House of Holes

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House of Holes Page 17

by Nicholson Baker


  “You don’t know this, Nedbody, but I just love sucking dick,” she said. “And you’ve got an unusually fine one, and I’m going to be very, very nice to it.” She closed her eyes again and smelled him and stroked him once. His hips moved, sending him toward her. She opened her mouth and felt him push against her tongue. She flattened her tongue out and slathered under his head, and each time she did his pelvis jerked, and that made her happy.

  She tried not to look up at his head, because his head wasn’t there, and she concentrated on his true self, which was his dick. She was grinding her muffin against the muscle just above his knee, and then she stood for a second because she wanted to be naked. She wondered if he could feel her breasts, and it seemed not too difficult to find out. He was lying with his hands at his sides. She lowered one of her breasts, and when his hand felt her nipple graze the sensitive skin in the middle of his palm his hips made another small jump.

  “You got me feeling pussyish, Nedbody,” she said, breathily. “Think with your asshole.” She grabbed his dick with one hand, and with her left hand she snookered a finger up his ass, and then she held her mouth still and began a slow, deliberate crescendo, jerking him off into her mouth. He raised his arms, and she saw his hands waving in the air in a little twirling dance of pelvis pleasure, and then both his fists clenched suddenly and she felt his asshole crunch. His stomach worked, and his hips rocked, and his legs flumped together, his knees knocking audibly, and she felt a hot jolt of manwater against the back of her throat. Then he trembled and subsided.

  “There you are,” she said, “you nice headless man. There you go. You stay right there, and I’m going to get my moment now. Wait.” She rode his thigh, looking at his spent cock and remembering how it had felt in her mouth, and she twizzled her riddler and moved back and forth on the wet slippery spot on his thigh, and finally she whispered, “Oh, Nedbody, here I come.” She clamped her legs around his thigh and came and came and came. Then she flung herself down on the bed next to him and laughed. Nedbody was asleep already, breathing quietly.

  Cardell Meets Betsy on the Beach

  Cardell knelt to study the footprint in the sand. In the air there was a deep-in-the-nose smell of ocean and seaweed and timeless things that have no name.

  The footprint was light and small—the print of a woman. He pressed his own foot into it and tried to imagine her firm footbone. He started following the footsteps, walking in them as much as he could.

  The beach curved back into a small bay where the House of Holes condominiums were, and as Cardell turned the corner he saw a distant figure wearing a hat. He increased his pace, still stepping in her footsteps. With each step he took, he learned more about the arch of her foot, the ball of her foot, and her small, strong toes. He was almost loping now.

  Finally, he caught up to her. She was wearing a loose, faded dress and a hat, and she held her sandals hooked on her fingers. Her hat was woven of pale fine straw and made her face glow like a classy tangerine. He recognized her.

  “Hi, I bought the pen,” he said.

  “Oh, good,” said Betsy.

  “I’ve been walking in your footsteps,” he said. “It was the most intimate experience. Did you feel my feet pressing against your feet?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Let me try walking in your footsteps, and you can see what you feel.”

  “Okay.”

  Cardell walked a few paces ahead and stopped.

  “Don’t turn around,” she said.

  He didn’t. She walked up to him.

  “Did you feel the ball of my foot pressing into your footprint?” she asked.

  “Some,” he said. “More I felt the arch. But yes, I feel I know you better now.”

  “And I know you better. We’re old friends, in fact.”

  Cardell paused, full of indecision. “But we’re very different.”

  “That’s true. I collect beach glass, and you don’t.”

  “You seem rich.”

  “I’m not poor. My husband’s father was rich. He was sup-posedly a ruthless businessman, but he was always nice to me.” She smiled.

  “I’d love to see you come,” Cardell said thickly.

  She laughed. “Ah, but I’m married, as you know. I don’t cheat. Much.”

  “Does your husband have a friendly sex organ that treats you well?” he asked.

  “He does,” she said, in a distant voice. “It’s got a knobby end that fits me just right. But I suppose that’s private information.”

  Cardell looked out at the ocean. “I wish I had a cold iced tea right now.”

