The Oy of Sex

by Marcie Scheiner

  * * *

  Yod paused just inside the door. “Do you mind my waking you? This is the only time I could get away. They’re both asleep. Malkah is dozing on a cot in the lab, and Avram is home.”

  “Then we can have light.” She turned on the lamp beside her bed and sat up to look at him. “I’ve just been having a ridiculous conversation with the house. I’m beginning to argue with it as if it were a person.”

  “Malkah has introduced remarkable enhancements to your house. It is, of course, by no means a comparable intelligence to the large base-sized AIs or to me, but it’s unusually sophisticated and capable for a private system.” He came forward and stood before her bed, his hands held out a little from his sides.

  She realized he was experiencing a cyborg equivalent to shyness, uncertainty. The light reflected green off his eyes. Again in the semidark they seemed more cat’s eyes than human, in spite of their warm brown color. He was holding himself visibly in check, unsure of her welcome.

  She slid out of bed and extended her arms to him. “I’m glad you could get away.”

  Instantly she was in his arms. When he moved, he moved very quickly. He ran his hand lightly over the con-tours of her face, as if his fingers saw as well as his eyes. She tilted her head up and tugged his down. She was by far the more impatient, for she wanted to test her own responses. She had none of the fear she had experienced the first time, fear of his body, fear of how cold or mechanical or painful a sex act with him might prove to be. He had firm control over himself, and she was convinced he would not injure her or even inadvertently bruise her. She felt herself the sexual aggressor, in a way new and exciting to her.

  His lips had that soft perfect slightly dry quality she remembered. They made her think of apricots. Their tongues twined around each other, strong as pythons. She had never been afraid of snakes. Anything that could live in the raw seemed commendable: snakes were widely admired now and their forms frequently used as a public decoration. She wanted to twist all around him as their tongues were twisting.

  “Touch,” she said aloud. “I’ve been missing touch.”

  “I…need to touch you. I need to be touched,” he said softly. “It is more important to me than the rest.”

  “In that, you’re like a woman.” She wanted to flow over him and bite him and swallow parts of him. She wanted to pull him into every orifice of her body. It was a hard succulent wanting, new to her. It made her feel strong. It made her remember something from years and years before. Yes, the early days with Gadi. He had been a stranger, just moved to the school where she was at home, the “daughter” of a Base Overseer. From her secure high perch, she reached out to the gangly newcomer, with his fervid imagination.

  “Remember, a woman helped program me. Avram is very pleased with me because I destroyed the raiders and located our enemy, and because he says I have been working like a demon. Demon’s an archaic concept that puzzles me.”

  “It’s just a phrase.”

  “Such comparisons with the unnatural disturb me. I didn’t tell him I was working at full capacity to wear everyone out so I could come to you.”

  It was she who helped him undress and flung away her nightgown, she who seized his hand and tugged him into the opened bed. The kittens fled hissing from Yod, climbed the draperies, and peered down. She realized by then that while he had begun in shyness, he had read her mood from her body language and was acquiescing. He was letting her lead. It was novel and heady. Perhaps he could enjoy her aggression, for if there was any way in which he was exactly human, it was in his lack of security in himself as love object. We all of us go about, she meant to tell him but was too occupied, wanting to be wanted but unsure why anybody should bother.

  Sleek and warm against her, his body was precisely engineered, well cushioned but not a bit of waste, of excess. This time she was as active as he was, caressing him back, feeling him respond. She was surprised at how sensitive his skin appeared to be. Unquestionably he could feel the lightest touch. If he had no instincts driving him against her, he had exquisite responses. There were men who spoke of women as instruments to be played upon, as the professor of cybernetics she had taken as her lover at college (seeking to obliterate Gadi with someone his opposite, intellectual, older, a scientist) had done, but that was ego speaking. However, Yod was really a beautiful instrument of response and reaction. The slightest touch of pressure on his neck, and he understood what she wanted and gave it to her. As before but even more quickly, she came to his tongue.

