"I don't think of her that way," said Kotex.
"You know, Elizabeth, under this corporate lard lie the thin bones of a dancer." Ruth made a raspberry at the mirror. She rotated her head slowly, full left profile to full right, pupils locked forward like a compass magnet. Then she worked the other axis. She started well with one chin pointing straight ahead and nose foreshortened but ended with two chins pointing down her nose at full staff. She frowned.
Ruth stepped up to the mirror and tipped forward, her stomach resting on the sink. Her nose streaked oil on the glass. Muted scents of day-old moisturizer, makeup, and hair rinse rose to us. She ran her fingertips over her entire face, then laid the two longest fingers around the outer vertex of each eye, and pulled smooth the lined skin. When she let go, the wrinkles sprang back.
"Poor Ruth," said Kotex. "She lives in a world of men insensitive to fifty points in a woman's IQ, but alert to a hundredth of an inch in her nose or her cheeks. And if one of them shaved his head or put on forty pounds, it really wouldn't matter to his wife. How can men care so much about features that aren't at all sexual? It's perverse."
"If anything, human IQ is a sexual inhibitor." It was hard to muster sympathy for Ruth, mother of Tupperware. But Kotex was right about appearance. Thinking back over the females I had inseminated, I couldn't recall anything about their looks, except for the antenna that Legs had lost to a splinter and Ivory's stump. I looked at Kotex. Did she have a higher epicranium than Rosa? Bigger palps than Julia? Tighter sternites than Peach Pit? Nothing matters in females but chemicals and genitals. What could a face possibly have to do with fucking?
Kotex seemed to be identifying with Ruth. Stroking Kotex's foreleg I said, "I've never told you this but I've always liked the line of your clypeus, the fine gleaming mandibles, and your dark brown kitchen eyes, all two hundred of them."
She pushed me away, then tossed me a tiny dose of pheromones. The huge erection it aroused made me lose my balance and nearly fall down the face of the mirror. She laughed. "That's all you understand. Sometimes I wonder if we're any better than humans." Immediately I was back on six legs. It was the first time a female had ever said something repugnant enough to quell my excitation.
Ruth stepped back from the mirror, hands on ample hips. She rotated at the waist and said, "You know, Elizabeth, I used to be a dancer until I was cursed with these large breasts." She smiled.
This was a false pride. Breasts were treacherous organs, designed to sustain young when the good of the species depends on the young being able to make it on their own. In use for no more than a few months, maybe a year or two in a woman's life, the sacs of fat then begin a long, irreversible descent that causes her great torment, until eventually they hang as useless and forlorn as a pair of abandoned orioles' nests.
But what did the truth matter? I had only to look at Ruth's smile as she swished back and forth to be reminded that human males, like big babies, love tits. In most places, in most times, Ruth's formidable pair would have drawn her all the male attention she would ever want. But I knew from the magazines on the coffee table that in this society, at this time, they were too big, fit only to be dieted or jogged away, or perhaps surgically reconfigured. I had to admire her indifference, however fleeting, to the dictates of fashion. She clasped her hands and locked her elbows, squeezing her breasts out with her upper arms.
"Wow!" said Kotex.
Ruth leaned forward and scratched something on her face. Again she frowned. "What's wrong with her?" said Kotex. "She's not like this. Do you think something happened at dinner?"
Ruth's face revealed nothing, because it showed everything. As she soaped up, her contorted features conveyed briefly every mental state from bliss to despondency to insanity. After rinsing, she scooped up some thick cream and rubbed it into her face until the white disappeared and just the grease remained. It gave her a well-basted look.
"Those poor pores. Just watching makes my spiracles ache," said Kotex.
As Ruth brushed her teeth, Kotex and I started down the wall. When Ruth turned to raise her skirt we raced to the inside rim of the toilet bowl, just beneath the seat. This was our chance to get at the facts of the evening.
Her bottom lowered toward us, accelerating and expanding with astonishing speed. A primitive panic seized me. Was getting sat on such an ancient danger? As the buttocks eclipsed the room light, I cowered beside Kotex. The speeding bottom darkened, and then it hit. The toilet shook like Golgotha. Black, silent, still. I was dead.
