“What the hell,” he said and splashed out into the pool. His penis was like a drag-anchor in the waters and he felt it bend forcefully and painfully downward. He flexed at the waist and kept on swimming. An image popped into his head of a lobster trying to defy nature and swim forward.
What a fox, he said to himself. First she disables me then she opens up a game of chase.
Susie had reached the far end of the pool by now and to her credit did not step out but returned, swimming directly at Herbie. At the last minute she diverted, turning down and away. Herbie overshot but recovered quickly, catching up to her swimming along the slope of the bottom toward the deep end.
He reached in from behind, between the kicking of her legs to her soft spot and grabbed her with what he judged to be moderate force. He heard her squeal under water. With sudden burst of strength she wriggled free.
Susie rolled up in a ball, placing her feet on the bottom and pushed off, overtaking Herbie just as he was swimming off to the side of the pool. She grasped his balls in the kind of clasp that says, just-to-let-you-know-I-was-here. Then turned quickly toward the shallow end.
Herbie caught up to her on the stairs where they collapsed, Susie lying on her side. Herbie partially over her.
They laughed and panted until breath came evenly once more. “Let’s just hold each other a while,” she said.
And after a few minutes of resting and laughing, she looked at him. “Now you’ve got me,” she said, “what are you going to do wit me?”
The question knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t miss the fact that embedded in the question was an undercurrent of invitation. When he recovered his wits he just decided to say the first thing that popped into his head.
“I want to feel you all over,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “If I can feel you too.”
Sitting in the pool in the moonlight, they explored each other. He made her stand up so he could see her breasts in air, then floating in water. She turned him sideways to see him project out as far as he could. She sat on the steps and let him place his finger in her, rubbing her, separating and squeezing her folds.
“What does this feel like?” Herbie asked.
She laughed. “It feels like you’re having fun,” she said.
She asked what it felt like when the penis came under water.
“It’s harder,” Herbie said. “More work. The water makes pressure somehow. It feels like the pumping has to leap over itself to get the gism out.”
There was a little pause in which Susie contemplated that feeling. She appeared to be thinking, weighing the circumstance, feeling her way.
“Would you like to be inside me for a while? She asked.
The answer was automatic. “Sure.”
She lay on the stairs, half in the water and half out, opening herself to him. She took him and guided him into her.
“Push,” she said.
Herbie was afraid he’d hurt her.
“Harder,” she said. “That’s it. Oh! No, go on. Don’t stop. Don’t think so much about me.”
But Herbie couldn’t help it. God! He thought. So that’s what this is all about. No wonder everybody says it’s great. She feels like a thousand kisses on me.
Herbie was easily stimulated. So it wasn’t long before Susie got that tingle in her spine that told her he was about to come. She grabbed him at the hips and pushed him away. This way, she said and stroked him the last few beats. He stiffened, flexed, then spun half-way around in the water like a marlin on a line and then shaking, withered at her feet.
She watched the silken liquid drifting in the waters and with a meditative arcing motion of her fingers, broke the mucousy chains into little white islands and pushed them gently away.
Then she simply turned and got out.
Herbie tried to call her several times over the next few days but there was always some reason why she couldn’t come to the phone.
He decided to wait a week and call again but the suspense was killing him. He was filled with gratitude, affection and other feelings he had no way to evaluate. And now, there was increasing suspense wondering what she was thinking.
Finally, he got hold of her. “Fine,” she said. “No, I don’t think it would be a good idea to do another midnight swim. We’re too much alike to be lovers,” she said. “We’re just good friends,, you and I. Think of it this way: It was a gift I made for you just to get you started. Besides, Johnny’s talking about eloping in the fall. He wants to get out to Colorado early enough to catch work hauling fuel in the crunch before winter settles in.”
They said maybe five words more... and then she was gone.
He didn’t get to tell her before she and Johnny left that September that two days after their swim Rachael went out on a date with her cousin, parked in the street behind Herbie’s house and in full view of his back window, made out like pigs in springtime sty...
... and that the next day he and Rachael broke up... and... that he was very grateful to Susie, because she, well, she had made his pain okay... and he was all right now. All right, but then, she probably wouldn’t want to hear it.
Secret in the Open
“What the hell is that?”
Tracy was the kind of up-front person Gina had come to enjoy, enjoy that is, after she got past the initial explosive recoil of the unselfconscious New York accent and her in-your-face, spittle-laced questions. Gina, all her life, had been far more reserved. But she had found an unmistakable honesty about East Coasters in general and Tracy in particular that was somehow quite attractive and reminded her of a few pleasurable moments when she overcame her own deep shyness and acted out just a little.
Tracy was standing in Gina’s entrance hall looking at the art work on the wall.
“It’s called Heart Tracing,” Gina said.