  Betsy’s voice was very small. “I have cold Snapple in my condo, if you want to come back.”

  So they went back to her condo where there was a tall vase filled with carved canes and a Chinese ceramic pig on a side table, its head resting on a red pillow. There were also many jars of shells and beach glass. Betsy pulled the sliding door half open so that they could still hear the sound of the sea.

  “My husband is at his office,” she said after a moment. “I—I can call him. Should I?”

  “Absolutely, yes, give him a call.”

  She flipped out her cell phone. “Honey,” she said, “I’ve met a nice-looking young man on the beach who says he wants to watch me come.” She paused. “I know. I know. Okay. I know. Okay.”

  She held the phone away from her ear. Cardell raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “He’s kind of angry,” she whispered. Then she listened some more to the telephone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Cardell took the phone. “Hello, sir?”

  There was a strong voice in his ear. “I don’t know who you are, but stay away from my wife. Leave the condo immediately.”

  “I will leave the condo, but I would really like to see her come first, and I know that’s a problem for you, but I also know she wants to see my mandingo. I’m just going to shuck my boxers off, and my mandingo will be sticking out, and she’ll get a good look at it. She wants to, I know it. Do you say yes?”

  “No, you will not bring out any such mandingo!” the husband choked. “You will absolutely do nothing of the sort! You are out of line!” He hung up.

  Cardell handed the phone back to Betsy, shaking his head.

  “Oh, he’s such an old poke-in-the-dough,” she said. “Are you disappointed?”

  He nodded.

  “You poor thing, you wanted to see me come, didn’t you?”

  He nodded again.

  She looked at him appraisingly. “And then you’d come, wouldn’t you? You probably have a cock that you’d jerk off big-time, wouldn’t you? I know you just love jerking off that proud nasty cock.”

  “That I do,” he said. “Hard as a ship’s biscuit, but fresher.”

  She had an idea. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Let’s go out on the back deck and I’ll pretend to have sex with my husband, and I’ll tell you all about it, and you’ll watch me pretending. Will that work?”

  “That sounds like a good fallback,” Cardell said.

  So they went out to the back deck, and she started with the running commentary.

  “Usually I’m in bed first,” she said. “He stays up doing the crossword—he’s good at it, but it takes him a long time sometimes, and I read a book.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, maybe something a little frisky, a little naughty,” said Betsy. “And sometimes I just turn my light off and go to sleep, and sometimes I’m still reading when I hear him washing up and sniffing. He hangs up his pants carefully and puts on his pajamas, which are on a hook on the back of the closet door. We have two hooks. Am I boring you?”

  Cardell was smiling, watching her tell the story, lying back on a lounge chair and feeling perfectly happy. He shook his head.

  “Good. Then he gets in bed, and if I’m awake and I stir he says, ‘Good-night, hon,’ and I say, ‘Good-night, darling.’ And often we go to sleep.”

  “But sometimes you don’t.”


  “Right, sometimes we’ve made a prior arrangement to do the triple-X dirty nasty.”

  “I see.”

  “And we both know that there’s the appointment. So I lie there, and he rubs my back for a while.” She lay with her eyes closed as she said this, rubbing her hands on her thighs. “Sometimes he teases under my ears, and that makes me shrug, whoo! And then I reach back behind me, and I find his bulgy bits in his pajamas, and I hold them a moment to figure out what’s what. Then I reach my hand in and grab a handful, and then usually he shifts and pulls his pajamas down. And then everything begins to make itself known.”

  She was reaching behind herself as she said this.

  “Do you like feeling him get hard?”

  “Love feeling him get hard, yes. He says, ‘Can I tweak your titties?’ And I lift so he can get at them, and he knows just how to play with my nipples so that the two jagged lightning lines go dingalinging straight down. And then I have to turn toward him—” Here she turned in the chaise longue and held her invisible husband. Her hand slid under her blouse. “He kisses me all over me and puddles up one of my tits so that the nipple is aiming straight up. Mmm.”

  Cardell, watching her tell this, found that his hips had slid forward on the chair and his knees had straightened. “And then he pushes that big cockhead inside you?”

