deeper. My fingers are good but I want my tongue, my very own tongue in my very own twat. And I come at last, a long drawn-out come, a resounding come but a sad, sad come. I come with my fingers but I wanted my tongue. I lie back, exhausted but not satisfied and my fingers, that have acted as surrogates for my tongue, slip out with their juicy burden of honey, slip out reluctantly and then I bring them in haste to my lips, in my mouth where if they were tongue they'd belong, and lap hungrily at the juice that I can reach no other way. I keep licking and lapping and licking and lapping, going back for more and yet more, creating the contact between lips and cunt that physical limitations deny. And as I lick and lick and stroke and lap, I become aroused once more so that, once more, I must work myself to the uncertain release of climax until I fall wearily and unsatisfied to sleep. And in the morning, being sober and awake though weary and exhausted, I pretend to look at it lightly, with a spirit of scientific inquiry, try to see whether it is physically possible for a woman to perform cunnilingus on her own little cunny. Only five inches to go, six at the most. It shouldn't be difficult. If I exercised more, regularly, daily, for a month or a year, eventually I should ... Look at contortionists, they can curl up much tighter than that. I should have started when I was young, I'm not too old yet, I can start right now. And so, for one day or two or at the most three, I exercise strenuously, but the moment I can have a real man's prick inside me and a real man's tongue and lips right there, and when I can take in my mouth a full hard prick that is so much bigger and harder and tastier and, above all, easier than my own little clit, I am satisfied at last and give up-until my next dream of happy illusion-the quest for my own twat.
But now, through a miracle, through Paul's great joke, through my own good staging, the opportunity has come. There are two of me now. There is no need to contort. I have a mouth to put on my twat and a twat I can hold to my mouth. I am me, there are two of me, I can do everything to me that I've ever wanted to do to myself. Paul's prick is nice but I can suck it any time. My own twat is a rarer morsel. I gently ease myself away from Paul's thighs and curl closer to Nicole. She is around me, her legs are around me, she is around me, I am around me and inside me. The smell is my own and the taste is my own. I hug myself by my legs and squeeze my thighs over my face. I open my cunt and swallow my tongue. I have a cunt at each end and a tongue there too. I am double-headed and double-bodied and magically double-twatted. My body neither begins nor ends; it goes on and on in infinity, a curl of love closing on itself and loving itself, exploring itself and exciting itself. A cosmos to itself, complete and entire.
This is personal fulfillment. A repose in myself, a turning into myself and on myself, that spreads a glow, an aura of pure joy, far removed from erotic longings or from orgiastic releases. I lie there, quiet and silent for an eternity, lapping myself and at myself, the one becoming two, the two becoming one. Cathleen and Nicole are no more; we are one, in perfect union, one to be and to feel and to sense, two aspects of one, one aspect of two.
When Paul gently pries us apart we remain one, closing in on him again as one. We enclose him in our folds and join him in love. There are two of me to love him. I both love him and give him me to love. He enters my body with his prick. I cradle my body in my lap, my head by my crotch, and he kisses me alternately, once on the mouth, once on the twat. My head is on my thigh, my hair spread on my belly. His prick is entering me down there where I cannot feel it directly, only feel it through the head that rests on my thigh and feel it directly through his tongue that laps deep into my twat. One leg is under my other waist feeling the softness and gentleness of my other body; the other leg is curled around him, feeling the angular masculinity of his. My hand stretches down to stroke the face on my thigh, another to fondle the breast under his chest.
He is loving me in every way physically imagined and many more than even the mind cannot grasp. There is a mystic bond, a mystery, a divine trinity, three joined into one by faith, three linked by bonds of non est, joined into one by est. I am the godhead, we are the godhead, we are one, divinely one. We leave our corporeal selves and enter the world of the spirit; the spirit floats away as a dove and the dove bursts into a scattering of rays and haloes and white feathers that startles me and makes me pull the bodies apart and push Paul off and go down on myself, go down on my cunt where Paul has just been, still pulsating from his presence, still panting from his thrusts, pouring thickly with his passions. I clamp my mouth on my cunt that has just clamped with such pleasure on my lover's cock. My tongue darts in and laps the honeyed jism that my lover has left, laps it all up, laps up every drop of my love, and as I do so I feel his tongue in me again, digging deep into my twat while his hand seeks out my clit and another seeks out my ass and I lap and suck and am lapped and sucked and stroked and loved by a million hands and a million limbs that are all mine, all mine, too many to be mine, too many for my mind, too many for anyone, too many to bear, too many that I explode and on and on, still being loved as I do so, ceaselessly, teasingly, excitingly, tinglingly, no letdown at all, peaks of excitement undivided by valleys that go on and on and higher and higher so that eventually I scream, no longer the scream of joy uncontrolled but the scream this time of begging for surcease from joy.
Later, much later, I recover. I am by myself on the bed. I want to be by myself on the bed. I am too tired to participate. Paul has taken the other me, the Nicole me, and he is kissing her, he is squashing her with his body, he is pounding her with his prick. I don't mind at all. What he does to her he does for me and I would rather rest now than fuck, rather enjoy than strain.
"That's good, Paul," I say. "That's good. Fuck her well. Fuck her hard. Let me watch."
"Join in?" he asks and offers.
"From the outside," I say.
I think I need to detach myself just a little. I perch on the high stool by the head of the bed. From there I can watch Paul below loving me, loving my copy, my surrogate, my substitute. I draw my naked knees to my chin and look at my lover down below making love to me. I'm lying down there and he's beside me. I grab his cock and he cups my crotch while I watch from up above feeling nothing but the pleasure of curiosity. He tweaks my breasts, he bites me and kisses me. He rolls me over, he rolls on top and I know I should feel it but it's so far away, in a body a world removed from my own, down there below, and all I feel is the warm echoes.