“I can see that,” said Tracy, “but look, it’s like no heart tracing I’ve ever seen before and believe me, when I was married to Nicky, that old broken-down cardiology frump, I saw lots of these.” She adjusted her glasses and leaned into the art piece. “Is it yours?”
Gina had fielded questions like these before. Somehow she always managed to avoid revealing more than she wanted. And she had to confess it wasn’t surprising to be asked about this little piece of art. After all she’d hung it in her entrance hall, a five minute excerpt of a continuous recording, arranged in lines like a musical score from Bolero with artistic blotches of pastel pinks and yellows added here and there in a spirit of frivolous abandon, double-matted, framed and hung in a place of distinction... for sure she was going to get questions and she was used to it. But Tracy would be tough.
“It’s me,” said Gina.
“Wow!” Tracy’s eyes went wide with whatever emotion it was that rang the bell of some, but not all, of those souls passing through this hall. Tracy was on it like a hound on a scent. “This is something else,” she said.
Gina was silent.
Gina had invited Tracy over. Tracy was a successful film producer whom she met in a beauty parlor. They had become instant friends. Maybe it was man trouble. Maybe it was that through discussions of men - what else do you talk about in beauty parlors? - they discovered common ground. Gina, though she kept it to herself, saw, or thought she saw that Tracy had a destructive relationship going, one that she’d lost all perspective about and needed a breakaway. For no particular reason other than that women in trouble need to stick together, Gina had invited her. Tracy was still stuck at the front door.
“Let me see if I can guess,” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on here. It starts with a regular heart beat - a normal pattern, as far as I can tell. How do they call it, baseline, yeah, baseline that’s it. But then the baseline starts going a little off kilter every now and then... ups and downs of... what, breathing maybe, or muscle movement
?”
Gina felt her face flush.
“And then here, why, Gina, all hell breaks loose. Look at this. I’ve never seen anything like it. The baseline goes haywire but the heart rate actually slows down. But then here is a wave pattern that looks a little like the ones you see during an epileptic fit on an EEG.”
“Gina,” Tracy was frantic with excitement, “you’ve GOT to tell me what this is.”
Gina served tea, which was her custom when she invited a friend, made small talk while the flavors steeped richly into the waters. It took time to brew a perfect cup of tea.
Tracy was patient but tense. She sensed she was on to something. Gina would tell her or she would not. Whatever. One thing for sure, Tracy would know if she were lying.
Presently the tea was sweetened and served and the warmth they expected from tea, spread through the women’s bodies like the flush of an early courtship. It was a time when intimacies floated near the surface, accessible, welcome finally, after long isolation.
Gina had not invited Tracy in order to talk of this, but trusting the wisdom of direction conversation with friends might give her, like that unexpected inspiration of believers bending over an Ouiigi board, she just followed its lead.
“It was ten years ago,” she began. “I developed a little... feeling, I guess you’d call it, in my chest. Fluttering is the best I can describe it. My doctor thought everything was OK but sent me for a cardiogram anyway.”
“It was during a time when I was seeing Rickey. He was a surfer type, a little... umm... you know... pretty but vapid.”
They both laughed.
“I don’t know what I saw in him. I still can’t tell. And we weren’t exactly going steady. Still I was unhappy he’d decided to go with some guys from the auto body shop to the Club Med singles week. I knew he was going to get laid there and it made me feel... I don’t know... bad inside. I guess that’s it. But, at the same time, it also made me angry. And I liked that, I liked that anger because I realized I could feel angry about him. And I could not give a rotten damn.”
“Hear, hear,” said Tracy.
“So I go to have this stupid cardiogram that probably wasn’t necessary in the first place, and I’m lying there - you know how it is - those silly pieces of flotsam they call gowns draped over me... and this gorgeous EKG technician walks in. I don’t even know his name.”
Tracy raised her eyebrows and leaned over her tea.
“He’s young, business-like, but polite. Yet I could tell he hadn’t done many of these and then to have a young woman with a... ” and here she paused, “Great body,” added Tracy.
“Thank you.” Gina knew she had one of those rare, classic Italian bodies: narrow waist, tight rounded hips, breasts that pointed straight ahead in perfect cones. A woman with that kind of gift can either use it to her advantage or ignore it altogether. Gina was in that latter category. But that didn’t keep her from knowing full well what she had.
“I think,” she said, “he was trying hard to hold it all together.”
”I bet.”
“Actually, I felt a little sorry for him - can you believe it? Here he is applying sticky circles to my breast line, probably enjoying himself out the universe and I’m feeling sorry for him.”
Tracy laughed and nodded. “Out the universe,” she said.
“But I did. Did feel sorry for him, I mean. I began watching him. I could see little signs of excitement in the clearing of his throat and that unnecessary aversion of the eyes that tells you he’s thinking something. You know. You can always tell.”
“Yes. Yes,” said Tracy. “This is good, really good.”
“So here we were in this silly situation. And I don’t know to this day what made me do it - maybe it was seeing a man, an attractive man, show vulnerability. It was... tender, Tracy, sweet. Anyway, I started teasing him.”