  “Yes, he does,” she said. “He’s quite talkative sometimes when we get going, like if we’ve been out to dinner at our little Mexican place. There’s a nice little Mexican place we go to. And he doesn’t know it, nor should he know it, but when he really gets down to fucking me I’m sometimes thinking of sucking off the Mexican busboys. I’m thinking they’re tied down on tables after the restaurant closes, and they need me to give them handjobs and blowjobs to relieve all the terrible stresses that come with the job of being a busboy, and I can feel their come boiling up the length of their cocks, and I swallow it all.”

  “Cocks on the boil, eh?”

  “Yes, often I think about jerking off well-knit young men whose dicks are out.” Betsy looked pointedly at Cardell when she said this. “But he doesn’t know what I’m thinking. Except once I told him and he came so hard afterward. That’s why I thought maybe he’d say yes to letting you watch me.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “No, he didn’t, because he’s a poky old thing. But he does know me better than anyone, and I’ve figured out just how to have a good orgasm with him, which I like.”

  “I kind of want to bring myself out now for you,” Cardell said.

  “You want to bring out Mr. Thick Dicky?”

  Cardell said, “Mm-hm.”

  “One sec.” Betsy dialed her husband’s number again. “Hon, I’m out on the back deck with Cardell, that’s his name, and I’ve been explaining to him how you and I make love. I know. I know, hon. I know. But he’s gotten a little aroused, the poor boy, as I have, and I wondered if it would be all right if he took out his dick and played with it, just for a moment or two, in a tasteful way, while I continued to tell him about us and what we do, so I thought I should ask you—”

  She listened for a moment.

  “Okay, no. I understand. Okay.” She clicked the phone off. “He says no. But!” She got a shrewd expression. “He didn’t say you couldn’t do what you need to do in your bathing suit.”

  “You mean reach in?”

  “Precisely. Reach in. Just don’t ‘bring it out.’ ”

  Cardell reached in, and as he did she came over. “But I’d like to have a peek,” she said. He pulled on his waistband so that she could peer into the depths of his bathing suit. She saw his fist in the green shadows, clutching his swollen packmule.

  “Oooh,” she said, “I’d like to have a taste of that big hunk of badness. But sadly—it is not to be.”

  “Why don’t you keep telling me how you and he fool around? That was going pretty good.”

  “Okay, well.” She closed her eyes and thought. “Somewhere along the way my panties have been scooted down and kicked off in the bottom of the bed, which means that after we’re done I have to hunt around for them for five minutes or give up and get a clean pair and figure I’ll find them in the morning.”

  “Then what?”

  “Ah, well, then there comes a point, always, inevitably, where I have to go on my knees and put my ass up. I don’t know why it is, but I need to feel the pressure of the bed on my knees and elbows and the high-up feeling of my ass pointing straight up! I can’t help it. It simply must go up! Always has.”

  “Does he like that?”

  “Yes, it makes him crazy.” She looked at him. “Do you want to see?”

  He smiled.

  She put her ass up. She was still wearing the light-blue shorts she wore over her bathing suit. She looked entrancingly suggestive, and Cardell began breathing noisily through his nose.

  “Does he cram it directly in?”

  “Not right away. By the way, does my eye look swollen?”

  Cardell leaned and peered at her. “Not too swollen. A little red, maybe, in the corner. Have you been crying?”

  “No, just a bug bite this morning. Annoying. Anyway, yes, his cock is knobby, so sometimes he rubs it against my thigh for a second and spanks it against my asscheek, because he likes me to know how big and warm and ass-slappy and hard it is. So hard.”

  She was lying back on the chaise longue now with her hands in the air. “Then I feel his hands grab my hips, and his woody finds me on its own, and I’m so darn wet and puffy that he can just stab it in one long stroke, right there, that long bone, mmmf.”

  Floomp, floomp went Cardell’s hand in his bathing suit.

  She opened her eyes and looked over at him. “You like listening to me tell you about how my husband fucks me?”

  Flump flump flump, said Cardell’s hand. He was smiling a wanker’s smile.

