“I don’t know,” she said, still not looking at him. “I don’t know what you feel at all, Ferris, and I don’t know what you think. You come here and we do all this, we make love, we fuck, but what does it count for?”
“A lot.”
That was true. It did count for a lot, but what “a lot” meant, he couldn’t have said. And here was a problem. It was great sex, great. No other word sufficed. And it satisfied his hunger for transgression, his need to affront convention. But how important was that out in the world? Not very, if he could walk away from it for weeks and months at a stretch. And what did it say about how he felt toward either of them? Not much.
“A lot?” she repeated. “You leave here in the morning like you’re escaping. Where do you go? I don’t know anything about your life. Do you ever think about me – about us – when you don’t have your face buried between my legs?”
It was a deadly question – and he didn’t have to answer it. Vince came out of the bathroom, still wet from the shower, with a towel around his head and shoulders. “So,” he asked, “what are you two talking about?”
Before Ferris could dodge, Vince told him what he thought the conversation was about. “Ava wants to have a child with you. I think it’s a good idea.”
This wasn’t what he and Ava were talking about, was it? He glanced at Ava and could read nothing, either way, from her expression. Maybe this is how she explained it to Vince, or maybe it was how Vince explained it to himself, made it into a practical reality. Vince’s version was the more frightening, but either way, it scared the shit out of Ferris.
“You already have a child,” Ferris said, tentatively. “If you want another, why don’t you just go ahead and have one?”
“We didn’t think about it until a little while ago,” Vince said. “I had a vasectomy last year. Didn’t think we’d want more kids. But Ava really loves you, Ferris. So do I. And why not?”
Ferris’s head was spinning. On this one, he could think of several dozen reasons why not, the best of them practical. Whose child would it be? Who would raise it? He was number three in this relationship in every way, and so far that had been fine. But what would happen if they were to throw a child out into the mix? Would the child have two fathers?
Oh no, Ferris could see that this was altogether too crazy.
“This is a pretty amazing proposition,” he said, trying to compose himself. “I need some time to think about it.”
“Oh, sure,” Vince said, very serious now. “Think about it.”
Ferris takes a sip of tea. “I’m thinking about that time you asked me if I wanted to father a child with you,” he says. “I never understood that.”
Vince shrugs. “What’s to understand? At the time, it was a serious offer. But you would have had to make a commitment, and you didn’t. So it passed. That’s when I began to realize just how screwed up you were, actually.”
Ferris looks to Ava for confirmation. She looks out the window, and then back at him. “It was a bad idea,” she says, slowly. “We had a lot of those, if you recall.”
Oh yes, indeed. The worst one was Ferris’s, kicked off from that incident. He decided that he wanted Ava for himself. Or at least, he wanted to see what it would be like between just the two of them. An affair, or whatever it might be called in the circumstances. The nomenclature would need to be peculiar, but then his feelings for her were peculiar. Until that moment putting a name to them hadn’t seemed relevant, or rather, it hadn’t seemed possible.
Ava went along with it, for as far as it went. They met several times in anonymous hotels. Ferris was all over her, and she was either bored or diffident – Ferris couldn’t decide which it was. He did everything he could to make her lose control of her reserve, to orgasm, but even though he licked and sucked and fucked her until she was raw he couldn’t get her half as close as Vince and he did together. She let him do whatever he wanted, affectionate and slightly impatient at the same time, as if she were humouring a child. Whatever he thought he was doing, it was wide of the mark, and Ava gave him no hint of any alternative. Maybe she felt guilty because Vince wasn’t there. After a while, Ferris did.
Alone, he and Ava discovered they had little to talk about. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about Vince or about the ménage-à-trois. They didn’t talk about being in love, or about having a child, although Ferris imagined that he might be getting her pregnant. They didn’t discuss how either of them got to the hotel, or how she would get back to the island afterward, they didn’t discuss work or children, and they barely talked about the weather. They were left with a present that had to subsist within the walls of the hotel room, and a future that they might be risking by being there.