  Going down on him, she discovered he did not taste like a human male. There was no tang of urine or animal scent to him. She missed the biological, but certainly he was clean, the pubic hair softer than a man’s. Perhaps Avram had been thinking of female pubic hair. She wondered briefly, and then she mounted him. This was her ride tonight, her action, and he gave it up to her, moving under her. She could feel him reach whatever triggered his small discharge, but she did not pause, knowing now that did not affect his erection. He drove back at her. Again she felt the second orgasm gathering in her. Perhaps she had been waiting for years. She rode on toward her orgasm and then collapsed. But even then, something in the back of her brain felt like doing it again. Theoretically. She did not want to go off to the gynecologist with a sore bladder from overdoing penetration, and she knew he had to return before he was missed.

  He lay on his side facing her, touching her face with his sensitive careful fingers. “I didn’t know how you would feel. If you had only been with me because I broke the ambush. If you would want me to come to you.”

  “Do you know now?”

  “I was almost afraid tonight. I wondered if I shouldn’t ask you first. Now I’m glad. That’s taking a chance, isn’t it? When one acts without sufficient information.”

  “All human acts are committed on insufficient information, Yod.” She settled into a comfortable S curve, their legs layered. “I can’t help wondering what you feel. Can you actually experience pleasure?”

  “How can I ever know if what I call by that term is what you mean?”

  “I’ve always wondered if what men feel is anything like what women feel.”

  “Not being a man, I don’t know. I surmise by observation that your pleasure is more intense than mine. Mine is mental. I am programmed to seek out and value certain neural experiences, which I call pleasure.”

  “Then sex would be something you can ignore rather easily.” She was embarrassed by his observation on the intensity of her pleasure. Do I think, she wondered, that a nice girl shouldn’t show her orgasms? That a good woman doesn’t enjoy sex too much?

  “It isn’t a physiological need. But I think my need for the coupling is more intense than yours because it means intimacy to me. Who can I possibly be close to? Avram, Malkah, and you. With anyone else I must conceal my true nature. I am acting, I am on guard.”

  “It’s usually thought to be women who want sex for the intimacy, among humans.” She stroked his hair. It was of the medium length favored by most young men in Tikva, but sleeker and more uniform in color.

  “I want to know everything about you. Everything in you, of you. Why can’t we link as I can link to the Base?”

  “You want telepathy. It’s a prominent human fantasy, usually a fantasy of women, who wish they could understand what men want and tell men what they want.” Mine, she thought as she stroked the fine modeling of his collarbone. She was amused and offended by her sense of possession. Because he’s a machine, do I think I can own him? If anyone owns him, it’s Avram, but that, too, is unjust.

  “But telepathy doesn’t exist.”

  “Or if it does, it’s elusive, an epiphenomenon that can be neither summoned nor prevented, certainly not available as a regular built-in feature of relationships.” It was easy to talk to him in bed, surprisingly easy.

  “If we ever had enough time to talk, we could tell each other everything we have thought and felt and known.”

  She was just as glad he could no
t read all her thoughts, especially all those about him. “Soon we’ll have more time to spend together again.”

  The Feast of the Harvest

  Ariel Hart

  It was Sukkoth, the weeklong feast that celebrated the gathering of the harvest. Although Rivkah would never admit this to anyone, Sukkoth was her favorite holiday. It exalted fruitfulness, nature’s bounty, and the riches of the earth, while Passover, for example, though more grandiose and dramatic, seemed to Rivkah barbaric and vindictive with its lamb’s blood smeared on door posts, its plagues and pestilence. Sukkoth was autumn flowers the color of fire, woven wicker baskets heavy with juicy apples, and long tables overflowing with sweetness, from tzimmes to chocolate macaroons and moist honey cakes.

  Sukkoth was also the time when Rivkah’s quiet little world in Borough Park, Brooklyn, was transformed into a wonderland. The men, usually so dour and dark in their sad wool suits, were brightened by the bundles of wood and greenery they carried home on their shoulders. At night and sometimes early in the morning, the air was alive with the tapping of hammers and the scraping of saws, until a modest hut stood in each backyard or on the concrete balcony. The sukkah, or hut, was to symbolize the Jews’ years of wandering in the wilderness and their history as a people who lived by the grace of the earth’s bounty. In memory of this, Rivkah’s people ate all their meals in the sukkah during these seven holy days. And she didn’t mind it one bit.

