You can see why I wondered if she was for real. Why, I threw down the manuscript I’d brought and reached for her tits, mashing my mouth down on hers while my hands moved down her body to her ass, pushing the panties down her thighs. She put her arms around me automatically, but otherwise she didn’t respond, even when I dug one finger into her small, tight cunt, even when I cupped her ass with one hand and stroked her clitoris with the other. I was like a kid set loose in a goddamned candy store, reaching for the gum and the Tootsie Rolls, the licorice, and the chocolate kisses at the same time, with extra arms and dozens of hands.
It didn’t matter what I did; she wouldn’t respond. My hands moved over her body desperately searching for the magic button that would turn her on. Apparently only Parker knew where it was.
Not that she resisted. I pushed her across the room to the couch and plunged between her legs, groaning when my cock pushed itself into her warm juices, into that wet groove that the Parker Colemans and Johnny Holmeses of the porno world took for granted. Her long legs wrapped themselves around my hips with all the intimacy of a seat belt, and she settled in for the ride. Her eyes were closed when I looked at her, but small pleading sounds were issuing from the corners of her mouth. (Or so I thought; maybe that was my imagination getting overheated.)
I held onto her ass and her tits like some crazed rapist frustratedly trying to cram all the experience of once-in-a-life-time sex with a desirable blonde into three minutes, but even then I was experiencing that guilt so special to mine and Parker’s generation, the guilt which said, You shall not treat a woman like a sexual plaything.
These thoughts didn’t prevent me from having one of the most memorable orgasms in a wasted life spent paying lip service to feminism while my cock twitched unheeded by the Gloria Steinem clones of my acquaintance. I mean, I came like a flood bursting through the Grand Coolee Dam. I even screamed a little bit at the end.
When I returned to my senses it was still a hot Sunday afternoon in New York, and Bliss was regarding me like a mannequin in a store window who’s just noticed a fly crawling on her expensive clothes.
My guilt returned, a homing pigeon with a fine regard to post-ejaculation blues.
“That was nice,” Bliss volunteered.
“Nice?”
“It was okay.”
“Don’t you feel used doing this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Parker calls you ginch. You do anything he tells you to do. Anything anybody tells you to do.”
“Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“Sure I enjoyed it. You bet your ass I enjoyed it.”
“Then . . .”
“But women just don’t act like you. None of them.”
“I’m happy. I like to screw. It makes me feel good.”
I lifted my weight from her and she slid to a corner of the couch, a wide-eyed look of carnal innocence on her face that I’d last seen on the screen in a Times Square porno house. I was in the throes of the usual neurotic male reaction to a woman who likes to fuck: I felt threatened. Having come in so glorious a fashion, I could afford to nitpick. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to: I still couldn’t figure her out.
She was so vague, so blissed-out, I wanted to shake her.
“Don’t you care who you fuck?”
“Sure. I like men who know how to take care of me.”
“Does Parker?”
“Let’s do a joint, okay? I have a hard time with questions. I think they suck.”
She shook her wet hair as if my questions were taxing her brain.
She dug into a fringed leather bag on the floor and produced a joint wrapped in red, white and blue. We smoked in silence while I tried to decide on the best ploy to use to get her away from Parker. Hoping that the grass would make her more suggestible, I let her smoke most of the joint.
“What kind of hold does Parker have on you?”
“I like the dude. He understands me.”
“Do you think I could understand you?”
“You?” She was inhaling when she answered; the rest of it was lost in a sudden coughing fit.
Being laughed at by a woman – even when she tried to cover it up, as Bliss was doing behind her coughing – is calculated to make even the best of men wonder if somehow he hasn’t failed at life’s ultimate test: getting laid with a certain pleasant regularity. Since I am painfully aware that I am more of an average guy than the best of men, I exploded.
“What the hell’s wrong with me? I’ll treat you a lot better than Parker does. You won’t be ginch to me. You cunt.”
