He drove the car rapidly down the street, looking occasionally at the girl's figure, huddled against the door. He turned down Seventh Avenue, and she still hadn't spoken. At Tenth Street, he stopped the car and turned toward her. She leaned her elbow against the door handle and was half on the sidewalk, calling, "Thank you," over her shoulder, when he reached over and pulled her back into her seat.
"What's the hurry? What's your hurry?"
"I'm tired, Paul," she explained. "My God," he answered. "You're fine all night. I really think you're relaxing and having a good time, but you always make the goodnight the briefest coldest moment of my day."
"I'm sorry," she said again humbly. "You know me.
"I don't know you Gloria. Does anyone know you?" Do you ever sit still long enough to be known?"
She was getting impatient, and she said, "For crying out loud. How often can you go over the same theme. No, I don't sit still. No, I don't like dragged-out good-nights. No, I don't care if I never see you again. Yes, I'm tired."
"Look Honey," he interrupted her. "I'm not going to rape you."
She smiled cruelly at the suggestion. "No one's going to rape me. It takes a very cooperative woman to get raped. A man might get me to the floor, but he wouldn't get any further."
Paul said, "Why speculate. Why don't you let me love you the way I want to. I swear to you Gloria, the way I feel about you, it would be wonderful for both of us. I'd really make you want it. I'd make you want it till you cried for it." And he put his mouth on her ear. "It's not fair for a woman as beautiful and sensuous looking as you to put men off. You were obviously put on earth to satisfy, not torment us."
Feeling his tongue nuzzling wet inside her ear, she shuddered with excitement and horror.
"Get away from me," she said with anger, and he could not hear the terror in her voice. "When I'm willing and ready to give myself to a man I will, and I don't need you licking my face like a stupid dog to convince me."
His fury relieved the bitterness inside her.
The man was livid at her gross refusal. "You whore," he whispered to her"
"You whore with a virgin's cunt. What are you waiting for? When are you going to give your rare gift away?"
"It's not that," she told him. Her voice was calm. "You know it's not that. It's just that I'm not interested."
"Not interested!" he shouted. "What the hell are you talking about! You sound as if you're returning a library book."
"I don't want it," she screamed. "I hate the whole phony slobbering business."
"You're a teasing bitch," he spat at her. "And you'll never know what it means to feel like a woman."
"What does it mean," she mocked, "to feel like a woman? What's so different and special about being a woman?"
"You fool," Paul roared. "You'll never know what it means to spread your knees and say to a man, 'Fill me with your prick because I'm dying from emptiness'."
"Don't," she begged. "Don't talk to me like that. Don't dare."
"You'll never know it from me," he continued. "And no man is going to wait as long as I did. Give it up, baby. Put on pants and wipe the mascara off your eyes and make it with the girls. Mona's Bar is full of dikes who are just waiting for you. They've seen the dead look in your eyes, and they know it'll take a woman's hand to make you feel like a woman. You disgust me. You're worse than a whore."
She listened with rapt pain, thinking, he will strike me when he's finished, and she waited with an ecstasy she did not understand. Her heart felt as though a strong hand were clutching and numbing it.
"Why don't you hit me?" she breathlessly demanded.
Paul looked down at her with a contempt as cold as had been his hot wanting of her. "I wouldn't touch you baby," he said. "I'll just let you rot untouched. The ladies like to get a virgin. When they see the blood on their hands, they know they've got them forever." He turned and walked away from her without a glance back. She stood motionless till she heard the drone of his car turning the corner of Sixth Avenue. The street lay dark ahead of her.
Oh God, she thought, I hate stinking men. I hate their hungry faces and their moving hands. I hate them when they press against me and I feel their pants bulging. I'll never let one love me. Imagine being naked on a bed, and having them crawl all over you and pull your legs apart, when you lay flat and broken like a defeated enemy, and they stick their stiff prick in you, and that's the only part of them that's got feeling left. They're like crazy animals till they spurt their vicious fluid in you. And then you're supposed to kiss their feet and pretend that you enjoyed it. They'll never have me. Nor will a woman. I don't want some woman's tongue and long nailed fingers to stroke me into an excitement that interferes with my thinking and breathing. Yes, I'll do it to myself. And I'll go to my grave never having been a fool for some sexual maniac.
Numbly Gloria pushed her shoulders against the door. It opened for her, and she closed out the silent street behind her and placed her hand on the dimly lit bannister.
At first she did not feel the hand that covered hers. Her heart was beating so loud in her chest, her thoughts were cutting out the world around her. But as she moved up the first step, she felt the iron-like hold, paralyzing her. She looked down, from her height, into cruel eyes. The blue of the man's eyes was so light, that his face looked like a portrait painted by a madman who had left the eyes, where the soul would have been, the dead white of the canvas. A shock of black hair covered his fine head. His mouth smiled grimly at her mute terror.
"Come down off the step, Miss," he whispered, "we're going to have a little party."
She opened her mouth to scream, realizing that no sound could come out of her. But then she felt his knife edging into the small of her back.
"No sound lady," he hissed, "just a nice quiet party." He pulled her roughly down beside him.
He pressed against her with the frigid indifference of steel.
"I gotta fuck some bitch, and you're the lucky cunt." He laughed soundlessly. "It's an honor baby, (Paul had called her baby) cause I got a cock as big as the Eiffel Tower."
Listening to him, she regained her senses. I'll talk him out of it, she thought.
"Look mister," she implored. "I'll give you all the money I have. I'm a virgin, I'm a virgin, and I'm getting married next week. And you'll ruin my life if you ... if you ... take me. Because then my fiance will never marry me. You see, he wants a ... a ... pure girl."
The man looked at her with his vacant eyes. "I dig virgins," he whispered. "Come virgin, we'll bleed all over this fancy hall." Effortlessly he pushed her down to the floor in the little black alcove behind the stairway. She found her voice to scream, and he slapped her face until her ears were deafened with a ringing inside her head that cut off the whole world.
"Unbutton my pants, you whore," he commanded.
"No," she said, "no, I can't touch you."
He grabbed her hand and placed it solidly a-cross the mound in his pants.
"Unbutton them, you bitch. My prick wants to be free to dig inside of you."
She felt his knife against her ribs. With trembling hands she unbuckled his belt.
"That's it, that's it, a thorough job, virgin."
She moved her fingers to the first button, and he shoved her hand deep inside his pants so she could feel his hot pulsing flesh. "Faster, faster, you cunt," he commanded. Slowly and miserably she undid the last button. He wore no under pants.
"Pull my fly open, pull my life open."
She did as she was told. His prick was folded primly between his thigh, covering his balls. "Now pull it out. Gently, gently ... with all the love in your fucking whore's heart," and again he laughed madly and excitedly. His cock leapt out straight beneath her fingers. It was veined and white, almost purple at the tip. It was huge and massive, bigger than anything she thought a man could fold between his legs.
"Kiss it," he said. And his voice trembled. "Open your virgin's mouth and suck it."
"Suck it, suck it, you pure cunt." She put the tip of his prick to her mouth, feeling it jump with life against her teeth.
"Spread your teeth, spread your teeth," he screamed under his breath. And he grabbed her head, pressing it against him so that his prick went cruelly between her teeth, gagging her at the back of her throat.
"Lick it, lick it like it's candy. Better than the best at Shraft's." And he pulled her head back, sticking his hand crudely in her mouth and pulling her tongue out.
"Here, here," he directed. "Where the vein bulges. Suck it up and down. Play with my balls. Play with my balls and suck it up and down ... ahh...." He seemed hypnotized by the motion of her unwilling head. "Enough, enough, you bitch. I'm going to come inside you like a Fourth of July celebration. I'm going to explode inside your pure cunt."
He threw her head down, twisting himself quickly on top of her body. Then he got on his knees and pulled her legs around his kneeling body. His prick came out stiff before him. He took his knife out and bent his head near hers.
Good, he's going to kill me. I'd rather die. I'd rather die.
But delicately and surely, he slit the crotch of her panties, exposing the soft black hair of her cunt. He did not touch it, but kneeled, sucking his breath in and out and staring at the cleft in her. She grew faint with naked horror. Not touching her cunt, he took his heavy penis in both hands and, lowering his body, with one thrust he dug inside her. She screamed with pain, but his hand was ready on her mouth, not letting any of the pain out; keeping it locked in her cunt. She felt him scraping the bleeding throbbing wound in her.
"You're dry baby, you're dry baby. Ain't you having fun. I'm having fun. You got the tightest cunt I ever been in. Tight cunt, sucking me in. Tight-cunted bitch."
Her body from the waist down was writhing with pain. He put his hands beneath her hips, and she felt his fingers digging into her ass. They found the hidden hole, and two fingers crushed mercilessly into it. Then she felt her body trapped and full with him. No out, no freedom for her body. Stuffed and prisoned with his prick and fingers. Then, miraculously, a great heat and throbbing started under her heart, and moved to meet his penis. She burnt with humiliation. Was this desire? This crazy itch and burning in her cunt? His penis rubbed against her blood taut clitoris, and when every nerve in her body was stretched like wire, and her thighs felt like fire, all the wires that were in her body let go, and she felt the pendulum throb in her cunt. A great flowing of liquid coursed to her vagina. Then a ballooning in and out of her inner flesh, like a fish's mouth. Open close ... open close ... she felt herself losing consciousness.
She lay still, not wanting ever to move again. But he was up on his feet. More cruel than when he had thrown her to the floor.
"Get up you bitch," he ordered. "Button my pants." She got to her knees, her head level with his lax soft prick. "Put it in and button me up." She fought a desire to stroke her pleasure.
"Put it in bitch."
She pressed his prick between his thighs and numbly, kneeling before him, began to button his pants. They were both silent. She lifted her head to his white eyes.
"Come upstairs to my apartment," she begged.
He laughed into her face. "I got what I wanted virgin. Ask your uptown friends to carry on."
But she knew that only this man with the white eyes could bring all the fluids of her body pulsing hot to her cunt.
"Don't leave me," she implored. "Don't leave me to die."
He pushed her head away from his covered prick. "I got what I wanted, cunt, try fucking the Eiffel Tower now." And he kicked her away from him and sauntered out of the hall. She heard the hall door lock behind him. She put her face against the tile floor and started to sob, with the gnawing in her body, "Come back," she sobbed against the tiles.
She lay for almost an hour hoping she would hear him turn the knob of the door. Then, knowing he was gone for the night, maybe forever, she drag-get her body up the stairs.
Gloria turned the lamp on over the bed. She fell across the bed dazed. Her feet, their shoes still on, touched the floor. She lay, knowing that the last half-hour had made her a slave to a pair of white eyes.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning, a persistent ringing in the room brought her swimming out of a dream where she had been floating in a pool, flat on her back, her belly facing the sky and swelling, swelling like a carnival balloon until she thought she would burst. Her eyes had wandered to the diving board and there, poised as though he would fly rather than dive, was her father. He laughed with his white eyes, and started to float toward her distended belly. She shrieked with the pain to come, and woke up, her screams competing with the blasting of the telephone.
"Yes, yes, yes," she called. As though it were the telephone, not a person soundlessly far from her room, urging her. "Yes," she called and pulled her bruised hips around. She reached out and picked up the receiver. Almost before she could speak, a husky voice said, "Gloria, is that you baby?" and she said, "Yes," blindly, still not fully conscious.
"Look baby, I'm sorry about yesterday. I didn't sleep all night. I'm so sorry about yesterday. Look, Honey, I just had a bit too much to drink ... I'm sorry. Are you there?"
"Yes," she answered wearily. Paul and the things he had said. What had he said yesterday? When was yesterday? When was Paul ... her body couldn't remember. Only something that had happened after Paul. What was it? And then the white eyes floated out of her dreams and gripped her stomach, and she was completely, shockingly awake.
"It's okay Paul. Really, I guess I deserved what you said."
"No Gloria. Look, I'm just a conceited ass. If a girl doesn't sleep with me, I make a whole case study out of it."
She pictured Paul's dark gentle eyes, and his fine soft hands.
"A girl should want to sleep with you," she said. "If she doesn't then she probably does have a screw missing someplace." And she thought, My God, I really got my screws bolted in place last night. No more loose screws. Except me, now I'm one big loosened screw. All of me, so no one can hear the rattling.
"Gloria, baby are you there? Look, can we just forget about last night? I promise, I won't say another word about us ... I mean that way. It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the winter chill is off. Let's drive up to Westchester and have some lobster in the Rye Inn."
"Good," she said, "get me out of the city today."
"Gloria, you're an angel. I don't think there's another girl who'd forgive me for last night. I don't know what got into my head."
Sense, she thought. It's the first time you ever sounded like a man. The first time you made me feel like a woman. Christ, do I have to be beaten and bullied into being a woman? Well then, beat me, bully me, I have to live. For the first time I want to live.
"I'll pick you up in an hour. Is that okay?"
"What time is it now Paul? Ten o'clock. Good. Come over for coffee and eggs at eleven, and by twelve we'll be on our way."
"Great, great," he said, his voice relaxed and relieved. The husky whisper of the first few seconds of conversation gone. "I'll pick up some cheese Danish and we'll have a picnic. I love you Gloria, I love you even if I am a stupid ass."
To bad for me, too bad the stupid ass goes for me. And they admit it too. The stupid asses are always very honest. I wonder if I could turn him into a man? I wonder if we can make a deal. I turn him into a man and he pays back by turning me into a woman. And she picturned Paul's gentle eyes. No, the only thing he could turn me into is a cow. A big, fat, contented, cud-chewing-in-the-green-fields cow.
"In an hour then baby," he sang.
"I'll be waiting for you," she answered.
When she hung up the phone, she was alone again. And then realized that she was afraid. She pulled herself off the bed and kicked off the shoes she had worn all night. Her toes felt stiff and cold. She walked to the window, and rolled the bamboo blind up. The windows were dirty on the outside, the way New York windows always are. Because you weren't allowed to sit out on the sill and wash them, the way you could in Kansas City. And in Kansas City, you lived in a house that had two floors. Two floors of a wooden house, and the windows always glistening and clean. Her eyes filled with hopeless tears. Here she lived on the fourth floor. A wonderful floor-through studio. And all the light she needed to paint. Though artists didn't really need light anymore, doing their crazy patterns of color. The artists didn't go out into the sun the way Cezanne had. It didn't matter how a tree looked with the sun coming through the leaves. They were city dwellers now, painting sunless images in sunless rooms.
She opened the window and looked up and down the quiet brownstone lined street. Down below her, a car was being parked badly. Two girls with short hair and slacks passed, and they touched hands behind their backs, hiding their love. But everything in their walk and dress and faces told the world that they were in love. That at night they gripped each other's short cropped heads, and dug into each other's hidden sex. And they had looks of frozen, corrupted purity.
Small fenced-in trees lined the street. A skinny man with corduroy pants passed, carrying a canvas under his arm. Another sunless artist. Then a hurried young man, with horn-rimmed glasses, scurrying like a rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, rushed by, balancing thick books against his tweed coat. She laughed. Boy oh boy, you'd better read fast. You've got lots to learn my bright young man. Hurry, or you'll die before you finish St. John's list of classics.
We're all insane, reading and painting and blowing tunes. And all the time we want a thick tongued maniac to grab us in a dark hallway and jam sex into us. All the money I wasted on paint and canvas and school. All the time I was just a cunt. An unused cunt. Those are the biggest cunts of all. Cunts as big as our heads.
She closed the window. Afraid again to be alone in the room. I wonder if he knows my name? I wonder if he'll look me up in the book and come back? But I must forget about him, I must forget and go on living.
She walked into the bathroom, the pale eyes invisibly following her. She leaned over the bathtub, the gesture bringing a throb of pain to her temples. She turned the hot water tap as smoke and splashing water filled the tub. She walked out into the small kitchen and filled the kettle with water. She set the kettle on the stove, and turned the automatic gas jet. A flame shot up and she jumped back, realizing that she had been standing in her kitchen, staring transfixed at the white eyes in the pattern of spots and cracks on the wall. Oh God, I'm trapped, I'm trapped.
Gloria wandered into her studio. The main room of her top floor apartment. The walls were covered with her paintings. An unfinished canvas hung on the wall between the two windows. Her canvasses were too large for her to use an easel. Dipping into brilliantly hued buckets of paint, and splashing her frustration and confusion across the white canvas. All the colors of her life leaped at her from the walls, and she felt surrounded by mute enemies. She fell across the sofa in the middle of the room. It was covered with an Indian throw. Tiny flowers and men on camels marched along the border of the couch. She reached over to the coffee table that she had made out of wrought iron legs and an old mahagony kitchen table. The first cigarette of the day tasted like blood in her mouth, and she smashed it out in her Mexican pottery ash tray, and went back into the kitchen. She poured the boiling water through a drip coffee-pot, and poured the full cup of black steaming coffee. She brought the cup into the bathroom, putting it down on the closed toilet seat and unzipped her black dress. The rapist, the white-eyed devil, hadn't bothered to take her dress off. Just pulled it above her knees. Didn't care that she had full, nipple tipped breasts. Didn't care that her white back exposed the long slim line of her spine. Didn't care that the musk of her body lay hidden in her armpits, that her hips curved out from a small sculpted waist. Only wanted to get to her cunt. No other part of her existed for him. Not her head, or her heart, or her round thobbing, blue veined beasts. Only one place his prick wanted to go ... only one thing he cared about, his prick. His prick and her cunt and they could fly to the moon.
She lowered herself into the tub, and the water turned pink with her clotted blood. She grew faint. The water rushing into her cunt, settling hot in her hidden cavity, bringing the memory of him back to her with painful immediacy. I must find him. He's got to come back to me. Does every vagina feel the same to him? Didn't he feel, inside me, that he'd come home. Will he want another woman tomorrow? Is he with another woman now, shoving his magnificent prick into her pink hot flesh? and the thought brought tears of rage and jealousy to her eyes.
She took the soft plastic sponge she used and soaped her body; her thighs, and the blood coating them, her slightly muscled calfs, her arms and breasts, and her tear stained face. Her body felt the prickly sensation he had left in it. A blind glutting desire. She remembered the Greek fable about Io. How Io had wandered between heaven and earth, a gnat biting at her, leaving her no peace ... torturing her with a persistency.
I'm just as damned. He's left a scar in my cunt. An itching burning scar. And only his prick can heal it. He's got to come back to me. He can't leave me to wander the earth like Io. And she started to cry.
But I'm an artist. I've won a drawerful of prizes. I've been shown in the Whitney exhibition. He can't have ruined me. Have left me with nothing to live for but his enormous cock. And, just thinking of the rigid boned flesh that had jutted from beneath his hard stomach, she trembled with excitement. I'm lost, I'm lost.
She pulled herself out of the tub, and dried her-body with the big Cannon towel. Wiping herself gently, with rhythmic concern. When she put the towel between her legs, her thighs pulled tightly together, as if her secret need had its own secret will. Her fingers wandered into her hot vagina. She felt the hot clitoris. It jumped at her fingertip's prodding. "I can't." She murmured. Knowing that if she flung herself across the bed and induced her own pulsating orgasm, she would be left with a hotter desire. Only the white eyes could save her. She walked into her bedroom, feeling the cruel urge between her legs. Her eyes reflected the torture. I'm going crazy. I am crazy.
Th green tweed suit, the fawn cashmere sweater, the thick hand crafted belt, the mascara, powder and lipstick, the stockings, garters and thin heeled shoes were all draped and painted importantly on her when the doorbell buzzed. Only the urgent itch inside of her didn't change with her cool, fresh looking exterior. Her secret, hot, hidden life laughed at her alligance to civilization. She could put on fourteen sweaters and twenty-two strings of beads, and she'd still be naked and hungry inside.
She opened the door gaily for Paul. "All is forgiven," she announced, fearing a long dull apology. "Let's just forget it and not even mention it again. Including today."
He put the bouquet of tulips and lilacs into her hands, and dared to kiss her timorously. There was no taste of blood.
"You look beautiful," he said, his eyes admiring her fine shoulder length black hair, cut in straight bangs across her forehead. Her mouth painted a fashionable orange.
"You are the coolest chick in New York," he said.
Very cool, she thought, nor to speak of the furnace in my groin.
"Well, let's scramble the eggs. I'm starving. Something about not sleeping all night, you have more time to be hungry."
She was afraid he'd apologize again. "You should have taken a Seconol. It's too much of a bore to toss all night."
He followed her lead. "Next time I don't sleep, I will, except," he slipped in an oblique apology, "if it's for the same reason I'll just blow my brains out."
Brains, she thought with contempt. Who gives a fuck about his brains.
"Let's get on with the breakfast. The cheese Danish looks gorgeous."
She took eggs, butter, bacon and cream out of the small refrigerator that supported the stove and oven about it. She pulled a bowl out of the cupboard and cracked four eggs into it. Beating the eggs she felt almost normal. He powdered salt and pepper into the bowl.
"You always forget the spice, honey." She laughed. "I don't believe in spice." He put his arm around her. "Is it really hopeless for me?"