He spreads my legs and examines my cunt, looks close at every bright pink fold. I bend over to get a closer look at what he sees. Is that how I look? I've never really had a close look at my cunt before. I'm disappointed; it's so much less impressive than a cock. He's got his tongue in me now. Hey, look, there's something wrong. I should be closing my thighs on his head; he likes to be smothered in woman. I apply body English from my perch; it doesn't work down below and Paul has to reach out for my legs and wrap my thighs around him. It's a strain on my muscles, getting them together, squeezing them together, and finding they still stay apart below. But the pressure's had an interesting effect; I am beginning to build up new sensations in my crotch above, to match the action in my cunt below.
I feel I'm part of a movie being run backwards or out of synchronization. What I do has no relation to what I feel, and what I think no connection with what I do. Down there my cunt is being sucked again for the umpteenth time and up here there's simply my thighs pressing tightly together. My cunt should be awash with thrills but it's only tightened with tensions up here. I'm heaving my hips down there; up here I sit rock steady and watch. He's using his fingers on me, he's determined I should come. My body starts thumping around and my face below takes on a vacant look of pleasure, but all I do is sit in stoic interest and watch. I'm going crazy down there with lust but feel nothing more than a warm glow up here. He's pulled away his head from my cunt but I don't miss it. He's into me now, humping me, thrusting his cock. It's fun to watch. He looks great. He's thrusting deep into me with his manly body. Each time he pulls out I can see just a short length of his cock and I urge it on as it goes in but I don't feel a thing except unsatisfied impulses that I try to convey to my body and that my body won't execute. I realize I'm taking his part, I'm moving my body, tensing my muscles, fucking for him from up here. That's absurd: you do your fucking, Paul, and let me play at watching myself being fucked.
He's rocking on his knees, thrusting with long and powerful strokes, kissing me on the breasts, holding me in the ass and on the clit. My legs alternately grip him and thrash loose. My bottom heaves but not quite in time with his, my back is arched, my neck thrown back and then I hear him scream and hear myself scream too, both at the same time.
And not a sound from between my lips except a deep breath slowly exhaled.
I'm in ecstasy, judging by the way I look and the sounds I make but all I feel is a dull pain of burning pleasure, slightly moist, slightly wet, that reaches from my cunt right through my bowels and leaves an empty hole in my throat.
So that's what it's like to fuck. That's what it's like to be fucked. I had no idea. I've never been able to get that far outside myself before, never been able to observe myself before, never been able to know and sense what I really feel and do. So that's it. That's how it is. That's how I look when I fuck with Paul.
That feeling in my crotch is good. It's selfless. It's altruistic. It is the pain in my womb which has given birth to them both. I am the mother who has brought them together, the mother who has brought them to love on my behalf. I gather them in my arms and kiss them. I'm proud of their love and proud of their joy and I wish them the best. I must remove myself now, dissolve my identity and let them get on with their business. There is no room for me here any more. I know what I must do. I know where I must go. A destiny that has been beckoning me for twenty years calls and I must answer. I am no longer one man's. I am no longer this man's. I am every man's and every man calls.
"I want you to stay with Nicole," I tell Paul. "Tell her I want to put on her clothes and pretend to be her. I want to see what it's like walking the streets. Perhaps I'll even turn a trick for her. I've always envied them their job."
Paul translates for her benefit. She looks and nods as if pretending to believe it and I know she thinks we're both consummate liars.
"Promise you'll fuck her again when I'm gone," I urge Paul. "I want to know you're fucking with her and enjoying her while I'm walking the beat. I'll come back when I'm tired of it."
Nicole insists on teaching me a few of the basic ground rules in a five-minute lesson, adjusts her knitted cap on my head, pecks me on the lips and sends me packing out of my own home with a final "bonne chance." She remains behind, mistress of my home, mistress to my man. Such is luck. After all, I'm nothing but a whore, a street whore at that.
Paul calls after me at the door not to forget to bring him all my earnings-or else.
I teeter down the stairs on spindly heels. I decide I won't push my luck. I won't make for her regular haunts where she'd be recognized. Not Rue Caulain-court. I don't want to run into her pimp or an irate customer or a cop who hasn't been paid off. Boulevard Clichy is too dangerous; it's too professional a place. I settle for the Rue de Clignancourt. I stand at a corner to look at the men with what I assume is the right pose. One man stops. I smile. He walks on and comes back. He's five feet away and about to speak to me when I turn on my heel and walk away.
I stand by a store window and wait. Two women approach, together, in anger. Professionals claiming monopoly rights. I see they form an unfriendly welcoming committee and decide to get out of town ahead of the sheriff. A small street takes me to the Boulevard Barbes. I walk along smiling at every man I see, and when he smiles back I look away with hauteur. I'm desirable. It's nice to have it confirmed. Every man wants me. This should be my life. A man suddenly accosts me. I hadn't noticed him; I'd been too busy catching the eyes of two elderly men walking hurriedly together. He raises his hat politely and wants to accompany me to a hotel. Here's the moment I've been waiting for. Come on, Cathleen, say the word.
"Monsieur must be mistaken. I don't know him."
He's really very handsome. His face is slightly florid but very distinguished looking nevertheless and the gray at the temples gives him a fatherly air.