I stopped myself before I really landed into her because it sounded just like arguments I’d had with my ex-wife, not seduction at all. “Come away with me,” was all I was really trying to say, but come away to what? To a lousy tenement apartment without electricity? Parker was a celebrity, the cocksman, the Name. I was a nobody. I had no bargaining position. I suddenly realized that ginch like Bliss was not for me, just like shooting pheasant was not up my alley. Ginch and pheasant were reserved for the aristocrats of life, the hustlers, cocksmen, and celebrities. My timing was off, and theirs was always perfect.
As if to prove the truth of my perception about timing, Parker walked into the loft at just that moment, when Bliss was looking at me with stoned, empty eyes, as if I were a frog who was never going to make it to prince status. He had a guy with him who looked like he sold ties in a fag boutique, or dressed hair in Queens. He wore a Hawaiian shirt over tight pre-shrunk jeans and a silver beard that looked like he kept it trimmed with toenail clippers.
“You got a script, man?” Parker said to me, dumping the Daily News in Bliss’s lap. (A lap, I should add, that when spread dripped my semen – my precious 100,000 sperm – onto the couch. I don’t think Parker even noticed. Bliss plunged right into the Sunday funnies.)
I pointed toward the manuscript I’d brought while Parker introduced me to his friend.
“Nick, this is Terry Chiffon. He’s gonna direct Parker’s Angels for me. The best talent in the business.”
We shook hands suspiciously. Terry parked himself on the couch next to Bliss and immediately began stroking her thigh. I watched his hand like a gunfighter watching his enemy’s hand as it moves closer to the .45 strapped to his leg, feeling that something was going to happen that I wouldn’t like at all.
“Has Bliss been taking care of you?” Parker asked, while rummaging through the pages of my script.
“I fucked her.”
“Good for you. You looked like you needed it.”
“Don’t you give a shit?”
“What about?” he asked distractedly. Maybe he was trying to figure out my typing.
“About me fucking her.”
“She’s ginch, man. Ginch is made to be fucked. Don’t you know that yet? There’s millions of hungry pussies where she came from. She knows it. It keeps her toed to the mark.”
I was about to argue with him – full of theories I’d learned from women – when I saw Terry’s hand insert itself into Bliss’s cunt.
She didn’t drop the funny papers. I watched as he stuck five fingers into the slit I’d just oiled for him. With the other hand he unzipped himself and pulled out a long thin cock. Then he looked at Parker.
“Is it cool, baby?”
Parker’s response was immediate: “You know it’s cool. You’re the director.”
While we watched, Terry spread Bliss’s legs and entered her. She looked at him over the top of the paper she was reading and then went back to it, while Terry jumped away. She was a sphinx; I realized then what I hadn’t seen before: she was every man’s woman, and no man’s. We all fed her emptiness.
“That’s some woman you’ve got there,” I said to Parker.
“The sixties brought them all out, man. Chicks suddenly discovered they had cunts. Bliss is a dime-a-dozen chick. They’re hanging from every tree. All you have to do is reach up and pick one.”
Parker looked at me l
ike I wasn’t in possession of all my marbles. Rejection must have been written on my face like the words on a billboard. He was reassuring.
“She’s just a ginch, man. Just a ginch.”
I looked at Terry fucking Bliss and winced, remembering how her tongue had felt on my cock, thinking miserably of all the avenues of life that were closed to me.
“She’s like a fucking machine. A doll,” I said.
“Ginch,” Parker repeated.
BLACK LILY
Thomas S. Roche
(For Paul Bowles)
THE SUN CAME up.
She might be asleep. It certainly seemed likely. If she wasn’t then perhaps she had been, recently. She had stopped walking. Whether she was sitting or standing, it was impossible to be sure. She was conscious only of the newborn sun and of the infinite world of sand dunes stretching all about her. Even the hunger and thirst were immaterial. There existed only the sky and the sand.
“Amelia,” she said, not knowing why she said it. It was a while later that she understood that it was her own name.
Her clothes hung destroyed on her body.
