“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Not as beautiful as you,” he replied, and he saw her blush and he grinned. “So what do we do in a one-horse town where it looks like the horse died?” he asked.
She smiled at his words and said, “Pub or pub I’m afraid. The diner’s closed.”
“Pub it is then,” he said, and reached out his hand as he stood up, and she took it and they left the room and walked towards The Moon In The Gutter together. And the sun was setting through the haze of the evening and the clouds that sat on the edge of the horizon were like purple ribbons on a golden bedspread.
When the pub closed he took her home and kissed her gently at the door. Eliza shuddered in his embrace and she felt tears smart in her eyes which he wiped away with his thumb before he said, “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m just happy I guess.”
“Good.”
“Do you want to come in?”
He hesitated for a moment. “No not tonight. It’s not quite right. Can I see you tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes of course.”
“Same time?”
“It’s Saturday. We close at noon. Come in the afternoon.”
“I’ll do that,” and with another kiss he vanished into the dark, and Eliza felt herself begin to ache with want for him.
On the second day Joe arrived not long after Sonny had left the car park in a cloud of dust. Joe carried another rose and when he handed it to her he said, “I’ve been picturing your face all night. My Wild Rose, I believe you are more beautiful than any woman I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s the loveliest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“It’s just the truth.”
“I doubt it. You’re just a flatterer.” But she smiled and added, “But don’t stop.”
“I won’t.”
“Where did you stay last night?” she asked.
“I slept down by the river where the wild roses grow so sweet and scarlet and free.”
“It sounds beautiful,” said Eliza Day.
“It was. But still not as beautiful as you.”
She blushed again. “Come in,” she said. “I got some beer from next door. It’s cold.”
“Good,” he said and walked across the floor and put the second rose into the bottle next to the first which had already started to wilt and drop in the heat.
She gave him a bottle that glistened with moisture and he twisted off the cap and drank deeply. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
“You know,” she replied boldly.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“There’ll be no turning back.”
“I know.”
He stood, took her hand and led her over to the bed. “Give me your loss and your sorrow,” he whispered.
“I will. I’ve waited forever for this. You are my first man.”
“I know I am. I was always going to be. Wait no longer,” he said and kissed her on her lips.
He was as gentle as a man could be with her, undressing her slowly on that hot afternoon, then himself and as they lay together their sweat and juice mixed pungently together and as the rose petals fell onto the table one by one, Eliza cried out and looked through the window and saw the thunderheads gathering on the horizon, thick and black like flowers piled on a grave and illuminated by the occasional flash of sheet lightning.
They stayed together until almost dawn, making love, and for Eliza it was the best night of her life.
Then as the sun began to rise Joe left her with a kiss.
“Come visit me later,” he whispered. “I’m parked down by the bridge.”
“Stay,” she begged.
“No. Come later. It’s Sunday. I need to pray.”
“What time?”
“Do you work today?”
She shook her head.
“Give me a couple of hours,” he said, and slipped through the door and she was alone.
She could barely contain her impatience, but waited until almost midday before walking down towards the river. She saw the pickup from the bridge and ran down towards it. The truck was empty and she looked around in confusion until she heard Joe’s voice from the middle of the tangles of thorny wild roses. “This way,” he said. “Be careful. Those thorns are sharp.”
She pushed aside the ropes of bramble and found Joe sitting by the water’s edge. “You came,” he said.
“Of course.”
“Sit beside me.”
She did his bidding and they held hands.
“I’ll be moving on soon,” he said.
“No.”
“I must.”
“Let me come with you.”
He shook his head sadly.
“Please.”
“You wouldn’t like the places I go,” he said. “They’re not for people like you.”
She thought with the innocence of her youth that she could bind him to her with love and she kissed him on the mouth. He responded as she knew he would and soon they were naked with only the sound of the hot breeze in the rose bushes and the trickle of the river to remind them where they were. Eliza lay on her back and watched as the thick clouds that had been gathering all night and that morning finally shrouded the sun and the wind picked up and shook the rose vines so that the petals fell around them like red snow.
When they made love he knelt above her and said, “The roses are dying,” and picked one from its stem and carefully put it between her teeth and a thorn pierced the skin and one perfect pearl of blood stood out on her lip, and she saw the terrible sadness in his blue eyes as he whispered the words. “As all beauty must die.” And the last thing she saw was the rock that he had in his hand before he brought it down on her face and the last thing she felt was the rain that came at last and washed the blood from her eyes like the tears she’d cried all her life.
