And it wasn’t just the erotic feelings that she was giving him. It was her closeness, and her flowery smell, and the fact that she was caring for him. He had never cried during love-making before, but now the tears were sliding from his eyes as he became overwhelmed with emotion. She gave him a last lingering suck, and then she sat up, still holding his cock in her left hand, her lips shining and her face bright.
‘You’re crying,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘I knew that you would.’
With her right hand, she wrestled off her T-shirt, revealing a lacy purple bra. ‘I’ll let you do that,’ she said hoarsely. He reached behind her to unfasten it and her big round breasts fell out of the cups with a deliciously complicated double sway. The areolas around her nipples were as wide as fallen rose petals, and the same faded pink color, edged with brown.
He tried to hold her breasts in his hands, but she pushed him away. Instead she leaned over him, so that her nipples just brushed his chest, and swung them from side to side, until they crinkled and stood up.
Every time he tried to raise his hands to touch her, she forced them back down. He felt a rising frustration, but at the same time he was growing more and more aroused. His heart was pumping so hard that he could hear the blood rushing in his ears, and he was actually trembling.
Astrid pulled down the zipper of her leather mini-skirt and let it drop down on to the carpet. Now she was wearing nothing but her thong and her ankle boots. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You can take this off, too.’
She climbed back on to the couch and sat astride him so that the thong was right in front of his face. He hesitated, but she waited for him, looking down at him, steadily breathing.
He looked back up at her. ‘I don’t know whether I can do this.’
‘Then don’t,’ she said, but she didn’t move.
He took hold of her waistband. Her stomach was rising and falling and he could feel her radiated warmth against his forehead. He knew that whatever he decided to do now, it would change everything. His life would never be the same again.
‘There’s no turning back, Frank,’ Astrid told him.
He rolled down the thin elastic and pulled down her thong. She’d had a Brazilian-wax and was completely hairless, like a ripe pink fruit. Her lips were slightly parted and he could see that she was already glistening wet.
Again he tried to touch her but again she snatched his wrists and levered his arms away. ‘Now, then. I want absolute submission.’
‘I’m not used to this.’
‘Exactly.’
She took hold of his cock and angled it between her legs. All the time he was looking at her, trying to understand why she was doing this, but she gave nothing away. She waited for a very long moment, her lips enclosing his glans, but only just, her head back, staring at the ceiling. Then she slowly sat down, so that Frank sank into her, as deep as it was possible to go, and she let out an aahhhhhhhh of satisfaction.
When he woke up again it was already growing dark. The sky was the color of royal-blue ink, the cicadas were chirruping, and he could hear people splashing and laughing in the pool below. He sat up in bed and pulled at his cheeks to stretch his dehydrated skin.
‘Astrid?’
She appeared in the bedroom doorway wearing a white fluffy hotel bathrobe and holding a glass of wine. Her hair was sticking up at the back and she was smiling.
‘You’re awake, then?’
‘I don’t think I’ve slept so good in days.’
She sat down on the bed beside him and ran her hand through his hair. ‘You needed it. You’ve been needing something like this for a long time.’
‘I guess I ought to feel guilty.’
Her robe had fallen open so that he could see the curved underside of her breast. She gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. ‘So do you?’
He thought about it, and he suddenly began to understand that he could tell her the truth. It had been a long time since he had been able to do that with Margot. He had never lied to Margot about anything serious, like how much he loved her. But he had told her again and again how impressed he was by her paintings, and how much he liked her friends (particularly that wiry-haired busybody Helen Mitchell, and her catarrhal husband, Byron) and how delicious he found her pasta with salmon and Pacific pesto. And somehow all of those small, inconsequential untruths had crept up year by year like ivy over a fairytale window and stifled their life together.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sad, but I don’t feel guilty.’
‘Sad?’
‘Sad for Danny. Sad for Margot. But it’s like breaking a piece of precious china, isn’t it? No use trying to stick it back together again. Best to remember it the way it was, when it was perfect.’
