“What the hell am I talking about?” he yelled, and charged the bear.
And it leaned back from its sitting position and went down on its back slowly, slowly, its body sighing backward, ajar as a door stirred by wind, and Ashenden belly-flopped on top of it—with its paws in the air he was a foot taller than the bear at either end, and this contributed to his sin, as if it were some child he tumbled—pressed on its swollen pussy as over a barrel. He felt nothing.
His erection had withered. The bear growled contemptuously. “Foreplay, foreplay,” Brewster hissed, and plunged his hand inside the bear. I’m doing this to save my life, he thought. I’m doing this to pass tests. This is what I call a challenge and a half.
The bear permitted the introduction of his hand and hugged him firmly, yet with a kind of reserve as though conscious of Ashenden’s eggshell mortality. His free hand was around her neck while the other moved around inside the bear insinuatingly. He felt a clit like a baseball. One hand high and one low, his head, mouth closed, buried in the mound of fur just to the side of the bear’s neck, he was like a man doing the Australian crawl.
The bear shifted. Still locked together, the two of them rolled over and over through the peaceable kingdom. For Ashenden it was like being run over, but she permitted him to come out on top. His hand had taken a terrific wrenching however, and he knew he had to get it out before it swelled and he was unable to move it. Jesus, I’ve stubbed my hand, he thought, and began to withdraw it gently, gingerly, through a booby-trapped channel of obstacle grown agonizing by his injury, a minefield of pain. The bear lay stock still as he reeled in his hand, climbing out of her cunt as up a rope. (Perhaps this feels good to her, he thought tenderly.) At last, love’s Little Jack Horner, it was out and Ashenden, his hand bent at almost a right angle to his wrist, felt disarmed. What he had counted on—without realizing he counted on it—was no longer available to him. He would not be able to manipulate the bear, would not be able to get away with merely jerking it off. It was another illusion stripped away. He would have to screw the animal conventionally.
Come on, he urged his cock, wax, grow, grow. He pleaded with his penis, taking it in his good hand and rubbing it desperately, polishing it like an heirloom, Aladdinizing it uselessly. Meanwhile, tears in his own, he looked deep into the bear’s eyes and stalled by blowing crazy kisses to it off his broken hand, saying foolish things, making it incredible promises, keeping up a lame chatter like the pepper talk around an infield.
“Just a minute. Hold on a sec. I’m almost ready. It’s going to be something. It’s really…I’ve just got to…Look, there’s really nothing to worry about. Everything’s going to work out fine. I’m going to be a man for you, darling. Just give me a chance, will you? Listen,” he said, “I love you. I don’t think I can live without you. I want you to marry me.” He didn’t know what he was saying, unconsciously selecting, with a sort of sexual guile he hadn’t known he possessed, phrases from love, the compromising sales talk of romantic stall. He had been maidenized, a game, scared bride at the bedside. Then he began to hear himself, to listen to what he was saying. He’d never spoken this way to a woman in his life. Where did he get this stuff? Where did it come from? It was the shallow language of two-timers, of drummers with farm girls, of whores holding out and gigolos holding in, the conversation of cuckoldry, of all amorous greed. It was base and cheap and tremendously exciting and suddenly Ashenden felt a stirring, the beginning of a faint lust. He moved to the spark like an arsonist and gazed steadily at the enormous hulk of impatient bear, at its black eyes cute as checkers on a snowman. Yes, he thought, afraid he’d lose it, yes. I am the wuver of the teddy bear, big bwown bear’s wittle white man.
He unbuckled his pants and let them drop and stepped out of his underwear feeling moonlight on his ass. He moved out of his jacket and tore off his shirt, his undershirt. He ran up against the bear. He slapped at it with his dick. He turned his back to it and moved the spread cheeks of his behind up and down the pelt. He climbed it, impaling himself on the strange softness of the enormous toy. He kissed it.