They met in the hotel lobby, rushed to the room, made love, and lay in the darkness without speaking. If this was the real thing, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the unrealities they were cheating on. Ava didn’t get pregnant, and they stopped meeting without having to admit they were going to. Ferris was disappointed and relieved at the same time.
Now, here, he has a sudden instinct that Vince had known about it all along, and that if not, he certainly knew now. “I had some dumb ideas in those days,” Ferris says, looking at Vince and feeling guilty.
“You mean like trying to take Ava away from me?” he says. “Yeah, I knew you were trying. I wasn’t worried. I thought you’d figure it out for yourself soon enough.”
“How did you find out?”
“Ava told me she was seeing you. I told you we trusted each other completely. You didn’t believe it like you didn’t believe a lot of the rest of what I said. More tea?”
Ferris decided to leave “the rest of it” alone. “Another cup is fine. Why didn’t you stop it?”
“Why should I? Ava was crazy about you . . . and I thought you might see what we were offering you.”
Ava fills Ferris’s cup, tops up her own and Vince’s, and goes off to the kitchen to make more. Watching her do this simple thing, Ferris tries to fathom how she sorted out complexities like the ones he’d created for her. Did she sort them out at all? He could hardly fault her if she didn’t. He hadn’t, not really.
From the beginning of it, Ferris had difficulty living with the idea that he was sexually involved with a married couple. How many times had he sat on the ferry on the trip back and told himself it was too weird, that he couldn’t handle it any longer?
Yes, but it was also the ferry rides, together with the isolation of the island, that protected it, and him. No one knew he had this other life. To his friends, Ferris was someone who sometimes disappeared for a few days, that’s all. Not generally available on weekends. If a friend asked where he was, he mentioned business. If business associates asked, he used his friends as an excuse.
After the “affair” ended, it got harder, and he didn’t return to the island at one point for almost eight months. He found several new lovers, tried hard to stay interested in them, but couldn’t. When he started coming back to the island regularly, there were no recriminations, no oblique punishments, no reluctances. But there was a subtle erotic escalation, so subtle that he didn’t notice it at first.
Ferris was conducting his own subtle escalation. He was competing with Vince, holding off his orgasms until after Vince had his, or breaking off to watch them fuck, nestling close to Ava, cuddling her, kissing her breasts or face or neck, holding her eyes with his while Vince came. Then he’d have her to himself, and he put on performances that were as much for Vince as for Ava.
They weren’t always comfortable performances, because Vince had some unsubtle ways of watching. He’d lie with his face next to Ava’s vagina, slipping Ferris’s cock out of her and into his mouth for a few strokes. Or while Ferris was fucking with Ava, Vince would play with his balls, or lick his asshole. Several times Vince insisted on joining in on fellatio – at least once, due to last-second manoeuvres, Ferris came in Vince’s mouth. Vince seemed to enjoy all of this, and Ferris, well, didn’t.
> Meanwhile, the configurations and combinations were escalating, getting wilder and weirder. Each round of love-making seemed to require a new configuration. Some of them were simply contortions – easy enough to adapt to. Then came vibrators and dildos, an uncomplicated fourth partner. There was a decipherable symmetry to the escalations. Each time, Ferris was offered the more extreme posture. At the next session, Vince began there. Oils appeared, anal intercourse was introduced. At that, Ferris at first balked.
“Don’t be a prude,” Vince said. “It isn’t painful if it’s done right. You lubricate properly, and come into her from the front, just like conventional fucking. You’ll like it. She does.”
Ava, lying between them on the bed, arched her back and licked her lips.
Then Ava wanted them both in her vagina at the same time. It was a difficult, contorted manoeuvre, and Ferris was convinced that it was painful for her. A few days afterward, he phoned and asked her point-blank.
“It was pleasant,” she said, her voice cool. “Should we be talking about this on the phone?”
