The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Flattery again,” she said, but she was pleased beyond words. “You might not think so if you saw me without a stitch.”

  “Would another drink help?” he offered. “Or another kiss?” He enfolded her in his arms and gave her another vigorous kiss, and she twisted and squirmed with desire for him, and thought To hell with modesty. When the kiss was over she ran into the kitchen and came back with two large plump tomatoes, which she’d picked that afternoon, intending to take them to Day and Diana but forgetting, what with all the other thoughts on her mind. They were the first ripe fruits of the Brandywine variety that Bo had started in his Cincinnati windowsill and brought with him to Arkansas. Brandywine, thought to have been started by the Amish, is an heirloom tomato whose taste is far more assertive and luscious than conventional tomatoes.

  “Recognize them?” she asked him.

  It took him just a moment. “My Brandywines?”

  “Yes, but the old-time Ozark folks called them ‘love apples’ because they were rumored to be aphrodisiac.”

  They didn’t need aphrodisiacs. But they took the love apples into the master bath, where they removed each other’s clothes quickly and got into the huge shower with their love apples, which they both began munching as if they were peaches, a very sexy, messy thing to do. He traced his juice-dripping fingertips along her backbone. “You have the most lithesome long back,” he said. Nobody had ever complimented her back before, and she was overwhelmed.

  “You look good all over,” she said. He was broad-shouldered, very muscular, and for a man his age his belly didn’t bulge very much. Below the slight paunch she couldn’t help seeing that his penis was already well risen, and not because of the love apple. It was huge, almost too big. She’d seen only two others for comparison—Mark’s and Vernon’s—and theirs had been plentifully expanded when aroused, but nothing like this. She couldn’t resist wrapping her fingers around it and her thumb came nowhere near meeting her fingertips.

  Bo shuddered and wriggled. “What a marvelous hand you have,” he said. They gobbled down the rest of their love apples, and then turned on the shower to wash away all the tomato juice trickling down their fronts. There was a big fresh bar of bath soap, an aromatic loaf bar scented with gardenia, and Jelena was the first to grab it. She rubbed it all over him, and it sudsed and foamed and lathered, and the fragrance turned him into a flower. She gave so much attention to his cock and balls that he had to say, “Easy.” And then he took the bar of soap from her and applied it to her body, gently and soothingly, to every convexity and every concavity of her flesh, coming finally to the bump that rose from the lips of her sex, and stroked and twiddled it in almost the very same fashion that she did to herself. In this very same spot, this shower, this very same spot, this place here, this, this, this. She was so close to coming.

  “Have you ever made love standing up?” he asked.

  “Not that I can recall,” she breathed, trying to remember if, long ago, she and Vernon might have done it.

  “Here we go,” he said, and pressed against her, bending his knees, spreading hers, raising her on tiptoe, touching, meeting, and then the one sliding up into the other. She gasped; it was painful, he was so big, it was worse than childbirth for a little while.

  He was attuned to all this. “If it hurts, we can wait until we’re more comfy, in bed.”

  She loved him for his thoughtfulness. “But I’m so close to the edge,” she said. “Could we just hold still a bit? To let me get used to it?”

  And he understood that perfectly too. He did not attempt to thrust. He was deep inside her and just stayed there, for a long time, the water coursing over them, washing off all the lovely suds. Eventually, he flexed his penis. She could feel it give a throb of expansion inside her. She squeezed her vaginal muscles around it in return. And then she decided she could stand it. She could stand standing and stand his stand. She could understand. She began rising on tiptoe and coming down, lifting and settling, impaling herself and levitating, slowly at first but then faster, until he too began moving, with great gentleness, gentleman that he was, until he realized he was no longer hurting her and could let go, exert himself, drive into her. He held her buttocks in his hands and steered his driving with them. He talked the whole time. He kept her informed of his progress, his destination and the pleasures of the trip, the feelings that he was having.