"Is what hopeless?"
"Am I going to love you like a distant statute, a marble goddess all my life?"
"Why not? I'm a goddess you know. I'm Io. Ever met her?"
"No," he said, sensing the desperation behind her humor.
"Io is the only goddess who had an itch. A real terrific itch."
He didn't answer her.
"This itch," she continued, "drove Io all over the damn earth. Across the Caucasus, to the shores of Exxine, across the Macotic Striat, into the arms of the Amazons, out of Europe, to the continent of Asia...." her voice droned on incoherrently.
Paul took her by both her shoulders and shook her gently. "Baby, Baby, what's got you. You sound miserable. Really beat."
"It's nothing Paul. Nothing. I've just got a long trip in front of me, that's all." Then suddenly, and inexplicably for him, she said, "Have you ever seen a man with white eyes?"
He answered her tone instead of her words. "Maybe you'd better lie down for a few minutes Gloria. I'll bring the breakfast in when it's finished. You've got deep shadows under your eyes. Honey, if you don't feel well, if I hurt you more last night than you admit, we don't have to go anywhere. There's a Mozart concert on WQXR. We can just sit here and listen to it. Then we can have an early dinner and make a short peaceful day of it."
"Yes," she said, feeling dizzy with the gnat inside her. "I'll lie down, but don't try to get out of that drive to Westchester. It's just what I need for my artistic nerves."
She kicked off her shoes and stretched lengthwise across the bed. In fifteen minutes Paul was beside her with a complete breakfast tray. Coffee, toast, bacon, soft scrambled eggs, and the gorgeous Danish cheese. He put the tray on her night table and sat on the bed beside her.
"Can you tell me what's wrong?"
"Nothing is wrong. I just didn't sleep too well. I'm a bit tired. Maybe a little manic, or depressed. Darling, do you think I'm a manic-depressive?"
Paul placed his hand on her back. She wanted to grab his hand and shove it between her legs.
"What I said last night really upset you Gloria. I'm a pig to speak to a sensitive girl like that."
"It was true yesterday, Paul," she said, looking into his gentle eyes with a mixture of loathing and insatiable desire. "But it's not true today."
"What do you mean?" he said, his voice hopeful.
"I mean last night I was a frigid bitch. And rotten to you."
His disappointment showed in his voice. "Oh."
"But today," she rewoke his hope, "I'm not frigid."
"Gloria, what are you saying?"
"Make love to me. Make love to me now."
"Baby," he implored, almost killing her desire with his serious concerned face. "I didn't mean what I said yesterday. I want you, oh God I want you. But only when you're ready."
"I'm ready Paul. I'm ready you fool. Do I have to get down on my knees and ... and ... unbutton your pants?"
There was a shocked silence. Paul winced. He was used to the ceremony, the eager ceremony, the eager asking and the gruding permission before he made love. He was not prepared for this dry, toneless command. Sex was a game for him, played in a very prescribed way.
"Have something to eat first," he hesitated to regain his composure. Sure he'd fuck her, but she had to play the game.
In frustrated rage Gloria picked up the parsley sprinkled eggs and flung them across the room. They fell in a disgusting mushy yellow heap. "Fuck me!" she screamed. "Fuck me my white knight. You do know how? You have a prick, don't you?"
His face grew bleak with rage and fear. His anger made a bulge in his pants. Eagerly she labored with his belt buckle and unzipped his sober pinstriped trousers, found his prick, decorously pressed against his left leg. He wore Brooks brothers pink underpants. She reached into the slit of his pink pants and freed the stiff hot flesh. It stood wonderously firm before her eyes. She caressed it, not seeing Paul's eager frightened face above her. She saw nothing but this taut rod, and felt nothing but the draining emptiness inside of her. She put her mouth eagerly against the cap of his prick and sucked at it with long cool intakes of breath. She felt his legs tremble.
"Put it in me Paul, put it in me quick."
He was silent with tension.
"Take off your clothes," he commanded.
"No, no," she screamed, "no time, no time. Just put it in me."
He ripped at her cashmere sweater, pulling it up around her neck, pushing her methodical head away from his prick. He tugged at the pink brassiere beneath the sweater, but his nervous fingers could not find the hooks. He pulled her brassiere up, so that it cut her under the arms. And at last, his mouth found her taut nipples. She felt a shiver of hot lust as his mouth wandered over her two stiff nipples. They're stiff like your prick. I have two pricks. Then she pulled his head away from her, because his mouth was making the cavity inside of her unbearable.
"Fuck me Paul," and she looked at his gentle dark eyes. They brought him humanly close to her, and she felt her body grow chill. "Close your eyes. Don't look at me, just fuck."
"Gloria," he implored, "Gloria." She knew the human contact had made it too late. Her nipples grew soft. She lowered her hand to touch his prick. It was stiff stiff, and he was breathing hard. But it was not the thick cruel prick of last night's lover. It felt hard and then, hopelessly thin to her touch. She turned defeated on her side. And that moment, from behind her, his prick found its way between her legs and into the hot cavity of her desire. Too late ... too late. But his firm thick rod, moving in and out of her with a crazy excited rhythm, was filling her with fire. Maybe, maybe? and she pressed hard against him.
Maybe, maybe, and she grew dizzy with the intensity of her need.
"Harder, harder Paul. Give me a prick of hate, not of love. Give me a prick of hate."
Her throaty insane demand freed Paul's orgasm. It rushed trembling from his shoulders, throbbing down his breast and stomach and groin and emptied groaning into her cunt.
"Not yet, not yet," she spat in fury.
But Paul had grown soft inside her. She pulled away from him, her cunt wet from him and the soothing liquids that had started to flow in her. She picked up his lax cock and balanced it in her palm. "I could crush it, you weak bastard. I hate you." And she burst into tears of frustration, her fingers pinching her hungry clitoris.
"You're crazy," he hissed. But he lowered his head to her cunt, and pushed her hand away. "Let me," he said gently.
He covered her emptiness with his mouth. She leaned her head against the pillow and thought, as long as he doesn't take his mouth away, I can live. His tongue was inside her, gently licking her enraged clitoris. She felt a trembling, exhausted calm. She touched his dark head. "Thank you darling," she said weakly. "Thank you." But sobbing her thanks, she knew that even as his tongue and teeth in her cunt calmed her insatiable need, it would not bring the blasting, blinding release she had known under the stairs. It took a cock of contempt to do that. She felt as though a slave were salving her hot tired in-sides.
A slave, a slave. And she arched her body sensuously against him. But it would take a master to cut the chords of her nerves. At the urgings of his mouth she felt the liquids flow gently down her body. The slow, tenuous pulsations of the orgasm began. Cheated and relaxed. Fulfilled, and yet hungrier from the entranced, controlled throbbing of her cunt, she lay back amongst the pillows and tasted her tears.
CHAPTER THREE
Paul put his head on the pillow next to her. His face had the look of mortification mixed with pain. After months of gentle cultivation he discovered this aggressive madwoman. Was she always repressing this abandoned sexuality? Laughing contemptuously at his pretty ways. Or, had his patient courting driven her to frenzied carnality. Or was there another man? And his face contorted with jealousy.
They lay next to each other, not touching, in heavy silence. He thought she was sleeping but looking over at her, found her still lying flat on her back, her eyes opened wide to the ceiling. She had an expression of entranced agony.
"Gloria" he said. "Gloria, what is it?"
Her face showed she had not heard him. He leaned over and took her shoulders, feeling her shudder.
"Gloria, are you sick?"
She turned on him, repeating his question mockingly. "Am I sick?"
"I can't tell," he said hopelessly, "if you love or hate me."
"Neither," she sighed. "You don't even exist for me, really." And she turned heavy feverish eyes on him.
"I know," he defended himself. "I would never want to make love again like we just did. I guess I'm rather old-fashioned, but I like to lead the woman. I don't like to feel drawn up into her emotion."
"I guess you are old-fashioned," she agreed with distant disinterest.
"I think," he countered, "that you'll find most men are like me."
She laughed hollowly. "Then maybe I will take your suggestion of yesterday. Maybe I will try Women."
His face grew grim with the insult. A woman had never rejected him with this scrupulous and utter detachment.
"What you want is some kind of animal fury. Not love."
"No, I just want you to kill the bug in me."
He got up on his elbows and looked down at her breasts. The sweater and brassiere still pulled below her armpits, her breasts forced into taut points by the pressure above. He felt the blood rushing to his penis, pressing it authoritatively through the slit in his drawers. He was horrified that his body desired this crude woman. He pressed his penis up against his leg, zipping his pants with nervous speed. She watched with a disinterested smile on her face.
"Don't worry Paul, you won't get in me again, you don't even get near my bug. You don't even flutter its wings."
"What are you talking about," he said-embarrassed that she had seen his fear. "You talk like there's a mosquito eating at your...."
"My cunt."
"Gloria!"
"That's all it is," she screamed. "Stop reading your fancy psychology books. Stop turning women into goddam monuments or Virgin Marys. There's only one monument, that's a man's prick, and there's only one Virgin Mary, and she had a mighty rough time. I don't want God in my cunt. I just want a man. Are there any? Do you know any?" and the white eyes floated before her, and laughed into her blood clotted face.
"I think," said Paul, "that you should see an analyst."
"Great, great," she answered. "Do you know of one with white eyes?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I want an analyst with white eyes. I want him to fuck me back to sanity."
He leaned to look closely at her, and his shirt rubbed the protruding breasts. Again his penis urgently pressed his pants. She felt his tongue searching her closed cool lips.
"Let me, let me," he cried. "What difference can it make to you?"
She pulled her head back and said, "Try, just try to be a man for me."
"Yes, yes," he said, not hearing the accusation in her voice. "Let me try."
He pulled her sweater over her head, and found the snap on her brassiere, so that from the waist up, except for a narrow string of pearls, she was naked. He ran his hands eagerly over the soft white warm breasts, pinching the nipples between his thumb and forefinger. He did not dare to look at her face. With a grunt he pressed his mouth open against the stiff pink knobs at the tip of her tits. He sucked for the pinpoint hole in her nipples, trying to drain milk from the childless breasts.
"You darling, you darling," he spoke against her breasts, each sound and breath of his voice giving the warm breasts new sensations.
He stuck his penis eagerly between the valley of her breasts. The channel was dry and he crushed the mounds of flesh tight against his prick, feeling the pulsation, the separate heartbeat. His penis expanded ... fatter and stiffer, pressed against her woman's body. And still she did not move.
Blind with the heavy, throbbing end of his body, he reached his hand under her skirt, pulling at the Suspants with the garters and fragile stockings. He lifted her body half into the air, and clumsily pulled the panties and stockings off in one long silky piece. He pulled off her nylon petticoat, silly frills of lace along the hem, and he slid her skirt off last. Then she lay flat on the bed, completely, ravishingly naked. He got on his knees beside her, and ran his fingers up her thick thighs. Her delicate ankle, her white ballooning hips, her fragile sucked in waist. His tongue tasted her cunt, her breasts, her belly, the fleshy inside of her thighs. He crushed himself against her smoothly moving stomach to relieve the tormented steel rod growing out of him.
He rubbed helplessly against her cool skin. Up and down, up and down, and heard her even breath grow rapid and gasping. Only then did he look into her eyes, seeing them glitter at him from a terrible depth. Her mouth was closed, and she looked nearly unconscious with her beautiful head crushed into the pillow.
"I love you, I love you," he murmured. Tenderness mixing ecstatically with his fierce love-hungry prick. Her eyes looked back at him with pure hate. The hate turning his stomach cold. With rage and frustration he pulled her passive legs apart, and rushed his blood heavy prick into her pink and sensitive flesh.
Her vagina was almost dry, and its unconscious resistance of his penis made him grow harder and more enraged. He tore into her, forgetting the woman or thing beneath him. Only knowing that he was dying in his tortured cock, and that the hot elastic channel of inner flesh was giving him back his life. He ground up and down, in and out of this hot path, hypnotized by the rhythm of his desire.
Clutching at her shoulder and whispering into her ear to the cascading of his body, "I love you, I love you. I am helpless in you. Love me."
The he felt the passion prisoned in his prick rush forward for freedom. From his muscled thighs, his knotted stomach, his prick grew rigid and leaden, and when it had to break from its own weight, he shot his sperm deep inside her.
He fell exhausted against the pillow, his face mixing with her perfumed black hair.
"My darling, my darling," he gasped, catching his breath, his body buzzing into normality. When he looked down at her face her eyes were cold.
"Leave now," she whispered, her voice dead.
"Gloria, Gloria, my darling," he almost wept.
"Leave now, or I will kill you," she repeated.
Her white face wanting him dead.
He got up from the bed, zipping his trousers.
He bent to speak to her. To plead for communication, for time. And he heard her say, in a trance-like voice:
"Leave quickly, quickly, or I will kill you."
CHAPTER FOUR
What is the point of going outside, when everything you want is inside? Gloria lay on the bed for hours after Paul left, waiting. Waiting for the sounds in the hallway, that might be his footsteps. For a tap on the window, for a scrape on the doorway. Waiting and not waiting. For there was no longer a reason to move. I wouldn't want him to speak to me, she thought. I never want to hear his voice. I wouldn't even open my eyes. If I could just stay here in the bed, stretched out naked and eager, and he would come in with his prick already stiff, and thrust it into me without touching my body, or even wanting me. If we could only have that between us, his fat cock in me, and not a word. And I wouldn't want to know his name, or where he comes from, or the women he goes to after me. I'd give him money, I'd feed him, he could sleep here, even not with me. If he could just get in me, rub me into life when it gets dark and hot in this room. Maybe he's literary and I can sneak an ad into the Saturday Review; the girl on West 10th Street hunting for rare edition of obscure Scandinavian poem called, "Under the Stairway," or Girl on West 10th Street lost first volume, looking for second volume of "The Quiet Party." Oh God, I'll never find him and my cunt will rot in me. I'd like to kill him. I will, I will. I'll find him and I'll kill him. An ad in the Villager. Girl on West 10th Street wants furnace stoked. Probably he can't read. Can't do anything but fuck, that's why he's so good at it. It doesn't hurt me so much inside to think of him. Maybe I can think hard of him, and keep my fingers here against my clitoris. That's a little better, a little better. I can't stop doing it to myself. I'll have to sit in art class with one hand stuck between my legs, and go to the movies and pinch this pit inside me. Ifs so small, so small, why should I feel it in my whole body. Why can I feel it in my toes and belly and my nipples are hard and my breasts swell, when I touch it like this. I wish I could reach my cunt with my mouth. And I could lie in bed like a cat with my tongue stuck in me. Probably I can buy something that feels like a mouth or train a dog or cat, a cat's tongue is rough, or a horse or an elephant to suck me, to suck me. I'm coming, I'm coming. All alone. I don't need him, I don't need anyone. Come, come, come. God help me it's worse. Ifs hotter than before, where is he? I've got a hot river inside me. Is there poison in his sperm, or some chemical that drives me crazy. He's the devil ... that's why they warn us about the devil. He's got a tail with a hook on the end of it. He's scraped out all my sanity ... I must take my fingers away. I must get dressed, and live. I'm caught, I'm caught. Trapped in my own cunt, and I can't let myself out.
Somehow the sun set. As though her day had had the same rhythm of all the other days of her life, suggesting that some people had gone to sleep the night before, and awakened for breakfast ... and walked until lunch, and sat in the movies until dinner, and had two sober scotches at eight, and gone to bed at eleven. She wondered if she would ever sleep again, create again, or laugh, or sit in the theatre, or play the Mozart records that she had jealously collected. She turned on the bed and felt her face hot against the pillows. No, she was all right now, it was just one day of delirium. Some girls just lost their virginity hard, and she was glad to be done with hers. If you ever did stop being a virgin for the first man who fucked you. He had fucked her. Not made love to her, or caressed her into womanliness. Paul had made love to her. She could not remember him very clearly. He has a prick without personality. And she thought of looking for faces in a penis, the way one looks for the face of the man in the moon. In subways you try to picture the faces hidden in men's pants. Vaginas have no faces.
The phone rang abusively. That was the second time that day. The only two moments of sound she remembered. Could it be he? The only reason for moving from the bed, and her hips rolled to reach the receiver.
"Hello."
"Hello, Gloria, Janet."
"How are you?"
"A little bored. Would you like to go to the Art? They have a new De Sica film. This new Italian beauty who doesn't wear any makeup or underwear."
"No thanks, Janet. I have some work to do tonight."
"Work!"
"Maybe we can go tomorrow if it's still playing."
"Gloria, you sound funny."
"What do you mean funny?"
"Far away."
"I'm right here. I just feel a little introverted today."
"I told you to see my analyst He's wonderful. He says if you feel introverted, be introverted. Just enjoy it."
"I am enjoying it."
"Oh, you don't sound it."
"I am. I've been playing with myself all day. What does he say about masturbation after the age of consent?"
"GLORIA!"
"That's the way to beat introversion. Just climb inside yourself with your thumb and index finger."
"Don't be disgusting."
"I agree. It would be better if you could reach with your tongue. Cleaner too."
"Gloria, are you drunk?"
"No," and she wanted to scream at the girl's cool empty analyzed voice."
"I'm just hot. Hot, hot, hot. Have you ever been hot? Do you ever want your darling anlayst to come over to the couch and say, 'Move over'."
"I should say not. You don't understand anything about analysis. He's like a father to me."
"Well, didn't you ever want your father to say 'move over'? I thought that was what the whole fuss was about."
"You're illiterate."
"Look Janet. Go see this Italian actress. Let her be hot for you."
"Well Gloria Hofstra. All I can say is that you're a very sick kid."
"I know. That's all you ever say."
"Goodbye!!!"
"Janet, wait, wait a second. Janet, were you ever raped?"
"Certainly not. Rape is a masochistic fantasy. Only women who want to be raped can get raped."
"Oh shit. Goodbye."
She moved out of the bed, and saw the sloppy pile of clothes heaped on the floor. Dizzily, she thought, I should take a shower before I get dressed. I don't want to feel all wet and then get dry and be dean. Entirely too much fuss about being clean. As if living were a sin and we washed off the traces of it every day. She reached into the pile of clothes for her Suspants, and released the silk stockings from the garters. She pulled the silk panties up a-round her hips, and felt the wetness against her crotch and a little down her thighs from Paul's coming in her twice. If only the wetness were from the rapist. Hi's eyes were like white milky sperm. Probably his whole body filled with sperm up to the top of his head, and his prick his only exit. So his whole body worked to explode in a woman. She fastened her brassiere blindly behind her back, and slipped the coffee colored sweater over her head. She stepped into striped grey and brown pants, tight around her belly and hips, and clinging to her rounded calves. At least if I get out of the house I'll stop thinking about him. Maybe he'll be in one of the bars. He might be along MacDougal Street or Third Street. I'll look in the coffee houses for him and the book stores. She walked down the four flights of stairs, and stopped behind the stairway. There were a few spots of blood dried on the tiled floor. So it had happend. She pushed the hall door open and felt the evening air against her face. She walked down 10th Street, heading towards Washington Square. Maybe he'll be sitting in the circle, listening to the guitar players.
The park was alive with people. Young beautiful boys walked in twos, their tightly blue-jeaned legs outlining the curved space between their thighs and their bulging sex. Size was the absolute standard for the gay boys. Size queens. And the boys arrogantly pushed their ten inches of male-devoted pricks before them. Walking at the side of the lovers, like precious children, muscled boxers and sleek dalmatians sniffed at neighboring dogs. Even the dogs in Washington Square were faggots, sniffing with equal pleasure male and female. One of the boys turned and looked at her and recognized her. His eyes were soft and pained like a poodle's.
"Gloria, the most beautiful woman in New York."
"Hello Jack."
"Honestly honey, you make me want to go straight."
"Maybe we should try."
"Baby darling, set a date."
"Now, here in the middle of the cirlcle in the Square."
"I don't think Harry would forgive me."
"Bring Harry along. We'll make a threesome."
"Gloria, I almost feel like forgiving you for being a woman. If you were a man I could love you."
"You're afraid once you get inside me I'd never let you out."
"My balls are too precious to share with a woman."
"Just think of yourself as a machine, a fucking machine that we use."
"Lovely."
"You know, nothing personal or involving about it."
"Jesus baby. My pants aren't big enough for this kind of talk."
"They're perfect. I like to know what effect I'm having."
"Look darling, I'm game if you'd like to try. Threesomes really are a ball."
"Jack," she said, feeling the gnawing inside her that made the talking not a game. "I have to look for someone now. If I find him, he has preference, but stop by at 11 o'clock if my eyes aren't good."
"Harry too?"
"You know I wouldn't leave Harry out of anything."
"Darling, he'll be thrilled. You know, he used to make it with women, and every now and then he thinks of them. It drives me mad. This might solve all my problems."
"Solve some of mine, Jack."
"What's the matter baby. You look as though your best friend fucked your other best friend."
"Just come at eleven. I wouldn't be able to get through this night alone."
"Darling, I never knew you were so civilized."
She smiled gently at him. "Do you know a man with white eyes?"
