by Marco Vassi
Francis looked at me. A shadow of pain crossed his eyes, and then he snapped to, stepping once more into his brisk cheerfulness. “It’s better just to leave it all alone,” he said.
I looked at Bertha. For the first time I could see her helplessness, her fear. And there was no support, no succor for her from the men in her life. She was learning what it meant to be a woman, yet still had much of the little girl in her. Delicious, to be fucking a chick like that. I got a quick insight on what their sex scene was. She would be physically exciting for another six months, I imagined. Francis saw me evaluating her. He smiled. “It’s really choice,” he said.
“What does that mean?” she said.
I stood up. “Sometimes, meaning is a woman,” I said.
I went into the bedroom, smoked a joint, and let my head settle. I heard the two of them go for bicycle rides, return, go upstairs, shower, and clomp into the bedroom. Within ten minutes I heard the bed move, and then the sounds of moans, his excitement and her ecstasy. I yawned. It was all so boring from the outside. But I sent them an abstract blessing, in empathy with their state. Finally, he came. I don’t think she did, or if she did, it was a quiet orgasm.
I rolled over and faced the wall. There were the lines I had scrawled while very stoned a few nights earlier:
Sniper sniper sighting tight
In the cosmos of your night
What pope could hold that voidedged heart?
What power dare to make it start?
I lay back and let my solitude enter me like a lover, and then I slept.
XI
I don’t suppose the rape should have surprised me, but it did. On the day after Labor Day, Fire Island empties out with the suddenness of a douche bag whose stopper has just been pulled. The slightly shambled secretaries and yellow-rimmed executives finish their summer fuck fest, and go home with memories of near-rapture to sustain them for another brutal New York winter, until the spring arrives again, and the girls don whatever thin things the style moguls have decreed they shall wear that year, and bring to life the great American middle-class crotch once more.
Lucinda had not yet returned from the city. We were on the phone to one another several times each day, the geographic distance between us making possible a regeneration of tender feeling. When I woke up I called her again, but now there was no answer, she had probably gone to a movie. Francis and Bertha were probably still upstairs, sleeping off the aftertaste of their earlier climax. I decided to go for a bicycle ride.
Gliding down the dark paths of the island, a blanket over my shoulders, I threw shadows like a low-flying vampire. Only here and there did lights show in the houses off the walks. It was possible to hallucinate inward images of a thousand historical periods. I was struck by the atemporality of the space, and realized again that the present moment, the now, had no context within which it could be understood. But I was equipped with a spectrum of moods through which to perceive it. It was as though eternity came in flavors, like ice cream. By the time I rolled up to Carol’s house, I vibrated in a state of phenomenological flux, and was giddy with the open potential of the moment.
There had been no conscious plan to go there. She lived with her three-year-old son, a lithe and indolent boy; a painter with great personal warmth and mediocre talent; and her mother, a soi-disant patroness of the arts who, sadly, had neither the style nor the wit to match her wealth. Visiting that scene was always a mixed bag, but I was hungry for any kind of human contact which involved a familiar face. But when I rode up the inclined path and onto the front porch, I saw no lights. I went around to the back, which jutted out into the bay, and sat on the wide deck, and watched the boats send their mysterious signal lights across the dark water.
The night was heavy with expectancy, the sky a portentous slate grey which showed neither moon nor stars. The only sound rose up from the gentle lapping of small waves against the pier wall which buttressed the property. I felt an odd stirring in my groin. There was something of the secret and hidden about the evening, a sense of murky pleasures about to be unearthed.
I heard a small noise and my skin tingled. I tried to pinpoint the directional source, and found that a very dim light was seeping out from under the door of the small house behind the main building. It was the place where Carol slept with the boy. Ordinarily, given the hour, I would have been too concerned about the impropriety of intrusion to go in there, but a sense of boldness had gripped me. I felt quite reckless.
Inside, lying on a mattress on the floor, was Carol. She wore a flannel housecoat and her eyes were glued to a television screen. I began to tremble. No thought formed in my mind, only a kind of aggressive premonition. I stood there for a full minute, watching the almost imperceptible movements of her body under the cloth, tuning in on her breathing, her tensions. Then she turned around suddenly and saw me.
She went through three changes within a second. At first she was frightened, startled; then she recognized my face and relaxed; finally, sensing my mood, she became fearful again.
I walked to her and stood over her. “Hello Carol,” I said.
She rolled over onto her back and lay there, looking at me. The space between us congealed and we were locked together in the encapsulating contour of our gaze. I looked at her body very deliberately, as she continued looking at my eyes. Her nipples made mounds under the soft fabric, and the gown caught between her thighs, outlining the bulge of her pubic bone. I could conjure up no picture for arousal. The mere presence of that soft machine had my cock stirring. She looked down and saw the erection beginning. “Please,” she said, “just go.” Her tone was that of a dignified housewife to an impudent milkman. She had no way of knowing that I was the White Rabbit with a new taste for leather games.
I stepped onto the mattress. “We can do it one of two ways,” I said. “You can cooperate and we’ll have an interesting time. Or you can struggle, in which case I may kill you.” I paused and nodded to the spot where her son was sleeping. “And him.”
