Secret in the Open

by Rigel Madsong

  Claire had gone down on the professor. He was in her half way, her hands positioned, palms against the wall, the tips of her thumbs and forefingers forming a little diamond through which the professor projected. This graceful gesture cushioned her against the impact of her face against the wall when we thrust her down on the professor and added a resilient, spring-like recoil that let her bounce back.

  G. was pumping harder. Claire appeared to be opening comfortably. I realized, G. was the one fucking Claire, using my penis to do it. I added a little push of my own.

  I thought perhaps G. might need a little something, isolated, as she was, working the engine back there without direct stimulation of her own. I reached around to grab her buttocks, digging my fingertips into the hard, contracting meat of her muscle. She cried out and bit my back, firmly, picking up her pace, issuing, for the first time, little cooing sounds each time she thrust her pelvis against mine.

  I moved my hand between her legs and closed within my fist, the mossy wetness of hair and soft ridges. I squeezed her tight enough to let her really know that I was there. Then, slipping and slathering and kneading and probing, I found the bump of her clitoris, rubbing it and pinching it. I set my finger on top of it, so that with each motion of her pelvis she would get a direct pulse of pressure. Good, I thought. But one thing more: I thought she should feel fucked just as she was fucking Claire. So I rolled two fingers over the lip of her entry deep inside and felt the ridges of her tubular sex slide over me. Now she had a prick to ride.

  The professor could not possibly know what was going on over here, isolated, as he was by the anonymity of the wall, feeling only with his penis and his imagination. Playful, quirky, he had, without hesitation, placed his penis in the dark hole of uncertainty, apparently trusting that the ethos of pleasure-making would be kind and just. It took great courage I thought, to give up any indicators by which he could anticipate what was about to happen to him, or even know who was touching him. Nothing could be certain beyond the tender layer of flesh that connected us.

  This wall, this membrane that partly concealed and partly revealed, had given us the freedom to make up a creative fiction, a healing fiction for the malady of reality in our lives. Oh, shut up, Claire would certainly have said if she were listening in on my brain. Just like a psychologist, analyzing life while the rest of us are enjoying it.

  On this side of the wall a great rhythm had been established, initiated by the incantatory thrusts of G, transmitted through me to Claire, then on to the Professor. The intensity was picking up. And as it did, the ascending ladder of G’s utterances became the music by which each of us judged our place on the crescendo. She was the command that would bring us together to the brink.

  I don’t remember what happened after that. Details melt into the dissolving interfaces between us. I do know that as we moved more as one, our pleasures also moved more as one, until the lines of separation dissolved.

  And I don’t remember who came first. But I remember that deafening silence that preceded our undoing, a silence in which everything paused, right down to the high-pitched ringing in my ears. Even the urgent motions of G. lulled like the luffing of jib sails in slow wind. And there was a sense of spreading, as if in windless flight out over an alluvial plane, a lifting that lasted and lasted and lasted...

  Then, collapse.

  The two women and I huddle on the floor in a catatonic, passive embrace where we stay for an indeterminate time, caressing whatever we, by happenstance, were touching.

  At last I rose, turned on the shower in the narrow stall and waited until the water was warm.

  G. was stirring. I lifted and half-carried her to the shower where, using my favorite Lapi de Provance - a lavender soap from the South of France - I washed her carefully. All over, careful with each prominence and fold, the slipperiness on her skin the residue of lovemaking departing down the drain.

  I left her leaning against the shower wall and went to get Claire. And with an affectionate, companionable, almost reverent sense of respect, I washed her too.

  I enjoyed, in a different way, the gift of washing. There was a peacefulness to it and it felt like acceptance had been granted into a private realm of friendship, passage to a room in the house where no words were spoken.

  Nor did we speak during the drying-off period, nor during the putting on of robe and clothes. The physicality that remained, fleetingly, during bathing was diminishing as it wanted to. We were returning to ourselves. We did not resist.

  Breakfast was continental. People came and went at will, sampling from the modest buffet of croissant and jellies, corn flakes, and fruit. None of our group showed.

  During the time that remained the professor and G became more part of the academic proceedings in the village and drifted away from us, even from dinnertime at the ancient table.

  Claire’s boyfriend showed up after all. On schedule. Thursday, as she said he would. I was shocked. She spent the rest of the week with him doing I don’t know what. I spent the days snowboarding like the mad bomber, hurling myself in a projectile of dangerous and reckless abandonment down the hill. Didn’t matter. I could die that day and have absolutely no regrets.

  I did catch Claire’s eye. Though only once. It was when she looked back over her shoulder as she and her boyfriend were leaving for an evening out. I glimpsed there a brief opening of tenderness, a melting forth, then, freezing up again.

  I returned to school, finished my degree in psychology. Changed my thesis title from “Archetypes of Schizophrenia” to “Behavioral Differences Between Love and That Which Has The Appearance of Love.” Claire came to my campus once during my senior year, attending a conference on Advances in Library Science. I saw her standing in the cafeteria line and without hesitation, went up to her. The tenderness that had come and gone from her eyes before, came again, though it flashed just briefly. “Be well,” she said, and walked away.

  When I discovered I couldn’t make a living trying to understand human nature I went back to get a MBA. These days I do what everybody else does - trade stocks on Wall Street and live with my wife and twin three-year-old daughters in the suburbs.

  Over the years I have wondered what would have happened if Claire and I had stopped at the love kiss. Stopped right there and not gone any further. Would we be together now, would we be a “thing,” a couple, cohorts in highrise and coffee.

  I don’t know.

  But sometimes when I am making love to my wife I think of Claire, bending over the professor, G pulling her on to me. It makes me come sooner. And harder. And I get a twinge that feels a little like unfaithfulness. But for all I know my wife is thinking about the linebacker’s hand up her dress in the middle of Casablanca or the sou chef fucking her standing up in cold storage. It’s all right with me, as long as we don’t share the details - her pleasures mixing with my pleasures to lift us both.

  Aren’t we, after all, the pleasures and sorrows we offer to each other? Even the love kiss, and the fading cone of possibility it opens briefly into the future.

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