Things began to come back to her, in vague impressions, as if they were unimportant and without immediacy.
She could recall the shouts of the men at the fortress as she ran. There had been a few scattered shots. Half-heartedly, she wondered why no one had chased her, but it seemed that didn’t matter. They had taken Jean; he had been the one they wanted, anyway. She was just along for the ride, and she didn’t seem to make much difference in this world, where there was only the sky and the sand.
It seemed that the memories of the fortress dissolved into nothing and she was left without a past or a future. She supposed there were worse things.
Late in the morning, a caravan happened by. It took her a long time to become aware of it. By the time she noticed, the caravan was almost gone. There were many camels led by four or five men dressed in black. She leapt up and ran to the caravan, without knowing why she was doing it. The man was tall, swathed in garments of black, his face shrouded. He regarded her calmly.
“Is there room for me?” she asked in French, instinctively assuming the man would understand. She wasn’t sure where she had learned the language. It came to her as out of a dream. Perhaps, then, she was French.
He made a gesture to indicate he didn’t understand. She motioned at the caravan, trying to indicate movement. The man looked at her for a long time. Finally he shrugged and motioned toward one of the camels. She let him help her onto the animal. The foul smell of dung and animal sweat was somehow comforting. She felt the thick bundles behind her, covered by blankets. She was suddenly incredibly hungry. She reached beneath one of the blankets and found a bundled mass of twigs and flowers. A crumpled blossom came off in her hand. She brought it to her face to smell it.
The man was upon her, taking the flower away from her. He slapped her wrist and replaced the thing under the blanket. He shouted at her in a language she did not understand.
The woman looked down at him blankly. Perhaps the flower was valuable. The man seemed to be cursing at her again, and the woman looked down, sheepish.
“Amelia,” she said, looking up, still not sure why she said it.
The man gestured dismissively at her and began to lead the camel forward. The woman closed her eyes.
A great weight came over her. Slowly, she drifted into a trance, until she slumped in the saddle. There under the sun she fell into nothing.
When she awoke, the sun slanted across her from a high window. She had no idea how long she had slept, nor did she care. She looked around, dazed. She was in a small room, stretched on a thin mat on a clean floor. The walls were hung with rich cloth, and a houkah as high as her waist sat in the corner. She had been placed in black clothing identical to that the people in the caravan had worn. Slipping her hand under the robe, she felt that she was still wearing her clothes, the cotton slacks and shirt from Bloomingdales. Outside the shirt, she had a cloth tied around her breasts, cinched tight. It was uncomfortable, and puzzled her. But she was wearing her Western clothes. Thank God. Then even her concern dissolved and she wondered to herself what would have happened if the man from the caravan had disrobed her. It all seemed so immaterial. Possession of her body seemed such a nebulous concept. She relaxed into the mat and faded in and out of consciousness.
After a time, there was a knock on the door. Disinterested, she lay there without answering for a long time while the knocking continued. She stared blankly at the door. Finally there was nothing.
She was achingly hungry. Her needs were such that she could hardly feel anything outside of her hunger. But she could not bring herself to move, and even the pain of her hunger seemed irrelevant.
Amelia. She was called Amelia, she suddenly remembered. Her father called her “Amy”, sometimes “A”, pronounced like “Ay”. For everyone else it was “Amelia”. That was all she remembered clearly. Occasionally things would surface, and then drop out of sight into her mind, deeper than ever. The taste of birthday cake. The smell of leather inside a new car. The sound of President Truman’s voice on the radio. Newsreels of the Bomb at Hiroshima. A harsh voice cursing her in French, foul breath in her face, sudden pain. Then it was all gone, and there was nothing that existed, except the sleep and the body she seemed to inhabit.
Once, when she reached under the black hood-and-mask to scratch the side of her head, something struck her as strange. Her hair had been cut. She felt sure it had been short before, but not this short. After the surge of panic, lasting half a second, she felt a vague curiosity. Why had she been shorn?