"White eyes? He sounds adorable. Can he come too?"
"If he comes, it's a party for two."
"Oh, you mean he has characteristics other than white eyes."
"Yes. He has a beautiful cock."
"Gloria, please, I'm only gay ... not perverted like other people."
"See you at eleven Jack."
"With bells on."
"That's original."
"Darling, you'll clang."
"Eleven."
She watched his slim hips saunter away, eager to deliver the surprising news to Harry. She thought of Harry's blond sleek body. Oh God, if only they could help her. Harry had been a football star at Wisconsin. He had thick muscled thighs, that she had seen at Fire Island the summer before. The boys looked at him with hot awe, and this was Jack's season. She hoped he had a big young prick. But he had a mouth and fingers and toes and elbows and knees, and he used them all dexterously. She turned her head and looked at the couples, old ladies and turtle-necked aesthetes sitting on the benches. Their voices droned on...."Nothings been written since Henry James...."
"Joyce was the end of the novel"...."So I said to him, I'm no easy lay"...."I mean he's a bore, and compulsively clean. Always picking things up after me." But no white eyes, and no thick cruel voice saying, "Just a quiet party."
She crossed the lane, and stepped over the cement steps of the circle in the Square. Some unshaven intellects were playing the guitar and singing " ... now I'm a bachelor, I live with my son...." They seemed contented and complete. She sat and listened to them, feeling the draining between the legs. She remembered the moment when he had pulled her paralyized legs around his hips, and his penis had been rigid before him. At least I excited him. He had wanted her desperately that moment. He would have killed her, had she resisted, and taken her dead. I would have felt it even if I were dead. Her tight cunt had tried to keep him out but he had ripped into her, not feeling the impotent resistance of her flesh. Maybe I'm the first virgin he's ever had. Maybe he'll remember me. Maybe I'm a special lay, and my cunt throbs in a way no man has ever experienced. But he had left. With cold disdain. He had left with what he'd come for. Why didn't he want more? Why could men be satisfied and be left whole and separate. Why couldn't they leave a part of their prick in you, and screw you viciously every night and morning to get it back. Why couldn't one woman's cunt be a maddening mystery to them. To keep them kneeling for ever before you. They got on their knees like slaves, but got up like masters. As if they resented their need to fuck, and walked away free, till the sperm collected in them. What a lousy joke. What a miserable riddle, that they resented having it satisfied. Yes, they called professional virgins cock-teasers ... but a tease was the best part of their game. And a woman didn't feel like that. Once a cock got in her, a big comfortable maddening one, she never wanted to let it out. Like getting back a missing piece. And they drained with emptiness, without purpose, till they got it back in them again. Maybe women can do something to each other, since they all share the same defeat. I'll try women it I don't find him. I'll try anything. There's only one thing I want more than him in me, I want him dead. I must have my victory to live again. I'll find him. I'll kill him in me. So he can have his last gasping orgasm in me. An orgasm to last him for eternity. And he'll lie in his grave with all the sperm shot out of him, finished.
She stepped across the cement barrier, and walked toward MacDougal Street. He might be in El Remo. Sitting with the junkies and asking if anyone knows where to get some pot. Conrad or Maurice may recognize him if I describe him. They know everybody who steps below Fourteenth Street. He's as good as dead. I'll buy a knife and keep it in my bag. I'll exchange knives with him. See which cuts deeper.
El Remo was ablaze with lights. The juke box was trembling with Ella Fitzgerald's pained voice; its bright flourescent lights bubbled in changing colors. Three boys leaned against the jukebox, worshipping the distant voice coming out of it. "Oh Ella, you kill me." She pushed hard toward the bar. Everyone was balancing bottles of beer in one hand, and a half filled glass in the other. A beer could last all night. An uptown couple, the boy in Madison Avenue grey and the girl in an English tweed suit, were drinking martinis. They were murmuring about the girls in pants. The land of the long haired boys and short haired girls. "Really, this is best aquarium in New York."
Everybody in the bar hated them and performed for them. The Village idiot offered to draw the girl's portrait. For a beer, for the pleasure of studying that cool face. The boy said "no thanks." No one was going to take him in. And the girl, out of habit, out of confusion about who she was, flirted with the shabby demented artist. She had to see the same look in every man's eyes. Her look was always the same, and she was lovely and safe and arrogant and stupid and empty. A refrigerated cunt, an automatic ice cube machine. The cooler they are, the harder they fall. Maybe ice cubes feel good against a prick. Soothing, like alcohol against a fevered brow. Lovely. All we have to do is freeze and we can live for ever. The girl looked at her, and her eyes gleamed with competition. She was capable of a less aloof expression. Bet a man never sees it. They have no idea who she is. I know in a glance. We're sisters. We're both loosing the game. But she doesn't know that there's no way to win. All you can do is not play. I guess she thinks she's smart. But her score card is blank. Mine was blank yesterday morning. I wish I could wipe it clean again. I'll kill him. That's how I'll keep score, I'll cheat.
Before she reached the bar, she saw Jules sitting half drunk in a booth. He had a dish of cold spaghetti in front of him. No one had ever seen him eat, and the bones in his face gave him a stark dramatic look. He caught her eyes.
"Jules, do you know a man with white eyes?"
"I don't know anyone."
"Jules, please, I'm serious. I must find him."
"Why, did he admire one of your paintings? You should never let an enthustiastic critic go."
"He never saw my paintings."
"Lucky chap."
"Don't be a bastard, Jules."
"No, Gloria. You're good in the best decadent tradition."
"Mercy."
"The bourgeoisie gets more paint on canvas than ever before in history. It follows."
"You don't know anyone with white eyes ... he has a kind of husky voice and a wide thin mouth, and he's slim, wearing a black jacket, I think."
"He sounds like Hamlet."
"Help me," she said. And her eyes filled with tears.
Jules looked crestfallen. "Baby, what's the matter. You know I'm not good when someone is depressed. I consider depression a personal assault on my male ego. If a woman is with me, she must be happy."
"Could you make me happy, Jules?"
"Well, I've always wanted to try."
"I think you're going to get your chance." Conrad and Maurice pushed their way to the booth.
"Man we scored, we scored. We blew some with this cat, and it is too much. I am now in a heaven shared only by my erstwhile degenerate associate, Maurice le Clair. Come romp with me, you two earthbound people."
Jules face lit up. His cheekbones glistened through his pale face. "Man, man, let's make it to my pad."
"Gloria, are you coming?"
"Maurice, do you know a guy with white eyes?"
Jules shook his head with mock dismay. The girl is a monomaniac. "Maurice, do you know anyone who looks like Hamlet and has white eyes?"
"You are speaking," said Maurice, from his elevated high, "of my alter ego."
"Not to speak," added Conrad, "of the collected unconscious."
"You are both so educated, it pains me," said Jules, "right in my ass."
Gloria felt herself growing dizzy with the vacuum hidden in her.
"Let's go smoke some pot. I know I could use something."
Conrad smiled suggestively at her. "Between us, we have everything that you can possibly want."
"Ahh...." said Jules, "but have you got white eyes?"
"I'll close my eyes, and you can picture anything you want."
"But," said Jules, with his Jesuit precision, "there is a special attitude ... a kind of white hot prick that goes with white eyes."
"I'll match my prick against any man's."
"Well, Gloria, you couldn't have a more noble offer than that."
"Let's go to your place, Jules. They don't allow fucking on the tables."
"Is this the dedicated artist of yesterday I see before me," murmured Maurice.
"Look, do you want to smoke, or do you want to sit here and philosophize."
"Psychologize, my dear."
"We are going," said Jules, seeing the frustrated fury in Gloria's eyes, "to my pad. From there, we are going to a land unknown to common man, or woman."
"It is fortunate that we are exceptional people."
They paid the bad mannered Italian waiter for Gloria's beer and Jules' congealed spaghetti.
"The spaghetti was superb as always."
"The chef will faint with joy when I tell him," said the waiter with unreserved contempt.
"Shall we walk or taxi to heaven?"
"Let's walk," said Jules, "the night air will cool our ardor."
"It won't touch mine," said Gloria, with hopeless resignation.
"Your ardor isn't supposed to cool. It's supposed to mount as we wind our way to Horatio Street."
They turned up McDougal Alley, and Gloria searched the bars as they passed.
"I never saw you look for anyone before, Gloria, this is quite an experience. I might get my faith back."
"He has white eyes. He doesn't look like anyone you've ever seen. I barely saw him myself. But I must find him. Or I'll die. He's left a fucking furnace in me."
"Let us help in our inferior brown-eyed way," said Conrad.
"A combination of pot and Mediterranean eyes should do it"
"I know I'm acting insane," said Gloria, "but I'm just out of my mind today."
Gloria walked between Conrad and Jules, cutting up McDougal Alley, past Sixth Avenue, and along the store-lined Greenwich Avenue.
"Man, should we roll one now, this is an endless walk?" asked Maurice. , "No, let's wait until we get into a house. The cops are learning how to smell tea."
They walked silently to the door of 92 Horatio Street. Jules stuck his key into the front door, and they climbed the three flights of steps to his two room flat. He snapped on a lamp that cast a faint yellow glow over his couch. The room was otherwise dark, and the faint reds of a Modigliani nude glistened at them.
"Man, this is a cool pad."
"My wife had excellent taste."
"Where is she now?"
"She ran off with a swimming instructor."
"Great taste, great taste."
"He swam like a bird."
"Let's smoke like a fish."
"D'accord."
Maurice took a discreet tin of aspirins out of his pocket. He slipped the lid open, and a mound of greenish, brownish, yellowish tobacco curled in the box.
"Oh what a splendid sight. If only I could paint those spiritual weeds."
"Who's got the paper?"
"Here lad, now roll."
Maurice separated a thin leaf of cigarette paper. He held it lovingly between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were the cunt of a fragile girl. He spilled the pot into the paper and, with his finger, levelled the tobacco. Then, with one more move, he twisted the paper into a perfect cylinder and passed his tongue over the edge.
"We are ready to fly."
Jules turned the phonograph on, and the wailing of Gerry Mulligan put the room into deeper darkness. Conrad held a match to Maurice's joint, and Maurice gasped the fumes in. He took another drag, and handed the cigarette to Gloria.
"Ladies second."
Her eyes opened wide as she took the offering. Oh God, let it cool my cunt, her heart and vagina thumped. She pulled a deep strong drag into her lungs, and held the smoke till her chest ached. She made a sucking sound of gasped ecstasy. Lovely as a fuck, lovely as a fuck. Her head grew heavy, and at the second puff, she looked up at the three men, and they were far and strange.
"Oh man, I love to see lipstick on a roach," said Jules.
"Give it class," added Maurice.
Conrad silently rolled another joint, and Gloria let her shoes fall to the foot of the couch. She stretched out, put her head on Jules' thigh. His muscle jumped, and he ran his fingers into her hair. Someone passed her another cigarette, and she inhaled with sensuous pleasure, not noticing the heat in her chest ... only the slow warm flow, deep in her cunt.
"Unbutton me, Jules," she murmured, "my pants are tight." He felt around her waist, until he came to the button. He pulled it open roughly, and opened her snug pants. He started to take his hand away, and she said, "No don't," and pressed his palm against her belly, "Baby wants to be petted."
"Gloria, what happened to you that should have happened a long time ago."
"None of your Jesuit questioning. Just be glad that I got my calling."
I've got to have him. I've got to have him. He's known me so long, he may feel strange about fucking me. Like fucking a sister. But I've never known any of them really. I won't know them till I've seen the face on their pricks. Oh God, what am I thinking.
I want them to all fuck me. I wish they could all get in my cunt at once. Ruba tub tub, three men in a tub ... three strong men on the dead man's chest ... no, thirteen men. I'm thinking in three. I want them all to fuck me. Deep in me, and get him out. I want them to push and come in me till they wipe out the imprint of his prick. I hope they fit tight and hard the way he did, so my flesh enfolds them like a flower. A man-eating flower. Oh, here, at last. His finger is getting to my hairs.
Jules' hand twisted into her cunt hairs. He opened his fingers and then cupped the raised, covered mound. One finger felt into her pouting wetness. "Oh baby, you got a mysterious cunt." His fingers rubbed up and down against her stiffened clitoris. He moved his thumb in, and pinched the naked mound. His fingers then moved faster and faster. She felt the muscles of her body expand, and her legs stretched apart. A cigarette was placed between her dry lips, and she pulled the smoke jealously into her.
"Shall Maurice and I cut?"
She heard Jules answer. "I guess so. It looks like my night."
"No," her voice sounded hollow and echoed. "No, stay. I want you all to get in me."
Jules' voice was angry. "When I finish with a girl, she doesn't feel like screwing anyone else."
"Well, let's wait and see, darling. If I don't like fucking anymore, I'll stop. I'll even give you a medal."
"Jesus baby. Are you a nympho? I hate screwing a nympho. It's like getting your cock into a sieve."
She wrapped her hand around his stiffened prick. It was thick and dry and hot in her palm. She clutched at it and moved her fisted hand up and down against his pole. She squeezed harder as he grew more massive under her grasp.
"Worry about what I am later. Just get in me, you idiot, or I'll pull this gorgeous prick out." She threw herself across him and pulled his pants open. His fat prick stood upright, and she lowered her mouth to encircle it. It tasted rich and musty in her mouth. He pulled his hand away from her throbbing cunt, and she gasped at the empty feeling that shot into her.
"Fuck me before I die."
Jules pulled her under him, and his hand directed his pole into her. One tremendous thrust, and he opened her wide for him. He gasped explosively against her. "Push, push," she urged, feeling whole for the first time for the evening. "Split me open."
"Baby, baby, I can't hold it. I'm coming."
"You bastard," she screamed. "You bastard," and her legs trembled with the passion still stored in her. "Let a man get in me. Maurice. Quick, before I die."
Maurice pulled Jules away from her, and nervously pulled at the buttons of his pants.
"Hurry," she wept. She did not see the prick that pushed into her, and she sucked deep at it with her cunt. He shoved up and down upon her, the buttons of his shirt digging into her. Her hands clung frantically to his head, then shoulders, then bobbing ass. "Deeper, deeper. Kill me."
"Just hold on, baby. Hold on," he urged.
He arched above her, and with maniacal mechanism, rubbed the tip of her clitoris against his inserted prick.
"Come now. Come you cunt," he gasped.
"Not yet, but soon, don't stop. Just that way, don't stop." Her body twisted and turned in anguish, then the heat in her sparked into flame, and they ground orgasms into each other. As she throbbed uncontrollably against him, a laugh echoed in her head and grew louder and louder as she drew breath. The rapist laughed wildly at her passion and the laugh said, "It didn't work, doll, did it? Every time you fuck, you get hotter and hotter for me. They just prepare you for me. Like plucking a chicken before you cook it." She cried out in terror, "I'll never get him out of me. Conrad, help me, help me."
Conrad removed his trembling hand from the prick it was pumping with frenzy.
"I thought you were played out. Let me get in you." His lithe body covered hers. He pulled his pants off, revealing the lightly but strongly muscled legs, and the hair-covered veins. His congealed cock was erect, the head flaring. He grunted against her and was in her, fucking fast and deep.
"Come," he commanded, and she came rapidly and desperately against this ordering prick. She pressed her thighs and mound and belly and breasts hungrily into him, his up and down rod releasing fluttering orgasms. She felt, hysterically, that she would come, senselessly and eternally. But his thighs became steel under her as his sperm pumped out of him, blending with the juices of her passion. He breathed exhaustively into her neck and her orgasms calmed into quietness. But she could have come and come for the evening, and her cunt opened like a mouth. She pressed her fingers into it, not moving them, just pressing languorously in the armchairs and couch.
"Oh man," said Jules. "This pot is the greatest.
I could swear I just fucked Gloria."
"Pot does strange things, said Conrad.
"Am I going to have to fuck forever, and never find the final release," asked Gloria wearily.
"Lady, you sure do get into it," said Conrad.
"It was good while it lasted, now I'm left high and wet."
"Give us time to gather our forces, Gloria."
"No. I never want to fuck any of you more than once. I'm looking for a particular prick ... the others just hang me up."
"Oh God," she started to cry. "Roll me a cigarette. Conrad stuck his between her lips, and she drew on it peckingly. She tried to draw the obliterating smoke down into he cunt, to smother the longing. She gasped and rolled her hips into the empty air. "Just put your fingers in me, please, Conrad," she pleaded.
He looked at her warningly. "That sounds theraputic, not romantic at all."
"Just don't let me faint here."
"I think you'd better go home. Come, I'll get you home."
"No, no."
"Get some sleep. You'll feel better."
"Better? What do you mean better? I'll just have to fuck till I die ... till I can come and look into a pair of dead white eyes."
"You're getting morbid."
"What the hell. What time is it"
"I have ten-thirty," answered Maurice.
"Yes, take me home, I have an eleven o'clock appointment that will keep me going."
She walked to the door with Conrad. "Thanks for the pot, thanks for the couch, thanks for the lay." Conrad opened the door for her, and she moved her hips around him and into the hall.
CHAPTER FIVE
She sat on the couch and opened a fresh pack of Chesterfields. It was five to eleven, and she was waiting. All her life, she thought, she had spent waiting.
Listening to footsteps in the hall. To keys turning in other locks. The people next door always led a fuller life . ... of groaning bedsprings and sated morning looks. And what am I waiting for now, that will not vanish and will not separate like mercury in my hands, if I try to hold it. But if you stop trying to hold to things, you relinquish your hold on life. Maybe that's how you win the game. To find the world, you must first loose it. And, big deal, here she was waiting to be fucked by two faggots, and that was the only reality. That was the total. Twenty-four years of girlish fanatasies and self-importance and faith in her specialness and now two twentieth-century crusaders were going to try to be men for her, or girls for each other, or father and son, or mother and son or daughters and mothers or daughters and fathers or sisters or brothers. Because everyone had just forgotten how to be men and women. And did the men forget first, or didn't the women, the eternal teachers, teach them a damn thing? Were they all doing it for "kicks." No, this bug in her was more than a kick. It was voracious enough to swallow her, to suck her in upside down, replacing her head with a great yawning cunt. Maybe that's why she was drawing bleeding gashes on her canvas. A half-ass art analysis, and why didn't they come, because her cunt was beating like an exhausted heart. Probably they'd never arrive. Off somewhere buggering each other. Proving they could do without women, which they could, but who wanted to prove it in the first place? You could do without anything, you could not get born. No, the one involuntary action, and Christ, you paid for it. She heard the shuffle of shoes on the stairway, then a shrill excited laugh, not male or female. Then a rap on the door.
"Let us in ... let us in you witch."
"We're dying, we're just dying."
She opened the door for the two handsome men. The chosen people. The self-sufficient. The suicidal, dead and breathing hard.
"Honey, we've worked out a juicy itinerary."
"Well, I've got juice enough for two of you."
"You're so dirty...."
"I'm so hot."
"Look, doll, we're better brought up than that. Let's have a drink and talk and act like we don't know what's going to happen till we get our clothes off."
"All right," she said, "shall I mix a pitcher of martinis. We might get thirsty."
"A pitcher. Not a drop less-we'll have a party."
Harry took her hand in his, and looked at her with his serious compassionate eyes. "Gloria. Are you just flipping? I mean, if you're just suffering over some guy, we don't want to move in and take advantage."
"I'm suffering over all mankind. Look at you two."
"Now that's no way to talk to your guests," said Jack. "Just go mix the booze darling."
"My God, Jack," Harry murmured, "you're so insensitive. I don't want histories. I don't care what's bugging her. I just want to get my cock in where I can-men, women, children, rocks, well, water hydrant, old shoes...."
"Okay, okay, man. You can be a bore."
"What's egging you? Just because you never screwed a woman. It's easy, just close your eyes and think you're in any hole."
"But what does he see when he closes his eyes?"
"His mother, fucking his father and screaming, Oh George."
"Why don't you shut your filthy faggot mouth?"
"Cause I'm just a faggot darling. I don't care what my mother did. I hope she had as good a time as I do."
"She had a ball."
"Let's have a ball, that's what we're here for, not group therapy."
"Not too much vermouth. Please don't dilute all that beautiful Gordon's gin."
"You're so fey."
"I'm all things to all people."
"And lover to me?" she asked.
"Not lover baby. Just fucker. Harry is my love."
"Your first?"
"I'm my first. I'm my first and no doubts about that."
"I'm surprised I got into the picture at all," Harry said with a suggestive pout.
"Oh lover boy, don't brood." Jack ran his hand over Harry's tight muscled buttocks.
"Don't touch me."
"Whore," said Jack, and kissed his angry lover. Gloria sat and watched them. The insatiable trembling between her legs filling her with fear that they would argue and leave, to caress each other into forgiving sighs.
"Drink your martinis. No more bickering. We don't want to hate each other when we screw."
"No. Just a little hate, cause it's so violent."
"God, you could turn wine to water."
"But most of all I'd like to just drink it."
"Let's just be gay."
"We're nothing if not gay."
