“Oh sure, now it’s all clear,” Aimee said out loud to herself as she watched the city from her big windows. That night, though, she remembered being very excited to be introduced to such-and-such patron. She hoped he would remember meeting the young bride when her own show came up.
“It was a good life for a while,” Aimee commented to the city below her window. Armed with youth and passion, even their poverty seemed the stuff of great bohemian legend. Art marched on. Photographs were sold. Birthdays passed, celebrated with a round of cheap wine in Dixie cups. Then, hanging a show in a gallery, Aimee fell off a ladder and broke her wrist.
It should have been simple, but the gallery was not insured for that sort of thing. Aimee wasn’t insured for anything. A week later, with her fingers swollen like baby potatoes, Aimee cried the story out to her parents. Her mother barreled into the city like bear racing down the mountain to save her cub. Two weeks and $10,000 later, the wrist was re-broken and the hand saved. Aimee was broken too. He kept pushing on, though, insisting it was a grand life. She suggested some compromises. He said they were impossibilities.
If it had been booze or football or poker he loved instead of working, she would have seen it for what it was from the beginning. Sitting alone in their apartment, she told herself, I should have insisted on a really big ring. He would never have gotten it and then I would have known how many things are more important than me.
With that, Aimee shoved all the thoughts into the back of her head, shut off the lights, and went to bed. She lay there in the darkness, waiting for sleep to come. She waited and she waited. After a while, she started doing the thing that usually relaxed her best. She stroked and she wiggled but tonight it just wasn’t working. Her hand was starting to cramp. In the quiet emptiness of her apartment, the phone rang.
“Hi, baby. What’cha doing?” her mother asked.
Well, Mom, I was masturbating, but then I realized what I really want is lasagna.
Aimee yawned and tried to formulate an honest answer that wouldn’t freak her mother out.
“I was trying to relax, but I’m starving. I’m thinking about ordering some lasagna.”
“Oooo! That sounds good,” her mom crowed. “I don’t want to keep you from your dinner.”
“Yeah, I think I’m gonna get up and eat,” Aimee said. She tried to sound upbeat and easy because sadness would cause her mother to worry, and worry might cause her mother to pack a suitcase and get on a city-bound train.
“You call me anytime you want, sweetie. Daddy sleeps like a dead man so even in the middle of the night is ok.”
“Hey, I’m fine. A little tired and ridiculously hungry, but just fine.”
“Well, you get that lasagna then. Next time I come I’ll bring you homemade.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“Course you do. And I love you.”
Aimee hung up the phone and went back to her original problem. Did she want to masturbate or eat lasagna? She was the kind of girl who almost always chose sex over pasta. Now all bets were off regarding desire. She didn’t know what was a real feeling and what was a hormonal surge; wasn’t sure if he’d left her or was being responsible in the only way he knew how. She pulled up her pants, got out of bed, and phoned the deli downstairs.
Money had always been an issue. Sometimes it was the only issue they discussed. After the wrist incident, she went back to school and became a paralegal. He told her not to. They would get by.
“I don’t want to get by,” she told him, “I want to live. I want health insurance.”
“You’ll miss the freedom.”
“Freedom’s too expensive,” she told him. “Costs an arm and a leg.”
“No!” he laughed. “Just your hand!”
She laughed too, sharing for a moment the bravura of his black humor. That night they went to an opening, drank coffees at midnight, and made love at dawn. She was late on her first day of classes, but not the second or any other class day after that. She graduated with honors and took a job that required her to show up in the morning, every morning, while he continued with a life that beckoned to him to stay out all night. He’d come home a couple of hours before she had to be at work, bounce into bed and wake her up.
“Oh, are you awake?” he’d ask.
“I am now,” she’d groan.
“Awake enough to make love?”
“No.”
“I read that sex when you’re pregnant is supposedly an amazing thing.”
“Not at seven in the morning.”
“Gee, is it seven?”