"Pardon, pardon. I don't know you but I was hoping to make your better acquaintance. Perhaps you will take a glass of something with me, or perhaps something to eat first. We can discuss the other matter later. Er, mademoiselle is American?"
I wonder how many American whores he'd expect to find in Paris. "No, not American," I lie. "Dutch. My husband was American. He's left me. To China." The more I lie the more the present became unreal. Had I told him the truth, I would have had to go through with my commitment. Once I start lying I am no longer bound to anything.
"Then you will come with me and have something to drink?"
"I'm sorry. I have to go. To pick up my child. From the orphanage, you know. You have been very kind," and I fade out of my role.
Will I really go through with it? I want to. I want to desperately. I've wanted to play a whore, a real whore, all my life. Now the opportunity has been presented. Paul forced me into it. I forced myself into it. I must go through with it. I'll never have the opportunity again. Paul is depending on me. I must. I'll go with the first decent-looking man who asks me.
But not on the Boulevard Barbes. I avoid every face I see. The Boulevard de la Chapelle is a better place. I'll have to find a hotel, anyway, if he agrees. I'll be better off by the Gare du Nord.
None of the men I see is attractive enough. They are all too old or too young, too rich or too poor, too fat or thin. This is foolish, I tell myself, I'm just avoiding the issue. I'll take the next one, whoever it is. The next one stops. He's ugly. I hate him. He's vulgar and gross and he smells of some anise-flavored liqueur. But I have to keep my promise. A cold clammy hand clenches at my cunt. He's going to fuck you, this man, your very first client as a whore. I know I don't want him but I mustn't cheat. I put on my best smile. It's him or nothing. I promised myself and I have to go through with it. In a moment he'll take my arm. He'll take me to a hotel. He'll take off his smelly clothes and I'll lift up my skirt. ("Don't actually take off any clothes unless he pays you extra," Nicole had taught me.) Then he'll climb on top of me and stick me with his dong and wheeze into my face and spend his stinky white drops and leave them in my slit.
I put on the bravest smile I can muster. Please, sir, stinking sir, I have to get you to fuck me right now or else my boy friend won't let me come home for dinner.
His face is only inches away. He breathes hard but doesn't say a word. A heavy paw moves out and feels my rump, runs over my tight skirt down my thigh. Then he presses my tits, first the left, then the right. Then he clears his throat as if to speak, gathers his phlegm, and shoots a load down at my feet. It's all he has for me. It lies there like a squirt of come. And he walks away from me, muttering.
He probably expects me to curse him. I want to shower him with blessings. Oh thank you sir! Thank you! You've saved me. Now I can truthfully say I've tried everything. It just happened not to be my night. I'll try again some other time. But not tonight. Tonight I can go home.
My feet are tired so I take a cab but leave it at the stairs at the bottom of the hill. I wouldn't want my neighbors to get the wrong impression of me. I climb up the stone stairs and then into my building and up to the studio. Paul and Nicole long ago finished whatever they wanted to do, and they've been sitting here, obviously bored with each other. Gladly I slip out of my clothes and let Nicole put on what is rightfully hers. She is welcome to take back her identity: I'll keep my own, if you don't mind. "How was it?" Paul asks.
"Not bad," I say. "A job. A job like any other job. Just another way of making a living."
CHAPTER SEVEN
I don't give answers. He asks no questions. What he has to say he says with his body, transmits with his hands. Cupped silently over my crotch his hand has stimulated a flow of thoughts and jumbled memories. Now, newly articulate, stirring the lips, it stimulates a new flow of the present, arousing me again to his love.
I hear his message. I turn even closer to him, push my thigh under his, and turn my shoulder away from him, rolling my body until I come to rest, both shoulders on the pillow, both buttocks firmly on the sheet, my legs stretched out and parted. He follows close behind, like one uncertain magnet drawn to another, rolls over me, hoists himself, plants himself between my legs. I guide his prick, gorged firm and thick and urgent. He's in me now and up me. I draw his face to mine so that I may stroke its gentle lines and rest my tongue in the passion-heated cavern of his mouth.
His murmur, a shapeless sound, is an urge, a question. I reply with a drawn-in sigh. It says it all. We know.
We're on our way, the last leg of the current trip. The whistle's blown, the conductor's shouted "All aboard!" the green paddle has been waved, the train has hooted and the engine let out steam. Ta-ra ta-room. Ta-ra ta-room. Ta-ra la-la. Tara tada. Tarrar-rarram, tarrarrarram, larrarrarram, larrarrarram....
We've reached full speed, we won't stop now, we'll just keep on.
The relief I always feel when the last lap is well and truly under way suggests there must have been some doubt: he might be too tired, I might get too sore, the door might burst open, the bed cave in. But once this stage is reached we're safe. Let the world collapse-we wouldn't stop. Nothing will stop us now. He's fucking me and I him and that's all that matters.
That relief in knowing you've made it. That relief in knowing you're loved. Each time it's a repeat of the first time. The first time I was really loved. The first time I experienced the relief of knowing I wouldn't have to fight it any more. That was with Paul. For Paul I was still a virgin. In sex: almost. In love: entirety-
I met Paul three or four days after my great fuck with Rene-and hated Paul at first sight. I'd heard about Rene, how with one generous gesture he disposes of his women and purchases his friendships by passing off his discarded fucks on his friends. So, I was to be discarded already, I thought, as Rene knocked at the door of the flat I was sharing with Virginia in Montparnasse, and presented me with Paul and a bunch of chrysanthemums. Was I such a lousy lay that he couldn't have the decency to wait at least a week? Couldn't he pretend to make another pass at me before he dropped me? Not that I would have accepted, of course, but it would have been nice if he'd asked.