"Does that make you something?"
"Two very intresting lays."
"I'm finished with my drink. Let's find out while we can see straight."
"Straight. Straight. I hate that word."
"Yes, Gloria. Be careful of your language."
"My God, I think you just came here to discuss language."
"Take your pants off," she said desperately.
"Easy baby, you know ... easy come, easy go."
"God, you're both scared. Just plain scared. And I thought it was so fancy to be a faggot."
"Just come here," he said furiously, "and suck me, and you'll see how scared I am."
The rapist had made her take his prick, already rigid, in her mouth, but the prick offered to her now was flaccid and limp, like a wet rope." She put the flesh in her mouth, and her tongue urged it to virility. Up the hidden spine of his cock her teeth made soft loving bites. Her heart felt wild with anger. What it he can't get in me after all of this? Why must we suffer and beg to be laid? Except when you don't want to. Then they're hard and urgent against you all the time. They really don't want you to like it. Not anything, not anything ... get hard you bastard. I swear I'll bite it oil.
"Gloria," he wailed, "you're hurting me," and he pulled her head away. "I'm sorry, baby. Too much talk, too much liquor."
"Look," she said, the madness spinning inside her, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. But don't leave me like this. I think really that I'd kill myself. Just put your fingers in me, or your tongue, or the broom handle. Anything. I've got a cavern inside of me.
Jack looked at her with pity and contempt. This was what he had always suspected lay hidden behind the modest performances of women. This rage that made them want to swallow your prick, and press it out through their cunts. He felt like laughing into her agonized face. You can't have it baby. It's all mine, and Harry's and all the men I offer it to, and sell it to, and give it to. They're safe. They've got cocks of their own. Know enough to give mine back ... and really admire it.
"Please," she was saying, "please, I can't bear it," whimpering to the demon in her. "We have a contract," she added desperately, as if an ethic could convince him. You've been trying to lay me for three years. Is everything a tucking lie? Don't men get any feeling out of getting into a woman, or is the whole kick working up to it and then thinking it over? Is the actual screwing nothing, just an unadvertised feature, just a time-killing newsreel? For us, the moment is when you get your pricks into the dark cave we hide beneath our skirts. Just the moment we're getting it is the moment you've had it. "I want to die," she said quite calmly. "I really want to die."
Harry took her hand, and said gently, "Maybe if Jack and I begin...."
"Yes," she agreed eagerly. "I'll wait. But don't make me wait too long, I might explode." Harry laughed cruelly and reached over to Jack's exposed, flaccid hook of flesh. He took it gently in his hand.
Gloria's body ached with excitement. There were two rigid cocks in the room and the terrible fear that neither of them were for her. Why did sex have to be attached to a brain. Why couldn't people screw eager and separate from anything else they did. She reached over to Harry's slender waist and found the button to his close fitting slacks. She slipped beneath the buttons to the zipper and reached for his stiff prick. It was swelled and throbbing to her touch, and she awkwardly encircled it with her hand. She could not stop knocking it, precious and virile, against her palm. He moved her hand away, and she understood, reached under his underpants and pulled his clothes away from his body. His hips were narrow as a young girl's, his skin was dry and hot. He pushed her aside and moved his body over Jack's head. Jack's mouth was open and gasping. He looked like a fish hungry for the hook.
With his free hand he caressed Harry's rigid cock, but Gloria pushed his hand away and greedily forced the excited flesh into her mouth. Her tongue moved hungrily down the length of the man's sex. Then she said to him, "Try, I beg you try," and got flat on her back, encircling the kneeling men with her legs. Harry seemed hardly conscious, so Gloria took his prick in both her hands and raised her hips up against it. Close, close, almost in. But as he neared her offered vagina, Harry's flesh softened. "Oh, my God," she moaned. "I can't stand it, I can't stand it." But Jack reached from behind Harry's back, and with sure fingers brought the failing erection back. Holding the rigid prick in his hand, he directed it into Gloria's yawning vagina. In it went, in, in, and grew harder and longer as he groped for the endless passage. "I've done it, I've done it," Harry began to weep, and he thrust his body up and down against the girl's white belly. The three of them pumped and groaned with a primitive desperation. "I'm coming, I'm coming," wailed Jack, and his lover, feeling the spurt of hot fluid, went into a grinding orgasm. "Come now, Gloria. Now or never," Gloria felt her hysterical body heave senselessly, and she knew from her gestures that she had realized the tense orgasm. But her cunt felt as empty and driven as before. She began to scream meaningless obscenities, and Harry struck her across the face ... Jack's prick was rigid again, so he tossed the screaming girl on her stomach, and searched for her anal vagina. His prick was as thick as a fist, and he forced it mercilessly into the narrow opening. Gloria shrieked with pain as the man's flesh seemed to split her unsated body. "It hurts too much. Stop, I beg you." But his body moved fiercely in its tight enclosure. The pain made her come faster, and she slipped from one orgasm to the other clutching Harry's bent head, and embracing the empty air. Finally the two men let her go. Her sobs of exhaustion filled the room. "Just one more," Harry commanded. "I've got to get my prick up your ass, and then you're finished for the night, doll."
"Wait," Jack said. "Wait till I'm stiff again. I'll fuck her straight, while you get in behind," Harry laughed with excitement. "Maybe we can touch pricks inside." Within a minute the two men were rigid.
Jack pulled her gracelessly over his slightly spread legs. His fingers found her wet cunt, and with his two thumbs he pulled the exhausted lips apart. His prick slipped up into her, and she lay panting against his chest. She was pinned to him with her desire, and her hips swung convulsively against him. Jack reached behind her and opened her for his lover. She could hear Harry gasping behind her, and then with excruciating pain felt him pierce her. The three lay spread and riveted together. "Now," said Jack, and pushing her head aside the two men's mouths met as they came in her, darting for each other's pricks. She swam into a black spinning unconsciousness. Her body, when she opened her eyes, felt weightless with pain.
"Let's cut, Jack," Harry said, and he slipped his pants over his hips.
"It's been grand baby," Harry touched her disheveled hair. "Now get some sleep so you'll be ready for the next time."
Her dry mouth formed the words. "There won't be a next time."
"Why Gloria, we came through with credits."
"There's only one man who's going to have a next time with me ... and it's going to be his last time."
"Wow, wow wow," said Jack. "I'd hate to make you angry baby."
It's not anger, she thought. It's insanity. I want to kill him more than anything I've ever wanted in my life. But God, just let me see him again. If he's taken off for Kansas or Tibet I'll be dead within a month. I'll fuck the life out of myself. She barely heard the door close behind Jack and Harry. Then the shrill feminine laugh came through the door, and she relaxed into a stupored sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
When she woke up next morning she felt sick and exhausted. She was feeding her disease with its cause. As if a thousand pricks in her could obliterate her need to be ravished again by the one man who had crumbled the thin shell of her sanity. She was not submitting to the other men for a moment's forgetting. Their bodies on top of hers gave her a sharp, maniac who had used and sullied and discarded her in one-half an hour. And most horrible of all, she would not or could not forget him. She was, in her suffering, intensely and hysterically alive. She hated it with a rage that made her wanton and destructive. As if she were shrieking to the men, "Destroy me before I destroy the world!" Yet they could not destroy her, they could not touch the cavern of anger beneath her soft flesh. My flesh is a disguise. I should be mottled and green and pockmarked. The ugliness inside should show, as the white eyes of the rapist had revealed his barren soul. His barrenness excited her, exhausted her. He was a man she could never have. A man who did not have himself, who had nothing. To search for him was to offer a primitive sacrifice. But she would sacrifice herself by killing her god. Yes, she would rivet his body onto her, as though she were the cross of Jesus. And she would pierce his heart. I must dominate him, and I will, I will. I shall give him his death. I will be second only to his mother, who gave him life. And mine is the more fearful role. I know how he'll look at me when I stab him. With milky eyes of contempt and surprise. He is waiting tor one of us to destroy him. It is strange, when the poisons seep into our actions. The men did not know that fear and loathing were making me dead to their desires. But they feared me, too, in their mother-shaped hearts, and what could we do but comfort each other with masks. Yes, they can fuck me, with the vestiges of need and contact. My passion is not free. I know that. My passion is a struggle up, up from the dungeon of fear. These men who crush against me know the dungeon is there; mossy and molding, inviting death. His sperm will be my Eucharist.
She moved her feet to the floor beside her bed, and lifted her body with the caution of a dying centenarian. I must buy a douche, she thought, and a diaphragm tool. What a monster would be born out of this sex battle. She walked into the bathroom and turned the tap on. The hot water splashed into the enamel tub. Beneath the white gleam on the tub was an iron base, and she fingered the chipped exterior that revealed it. She felt almost relaxed as she prepared the coffee in the kitchen, knowing that the pain and madness would be back in her within an hour.
Often, when she woke up, she felt that she was coming forth from the source of the pain, and for a moment she lay resolved and depleted. Then the world that she had lived in for twenty-four deceitful suffering years beckoned her, and she lay crushed and doomed. As fearful as she found her dreams, they still locked out her consciousness. In dreams she suffered with the frustration and protection of echoed sounds. The reality of life was worse. Ifs the mystery, she thought. At least in my dreams I act directly and fully believe. It's the not believing that wounds us. In dreams there is only one voice, our voice, and we believe it with the faith of children or simpletons. Now my only belief is the rapist, my longing to destroy him, the singularity of a dream. And she knew, therefore, that she would not give it up.
She stripped herself of the clothes she had slept with and sank into the hot smoking bath. Her body gave itself to the soothing balm as it had never been given to a man. The water rose, green and clear to outline her breasts, and her hips spread langourously. The rapist had unearthed a chain of orgasms that gave her no gratification, and she felt her body, like a mocking enemy, grow hot with passion in the tub. The horror, the aloneness was gone. She rushed her fingers under water to get at her sobbing cunt, but the water made her fingers slippery and ineffectual against the insatiable pit. Despeately she rushed from the bath and pressed a thick, absorbant towel into her vagina. She rubbed mercilessly, and thought of the knife she had placed in her handbag, with which to kill her god. Maybe I should just cut my sex away. Her death was of indifference to her, but his death ... She rubbed eagerly and her body gave its empty orgasm. The desire in her grew in intensity. She rushed to the kitchen and saw a thin-necked bottle of emptied Chianti. With a groan she sat heavily on the bottle and felt it dig into the folds of her insane flesh. She spinned meaninglessly on the bottle top, and then stretched flat on the kitchen floor and methodically pulled the bottle in and out of her cunt. The cool glass grew warm and wet in her. She came against the bottle and lay nearly unconscious on the floor. I must get out of here. I'll walk, or go horseback riding, or do something to get my mind off my cunt. Her passion was mindless ... Maybe I can control it. What is a brain for? To find bottles and towels? Oh God, she whimpered. Have other women gone through this. Are we a society of prick-worshippers or despisers-ifs the same thing. Will I now look at them and recognize them. I hate them. I hate the women like me, the pathetic beasts. I must get dressed and get out. That's the first thing. Surely I can hold on to myself long enough to get dressed. It's like an attack that overwhelms me. His attack. Over and over. I get the same sensation of panic at that moment when he kneeled between my legs ... She dressed herself with fevered haste, as if a monster was in the room with her and she could leave it behind. She rushed down the stairs and out into the sunshine of an innocuous day. The people on the street looked calm, not particularly alive.
I'II get info the theatre, there won't be many people at two-thirty in the afternoon. She brushed against automobiles, and got to the ticket window. Her hands trembled as she paid her money and then handed the ticket to the old unfriendly attendant. She climbed high into the balcony and sat down in a far corner of the theatre. Ahead of her were seven or eight heads, scattered in twos and threes and ones. She leaned back and reached her fingers to her wet cunt, but there was a sudden motion next to her, and she jumped with fright. She had forgotten that she was not alone in the world.
The man sat busily next to her, removing his coat, then reaching into his pocket for a cellophane wrapped package of caramels. He held them out before her, and she shook her head. The man's face was indistinct in the darkened room. She could barely make out his profile. On the screen, a bunch of thugs were pounding Marlon Brando's face, and a skinny blond girl was looking agonized. Maybe he's a stevedore. I must go early in the morning, when they're loading ships and look for him. The man next to her tapped her shoulder again and stuck a bag of popcorn in front of her nose. "No, thanks," she said, "I'm not hungry."
But the man didn't take his hand from her shoulder. It rested lightly against her, and she sat motionless, the contact intensifying the yearning in her body. He moved his hand down her arms and brushed against her breasts. Her soft cashmere sweater welcomed the caress. His fingers circled her breast until they found and formed the hard outline of her nipple. His thumb and forefinger pinched the nipple gently, and her body buzzed from breast to cunt. He moved close to her and reached his arm across the back of her chair. His other hand found the other breast, and four fingers worked with sure mastery. He head fell back into the cuve of his arm and she gasped incoherently as he luxuriated over a pointed stiff tit. The moisture, in drops, began to flow down her thighs, and the man seemed to sense the moment she could stand it no longer. His hand moved to her skirt and touched her bare knee. He found the wet thighs and kneaded them roughly. Then he touched the burning fold of hidden flesh, and his fingers darted eagerly, deeply into her. She felt the orgasm coming, and he cruelly removed his hand. She screamed with horror and saw that Marlon Brando was now a bloody pulp. Someone in the audience laughed, thinking her cry was one of sympathy. He undid his pants, and she said, "No, not here," with desperation.
His voice was a harsh, guttural growl, and he commanded, "Just go down on me."
"Don't leave me like this, I beg you," she cried.
"I'll finish you, baby," he whispered. "I just don't want to be left too far behind."
His prick was the only spot of whiteness in the dark balcony. She bent her head to her humble task and mixed her tears with the few drops of sperm that lubricated the rigid flesh. Her tongue was frantic, and she heard his groan of pleasure. The flesh in her mouth beat uncontrollably, and she felt it grow still stiffer. Then, like a balloon over-filled with air, it burst in her mouth. The liquid streamed in behind her teeth, and she moved her head hastily to the side to spit it out, but some of the sperm had trickled down her throat, with a musty, exotic taste. Curiously she swallowed a bit more and then curved her tongue upward to keep the strange serum in her mouth. There was something disgusting and yet elusive about the taste. She wanted to throw up and gagged sickly. But her lips pressed together tightly, and soon her mouth had emptied into her tense throat. She sat quietly, remembering, clinging to the sensation. Her unknown lover was down on his knees before her. He lifted her skirt and buried his head skillfully against her thighs. His tongue leapt out and skillfully sucked her enraged mound of damp hair and the skinless flesh it guarded. He made deep swallowing noises. For a moment she felt delirious and separate from the animal at her feet. "Good as caramels?" she wanted to ask. But her tongue would not cooperate with her sardonic thoughts. He pressed his head against her; his teeth, biting gently at her flesh, seemed to close her into a hidden world of inexhaustible sensuality. She moved her hips contentedly against him, and then a rush of energy along her limbs freed the orgasm. She panted with excitement, wanting him to go on forever. But he lifted his body and sat heavily in his vacant seat.
"Let's get out of here," he implored. "Let's get something to drink."
She did not turn to him, but watched Marlon Brando walking heroically toward a blurred building. Some fat idiot was waiting in the doorway.
"No," she answered. "No drink. No nothing. Don't look at me. Just get up and leave the theatre. I'm going to watch the coming attractions. And I don't want to see you when I leave, or I swear I'll call the cops."
"What's the matter, baby," he asked. "Didn't you like it. I got a million tricks to show you."
"I like it fine," she said sarcastically, "but I don't believe in repeat performances. I haven't got time to go around the world twice."
"But lady, we haven't begun to go anywhere yet. Believe me, the next part of the trip is better."
"Leave now," she repeated, "or I'll complain to the manager. I'll tell him I've changed my seat twelve times, I'm serious. I don't know exactly what you look like, and I don't want to know. If you look for me, or wait for me, or follow me, I'll have you arrested."
"What's the matter, kid? You got a jealous husband?"
"Yes," she said wearily, "and he'd kill both of us."
"You must kill him."
"No, I don't kill him," she replied grimly, "but I will."
The man beside her shuddered. "I get the feeling he's as good as dead."
She smiled into the darkness. "Nothing's as good as dead, but he's close."
The man sat quietly for a few seconds. "You win lady. I think you're nuts, but it was a good show." He slipped her a printed card. "If you ever get lonely, ring me. Just mention Brando's name."
Fifteen minutes later, she dropped the card on the floor and walked back to her empty apartment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
She spent a few days feeling completely insane. She walked the streets of Greenwich Village for hours looking for the man whose face she had completely forgotten. What was most frightening was the thought that he might never have existed, that she had created him out of an incredible lust and sickness inside herself. As long as he was not her creation, she could live, searching for him and trying to have, for the final time, the experience he had given her. If he did not exist, she was already dead, and it was a shadow that her lovers embraced.
Gloria had changed in the two weeks of her debauch. Her face wore the exhausted and strained look of one who waits. Her hands strayed nervously across her neck and face with a spinsterish aimlessness. Sometimes, in the morning, she felt liberated. But a glance in the mirror revealed her agony and would send her down into the streets, peering into bars and passing automobiles for her appointed victim. She was completely dedicated to one idea ... to kill him. Some women, she knew, chose to live their subjugation. They discovered the chastised, tormented creature they were and lived to feed their suffering. They searched for a master to punish them, to sate their craving for punishment. That was the sick dream-to be punished enough. Punished for what? For forgiveness, for a reprieve, for the sins of fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and cousins. And finally for the sins of rage and appetite-the combined sins of all. There was no human pain to touch her. She was incapable of repentance, all she wished was vengeance.
In weariness, one night, she went to the bar across the street from her apartment.
Gloria sat at the mahogany bar, and locked her heels in the bottom rung of the stool. She talked quietly to Mike, the bartender, who mixed the chilled martinis and seemed genuinely concerned about her. With infinite discretion he asked her if she was feeling all right.
"Hello, Gloria," he said, as she sat tiredly in front of him. "Haven't seen you for a couple of weeks."
"I've been away," she lied.
"Back home?" he asked eagerly. He had been tending in the village for eleven years, but his mission was to send small-town girls out of the city.
"No," she said. "Just a vacation to Fire Island."
"Fire Island," he echoed. "I used to go there years ago. Got a quiet crowd then. But I hear it's changed."
"It's pretty wild," she agreed. "But it still looks kind of rustic and good, and the beach is terrific."
Talking to him, calmly and mundanely, she felt that she was grabbing frantically for her sanity. That's the quality of a good bartender, to make the drunk feel sober and sensible. This is what happens to us, she thought, when we really go nuts. We become absolutely banal. I'd give him my life if he'd just stand here and talk to me about the weather.
"Excuse me, Gloria," he said, and moved up the bar to take an order for two Manhattans. He stood talking to the man who ordered the drinks and then moved to the back of the bar to mix them. Gloria cupped the martini glass in her two hands and swallowed the clean liquid.
Without saying another word, Mike mixed her a double Martini. He poured it into the emptied glass, which was careless, since Martini glasses should be chilled. But she could not be a second without the drink before her, just as she could not breathe without something between her legs. A penis had become a pacifier to her, like rubber teethers that babies suck on.
She was deep in the second drink when a man sat down next to her and said, "Let me buy you the next one."
Mike looked up hastily across the bar. He did not like to see his regular women customers annoyed. He moved toward them. Gloria stopped him with a look.
"Thanks," she said. "I'd love you to buy the next one."
Mike looked amazed, then disappointed. He thought that all women must be rotten, and then remembered his wife and daughter and wanted to rush out and drive quickly to Queens. They should be sitting down to dinner now, but you couldn't be sure. You couldn't be sure of anything.
"I've seen you in here quite often," he told her.
"Yes, I live across the street. It's a good place to come for a quickie."
He carefully misunderstood the word. "We all need quickies once in a while," and he winked with adolescent lasciviousness. She hated him for the weak pun, and for his enjoyment of it.
"Brilliant."
The man looked back at her, first with confusion and then with distrust. "Lady," he said rudely. "I just want a piece of ass."
She thought only ignorant soldiers used that expression, and for an instant her face contorted with distaste.
"I know what you want," she said.
He was going to let her despise him, so long as he could have a fifteen minute fuck. "You're a smart little girl," he changed his tone.
"Buy me another drink," she commanded.
She reached over and patted the man's hand.
"Don't mind me," she apologized. "I'm just fighting a ghost?"
"Someone in your family die?" he asked with the mock suburban concern he always showed to whores.
"Yes," she said. "Someone in my family died."
"Why, that's a shame, little girl," he murmured. "But we all have to go some time or other."
She wondered if she should kill him instead of the rapist.
"We all have to go," she echoed, and laughed.
"It makes you think," he added. "It makes you think that you'd better enjoy life while you got it"
"You're right," she said. "Everyone should enjoy life. To the fullest, to the brimming-over cup."
He looked down at his brown and white shoes. "Now don't be sacrilegious."
She almost fell off the stool. "What I mean," she said, pressing against his frightened, corpulent body, "is that everyone should fuck a lot."