“You what!”
“And, I must say, quite uncharacteristically for me, without mercy.”
“This is great. Go on. Go on.”
“Well, I asked him how many young women he had done.”
“You didn’t.”
Gina chocked a little on her own chutzpa.
“Well, it’s not a bad question. How many young women have heart disease do you think? Not many. Most of his conversations were probably about bingo night at the community center. He probably hadn’t done many EKG’s on young women. At the same time I knew what I was doing. I knew the question was layered with more than one meaning and, in his state, I knew it would affect him.”
“You racy girl, you.”
“He said not many. And I knew by that that I was probably his first.”
“Gina this is good.”
“Then I asked him what he knew about young women’s hearts. How they were different. How they were... interesting.”
“Jesus, this is rich.”
“Yeah, I’m almost ashamed of myself. But not. Still not. I was... I don’t know, possessed, maybe. He talked about conduction pathways, depolarization of the electrically charged membrane - nice words, I thought, stuff he’d probably learned in tech. school. And during all that... ”
She paused and sipped her tea as if contemplating her next words, turning them over in her mind examining, admiring... a little smile curled at the corner of her lips. Tracy was impatient to the point of a minor explosion but she didn’t dare break the spell.
“... well, you know how they drape you in that foolish gown, making a little peninsula of crumpled paper to cover your breast while they plant these electrodes around the base of it - and you know how light and stiff the paper is. It lifts or floats away real easy. I was aware, as I know he was, exactly where that nubbin of gown was located at every instant and I, at first, was concerned that it do its appointed task and conceal what it was supposed to conceal.”
“The longer we talked the more I realized that I didn’t give a damn about that gown. And, I guess it’s a simple thing, but it was such a liberating feeling. And furthermore - and this is a big step for me- I wanted it to slide off and I wanted it to release me into the open air.”
“Oh mygod, Gina.”
“I even, you know...” and Gina giggled a little here... “I even twitched my body a little to help it along, and it did, it did slip off, eventually, exposing me to him.... and I hesitate to say this, but I loved it, Tracy. I absolutely loved it. It gave me such a feeling of exhilaration and a - what was it, a sense of the goddess, perhaps - a feeling I was someone of great value, of beauty, of power... it was wonderful!”
Tracy shrieked.
“In fact it was so wonderful that when he politely (after looking right at my nakedness, of course)... ”
“Of course,”
“... after he politely placed the gown back over me I was disappointed. I understood his professionalism so I told him he didn’t need to do that. It was just getting in the way. I shocked myself but there was no turning back.”
“Then he let it fall where it would. He may have even helped it a little, in subtle ways, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And then... then, Tracy, I was bare breasted before him. And you know, I had this sensation that my nipples were like a second set of eyes for him to look into.”
Tracy moaned in delight and shifted in her chair. She closed her eyes as if to savor the image a beat more. “What was he doing all this time?”
Gina laughed. “Struggling is probably the best word. And I loved his struggle because it was a struggle for me, over me. He was responding to me in a direct way, not in a way complicated by that terrible word ‘relationship.’ So, naturally, I made him struggle more.”
“Naturally.”
“I asked him what would happen to the test result if the patient was really turned on.”
“Oh m
y god, Gina.”
“Yeah I know. Merciless. But you can be damn sure he was enjoying this as much as I was.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he wasn’t sure.”
“God,” said Tracy, “I’m so flustered I can’t remember what he wasn’t sure of.”
“Wasn’t sure if the patient was really turned on.”
“How could I forget?”
“He guessed the heart rate would increase a little, he said. But it’s a healthy process, he said. Desire is natural. He said he wouldn’t expect to see evidence of damage or injury.”
“Of course he wouldn’t.”
“I kept after him.”
“I bet you did.”
“I asked him if there were any recordings of people having sex.”
Tracy shrieked.
Gina held up her hand. “It gets better,” she said.
Tracy spilled her tea.
Gina was quick on the draw with a paper towel. “Well,” she went on, “he said wasn’t sure but he didn’t think so. At least he’d never heard of such a thing.”
Gina paused.
“Go on, goddammit. If you stop here I’ll kill you. I promise I’ll fucking kill you.”
Gina waited for what seemed like a long time. “You know how there are times in your life when you know, instinctively, that you’ve come upon a point where you have to spring for something? that there’s a narrow window that will close in a few minutes and ever after you will look back and wonder how your life would have been if you’d just had the courage to do it? Well, that’s what I felt. This was that Spring Moment, big time, and something in me, don’t ask me what, was absolutely up for it.”
“So I said to him, let’s make a little medical history.”
Tracy yahooed and slapped her thigh.
“And for emphasis, and I guess to show that I was serious enough to take the first step, I sat up, took my gown all the way off and looked directly into his eyes.”
Secret in the Open Page 5