People who regularly fail to know what time it is should die. If they’re not doing it to flaunt their freedom, then they are foisting a basic responsibility onto someone else’s shoulders. Either way, Aimee came to believe it should carry the death penalty.
Aimee got up, drank a glass of milk, and wondered if the heartburn would ever go away. She polished off a peanut butter and jelly sandwich waiting for the deli downstairs to bring up the lasagna—no salt please.
The downstairs deli used to be a special treat, far too expensive to be frequented on a regular basis. Lately though, fat checks with his name on them had been arriving from far away places in envelopes adorned with colorful stamps. She deposited them in their joint account and withdrew cash to pay the rent and other expenses. She became a regular customer at the deli, ordering in three or four nights a week.
Aimee eyed the cute delivery boy but stopped when she realized it made him really uncomfortable and tipped him well for remembering she wanted seltzer (salt-free) even though she had ordered club soda.
In the film Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary had not assumed herself crazy when she wolfed down raw liver in the middle of the night while standing in front of the fridge. Thinking about that scene, Aimee consumed her pasta standing up and wished she’d ordered a side of chopped liver. Sipping seltzer and praying that the belly would find peace with the calories she had given it, Aimee sat down on the couch to have a good long think about her life. She promptly fell asleep.
The next morning Aimee woke up in her own bed, in her pajamas. There was a fresh flower in a vase on the night table on her side of the bed, a glass of seltzer, some crackers and a little note that said I love you. He’d been there, but now he was gone.
She sat up and puked into the little bucket she kept there for that very reason, then carefully sipped the seltzer and nibbled the saltine hoping to keep it down long enough to get into the shower. She looked out the window and searched for the joy that she so longed for. It was there, underneath a wet blanket of loss and constant indigestion. In three months she would be having a baby and he couldn’t even do her the courtesy of ruining it for her in person.
3. Butts and Feet
“SHE WIGGLED HER TOES and warm wet tongues licked at her calves. A splash of icy scotch slipped down her throat and she felt the muscles uncoil, opening for the first time in days the tibialis posterior.”
“Christ! Is she writing about her butt?” Lux exclaimed.
Aimee burned and the room fell silent.
“No. I’m not writing about my butt,” Aimee tried not to hiss.
“It sounds like you’re writing about your butt.”
“I’m not.”
“There’s really nothing wrong with writing about
your butt,” Brooke felt she needed to say.
“My butt is a total one way street,” Lux informed them.
Aimee waited. This was not what she wanted. Maybe she should quit the club and find some kind of solace in a support group specifically geared for pregnant women. There were groups all over the Internet. I’m not ready to talk about diapers and hemorrhoids, Aimee told herself. I want to stay in the adult world for as long as I can.
“It works for me,” Brooke pronounced, regarding anal sex.
Margot stared at Brooke. It seemed incongruous to her that Brooke with her WASPy good looks, white blouse, and pleated skirt would voice a vote for anal sex. Margot could not
imagine it because Brooke’s tattoos were all in places that didn’t show when she was wearing clothes. I Margot saw Brooke naked, she would understand.
“But, Brooke, there’s no prostate,” Margot argued. “Women don’t have a prostate gland so there’s nothing nice to rub up against, up in there.”
“It works for me,” Brooke maintained. “What doesn’t work for me is a really big cock.”
Then the opinions started to fly. Margot favored the bigger the better, while Brooke and Lux nearly jumped out of their seats to express their opinion on the perfect dimensions of a penis.
“I’m not—HEY!” Aimee shouted above the noise. “I’m not writing about my butt. The tibialis posterior is a muscle in the foot.”
“Ew!” exclaimed Lux.
“Now, toe sucking can be an amazing experience,” Brooke said.
“No,” Lux countered, “it can’t.
“If the toes are clean and the foot is beautiful. I mean, it’s a way of saying to your lover everything about you is delicious and I want all of it in my body,” Brooke laughed.