He didn't answer her for a few seconds. "Who died?" he asked, getting the conversation onto safer grounds.
"I did," she answered. "If you don't object to necrophilia, I guarantee a good time."
"What's that," and in his confusion, lifted his hand for another round.
"It's copulating with a corpse," she told him, in the tone she'd tell him the time, or her name.
He turned his head away. "You got a funny sense of humor."
"What?"
"You got a helluva sense of humor," he said, with the slight toughening alteration.
"I was even funnier," she explained, "when I was alive. When I was alive, I was an absolute scream."
"And now," he said, afraid to look stupid. "Now I'm only a moan."
He looked at her slim arms and softly-powdered pale skin. It seemed a shame to give her up just because she was nuts.
"Where do you come from," he finally asked.
"Across the street," she answered, purposefully avoiding the obvious information.
"I mean where were you born?" he persisted.
"Under a stairway," she told him. "In blood and pain. It was quite a shock. I almost died. In fact, that's when I died."
"Look sister," he submitted wearily. "I only have an hour before I catch a train. If you want to do business, okay-If not, I'd rather finish this drink alone." His chin trembled at his offer to relinquish her.
Gloria sat very still. She drained her glass and looked at the fly of his pants. Nothing. She had scared the sex from between his thighs. Her head arched from the four martinis, and she knew that she'd have a hard time getting up the stairs alone. Alone. Alone. To lie in her bed and listen for footsteps.
"I want to do business," she said meekly.
The man didn't say another word. He gathered the cashier slips in his hand and paid Mike. Then he placed his hand under her elbow and helped her off the stool. The room was turning with carnaval abandon.
"I live right across the street."
"What number?"
"Sixty-two."
He pushed the swinging doors open for her, and she was out on the dark, quiet street. They walked silently to her house.
"The fourth floor."
They mounted the steps wordlessly. He's not so bad when he shuts his mouth, she thought.
At her door, she reached into her handbag and found her key. She gave it to him as she would to a fraternity date. He looked surprised but put the key in the lock and let them both into the apartment. The rooms were forbiddingly silent, and he nervously cleared his throat. She turned on the lamp in the living room. A distorted light fell on a blue and grey canvas.
He stood and looked at the picture. "Quite a little picture." He rocked on his heels. "Shut up," she said.
He looked shocked. "What? What did you say?"
"Shut up. Shut up. Shut your mouth. Nothing but stupidities come out of your mouth. You have no right to be that stupid. No one has the right to be that stuid." She knew she was drunk. "I bet that you never call anyone stupid. You call them ignoramuses I bet you have six real long words that you use for speeches and strangers."
"You know a lot," he said. Then he pulled his hand back and slapped her across the mouth. She tasted blood and surprise, and finally excitement.
"Do you beat your whores, stupid? Do you beat your whores and your wife beats you?" She laughed gaily. This time he made an enraged fist and punched her in the face. The blow was down on her jaw, and she thought he must have broken something.
"You should enjoy what I'm telling you," she pursued. "You'd have to pay an analyst a bucket of money to get this truthful observation. You have a fat stomach and a fat head and a fat brain. No brain. You are, in fact, an ignormus. There, I'm using your word. Get the hell out of here."
He made a mirthless grunt and pulled her arms behind her back. She felt the muscles ache with strain. He pressed his thumbs and then his hands tightly around her breasts. She thought she would faint with the pain.
"Take your hands off me, you buffoon. You ignoramus, you disgusting, meaningless paunch."
His hands tightened, around her breasts and his knee pressed against her kidneys. She slid to the floor in agony. The man was insane with rage. He pulled his belt out of his pants and struck her hard across the stomach. She screamed with pain and then saw his gloated furious face. It was too contemptible to let that fool hear her screams for mercy.
"Stop," she called to him. "Stop and come down here and love me. Fuck me! Fuck me! Don't waste your strength beating me. I love your fat sloppy belly. Press it on me," and she opened her legs.
The man had his belt lifted for another slash, and it landed forcefully on her chest. He seemed not to hear her, not to hear anything. The Neanderthal, the preliterate man was insulted.
He got down on his knees beside her and roughly unbuttoned her blouse. She thought that at last he was going to take her, then leave her with the few welts. He pulled her skirt off, and she lay beside him covered only with a thin nylon brassiere and transparent panties. He ripped the undergarments off her body, and she saw his huge hairless hands. The hands alone made him disgusting. She moved her head and was sick on the rug. There was the immediate stench of putrified gin and she was sick again. He leaned his head close to hers, and she heard him say, "Bitch, filthy fucking bitch."
He stood up and looked long at her naked body, lying limp next to the stench. He raised his leather belt and cut her thigh. He kicked her over with the pointed toe of his shoe, and she felt her stomach against the mess she had made. She was sober now, sober and bruised and wanting to die. She felt the belt lacerate her back, and she could not stop the trembling of her body. The belt fell again with his brute primitive strength. It slashed crazily into her white butocks, and then up again to her neat waist. He hit her without direction, up and down her body, sometimes missing completely and pounding the rug beside her. She knew, from occasional returning echoes that she was screaming for help and release. His arm waved frantically above her, and the leather made a swooshing sound before it planted itself against her skin. There was a pause in the incessant beating, and the dimly familiar buzz of a sliding zipper. She waited to feel her body turned over, but he apparently enjoyed the network of red slashes on her bottom and back.
She crossed her arms in front of her and leaned her cheek against the soft upper arm, like a child asleep. The pain separated her from her body. There was nothing but a creature lying achingly in filth on the floor; a creature from a nightmare. Her face aginst her arm was wet with tears. How strange that she had cried. Her body had its habits of response, and a blow produced tears. But all the whipping had accomplished was to stop the buzzing in her cunt, and now he would take her when she had passed the threshold of feeling.
His hands grasped her belly and thighs. He was trying to lift her buttocks to a comfortable height. Business before pleasure. His thumbs pressed her scarred behind, and she jumped with pain. Then she could still know more agony; she thought he had finished her. His fingers crawled betwen her legs to her soft, dry pubic hairs. He kneaded the mound of sensitive flesh, and she writhed with the insult. She tried to find her voice to insult him, preferring his enraged blows to his groping tenderness. But her voice belonged to her body, and neither belonged to her. His finger pierced the futile tension of her inner flesh. She could feel his knuckle scraping against her, measuring the capacity of her vagina. He grunted his excitement. Pig-Fat, knuckle mad, cunt mad pig. The words did not escape from her, and she thought with ecstasy, I'm afraid. Afraid of Mr. Pig, and her body crouched closer to the floor.
He lifted her higher with an angry and impatient gesture, and he said, "Stay the way I put you sister, if you want to live" But she didn't want to live, and she sank her body to the floor. He slapped her hard across her inflamed buttocks and lifted her body in a high arch. She stayed that way for him, suspended like a Gothic doorway. Her body trembled in its taut position, and he kneeled behind her, relishing her discomfort. Finally his passion succeeded his brief sadism, and she felt him enter her body with relief. He moved in and out against her motionless hips, gasping into the silent room. "Ahh," he moaned. "You cunts are all alike. You love it when we get it in. You love it more than we do" She dug her chin into her passive arm and offered him her still body.
"So I'm screwing a corpse," he laughed. "So I'm screwing a corpse."
His belly slapped against her unresisting ass. Then he packed faster and tighter against her, his prick swelling inside of her. She felt the pressure climb within, and then he grabbed her belly and rocked frantically as he came. He came as if it would be the last time, every fuck the last time, and her heart chilled with detachment. He released her, and she discovered her exhaustion. She sank into the rug and the room spinned out of existence.
Her faint could have lasted only a few minutes, and she opened her eyes to his rampant pawing of her breasts and thighs and cunt. He was breathing his liquored breath against her neck and squeezing her with the ecstasy of possession.
"Feel that," he urged her. "Feel that."
She reached her hand behind her and found his stiff eager prick in her palm. "None of this one-shot business for old Charley," he gloated. "I'm gonna fuck you all night, sister. I'm good for another six rounds."
She began to cry her repugnance. With horror she imagined that she would spend the rest of her life on the smirched rug, fainting and being taken by the insatiable boor, and fainting again. The room did not spin any more, and she was relentlessly sober. She pretended unconsciousness, but he continued to squeeze her body. Then he twisted her head and forced her mouth open. He pried at her teeth with drunken energy and howled vulgarly, "I'll buy! This pony is good for another six fucks."
"You're a pig," she managed to whisper.
"What? I didn't hear you baby. You think old Charley's a pretty good lay? I been around. Used to have women getting on their knees for me to fuck them. Charley never leaves a lady in distress," and he howled his American Legion laugh.
She was too scared to call him a pig again.
She moved her head to the side and saw a bottle of gin on the floor beside her. He had found her liquor cabinet. She heard him swallow and wondered if he would kill her.
He turned her over on her back and sat his fat ass on her stomach. "You're the best little horse I ever bought. A real bucking mare" His prick was pointing to the ceiling, and he straddled her body and moved towards her mouth. "Suck old Charley," he cajoled. "Be a good obedient mare and suck daddy Charley."
She closed her eyes and he pressed his penis into her lax mouth. She held it between her lips like a stubborn, spoiled child refusing to swallow her lamb chop. Charley was undaunted. He pressed up and down on her face, using her mouth as he had her unwilling sex. He used her as he would a life-sized sponge with a few openings. But he was not a man for strenuous exercise, and he grew tired of his joggling motion.
Her eyes were still closed, and she opened them only when he lifted his body and lay beside her. His face and the whites of his eyes were delicately laced with red. He looked apoplectic, as if he might suddenly spit up all the blood in his head and die before her. She wished he would die. He semed to pass out for a moment, and she realized how drunk he was. But his prick still stood high and urgent in the air. He came to with an impatient shaking of his head, and staggered about the room. She could not take her fascinated eyes off his stiff penis, which seemed to have an independently rigid life. He rushed to her when he understood her mocking eyes, and seemed unsure of himself for the first time since he had removed his belt and beat her. She lowered her eyes to his thin, frail, white, blue-veined legs that supported his enormous trunk and started to giggle at the horror, humiliation, and stupidity of her evening. He stood furious next to her and kicked her prostrate form. But the kick lacked the enthusiasm and conviction it had had one hour ago He reached for the half-empty bottle of gin and put the thin neck of the bottle against his lips.
I must remember to throw the bottle away-The hot liquor seemed to renew his assurance. "Get on your knees, you cunt," he commanded.
She looked at him with disdain, and he roughly twisted her body around. She lay flat, her knees, her thighs, her stomach, her flattened breasts, her shoulders and hair touching the carpet. He kneeled behind her and pulled her body into the arch he elected for fucking. She did not resist him, did not really acknowledge that he was there behind her.
"I'm gonna do something I've always wanted to do baby. But I never met a slut I dared to do it with. I'm gonna dig so deep into your ass, you'll taste my come on your tongue."
He slapped her blood-smeared buttocks and without pause or warning, pressed into the narrow crevice between her buttocks. A remarkable pain inflamed her body, and she screamed. He laughed wildly and smashed his prick into her rear again, the pain intensifying with each push of his body. She began to rotate her body wildly to make him come by the next thrust. But he had the hard control of a drunk and he thumped into her narrow hole with shrieks of pleasure. He reached his hand around her jumping hips and felt her cunt. It was dry-a desert of despair. His fingers found her shrunken clitoris, and he grubbily massaged it. To her shock she felt the drops of sensuality flowing onto his fingertips. She could not be sure if her body was moving with terror or desire. He raised the stubborn dot of clitoris and pinched it cruelly. Her body was a flame of pain from her waist to her tired knees. He smashed against her, forcing her chin roughly to the rug. His free hand found the nipple of her hanging breast. His nails were like teeth against the stiff deep red tits. Her body sang its captivity, and she swung eagerly against him. His hands busily tensed her nipples and cunt. Then he lunged into her with a final howl, and removed his hands without warning. Her abused body thumped to the ground. His prick was shrinking inside her. He released a final spurt of sperm, and the smoky liquid seemed to flow to her tongue. Her mouth was full of the taste of him, and with a terrible moan of defeat she came.
He was motionless beside her, and she saw that he had really passed out. He looked dead. She lay gasping for breath for a few minutes, and then swallowed a mouthful of the raw gin. It slid hot down her chest, and gave her an instant's strength. She shook the lifeless form. He did not respond at all. She kicked him hard with her foot, but he was turned up with an impotent calm. Instead of the vicious attacker he had been for her, he resembled a stupefied whale. She remembered her body's deceit and kicked him in disgust. She wanted to get into her bed and sleep, sleep for a hundred hours. But she could not sleep with this senseless bulk on the studio floor. His clothes were dropped carelessly beside him.
Gloria walked to her bathroom and washed her tear-stained, sick-stained face. She took a paisley dressing gown off the door hook and moved her pained body into it. The robe stuck to her hips and buttocks, and she knew that the blood he had drawn was still flowing. She brushed her hair from her face and caught it at the nape of her neck with a tortoise shell clip. Her face was fatigued and bruised, but younger than it had been in the morning. Her skin had the burnt, now pale color of a convalescent. She was not thinking of the rapist, not thinking of anything but getting that bulk off the living room floor. She walked back to him, to find him still stretched out, motionless and stupid. Some spittle ran down the corner of his chin, and he snored with a wet, gurgling sound. She reached down and took him by his two bare feet. His huge shape formed its own fulcrum, and she turned him like a top toward the door.
She opened the hall door and made sure that the house was still and empty. With tremendous effort she pulled his body into the hall; it was naked and ludicrous in the tiled dark passage. She did not want his sprawling form snoring outside her apartment, so she dragged him down the steps feet first to the second-story landing. His head jumped with a hollow sound at each step. You're going to miss your train, Charley. You may never run to catch another train-She left him on the second floor and dashed noiselessly up to her apartment. The door was standing open. She grabbed his underwear, his shoes and socks, his pants and jacket, shirt and tie, and holding them wide in her arms, rushed to the landing where he lay. He was covered with spit, his penis little and pink on his thigh. She dropped the clothes on his unconscious figure and rushed quickly to her fourth floor. She slammed the door behind her and nervously latched the safety lock. She breathed in hysterical little gasps and putting her palm automatically to her forehead, found it burning with fever. Well, I'm sick, she thought. I've been trying to die, but I've only managed to get sick. For the first time she did not think of her search for the white-eyed violator. All she wanted was to get her throbbing body between the sheets of her bed. She walked towards the bedroom and saw the bottle of gin lying empty on its side. Next to the bottle was Charley's belt. She had not noticed it in her mad grab for his clothes. She picked the belt up and studied it. It was long, to circle his ridiculous girth. There were six holes on the pointed end of the belt, and a silver buckle that was initialed C D. on the other side. The leather was worn shiny, and it was stained with blood where it had struck her.
A well-earned souvenir. I'll keep Charleys' belt as a souvenir. She dragged herself tiredly to bed, holding onto the belt, as if for support, with both hands.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She looked at the clock on the dressing table and saw that it was two o'clock. The sun poured in through the open windows, and she had nothing to do with the sun.
Her skin stuck to the sheets where the blood had congealed during the night. Her slightest motion opened the wounds. She touched her jaws and mouth, and found her face tender and swollen. She reached to the bedside table for the hand mirror. She stared long at her reflection. Her eyes were dark-rimmed, but peaceful. Her mouth was split and bruised, it would be difficult to speak, but there were no words she wanted to speak. Thank God she was sick. It was a welcome reprieve, now she could offer herself the devotions due an invalid. The sickness of her mind had at last conquered her body. The fever that would register on the thermometer would entitle her to rest. The next best thing to love was rest. The next best thing to rest was death. The rapist was not important. The welts rising material on her back, that was her true concern. At last her body was a fitting prison. The pain of her flesh equalled the pain in her heart, balanced and finally negated the untouchable torment.
She remembered the heap of naked flesh that she had dragged to the second floor landing. It was two o'clock, he must be gone by now. Had one of the tenants found him, sprawled clumsily in his own sweat? He seemed a timid man, except for the drunken beating. Probably when he sobered he would recall the evening with shame. She didn't think he'd repeat the visit. Possibly one night, drunk and hot, he would. But she didn't particularly hate him. He had proved a valuable executioner. The leather belt was still in the bed beside her. C-D. Charles the Divine. The room was comforting and familiar, she lay back in a curious repose.
She was too sore to bathe, she could barely sponge her face. She put fresh sheets on the bed and then put on a pair of starched cotton pajamas. The house was in a disorder that upset her, upset the feeling of tenuous calm. But solutions, this free afternoon, were everywhere. She called the maid service and then got into bed with a book.
She got up from the bed and found a woolen shawl that she wrapped around her shoulders. It was too warm, but she wanted the comfort of illness. She did not wait for the rapist, but seemed to wait for her mother to walk into her bedroom with a tray of orange juice and tea and thinly sliced toasts. She recalled the love her mother had showered on her when she was sick. It was worth the aches to hear the husband voices outside her door; to be coaxed into tasting the deliciously dull food. Gloria heard the key turning in the lock, and she knew that the maid had arrived. The woman poked her head into the bedroom and announced herself.
"Anything special you want done, Miss Gloria?"
"No," said Gloria, "please just clean up the mess."
"Why you're sick," she said sympathetically. "Yes, very," Gloria sighed contentedly. "Shall I call the doctor for you?"
"I'll be all right," Gloria assured her. "I just need a few days' rest."
The woman remained staring at her. Finally she said in a choked voice, "Who did it to you?"
"I did it to myself," Gloria explained.
The woman had an aged cynicism. "It's pretty hard to blacken your own jaw"
"It was very difficult. But if you try very hard you can manage anything."
The maid started to walk out of the room. Her shoulders shrugged disapproval.
"Oh please," Gloria called her back, "can I have a tray with orange juice and lemon tea and a few slices of toast?"
"I'll get it for you first thing," the maid promised, and seemed to like Gloria better for the request. She knew how to act towards children with grippe. Gloria had a seven year old's expression etched peacefully on her face.
Gloria leaned back on the crisp pillows and opened a Joseph Conrad novel. It began, "He was an inch, perhaps two under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders...." It was relaxing to sink into another man's imagination. Hers was limited. The only light in her world came from two white eyes. She turned the page and did not notice the maid entering with the tray. The tea steamed through the nozzle of the tea pot. The lemon was sliced thin and yellow in the cup. She saw that the maid had placed a small dish of strawberry preserves, and a few round chocolate cookies on the tray. The child-like kindness filled her eyes with tears. The woman was pathetically concerned.
"Here, here," she soothed, "you'll soon feel better."
"I feel wonderful." She was surprised by her emotion-cracked voice.
"You're a very brave girl," the woman reassured. Gloria could not bare the automatic affection. "Would you turn the radio on?" she asked.
She decided to listen to a thick impassioned Edith Piaf. The French accent was as tragic as the defeated lyrics of the song.
Maybe I'll go to Paris, Gloria speculated. After I kill him I'll go to Paris.
From the living room she heard the vacuum cleaner buzzing under the chairs and tables. She loved the apartment being cleaned. This is what the people around me have been doing, she thought. They've been resting, sitting in soft chairs and repeating familiar sensations. I want to rest, when he's dead. I'll rest.
Joseph Conrad carried her into the pride of heroes, and she dozed in the warm room. When she awoke, the dusk was falling heavy and quiet in the streets. Her terrible aloneness, that had been her peace, assaulted her. The maid had left the flat clean and empty as a stage set. Gloria wandered into her studio. The ashtrays were sparkling on the tables. The few drops of paint that had stained the floor were, scraped away. The immaculate room mocked her, "No one lives here anymore."
She walked hastily to her paints and squeezed some crimson pigment on her pallet. She mixed the paint with her spatula and spilled the paint, in drops, on the waxed floor. She pushed her bare toes into the paint and smeared it frantically along the floor and onto the white wall. She got down on her knees and stupidly rubbed the paint over her pajamas, then pulled them off and rubbed the pigment into her unhealed flesh. She was crying, lamenting her brief succor of rest. She rubbed the paint into her cunt, her pubic hairs became flaming and heavy. She reached to press her red palms against her cheeks. The fellows are crazy for the lady in red....
The doorbell rang. It rang persistently.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
"One minute, please," she called.
The jangling sound had brought her down to earth. She poured turpentine on a white cloth and rapidly wiped the paint off her body, her hands and face. She gathered up her pajamas and dropped them into the bathroom hamper. Then she took her paisley robe and belted it around her waist. Her face in the mirror was swollen, less swollen, than it had been in the afternoon, strangely serene. She hoped, now that her head was calmer, that her visitor was not the rapist. It seemed the greatest deceit that someone else had beaten her. The rapist would not object to signs of another man's love on her, because he did not love her. But she was his to destroy. Except that she would destroy him first.
She opened the door and Laura was there opening her bag, fumbling for one of her eternal cigarettes. It was a relief for Laura to break the nervous solitude of her evening.
"Come in," she said. "I'm glad to see you."
