As I pushed the door shut behind me he turned and loosened his belt. I fell to my knees in front of him and pulled his pants and jockey shorts down his legs and put his cock in my mouth. I pulled him down on the scruffy wall-to-wall. He groaned and rubbed his hands repeatedly through my hair. I stuck a finger up his anus. He struggled to open his legs and couldn’t with his ankles stuck in his trousers. Still holding him in my mouth I moved over and with one hand pulled off his loafers and trousers and underpants. He pulled up his legs to help me. God, I thought, What am I doing? I crouched between his bent legs and pushed up his striped polo shirt with both hands and ran my hands over his smooth torso. I gripped his pectorals and squeezed. He groaned some more.
He pulled me up on top of him and rolled me over onto the floor. His hands were tearing at my pantyhose. He didn’t seem to understand they came down. He wanted them off. He tore. They gave. He got in. Very deeply in. He was pushing hard, not pumping. As though he was looking for something. I opened my legs very widely and kicked over a side table. The big ugly chartreuse lamp on it went over with a sick plonk. It didn’t sound so much like it was breaking, more as though it had collapsed. I seemed to be registering these things at the same time that my stomach seemed to be melting and I seemed to be opening up more and more and more. As though I was offering myself up and it wasn’t enough. His mouth was very tightly on mine. As though he was trying to get into my body as profoundly as possible at both ends.
Why am I wearing shoes? I thought. Particularly black suede pumps? And pantyhose? Where did I think I was going? Did I know this was going to happen?
I felt for his buttocks. I put my finger as deeply into him as I could. I was curled up now, my chin on his shoulder, reaching as deeply into his ass as I could as he plunged and plunged.
“Almost ready?” he mumbled into my ear. A question? A statement?
“Yes, honey, let’s do it.” I said.
“Oh, My God, My God, My God.” he said, his arms pushing him away from the floor, his head pushed towards the ceiling, his face twisted. He shuddered and shuddered again, his head whipped right and left, right and left. I held tightly to his body at the waist. He sank down upon me and held me very tightly. He kissed me again and rocked his body slowly back and forth from side to side as he pulled his penis out. He rolled off and put one arm over his eyes and the other companionably under my shoulders. He pulled me over to him. I put my head on his chest and one arm across his mid-section. It felt warm and sweet.
“Well,” he said, “Are you really in love with me now?” I sat up and looked at him, my hair falling down around my face. I lifted his arm off his eyes. They were closed. He was smiling slightly to himself.
“You can certainly let yourself go when the spirit moves you, can’t you?” I said.
“Not with everybody,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked up at me quickly and then closed them again. I turned away and pulled what was left of my pantyhose off and wiped between my legs with them. Then I reached over and wiped his groin, too. Stumbling over my shoes I went into the bathroom and squeezed out a washcloth in warm water. Gently I wiped him. He winced a little, still shading his eyes with his arm. His body looked very beautiful lying there on the ratty gray industrial carpeting. Sweat socks are a great thing for a naked body to wear. His polo shirt bunched up under his armpits made me think of the Michelangelo statue at the Louvre called The Slave. That statue looks like it just had an orgasm, too, I thought.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, my legs stretched in front of me, looking at him. He turned and rested his head on a bent arm. “Do you still want to go to Butterfly World?” he said.
I looked at my watch. We had only been in the motel room fifteen minutes.
“I think I begin to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity,” I said.
“What?” he said in that way that requires no further explanation. He sat up and looked for his underpants. They were over by the door. His trousers had half gotten under the edge of the bed. He crawled on his hands and knees to recover his underpants and stood up to put them on. The sun, creeping under the heavy draperies was making a long rectangle on the floor near him. I noticed the door was unlocked.
He picked up his pants and ruffled my hair with one hand. I pulled him to me and put my head against his hip. He pressed it to him even more tightly. “I love you, my little weird one.” he said. I didn’t say anything.