Pet, pet, he thought. “Pet,” he moaned, his eyes closed now. “My pet, my pet.” Yes, he thought, yes. And remembered, suddenly, saw, all the animals he had ever petted, all the furry underbellies, writhing, inviting his nails, all the babies whose rubbery behinds he’d squeezed, the little girls he’d drawn toward him and held between his knees to comfort or tell a secret to, their hair tickling his face, all small boys whose heads he’d rubbed and cheeks pinched between his fingers. We are all sodomites, he thought. There is disparity at the source of love. We are all sodomites, all pederasts, all dikes and queens and mother fuckers.
“Hey bear,” he whispered, “d’ja ever notice how all the short, bald, fat men get all the tall, good-looking blondes?” He was stiffening fast. “Hey bear, ma’am,” he said, leaning naked against her fur, bare-assed and upright on a bear rug, “there’s something darling in a difference. Why me—take me. There’s somethin’ darlin’ in a difference, how else would water come to fire or earth to air?” He cupped his hand over one of its cute little ears and rubbed his palm gently over the bristling fur as over the breast buds of a twelve-year-old-girl. “My life, if you want to know, has been a sodomy. What fingers in what pies, what toes in what seas! I have the tourist’s imagination, the day-tripper’s vision. Fleeing the ordinary, crossing state lines, greedy at Customs and impatient for the red stamps on my passports like lipstick kisses on an envelope from a kid in the summer camp. Yes, and there’s wolf in me too now. God, how I honor a difference and crave the unusual, life like a link of mixed boxcars.” He put a finger in the lining of the bear’s silken ear. He kissed its mouth and vaulted his tongue over her teeth, probing with it for the roof of her mouth. Then the bear’s tongue was in his throat, not horrible, only strange, the cunning length and marvelous flexibility an avatar of flesh, as if life were in it like an essence sealed in a tube, and even the breath, the taste of living, rutting bear, delicious to him as the taste of poisons vouchsafed not to kill him, as the taste of a pal’s bowel or a parent’s fats and privates.
He mooned with the giant bear, insinuating it backwards, guiding it as he would a horse with subtle pressures, squeezes, words and hugs. The bear responded, but you do not screw a bear as you would a woman and, seeing what he was about to do, she suddenly resisted. Now he was the horse—this too—and the bear the guide, and she crouched, a sort of semi-squat, and somehow shifted her cunt, sending it down her body and up behind her as a tap dancer sends a top hat down the length of her arm. With her head stretching out, pushing up and outward like the thrust of a shriek, cantilevering impossibly and looking over her shoulder, she signaled Ashenden behind her.
He entered her from the rear, and oddly he had never felt so male, so much the man, as when he was inside her. Their position reinforced this, the bear before him, stooped, gymnastically leaning forward as in the beginning of a handstand, and he behind as if he drove sled dogs. He might have been upright in a chariot, some Greek combination of man and bear exiled in stars for a broken rule. So good was it all that he did not even pause to wonder how he fit. He fit, that’s all. Whether swollen beyond ordinary length himself or adjusted to by some stretch-sock principle of bear cunt (like a ring in a dime store that snugs any finger), he fit. “He fit, he fit and that was it,” he crooned happily, and moved this way and that in the warm syrups of the beast, united with her, ecstatic, transcendent, not knowing where his cock left off and the bear began. Not deadened, however, not like a novocained presence of tongue in the mouth or the alien feel of a scar, in fact never so filled with sensation, every nerve in his body alive with delight, even his broken hand, even that, the nerves rearing, it seemed, hind-legged almost, revolting under their impossible burden of pleasure, vertiginous at the prospect of such orgasm, counseling Ashenden to back off, go slow, back off or the nerves would burst, a new lovely energy like love’s atoms split. And even before he came, he felt addicted, hook
ed; where would his next high come from, he wondered almost in despair, and how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, and what awfulness must follow such rising expectations?
And they went at it for ten minutes more and he and the bear came together.