NICOLE
William T. Vollmann
THE NEXT THING Jimmy knew, he was on the street and it was dark and he was whore-hunting. He saw women dancing on the sidewalk; he was sure that they offered both acute and obtuse triangles; but they would not go to his hotel and he did not want to go to theirs because he did not like to feel trapped at the same time that he felt dizzy. – How fine the moonlight was, though! It made him retch. – He saw a whore leaning against the side of a reflective building, waggling her skinny knees although her high heels and her butt did not move and her head was cocked against her shoulder so that she could watch men out of the corner of her stupid little eyes. She said doll you want a date? and Jimmy said thank you for the offer but tell you the truth I’m looking for my friend Gloria you know the one with the big tits? – Oh that’s just an excuse! sneered the whore, at which Jimmy cocked his head very wisely and said I never excuse myself except when I burp. Do you ever burp? Gloria doesn’t. – Oh Christ, said the whore, who was as slender and unwholesome looking as a snake, and she stalked around the corner, heels clacking angrily. – Next he had several offers from a pimp who said he knew Jimmy would be satisfied, so Jimmy looked as dumb as he could and said wow pal sounds like a good one and you’ll never believe this but I left all my money back at my hotel. – Don’tcha even have twenty on ya? said the pimp. – Jimmy said don’t I wish but God’s truth is I got one hundred two hundred dollars back home in fact I got lots of money in fact I think I may even be a millionaire, so bring her by pal I only live two hours away from here what do you say? – When the pimp heard that, he didn’t even bother to answer. He crossed the street, shaking his head, and Jimmy stood leaning up against a wall and laughing inside himself with snotty little gurgles like a bottle of Scotch pouring down the toilet. Finally he found a whore who would go with him. He looked around to make sure that the pimp wasn’t watching and showed her forty dollars. Her name was Nicole, and she looked rather more than young, twenty-five maybe and strung-out, but not sharp and hard like a piece of broken glass, only used up like a dirty eraser, s
o he figured she would be OK with her lank hair curling around her ears and her ear-rings of white plastic pearls, so he said Well come on and Nicole looked at him tiredly with her skin stretched dry and tight across her forehead and Jimmy said Nicole your blue eyeliner’s smeared you should fix it if you want to stay beautiful and Nicole rubbed her forehead and said she had a headache. He said well come on baby come with me then you can buy yourself a painkiller.
I don’t usually go to the man’s place, Nicole said. You promise you won’t hurt me?
I promise, Jimmy said. If I wanted to hurt you, he explained to her very logically, you couldn’t get away from me anyway.
That’s not true, said Nicole. I could kill you easy.
Well see, said Jimmy grandly, you have nothing to worry about. You can kill me easy, so why be nervous?
He took her up the street and she kept asking how far it was. Three more blocks, said Jimmy. The light glowed in her hair.
The first thing she asked to do was use the bathroom. He heard her shit. I suppose she must be nervous, he said to himself. Jimmy had once been a reader, so he knew how in Auschwitz or Treblinka there was a ramp leading up to the gas chambers called the Road to Heaven where all the women had to wait naked and squatting while the men were finished being gassed (they went first because they did not need to have their hair cut off for the submarine crews), and while the sheared women waited they usually emptied their bowels and the guards laughed and laughed like hooded pimps in an alley and now history repeated itself as Jimmy stood nipping on a fresh beer and waiting for Nicole to complete the preparations for her little ordeal. Well, he said to himself, I can’t help it if she’s nervous. She’s got a job to do.
Silently he said Gloria, are you still there? Gloria?
When Nicole came into the kitchen she was naked except for her red shirt. – You want a half-and-half? she said.
Sure, Jimmy said.
Will you take care of me first? she said smiling; her face glowed, she seemed so sweet like Gloria.
Sure I will, he said, what do you want me to do? (He thought she meant for him to jerk her off or otherwise affect her. He sometimes liked to fool himself.)
Will you pay me first? Nicole said patiently.
Oh fine, Jimmy said. He got the forty dollars out of his wallet and gave it to her.
Then Nicole sat down on the chair in the kitchen and took his penis in her hand and he saw how her arms were discolored everywhere with abscesses and needle tracks and he leaned forward a little so that Nicole could put his penis into her mouth and she began to suck at it smoothly, rapidly and Jimmy looked down at the top of her head and wondered if her eyes were open or closed and then he looked at the wall and watched a cockroach crawling down between the gas pipe and the sink, and he listened to the noises that her lips made sucking his penis, and he listened to the loud ticking of her cheap plastic watch. Jimmy was not thinking about anything in particular, but his penis began to get hard right away. As soon as it was entirely stiff like some dead thing, she took it out of her mouth and rolled a rubber onto it with her lined and grimy hands. – Now take your shirt off, Jimmy said. – He stepped back from her and dropped his clothes to the floor. Nicole sat wearily on the chair, rubbing her forehead. When she pulled her shirt over her head he saw that she had a cast on her left wrist. Her breasts were big and sad like owls’ eyes.
You want my coat for a pillow? said Jimmy.
Nicole shook her head.
All right then, he said, get down on the floor.
The kitchen floor was black with dirt. Nicole lay down on it and raised her legs to make her cunt so nice and tight for him, and Jimmy stood over her watching the groping of those legs, which were speckled with boils and lesions, until her left ankle came to rest on the chair that she had sat on, while the sole of her right foot had to be content with bracing itself against Jimmy’s refrigerator. Her breasts lay limp on her belly, as round as the faces of polished brass pendulums of clocks. Jimmy stood enjoying her for another moment, liking the way she looked as she lay there between the refrigerator and the wall, brown-skinned and almost pretty, with a white plastic cross between her tits.
Are you Catholic? he said.
Yes, Nicole said.