Laura studied her face with alarm. "Christ," she said. She looked behind Gloria's shoulder and saw the unmade bed through the opened door. "Get back into bed," she urged. Gloria was feeling dizzy from the few minutes on her feet, and she hurried under the protecting blankets.
Laura looked confused and unhappy. "What happened to you," she asked.
"I fell off a horse," Gloria told her.
"I'll bet you did."
"Well, I had a frisky gentleman caller."
"My God. Is it anyone I know? He should be arrested or shot," Laura said.
"No," Gloria explained. "It's somebody nobody knows. He's just about getting an introduction to himself. I made him a little angry"
"Angry."
"He was very sensitive, and I called him an ox, or something like that."
"Gloria," Laura said, "I don't want to go on as if you're on the couch and I'm not, but you're not trying to get killed are you? I mean, I can perfectly well understand the decision, but it doesn't seem fair to make someone else do the dirty work."
"Why you cunning girl," Gloria said with distaste, "how did you guess? You didn't nearly use up your twenty questions."
"I'm sorry," Laura smiled. "I suppose I'm trying to get knocked off myself, going around with my juicy welcome insights. I just think this is a pretty insane world, and I get a kick out of taking informal surveys."
"Christopher," Gloria suggested, "has very good taste in sculpture."
"Oh yes," Laura agreed, "he's a connoisseur. That's because he isn't even good enough to be mediocre. Really, you think I'm vindictive, but Christopher couldn't sculpt a faithful horse or a southern general or a convincing wreath."
"Well, I think," Gloria said, to keep the conversation unhysterical, "that Christopher could use a little life study. I mean just work from a model for a few months."
"I thought so too," Laura said drily.
"So?"
"So I convinced Christopher to get a model for a few hours a day"
"Oh."
"Oh, yes. So now Christopher gets her services for nothing. In fact, he's living with her. In fact, he can study from morning to night. She may succeed where I failed. She may make a great artist of him." Laura began to cry.
"It's ridiculous," Laura sobbed. "I know I'm ridiculous."
"My adoration is making me ugly," Laura mused. "Christopher can do anything he wants with me, and when this happens to a woman she is hideous. Look at me; I'm a shadow. I'm one of Christopher's mediocre statues, waiting patiently for him to chip an expression onto my face. Oh God, I know I bore him."
"Don't torture yourself," Gloria begged. "In many ways your love for Christopher makes you more beautiful. You have sacrifice on your face, and that is a kind of beauty."
"Sacrifice!" Laura snapped with contempt. "Sacrifice to whom and for what? To Christopher, the modern girl's surest lay? What do I sacrifice? My sanity? My pride? To be fucked by my husband when he comes home for a rest?"
"Pride has nothing to do with it," Gloria said. "And you know it's not for the fuck. You'd live with Christopher in absolute celibacy for twenty years, if he'd just stay with you."
"That's cruel, Gloria."
"No, no, no. Listen to me. I don't mean it to be cruel. Don't hear in my words some lousy pat definition of married love. It's not the fuck. We tell ourselves it's the fuck because it justifies us. It's a simple little taste that everybody understands ... but it's not true. Does Christopher have some magic in his prick? Or is the magic in you? Why can the other women give him up so easily? Christopher's been given up by more women than the spit curl. It's something else Christopher does to you. He enters a secret chasm in your heart, or psyche, I don't know, I really don't know. But once he enters, he lives there. Christopher walks about in you as if you were a house without doors."
"But why can't I walk about in Christopher? Do you realize, Gloria, what he is? Yes, I say he's beautiful, because when I say he's not, the suffering is worse. That makes me not only insane, but a fool. But Christopher is so weak, so inexcusably, fragilely, stupidly weak, he needs me to be accused of the things he can not do. Yes, Christopher would not want so many women without me sitting at home suffering his infidelities. He runs to me the way he would to a mother, proudly singing, 'Momma, I had a good fuck.' And I'm supposed to sign the report card and promote him into another class."
"You're right, Laura, and you know these things. Are they just going to sit in your head like stinking Chinese eggs? Or are they going to change your life with Christopher?"
Laura sat quietly for a full minute. She lit another cigarette, striking five matches before the tobacco flamed, and released the smoke in her mouth.
"My knowledge of Christopher has been putri-fying in my head for a long time."
"Please," Gloria said, as the tears rolled wet on Laura's face. "Please, please, please." Because the freedom was not in Laura.
"A few times when Christopher left me, I felt, well, this time I'm finished. I'm finally finished. When-he flew to California with that idiot starlet, then called me from Los Angeles to tell me that he felt with pleasure every inch of the three thousand miles that separated us, I almost didn't care. I mean, it just passed endurance, and I didn't feel anything-I thought it was over."
"You had an affair with Carl, then, didn't you?" Gloria said.
"Yes. It was the first and only affair I've had since I've been married. And it really was quite nice-Carl is warm and sweet and attentive."
Gloria winced. "Quite nice. How you must have hated it."
"No. I wasn't hating it. I wasn't feeling it. I wasn't feeling anything. That's what so terrifies me. That my life without Christopher will be a long painless nothing.
"But then you weren't really over Christopher."
"Who knows. I don't know. I didn't think of him. I didn't dream of him. I didn't rush to the movies to see his starlet perform. It was the only time since I've known Christopher that I've let him out of my head. But nothing came in to take his place. I was stupefied for six months."
"Another six months might have done it. Another six months and you might have loved somebody else."
"I don't know. You see, Christopher came back. When he knocked at the door, and I opened it, I knew that I had been waiting for him for six months."
"We have more stamina than that," Gloria said "You wouldn't have waited forever. A few more months and you might have waited forever. A few more months and you might have opened the door to a stranger."
"The day I stopped waiting, I would start decaying. Yes, I can see my skin growing moldy. I can feel the tissues of my flesh turning to water."
"But my God," Gloria cried, "why are we talking! Why do we bother to repeat our third rate, monstrous tragedies to each other? Look at me. I'm beaten up, I'm bleeding and black and blue. Is this my statement? Is this the total of my expression. 'Stop painting on canvasses, paint your story in bruises on your body!' What right do you have to say you'd decay? If you know you'd decay, if you know the word decay, you have no right to decay. Why did we find the words if we wanted to stay in the cave? You have no right not to live more happily. You have no right to give your intelligence and will and body and goals and yesterday and tomorrow and now to Christopher."
"Rights," mocked Laura. "As if there were any rights. You had no right to be beaten, and the man had no right to beat you. But you were both fit only for the cave."
"Then what are we waiting for?" Gloria lamented. "Why don't we die now, kill ourselves? Group suicides. If we lurk in the cave, we're not living. We died three million years ago."
"But," said Laura, "we've seen a bit of light."
"What are you talking about?"
"We've seen the light of victory. I'm waiting, yes. I'm waiting for Christopher. I want him to look at me and see that I'm beautiful and valuable. And that day I'll be beautiful and valuable. And mybe that day I'll leave him, or that day we'll really get married. But I want that day. I can live for it"
"When will Christopher see that you're beautiful?"
"When I am."
"I tell you, you're beautiful now."
"And I don't hear you."
Gloria leaned back on the pillows. "I hate your wait," she said. "It disgusts me."
Laura pushed her boyish hair behind her ears. "I have given so much pain and love and hate to Christopher. More than to anyone in the world, in my life. And I want one day for him to feel it. It will make my wait not a wait, but a process. A dawning of love."
"Can Christopher feel you?"
"Not now."
"I live in the now. Tomorrow is just too much of a chance for me."
"If I felt that," Laura paused and spoke slowly, "I would kill Christopher."
"Kill him?" said Gloria with interest.
"Yes. If Christopher will never come to me, I want him to die."
"It would be better," said Gloria, "if you just decided to live. That might be the same as Christopher's dying. He might even come to you then, and you'd find out he was dead"
"That's why I'd kill him," said Laura. She laughed foolishly. "I don't want to be disappointed."
"Maybe he'll come to you," Gloria mummured.
"Shall we have some dinner?" Laura asked. She clumsily moved the conversation away from the area that whispered, 'It might not happen. Christopher may never be yours!'
"Yes," agreed Gloria. "There are some eggs and bacon in the refrigerator, and a can of Campbell's soup in the pantry."
Laura walked into the kitchen, and Gloria heard her banging the refrigerator door shut. Then, lying back, she heard the bacon sizzling and tried to remember the words she had said. They had nothing to do with the rapist. But that was different. The rapist was not to be her life-she was killing him to live. But she had said to Laura, 'It would be better if you just decided to live.' Afterwards, afterwards. First her vengeance, and then a life out of the caves. Laura was not waiting for vengeance, but for love. That was why she was doomed. We can not wait for love, but can only create it out of the present with the imperfect feelings sifted to us through a gnarled tree of family. I must be insane, reasoned Gloria. Laura lives what she speaks, and so do I. Except for the one enraged thorn in my flesh that demands his death. I am insane now, and the words I speak come out of a well-tutored yesterday. I'm the most savage waiter of all ... waiting for death.
Laura came back into the bedroom. She had washed her face, but fresh tears were staining her cheeks.
"I wish I were beautiful for him, I wish I looked like a Hollywood starlet." Gloria did not answer.
"If I were beautiful I'd torture him. I'd fuck his father and his brother and his best friend." Gloria seemed as distant as a trance.
"I just want to be what he wants. I don't care about anything else. About freedom or soul or truth ... or," she laughed, "beauty."
Gloria moved her head to look at Laura.
"Kill him," she commanded. The two women shared the moment, and Laura shrugged her shoulders nervously and said, "Let's be a bit serious. Actually I came here to ask you if you'd like to spend a week at Fire Island. It's warm enough now, and the cottage is in good shape."
Maybe he's in Fire Island, Gloria thought. Io makes her modern tour. Yes. I'll go. I pray to God I find him there....
"Kill him," she repeated to Laura. "Don't wait for him. Kill him."
CHAPTER NINE
Fire Island is close to New York City. It is quite close, and quite chic. Not chic the way the Hamptons are, but anyway, Gloria speculated, Gatsby is dead. The island attracted the city-imprisoned artists and writers and advertising executives and publicity hawks. They rushed every weekend to Fire Island to run as innocently as Polinesian primitives along the white beaches and the rough Atlantic surf. But though they conspicuously took off their shoes and walked the wooden-planked streets of the island, they brought their insulated aren't-we-having-a-good-time attitudes with them. And they had a very good time; the thousands of emptied gin bottles were proof. The men wore faded worn levis, thin from the sunny Saturdays and Sundays of fun, and they bared their white smoke-choked chests to the air. Some of the men on the Island were very beautiful. They lived from resort to resort, exciting the men and women with the exposed confidence of their muscles.
The women wore pants. Skirts were taboo oh the island. The shape of their legs and Fifth Avenue fashions decreed the length of the pants. Sometimes they were rolled ruggedly over the thighs, showing the subtle crease where the thighs swelled into buttocks. The front of their shorts V'd into their loins. V marks the spot. The pants stayed tight against their hips and tapered suggestively along the calf, and exposed trim ankles and naked feet. They cruised the island looking for bulls. They were too anxious to have a good time to be disappointed. If a man showed his horn, they were convinced. And they played a voluptuous game, pretending they could gore each other.
There was practically no electricity on the island, no cars, no paved roads, no buildings made of steel, and no stairs that reached up to great heights. The island insisted 'life is simple.' The houses were open to the sea, and the islander's feet felt the sand-grit on the floors, their bodies felt it between the sheets, and their teeth felt it in the hamburger.
There were about six separate communities on the island. In each section there settled a different perversion, tortured by the anonymity and accusations of the big city. Here the lesbians took off their tight secretarial skirts and high heels, and did revengeful dances. The faggots sang the sibilant "S" that was modified for scared bosses. They took off their city manners and hugged each other in the silent sand dunes, loving and screaming and being jealous and crying and drinking, and getting on the Sunday-night boat for home.
They had to supply a city-identity on the let's-be-children-again island. Where are you from? And what do you do? And oh, you were at that party too, I don't remember seeing you there. But once everybody knew who everybody else was, then it was all right to fuck with child-like joy.
The island was shaped like a floating penis, eight times as long as wide, tapering to a bulbous end. There was the Atlantic cooling one side of the narrow stretch of land, and a bay filled with docked yachts on the other. A ferry traveled every few hours from Long Island, depositing gritty vacationers on the shore, and the same ferry took them back, drunken and sunburned.
To get to Fire Island they would catch the train at Pennsylvania Staiton or drive to Amityville where the loading ferry would be waiting.
Gloria and Laura drove to Long Island in Laura's small convertible. They kept the top of the car down and wore kerchiefs to keep their hair flat against their heads. They looked young and carefree, speeding down the fast highway, and they spoke about dresses and Gloria's coming exhibit. They scrupulously avoided mentioning Christopher. Laura had carefully donned her best New England reserve, and it was obvious that she could not bare to mention Christopher's name. But her silence enveloped them in her husband's presence, and the motor of the car hummed "Christopher," and the water at the left rippled the same sound. Gloria's face had lost its swollen contours, and she leaned back on the cool leather seat and felt happy to be leaving the city. It is difficult, she realized, to live all year in the city. Especially when I am used to big houses and lots of space. I don't sense how closed in I am until I drive over a Manhattan bridge and see the trees and lawns I grew up with.
"It's good to get out of the city, isn't it?" She turned to Laura.
"Oh God, yes," Laura answered conventionally. "Sometimes I think I'll just choke if I don't get some air in my lungs." Gloria was bored with the familiar patter.
"It isn't so bad in the winter. But in the spring and summer, you just have to get away."
"I'm sure," Laura responded, "we'll feel much better when we get itno bathing suits and dive into the water." That was the wrong thing to say. They were supposed to feel magnificent now. Gloria lit a cigarette.
"Let's go swimming as soon as the boat docks," she suggested. "It shouldn't be much after five"
"Leon is giving a cocktail party," Laura mentioned.
"Oh Christ," said Gloria. "Has he been there all winter giving cocktail parties. Doesn't he know how to do anything else."
"Leon is quite nice."
It was obvious that Laura was hating Gloria for the broken words that she had spoken to her a few nights before. It was because of the Glorias she wanted him so deseperately. To show them they were all wrong. To prove that she had something private and wonderful with Christopher that none of them could see. Had Gloria fucked Christopher? Could she not even have the dignity of revealing her misery to someone Christopher had not fucked!
Gloria, sitting beside Laura, studied the tense, drawn look of her companion. She knew that Christopher had not been heard from since his liaison with the model. Then she saw a twitch of hate on Laura's mouth, and a message came to her with frightening clarity. She wanted to say, "Laura, I never had Christopher. There has never been anything between us." But she knew how insulting that would be, how clearly that would declare, "Christopher is public property."
They got to Amityville at a quarter to three-perfect timing, because the boat was leaving at three o'clock. They would be on the island earlier than they had expected-at the most four o'clock. That left plenty of time for a long swim. Gloria was happy about that. There was a lot of city-living to wash clean in the ocean. The white houses of Amityville shined bright in the sun. The two-story wooden houses were fronted with green grass and cultivated flowers. They looked very safe and very civilized.
The residents of Amityville hurried into their homes when the Ferry loaded to cross the chanel. She could feel them pulling back starched curtains, and staring at the slightly disgusting voyagers. They heard tales about the island, and worried about the proximity of their children to the debauchery. They resented the intruders, with all the small-town hate for the "summer people." The clumsy giants who stepped on the lawns and got too brown in the sun.
The boat was half-filled, and more cars were driving up all the time. They left the car in the expensive parking lot, minding, wordlessly, the rise in prices that marked every vacation. The car would wait there until they returned. Gloria walked the plank and dropped onto the deck of the boat. She had a small weekend case in her hand; pajamas, shorts, matador pants, two shirts, another brassiere, panties, and a bathing suit. That was enough for a week. There was something relaxing about the ease of the island, she had to admit that.
She felt the boat rocking under her feet, and it was an exhilarating sensation. The New York pavements probably shook every nerve in your body, and the gentle sea reminded her that there were some experiences that man had not created, could not tamper with. Just an old nature girl at heart, she scoffed, knowing that within a week she would be hungry for a badly-lit bar or even a bus ride. I wonder, she thought, if the rapist likes the water. Was he always there in her head, sharing and damaging every moment?
She walked to the top deck of the boat, and sat on the bench that circled the railing. She turned backwards on the bench, and stuck her feet through the bottom railing. She leaned her arms on the top bar and watched the silver specked chopping of the bay. She flicked her cigarette overboard and could see it, white and sinking through the water. Laura sat down next to her and seemed to loose her tension as she breathed deeply. Maybe I could tell her now-Maybe she'd forgive that I never tasted her precious husband's prick. Laura twisted in her seat and faced the water with Gloria.
"It is wonderful. It's embarrassing to say it every week, but it is wonderful, isn't it?"
"It makes you feel," Gloria helped, "that we live in an awfully small world, knocking our heads against television aerials over one paltry little man."
Laura laughed. "Paltry is hardly the word. But maybe we have paltry heads. Maybe that's why they knock so easily."
"I never thought of that," Gloria told her. "I'm glad I never thought of that. It's rather depressing."
"I'm stupid to say this," Laura relinquished her firm self-control, "but often, when I come someplace very lovely, and enjoy it, like here and now, I hate Christopher's not being with me. It's as though I'm enjoying it one-half as much as I could. And knowing about the other half really makes it worse than nothing. I'm sorry to say this," she quickly added. "I don't mean to punish you with my marital problems," and her voice was sarcastic, "all week."
Don't try so hard, Gloria wanted to say. Don't think for a minute that just because you're not screaming like a mad-woman, I don't know you're suffering. Instead she said, "Laura, please don't be too brave with me. That's only thing that really horrifies me-your bravery."
"But you never tell me what you're thinking or going through," Laura admonished, "I know something's terribly wrong with you now, but you'll never say a word about it."
"Believe me," Gloria hastily interposed, "there's nothing I could say. I'm going through something, but I'll get out to the other side. Only I'll never be able to discuss it. No one, and here I go being original, would understand."
Laura sat looking at her, and there was a fortunate interruption to rescue them. A very energetic man sat down next to them. He was one of the island "regulars," and both women knew him from last year, and the year before, and the year before that.
"Babies," he greeted them, and wasted no time, "Are you coming to Leon's party?"
He wrote the gags for a leading TV comedian, but he was disastrously unfunny in his life. Probably the comedian was unfunny too, but nobody ever listened to him. The island was filled with people who created the mass mediums, and nobody listened to another's product.
"Yes, Gregory," Laura answered. "We'll be at Leon's."
He was a bit disappointed. He would have liked, for once, to be invited to a party that didn't include everyone he knew. He would have liked to feign naive dismay if Laura had said, "What party?" But he settled to their being invited, and decided to treat them as one of the accepted.
"He's going to have a terrific bongo player there"
Laura continued the conversation, but Gloria stared at the water as the boat started to move, and arched into the bay.
There was still an hour's sun when they pulled to shore. Along the small wooden docks, a handful of women who spent their week on the island were waving to the boat and calling out names. A redhead named Peggy had a lei around her neck, and she was swaying to unheard Hawaian chants. She had a few empty glasses and a pitcher of martinis in her hands, ready to serve the weary travelers. So the weekened was begun, and Peggy was a distant cry from Circe. But then, anyone who got on the island could get off, and they generally did.
Laura and Gloria walked the wooden boards to Laura's small cottage. It was a pleasant, simply built structure. They quickly stripped off their shoes and stockings, skirts and shirts, and stepped into brief winter-packed bathing suits. They threw thin cotton jackets over their shoulders, and rushed to the sea.
Gloria almost wanted to cry when she saw the vital waves breaking on the shore. She wanted to weep at the beauty she could not live with; or swim far out beyond the waves and stay there until she knew she would live without ever forgetting them. Which would be never. Her mind could not contain her sick need to be smothered in unloving arms.
The water was chilling on her naked back and stomach. She swam hard, but the waves knocked her back to the shore. Her mind emptied for the activity of her limbs, as she forced her body against a too-strong mother. No, the sea would nurse no one. They left the water together, and stretched out on the sand. Gloria's fingers wet the cigarette that she freed from the pack, but the match ignited the tobacco. The salt water dripped from her hair across her face, and down into the channel of her breasts. The cold, bracing water had made her breasts hard and round under her suit, and she could feel the nipples abrasive against the cloth.
"Come on," Laura urged. "We'll be late for the party."
"Oh boy," Gloria mocked. "Imagine being late for one of Leon's parties. I don't think I could live through it."
"I just want to have a few drinks and be in a room with lots of people," Laura explained.
They had a few bottles of cold beer, and changed into long, tight, dark pants and sleeveless sweaters. Their faces sparkled with artificial health. It was already darkening when they reached the door of Leon's cottage.
Gloria accepted a drink and sat down to talk with some of last year's friends. A few of them had been divorced, and a few had been married. Next year, roles would be reversed-Nothing had happened, but they were all filled with the importance of the winter's events. She took another drink.