“Kind of like swallowing instead of spitting,” Margot offered.
“Exactly!”
“You guys are gross,” Lux said.
“My piece this week,” Aimee began again, but she was run over by Margot’s shock at Brooke’s preferences.
“I can’t believe you don’t like a huge cock,” Margot said to Brooke.
“Too much work.”
“The bigger the better. Ten, twelve, inches. I want it all,” Margot said laughing.
Brooke pulled a ruler out of her art kit on the table.
“Ten or twelve inches?” Brook said holding the bottom of the ruler down at the bottom of her pubic bone and extended it up. Twelve inches came to the bottom of her solar plexus.
“Oh!” Margot said. “Is that what twelve inches looks like?”
“Yep. So let’s agree that twelve inches is just fictitious. Ten inches and you’re talking porno, bullshit, rib-breaking dick. Nine is still well above my navel and even with eight, you’re driving deep in my bladder and I’m spending the next week with a urinary tract infection. Doctors, antibiotics, I don’t need the hassle.”
“Lemme borrow that ruler,” Margot asked. Brooke handed it to her and Margot became consumed with measuring the distance between the entrance to her vagina and the beginning of her ribs. No one was listening to Aimee.
“Could I please finish my story?” Aimee asked, fuming. All eyes turned to her, but as she began to read, Lux erupted with a thought she could not contain.
“Once, my mother told me that she’d dumped her first husband because his penis was too small and I said, well, like, maybe his penis was the right size and your vagina is too big.”
Silence. And then.
“What did she say?” Brooke asked.
“Who?”
“Your mother,” said Margot.
“Nothing. I mean, like are you asking me if she was mad? Cuz she wasn’t. I mean, she’s never been, you know, competitive about the size of her vagina so, you know, she just said something like ‘Yeah, Lux, maybe that was the problem.’ Or maybe she said ‘Yeah, Lux, could you pass me the salt now,’ or something empty like that.”
Lux’s side story about the relative dimensions of her mother’s vagina hung in the air like a neighbor’s bong hit, leaving everyone a little senseless and lost.
“So,” said Lux because no one else seemed capable of speech, “I think Aimee wanted to read something she wrote about her ass, right?”
“No!” Aimee exclaimed. “My piece is not about my ass! It’s about coming home, having a glass of scotch, and soaking my feet in a hot tub of water.”
“I thought these were supposed to be sex stories,” interrupted Lux, unable to be quiet for long.
“We are writing erotic stories,” Aimee said, burning, “which includes anything sensual. Not just sexual. Not pornographic.”
“Although, well, actually,” Brooke offered, “actually, I would define the piece I wrote this week as leaning towards the pornographic. If that’s going to be a problem, I would rather sit out this round of sharing.”
Lux mouthed the word “buttocks” to Margot across the table. Margot’s eyebrows rose, and she felt a giddy surprise jumping up inside her too. She sat up a little straighter in her chair.
“I’d like to hear your butt story, Brooke,” Margot said.
Aimee sighed. Aimee and Brooke had been friends for over twenty years and she already knew everything there was to know about Brooke’s tattooed ass. Back in Chicago, when they were free and twenty-three years old, Brooke and Aimee shared an apartment and the occasional lover. Aimee had spent too many evenings sitting naked in the overstuffed chair next to the bed, feeling left out, watching Brooke writhe in delight with the lover they were supposed to be enjoying together.
“Aimee!” Brooke had insisted, “you gotta try it.”
“Why?”
“It’ll change your life. You’ll totally rethink everything you know about sex. But not with Dave.”
“Why not with Dave?” Aimee asked. He was her then current boyfriend and seemed like the perfect choice.
“Because literally and figuratively, Dave is a big dick. You need a sensitive man.”