Under any other circumstances Paul might have seemed rather nice. Almost six foot tall, handsome in a rugged outdoorsy way, light brown hair escaping all over in unkempt curls, a slightly crooked tilt to his mouth and his eyes that made him seem both boyish and roguishly dangerous. But what really got to me as he sat there in my most comfortable chair, talking directly at me, was his persuasiveness, his ability to master any situation, the conviction-almost command he was able to put into every statement. Whatever it was he said, whether I believed it or thought it outrageous, I had to accept, simply because Paul had said it. I admitted Paul-but I hated him. I wasn't going to take Paul as a gift from Rene, not under any circumstances, and I certainly wasn't going to let Rene give me as a gift to anyone.
So that when Paul said to me on leaving; "I'd like to see you again soon," I put on as hard a front as I could, deliberately shutting out the persuasiveness in his voice, blocking off all the good feelings I had about him.
"Why not?" I replied with as much bitchiness as I could muster. "I manage to be seen in all the places where American girls are supposed to be found. No doubt we'll bump into each other again eventually." Like fucking hell, I thought to myself, you and the little maquereau that brought you here.
The trouble was, I really liked Paul, I really wanted to get to bed with him some day. If only Rene hadn't messed it up with his sordid pimping! There was no way of undoing Rene's act now but perhaps I could outmaneuver him and turn Paul into a personal conquest entirely beyond the grasp of Rene's scheming. I discussed my problem with Virginia when she got back later that evening. She too had been one of Rene's trophies, now more or less discarded but not as completely as I, since she still saw him frequently and was still sleeping with him occasionally. The best we could come up with-it was rather late at night-was that she would wage a Lysistrata campaign on my behalf next time Rene invited her to bed; it was a rather silly scheme because for one there was no certainly Rene ever would and, for another, there was almost no likelihood that Ginny would hold out on anyone for more time than it took her to slip out of her girdle.
The plan I finally decided on a couple days later was to try and make Paul my lover and make Rene jealous, both at the same time. I wouldn't be just a screw for Paul: I'd try to become his admirer, his devotee, his faithful retainer. I'd try to become an adjunct to his home and life in such a way as to make Rene jealous every time he saw me. Well ... maybe ... it just might work.
I telephoned him at his office next day, the first time in my life I'd overcome my native American reserve to make such an unmistakable overture to a man. "I've got a yen for some imagine cooking," I told him. "The stove in our flat is hardly up to boiling potatoes and Ginny tells me that you and Rene have a superb kitchen in yours. Can I come over one day and cook a imagine dinner for you, some evening when you'll be alone, just the two of us?"
"Sounds delicious. What do you have in mind?"
What I had in mind was to cook Rene's goose. I floundered around, trying to remember the French word for goose and came up with caneton instead. "I've got this delicious recipe for caneton a la bigar-ade that I've been dying to make. If you'll lay in the wine, I'd rather leave that to you. You won't mind if I use your dishes and things...."
I don't know what thoughts were going through Paul's mind, whether sex or food had the upper hand. I didn't give him a chance to do much thinking.
"Well, yes...." he started. "I thought maybe you and I could get together some...."
"We could make it this Friday," I said. "This coming Friday. I'll be over about fourish if you'll leave the key with the concierge. And try to get rid of that grin-faced roommate of yours for the evening."
Since this was Thursday evening and I didn't even have the vaguest idea of what or who bigarade was, and what a duck had to be to taste like one, I had a rather hectic time getting recipes and ingredients together. The recipe I got from our concierge's neighbor's sister-in-law and I chased down a little duckling just big enough for two without having to go to Les Halles, and had the ingredients, plus bread, fruit, dessert and a bunch of flowers, all ready in a string bag by three-thirty on Friday. By four-thirty I was washed and dressed in my sexiest afternoon frock, my hair was done, perfume behind my ears, in the crook of my elbows and behind my knees. Then I pushed the perfume bottle into another bag together with brush and comb, folded a dainty pinafore on top of that, and then, hurriedly remembering, tucked my diaphragm, the cream and a small box of talcum carefully under the pinafore. I was all set.
Paul had a note for me when I arrived: "Will be home about six. Rene's gone off with one of his tour groups for the weekend and won't be back before Monday. Make yourself at home in the kitchen. Have fun!"
He could have written "Love," or something, especially as for him it wouldn't have meant anything more than a formal phrase. But I already knew Paul better than to expect that of him.
He arrived practically on the dot of six, hugged me for the briefest moment, said "Hi cook, glad you're here to look after me tonight," threw his coat over one chair, his hat on another, plonked down a pile of French, British and German newspapers on the floor, sat on the sofa, lit up his pipe and let me stew in resentment in the kitchen.
I should have brought a tablecloth; the only one I could find was grubby. I should have brought some candles; there weren't any, nor were there any decent candlesticks. And I had to stick the flowers into a couple of wine bottles from the big pile that someone had been too lazy to return to the store. My scene wasn't as idyllic as I had imagined it would be.
Monsieur est servi, I announced in a high dudgeon when all the food was on the table and Paul still hadn't uttered an extra word. He got up clumsily from the sofa, dropping his newspapers and his pipe, and followed me into the dining room, the image of the domesticated man who doesn't have a moment to spare for a woman except as an object to cook for him and pick up his shoes. We might have been married for twenty years for all the interest he showed.