Then I heard a little pfft! Methane. Could the afterlife have farts?
The earth had trembled, and now cracked open, just as the Book said. But when light poured in, I knew that this was no cataclysm. I was still in the toilet, and the light was streaming through a wedge between Ruth's thighs, like a slice from an adipose pie.
An extraordinary change had occurred. Impact with the toilet seat had transformed the pitted glob of flesh into a tighter, neater shape, veined gently like a young casaba melon. The pits disappeared. "And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched her, saying be thou clean. And immediately her leprosy was clean," I said.
"Spare me."
Ruth's crack, largely obscured by her cheeks when she stood, was now exposed. A line of fine black hair led from the back to front, like the tail of a little gerbil.
"What's going to happen?" I said. "I'm nervous."
"Ruth is steady. Her delivery is good, and her parcels are even and firm and dark, almost as regular as ours."
She didn't look so steady tonight. She shifted her buttocks from side to side. Her anus strained. I felt uncomfortable.
"Don't worry," said Kotex.
I could see Ruth's bowed head through the gap between her slowly waving thighs. Her breathing was shallow and loud. She grunted. Was she davening?
"Is this Friday night?" I asked.
Her bottom became prickly and flushed. Her legs bounced. I lowered my antennae for protection.
"Here it comes," Kotex said. The brown bud threw open its petals. I stepped back. Gas hissed through, and it closed.
Ruth groaned. "Oh God!"
Several minutes later the bud again stretched and quivered. But the payload was not at all what Kotex had led me to expect. There was nothing smooth, no neat, elegant parcels, no Blattella-brown. Instead a sour-smelling, green-speckled colloid shot out. After impact, its ghost slid unevenly down the porcelain walls toward the water, where a slick had already formed.
I pulled Kotex back. Though Ruth couldn't hit us with a direct shot, I feared upsplash. After five bursts, she hissed like a dry well.
Acrid urine crackled against the front of the bowl, clearing away a little parabola of scum.
"I've never seen her like this. Something's definitely up," said Kotex.
As Ruth reached for the toilet paper, I remembered a conversation between Ira and her on the subject:
"It's not neat crumpled," he said.
"It's more absorbent crumpled," she said.
"It's more hygienic folded."
She said, "I don't believe that. But remember, it is more expensive folded."
He laughed. "My treat." After thinking for a moment he added, "You know, I bet it's not cheaper crumpled, because the breakthrough threat means you have to make more passes."
"Oh, Ira, I've been practicing for thirty-five years. I hate to brag, but I'm good. I'm real good."
Her volume on the philosophy of vaginal care, Candida, which she kept on the window ledge, said that orifices should be wiped independently. At least wipe front to back, to keep those nether bacteria from the fertile vaginal earth. To silence Ira, Ruth had become a folding front-to-backer. But tonight she tore off a scroll-length of paper, crumpled it, and wiped randomly.
We backed under the seat as Ruth rose. The miracle expired—the pits and ridges instantly reformed on her behind. Taupe flotsam remained after the first flush, so she flushed again. She washed her hands and left.
Before we could get out of the bathro
om Ira came in. We decided to get his view of the evening as well.
As soon as he took off his glasses we climbed back to the top of the medicine cabinet. His self-examination was not aesthetic but medical. He sprouted periodic pimples, which he refused to squeeze or lance because, as he once told the Gypsy, bacteria would then storm his brain the way the Nazis took Poland. His weapon was the washcloth, his strategy that bacteria would sooner move elsewhere than endure relentless antisepsis.
He scrubbed his face, then brushed his teeth. While he sang through mouthwash, we returned to the toilet.
A cool veteran now, I watched the descent of Ira's little dimpled ass in very handsome detail, the black curly hairs, the shining pimples, the sag lines, the patches of pink chafing. Even when he sat, his bony thighs allowed sheets of light into the bowl. Now another extraordinary thing happened: though the displacement of Ira's ass was a fraction of Ruth's, though his was eroded and slipping while hers was pitted and swollen, though his had the silhouette of a diseased tree trunk while hers that of a manta hung by its tail, stretched across the toilet seat they looked virtually the same.