“ ouhw ouhw nnng,” said the bear.
“” groaned Ashenden, and fell out of the bear and lay on his back and looked at the stars.
And he lay like that for half an hour, catching his breath, feeling his nerves coalesce, consolidating once more as a man, his hard-on declining, his flesh turning back into flesh, the pleasure lifting slow as fever. And thinking. So. I’m a sodomite. But not just any ordinary sodomite with a taste for sheep or a thing for cows, some carnivore’s harmless extension of appetite that drives him to sleep with what he eats. No. I’m kinky for bears.
And then, when he was ready, when at last he could once more feel his injured hand, he pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. The bear was gone, though he thought he saw its shape reclined beside a tree. He stood up and looked down and examined himself. When he put his clothes back on, they hung on him like flayed skin and he was conscious of vague withdrawal symptoms in his nuts. He moved into the moonlight. His penis looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Had it still been erect the blood might perhaps have gone unnoticed, a faint flush; no longer distended, it seemed horrid, wet, thick as paint. He cupped his hand beneath himself and caught one drop in his palm. He shook his head. “My God,” he said, “I haven’t just screwed a bear, I’ve fucked a virgin!”
Now his old honor came back to chide him. He thought of Jane dying in the castle, of the wolf mask binding her eyes like a dark handkerchief on the vision of a condemned prisoner, of it binding his own and of the tan beard across his face like a robber’s bandanna. Ashenden shuddered. But perhaps it was not contagious unless from love and honor’s self-inflicted homeopathy. Surely he would not have to die with her. All he had to do was tell her that he had failed the test, that he had not met her conditions. Then he knew that he would never tell her this, that he would tell her nothing, that he would not even see her, that tomorrow—today, in an hour or so when the sun was up—he would have Plympton’s man take him to the station, that he would board a train, go to London, rest there for a day or two, take in a show, perhaps go to the zoo, book passage to someplace far, someplace wild, further and wilder than he had ever been, look it over, get its feel, with an idea of maybe settling down one day. He’d better get started. He had to change.
He remembered that he was still exposed and thought to cover himself lest someone see him, but first he’d better wipe the blood off his penis. There was a fresh handkerchief in his pocket, and he took it out, unfolded it and strolled over to the pond. He dipped the handkerchief in the water and rubbed himself briskly, his organ suddenly tingling with a new surge of pleasure, but a pleasure mitigated by twinges of pain. There was soreness, a bruise. He placed the handkerchief back in his pocket and handled himself lightly, as one goes over a tire to find a puncture. There was a small cut on the underside of his penis that he must have acquired from the bear. Then the blood could have been mine, he thought. Maybe I was the virgin. Maybe I was. It was good news. Though he was a little sad. Post-coitum tristesse, he thought. It’ll pass.
He started back through art to the house, but first he looked over his shoulder for a last glimpse of the sleeping bear. And he thought again of how grand it had been, and wondered if it was possible that something might come of it. And seeing ahead, speculating about the generations that would follow his own, he thought, Air. Water, he thought. Fire, Earth, he thought…And honey.
The Condominium
“NO DREAM,” he would write, “not a vision, not even a reverie. No fancy nor aspiration either. No crummy goal nor lousy aim. Something harder, acknowledged. More real than any of these. Something two-in-the-bush realer than any bird. Right up there with death and taxes.
“A place to live, to be. Out of what vortical history came spinning this notion of a second skin? From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt? (Small wonder our daddies were tailors, needlers and threaders, or that our mothers threw up an archaeology on the dining room table, first the wood, varnished and glossed and waxed, then thick baize pads, next a linoleum, then a plain cloth and then a crocheted, a sheet of plastic over all with a bowl of fruit, a dish of candy, a vase of flowers, and none of this for protection and even less for ornament, but just out of dedication to weight as a principle, a tropism in the bones for mass and hide.) Out of what frightful trauma of exclusion arose this need, what base expulsion from what cave during which incredible spell of rotten weather?