Until he entered the dining room and surveyed the duckling decorated with its oranges and lettuce (that hid the slightly overdone spots) and took a deep breath. And then he said Formidable! and then let out his breath slowly and said "Zowie! That smells good," and then he took me in his arms, but hard, and kissed me on my lips in a manner novelists would describe as "unmistakable," and chucked me under the chin, and I knew that things weren't going to be as catastrophic as I had feared.
"You know," Paul said later, his mouth full of potatoes and duck gravy, "I'm really rather lucky. I never expected to be having a gorgeous dinner like this served up by you tonight. In fact I didn't even know you existed."
"You must have known since Tuesday."
"Yes, but I wasn't really interested in you. I mean you're quite nice and you seem to be a fairly good cook if this is any indication, but frankly I hadn't expected to meet you again. I went over to meet your roommate, what'sername, Valerie, Virginia, that's right. I'd met her a couple of times before with Rene and I thought she'd be in."
"I'm sorry you were disappointed by finding only me," I told her icily.
"No, no. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I met you. I'm just explaining why I didn't exactly fall head over heels at your feet when we were over at your place."
"No need for apologies. I quite understand. I assume Rene is through with Virginia now and he was inviting you up to take your turn; he's very considerate, your roommate is. What did he tell you about me? Wasn't he setting me up for you, too?"
"Oddly enough, no. He never even mentioned you before I happened to meet you. Which means he either didn't like you at all which would be unlikely for him, or else he liked you enough to want to keep you private for at least another week or so. Do you feel flattered?"
"Should I?"
"Under the circumstances, yes."
"What did he say when you told him I was coming over to make dinner for you tonight."
"Nothing."
"Nothing? Nothing at all? Wasn't he just a little curious or angry or jealous at least?"
"No, he didn't know it was you. I told him I'd be having the wife of a colleague over for the weekend and I wanted him out of the house for that."
"You two boys," I told him, putting an emphasis on boys, "have a strange concept of life. Everything revolves around affairs and intrigues and sexual make-believe. I'd expect it of Rene but I thought you were above that sort of locker-room skylarking. Is that why you room together, to impress each other with your amours and your conquests?"
I decided that this was the right moment to get up and fetch the dessert. It would give me a few minutes while the coffee was boiling to think up some more penetrating comments. One moment I was on my way, determined; the next I was in his arms, on his lap, my mouth under his, caught in his embrace, alternately struggling to get away and kissing back eagerly, hungrily, passionately. I mustn't let this go on.
"Please, Paul," I said with my final mustering of determination, "I really don't want us to have a misunderstanding. I like you and I think you're a rather attractive person, but I want you to understand that there's nothing beyond that between us, absolutely nothing. I have no intention of making love with you either tonight or any other time and I think it's very pointless and childish of us to neck around like this and I'm probably going to get very mad at you if you persist in trying to force your attention on me in this way. Now please let me go and make the coffee."
And, to my great surprise, he let me go. I placed the dessert on a tray, put a pot of water on the boil, ground up the coffee, picked up the tray-and came face to face with Paul again. He had me cornered in the little kitchen. With his finger he spooned up some dessert from the bowl, tasted it, murmured appreciatively, spooned up some more and gave it to me to taste, smiled at me, took the tray from my helpless hands, picked me up in his arms and carried me straight into the bedroom.
My struggles were very brief. Paul was the complete master. My dress was off in a minute, my tightly crossed legs were opened perhaps two or three minutes later. Within five minutes I was completely bare and Paul (not wasting a moment on his own deshabillage, except to remove his shoes and tie) was crawling all over me, kissing me, licking me, stroking me, exciting me. I didn't have it in my power to stop him but I wanted to, I needed to, it was terribly important. The urge to fuck, the urge to release my desires and emotions, were almost exactly outweighed by my need to protect myself, the need to prevent myself from becoming a toy to be thrown backwards and forwards between Paul and Rene. The more urgent my desires were for Paul, the more urgent became my need to resist him. I struggled harder and harder. I twisted my torso to wrench my breasts from his lips but his lips simply traveled further down to my belly. I pushed him away and he made for my thighs. His hands were around my buttocks and his nose was pushed into my crotch and my crotch was burning and aching for him, throbbing with an excitement that traveled right through my guts to my throat. And I knew I was lost and there was nothing I could do and that I would love him for fucking me-and hate him ever after and hate myself too.
And as Paul's gentle tongue parted my thighs and parted my twat and licked at my clit, I burst into tears like a little child. Uncontrollably. Sobbing, not with thrills or excitement but with fears and terrors and apprehensions. I made an absolute fool of myself. "Please, Paul," I sobbed and kept on repeating. "Please, Paul, don't. I really don't want to. It's all a mistake. It's all gone wrong. I'm sorry for leading you on but I really don't want to. Please, Paul. Please!"
The one thing I hadn't expected of Paul was that he'd be sentimental. But suddenly he was all concern. He sat up on the edge of the bed with my head cradled in his lap and started stroking me and comforting me. Not like a lover at all but like a solicitous father or perhaps like an older brother. "I had no idea," he murmured. "I didn't think ... I had no intention ... It was just that I got to like you ... I wanted you to know how I felt and how much I liked you and this was the way I could best express ... But you must have had some very unpleasant experience ... I'm sorry if I've brought it back."
He kissed the tears off my eyes with his lips and then he wiped them with his shirt tails and then he took off his shirt to wipe my face. I had to stop crying just in order to laugh at the silliness of it.
"I'm sorry I'm such a fool," I said.
"Shh! Shh! It's all right. I can guess what happened. Rene seduced you, didn't he?"
I smiled and nodded through my tears.