The evening went on, and she got drunker and drunker, till she thought it might be a good idea to pick up a big fat book and break all the glasses in all the hands in the room. She was searching for the right book when a young man walked over to her and said, "I think your glass is empty."
"Wouldn't that be a tragedy."
"Would you like another drink?" he asked.
"No," she said. "As a matter-of-fact, I'd like something to eat. I haven't had anything all day."
"Wait here a minute," he told her.
She forgot him, till he reappeared and took her by the elbow.
"I've got a few ham sandwiches in my pockets," he whispered. "But let's get out of here and eat them on the beach." The smoke in the room was getting thick as rubber, and she was happy to leave.
They walked quietly to the water, and she saw the modest sand dunes rising in front of them.
"Love among the dunes," she sang.
He said, "What?"
"Could I have the sandwich now," she said. "I'm very hungry."
"Oh, sure," he agreed. "I'm sorry."
She bit voraciously into the bread, but as soon as she started to chew, she discovered the dryness of her throat, and with terror could not swallow.
"What's the matter," he asked.
She spit the bread out. "Sorry, my throat is like parchment."
"Wait here," he said again, and disappeared into a house.
She heard the waves dashing on the other side of the dunes, and he was back in an instant with two bottles of beer and his raincoat.
"Better to sit on," he explained, pointing to the coat.
"You think of everything."
He stopped and looked at her for a while, with his sympathetic and knowing eyes. Then he said, "Take it easy."
"What do you mean?" Gloria countered, feeling stupid for her sarcasm.
"You know baby, I'm not going to rape you."
"That's my problem," she told him.
He was quite wise. "A lot of people have that problem. But I don't rape women. I make them share the responsibility."
"You have a point," she nodded to him.
He spread his coat, and they sat down, protected by a softly sloping sand dune. She bit the sandwich hungrily and took great gulps of the bottled beer.
"You forget to eat in the big city, don't you?" he asked.
"You forget to live," she laughed.
"Where are you from?" he questioned.
Here we go around the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
"Kansas City."
He studied her. "You like New York?"
"New York is New York," she explained. "You make your own New York."
"You shouldn't stay here," he said.
"That's what they told me in Kansas City."
"They were wrong." He was very sure of himself. "New York is a tough city."
"Everywhere is tough. First of all we live in our own bodies with our own twisted heads. The same things would happen to me anywhere I lived"
"There are more rules in Kansas City," he explained. "Sometimes it's convenient to have a lot of rules."
She put her head in her hands. God was he going to depress her. Was he going to tell her to take care of herself, and what 'was best for her, and then fuck her.
"Do I remind you of your sister, or mother," she said acidly.
"No," he told her. "Not at all."
"Would you like to fuck me?"
He paused, and the sea's phosphorescence made a straight green line.
"No," he answered. "Not particularly."
"What are you, gay or something?"
"Why do you fight so hard," he asked.
"I'd just rather fuck than be analyzed," she explained.
"Is every word two people exchange analysis?"
She pressed her body into the sand. Her invitation and his quiet refusal mortified her, and she felt foolish tears coming into her eyes. Oh Christ, now to cry in front of him.
"Don't feel so bad," he advised. "I don't think I've won the first round."
"You should have just fucked me," she said.
"Would you have felt better?" he asked.
"Much," she answered. "Much much better," and this time she was sobbing.
Then he leaned over, and curiously, gently, inexplicably, kissed her. It felt like her first kiss. His mouth cushioned hers with young sensitivity. She gasped with a mixture of pleasure and surprise. He did not speak another word to her. His mouth traveled down to her neck, and found the shaded hollow of her delicate bones. He pressed against her throat as though he would transfuse his blood and life into her. Then he returned to her mouth and lingered there, moving his tongue exploringly against the soft inner flesh of her cheeks.
His mouth played long and soft on hers, until she felt that she was moving her head in slow rapturous movements against the sun, an infinitely warm and patient nourishment. His mouth sapped her and he moved noiselessly to remove her sweater and matador pants and thin nylon underclothes. She lay, stretched out and sacrificed in the sand. She had rolled off his coat, and the sand was damp and cool and granular against her buttocks. Over his shoulders she could see the stars, spaced and cold-The moon was white, like a winter's moon, and imperfectly round. Somewhere in space an edge of the moon turned more to the sun than to earth.
The black sky filtered into her soul. But miraculously it reassured her that time was hers. She could stretch time beyond the bounds of eternity. The sea, smacking the shore, understood her restless struggle. The sea was tireless in it erosion of the basin it rested within-and it promised her the faith of motion, to wear away earth's containers.
The boy's head was magnificent, silhouetted by the white moon. His head comforted her and explained, "Though we are human, we are sometimes divine." He looked with adoration at her breasts, light and sharp in the night air. He circled her nipple with his lips. He sucked ravenously at the firm tit, sending shivers of terror and glory along her spine. His hand reached for her godhead, and his mouth and fingers kept the same magical rhythm. Then he moved his head to her thighs and pressed his tongue into her flowing sex. She did not touch him, but ground herself into the sand, enslaved by his controlled caresses. He pierced her taut clitoris and ran his teeth over the throbbing pit. She cried for mercy and for more ... but he did not hear her, intent on his sensuous worship. Her body shivered with the swiftly moving sensations, melting with the heat, then rigid with chills. She wanted to, but could not touch him. Her skin felt a prickly bloodless chill. His tongue was searching deep within her womb, proving that her body's privacy was a chimera, that she belonged to man; denying her retreat, exposing her with his insistent unhurried command. She revelled in the humiliation, waiting only to be taken.
"Drain me," she cried. "Let it all out of me. Drain me."
His palms cupped her buttocks and pulled her against him. She was wet and exposed, muscleless and boneless. She sank into him, rotating her hips in sensuous accord. Then his body was full on hers, and he released his thick, virile erection. She wanted to take his rock-like penis into her hands, but hadn't the strength or courage to initiate a gesture.
He thrust his prick into the center of her heat and energy. It pushed massive and tight in her black eternal secret. Feeling it safe and belonging in her core, she reached her arms around him, timid in her tenderness, and pinned him close, pressing him to her chest. It was the first time that she had clung lovingly to a man. He enabled her at last to be the initiated virgin. Her thighs were spread wide on the sand to make his entry effortless. Be at rest in me, she whispered, be at rest in me.
He lifted his torso to the full length of his potent prick, and sank back into her. With his first full thrust she throbbed the tremendous urge that became an orgasm. He did not move then, but let her release her convulsive triumph against his maleness. Then she felt free and light under him. Free to love with abandon the remainder of the sea-and-sperm-drenched night.
His strong body pulled her hips against his and he slapped their bellies together, moving primor-dially, letting her have it all and give it all. His prick was swollen with love within her, and he ponderously, insanely vibrated it in her flowing cunt. She bent her knees and grasped his middle body with her legs, locking her ankles together and firmly attaching him to her. Their bodies rocked in the curve of a demented human cradle. His vital flesh was rubbing ponderously against the small stiff source of her sensation. With each long contact, a turmoil of ecstasy sped through her body-The small knot in her tightened, became a steel puzzle, and then he quickened his motion, feverishly offering it life. A light, clear and crystal, striped the heavens, and the wires snapped. They palpitated, bodies sucking in and out, and came.
He fell emptied at her side, and she lay breathing deeply and staring at the sky. The tears had again gathered and they were pocketed in the corner of her eyes. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. They still did not speak, but inhaled the cigarettes deeply, remembering the life apart from their bodies. She turned on her side to him and kissed his hair and mouth and neck and throbbing heart. She could only thank him without words. Staring down at this motionless body, she felt the passion rise within her. But this time, he offered his inert form to her. She unbuttoned his light summer shirt and lifted it from his heavy arms pulling out from behind him. He was naked under the shirt, and his chest skin was soft and tight against his rib bones. She quickly pulled his trousers and tugged at the cuffs till they were slipped in one movement off his body. He lay naked, white as pumice stone in the night's sun. She sat cross-legged beside him, and then bent her head as if in prayer. She caught his stiff young rod in her mouth and bowed her head to it until her forehead brushed his pubic hairs. She gluttonously sucked him, revelling in her possession. He shuddered his excitement, and, beneath her head, his hips jumped. Her mouth was as ruthless as his had been. She tongued the smooth, tight-skinned rod, and fingered the heavy potent sacs beneath. He crushed her head against his middle and twisted with a fury that begged for more. The penis pressed the back of her palate, and she released her hands to let them wander over his flatly muscled chest. Her hair spread and blanketed his loins, and finally her mouth wandered, tasting his thighs and stomach, and the delicate stretch of flesh that bridged his virility to his midriff. His rod pointed to the moon, and now he did not touch her, as she had not touched him before. He moved to turn her on her back, but she motioned "no" to him. Wordlessly, she lifted her hips and lowered herself squarely onto his upraised prick. He sank up into her with a wet sucking sound. She sat high on him and pressed violently, rooted to him and the earth beneath them. In her excitement, she could not rotate with the smooth flawless thrusts he had inflicted upon her. Her movements were erratic, like a maddened woman grasped with frenzied religion. She pumped clumsily and brutally on his prick till the waves of heat in her groin made her unconscious of her motion. She felt herself reaching her climax too soon. It was always too soon, but now she wanted to delay it for eternity. She sat high and still on him, but the involuntary spasms had begun and they traveled to her clitoris and exhausted themselves there. Her hidden insides drummed and palpitated on his indestructible erection. She gasped with delirium and suddenly felt remote and separate, sitting distant and untouched on his hips. With the unerring communication of love, he lowered her to his chest, and she rested against his cool skin. He lifted her skillfully onto her back and was on her with his unspent vigor. First he moved in slow, long thrusts, then they both surrendered to a primitive unlearned tempo and pounded mercilessly against each other. Her body succumbed to the shock of completion, and she knew that she was screaming into the silent night. They were still then, pulsating their fluids into each other's interlocked body.
Gloria heard him stirring and opened her eyes to the reddening dawn. The water was deep green, and the sands a quiet grey. The sky streaked over with purple and yellow and pink lights. He looked at his watch and spoke for the first time since she had asked him to fuck her.
"It's six o'clock," he said.
She stared at the heavens and did not answer. So there would have to be today and tomorrow.
"I must go," he added. "I have to catch the seven o'clock boat to shore."
She turned eyes of yearning towards him.
"I'm sorry," he whispered gently. "But I have to leave New York tomorrow."
Somehow she had known he was a moment, a moment to show her that beyond the rapist there would be a life for her.
"I have to go to Colorado," he explained. "You see, I teach there."
It was really all right, his going; she had something else to do. But her body was hungry in the filtered morning light, and she wanted him to take her once more. He would not. Instinctively she accepted that they would have only this past evening together. It was the promise, not the fulfillment of her life.
"I would ask you to come with me," he said. "No," she answered. "I can't come yet"
"Why must you stay?"
"There is something I must do"
"Something from out of the past?"
"Yes."
"You're wrong. You're wrong to live in the past. Live in the present, for now and possibly for tomorrow."
"My past creates my now," she explained.
"No. Not to undo it, not to avenge it."
"My past is my present. My past is now."
"I'm sorry," he said, and he got up and moved to retrieve his clothes. She lay naked and watched him. He was a young God. His penis, slack against his thigh, made him unknown and innocent in the warm morning. He buckled his belt and pulled his shirt over his head. He was barefoot, and he folded the coat over his arm. He smiled down at her. She wanted to cry her love and finally managed her first sacrifice. "Thank you," she told him. "Thank you my darling."
He bent down and kissed her. "Thank both of us," he explained, and was over the sand dune and invisible within a moment.
She breathed the marvelous breath of contentment. Her body radiated its youth. The sea still beat tirelessly against the washed shore. The beach was empty and virginal. She sank into the sand with each step toward the water and then, offering her chest first she swam beyond the waves. The salt stung her body and awakened her into a world of voluptuous promise. Her hair fanned the ocean.
It will be good when I kill him, she pondered, like a young saint. I'm ready to be born again-She wept noiselessly into the huge salty sea, adding her tears to the immense reservoir of earth.
CHAPTER TEN
Gloria rested three days on Fire Island. Rested in that she did not think constantly of the rapist, the eternal source of her fatigue. She went to cocktail parties with Laura at five every afternoon. Laura was being pathologically gay, and Gloria escaped from her in the impersonal currents of the ocean.
She avoided the arm-in-arm lovers and walked in the direction of the sea. The eternal comforter. She started along the water, one foot in the water, the other on the sand. Up ahead she could see a bright blazing fire. It made the sky it did not touch look blacker, and instinctively she moved toward it.
When she was close to the fire she could hear a low soft chant, and she saw a huge pale edifice that she could not distinguish. Closer she saw that it was an enormous papier mache penis, at least ten feet long and three feet around. Below the fantastic prick, where the testicles should have been, were two hanging balls on which were sketched grinning faces. In the spasmodic flame's glow, she counted twenty sprawled and naked bodies. They grew silent as she approached.
"We're having a bacchanal," a loud voice announced to her.
"Good," she responded, "I'm just in the mood."
"If you worship the invincible god Dionysos, you may join us," a thick naked man intoned.
"I am a converted believer," Gloria played back.
The twenty bodies seemed to sigh relief.
"Remove your filthy encumbering garments," the man ordered. "Dionysos despises modesty."
"My clothes offend me," Gloria agreed, and she opened the side of her pants, then pulled the trousers over her ankles. Her belly gleamed pink in the glow of the fire; her legs, blackened by the sun, blended with the dark night. Her torso floated to them over the flames.
"Bare your breasts," the voice continued-"Stand before us as the God Dionysos wishes man to be."
She tugged at her black sweater, unsnapped her tissue thin brassiere. Her breasts were heavy circles in the evening air. They curved skyward with the pride of a savage woman's. The voices approved of the fullness and succulency of her exposed body.
"Our God welcomes you, and invites you to sit and be one of us."
Gloria sat close to the fire warming her front. Her eyes, accustomed to the dark, outlined a young blonde girl across from her, who was staring at Gloria in admiration.
A thin boy with an enormous prick got to his feet and held a flute before his lips. He blew a thinly melodious song, and three women undulated to the faint rhythm; they pumped their hips and buttocks and bosoms in burlesque obscenity, finally embracing and falling amorously to the sand. Gloria's body lusted for a month to find her emptiness. She sat and listened to the reedy music, then a bored girl interrupted.
"Really this is pretty dull stuff. I can't believe the Greeks worshipped like this."
"Be quiet, non-beliver," the leader shouted.
"Well what did we take all our clothes off for? It's too late to get a sunburn."
"Have faith," the boy urged, "the fun hasn't begun yet."
"The fun never begins. I'm sick and tired of this elaborate fun. I get so tense waiting to have a good time that I'm completely neurotic and miserable when something amusing does happen."
"I have prepared a little game for this evening's prayers," the leader announced.
"Oh goodie, games," somebody mocked.
"This game is called blind man's bluff."
"You're kidding."
"With a slight twist," the leader amended.
"How can you twist blind man's bluff? It was considered passe in kindergarten."
"The blind man will be blindfolded."
"You really have this game down pat, don't you."
"We will all run in a circle around him"
"I don't think I could stand that much fun"
"The person he catches," the boy continued, "be it man, woman, child, dog (do we have any dogs here?) will have to fuck the blind man."
They were all studiously silent for a moment. "Splendid," a voice shouted. "Leader you are a genius-That's a splendid game. What a twist! No wonder we didn't appreciate it in kindergarten."
"There is another condition," the spokesman continued.
They were all eager to begin.
"It is the task of the victim, in case of differences in taste or sex, to stimulate the blind man to a generous unstinted fuck. The victim must abide by the preferences of the blind man"
"Wonderful, wonderful," they declared. "Let's begin now ... immediately. Who's first blind man?"
The flutist lilted a merry tune, and they clapped their hands like obedient children ready to play.
"I choose Henry as the first blind man," the leader announced with elected authority.
There was a gasp of surprise from a small brunette girl. "Now Paula," Henry warned.
Henry walked to the center, near the fire. He was ludicrously tall and skinny, and completely naked, except for a brush of hair on his chin and head and middle. He wore thick glasses which gave him, from the chin up, a very dressed appearance. One expected him to gravely tip a black derby.
The leader moved to tie a red and white polka dot handkerchief across Henry's eyes. Henry's glasses interferred with the operation, and his wife said, "Why don't you just take off his glasses. I asure you he'll be quite blind."
"Why don't you stop assuring people and keep quite quiet," her husband insisted. But his voice was hurt, her barb had connected.
The blind man tripped away from the fire, his arms outstretched, cutting the empty but shrieking space around him. Gloria did not move from her position on the sand. She pulled her arm-wrapped knees against her chest and sat watching the bacchanal. Suddenly the blind man whirled about and caught a girl by her Shoulders. He held to her firmly as the leader removed the blindfold and handed him his thick-rimmed glasses. He hastily stuck the eyeglasses on his nose and looked at his prize. He grunted in horror as he stared into the eyes of his benign wife. He was speechless for a few seconds and then he shouted at her.
"Well how in Christ's name did I know you were going to grab someone behind you?"
"Can't you ever sit down, I mean just sit down on the side and watch something. Do you always have to be in the middle of all the noise, in the middle of my god damn world?"
"I never see you on the sidelines," she retorted. And they stood glaring at each other.
They turned to the leader in unison. "We don't have to, do we? I mean, for crying out loud, we're married. Can't you make another rule, or give us another chance?"
The leader turned, for his answer, to the crowd. They shouted in accord, "THEY FUCK!"
"Okay Paula, do your tricks," the high priest ordered.
"Oh come off it," she pleaded in alarm.
"Look at your husband, madam," he advised.
There stood Henry. His hopeful immense erection had wilted like a sick plant on his leg.
"Husbands and wives shouldn't have to play. They certainly shouldn't have to fuck."
"Hey Paula," someone in the crowd shouted vulgarly, "Can't you even make your husband hot?"
"Sure I can," she retorted, "it's just such an effort." Then she decided to play the game. Her husband said, "Get on your knees in front of me and suck me. Shut up for two minutes."
Paula knelt in the sand, her head level with her husband's lax prick. She picked it up, fingering it critically and sighed, "Ain't I too lucky." From above her head, Henry reached back his arm and struck her brutally on the back of her neck. The girl glared back, shaken. Then she exposed her darting tongue and began to lick him on his inner thighs and the two unsmiling balls that hung beneath his tapered frightened prick. Gloria could clearly see the pink tongue outlining a circle around his maleness. Henry's rod, with ageless response, trembled and started its urgent ascent-Her head moved busily at his hip, undulating before him. He looked down at her bowed head, and his prick took an important leap.
She at last took the tough member in her mouth and she sucked it eagerly, palming his sperm-packed sacs-The prick disappeared completely into her mouth. Her teeth were nipping it gently, and Henry groaned. She seemed intent and lost in her task. Gloria's mouth felt dry and jealous, her tongue unconsciously repeating Paula's devotions-Henry crushed his wife's head against him and moaned, "That's wonderful darling, that's wonderful darling." Paula, intent on his now rigid cock, could not lift her head to deflate his pleasure. Then Henry pushed her away from him and said, "Get on your hands and knees with your back to me."
"What!" she exclaimed.
His face was livid with his passion and the reflection of the glowing fire. "Go ahead, you heard me.
"You wouldn't dare do this to me in private," she complained.
He hit her again and she fell to her flat palms, lifting her bottom to his scrutiny. Now he bent his head to her hair-cushioned vault. From behind her, he pulled her legs apart and sniffed his head closer. She looked like a chicken, wings pulled apart, being searched for the white meat-His rod was sailing ponderously before him. Paula's hair matted the sand. She was not prepared for the violent push into her sex, and screamed out. But he was having her at last in the position her arrogance denied. Gloria watched the huge white prick sucking in and out of the quicksand hole. As big as it got, the elastic hole could absorb more. His chin dug high in his wife's shoulder, and he rocked violently against her. Gloria's vagina burned with sympathy and envy. She reached down and rubbed some sand against the inflamed membranes.
The husband and wife were oblivious to the panting faces around them. They riveted against each other for completion, moving frantically and often dropping to the sand. His entire penis could not be seen now, only the hair planted root. "Come," he urged her. "Come baby, come"
"Yes, yes, yes, yes," her body twitched, planted awkwardly in the sand. At her first automatic reflex, the husband quickened and deepened his thrusts, and geysered into her. She fell to the ground, and he sprawled on top of the shaking form, covering her with his long thin bearded body. The audience was silent. When she could finally speak, she said:
"We should do this more often in public. You really improve." And they hated each other again.
The crowd burst out its enthusiasm. "The next blind man, hurry pick somebody."
"Paula," the leader anounced, "in the best tradition of blind man's bluff, will now be blind man."
"That's not fair," a girl exclaimed. "She'll get fucked twice."
"No alarm, kitten," he soothed, "we'll all get in twice."
"Well," a girl next to Gloria whispered, "I think it's just as much of a kick to watch." Gloria looked at her as if she were insane.
"Don't you think so?" the girl questioned.