“It didn’t look like it was pleasant,” he said. “It looked painful. And it felt painful.”
“It hurt you?” she answered, her tone still cool.
“No, damn it. It hurt you. I hurt you.”
“Ferris, sweetie,” she said as if instructing a child. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between pleasure and pain. In any case, if I’d wanted you to stop, I would have said so.”
“You would have.”
“Yes. Don’t you understand that?”
He told her he did.
Ferris realizes that he’s staring at Ava, remembering being in those strange and stranger embraces with her, helplessly recalling her scent and taste and the myriad erotic postures in which he’s seen her exquisite body. He knows more about her, been more intimate with her than any woman he’s been with. At the same time, he knows nothing about her, nothing comfortably human. Doesn’t intimacy leave indelible traces? Where are they, here?
“Don’t, Ferris,” Ava says. “I don’t want to be looked at like that. Not by you, or Vince, or anyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He is sorry. “That certainly isn’t why I’m here.”
“So why are you here, exactly?”
Tough question. Mentally he goes over the list: curiosity about the events of the last ten years, an old friend’s and lover’s distant concern, some personal curiosity about how a beautiful woman has aged. All acceptable motives. But there’s a surprise item on the list, and it isn’t acceptable: Ferris isn’t sure he wouldn’t tumble into the sack with them right now if they proposed it.
He frowns, tries to rid himself of the thought. “Tell me what happened with the child you adopted.”
Ava looks at the floor, and Vince sinks back in his chair with a sigh.
“There’s not much to tell,” he says. “She had learning disabilities, you knew that. She didn’t improve, and by the time she was fifteen, we had a major behaviour problem on our hands. All sorts of incidents, one thing after another. Eventually she was caught breaking into the house of one of our neighbours, and she got sent to a juvenile home. We sprung her, but after that, it was worse. She’d be here for a few days, and then she’d disappear for weeks on end. Then she stopped coming. We don’t even know where she is, now. In jail, I think.”
“I’m sorry,” Ferris says. “What about Bobby?”
“What about him?” Vince replies. “He’s around. He has his own place in town, works, goes to school part-time. He just outgrew the island, that’s all. This isn’t much of a place for young people.”
“Are you two happy?”
Ava answers. “Sometimes. Yes.” There’s a long hesitation. “We’ve been in therapy for three years. That’s helped a lot.”
“What for?” Ferris asks, without thinking.
“It got out of hand,” Vince answers for her. “There was nothing in our lives but sex. It was an addiction.”
Their distance makes it feel more like there’s a continent between them and him rather than a few feet. The distance was there when he arrived, but now it is tangible. And it is growing, solidifying.
“We didn’t understand that, not really. Nobody does, anymore. We thought the pleasure we wanted, or whatever it is life is about, was somewhere else, something else, someone else. That’s what you were all about, what that whole thing was about. It felt like a big mountain we were climbing, but we were only climbing out of ourselves. We discovered that what matters is the village at the base of the mountain. Now we get up in the morning and work on things. One day at a time.”
Ferris can feel disappointment straining against his discretion. Vince has just given him a cliche-ridden Alcoholics Anonymous speech. It’s evidently a sincere one, and the small smile on Ava’s face as he speaks confirms her agreement.
“But you know, Ferris,” Vince says after an awkward silence Ferris doesn’t break, “we’re okay, now. It started to come around when we realized that life isn’t supposed to be easy. None of what we did was a total waste of time. We had to go through it and come out on the other side. I think that’s what you’re doing, too, in your own way. It’s too bad you have to do it alone.”
Ferris shrugs. Maybe, just maybe, it is that simple. The way they lived, the dangers must have kept growing, while the payoffs got smaller, or at least harder to find. Eventually, the accumulated discretions and indiscretions must have toppled over on them in some terrible way. Maybe in the real world, maybe just in their minds. But maybe they just got tired of the complications, and stopped. So maybe the unfinished business he came here to settle isn’t unfinished, and there are no revelations forthcoming.