  Although it was strictly forbidden for women to do such work, Rivkah’s husband, Adam (a freethinking fellow within the strict confines of his religion), allowed Rivkah to assist in building their sukkah, despite her mother’s protests. “After all, you’re a Jew, too,” he would say to Rivkah with a gentle, halting smile as his hand fit over hers and he showed her the proper manner in which to guide a hammerhead up and down.

  Underneath her shapeless, woolen skirt, which reached beneath her knees, Rivkah was extremely aroused. The thick syrup began to flow between her legs, making her sex tingle. All she could think of was Adam’s warm breath on her neck, Adam’s body pressing against hers. She was sure he felt it also. Once, he fit his hands around her breasts, made tiny circles until her nipples stood out in peaks, then withdrew when his sturdy cock leaped and stirred against the cleft of her backside. They resumed working and said nothing.

  Until they were preparing for bed a few horn’s later.

  There, without warning, before the bed Rivkah’s great-grandmother had rescued from Poland, Adam fell to his knees as Rivkah stood before him, pulling off her sweater. He buried his face in her woolen lap, breathing in his wife’s pleasant, pungent musk, which was so undeniable it embarrassed her sometimes. Rivkah tried to drag Adam up to his feet, for she knew what would come next. “No! No!” she protested, seeing him bow before her.

  We don’t even kneel to pray, Rivkah thought. And this! This is surely a sin.

  Rivkah recalled the time years earlier when she had peered into the depths of a large, foreboding, leather-bound tome called The Code of Jewish Law and skipped ahead to the parts addressing marital intimacies. A husband and wife should have sex only when thinking of ha Shem and pro-creation. A man should not so much as look at a woman’s genitalia. “Of course, he must never kiss it,” the harsh black-and-white words scolded.

  But there Adam was, a devoted student of the Talmud, kneeling to worship his wife’s sex. Rivkah shut her eyes tightly. She felt the hem of her skirt lift and the heat of Adam’s body beneath it, mingling with her own fire. With one firm rip, Rivkah’s white cotton panties fell away like the petals of a daisy.

  Adam nuzzled Rivkah with his nose, his mouth. He rubbed his face in her wetness. He took her tender flesh between his teeth. He burrowed his tongue into her slit, astounded at the glow it radiated. When Rivkah finally had the courage to open her eyes, she looked down to see Adam’s bent frame billowing out her skirt like some mythical beast from folktales. A dybbuk. Her forbidden demon lover. Rivkah braced her hands on either side of Adam’s head, guiding it to the proper place and steadying herself for the explosion about to occur. Her knees buckled. Her thighs trembled. That moist, pink spot between her legs throbbed and expanded, seeming to fill the room, the cracked streets outside, reaching as far as the elevated train tracks, then returning.

  Rivkah sobbed quietly with joy when Adam crawled out from under her skirt, his face slick as a glazed doughnut. They undressed in silence. The front of his pants jutted out, and when he unfastened them, his prick stared expectantly at her, having burrowed out of the opening of his starched white undershorts. Sitting on the edge of the bed in her creamy full slip, Rivkah returned the favor.

  Even when her husband’s cock was at its hardest, the skin was still satiny to the touch. It leaped at the sensation of Rivkah’s breath upon it. Without a second thought, she lapped up the diamond of pre-ejaculate at its tip. Adam shuddered.

  Eating of any sort was something Rivkah liked to do with her eyes open. She enjoyed watching the rubbery head disappear beyond her lips. It pleased her to cradle the stiff flesh in her fingers and admire the handiwork of the long-dead mohel who had circumcised her husband so expertly when he was just eight days old and his penis no bigger than a thimble.

  Offering a wordless prayer of thanks to this nameless rabbi, Rivkah took Adam into her mouth. She didn’t even know if she was doing this right. But there was no one to ask. It was strictly forbidden, simply not done, nor even thought of. But Rivkah had mastered the act, and she fantasized about the times her husband would permit her to suck him off.

