No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

  She was looking at him through half-closed eyes, long eyelashes, and she sent him a dreamy smile. He knew now that he’d never forget her. A clattering noise came from the backyard. A piece of corrugated iron moved in a gust of wind. She didn’t open her eyes for it, but cocked her head at the sound.

  Aoyama knew what he was going to say and he said it: “Not a chance.” Then he shrugged meaninglessly. “I’m not interested in what you want,” he added, emphasizing each word.

  She opened her eyes and fluttered her eyelids, and then her eyes were wide all of a sudden and brimmed with an exaggerated sincerity. “You don’t care what you say to a woman, do you?” She looked young and untroubled. She stuck her chin out, highlighting the oval shape of her face. “You think you’re tough.” Now her teeth were clenched.

  “Right now, no.”

  He felt his own pulse with two fingers, counted to himself, then reached for the pack of cigarettes, offered her one. She took it and fit it between her lips without opening her mouth. Her fingernails were the same color as the nails of her toes. Aoyama lit her cigarette, then his own. He sucked smoke into his mouth, filled himself up with the smoke and let it out between his teeth. The phone rang. This time she didn’t answer it. She exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked at him with nymphlike eyes.

  The phone stopped ringing, the wind stopped blowing, and the piece of corrugated iron didn’t move or make a sound. He turned the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and made it disappear like a magician. It reappeared between his lips. He squinted as the smoke trailed upward.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said, leaning forward with her elbows on the tabletop. “I’m telling you, I like it. I don’t want you to refuse the offer. But as long as you’re sure you don’t want me, I won’t make things any harder for you.” She winked.

  He looked down at himself and saw that his erect cock was trying to push its way through his trousers. His eyelids got heavy. There was a tense silence. She eyed him hungrily. He looked away, turning his head as if it had an enormous weight. Then he narrowed his eyes and stared back at her.

  She was leaning back in the chair and playing indifferently with the plum-colored silk drawn tight across her breasts. She gave him a peculiar smile, put her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “I guess I feel kind of responsible for you now,” she confided.

  “That’s obvious.” He looked at the hill made by his erection. His head came up slowly, his eyes focused, and he said, “One of these days we’ll get together on it, but not today.”

  “Not now, not ever.” She smiled cheerfully. “You’re not going to tell me you don’t want it, are you?”

  She reached up and pulled the left shoulder strap down past her upper arm. Her skin was truly pale, lightly freckled, and it shone in a ray of sunlight which came through the window and spread out harmlessly on the kitchen table just for the occasion.

  Aoyama raised his brows and sighed heavily. His lips were numb just watching her. She pulled the other strap down and her breasts were exposed. She opened her mouth, a sparkle in her eyes, then sat up straight in the chair.

  A drop of sweat squeezed out of his forehead and ran down the plastic nose. Warm rays of sunlight splashed on his face. A drawstring pulled in his throat. He was being pulled into nothingness. The sky, no matter how blue it was, lost its importance. The sheet of corrugated iron shivered. The structure of purpose inside his head fell apart, all the measured elements dropped away from his professional grasp.

  The woman held onto the edge of her seat with both hands, swung her feet back and forth above the floor like a child, then inched the chair forward, making a dull scraping noise.

  “Do you get what I’m saying?” she asked.

  It wasn’t really a question. He dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. The drawstring jerked in his throat. His false nose started to slip down, oiled by perspiration and encouraged by the weight of his glasses. His right hand came up to put them in place. He tried to think of something to say. Aoyama inclined his head.

  She gave him the answer herself. She grabbed a nipple between two painted fingernails, thumb and forefinger, and pinched hard. A flush shot upward under the surface of her skin. Her other hand stayed where it was, resting on her ribcage, and her fingers gave the same nipple another pinch, and this time she pulled it agonizingly upward and away from her body. Her eyes were very hungry. Aoyama winced. He stared at her tormented breast, then looked at her hair as a violent reddish-blue cast swept through it, engulfing her head like flames. Now her eyes were lit with a strange fire the color of fresh cucumber.

  Aoyama fumbled in his pockets looking for his cigarettes. He found the pack, flicked his wrist to knock a cigarette out of it, put the wrong end between his lips, abruptly turned it around in his mouth with the filter now pressed against the tip of his tongue. He leaned anxiously forward and lit it, took several short drags, balanced it unceremoniously on the rim of the ashtray.

  Her skin looked like transparent paper, the bluish veins were at the surface, wriggling like snakes. Aoyama trembled from head to toe. He took up the cigarette and inhaled and exhaled quickly until it was halfway smoked, then frantically put it out. He pressed his teeth into his lower lip. All the time the woman had been watching him and now she burst out laughing.

  “Do you see my position?” she asked.

  “What position is that?”

  She tilted her chair back on its two rear legs, raised her own legs one at a time and propped her bare feet on the edge of the table. She parted her legs, moving her knees outward, and slowly pulled the hem of her chemise from her thighs to her waist. She wriggled around a bit to arrange it just right. She wore a pair of shiny, plum-colored panties that stretched tight across her lower belly below her navel at her hips. The panties showed a spot of moisture where her labia seemed to breathe like the mouth of a large fish. A few wiry pubic hairs poked anxiously out of the nearly transparent fabric. Aoyama averted his eyes after he got a good look at her.