  Vernon never talked during sex. Mark had never talked, period. Bo was almost too much, like a tour guide. Rising on our left, ladies and gentlemen, is a monumental edifice called a multiple orgasm; we shall soon not only see it but feel it, and we will never have felt anything like it before. She knew she was going to come uniquely, and multiply, and she did her share to make it happen, and he, considerate sweetheart that he was, took note of her every inch in progress toward that goal, and kept always just an inch behind her, always with her, but letting her get there first, as if, racing toward the finish line as all-time scholar of Harrison High, she beat him by just a fraction of an inch, and gasped and shook and cried aloud in victory and collapsed against him, who held her as his own crossing of the finish line shook him and shook him, and she could feel that thick flesh of his emptying itself inside her. Then they both slid to the tile floor of the shower and just lay there panting and sighing, and Bo had to shut up, at last. The water continued to pour down on them, washing away every trace of tomato juice and love juice, until the water began to turn cold, and she rose up to turn it off.

  They spent the night together in the king-sized bed of the guestroom, but it was a long time before they slept. That big bed was a challenge to try it out this way and that way, south north east and west, south over north and east over west, the great variety of things they were doing and feeling only briefly giving her the jealous thought that he must have had a lot of experience with all these things. Vernon, alas, did not. As far as she knew, Vernon had never made love to anyone else (except possibly that one time when he had a chance, with Diana). Jelena had been his original teacher and while surely his vast reading had exposed him to an entire kama sutra of possibilities and variations, he had never seemed to realize that she had more than one opening, or even that there were more than two or three positions available to them. Now to add to her list of all that things that were secret from Vernon she wanted to have Bo take her anal virginity. “I am not too old to start,” she declared. But it wouldn’t work. He was simply too large. He gave her plenty of lubrication and stretching with his gentle fingers but it wasn’t enough, although he blamed himself, not for his being too large but for being too soft: after his second coming of the night he simply couldn’t become stiff enough again.

  “But we can try again tomorrow,” he said. “Or any time.” And she reflected that this night was not, as she’d been thinking, a onetime spur-of-passion fling, but just the beginning of something that could conceivably continue a long time.

  She gave him his third coming with her mouth, and then they fell asleep. It must have been long past midnight. But she woke before dawn, her intuition on fire, and slipped out of Bo’s bed and returned to her own. She lay there for quite a long while trying to get back to sleep, kept from it not by any guilt over her infidelity nor even any further jealous thoughts of Juliana, but by the conviction, not suspicion but conviction, that Vernon was in Stay More, that he would be home any minute now but that he was still in the process of taking leave of the wigwam, where he had discovered that the Osage bedding was not nearly as commodious as the king-sized bed where she and Bo had been cavorting, but that, in contrast to the square shape of the king-sized bed, the Osage field of sport was round, like the wigwam itself, and that there is something about fucking in a round space that gives a whole new dimension to the frolic. So what Jelena found herself being jealous of was not that Vernon and Juliana had been screwing (you can’t be jealous of something that you’ve just been doing yourself) but that the round space of their act(s) was a creative cosmos unlike any she’d ever imagined or would ev
er experience…unless she and Bo borrowed the wigwam some night. This last thought caused her to laugh aloud, wondering when was the last time she’d laughed aloud alone.

  “You’re awake,” Vernon observed. She turned, and there he was, under the sheets beside her. He must have sneaked into bed so stealthily she hadn’t even felt the bed move. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “When did you come in?” she asked.

  “Oh, a while ago,” he said, which could have meant anything: thirty seconds or an hour. For a moment she had the panicky thought that he might have already been here while she was in the guestroom with Bo, but she convinced herself that that wouldn’t have been possible if the sexual activities of the two couples were truly simultaneous, as she knew them to have been. “George and I decided to leave right after the rally was over. Pine Bluff is no place to spend the night.”

  “How did the rally go?” she asked politely, wondering if by any chance she might possess any aromas of sexual activity, or of Bo. But there was only the gardenia, a pervasive fragrance.

  “There wasn’t much of a turn-out,” he said. “In this hot weather, nobody wants to attend an outdoor rally. I don’t think I gave a very inspired speech.”

  Perhaps your mind was elsewhere, she nearly said. Instead she asked, “How did you get here? I didn’t hear the helicopter land.”

  “Bending Bear brought me.”

  “In the Pierce-Arrow?”

  “Those things can go anywhere.”

  “How did you happen to run into Bending Bear?”