"Against your will, no doubt. And on my bed too if I know him; he always uses my bed for some reason when I'm away. Rene's such an inconsiderate bastard, I often wonder why I've stood living with him so long. I swear I'm going to throw him out one of these days.
Look, honey, you're right. Things aren't going to work out this way. I don't want to force myself on you. I'm not that type. I thought we could really get to like each other and enjoy making love together but this business with Rene's spoiled it all. We won't be able to pick up the broken pieces now. What do you say, we'll just get dressed now and then we'll go in to finish our coffee and dessert and then, maybe, when we meet again, next time, if there is a next time, we can start all over again, without all these memories coming between us. Would you like me to leave the room while you get dressed?"
I don't think I have ever gone through as many changes of emotion in a month as I went through in that one hour with Paul. Now, suddenly all my anger was directed against myself for having misunderstood Paul, for having suspected him and distrusted him. It seemed to be a very uncharitable thing of me to have done. "Oh Paul!" I said, sobbing again and pulling his face down to mine. "You're so good, so understanding. I'm sorry I was such a bitch. I didn't really know how to appreciate you. I thought you were like Rene. I wish I'd never met him. I wish he'd never spoiled things. Oh, Paul! I'm so sorry." And I kissed him with ever greater need and hunger and held him to me and hugged him.
His clothes were off in a trice. He jumped on me and pinned me down. He put three fingers into my twat to open me up there and two at my arsehole. His teeth bit on my nipple and his lips mouthed my breast. His knees forced mine apart and then his prick went right in. All of it. Up to the hilt. A big, firm, hard, comforting prick filling up my cunt and stopping up all my silly thoughts. A prick that sent its messages right through my body. He was going in and coming out and in and out and I was slippery and gooey and ready and happy. He had my legs pushed up high; his thighs were rubbing up and down the insides of my thighs. His lips were on mine and his tongue was curling in and out between my lips. I tried to devour him, to soak him up and swallow him up at every opening. There were fingers teasing my clit and other fingers at my anus and his weight on my breasts and his tongue in my ears. Then his motions became faster and faster and I was heaving with my hips, pushing back against his delicious weight and his delightful thrust, throwing my body around in ecstasy, twitching and turning and moaning as he got faster and faster and I was going faster and faster too until I couldn't hold back any more and everything was exploding including Paul inside me and I exploded too-into an orgiastic convulsive laughter of an orgasm. It must have sounded quite startling, for in the excitement of the fuck I suddenly found all the fears and schemes and intrigues of the previous week flashing in front of me, so ridiculous now, so pointless, that I simply couldn't hold back my laughter.
What did it matter now? I'd made Paul's dinner and cooked Rene's goose and I'd got fucked by Paul in the best goddamn fuck I'd ever had after the worst god-awful scenes there could ever be, and everything was right with the world. And so I came and kept on coming, laughing and loving and joyful and happy and urging Paul to keep on and on and on until finally I couldn't take any more, just couldn't and Paul couldn't either and we just lay there, he still on top of me, the soft tip of his prick still just slightly inside me, just lying there in each other's arms, smiling away into each other's eyes and laughing at the foolishness and the joy of it all.
Suddenly the doorbell rang. "Don't answer it," I said to Paul. "Don't get up."
I heard a key being turned in the lock. "My God!" Paul said, sitting up. "It must be Rene. He wasn't supposed to be back before Monday."
"Don't let him in, Paul. Don't let him. Tell him a story. Tell him anything. Tell him I'm the wife of your friend. Don't let him in for God's sake! Do you hear me, Paul! Do you hear me?"
Of course he'd heard me. He heard me all the way to the front door. He didn't even bother to shut the bedroom door, he didn't even bother to cover himself with a towel but walked stark-naked to the front door with his prick all shiny and glistening to show what he'd been doing, and he undid the chain on the front door, and there was no reason at all in the world why he should have done that.
I crawled under the sheet to hide.
"You've come at an awkward moment," Paul told Rene. "I just finished fucking my girl friend. We hadn't expected you."
I heard their voices approaching. They stopped right outside Paul's bedroom. "Sorry, there was a hitch. My party won't be leaving until tomorrow morning after all. Who's the girl you're with? Anyone I know?"
I expected Paul to slam the door in front of his inquisitive friend. I expected to hear the story of his intrigue with the mysterious married woman. I hadn't expected, after those tender, loving moments, that Paul would betray me: "Of course. You introduced us. You remember Virginia's roommate, Cathleen? She came over to make dinner tonight and we've just been to bed. Don't you want to say hello to her?"
I didn't care a damn any more. I sat bold upright letting the sheet drop to my waist, looked straight at Paul and said with all the venom I could gather: "You are a filthy, dirty, lousy, fucking bastard. Now give me my clothes please and let me leave and I don't ever want to see either one of you jokers again my whole life."
"She's very spirited," Paul said matter-of-factly. "And changable too. You never know from one moment to the next whether she's going to cry or laugh. But there's one thing I can tell you: she's a tremendously good fuck. Not too much experience, I suspect, but very willing and very passionate and really excellent material. But why am I telling you all this? You fucked her last week, didn't you? On the same bed, too, I'm told."
Rene stared open-mouthed, his eyes going from his friend to me and back again. "I must say I am very disappointed in both of you. I thought I meant something to you, Cathleen. I really didn't expect to find you making love to my roommate the moment my back was turned. And Paul, I didn't think you'd take advantage of every one of my friends I happened to introduce to you."
I didn't know which of the two to be angrier at, which of the two was the nastier, slier, more perverse.