Jimmy strode around naked except for his socks, inspecting her cunt like an emperor. This was the best part. Nicole gazed up at him and pulled the lips of her slit taut and up to show him the ragged pear of pinkness inside, and her cunt-lips glistened under the kitchen lights with the brightness of metal foil. – Your pussy is just like a flower,9 Jimmy complimented her; all the same he did not want to get his face too close to it. He got down on his knees; he leaned his weight on his arms as if he were doing pushups (for Jimmy was always a gentleman who would not hurt a woman with his weight); then he stuck his penis into her. She had told him that he was her first date of the night, but her cunt seemed to be full of something viscous like come or corn syrup. Maybe it was just the lubricant she used. Anyhow, it stank. She had great black spots on her thighs that might have been moles or more probably the subcutaneous hemorrhages of Kaposi’s syndrome as Jimmy well knew from his profoundly intellectual studies. Every time he thrust into her she grunted. He could not tell whether this was because he hurt her or because she did it to excite him and so get it over with faster. He did not feel that she hated him and her body was trying to expel him; more probably she just endured him and trusted to the frictionlessness of the corn syrup or whatever it was to protect her from being hurt by his thrusts (in direct proportion as his sensation was diminished), but the corn syrup did not much work anymore to soothe that red raw-rubbed meat between her legs, so Nicole just tried not to think about what was happening and grunted at Jimmy’s every painful thrust and bit her lips whenever he grazed an ovary. She gripped his balls tightly all the time so that the rubber wouldn’t slip; she dug her fingernails into his balls, either by mistake or to make him come. But after thirty seconds Jimmy knew that he wasn’t going to be able to come. Maybe if she’d just sucked him off he could have done it, but what with the rubber and the stuff in her cunt he couldn’t feel much. Jimmy fucked and fucked until he got bored and then told her that he was done. – Call me, he said politely. – Later his prick started to itch, and he worried about disease.
THE NEW FIANCÉE
N. T. Morley
Meredith got home from work around midnight and discovered the beautiful woman sitting in the living room. It took her a moment to register her surprise, especially given the casual comfort with which the woman sat on the couch sipping a glass of red wine. The woman, a strikingly tall and quite breathtaking ivory-skinned brunette, was very dressed up – much like Meredith herself-as if she were about to spend the night at the opera, or had just finished doing so. The woman’s dress, long and black, was slit on both sides almost up to her hips, revealing the full length of her shapely legs. The dress was also low-cut and showed that the woman had quite ample, perfect endowments. Perhaps in her midthirties, she was strikingly beautiful, her jet-black hair and pale skin accenting her rather Nordic features.
‘Hello,” Meredith said nervously.
“You must be Meredith,” said the woman, without getting up. She looked Meredith over quite blatantly, not even trying to disguise the up-and-down motion of her eyes that focused first on Meredith’s face, then slid down her body, then slowly stroked upward to rest on the single slit in Meredith’s dress – not quite as high as that in the strange woman’s dress, but more than revealing enough to show what shapely legs the girl had – then continued up to take in the slight swell of Meredith’s small but perfect bust. Meredith felt her face getting hot as the woman’s eyes lingered over her breasts, then slowly rose to meet Meredith’s gaze, fixing her with a hungry stare.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said the woman.
“Ah, Meredith,” said Phillip, appearing from the kitchen with a Scotch in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “We’ve been waiting for you.” He topped off the wom
an’s drink and sat down opposite her on the big white armchair, propping his feet on the coffee table quite indelicately and taking a sip of his Scotch.
“You remember me telling you about Yvanna, my ex-wife?”
Meredith gave a shiver.
“Please, Phillip, former wife. Ex-wife sounds so unfriendly.”
“We’re anything but that, my dear,” said Phillip with a lustful glance at Yvanna. He then looked at Meredith with the kind of lascivious sense of ownership he always gave her when he knew he would soon prove just how profoundly he had his new fiancée under his control.
“With our wedding date set, I figured it was time for you and Yvanna to get . . . acquainted.”
Again, Meredith shivered. She saw Yvanna’s eyes flickering over her once more with the immodest gaze of the heartless seducer suddenly set loose upon an ingenue, and knew immediately what was to be expected of her.
As if to assert her independence, Meredith quickly assessed Yvanna’s body, attempting to display the same kind of unrepentant randiness that the self-composed woman showed toward her. She could see the older woman’s sensuous curves, the firmness of her full breasts capped by hard nipples tenting the thin fabric of the black opera dress. Meredith let her eyes caress those perfect tits, knowing that within moments she would be called upon to touch them, kiss them, perhaps even suckle them, before being bidden to travel further into depravity and perform services foreign to her. She knew she would be expected to touch the woman lower down, between the slits of that dress and, without a doubt, underneath the dress itself. That, she could not even comprehend; her head spun at the very thought of it. It was all Meredith could do to look at the woman’s breasts and know she would soon be touching them. But those bright green eyes of hers did not linger on Yvanna’s ample tits; on the contrary, Meredith let her eyes drift upward to Yvanna’s piercing, frosty blue gaze and, unable to keep up her facade of self-confidence, whimpered softly and dropped her eyes submissively.
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica Page 30