"A hundred times I've heard Ira insist that all men are created equal," I said, "and until this moment I never knew what he meant."
"I wonder how Jefferson found out," said Kotex.
The one obvious difference between the two behinds was Ira's baby boa. A skilled handler, Ira grabbed it safely behind the mouth. It spit a furious stream, which he directed around the bowl until it echoed with manly resonance. Though I did not think splashing was a danger to Kotex and me, Ira suddenly shook it viciously, as if he were trying to throttle it. Salvos of golden venom rang against the porcelain beside us. We backed further under the seat; Ira had taken our Ophelia to a watery grave just this way the previous month.
Though it was obvious that Ira did not get any regular exercise, he was a toilet athlete. He worked out nightly, but successfully defecated no more than once or twice a week, no matter how much raisin bran he ate. Flexing and unflexing his gluteus, he rose and relaxed in the seat as regularly as if he were under the spell of Jane Fonda's simpered commands on Ruth's tape.
"This is obscene," said Kotex.
Ira did a set of twenty-five. Though not a hint of feces had appeared, not even a leak of gas, he leaned forward and drew neatly folded toilet paper across his anus. As the wad floated to the water, he folded and applied another. The black perianal hairs, now charged with electricity, stood up and fanned apart, an antipodal plume. Whistling, Ira flushed, washed his hands, and left.
"If something's wrong, he doesn't know about it," I said.
"I trust Ruth. Let's stay with her a while longer."
We walked inside the bedroom molding until we were above the headboard. Ruth lay under the covers, watching Ira undress. He was about to put his suit in the closet when he began to sniff. Then he buried his nose in the fabric.
"Oliver said the perfume was cheap. He said it didn't last," said Ira triumphantly. "But it's what, six hours? Smell."
Ruth took a perfunctory whiff. "Yes, you gave Elizabeth a lovely gift. Do we have to go through this again? How did you get it on your suit?"
"At dinner. She was sitting right next to me. How else?"
"I don't know, Ira. You're an unusual guy. I don't know many men who know brands of perfume, or who have suits that absorb them. I don't know many men who would sniff their own armpits when there was a naked woman right there." She sat upright and dropped her covers, challenging him with the huge appendages mounted on her chest, two torpedoes on a sexual bomb rack.
Ira stared at her, suit still at his nose.
"This is embarrassing," said Kotex. "Maybe we shouldn't be here."
Ruth grabbed him by the waist and pulled him into bed on top of her. He managed to lay the suit down flat before she rolled over on top of him. She removed his glasses and pulled his face into hers. Their noses butted. "Ouch!" said Ira. She slapped his hand away. Air fluttered through the stalactites of goo in his nose.
"Think how less vile human kissing would be if they breathed through their backs," Kotex said. "And Ruth would look great with spiracles."
Ira pulled away and gasped. In a second her mouth was back over his. A small trickle, a fifth column, of saliva ran down his cheek and into his ear.
Kotex said, "That does it. Let's go. I don't want to see any more."
But now I wanted to stay. There was a truth lurking below the surface of this repellent demonstration, and I needed to learn it.
I had an idea. "Zoology! Just like under the toilet." Ruth's tongue, tracing across the inside of his cheek, peeked out from between the lips to an impassioned moan. "This isn't human at all. It's the mating dance of slugs."
Ruth pulled his loosened shirt, then his undershirt, over his head and threw them against the wall. Her mouth found his Adam's apple. This provoked some powerful childhood anxiety in me.
She moved quickly to the nipples. Kotex took exception. "Numbers, she knows they don't work. What is she doing?" She tried to cover her huge compound eyes with her antennae.
I was just now beginning to see that Ruth knew exactly what she was doing. She sucked and chewed until the roles reversed; he cooed as if he were the one at the teat. Then she descended to his navel.
"She wouldn't!" said Kotex. She would. We cringed as Ruth plunged her tongue into the fetid cavity, recalling his natal eviction, a helpless, puling pull-toy—which was pretty much what she was making of him now. She yanked off his briefs, and his penis swung up and oscillated to a halt, like a sand-bottomed beach toy. Ira lay motionless, eyes closed, fingers outstretched, hyperventilating.