"Look, Rene," Paul said. "There's no reason why we shouldn't treat this like two men of the world. I like her and you like her. I've fucked her and you've fucked her. Now we either can both keep on being friends with her or we can ask her to choose the better man."
"You can fuck each other for all I care," I told him. "I'm clearing out."
"Now that's silly, Cathleen. You're acting just like a prudish, priggish little American tourist. Where's your sense of adventure? Where's your sense of humor? Where's all that sensuality you were showing in bed just a little while back? I've asked you to tell us whom you like better, Rene or me. If all you can say is 'Go fuck each other,' then I must assume you've been playing ring-a-ring-a-rosy with both of us and you don't belong here. Did you enjoy fucking with me?"
"Yes!" I spat out. "So what?"
"Would you like to fuck with me again?"
"No! Never in my whole life."
"Well, I guess that proves it. You're a better man than me, Rene. I take off my hat to you. Get into bed with her, she's all yours."
"No!" I screamed. "No! No! No! Get away from me! Leave me alone! I hate you. Both of you. Do you hear?"
But Paul had left the room and shut the door and Rene had kicked off his shoes and pulled off his trousers and he was holding me in his arms, keeping me from struggling, and one hand was over my mouth to stop me from screaming, and he had me pinned to the bed with his knee on my belly to keep me down, and his shoulder against my chin, and then another knee between mine, and his mouth covering mine so that I couldn't breathe, a hand in my cunt to tear at me and a prick snaring out to spear me.
It was a nightmare from which I didn't want to wake up in case reality turned out to be worse. It was just physically impossible that all that I had imagined was really happening, that all the many changes and turns of events had taken place within a few short hours. It wasn't real. Paul wasn't real. Rene wasn't real. I wasn't real.
I lay back, exhausted, and stopped struggling. I dozed off into a numbing void. I let myself fall into blackness. I allowed my mind to become vacant. I allowed a warmth to well up in my crotch, my nipples to get excited, my mouth to tingle, my cunt to burn. It was nothing, just comfort, just myself, just me in bed, dreaming and playing and thinking about love and falling asleep to it. Dreaming about Chuck or all the other nameless idiots while my cunt was burning and a finger went in and another and another and then a prick which felt so much better, and lips around my nipples, and kisses on my belly, and fingers up my butt, and humping and thumping inside me, on and on to an orgasm, an orgasm like any orgasm, like any time I played with myself before I fell asleep only better this time because there was a real prick which belonged to someone who wasn't there, who I pretended wasn't there. A lazy, easy-going orgasm that allowed me to relax. A good, pleasant orgasm so that I could fall asleep.
And almost did, only I was wakened by loud shattering moans right in my ear from Rene, and I knew I wasn't dreaming-but now it didn't matter. I just lay back and panted. I had to think, to collect my thoughts, to figure out what I was and who I was and why.
Then the door burst open and Paul, still naked, walked in with a tray. "Congratulations!" he said. "I'm glad you had fun. I wanted to bring you some coffee to refresh you, Cathleen, but I'm afraid you let the pot over boil and you've burned a great big hole in it. But here's what's left of the dessert. Very good, by the way. Very good indeed." He smacked his lips and then he dug a spoon into the dish and fed me. I didn't have the will to resist. My mouth opened automatically like a little fledgling being fed by its mother and he crammed it with strawberries and whipped cream and Cointreau and then my mouth closed on it again until he presented the next spoonful.
"I didn't bring you any dessert, Rene. I'm not sure you deserve it, anyway. But if you're hungry, you might as well go into the kitchen and help yourself to some of the duck Cathleen cooked for me. It's cold now but it's excellent. Come on! Be quick. You're in my bed and I want to get back in."
I turned my back on them both and crawled into the smallest ball I could get into. I didn't want to have anything to do with anyone or anything. I pulled my face down to my knees and my knees up to my chin and put my arms around my knees and shut my eyes. I could feel a tussle of sorts around me with grunts and heaves and curses in English and French and then there was a warm, strong body pressed into my back and firm masterful arms around me. My muscles relaxed, my eyes opened, my breathing got easier and I lay back in Paul's arms.
He made love to me again, very gently this time. Gently, romantically, idyllically. I drifted off with him, floated along with him, let him guide me. I was his entirely; my entire will was at his disposal. I swept along on clouds and rose up on peaks and rocked among the waves with him. I was with Paul, a dream Paul, an idealized Paul, the Paul I had wanted to make love with, the Paul I had called up the day before, the Paul I had come to make dinner for, the Paul I had wanted to seduce. I had no more memory of the other Paul, the bully, the tyrant, the pervert, the trickster, the Paul who had betrayed me to Rene.
Sometime during the night I fell asleep and then I woke up again as Paul entered the room, fully dressed, with a tray of peaches and grapes, a foaming bottle of champagne wrapped in a napkin, two candles in crystal holders, and a bunch of long-stemmed roses.
"Wait!" he said as I sat up. "Don't get up yet. Slip into something comfortable first." And with that he produced a package wrapped in gold foil that I tore at with impatient fingers and opened up to reveal a gorgeous diaphanous silk nightgown cut low at the neck almost down to the navel and split up the thigh almost to the waist and trimmed with downy fur.
So we sipped wine and fed grapes to each other and nibbled at what was left in the kitchen, danced to the Victrola, smoked, drank more champagne, downed coffee and talked and talked and kissed and talked and I fell in love for the first time in my life, really fell in love, truly fell in love.