  “You love to tug that dirty dick and listen to me chatter, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do, and tell me, do you prefer when he’s slow and smooth or hard and pounding?”

  “I like it when he’s been going along slow and then with no warning he just barrels into me at double speed, bam bam bam bam! And I say, ‘Fuck me, moneyman, bang me hard, yeah, hard, yeah!’ He likes when I call him moneyman.” Her arm was up to the wrist in her shorts now. “But he could be anybody, then. In fact, he is anybody. He’s not my husband anymore, he’s a big bad stranger on a string connected to twelve guys I’ve seen, some on TV, some in real life. They’re cycling around, having at me one by one.”

  At this Cardell stood wildly and pulled all of his dick out. “Does his dick look like this? Hmmm?” he asked. “Sorry, I can’t help it,” he added.

  She stared at him and blinked. “No, yours is very different—very different in shape and tint and everything—although about the same size. People care so much about size, but size is just the beginning. It’s like comparing flavors of apples.”

  Cardell was slowly working it, leering.

  She stared a moment longer and then roused herself. “Put it back now. I’m trying to stay within bounds. Back in the bathing suit, back, back, back, that’s right. Do whatever you have to do in the suit.”

  Cardell started floomp-floomping again, punching from within the bathing suit to make room for his rogue jacquard.

  He said, “Tell me about the hardest time you ever came.”

  She reflected, lightly touching the potted boxwood that was next to her. “In general I come hardest when I put a something in my ass. My husband is away a lot, and I read one of my erotic romance books about bad assfucking vampires, and I start to get a little wild, and I put a screwdriver in a latex glove and put the handle in my ass.”

  Cardell was silent, surprised, pondering. Then he said, “It would be nice if you could do that for me.”

  “What, now? Put a screwdriver handle in my ass now? No, I haven’t showered. I’d have to shower. I have a whole procedure. Also I’ll have to call my husband and ask him if it’s okay.”<
br />
  “You know he’s going to say no.”

  “It’s worth a try.” She blipped out the phone number again. “Hello, hon, I’m still here with this boy. I know, but he’s a good listener. I know. You’re right, but—I was just telling him about how I read one of my dark urban fantasy books and I play with the screwdriver handle. And he said he wanted me to show him. Yes. In my ass. Yes. It’s Cardell.” She handed him the phone.

  “Cardell, I thought I told you to leave my condo,” said the husband in an even voice.

  “I will,” said Cardell, “but you should know that your wife was telling me all about how you take her like a madman at least once a week, if not oftener, and leave her fully satisfied.”

  “That’s private information!”

  “True, but she says you’re quite the cocksman. She says you slap your dick on her ass to make her feel its meat. She says she knows just how to come with you inside because your knob is special and fits her perfectly. She seems quite content with you as a husband and a lover.”

  He sounded relieved. “That’s welcome news, at least.”

  “But look, man, she’s clearly a highly sexed woman, and she wants to show me how she takes care of important business when you’re out on the road selling the cheese, or whatever.”

  “I draw the line there.”

  “You shouldn’t draw that line, sir. I’m looking at her, and I can tell you she is nasty for the handle. This is a big, big urge she’s got. I think if you don’t say yes she may get frustrated and take me as a lover.”

  “No!” There was real anguish in his voice.

  Cardell let the reality sink in for a moment. “How about if she just tells me, briefly, and doesn’t show me. Would that work?”

  The husband made an explosive sigh. “Did she just go for a walk on that beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know she’s a beautiful woman and a highly sexed woman. She gets superhorny after she’s gone for a beach walk and found a couple of pieces of nice beach glass. Put her back on.”

  Cardell handed the phone back to Betsy.

  “I’ll just tell him about it, hon,” said Betsy, “I won’t show him. Yes, I promise. Okay. Love you, honey. Bye!” She hung up. “I’ll pop into the shower, Cardell. Meanwhile, we keep the screwdrivers in a tool belt hanging in the foyer. I like the one with the kelly green handle. Not the huge one with the blue handle—I tried that one once. Troppo big. Feel free to read a magazine. As you can see, my husband’s into mountain hiking.”

 

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