An hour later Miss Breeson sent Linda home, having promised that she could keep working for Model Tenants. When Miss Breeson herself got home she saw that her younger brother was there
“Have fun?” he asked.
“Lots of fun,” Miss Breeson answered. Her labia was still tingling from her employee’s obsequious tongue.
“Linda’s got a great arse, doesn’t she?” the younger man continued. “I kept looking at it the whole time I was making love to her,” he added with a knowing grin.
Miss Breeson smiled brightly at her ever-helpful brother.
“She does indeed, Nick,” she said. She paused. “I’m through with Linda for now, but maybe next week you can start checking up on young Mandy. She’s supposed to be guarding the Riverside Hotel but I’m sure she’d break her curfew if you asked her for a date.”
Greek Fever
Anne Tourney
There weren’t many men in my Bible Belt town who practised Greek love. One of the few was my father, Simon. The other was Gabriel, who was posing as our live-in handyman. My father believed that Gabriel, with his charmed hands and cock, could fix anything from a sinking roof to a rusted libido. I didn’t believe anything about Gabriel except for one promise he made to me. And that was only because I had wrestled my lust into something resembling faith.
Simon and I had Greek fever that summer. We staggered around with Greece on the brain, the light of Athens burning our bodies from inside. But while Simon retreated into his fever like a trance, I was planning to act on my affliction.
My father didn’t know that I was going to Greece with his lover.
Gabriel told me what to pack: only enough clothes for sunbathing, drinking, and fucking. We could have done all those things in Oklahoma, but in Greece, Gabriel said, you could turn a life of lazy horniness into a personal philosophy. In the town of Pawsupsnatch (pop. 3,007) that kind of slutty behaviour was just another reason for people to gossip about you.
The gossip would have turned into mass hysteria if the citizens of Pawsupsnatch had known what went on in our house. On my days off, Gabriel fucked me. Nights, he made love with my father. In the darkness, soft groans would drift from Simon’s locked bedroom. During the day Gabriel and I would tear the house apart as we banged our way from room to room, knocking over furniture and denting the walls. Terrified of the Baptists who ran our local drugstore, I made secret trips to Tulsa to buy condoms by the trunkload. Considering Simon’s social status as a widowed high school teacher, I assumed he was doing some smuggling himself. After twelve years of exile, the spectre of sex had swooped back into our home, and that spectre was pissed-off and ravenous.
“It’s your turn, Aggie,” Gabriel would murmur, starting things off with moth-wing kisses on the nape of my neck. His lips would buzz my ears while his arms roped my waist from behind. I’d burrow back into the muscular cradle of his torso until I felt his cock rise against my ass cheeks. I started wearing short, flimsy skirts so he could get to my pussy with his fingers, cock, or tongue whenever the urge seized us. Betraying my father felt like stepping barefoot on a rusty tin can – agonizing and thrilling and toxic – but I couldn’t help myself. When I came with Gabriel, mighty spasms cored my body, leaving me raving and senseless. I didn’t have orgasms; I had seizures.
“I could fall in love with you in Greece,” Gabriel once told me. Now that summer’s long gone, I know he must have told my father the same thing.
At first I couldn’t stand to hear Gabriel and Simon making love. My father’s celibacy was a given part of the deal we made when I put my life in deep-freeze so I could look after him and his feeble heart. I knew he fell in love now and then and that, since my mother died, he’d given up the struggle to love women. I must have known that his abstract love for men could translate into sex. I just never thought it would happen in my mother’s bed.
My mother and father had always been discreet in their passion. As a child I never wondered how they made love, but whether they “did it” at all. At the age of 28, I wasn’t prepared for this variation on the primal scene: my father having sex – intense, audible sex – with another man. My mind reeled. I wrote down a list of words to describe what two naked men might get up to, then I repeated those words until they lost their mystery. Fellatio, sodomy, cornholing, cocksucking. The throaty male voices taunted me, their moans melting and swirling like butter and bittersweet chocolate. Rituals went on behind that door that I couldn’t visualize. Did they kiss with open lips and tongues? Did they rub their erections together, like two scouts trying to start a fire with a pair of sticks? Did they suck each other’s cocks with juicy abandon as they lay coiled in bed, each lover’s heart thumping against the other’s belly? Did they mount each other, penetrate and thrust?