"This is crazy, Paul," I told him. "I was hating your guts just a few hours ago. I wanted to kill both you and Rene. Say, whatever happened to Rene?" I'd quite forgotten he was in the apartment.
"Him? I sent him packing as soon as I could. He had no business here, anyway. As soon as he'd done what he was supposed to do I told him to scram."
"Supposed to do! You mean you planned this!"
"Of course. I had to. I could see you were playing him and me off against each other. The only thing to do was to let you see where your game would get you and also what sort of a person Rene really is. I mean, anyone who'd take up his roommate's offer to get into a bed he's only just gotten out of can't really be taken seriously, can he?"
My God, I thought. Here it comes again. He's turning logic inside out. He's going to make me go crazy, that Paul.
"See what else you've learned? You've learned there's nothing specially sacred about screwing, right? That I don't give a damn whether I screw you or someone else does, right? That it doesn't matter much as far as the fun is concerned whether you get fucked by Tom or Dick or Harry, right? All your little bourgeois American values about sex blown to bits and put together again in a better mold, right? So that now you can enjoy sex for what it is, and people for what they are, and us for what we are."
I had no time or opportunity to either accept or refute his perverse philosophy. He started making love again and this time he carried me into Rene's room and laid me on Rene's bed. He sucked my cunt to open me up-it didn't take many minutes for that-and he spread the quim juice around from my twat to my butt and opened me up there and then he rolled me over expertly on my belly and took me from the lick.
Nothing surprised me any more. Nothing could surprise me. If he'd entered me through my navel or through my little toe I wouldn't have been surprised either. A heavy blunt ram pushed up my anus and it felt to me that this was what I was supposed to have there. There was an aching and what seemed a tearing of my muscles and it seemed that that too was what I should feel there. I had a sensation as if I was going to crap and I thought I should avoid that at any cost and tightened my muscles to prevent it but then I got the feeling that this too was natural and if I had to shit I'd just go ahead and shit because that was what would be happening, and I relaxed my muscles again. Then he had me by the clit, squeezing and pinching with half a hand right inside my twat and other fingers all over and around it and his hips against my buttocks and his teeth biting-really biting-into my neck and thrust, thrust, thrust right into and through me, right up from my buttocks and my cunt and my ass into my bowels and up to my chest and out of the top of my head and coming out from my ears. Pushing and thrusting, faster and faster, a powerful ram-shoving push with a steamshovel force that I swallowed right up into my body. I didn't even know where he was entering me any more. I was just one opening surrounding his ram. I was a giant cunt, a cunt all over, an open-ended pipe that he was driving through. He was driving through with a manic force and I was trembling on his thrust with an equal force, holding on to him just tight enough so that I wouldn't be blown right off and out into space. I was exploding in all my linings, and in every nerve of me, and every nerve was only something to wrap around him. He shoved his love right up me and through me and I had to open my mouth to let some of it out of the other end and then finally it gushed and exploded and went all the way up me in ripples and breaking waves that climaxed with an explosive scream from my mouth scaring the hell out of me because I couldn't for the life of me stop but went on and on and on.
And some time towards dawn I fell asleep.
And finally on Monday morning we got out of bed and Paul went to his office and put me in a cab for home.
"Give my love to Virginia," he told me as I settled into my seat. "Tell her what she missed by not being home when I happened to meet you."
"I will," I promised. And I had to laugh at myself and at the changes in me because I meant it. "I'm going to give you a great build-up."
"Thanks, honey. I'd like to fuck your roommate one day; after all, you fucked mine. Besides, I'm partial to virgins."
"You're silly, Paul. You know Ginny isn't a virgin."
"For me everyone is a virgin until I've fucked her myself."
There was nothing I could say because it was so true. I had been a virgin until I'd met Paul. I really hadn't known what sex or love was about. I hadn't been free to love until Paul showed me what it meant, that it was just as important to be able to love as to hate and to hate as to love, that you can love a man for himself or love him for his prick or love him just for the loving he can give you. I was a virgin until I met Paul, in more ways than one; I couldn't give him my maidenhead, which didn't mean a damn thing anyway, but I gave him my mouth, the first man I let come all the way in my mouth, and I gave him my anus, the first man to enter all the way, and I let him enter my heart, the first man I really let enter, the first man who by his skill and his love and his interest-and by his callous indifference and his overpowering self-confidence-could break through my silly school-girlish, Midwestern Catholic prejudices to get at the real carnal Cathleen within me.
Paul took my virginity. Paul opened me up. Paul made me ready to love. Paul taught me to love others and, more important, to be able to love myself.
There aren't many men like Paul. There aren't many I could ever get to love like him, and those that there are I've only been able to love because he made me learn to love.
Like Harold. And like Roger. And of course Paul.
Only three men I've ever really loved. Only three men I love. Three men I still love. Love them all, all differently but all, in a way, equally.
I've picked one. One out of three. To be my mate. Until death do us part.
He's loving me now. Loving me with his heart and his soul and his body.
I'm holding his thighs and he's holding my face. Holding my face in both his hands, cradling me in his hands, looking into my eyes as if awaiting the message that he doesn't even know to expect. His tongue is tangled with mine. His prick is in my cunt, right in my cunt, driving right into me.
I love him, my man. I love him, that man. Love him and fuck him and fuck him and fuck me.
Faster and faster.
Deeper and deeper.
Don't stop. Not now. Keep on. It's near. Come on, on, on, ON!
I can't bear this! I can't bear this. I'm bursting. My eyeballs are turning in my skull. My mind is bursting out. I can't breathe. I'm going to scream. Go on! Go on!