I just pressed my head against him more and tightened my arms around his thighs. “Well,” I said, “let’s be on our way to Butterfly World. I’m sure we missed the lecture on how to attract butterflies but we can still see them.” Glenn pulled on his trousers and pushed his feet into his loafers. He looked into the mirror and ran his hand over his hair. “I look a wreck,” I said, looking over his shoulder into the mirror. I touched him slightly as I put on my pumps. My hair was all over the place but it looked good. I stuffed my torn and messy pantyhose into my purse. “Somehow I think the maid has enough to put up without finding my pantyhose in the wastebasket,” I said.
“At least she doesn’t have to change the bed,” Glenn said.
“I’ll bet she does anyway. They probably always do, no matter what.” I looked at the lamp. “I’ve got to go to the office and pay for that lamp.”
“I’ll do it,” Glenn said.
“No, I want to do it,” I said. “I kicked it over. It makes it more real—that something happened if I pay for it.”
“Well, something certainly happened,” Glenn said as he looked back into the room before he closed the door.
The motel clerk was a young Hispanic girl. She looked up as I walked in. “That must have been great,” she said.
“I broke the lamp,” I said.
“Forget it,” the girl said. “They get broken very rarely. It’s the sheets and towels that take a beating and nobody ever pays for that. I’m sure it was in a good cause.”
I turned to go and then I said to my new friend, “I’m caught in an irreversible tide of love. Next week, a hurricane of tears and regrets.”
“I’m jealous,” the girl said.
We went to Butterfly World. It was small and the lecture was over. In the screen-covered butterfly house, frilly black and white butterflies from the Philippines looked like floating bits of old lace. Tinier butterflies winked here and there in shades of turquoise and fragments of scarlet and black. A gray haired lady in a pink shirt told us that these were not the kind of butterflies I could hope to attract as they only existed in the Butterfly House. And the local butterflies only lived for a week or ten days after their three month caterpillar and chrysalis phases.
“It’s hardly worth it,” Glenn said.
“Oh, no,” the little gray haired lady said. “Each one only lives a week but they keep being born and being born. You will never be without them.”
In the plant department I bought the recommended plants for attracting the local butterflies, mostly yellow, and left. “These plants look like weeds,” Glenn said.
“I guess butterflies figure they are beautiful enough in themselves. The plants they like to feed on and lay their eggs on don’t have to be beautiful, too.”
When we got home, Glenn said, “I’m going to stay here tonight.”
“That would be nice,” I answered him.
In bed that night as we lay in each other’s arms Glenn said, “You didn’t come this morning did you?”
“I think you came enough for two people, don’t you?”
“No, I mean it. I’m serious. You didn’t, did you?”
I sat up. “No, but I had a very thrilling time all the same. You have to realize that women are very different from men. Men have to have an orgasm or the whole thing is a disaster. Your orgasm was very exciting to me. Really exciting. I have never known you to let yourself go emotionally so much. It was very exciting and very flattering and I felt I had really been through the mill when we got done, even without an orgasm.”
“But you said you
were ready.”
“I was ready—for you to have an orgasm. The experience was you screwing the daylights out of me, see?
“Maybe it has to do with domination. Or control. Or winning you over. Who knows? All I know is that I wanted our relationship to feel like it was really happening and that certainly felt like it was really happening. And you know all this Cosmopolitan magazine bullshit about women deserving the same orgasms as men and men being insensitive to women’s sexual needs, and so on. I mean, what kind of woman knows what’s going on sexually and what she enjoys and doesn’t manage to have it happen? We’re not all alike. Some of us get a great deal of pleasure out of the fact that the man who is sleeping with us is getting a great deal of pleasure out of it. Men and women are really very different sexually. You’re just lucky if the person you sleep with is really interesting to you and you’re interesting to them. It’s so American. Thinking there is some kind of system that we should all follow. Because we’re all alive we must be all the same. Very silly.”
“Sticking your fingers up my behind was a little different. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I didn’t. I don’t know where that came from,” I said. “Out of the woodwork. It just happened. And then I wondered what it felt like.”