Well, not quite. Ever since he got on the ferry this morning, he’s been wrestling, somewhere in his subconscious, with the puzzle of how Vince and he performed simultaneous anal and vaginal intercourse with Ava. He’s certain it took place, because he can distinctly remember the sensation of his and Vince’s penises touching through the thin membrane between them. What’s bothering him – what’s been bothering him for a long time – is the configuration.
It was part of an obscure fidelity Ferris kept, and he’d been subtle enough with it that he was certain that neither Vince nor Ava were aware of it. But throughout everything they did, Ferris had not once entered Ava unless they were face to face. Now, suddenly, he realizes the configuration he wants isn’t physically possible. He’s been deluding himself. Vince had been on his back, she kneeling forward on his chest, and Ferris was squatting behind her. In the crudest possible sense, Ferris had fucked her up the ass, impersonally, like a dog would. And for ten years, he’d been blocking the memory of it.
“What’s wrong, Ferris?” he hears Ava asking. His consternation must have shown in his face. “Were you expecting more?”
Ferris looks at the ceiling. “No,” he says. “I just thought of something. It’s obscure stuff. Nothing to do with you.”
He wants to tell Ava he’s sorry, but what he’s sorry about is so oblique there’s no way he can make her understand – even if she wanted to. It’s the truth, but sex delivers an almost infinite number of truths, all equal. It’s also true that he didn’t return after that because he was frightened to. Beyond unrestricted pleasure he’d glimpsed its opposites: violence and pain. And in Ferris’s mind, they had crossed the boundary.
Or maybe that’s what I’m seeing and saying, and Ferris is nothing but a sexual cuckoo that vacated the nest when it got too hot inside. I’d like Ferris to see it, but what’s the point of inflicting my erotic insights on him – or on Vince and Ava? I could do all sorts of comforting things here. I could make Ferris grovel for forgiveness, join their chapter of Sexaholics Anonymous – or form his own. I could force him to admit that he’d started a primary relationship soon after he left, and when that failed, another, ad nauseam. Or less comforting, I could make him confess a secret he’s kept even from himself: that sex was never so good as it was wi
th them, not before, nor after.
But there’s nothing discreet for him to say, nothing he needs to know or say about this. By a different route, he’s come to the same conclusions they have. It’s time to go.
“I should catch the next ferry back,” Ferris says. “But you’re right. Life isn’t supposed to be easy: I just wish I’d known that twenty years ago.”
Ava smiles. It’s a real one this time, and as Ferris gets up to leave, she reaches over and grasps his hand. “So do we,” she says. “But we didn’t.”
It’s too early to leave for the ferry, so Ferris and Vince wander out to the workshop, where Vince shows him an array of power tools and a birdhouse he’s planning to elevate next to the livingroom window. It’s a mess, big enough to house a raven, but Ferris doesn’t say so.
On the ferry back from the island, Ferris writes this in his notebook:
What if our erotic lives are not written on water; but are a kind of graffiti scribbled on the planetary and cosmic slate, an inscription of meaningless insights and temporary states of emotions and prejudice by which we are nonetheless going to be mercilessly judged, not by a divine being but by the volume of darkness and misery we generate with them.
“Well then,” he says aloud. “I will generate no more darkness.”
The man sitting next to him looks up from the book he’s been dozing over. “What did you say? Were you talking to me?”
Ferris laughs. “No,” he says. “Not directly. Thinking out loud, I guess.”
He pulls his bag onto his shoulder. The ferry is nearing the mainland terminal, but he’s got time for a pee before it docks. After that, he has distant places to go, faraway people to meet and write lies about.
Over the urinal is scribbled the following barely literate message:
I guess the confusion is universal, Ferris thinks to himself as he tries to come up with an answer to the graffito. Trouble is, it exists in specific conditions. Some of them lead easily to violence, others get resolved by small bursts of insight, and some simply remain unanswered and unrelieved.
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica Page 19