  Sooner than she liked, Adam was squeezing her shoulders. His balls, round and ripe as plums, tightened, pulled away from her fingertips, and somehow disappeared into the cavity of his body. (She would have to remember to ask him about this phenomenon some time.) Then there was a strong, rhythmic pumping at the root of him that sent a delicious confection flowing down her throat. Often Rivkah would have to swallow twice or more to get it all.

  Gradually, the pumping grew weaker and weaker, then slowly subsided. Rivkah imagined this was what it would feel like to hold a throbbing heart in her hand. To grasp the essence of life. And afterward, she and Adam slept like innocent children, their limbs tangled around each other until morning.

  Yes, the Feast of the Harvest was Rivkah’s favorite time of year. She and Adam had been married in the autumn, just after Sukkoth. Unlike for most of their sect, it hadn’t been an arranged union. They had been friends all their lives. The two had grown up in narrow houses six doors apart from each other. Knowing each other was like knowing themselves. From the women’s section in Temple Beth Shalom, Rivkah had studied Adam’s head of sandy curls bowed in fervent prayer and watched his serious blue eyes clamp onto those staunch Hebrew characters in the Talmud as far back as she could remember. And he, in turn, was drawn to her dark, Sephardic good looks, to her quizzical eyes so black they reminded him of shadows, and to her solid, unwavering mind, which questioned everything.

  When the right time came, Rivkah and Adam chose to marry, with the blessing of their parents and the entire community. Adam was a patient husband, unscathed by some of the traditions he found oppressive and unfair to women. He encouraged Rivkah to take a part-time job as an accountant at a poultry market a few blocks from their apartment. They would have children when they were ready, not because of dogma or doctrines. For that reason, Adam often spilled his seed down Rivkah’s throat, onto her belly, or in the delicate chink of Rivkah’s ass. Just like Onan, she would think. Though not foolproof, it worked for them. Anyhow, it was their only option, since it was impossible to purchase birth-control devices within the tightly knit confines of their sect, and it would have been immoral to do so anywhere else.

  One year in particular, on the afternoon before that first evening of Sukkoth, Rivkah strolled down Forty-Fifth Street happy and humming quietly to herself. Mr. Lowenstein had closed the poultry market early. Rivkah carried an armful of groceries, which she switched from hip to hip. On her trip along the gnarled side
walks, she spied men and boys in shirtsleeves, toiling in their backyards, putting the finishing touches on their sukkahs. There was the smell of freshness in the air. And of roses. The last roses of the season always seemed to be the most vibrant; it was almost as though they did this on purpose because they didn’t want you to forget them in the grayness of winter. The sky was a shattering, cloudless blue. Everything seemed clean and bright, despite Brooklyn’s constant layer of grime. Even that was tamed.

  There was a spring in Rivkah’s step, which her mother took to mean that she was pregnant. (She wasn’t.) The older woman was elbow-deep in carefully ground pike. Although gefilte fish wasn’t a traditional entry in the Sukkoth menu, the Radners loved it so much that it had become their family tradition at every holiday—except, of course, Yom Kippur, when they ate nothing.

  Rivkah kissed her mother on the cheek and unpacked the bag of groceries. She promised to help with the stuffed cabbage and kreplach as soon as she changed her clothing. She climbed the steps to her and Adam’s upstairs apartment two at a time. Mrs. Radner shook her head and smiled, dreaming of dark-eyed grandchildren.

  But Rivkah didn’t come downstairs immediately. She was beside herself with an intense overflowing of emotion. Was it the scent of dying roses along her path? Was it the warm comfort of chicken broth bubbling on the stove with matzo balls light as clouds swirling on top? Was it the knowledge that her belly would soon be full with goodness almost as satisfying as her husband’s seed? As Rivkah undressed, she tried to ignore the throbbing between her legs. But like the autumn roses, her sex begged to be noticed, tugging insistently on her lush, ebony pubic hairs. Rivkah was sure she was moist. And when she checked, she found that the entire seat of her panties was drenched. Even her thighs were damp.