  “It’s complicated. Basically, George landed down in the village, because he suspected engine trouble. He decided to wait until daylight to work on it, and so there we were, and Bending Bear offered to bring me on home.”

  “Did you see Juliana?”

  He was spared answering that question by the ringing of the bedside phone. He reached for it, and she tried to hear enough to determine who was calling. She could only determine it was a woman’s voice. Did Juliana have a cell phone in the wigwam? He talked a while, keeping his voice low. Or rather he listened, mostly. Then he said, “Hang on, and I’ll ask Jelena. She’s already awake.” And he put one hand over the mouthpiece and said to her, “It’s Lydia. She’s trying to locate Bo. All hell has broken loose down to Little Rock, and she can’t find Bo. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about him?”

  “He’s sleeping in our guestroom,” she declared.

  “Ha! No wonder he couldn’t be found.” Vernon got out of bed. He said into the phone, “Lydia, it just so happens he’s right here in my house. I’ll get him.” Vernon headed for the guestroom. Jelena tried to think if there might have been anything incriminatory about the guest room. No doubt it smelled like gardenia in there. She got up and put on her kimono and stepped into the master bath just to look around and be sure there wasn’t anything left behind. Sure enough, Bo’s and her clothes were still on the floor! She snatched up Bo’s things and hugged them into a bundle and sneaked into the other bubble, into the guest bath, where she dumped them on the floor there. As she was returning to her own bedroom, she bumped into Vernon. “He’s talking to Lydia,” Vernon said. “Why don’t you make some coffee? I had better shower and get dressed. We’ll be going to Fayetteville, whether or not George fixes the helicopter.”

  “What’s this all about?” she wanted to know.

  “Governor Bradfield apparently has decided not to back down in the face of all the ‘goods’ we’ve got on him. We hoped—or Bo did—that if we had enough evidence against him, he wouldn’t use his evidence against me…and it seems that Carleton Drew went over to his side and divulged all of my albatrosses. We hoped that we could run a clean campaign without mudslinging and concentrate on the issues. But it seems that my crafty opponent—my powerful opponent—went on television last night to announce that he has elected to confess each and every one of the black marks that we’ve got on him. And then to make capital of those he’s got on me.”

  “Can he defeat you with that?” she asked, politely but hoping, as she had been all along, that something could stop Vernon from moving into the governor’s mansion.

  “Quite possibly,” Vernon said glumly, and then, changing the subject, lowering his voice, he said, “Did you know that Bo sleeps in the nude?”

  Chapter fifteen

  For a long time after becoming aware of the contents of the previous chapter, Day was thrown, to put it mildly, and he began to wish that he did not enjoy his privilege of being privy to all this novel as it unfolded. Now, when it was his turn to take charge of a chapter, following the same sequence as in the first half of the book, he felt as if some unruly strangers had left behind a hideous mess for him to clean up. Not knowing how to clean it, he seriously considered begging out of the responsibility of taking charge of this chapter. Why couldn’t Cast Sherrill do it? Or Larry Brace? Or Sharon? Or, perhaps best of all, since she had so much experience at writing, Ekaterina?

  He wanted desperately to confide in Diana and complain to her about this impossible onus, not only of knowing about Jelena’s secret garden literally and figuratively but of having to comment upon it in Chapter fifteen. Of course he couldn’t say anything to Diana. How could he possibly explain to her how he knew the contents of Chapter fourteen? He wasn’t completely sure, himself, just how he possessed that privilege. He hadn’t seen the words written on a page, even in typescript or computer printout. Unlike you, the reader, he hadn’t even seen the words at all. He just knew that Jelena Ingledew, the woman in all the world he loved most next to Diana, had wanted so much to say to him, “Well, if Vernon is fooling around, now you and I can fool around at long last”—but she had not said that; she had instead fooled around with someone else. He just knew that Jelena had created a secret garden in which she imagined making love to Day, “their lovemaking like that of the flowers, burgeoning and bursting and bright, in all colors.” Worst of all, he just knew, as if he’d been in that shower with them and in that bed with them, that Jelena and Bolin Pharis had started a passionate affair. Rightfully, Day was feeling more jealous than Vernon himself might have, under the circumstances. Why couldn’t it have been me? he kept asking of the woods, aloud.