From the shouts and pleas that rang through the house at night, I imagined they did all that and then some.
After Gabriel had been with us for a week, my fascination took on a harder edge. In my sexual starvation, I hallucinated that Gabriel was moving on top of me, and that the moans echoing through the walls came from my own lips, not my father’s. My body ignored all taboos and began responding to the urgent sounds. My fingers stabbed my cunt in time to the squeaking bedsprings. I imagined Gabriel’s mouth on my pussy, my mouth on his prick, our hands roving over each other’s sweat-slick skin. In the daylight, I was mortified by the idea of being aroused by my father’s lovemaking. But as I witnessed Simon’s growing joy, I realized that the man sharing a bed with Gabriel was no longer just my father. With Gabriel, Simon was transformed into the man he was meant to be.
That’s when I let myself start wanting Gabriel. I not only wanted him, I deserved him.
He came to us in June. Tornado weather – the sky was swollen with its own miserable promise. The air in the house felt as dead as dough that won’t rise. Simon and I were reading on the front porch.
As soon as Gabriel stopped his battered Dodge and stepped out, my father and I were lost. We gaped as he strolled around the car, his hips rolling in frayed blue jeans. The tips of his savannah-blond hair were painted with sweat. His white cotton T-shirt sucked lovingly at his damp chest. A halo of black gnats circled his face and throat. Suddenly I wanted more than anything to be one of those miniscule insects, sipping at that man’s juice, stinging, biting, living a flash of a life in the warmth of his body.
“Morning,” he said. “Need any odd jobs done around here?” His voice was like his looks: bronzed, sun-creased, lubed with honey. In the bilious daylight his eyes were snake green.
Odd jobs? In a household consisting of a lonely, horny librarian; her lonelier, hornier father; and about three thousand books (half of them written in dead languages) I’d say there were a few odd jobs to be done. Yes, sir.
My father rose and walked down the front steps. Gabriel extended his hand (God, to think where that hand would end up that summer) and my father clutched it, for what seemed like forever.
“I think we could find you some work,” Simon said.
Gabriel stayed for lunch. I prepared the food while my father and Gabriel got to know each other. As I carried the plates to the table, my father announced, “Gabriel just got back from Athens. Agatha, he lived there for a year. He speaks a bit of the language.”
Around here, that just about made him Plato reincarnate.
Simon’s face was a searchlight, casting its beam back and forth between me and Gabriel, but resting mostly on Gabriel. Barring death or disaster, there was no way this stranger was going to leave our house.
And he didn’t. The first night, Gabriel made a nest for himself on our sofa. Early the next morning, while he was taking a shower, I went through his belongings. I found a few dirty socks and T-shirts and a wallet with nothing but seven dollars inside: no credit cards, no driver’s licence. I held a shirt up to my nose and inhaled his smell, as dizzying as a stag’s musk.
The water stopped running. I flung Gabriel’s things back into a heap. I thought he would appear any second,
padding barefoot into the living room. His brown body would be sparkling with moisture, his hair slicked back, water clinging to his nipples and welling out of his navel and trickling down through the dark gold tendrils that fanned his pubis.
From upstairs I heard voices: masculine, companionable, an intimate rumbling.
Love banter.
I buried my hand in the heap of quilts and felt no trace of warmth. Gabriel hadn’t slept on this sofa; he’d slept in my father’s bed. While I was trying to find out whether Gabriel was a travelling axe murderer, he and Simon had been showering together.
Over the nights that followed, as I lay in my bed listening to the ongoing seduction of my father, I developed a theory about Gabriel. I decided that Gabriel wasn’t a man or a god, but a spirit who goes back and forth between the worlds, like the daimon of Greek myth. This spirit came over from Athens in some tourist’s shopping bag, landed in the Bible Belt, and answered the cry for love that came from Simon and me. I never thought to analyze Gabriel’s sexual preferences: whether he was gay, straight, or some hybrid of the two. From the first time I saw him, I knew that Gabriel could take on any shape you wanted.