‘Do you want me to stay tonight?’
He reached into her open bathrobe and caressed her bare shoulder. This time she didn’t try to twist herself away.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her.
Astrid did things for him that night that he had fantasized about but never had the nerve to try, not with Margot. She seemed to have no inhibitions at all, and an endlessly burning sexual hunger. Each time he turned over and tried to sleep, her hand crept over his hip and started to pull at his cock yet again, and her tongue paddled in his ear. ‘Not tired yet, are you?’ she breathed.
Sometime shortly after midnight she was kneeling astride his face, her back arched, gripping the bedposts while he licked her and her juice coursed down his chin. At two in the morning she wriggled her finger into his anus while she bit the skin of his scrotum until it bled. At four thirty he was taking her, doggy fashion, grunting, on the bedside rug. At a quarter after six, when the sky was already light, she climbed on top of him again and made love to him in dreamy slow motion.
She woke him again just after eight, lying heavily on top of him and nuzzling his neck.
‘Not again, Astrid,’ he begged her. ‘I’m bushed.’
‘Don’t worry, you poor old man, I have to go. I’ll see you again tonight.’
He tried to turn his head around. ‘How can I get in touch with you?’
She kissed him once, twice, three times, then she climbed off him. ‘You can’t. I’ll get in touch with you.’
‘Astrid . . .’ he said as she hooked up her bra.
‘You’ll have to trust me, Frank.’
‘Look, I’m not asking for commitment. I’m just asking where I can phone you, in case something comes up.’
‘Ohhh,’ she teased, sitting down next to him and squeezing the sheet in between his legs. ‘In case something comes up, huh?’
He kissed her. ‘You’re extraordinary, do you know that?’
‘I’m no different from any other girl, Frank. It’s just that you’ve forgotten what girls are really like . . . That’s if you ever knew.’
Frank watched her as she finished dressing and brushed her hair. ‘You make me feel . . . totally different.’
‘I know.’ She gave him the gentlest of kisses on the forehead, then left him. After she had gone, he lay back on the bed and stared at the swirling plaster patterns on the ceiling, thinking of The Process.
Of course the sands of Present Time are running out beneath our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum, ‘What are we here for?’ is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. ‘What are we here for?’ But the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. We are here to go!
Tuesday, September 28, 3:27 P.M.
‘How’s it going, people?’ Garry Sherman breezed into the so-called ‘hospitality suite’ at Panorama-TV with a makeup towel still tied around his neck. His hair was as black as crows’ feathers; his suit was sapphire blue and his face was orange.
His three guests were sitting around a small Formica-topped table eating sandwiches and barbecued chicken legs and drinking wine out of plastic cups.
‘You’re all way too polite,’ Garry grinned. ‘You haven’t started throwing food at each other yet.’
‘Actually, we’ve been getting along like a house on fire,’ drawled Jean Lassiter. She was a handsome fiftyish woman with silvery bouffant hair. She was wearing a salmon-pink suit and strappy silver shoes.
‘That’s not what I want to hear,’ said Garry in mock disgust. ‘I want aggression! I want tantrums! I want overweening egos!’
‘Oh, I think you’ll get plenty of contention,’ said Dr Fortensky. ‘Just because we’re all nice people doesn’t mean we don’t have very strong differences of opinion.’ Dr Fortensky had a bald, suntanned dome of a head and the kind of huge yellow-tinted designer glasses that had been popular in the mid-1980s.
‘That’s right,’ put in Sara Velman. ‘So far we haven’t even been able to agree what sexual domination actually is. Is it handcuffing your lover to the bedpost and whipping him with wet spaghetti, or is it making him iron his own shirts?’ Sara Velman had glossy brunette hair, fashionably chopped, and a highly groomed assertiveness that came from being the Vassar-educated only daughter of a very wealthy family.
‘Give me the handcuffs and wet spaghetti every time,’ said Garry.
A bespectacled young studio assistant opened the door and said, ‘Two minutes, Mr Sherman.’