  Diana and Jelena had been such intimate friends for so many years that quite possibly Jelena would confess the affair to Diana anyway, and then perhaps Day could talk to Diana about it. But not now. Day doubted that Jelena would ever confess to anybody, not Diana, certainly not Vernon, that she made herself come with fantasies of Day. He was most uncomfortable with that, at the same time he had to face up to the simple fact that when he “saw” her in her secret garden with her eyes closed pretending he was with her, holding her, touching her, kissing her, and licking her, and entering her, making her gasp and sigh and come, he had become so aroused that he himself had been required to masturbate, then and there. No way could he tell Diana about that, and even thinking of it swept him back thirty-some-odd years to the time when, as kids in the forest of Five Corners, Vermont, he had been so embarrassed to learn that Diana had seen him masturbating that he had tried to hang himself.

  Years ago he had told Vernon the story of that, needing to talk about it at last to somebody, not just the embarrassment of being caught jerking off but the humiliation of failing in his attempt at suicide (he’d tripped and got tangled in his rope, and Diana had to climb the tree and get him down), and he had been surprised and relieved to hear Vernon explain how commonplace and incessant the act of masturbation is. “Do you have to do it?” Day had asked him. “With Jelena available?” And Vernon had delivered a little lecture on how self-sex is more “ready” and “personal” and “expert” than sex with another.

  “Jelena does it too,” Vernon had said.

  “How do you know? Have you watched?”

  “I found her vibrator,” he had said. “If she used it simply for other parts of her body, why would she hide it from me?”

  Day wondered if possibly the other things that Jelena was
hiding from Vernon—her cigarettes, her journal, her Bible, her TV set, her other garden, and, now, her affair with Bo—were not as secret as she thought. Vernon was no dummy. And what about his casual remark to her: “Did you know that Bo sleeps in the nude?” That sounded to Day as if Vernon had a suspicion, even if he hadn’t noticed the clothes on the floor in the master bathroom and the scent of gardenia in the guestroom. Day was convinced that if Vernon did not already suspect the affair between Jelena and Bo, he would soon find out. And then what? Would he simply shrug it off, or use it as an excuse for his own affair with Juliana Heartstays? Day was mildly amused that Vernon had started his affair with Juliana before knowing that Jelena was starting one with Bo. Or had he? Diana had told Day that on several occasions when she’d gone up to visit Jelena, she’d found Jelena and Bo working together in the garden (not the secret one) and on at least two of those occasions Vernon was out of town, and Jelena had told Diana that she thought Bo “exuded virility.” Day still wasn’t able to understand how Bo could permit himself with impunity to become involved with his employer’s woman, and right in the middle of a hectic political campaign.

  Now in this chapter under Day’s aegis, the campaign was going to become more hectic. Governor Bradfield, surrounded by his family, including a daughter recently removed from a private psychiatric hospital, and even the family’s cocker spaniel, had appeared on television to say, “Yes, I have sinned. I am no better than the next man in this regard. I have misused alcohol. I was a problem child in school and a goof-off in college. My military service to my country was hampered by misfortune due to my own stupidity. The Democrat-controlled legislature has kept me from carrying out my vision for the great state of Arkansas, and I have made enemies right and left. But you are still my friend. And when you compare my character and my record with Vernon Ingledew’s, you will reach the firm conviction that I am the lesser of two evils.” The governor and his campaign had launched a 13-week program of spending an entire week of newspaper ads and television spots (under the fiendish direction of Carleton Drew) on each one of Vernon’s so-called albatrosses, starting with his atheism, in which Vernon was being presented not just as a disbeliever in the divinity of Jesus Christ but as an Antichrist, who, if elected, would guilefully abolish the state’s houses of worship. Week One of this campaign was already pretty ugly, with the Arkansas Ministerial Alliance up in arms and unanimous in their opposition to Vernon, and making a large number of widespread Sunday sermons denouncing him, several of which were reprinted in the state’s newspapers. Monica Breedlove was appearing regularly at church youth groups and church socials and fellowship meetings to deliver a spirited talk in Vernon’s defense, in which she, a good Christian, claimed that Vernon had the highest respect for Jesus Christ even if he did not believe that He was the son of God (for the simple reason that there was no God).