Since my mother’s death Simon had fallen in love a few times, but until Gabriel his loves were always wildly suppressed and embarrassing, like the crumb that gets stuck in your throat in a fancy restaurant. Simon had a disturbing tendency to fall for his students. He taught History and Driver’s Ed at the high school, but long ago he had earned a Ph.D. in Classics, and he missed Ancient Greek with a pain that showed in his eyes. Every so often a male student would sidle up to him and confess that he wanted to read Sappho or Plato or Aristophanes in the original. Boom – Simon would be gone. He couldn’t help it; Greek was the language he loved with.
This whole affair would have been easier if Gabriel had been one of my father’s pupils, and my father had suffered with love for years, waiting for an illicit yearning to ripen into a legitimate romance when Gabriel came of age.
Nothing in our lives was ever that easy.
The first words Gabriel said to me outside of Simon’s earshot were, “I love girls your age.” The way he let the word “love” shimmy down his tongue, it sounded more like he wanted to say “crave”.
It was late at night. Somehow, under the dense shelf of heat that had been building up all day, Simon had managed to fall asleep. Gabriel and I sat outside at the picnic table.
“How old do you think I am?”
“Stand up.”
I stood.
Though I couldn’t see Gabriel’s eyes, I could feel him looking me up and down. My nipples stuck straight out and begged his eyes to linger.
“Eighteen?”
“I’m older than I look,” I warned.
I wasn’t about to admit that I was 28. My personal fashion profile hadn’t changed much since I was 16, the year my mother died.
“Take off that top, and I could make a better guess.”
I could sense Gabriel grinning in the darkness. He wasn’t wearing a shirt himself. All day he’d worn nothing but a pair of cut-offs, so short that I could practically hear his balls chafing against the ragged hems. Spit crackled in my parched mouth.
“I’ll take off my top if you answer a question,” I said.
“What kind of question?”
“Does it matter?”
“Sure. If it’s about the past, I won’t answer it. And if it’s about the future, I can’t.”
“Do you love Simon?”
Gabriel didn’t answer. I longed to sit down again, to get back to the promising buzz that had risen between us. But I had to keep standing there, like a prosecutor waiting for testimony.
Then Gabriel asked me a question.
“Have you ever been to Greece?”
“No. I’ve never been anywhere.”
“How come?”
I sat down again. “My father has heart trouble, so I’ve stayed close to home. After high school I got a job at the public library, and I’ve been there ever since.”
When it came to life, I was a virgin in all but the old cock-in-the-hole sense. Hand me any book, and I could catalogue it even in a coma. I could find answers to questions about everything from ant hills to transvestism, but I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, my heart galloping, and realized that I might die before I ever experienced cunnilingus.
“You should go to Greece, Aggie. You’d see things differently there. Simon knows what I mean.”
“My father’s never been to Greece, either.”
“Even so, he understands me. He knows what I am.”
“Do you think you might fall in love with him?”
Gabriel laughed. “I told you I couldn’t answer questions about the future.”
“If you don’t love him, why are you here?”
“I like the way he stares at me when I’m naked. I like the way he touches me. And because I’m dead broke and he’s letting me stay here for free.”
I should have hated Gabriel for admitting that, but I didn’t. I could see him in Greece, sunbathing naked in the rubble of a ruined temple, recharging his body in the light of an amoral sun. I could see myself there, too, emptied of everything but a desire for life. Free of taking care of Simon. Free of being Agatha.
“I want to go to Greece,” I said.
“Me too. But I can’t get there without any money.”
“I have money.”
“Sure, Aggie.”
“I do! Not a fortune, but enough.”
“Then we’ll go,” Gabriel said.
I believed him.
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Gabriel said. “We’ll go.”
“When?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
I didn’t decide that night. I did my research, throttled my conscience, and decided we’d leave in September. By the time my father started the new school year, Gabriel and I would be in Athens. From there we’d travel to the islands whose names I murmured in my bed at night like incantations.