They’d settled on a guy Aimee knew and liked who was delighted by the girls’ invitation to enter Aimee’s rectum. He was gentle and kind. To ease the event, he brought over an excellent bottle of red wine and a large tube of some water-based lubricant. He did everything right and yet it was one of the most startling and unpleasant sensation Aimee had ever experienced.
Brooke said she’d just picked the wrong guy to do it with. Aimee quit having threesomes with Brooke. She just couldn’t compete with that willing, yearning rectum.
“I don’t want to hear a story about Brooke’s butt,” pronounced Lux. Aimee didn’t want to hear it either, but perhaps she could use the issue to get Lux to leave the group.
“We’re not censoring Brooke’s piece. I can guarantee you won’t like hearing it. You’re welcome to skip the rest of the meeting if you think it would upset you.”
Lux sat down and shut her mouth.
“Shall I read it now?” Brooke asked.
“Actually I haven’t finished with my story,” Aimee began only to be interrupted by Lux.
“So Brooke, how pornographic is it? Mildly pornographic?” Lux asked.
“No, Lux, it’s a down and dirty, up the butt, wildly pornographic story. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen to it,” Brooke informed her in scathing tones, which had no effect on Lux’s determination to understand the full range of Brooke’s story before hearing it.
“In your story, does anyone, like, act really mean to anyone else in it?” Lux asked.
“No.”
“Does anyone get abused? Or physically hurt?” Lux asked.
“No.”
“Does anyone have to do, you know, something against their will?” Lux asked.
“What interesting questions,” Margot said.
“I got nothing against the sex parts,” Lux said defensively, “but I don’t like to hear about people getting their feelings or their bodies hurt, all right? Especially when the girl gets her feelings hurt just so the boy can feel better about his self.”
There was a quiet in the room as everyone thought about Lux for a moment. Lux had interesting and well-thought-out ideas about how she liked her pornography to unfold.
“It’s just a dirty little story about me seducing my mailman,” Brooke reassured her.
“Oh, well then,” Lux said by way of invitation.
Brooke opened her paper and began to read.
Aimee sighed, losing out once again to the excitement of Brooke’s butt. She should have said something, but then things might have gotten unpleasant and that wasn’t worth the remaining three paragraphs of her footbath and scotch description.
As Brooke began to read, Lux pulled out her notebook full
of words that interested her. Words she wanted to know more about.
“Enrique rang my bell,” Brooke began. “I threw on a bathrobe and ran to the door. ‘Who is it,’ I asked trying not to sound as lascivious as I felt. ‘Mailman,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got a package for you.’”
Lux laughed and wrote down the word “lascivious” in her notebook.
“With my bathrobe on the floor covering only my ankles, I opened the door a crack, just enough that he would see what was waiting inside. ‘Do I have to sign for this package?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Would you be interested in bringing it around to the back door?’ Enrique’s’ eyes bulged out of his head, and I knew he was a virgin to that sort of invitation. I opened the door, and he slid into my house.”
Lux gasped, but not about what was about to come in through Brooke’s back door. Brooke would have kept reading her story, but Aimee quickly swatted her across the back of the head.
“Margot,” Trevor said as he opened the glass door and leaned his handsome head into the conference room. The hair was gray and the face lined, but Trevor’s spirit was light and fun.
Margot felt her usual belly spasm of delight at the sight of him. A mantra ran through her head, reminding her, “He’s so cute, he’s so sexy, he’s so nice.” Although “nice” had been the death-adjective of earlier passions, Margot, at fifty, craved “nice.”
“You’re supposed to have completed all the manufacturing contracts for the Peabody Christmas catalogue,” Trevor informed her. “Crescentia Peabody is sitting in my office right now, waiting to sign. What are you all doing in here?”
“Book club meeting,” said Lux with a winning smile.
“Really? I didn’t know you had a book club. What are you reading? Are you open to new members?”
“Girls only,” said Aimee.
“You wouldn’t like it,” Brooke warned him. “We read girlie things.”
Tuesday Erotica Club Page 3