My words astonished me. The deed was moving too quickly for me even to consider it. Through the workings of some arcane pattern of events, I found myself at the brink of murder and rape, and quite calm about it. “Yes,” I thought, “of course it would be calm. Only an idiot would not know enough about all the levels of his action to become frantic about it.”
“You have a strange sense of humor.” She tried to make her tone conversational, perhaps thinking to placate me. Oddly, as she responded to my behavior, my behavior became more real. There must have been some way for her to refuse to cooperate in such a way as to skewer my role. But, in some confusing way, she was adding fuel to the encounter.
I took my shirt off slowly, my eyes never leaving hers. “Take that thing off,” I said.
The scene took on all the surreal sharpness of a Van Gogh landscape. All the objects in the room stood out in the clarity of form and color, but ringed with a shimmering aura. Our words and actions fell into slow motion.
“What if she refuses?” I thought. “What if she begins to scream? Will I really kill her?” I shivered, and she mistook that for a rush of passion, and for the most fleeting instant I saw her eyes smolder. But I could never use that as evidence in a court of law. This was, in the eyes of society, rape. The spectre of prison rose up.
I opened my pants and let them drop. My cock was only half hard, and when she saw it, her mouth dropped open. She stared hypnotically. “No,” she said. Then she shook herself and said “No” again, this time simply, matter-of-factly.
I knew there was a bridge I had to cross, and it involved not allowing myself to become embarrassed at the dramatics of the scenario. This was a rape scene, and no matter how corny it became, my one duty was to see it through. It was too late to wonder how I got there, or what her inner drama was. She started to get up. “This is ridiculous,” she said.
There was something I had to do now. I m
ade myself get violent. I sent waves of unthinking brutality through the air. My breathing came in hoarse rasps. I clenched my fist and my eyes popped out. The most extraordinary thing about the moment was the way in which the action hung between theatrics and actuality. At one point, the entire thing was simply a drama, including the murder I might commit, and I saw myself captured, tried, sentenced, and sizzling in the electric chair, surrounded by the same air of unreality which now permeated the room. All life became two-dimensional. It was only with great effort that I could tear myself loose from that vision and return to the immediacy of what was happening. It was as though a balance hung in the void, with eternity weighing down one end, and the other holding the substance of mind in its three-headed form of thought, time, and technology. It was my Libra Ascendant asserting its shape.
“You’re frightening me,” she said.
Her words snapped me back to the business at hand. I could almost hear the voice of a director urging me to be more attentive to cues. I wondered what celestial audience this performance was for.
I bent forward and slapped her hard across the cheek. It felt good. She fell back. I knelt beside her and slapped her backhanded across the other cheek. My exictement mounted. I hit her again. She lay still, a thin trickle of blood coming out of the corner of her mouth. I moved forward so I could look into her eyes. I saw a total absence of will. She lay in complete suspension, waiting. Her passivity pleased me, but the impersonality of her mood chilled me. I wanted her, not just her body.
For a long moment we remained like that. “What’s your sign?” I said.
She giggled. Carefully, I grabbed the top other dressing gown and pulled down, ripping it along one seam. I partially lifted her body from the mattress with the effort, and as the lower portion of the gown tore, her naked body fell back. I liked that, the way her body fell.
She lay in the classic pose of pre-ravishment, and I admired the sprawl of her arms and legs, the lay of her breasts, the aroma from her cunt. There was nothing to do now but fuck her. But my excitement at the moment was other than sexual. I needed her to struggle, or show signs of revulsion. How could there be a rape without a contest?
For the first time I became aware of another presence. The television screen threw its flickering grey shadows over her face, voices floated out of the box. I found myself turning toward it, involuntarily as usual.
“This is insane,” I thought. “One doesn’t stop in the middle of a rape to look at television.” Carol wasn’t moving. I assumed she had resigned herself to the experience and was just waiting for me to get it together. Hitting her seemed to have fixed her role quite firmly.
“When will I see you again? Will I ever see you again?” A man was lowering himself through a trapdoor and looking up into the face of a young woman. She was close to tears.
“I’ll come back, after the war,” he said.
She seemed taken by a peristaltic spasm, and pressed a rosary into his hands. “Here, take this,” she said.
“The girl’s a nun,” Carol said. “She’s helping him escape from the Germans.”
Her words returned a dangerous quality of surface normality to the scene. I clenched my fists. “What’s the matter?” she said.
“The rape,” I hissed. “Let’s get on with the rape!”
“Quickly,” the nun said, “follow the tunnel until you come to the iron ladder. There will be friends waiting at the top.”
“You don’t want me,” Carol said, “you want my cunt. Why are you wasting your time with me?”
I looked at the tuft of hair between her legs. It seemed utterly trivial. Even in square or cubic inches, it assumed a tiny percentage of the body’s total area or volume. It was, literally, a hole. That is to say, an emptiness. And was all this torment over a nothingness?
The man attempted to kiss the nun, but she pulled back, and suddenly he was ashamed of himself. His concept of what a moment of unbearable agony might look like on the face of an American pilot shot down in France during the war was etched by a billion electrons against a curved sheet of coated glass. “God bless you,” the nun said.