"No I don't," Gloria replied flatly.
Paula stood naked, the bandage over her eyes. Her squat body rotated in circles. She held her arms before her, searching for a victim. Her husband lay spent and curious in a far corner of the circle Paula stumbled blindly, and reached down to a motionless figure on the sand.
"You are my victim," she announced.
A very drunk boy was picked. He looked up at her and said, "Baby we are all your victims."
The high priest removed Paula's blindfold, and she studied her to-be lover.
"Jenkins," the joy was in her voice, "I knew I'd catch you someday."
"Someday," the girl next to Gloria echoed, "she's surer than guided missiles at getting Jenkins."
Jenkins weaved out toward the center of the group. He could not stand upright for too long. He had a substantial erection that did not seem to interest him at all.
"Stimulate me," Paula demanded.
"The day you need stimulation, kid," he told her "I might get a little stimulated." He hiccupped his boredom and drunkenness.
Then, with a flying lunge, he caught her by the knees and knocked her sprawling on the sand. Without pause or caress, he pried her vagina, getting his cock in with one precise gesture. The girl moaned. Jenkins pulled her legs tight around his hips, and raised her body till she was propped on her head and shoulders. He methodically and ruthlessly pumped her. Gloria could see the juices dampening the bed of sand under Paula's bottom. Her husband, still in his corner, watched them with hot eyes.
Jenkins shot in and out of her, treating her like an accidental depression in the sand. The girl writhed under his pounding, screaming his name with abandoned adoration. Up and down he went, and from behind them Gloria could see his tossing ass and then a glimpse of his knocking balls and the thick wet rod that he threw into her. With each push, Gloria could feel her teeth shake in her head. She was rubbing her starved clitoris to the boy's masterful rhythm. Paula shuddered, her legs and arms flung out with the gesture of a wounded deer. The boy pulled out of her at that instant, and with a drunken laugh, freed his sperm in a curved fountain onto her quivering stomach.
"No babies today," he roared. "Just some old-fashioned sanitary fucking."
The girl was still on the sand. Her husband studied her with contempt. She dragged quietly to a darkened area. Far from the fire, they heard her whimpering.
Jenkins couldn't get up to be blindfolded. He stretched out, not fully conscious. But according to the rules, the high priest bandaged him and demanded that he choose a victim. The boy tried to stagger to his feet, and they all laughed watching him. A few of the viewers ran about him. Gloria sat motionless on the sand, hugging her knees and exposing the ridges of her wet flesh. Jenkins tripped over the blonde girl who had stared at Gloria when Gloria had removed her clothes.
"He has a victim," they all shouted, eager to see how he would rise to the demands of carnality. But Jenkins sprawled across the girl's slim figure, was motionless. He was now completely unconscious. They stared in dismay at the hopeless mound of bodies. The leader stood up. "The victim, in this case, will have to become the blind man."
"Yes," there was immediate agreement and relief that the game would continue unabated. The blonde girl was quickly blindfolded. She waved her arms before her, chanting, "Who will be my victim?" Gloria studied the sand; it was running with her streamed passion. Her head fell to her cushioning arm, and at that moment, she felt hands lightly tapping her shoulder. "You are my victim," the girl cried.
When her blindfold was removed, she looked at Gloria and smiled into her eyes. It was obviously not by chance that the victim had been found. "Come into the center of the ring," the girl insisted. Gloria stood up on her feet, and was surprised at her own trembling.
"What do I do with you," she implored. "I don't know what to do with a woman."
"Just do as I tell you," the girl calmed her. "I have no parts you don't have, no secrets. There's nothing to be afraid of."
They stood exposed in the light of the fire, the audience delighted that the two girls would be the next lovers. The blonde girl stared at Gloria and addressed her. "Reach out and touch my breasts."
Gloria was standing directly facing her lover. They were about a foot apart. She cautiously put her hands before her, and closing her eyes, she cupped the girl's full globes. Her body heated with alarm. The breasts were soft, soft but firm in their shape. The girl reached over and put her hands on Gloria's erect breasts. The hands were gentle, a woman's hands. It was as if Gloria were performing before an enchanted mirror.
"Now do whatever I do," the girl commanded. She freed three of her fingers from the round throbbing flesh, and delicately pinched the hard nipples. Gloria looked down at her body, watching the tits in erected obedience. The warmth was radiating to her vagina. She timidly, then hungrily, fingered her double's rosy resistant tips, realizing that she controlled her own experience. As hard as she pinched and pressed, the pressure on her own singing breasts responded. It was magic, and she kneaded the girl with liberty, forgetting the staring fire-lit faces. The blonde girl clasped Gloria's head and pulled it toward her. She pressed soft lips against parched lips. The woman's mouth was softer and more insinuating than any man's had been. She bit her lips and struggled with tenderness to the dark blood-tasting tissues within. For a long moment the girl chewed her mouth, fingering her nipples, till Gloria lost cognizance of which was her lover, and which herself. They lowered themselves to the sand.
The girl's head was at Gloria's thighs, and Gloria balanced the position. They formed a white oval on the sand. The girl scissored her head between Gloria's loins, and Gloria did the same. Then she felt a tongue, maybe her own, pierce her clotted passion. The tongue and mouth and teeth gnawed at her core. With fear, Gloria darted her tongue into the girl's offered opening. Her mouth found the hard button of sensation. So this was her taste. So this was the musk and dampness that she thought she could never know, as mysteriously to her as it was revealed to the men who possessed her. She dug eagerly into the soaking membranes, and heard herself groan.
She adored her reflection. Then she felt the tension mounting, like one brick pressed on top another, in her now familiar vault. Her own tongue urged and nuzzled her completion. Her body writhed with the first mighty contraction, and she felt the little knot in her mouth throb. The orgasm waved out of her, and the cunt around her tongue expired like a bleeding artery. Then the girls fell apart.
They lay obscenely splayed in the sand. Gloria felt the blonde girl rise and walk back into the dark. Alone she was offered to the stranger's eyes.
The high priest approached her exhausted form and helped her to stand. "Now you must find your victim," he told her. She stood subservient before her. He tied the bandage over her eyes. It was more stranger than she had anticipated, to be blind, with the fire first warm on her back then on the tense trembling breasts.
She reached her arms into the unseen and heard the taunting of near voices. She circled in the hot dark, sometimes tripping to her knees, as she searched for a victim.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when she opened her eyes in the small cottage bedroom. She knew, once awake, that she would catch the five o'clock boat to New York. She wished herself in the city now, searching the streets for him. The evening's bacchanal made his death urgent-She would turn into a twisting animal if the poison he had deposited in her could not seep out with his spattered blood.
She slipped into her bathing suit. There would be time for a fast swim, then she'd pack and shower, and by nine she would be home. She hurried out to the beach and found Laura sitting on a blanket with three other bridge players. They were waiting for a bid and had been silent for the past five minutes. Gloria's presence changed the electricity in the patient air, and they all looked at her with annoyance. Laura smiled and said accusingly, "I hear there was quite a party on the beach last night."
"Yes," one of the players pulled her eyes from the cards, "tales of nudity and strange religious rites."
"I wouldn't know," Gloria lied, "I just woke up."
Laura regarded her strangely. "You look like the unkissed sleeping beauty."
"I'm going back to the city today," Gloria announced.
"Must you?"
"Yes, there's something I forgot to attend to."
Laura remembered her breeding and did not press. "Come out again if you can. I'll probably be here all of next week."
"Thank you," Gloria said, "I had a good rest."
"You look like hell," Laura suppressed a laugh. "If you see Christopher and his concubine don't give him my regards. Tell him I never mention his name."
"All right."
"Say it in such a way that he comes running out here to get me. Hint that big things are happening, if he doesn't hurry he'll be too late."
"All right," Gloria repeated, and looked away from Laura's painfully of-course-I'm-not-being-serious face.
"I've been pretty good about Christopher, haven't I? I mean, I've been living in spite of all kinds of preferences."
"Splendid," Gloria told her. "I hope you get what you want from him." Her tone gave it importance. Laura looked away with embarrassment and quickly bid.
"You're all right Gloria, aren't you?"
Gloria felt a burst of pain in her brutally used cunt.
"I'll be all right," she promised Laura.
She walked to the sea and stood at the edge of the water. She muttered a pagan incantation to the sea. "Lead me to him tonight. I can go no further. Help me, I pray to you." Then she dived into the divinity's breast, and floated far out.
The boat left sharply at six, and it chugged across the inlet, managing to take one and a half tense hours before it docked at Amityville. The slow painful voyage induced a stupor in Gloria, and she sat on the top deck with an unseen book in her lap. She caught the seven o'clock train at Amityville and reached Pennsylvania Station at a quarter past eight.
Gloria unlocked the door of her partment and entered the silent rooms. The night pressed black through the transparent curtains. There was a sterile order in the flat, except for a lisptick-rimmed coffee cup left on the kitchen table. The order oppressed Gloria and she opened the cupboard and took out a bottle of Ballantine's scotch. She poured some generously into a glass, and took a deep drink of the burning liquid. Her mouth stung, and she held the scotch in her puffed cheeks until is was warm enough to slide down her throat. She walked to the water tap and diluted the liquor with a third of water. Then she sat on the couch, smoking and drinking slowly, inspecting her latest painting. The canvas was a streaking of blues and dull flat greys. The colors moved in and out with a futile energy. She stared at the painting with distaste, wondering if it was better to do nothing, or something unimportant.
She hadn't realized, during her hours of work, how trivial the final product would be. All her life Gloria had had a faith in her world, in her ideas, in her talent. When she was five years old, she had taken a black crayon on a black farmhouse hidden in a field of black corn. Her mother had shown the picture to Gloria's father, and that moment her parents concurred that she was an artist. It was comfortable to have an identity. The rapist had crushed that identity. She would have it back. She would have him back for one half an hour, that was all she needed; one half an hour.
She left the house and walked lonely in the summernight streets. It had to be that evening. Time denied an egress. She could not contain or stay her desperation with another impersonal nameless fuck. She had to find him to return his hate. She was a vessel in which he had carelessly deposited his soul, and it choked hers. She was a frozen star, circling his mysterious orbit, and something profound and undeniable in nature would take her back to him.
Third Street was filled with pushing tourists. The men balanced wide-brimmed hats that would have been suicide on Madison Avenue. The women still wore flower print silk dresses, all the same cut and pattern. They must all have been seduced by the same "what to wear in New York" ad.
Some soldiers jostled her and a southern corporal drawled, "Baby ahm just a lonely boy lost in the big city." His buddies laughed uproariously at his witty courage, and Gloria knew with nausea that she had to get off the streets.
She went into the dark club where dedicated jazz musicians went to play after hours. Climbing down the steep narrow steps she could hear a trumpet playing with "Melancholy Baby." She sat down at a round table for two, and asked the waiter to bring her bottled beer. He brought it to her and took the opener out of his dirty apron, snapped the top of the bottle and pocketed the bottle cap. The piano was alone now, dancers were clinging to each other on the tiny floor, guided away from the bordering tables.
She lifted the beer to her lips and the trumpet wailed for her attention. She looked over the rim of the glass at the slightly elevated bandstand. He was there, whispering into the trumpet. She finished a long, cool, thirst-quenching drink.
She recognized him in a distracted casual glance. The same white eyes flickered expressionlessly over the dancers.
His shoulders, clothed in the dark jacket, hovered over the brass trumpet, protecting it from the smoke packed room.
Sitting alone at a minute table placed at the foot of the low platform was a pale young girl. She had long fair hair and the detached melancholy stare of an addict. She moved imperceptibly to the music, and smiled secret smiles as if she were receiving coy messages in the melody. Messages reserved for opiate ears. The rapist nodded curtly to the remote girl, and the girl made a responsive motion toward him that was not physical. Her spirit leapt, in a movement, to return his nod. So he had a woman who waited for him. He took her home after the last set, and if they weren't too high they fucked.
"You're going to die tonight, Gloria messaged to him. Blow a dirge, blow taps for yourself. She didn't know how she would get to him, but he would die tonight.
A boy with a busy tweed jacket pulled at the rapist's sleeve, and the musician lowered his ear to the customer. A request for "The Lady is a Tramp" The rapist motioned to the piano player, and they decided on a key.
She tried to fully feel his presence, the long hunt rewarded, but she sat calmly, thinking they had made an appointment that he must acknowledge. When the band finished playing, "The Lady is a Tramp," they scraped back their chairs and took cigarettes out of their pockets. Time for a break. A few young boys in the club dashed to the platform to play the idle instruments. The rapist walked toward the fair girl. Gloria got up from her table and discreetly blocked his way.
"Don't musicians dance too," she smiled. The invitation was exposed with her teeth.
"Yeah kid, musicians dance." The customer was always there. He put his arms around her and led her onto the small dance floor. The pale girl looked at them casually. She was accustomed to the rapist not reaching the table. Gloria felt a great rest, leaning against his chest. She had never really been anywhere else. The rapist looked over his shoulder and directed her effortlessly. She could tell by the uninspired movements that he was annoyed. Sometimes she thought he would not take the next step, just let his arms drop wearily to his side and walk off the floor.
"Not bad," he commented, and she turned a-round to see that he was staring at the flared hips of a neighboring redhead. The redhead was clinging to her partner. Gloria tightened her grip on the rapist.
"What time do you finish work?" He remembered that she was there. "Two o'clock."
"What do you do when you leave?"
"I go home, baby."
"Do you live in New York?" She was asking all the insipid questions that the eager-to-be-friends ask.
"No," he had answered that too often. "I make it in Chicago."
"How long will you be in New York?"
"The band cuts to Ohio tomorrow," he volunteered.
Without you, she thought. You're going to be stuck in New York.
"Ever been to New York before?" she questioned.
"About a month ago," he supplied.
"Been here before that?"
"About thirty-six times."
He hates me, she thought.
"I live around the corner," she said.
"Crazy."
They were both silent after that. The dance would end and he would disappear. She moved closer to him, rubbing against his flat stomach.
"Not bad," he sighed. He was looking at the redhead.
"What do you do when you come to New York?" She wanted him to remember, for an instant, for a realized flash, that he had held her in his arms once before."
"I flip," he laughed, "I pick up, prowl and flip"
"Anything interesting happen to you last trip?"
"Nothing interesting ever happens to me baby. I'm a very uneventful cat" He loved himself, she could tell that. Well, she loved him too. Probably he could feel that. She remembered that this was a man who got his kick, even if he couldn't recall it, when he violated a woman. He despised her eager rubbing against his body. He had to iniate the attack, and then take the woman before she was ready. If there was time she would have played the game, created the illusion that he was chasing her. But there was no time for games. The game was up. She touched his pants. He was flat.
He glanced down at her. "What do you do?"
He was waiting for the dance to be over, but the unprofessional musicians didn't know how to end a number. They were afraid that if they stopped they'd never start again.
"I'm a painter," she replied.
"A painter," he was like lead in her arms. "What do you paint, chick, walls?"
She detested his banal humor. It would be too ignominious to kill him if he were a fool.
"Don't say stupidities," she warned him. He looked down at her with curiosity. "You take yourself pretty seriously."
"I'm a very serious woman."
He scoffed. "You all are, women are too much."
"Do you have much trouble with women?" her hand was on his groin, and the bump was shaping.
"I make out." He looked at the clinging redhead. "I make out"
The music rose to finish. Now now now.
"Look," she suggested. "I live right around the corner, why don't you come over now for a cup of coffee."
She wasn't his type. "I only get a fifteen minute break," he told her. What he meant was, no dice, not interested.
"I've got some new Chet Baker records," she was desperate, "they're terrific." He didn't answer and she added, "You can have them if you like."
He stopped on the dance floor and watched her. He found it interesting for a woman to be that much out of her mind. It didn't excite him but it was interesting. Too bad it wasn't the redhead.
"Great," he said, "let's go listen to your records."
Her heart suffused her throat. For a minute she couldn't reply. They were standing in the middle of the floor and the music had stopped. Other dancers were quietly waiting for the next number. They weren't conspicuous. "I'll get my bag," she told him. She walked to the table and looked into her purse. The knife was there. He was waiting at the entrance and they walked up the stair out into the street.
When they, got to the door of her house, she turned to him and said, "Ever been here before?"
"I don't know baby," he responded. "I never know where I am in New York."
She wanted him to remember. "You must know people in the neighborhood. A lot of musicians live around here. A lot of kids from Chicago too." He turned the knob and let her into the hall.
"It looks familiar," he helped her. "But all the pads in New York look the same to me."
Nothing, nothing.
"The fourth."
Walking up the steps, she knew that she was not going to let him into her apartment. That wasn't the plan. The plan had been carefully made. She stood before her door, and dug into her pocketbook for the key.
"Christ," she complained, "I've lost the key."
He wanted to go through with it now. "Let me look for it," he offered. He reached for her purse.
"No, I remember now. I didn't lose it. I lent it to a friend. She must be in there now. Damn it, we can't disturb her."
"That's too bad," he really didn't care that much. "No Chet Baker," They walked down the steps together. In the hall she took her chance.
"Look, I have a kick, do you mind?"
He didn't understand. She put her arms around him and rubbed her mouth against his pale lips. She moved her head, caressing the sensitive mouth. She fingered the outline of his stiff prick.
"I'm sorry, it would have been fun." He looked at his watch He had ten minutes.
"Come back here," she urged him. "Here behind the stairs. No one ever comes in at this hour."
"You're a real flip," he said, but followed her to the small cave behind the stairway. She pressed him passionately against the wall. It was a performance. For the first time since he'd raped her, she wasn't hot. Her cunt was turned to ice.
He grabbed her breasts. The other time, he hadn't touched her body. Only her cunt. He was not a tender lover. He bit her mouth savagely, and his hate shot a flame of recovered excitement through her. She gasped against him.
"Do you remember," she begged. He could even save himself if he'd remember. "Have you been here before? Do you feel that you've been here before, like this, here with me?"
"I feel like I've been here all my life baby" He was hot and saying the expected thing. So he would die.
He lowered her to the floor. He was pulling her panties off over her hips. "Wait wait," she breathed, "cut them off me." He understood and with recollected skill slit the thin nylon bridge of her panties. Her black fur mound lifted to him.
"Now," she screamed, "now."
"Quiet baby, you'll wake the dead." Wake up the dead. That's what he was doing to her. She wouldn't be dead anymore when they finished. And he would never finish. He'd take the feel of her cunt to hell with him.
He kneeled between her legs. She was dizzy with the repeated nightmare. Had she moved, had he moved, since the rape a month ago? Or had he stayed, kneeling at her prostrate form, collecting his strength for the next assault?
She freed his penis, and it sprang to her, white and urgent. He pulled her knees apart and sank into her womb. She shouted her ecstasy, "Quiet," he warned her. But he was grinding hard, not hearing clearly. He had only five minutes, then he'd blow till two o'clock and smoke a joint and take the longhaired blonde home.
His flying body was saying to her, "Here, take it back. I give it to you back. Grab your sanity. Remember this fuck, remember it and finish it. Here, I'm breaking the gates, escape, run for freedom."
Her hidden sex was turgid. His prick boiled the juices inside her. She had the inflamed, don't-stop sob in her cunt. She started to babble, to beg his forgiveness for their death. "I must do it to you," she wept. "Forgive me, forgive me darling." His prick was hardening and he ripped faster into her. "I love you," she explained, "I love you my darling. I love you with all my hate. I hate you with all my love. I must give it back to you. Understand. Understand. I beg you, I beg you. I can never let you take it from me. I must give it. It must be mine, only mine, so that I can give it. Help me. Help me."
The spring snapped and the liberating contractions began. "Come, come," she implored. His prick swelled and the first spurt of sperm inundated her. He moaned, "Baby, baby, baby." He was helpless. She owned his last ecstasy. Her arms flung out as her limbs fought. Her fingers clenched the handle of his knife. The knife he had used to slit her pants. She clutched him in her arms, the knife free behind his back.
"Hold me my darling. Hold me my love. It's all right, you're safe. You're safe in my love" Obediently he pulled her closer. The final burst of his loins pumped to the head of his penis, and with an inhuman wail she sank the knife into him.
He lurched up, assisting the sharp blade. She felt his shirt rub the hilt of the knife. It could go no further, and he fell heavily against her. His eyes, expressionless in life, wore the hideous death stare of recognition. Had he known her or his death?
His body stretched motionless on top of her. He was dead. The last sated pulse of her orgasm was unfelt against his inert sex. Her mind stayed with them, enjoying simply the comforting weight of his corpse. She then rolled his body off her, onto its side. He was immediately, absolutely dead. Some of his blood brushed her thigh, and she was red beneath her sex. His eyes stared wide in frozen surprise. Her head began to ache and she stretched out next to his immobile body. She was ready to give him up.
The police would be convinced that it was a rape. "Brave girl," they'd say, and pat her on the back and offer her a lollypop. She turned her head and it brushed his rigid profile. Yes, she'd have to get up from the floor and call the police and cry out her contrived terror to them. Her body was languid in semi-sleep. She was so tired.