“And never land, never real estate, the land grant unheard of, unimagined and unnecessary (what could you do with land?), even the notion of a ‘promised land’ merely religion, poetry. No. No great Mosaic East India Company tracts in the background, no primogenitive tradition of estates, properties, patents and dominions. Not land, not dirt, only what land and dirt threw up, its lumbers and sands and clays and ores and stones—its ingredients, like a recipe for cement.”
“His father,” he would write, “met his mother at ‘camp.’ There were tents but this may have been before tents. Somewhere there was a photograph of young men in bedrolls, his father and his shrouded pals like disaster victims laid out in a line in the sun. And the girls—Floradora, Gibson, Bloomer, whatever the Twenties term for their type may have been—with already about them a sepia hunt of nostalgia puffing their knickers, thickening their socks, bagging their sweaters, complicating their curls. Weekend fraternities—‘The River Rats,’ ‘The Crusoe Club,’ ‘The Peninsula Club’—and sororities—‘The Blueschasers,’ ‘The Flappers,’ ‘The Go-to-Hell-God-Damnits’—of the white-collar working class down to New Jersey on the train from New York, the city. He had spent more than half his summers there, but had no fixed memory of the place because it was always changing. When he was a boy it was like living on a sound stage, some studio town going up before his eyes. He watched the carpenters, the Phil-Gas, the diggers of septic tanks, all the electricians, all the Dugan’s and Breyer’s Ice Cream and Borden’s Milk and Nehi Soda people opening up routes, signing up customers, civilizing this wilderness as ever any missionaries or conquistadors civilized theirs. He saw electricity come in, city water, mail (the rural delivery boxes like the tunnels for toy trains, PATERSON MORNING CALL or BERGEN MESSENGER stenciled on the tin tunnels like names for the trains).
“So the tents came down (never having actually seen the tents, he nevertheless sensed them, or rather their absence, knowing that he walked not through fields and cleared woods but along lots and parcels, and that antecedent to these there would have to have been sites) and the bungalows went up, each summer some new section of the colony developed, the new bungalows put up in pairs or fours or half-dozens, as though speculators and contractors were incapable of dealing in anything but even numbers, their insistence on the careful geometric arrangements like architecture’s on some principle of equilibrium, a vaguely military hedging against the failure of their enterprise. Only his and a few of the other bungalows owned, or anyway mortgaged, not rented, by his parents and a handful of collateral old-timers, ‘pioneers’—some of them relatives, all of them friends—as they styled themselves, had been put up independently. (And didn’t he feel proud, aristocratic even, with the distinction imposed by ownership?)
“The bungalows went up and he went to meet the Friday night trains on the hill that brought the droves of what were still called campers for their weekend in the country. Saw with the gradual development the appearance of the fabulous ‘extras’—handball courts, an entire ball field with wooden bases, two or three tennis courts and, one summer (it had gone up over the winter) an actual outdoor roller-skating rink, which later, when the bungalows were finally purchased, the developers would fail
to maintain so that he would see it literally reclaimed, the shuffleboard court inset within the oval rink the first to go, the painted numbers fading, fading, gone like a dissolve in films, then weeds springing up irresistibly through cracks in the cement that had not been there the year before and the once smooth white concrete overrun with sudden wolf-man growths and sproutings, the rink itself collapsing piecemeal, drowning in ivies, nettles, briars and poisonous-looking trees. Eventually not a handball court was left standing, not a tennis court, nor a single dock for canoes, the rollers rusted, jammed, as if the renters, now owners themselves, had no interest in the out-of-doors at all, had repudiated it, as if life were meant to be lived inside and the games they once played as bachelor boys and bachelor girls—‘The Good Sports,’ ‘The Merry Maidens’—were over, literally, the scores frozen, more final than Olympic records. (Though he and his cousins and friends still used the courts, their skills damaged by the disrepair.)
Searches & Seizures Page 21