I sank to my knees and then lay full-length on the mattress. Carol rolled to one side. “Aren’t you going to hit me any more?” she said.
Suddenly the door burst open and four Nazi soldiers spilled into the room. One was a colonel and the others were enlisted men. The colonel grabbed the nun by the wrist and twisted her arm, but by this time she had closed the trapdoor and covered it with the rug. “Where is he?” he said. He spoke with a German accent. “If you don’t tell us, I will turn you over to my men, and they will not only torture you, but . . . “ He let the sentence trail off and raked her body with his eyes glowing like dislocated diamonds.
Her face showed the expression which the actress probably considered went with the feeling, A fate worse than death, and she broke free and ran out of the room.
I swung my knee up and hit Carol’s cunt with the padded portion above the kneecap. She grunted with pain. I punched her once, hitting her face on the left side between the jawbone and her lower teeth. I was going to smash her nose in, but that same odd sense of restraint, the notion that this was somehow “wrong” held me back. My cock was hard again.
Three submachine guns rattled into the darkness. The screen cut sharply to the front yard of the house. The girl was lying on her back, while fourteen steel-jacketed bullets burned in her back and bowels. Oddly, her face held the kind of beatific smile one would expect of a nun who has just been martyred to save her virginity, an American bomber pilot, and the matchlessness of five distinct myths. The colonel’s face softened. “She was too pure for this world,” he said, turned on his heel, and strode away. The final shot was of the nun’s face surrounded by a four-inch aura. The screen went dark and obscure music played.
I knelt between her legs, rubbing the outer lips of her cunt with the thumb of my left hand, and nudging my cock along the inside of her right thigh. I felt no passion, no excitement, no interest. I grabbed my cock with my right hand and brought it to the cunt lips I had now partially parted. She ground her pelvis gently up and forward, inviting me to enter her. “Fuck me good,” she said, “I haven’t been fucked good in a really long time.”
For the next half hour I fucked her with the concentration and sang froid of a masseur. I took a certain chilly technical pride in the accomplishment. With no real difficulty I opened layer after layer of resistance, lodging finally into the deepest possible cunt of her cunt. She had countless orgasms, great shuddering affairs which bunched the muscles in her belly, and made her emit a noise like a vigorous death rattle. When I had completed the entire set of postures, the exercise was completed, and like a Tai Chi practitioner who comes to the end of the series, I simply came to rest. After a while my erection subsided, and I sat back.
“You didn’t come?” she asked with some surprise after she had pulled herself together. I abstractly admired the sheen of sweat on her skin, the hardness other nipples, the utter abandon of the angle of her legs and the cant of her cunt. She shurgged. I changed the channel.
Raquel Welch was saying, “The mind is the most erogenous zone of all.” David Frost, a slight tic developing near his right eye, said, “What do you mean by that?” And she knighted him with a look of disdain he richly deserved. Carol started sucking my cock. “Some rape,” I thought. “I smoke too much dope. It interferes with my concentration.”
She fell into the greedy-gobbling-child pose, lying on her side, her knees to her chest, both hands around my cock, pulling it into her slackly open mouth. The pressure on the base, the friction against her lips, and the sweet sensation of her wet tongue hitting the tip each time she pulled, quieted my thoughts. She was most gentle and loving, lapping, juice-hungry. I could have come easy, but I changed my ways.
I sat on her chest and lifted her head from behind, bringing her mouth up. I slipped a pillow u
nder her head, freeing my hands. Then I fucked her in the mouth, penetrating her throat until she gagged, then pulling out and letting her sputter around the tip of my cock, whimpering and licking, finally taking the meat into her mouth again. I put my hands around her throat. She tensed, then relaxed. I began to choke her, all the while keeping up the stream of strokes into her mouth. I was close to killing her, and we both knew it. There was nothing in the world to stop me. That is to say, nothing in any manifestation of the inner or outer worlds stayed my intent. I don’t know why I stopped at the deed. But I loosened the pressure and my action became a pretence at strangulation, a simulated murder. That was quite exciting and I shot a very heavy deposit of swirled sperm onto her tongue, and she swallowed until my entire cock was drained, and then kept her mouth on me until I had grown totally limp.
I looked down at her. Her eyes were maps of contentment except for a brief wild gleam of contempt. She despised me for not killing her! I spat on her face; I yanked her hair, pinning her head back, and let the cupful of urine in my bladder be teased up, and filled her mouth with the warm green fluid. She froze, and then with a horrid tremor, swallowed it all in a gulp. I admired her, and then got up to dress.
“Would you like some coffee?” she said.
“Would you like to stay the night?” she said.
“Would you like to fuck me again?” she said.
And added, “Any way you like.”
During the night I woke up and heard her mumbling and moaning in her dreams. I wondered what sort of interior life she had, and speculated on how tedious it might be getting to know her. I glimpsed an impulse to wake her up, to talk to her, to ask directions to the person. But all the experience of my life brayed with laughter, and I closed my eyes to wait for sleep again.
In the morning I dressed before she woke up. “You’re going?” she said as I went. “The others won’t be back until tomorrow.”