It started on a Monday morning. Simon was teaching summer school. Gabriel was mowing the lawn. I stood at the kitchen sink, sipping a glass of iced coffee and inhaling the fragrance of cut grass. I should have known something was up when the lawnmower’s drone stopped.
“Aggie?”
I hadn’t heard Gabriel enter the kitchen. Coffee spilled down my chin. The glass fell from my hand and shattered on the floor.
“Shit!” I grabbed a dishcloth.
Gabriel was on his knees, picking up the shards of glass. I knelt beside him. A ruby bead welled out of the pad of his thumb. I grabbed his hand and stuck his thumb in my mouth.
His thumb tasted of gasoline, grass, and the dangerous tang of blood. I closed my eyes and sucked at the digit as if it were a straw to his soul. I sucked greedily, drinking his experiences, his memories, the mysteries of his past. I didn’t consider what I was doing until I opened my eyes and found him staring at me. His eyes were a clear, steady gold that morning. I could almost believe he was sincere when he said, “I could fall in love with you in Greece.”
“I don’t know if I could fall in love with you,” I said, “but I sure as hell need to fuck you.”
We stampeded upstairs like wild horses, tripping over each other to get to my bedroom, where we undressed in a mute frenzy. Naked, we slowed down for some sensual investigation. His skin was moist from working outdoors; my fingertips clung softly wherever they made contact. He cupped my breasts and suckled my nipples until I thought I’d cry from the keen joy. His hard-on nudged my thigh, but he wasn’t in any rush to enter me. Instead he moved down, spangling my belly with kisses. A prayer took shape in my mind.
Oh, Lord, let him eat my pussy.
Oh, Lord, let this be better than that time in the truck with Hank Maples.
Then Gabriel was turning my cunt inside out like the cuff of a velvet sleeve, and his tongue was wandering through grooves I didn’t know I had, places that hadn’t been touc
hed by anything more exotic than a washcloth. Gabriel’s mouth had more tricks than a whole herd of circus ponies, and that morning he showed me all of them. The flutter. The clitflicker. The figure eight, the labial lunge, the lick-out-the-slipper, the toad-in-the-hole. He licked me into a state I’ve only heard drug addicts talk about: a mindless, floating ecstasy.
The floating got turbulent when he started to suck on my clit. He slid one finger inside me, then two, then three, then an impossible four. Deeper his hand plunged. My body felt paralyzed from the waist down, except for the red zone between my thighs. I was wetter than I’d ever known a woman could be, until I hit my peak and unleashed a flood. My body arched so high that I could swear I saw Greece. While Gabriel rode me to his own climax, I watched a delirious light dance against a blinding blue sky.
After he fell asleep I explored him, inch by inch. Gabriel’s skin was a map. His tan formed continents of bronze and seas of dusky rose. It was not the kind of tan you get working in an oil field or fishing for crappie. His body bore the imprint of ancient light.
But Gabriel wasn’t interested in ancient light. He was more concerned with drinking beer and scamming free plane tickets and screwing outdoors. Yet in that sense, Simon would have said, he was as ancient as they come: the living, breathing soul of unreasoning desire.
As a teenager I’d read my father’s copy of Plato’s Symposium. Simon worshipped those dialogues; he’d have given his life to go back to ancient Athens and sit in on that dinner party with Socrates and his friends, drinking and laughing and talking about love. I didn’t know what I was looking for in that book. Possibly a balm for the uneasiness I felt about my parents’ marriage, or a map to the places Simon travelled in his mind when his body seemed so restless.
When I read what Diotima tells Socrates about love and procreation, my heart turned into a sack of wet cement. Love is creative, she says; it strives for immortality in different forms. A person can create with his body – have children with women, in other words – or reach for a more exalted love and produce children of the soul. It’s the second kind of love that takes you from the physical to the spiritual plane, and finally earns you a ticket to see absolute beauty. I figured that second kind of love was what Simon secretly craved, what kept him awake at night, incapable of resting in my mother’s bed.
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