As a human being he had been taken all the way back. But I couldn't help suspecting the story was far older than the species.
I said, "Now look at that thing. No hair, no spinal column, no lungs. The penis is a mollusk. The Portuguese man-of-war is not one organism, but a colony of different ones that grow together. The same is true of man and penis— mammal and mollusk."
Kotex said, "What's that growing on Ruth, barnacles?"
Ruth's tongue danced around Ira's member, mollusk courting mollusk. Suddenly she engulfed him.
"Maybe she's a praying mantis," Kotex said. "But she was supposed to wait for the sperm before she ate him."
The penis popped out, tied by an umbilicus of saliva to Ruth's mouth. "Don't stop," Ira said.
Ruth pushed herself up on her elbows. Her breasts, which had pooled over his thighs, resumed their explosive shape.
"What?" Ira said desperately.
"I'm feeling separate and terribly unequal." She crawled forward, then shifted her hips. Her vulva, a shiny pink ellipsoid with short radiating tentacles, looked like a sea anemone that someone had stepped on.
"Ah, justice!" she sighed as she inserted his penis into her vagina, his mollusk into her coelenterate. Sex between species—unnatural and abhorrent.
Ruth began wildly pumping her chubby but lithe hips, her breasts flapping wetly against her chest. Ira looked up at her, then let his head fell back against his pillow, eyes tightly shut. "Oh, my knees," she soon said, and straightened them, flattening against him. She grabbed him around the waist and rolled, pulling him on top.
Ira inhaled through clenched teeth. When his hollow chest landed on Ruth's wet tits, pockets of air collapsed with wet blasts. Ruth began to cry, "Ooh, ooh, ooh." Ira grunted as she dug her fingers into his behind, like spurs.
Ruth farted. "Oh, Ira, I'm sorry." In an instant she was again lost in sensation.
"Quite a lovely serenade," said Kotex.
"Aren't you glad we stayed?" I said.
"No! No! No!" cried Ruth. Miller had taught me that by this human females usually mean yes, yes, yes. But this time Ruth did mean no. She reached down. The little critter had slipped out. It was so well marinated that she was having trouble corralling it.
Funk from her cavity quickly rose to the molding.
"I know that smell," said Kotex.
&n
bsp; Ira collapsed after several more minutes. Chin on her shoulder, he kept pumping. There were no words now, not even groans or moans. Primitive diphthongs churned in the back of their throats, primeval Semitic relics of the struggle with the arid heat of the Levant.
"What are they saying?" I asked Kotex.
She was humming loudly to drown them out.
I had to know. I vaulted over the lip of the molding and started down the wall. Halfway to the bed I noticed that the light from Ira's bedside lamp was casting a shadow many times my size, with Ruth-sized rear flanks covered with formidable spikes.
"Holy shit!" yelled Ira. Blattella was one of the few forms he could distinguish without his glasses.
"Yes, you animal!" cried Ruth.
He rose on his hands. "Look at that damned thing."
"What thing?"
"A bug. Right behind your head."
"Don't you stop moving."
I retreated quickly. From my first day in Eden I had known better than to depend on the power of human love.
"It's getting away."
She grabbed him by the shoulders and locked her ankles around his back.
"Let go," he said. "I have to kill it."
"I need you right where you are." She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately.
Ira pulled his head loose so he could watch me hurdle the molding. He fell back on his lover and said, "It's revolting. Right in the bedroom."
Kotex stopped humming. "That's exactly what I said."
"Oh dear," said Ruth softly. "I'm not through with you, little one."
As Kotex and I started to leave the room, she said, "Ruth completely controls him. It's kind of pathetic."
It was far worse than pathetic. I was already worried that my beloved Gypsy would not come back to us after all this time. Now Ruth, who apparently lacked the power to inspire Ira to use his secret money, seemed to have attained such sexual power over him that she might be able to repel the Gypsy anyway.
"I'm not sure I understand," I said. "Is it possible to control someone without 'lighting him up?'"
"Just concentrate on the sensation, honey," Ruth whispered.
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