  “That’s for you,” she said, pointing at the wet spot with an accusing finger. She thrust her face forward, eyeing him. “Now, what becomes of the body after death?”

  Her question frightened him. He aimed a level gaze at her. “You’re not just leaking juice between your legs,” he said.

  She placed a finger to her lips, meaning silence. She stuck out her tongue menacingly. Her eyes were sometimes green, sometimes yellow. He might have jumped up and fucked her if he didn’t know there was something wrong with her. She looked at him, pleading and reproachful. His cock strained against his trousers.

  “You’re a lot closer to it than you know,” she said.

  “To what, exactly?”

  “Can’t you smell it?”

  Aoyama furrowed his brow, looked sideways at her. She ran her second finger up and down the wet spot.

  “Looks like the question gives you more trouble than it gives me,” she said.

  “And what happens when you don’t get what you want?”

  “You’ll find out.” She sat up straight in the chair, opened her legs. “Most people can’t even write their names properly when they get an eyeful of this.” She placed the palm of her hand over her pussy, then slapped it. “And you’re wasting your time talking.”

  He sat there a while silently nodding his head. He felt that time stood still, but the second hand on his wristwatch moved steadily forward. She looked bitterly at him, he gazed vacantly at her.

  “As long as we breathe we can still change our minds,” she said in a whisper. “Once upon a time there was a man named Aoyama.”

  “It’s a circus here,” he said. “How did you know my name?”

  “I don’t like you. But right now you’re the man for me.”

  Aoyama smiled at something far away and that something smiled back at him.

  “A virtuous man has been turned into a horse,” he said.

  “If anyone’s interested, they can come and g
et you when I’m through with you and lock you up some place where you’ll get plenty of oats morning and night.” She raised her eyebrows comically. “If that’ll make you happy.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant. You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Half of what?”

  He wanted to take her by the throat, by the hair, and smash her head into the refrigerator. And he still wanted to fuck her. He laughed voluntarily, too loud. He shifted a bit in his chair.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve.” She giggled maliciously.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell you the half of it I know,” she said. “You’re going to forget whatever else it is you’ve got on your mind. You’re going to concentrate on me because that’s what I’m telling you to do. If you think you can do anything about it you’re way off in some faraway place where there’s no reality like the reality we’ve got here. It won’t kill you. It’ll probably do you some good. You don’t have a clue about responsibility.”

  Her breath came and went like a ventilating system shuffling gusts of stale air.

  “Just put it where it belongs,” she went on. “Right here.”

  She slumped languidly in the chair, maintaining her balance, moved her knees farther apart, showing the taut muscles that were pulling on the inside of her thighs. They looked like something he could sink his teeth into. He wanted to do it right now. He wanted to swallow her. Just a bite. But she wasn’t going to let go easily once she got hold of him. He showed his teeth in a grin, appreciating every inch of her. His eyes watered. His chin went up and down. She held him there. He didn’t know how she was doing it. He almost wished Newton, whoever he was, was here.

  “It doesn’t make any difference what you think,” he said at last. He looked down at his erection. Then his voice climbed an octave as he was saying: “No. None at all. No nerve. Zero.”

  “A man of genius gets drowned in his own talent,” she stated flatly.

  Aoyama looked away from her. He touched his face in various places. His nose hung down almost to his upper lip, his cheeks and neck were flushed. He straightened the nose and he straightened himself in the chair and he returned the woman’s intense gaze. Say what you’re thinking, he told himself. Say it. He opened and closed his mouth. But he wordlessly shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing he could say that would change anything.

  She didn’t laugh at him because he had nothing to say. A vein distended on her forehead with the seeming intention to burst. He narrowed his eyes and fidgeted in the chair, waiting for the spray of a ruptured vein. He snapped his mouth shut.

  He felt like he weighed nothing at all. He shielded his eyes with his hands, then peered cautiously between his fingers. The features of her face were abnormally enlarged. The wet spot on her panties went on winking indecently at him. She opened her mouth, a bubble of saliva formed at the opening, and a strand of saliva dribbled out of it, streaming downward. When it touched one of her breasts it sizzled and evaporated from an intense heat.

  At last, Aoyama stared at her in a wide-eyed daze. He saw her pale skin and hard bones under nearly transparent skin, a head of reddish-blue flames and a gaping red mouth that twitched violently, and the mouth offering him its sweetness was drawing him forward like a poisonous magnet. Not wanting to open his mouth, not wanting to kiss her, he opened his mouth. Not wanting to move, afraid of what she might do, he moved toward her.

  She curled her painted toes around the edge of the table, her green eyes spun in their sockets. There was a strange light in them as if, in a trance, she were pursuing a dream. Aoyama snapped his mouth shut with all the force of a steam-shovel, then with a strength that surprised him he leaned back in his chair. Her gaping, watery mouth might have swallowed him. His lips curved up in a faint smile that contained both hope and anxiety. He swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the heavy thing in his throat.