“We could try it. You might even like to see what it feels like for me to put little Larry up there.” Glenn said. “For one thing, I wouldn’t call that thing little Larry,” I said, straddling him. “And for another, I think we should just let nature take its course.”
hugo thinks about stanford white
Now Glenn is staying here nights. Not with me. With Mom. Which is cool.
Sex is such a complicated thing. You think things are going in a certain direction, and then voom, suddenly they go off somewhere else. Or they disappear. Or go underground, like those rivers that disappear in the desert. I don’t know where I thought this thing with Glenn was going. I thought he knew. And then suddenly there’s like two Glenns. The one who sleeps with me and the one who sleeps with Mom. Except the one who sleeps with me is on vacation.
Here’s my question. Why do people have it all wrong about sex and how it works? Obviously men like to run around. Obviously it’s sort of a trophy sport. What’s important is that they can lay claim to it later. Like scalps. Or hood ornaments. I mean, the sex thing is probably like not much. He slips the little minnow in, squeezes, feels good, it’s out and over. She wonders what’s the big deal. And he goes running back to his pals and say, “I did it! I did it!” How many people really have a great time in bed together? That’s my question.
I’m reading about Stanford White. Very important architect. Built lots of beautiful buildings in New York. And then the husband of an old girlfriend shot him in the head in an outdoor theater on top of the old Madison Square Garden, which he had built. When you read about it and look at the pictures there’s his wife, this big sort of battle-ax lady. She lived in the country. He lived in town. And you think, they probably had terrible sex together. He just popped on occasionally, she didn’t mind if he never did. So he wanders off with some sixteen-year-old sexpot. And she doesn’t see that it’s her fault in any way. Because nobody ever said it was supposed to be fun. Or that you shouldn’t marry somebody if it wasn’t fun. Mrs. White lived until 1950 and he was shot in 1906. I’ll bet she never thought once that maybe she should have given him some better shagging.
And the last Esquire had this article on unfaithful husbands. It’s like nobody ever says, “Look, men like to screw around. It’s good for their ego and keeps them from getting too bored at their dopey old nine to fives. So maybe steps should be taken to relieve the pressure.” No, they marry some dame and live in the suburbs and you get the feeling they never had this big romance in the first place. I really don’t get it. How can you climb into bed every night with someone you really don’t care about all that much? I mean, sleeping in the same bed is a very intimate thing. It’s like sleeping with your dog, otherwise.
Just reach over and give old Fido a pat. What are people thinking of? To me, most marriages are living with someone you don’t particularly care about, but who makes it impossible for you to meet someone you might care about.
People think that all this stuff about romance is a lot of hooey. I don’t think they make enough out of romance. Basically women have it right. The big deal is that other person. And if you hold out until you find that other person, is it such a big deal if he never shows up? Getting married and having a family and all that stuff is just keeping busy.
If people weren’t just killing time replicating themselves, what would they be doing? Funny idea, isn’t it? All these bored people doing the same things over and over again because they just can’t find something else to do. Maybe we’d be better off if we were like bees. Just one woman has children and everyone else in the tribe runs around taking care of everything. Servants. I could kind of get into that. Serve, serve, serve. It’s real clear. Except we have the problem of being able to think and then there’d always be somebody who wanted it to be their turn to be Queen Bee.
And now if I step out of the picture, what gives with Mom and Glenn? I think she really loves him and she deserves to be in love with somebody. I’m much younger and I’ve got time to be in love, I guess. Or I could run into the house screaming, “But I love him! He’s mine!” Can you picture it? Mom would die of embarrassment. Me, too. Except old Glenn would give us both that great stone-face treatment of his and walk out, like he’d been stuck with a couple of crazies who imagined something was going on that wasn’t even happening. I’m sure that’s how he deals with this stuff. Who, me? You must have me confused with some other handsome, well-built, well-hung guy. No, this hand is going to go to Mom. And she won’t even know I was ever in the game.
father
Glenn Elliott had picked me up after work at the Armani Exchange. I had kind of planned to work out but when your lover wants to see you you can’t say no, can you? Ha, ha. I have never thought of him as my lover or even my boyfriend. He doesn’t seem to think of me as his lover either. Doesn’t seem to think about it at all, matter of fact. Mom is channel 1, I’m channel 2. No prob.