The knocking came again, and went. More time passed. Finally the door opened without a knock, and a girl came in bearing a tray of food. The girl was veiled, her eyes dark and intriguing. Amelia wondered if this was what the travel guides meant by “exotic”. The woman looked down submissively as she knelt beside the cloth mat. She waited there while Amelia struggled to sit up, then reached for the food. The hunger, long unnoticed or denied, came upon her like an avalanche.
She had to yank the mask down to eat, which pulled it across her eyes. So great was her sudden hunger that she didn’t care or take time to readjust it. She ate blindly, stuffing her mouth full of the thick, heavy bread and then taking great handfuls of the smoky-tasting grey paste, and eating that with her fingers. She felt dizzy, sick. But she kept eating, and gulping down water from the metal cup. The water was foul and barely drinkable. There was also some tea, but she was unconcerned with that for now.
The girl knelt, watching her through the whole thing. Amelia remembered suddenly that in her past life she had always been terrified to let people see her eat. That was one of the many reasons she was so skinny. The memory made no sense to her, as if it had happened to someone else, or she had seen it in a movie.
She finally lapsed, slipping back onto the mat, the mask still pulled down over her eyes. She lay, blinded, breathing hard from exhaustion. Her orgy of consumption had left her spent. The girl immediately took a cloth and wet it from the carafe of water. She took hold of Amelia’s hands and started wiping them, cleaning away the thick paste and the crumbs of bread. When Amelia’s hands were clean, the woman moved to her face. She began to wipe Amelia’s mouth, meticulously cleaning away the smears of food.
Amelia’s mask was still down low, her mouth exposed, her eyes covered. Amelia didn’t have the energy to pull the mask away so that she could see better. She could just barely see the woman’s mouth and chin, lips slightly parted, as the woman cleaned Amelia’s face. After a time the mask was tugged up a little and the woman looked into Amelia’s eyes, just for a moment. Amelia felt a rush of stimulation and a sudden terror of seeing, which the woman seemed to sense. The woman pulled the mask down across Amelia’s eyes again and moved back to cleaning her mouth and chin. She started on her upper throat.
Amelia felt a curious sort of comfort, her face being stroked with the cool water while she recalled the brief mo
ment of looking into the mysterious eyes of the beautiful woman. Amelia felt a curious desire, all of a sudden. She felt quite sure it had been months. Except for that French soldier at the outpost. . . .
Her mind refused to remember, and Amelia’s need blotted out everything else. She found herself fascinated by the woman, seduced by her image. She remembered a moment a long time ago, before her last lover . . . but that woman had been a schoolteacher, and Amelia had been uninterested in pursuing an affair. She could not recall the woman’s name.
Amelia wasn’t sure what she was doing. She leaned forward and kissed the woman, through the veil, feeling the warmth of her lips and the softness of her tongue through the gauzy fabric. The woman responded, kissing Amelia back. The woman set down the cloth and pulled away her veil. Amelia still could not see, but that only heightened the taste of the woman’s lips and the slick feel of her tongue sliding into Amelia’s mouth. With her first demanding motion in days, Amelia squirmed against her, pulling the woman close. The woman melted into her arms.
Slowly, without passion, the woman began to open the laces of her garment. She took Amelia’s hand and placed it on her breast. Amelia felt a curious sort of terror, but could not imagine what she could possibly be afraid of. She didn’t remember there being anything dangerous about this behavior. She took the woman’s breast into her hand and caressed it, feeling acutely the hardness of the nipple against her palm. She lay in darkness as she touched the breast, drifting into confusion, as if she weren’t quite sure what the breast was. Amelia felt the woman’s slender fingers across the back of her head, felt herself being pulled forward as the woman leaned against her. The woman guided Amelia to her breast and Amelia’s lips closed around the nipple.
She suckled there for a time, her lust having flared and subsided. She still desired the woman, wanted to touch her, devour her. But the intense need had settled into a faint ache deep inside her body, and it was enough to suckle on the woman’s breast while the woman stroked Amelia’s head.
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica Page 47