Garry went to the mirror on the opposite side of the room, jutted out his chin, and closely inspected each of his profiles in turn. ‘OK, I’m going to introduce you to our studio audience one after the other. I’m going to say a few highly flattering words about your respective books, at which time your book covers will appear on the screen. I’m going to ask each of you in turn what you think about today’s subject: Women on Top. After that, I’m going to invite you to rip each other to shreds, and I don’t care how outspoken you are or how riled up you get, short of getting out of your seat and socking each other on the nose. This isn’t the Jerry Springer show – besides, my budget doesn’t run to bodyguards.
‘Halfway through we go into a short commercial break and then we open up the floor to questions from the audience, some of which will be dumb and some of which will be stupefyingly dumb. See if you can coax the audience to come up with some personal anecdotes about sexual domination . . . you know the kind of thing – I make my husband fry pork chops in the nude.’
‘What’s wrong with frying pork chops in the nude?’ asked Dr Fortensky.
‘Nothing,’ said Jean Lassiter, ‘so long as you wear a little frilly apron.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Sara Velman. ‘All men secretly want to be women. Under every business suit is a metaphorical garter belt.’
‘OK, then,’ said Gary Sherman, smacking his hands together. ‘Let’s get out there and shake our tambourines.’
He led the way along a corridor stacked with folding chairs and pieces of studio backdrop. At last they came out into the studio itself, under hot and dazzling lights. An audience of over a hundred people were sitting waiting for them, and when Garry walked over to his big white leather chair, there were whoops and whistles and a clatter of applause.
Studio assistants led Garry’s three guests up on to a raised platform, where three white chairs were positioned, with white side tables and glasses of water. The audience stared at them as if they were human exhibits on The Planet of the Apes.
‘Why do we do this? We must be mad,’ Sara said.
Jean flapped her hand dismissively. ‘We do it to sell books, dear. Can you think of a better reason?’
‘Who cares about books?’ said Dr Fortensky. ‘They give us warm white wine and curled-up Kraft cheese sandwiches and our plane fare home. What more could anybody ask for?’
‘Quiet, please,’ said the producer, raising his arm.
Tuesday, September 28, 3:41 P.M.
Outside Studio V, where The Garry Sherman Show was being recorded, Bill Dunphy and Joan Napela were sitting on an Italianate garden bench made of fiberglass painted to look like stone. Bill had tilted his cap over his eyes but Joan had taken her sunglasses off so that she could refresh her tan. She had been on night duty for the past three weeks and thought that she was starting to look yellow.
The lot was almost deserted, except for two stage hands outside Studio III, moving pieces of Greek columns and lengths of scaffolding with a forklift truck. Now that the studio tours had been suspended, the whole Panorama TV complex was eerily quiet. Bill and Joan had only had cause to challenge one visitor today, and he had turned out to be a plumber who had been called to unblock the executive toilets, and got lost in costumes.
‘Three weeks, two days, five hours and forty-one minutes,’ Bill announced.
‘Since when?’
‘Since I gave up smoking.’
‘That’s very good, Bill! You should be proud of yourself.’
‘I don’t have time to be proud of myself. I’m too busy feeling like something the dog sicked up.’
Joan sat up straight and put on her sunglasses. ‘You’ll get over it. One day you’ll go to bed and you’ll realize that you’ve not even thought about smoking all day.’
‘I’ll be dead from overeating by then. I’ve put on seven pounds already, and all I can think of is cheeseburgers. I’m thinking of cheeseburgers right now, as a matter of fact. Triple cheeseburgers, with extra cheese, and a basket of fried pickles on the side.’
Bill had worked for Studio Security for over eleven years. Back at home, he had photographs all over the living-room walls. Bill and Warren Beatty; Bill and Meryl Streep. Bill and Leonardo DiCaprio. He was an ex-traffic cop, a big dog-faced man with a scar down his left cheek. He looked as if he would tear your arms off just for looking at him funny, but in reality he was shy, soft spoken and careful in his ways. His hobby was collecting the tiniest moths.