In the car I told him that if he was thinking of marrying my mother he ought to wait for a while. At least until I finished high school.
He said, “I don’t know that I want to marry your mother. But I have to admit I’ve been thinking about it. What would be the problem?”
I looked at him. We pulled up in front of the house. “You don’t see a problem being my father?”
“I wouldn’t really be your father, Hugo. You have a father somewhere. And you’re a big boy. A very big boy.” I was about to tell him that we seemed to heading dangerously toward the kind of stuff that’s on Oprah. Right behind me my mom’s voice was in my ear. She was at the car window. “Having a little argument, are we? I hope it’s not about me.” She was kidding so I knew she wasn’t getting the picture.
“Actually, Mom, we were talking about fathers.”
“Yours or his?” she said.
“Neither one. Just fathers in general. How necessary are they? You know.”
“Funny you should bring that up. Your father called me today. He wants to see you.”
That really stopped my motor. Glenn’s too. He started getting out of the car. It was sort of as though she had been rehearsing this for a long time. “He’s here. In Miami Beach. Actually, Fisher’s Island. He said he’d been running into some of the old-time models like Sylvia DiMazzo in Rio and they’d told him I was here. He found the phone book and the rest is history.”
“What about you?” I wanted to know. “Doesn’t he want to see you?”
“Actually I think he could skip that part, but he’s not going to. There’s no way he’s going to see you without seeing me.”
“What about me?” Glenn said. “If there’s going to be any trouble I’m at your service.”
“There’s not going to be any trouble. He’s here visiting
people on swanky Fisher’s Island. Curiosity got the better of him. I told him we would meet him in public and so we’re going to have dinner with him at the Strand. Tonight.”
“What about me?” I said. “Don’t I have any say in this? What if I don’t want to see my father? This is somebody I’ve barely heard of. What if I don’t like him? This could be traumatic.” Actually I was very excited. I never really had missed him or fantasized about having a father. I just never seemed to have cared. But now one was about to appear before my eyes. I certainly wasn’t going to miss it. I knew Mom was reading this. She knows me all too well.
“Trauma is your middle name, Hugo. If you can just step in and do a television pilot, you can certainly step in and say hello to your old dad. I cannot imagine what he’s up to and my first instinct was to tell him to go fly a kite. But then I thought, this could be interesting.”
“You know, Mom, to me he’s just semen,” I said. That stopped her.
“I think maybe we should go into the house to continue this conversation,” she said. “I think it might be getting too fascinating for the neighbors. And we’re already the highlight of their day.”
Glenn Elliott said, “I should be going but I’m not going to. I’m coming in just to take lessons on handling dramatic situations. You two do make quite a fascinating couple. I’m sorry to have to agree with the neighbors. I wouldn’t miss this for all the world.”
This kind of surprised me. Coming from Glenn this was kind of droll. He doesn’t usually display much sense of humor unless he’s fucking you.
In the house I said, “First things first. What should I wear?” Glenn laughed but my mother knew I wasn’t really being funny.
“The navy blue blazer I think. That makes you look like a little gentleman. And definitely a tie. Let’s make it real clear, the real reason we’re doing this is to show you off, Hugo my darling. I want to show that jerk what he missed.”
“You’d never go back to him, would you, Mom?” I said. Glenn Elliott was sprawled on the flowered rattan settee. I sat down on the chair. Mom was kind of marching up and down from one end of the room to the other. “Go back to whom?” she said. “I haven’t heard from this guy for fifteen years. Those were two other people altogether. We’ll see what he’s like. But if all your cells completely replace themselves every seven years, I am at least two different people away from the person I was in Rio.” She looked in the mirror. “Although I don’t look all that different.”
My Worst Date Page 18