  It was now that he’d have to do something to put some distance between himself and the bitch with flaming hair and green eyes. He figured the moment was right because there wouldn’t be another moment like it, and if he waited any longer he’d never get out of the house. Aoyama grabbed the edge of the table with one hand and shoved it just hard enough to knock the rear legs of her chair out from under her. She fell backward with the chair and landed with a thud on the linoleum floor, banging her elbows and the back of her head and letting out a shriek, cursing loudly.

  He looked over the tabletop at her. He blinked, opened his mouth, held it open and closed it hard. The woman’s hair was spread out around her head like a black sea and her head lolled on her bent neck. Strands of black hair were stuck together across her forehead.

  “Maybe I don’t know exactly why you’re doing it,” he said, “but I know what you want and you’re not going to get it.”

  Her eyes focused, stared uncomprehendingly at him.

  “That bothers me,” she said.

  “Bothers you?” He raised an eyebrow slightly. “I know what you are — an oracle of some things and not others.”

  “I can’t stand arguments,” she said. Her body gave a shudder, her mouth twisted and her eyes goggled.

  He had nothing to say because he knew that he was right about her. He frowned, the frown became a grin, and he shrugged and said to himself: Maybe I’m right, but what does it matter?

  “If only you’d been somebody else,” she lamented while sprawled on the floor. Her chemise was twisted around her waist. “There’s something heroic here between my legs!”

  A voice came from him that wasn’t his voice: “Where do you want it?”

  He pressed his fingers against the bones of his face. He felt like laughing.

  She let out a long sigh. She put out her tongue and licked her shoulder, then turned her gaze to him.

  “I don’t want anything from you,” he said.

  She propped herself on her bruised elbows.

  “I want something from you.”

  “I want you to leave me alone.”

  “Quit worrying.” The woman smiled.

  “For the rest of my life I want you to leave me alone.”

  “The rest of your life is a matter of minutes if you don’t fuck me,” she said.

  Bright red flowers blossomed and burned on her chest. He stared at the attractive patterns they made on her skin, then his eyes narrowed with disappointment.

  “I hate to see a woman like you in a vulnerable position,” he said, moistening his lips.

  “Bring your face over here so I can smack it.” She aimed a dim but dangerous smile at him.

  Aoyama shook his head.

  “Newton’s not going to like it,” she warned him.

  “Fuck Newton.”

  “I already have.”

  He looked at the lustful expression on her face.

  “What can I say after I say I’m sorry?” he said.

  “You can tell me you want it, anyway.”

  “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  “You’re adding it up backward.” She eased herself down taking the weight off her bruised elbows. Flat on her back, she stared at the ceiling.

  “I know when I’m being kidded.”

  She said very quietly, “I want to keep you with me.”

  His eyes were dull, gazing past her. “You think you know me?”

  She shook her head slowly. “You’ll find what you’re looking for but it won’t be what you expected.”

  “Fortune-teller.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  Aoyama took a few steps backward without taking his eyes off her, then hurried out of the kitchen. He went quickly down the hallway toward the front door thinking about the road on the other side of it. It was the only reason he’d gone into this house in the first place, and it seemed now like one of the worst ideas he’d ever had. But the location was right for what he had to do. He wanted the anonymity it gave him.

  No sound came from the kitchen to interrupt him. The woman had exhausted him and he f
elt how much his body was beat up. She’d given him a painful erection. He wasn’t far from the door but he could have been a mile away. The hallway kept its low-ceilinged tunnel-like shape. He felt like an insect slowly being crushed between the pages of a book. His knees almost gave out. He groaned. He didn’t know if he was going to make it. At last he pressed his hand against the smooth surface of the door, peered through the curtained window. The sun shone brightly between clouds from a distant patch of blue sky.

  He grasped the handle and turned it and partly opened the door. He poked his head around it to check out Loomis Street for anything unusual, and he breathed in the fresh odor of the damp greens and fairways of a golf course a few blocks away.

  “Good-bye!” the woman shouted grudgingly from the kitchen. “Stay alive and wait for me.”

  Aoyama jumped, he fumbled with the glasses and plastic nose and latex scalp. The disguise went into his pockets. He massaged his head, rubbed life back into his face, felt his heart bouncing around in his chest. He put the sun hat back on his head, swung the door open, and stepped out onto the porch. He looked like an ordinary resident of the neighborhood.

  The door clicked shut behind Aoyama. He stood on the wooden porch and leaned against one of the stone pillars looking at the sidewalk and Loomis Street that shone with needless brilliance. His muscles tensed up. He looked sideways up and down the street past the wooden stairs a few feet in front of him. He looked at the sky where clouds refused to crowd out the sun. He squinted at the sunlight and at the reflection of sunlight in the upper windows of a house at the corner.

  People came and went in a dreamy procession, walking in both directions along the sidewalk. Aoyama yawned, his jaw made a pleasant click in his head. Men dragged their feet in worn-out shoes, women held children’s hands and mothers carried smaller children in their arms. Some people gathered at the bus stop, others went on walking on Loomis to the next intersecting street, turning there and following it to wherever they were going.