Joan was small and wiry, with a big nose and frizzy blonde hair. Her alcoholic husband Carl had left her eighteen months ago with two children under five to take care of, and for a time she had held down two jobs – one behind the deli counter at Ralph’s and the other as an office cleaner. But then her best friend’s husband had told her that Studio Security were looking for recruits, male or female, big or little, white or black, and she had astonished herself by being accepted. She didn’t know that she had impressed Studio Security’s personnel manager by the fact that she never stopped talking. People would stop causing trouble just to shut her up.
‘You should try acupuncture,’ she suggested. ‘My friend Lena lost seventeen pounds with acupuncture. Mind you, she lost her husband as well. He said that if he had wanted a human skeleton he would have married Calista Flockhart. Now there’s the inflated male ego for you. He looked like an orangutan in a plaid sport coat.’
‘Acupuncture, that’s when they stick needles in you? I can’t stand needles. Brrr.’
‘Well, maybe you should try hypnotism. Or aversion therapy.’
‘What’s aversion therapy?’
‘What they would do is, they would make you eat triple cheeseburgers all day, every day, so that you never want to look at another triple cheeseburger, ever again.’
Bill shook his head. ‘Sounds great. Wouldn’t work on me. But I sure wouldn’t mind trying it.’
As they talked, a dark blue Mack truck came around the corner of Studio IV, and drove slowly toward them.
Tuesday, September 28, 3:47 P.M.
In the studio, the audience were screaming with laughter. Sara Velman had said that women were sexually excited by hurting their lovers, and so Garry had invited her to prove it by hurting him. She had strutted over to his seat and climbed on to his lap. Now she was twisting his ears and pulling his hair.
‘Hey, be careful with the hair, all right? This cost me nearly fourteen hundred dollars!’
One tall ginger-freckled woman put up her hand and said, ‘I love to bite my husband. I give him love bites all over, especially on his tush.’
‘Well, biting your partner is an indication of possessiveness, rather than domination,’ said Dr Fortensky. ‘You want your husband physically marked so that any other woman will know that he belong
s to you. It’s like branding a steer.’
Garry said, ‘No, I think it’s simpler than that. I think it’s an indication that she’s not getting nearly enough to eat.’
‘Hurting your lover isn’t necessarily an act of sexual domination,’ put in Jean Lassiter. ‘In my experience, many men are highly aroused by being bitten or scratched or whipped. They want to be hurt. So you have to ask yourself, who is really doing the dominating here? The biter or the bitten?’
‘The scratcher or the scratchee?’ Garry added. ‘The whipper or the whipped?’
Sara Velman suddenly lunged her head forward and nipped at Garry’s neck.
‘Ow! No!’ he protested, kicking his feet. ‘Get off! Honest injun! Honest injun!’
Tuesday, September 28, 3:49 P.M.
The dark blue truck turned right and parked very close to the studio wall. Its side panels were painted with reels of film, and in each frame of film there was chicken or salad or pasta or lobsters. Underneath, in white lettering, it read: A MOVIEBLE FEAST, CATERING SPECIALISTS FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY.
Joan picked up her clipboard and ran her finger down it. ‘Here it is. Sixteen hundred hours, catering supplies.’
‘I’ll check it out,’ said Bill, rousing himself off the mock-stone bench. ‘Maybe they can spare us a couple of subs.’
He straightened his cap and walked around the corner. The truck was stationary and its doors were still closed but its engine was running. Bill walked up to the cab and gave the driver a wave. The driver waved back. He was a swarthy-looking guy with dark glasses and a black beard. Sitting next to him was a suntanned girl, around eighteen or nineteen years old, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and a red head scarf. She waved, too.
‘You delivering to The Garry Sherman Show?’ Bill shouted.
The driver cupped his hand to his ear to show that he couldn’t hear.
Bill made a twisting gesture with his right hand to tell the driver that he should cut his engine. ‘Switch your engine off! I have to check your ID!’
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