Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  Delicately, she begins to touch me with her toes, pulling gently at me as I become wet between her feet. She has me pinned. I don’t want Humphrey to see that I am close to coming, so I roll my head back, taking one of Elsa’s nipples into my mouth, tasting salt and feeling her grow erect as I tease with my teeth.

  Humphrey bends over the easel, maniacally splashing paint in great sprays. He eases his cock out of his fly; it stands erect, absurd against the cotton of his trousers. He holds it in his left hand, running his fingers along the whole shaft, pulling down over the tip. The paint brush in his right hand pushes huge globules of paint over the surface in rhythm with his left.

  Elsa lifts her legs away from me and kneels on the floor. I move forward so that I am curled over her body. She turns me around so that my pudendum is facing Humphrey.

  “Pose number two.” She places me in the position of the young Chinese girl in the second picture; there is a precision to her actions as she orchestrates the making of the image. Her hands slide around the orbs of my ass. She pries me open, turning my secret parts into a visual feast. I sit over her face and can feel her breath on my thighs. One finger slides into my ass while two others enter my cunt, and she pulls me down to her mouth. Her tongue touches the tip of my clit, teasing, flicking. Humphrey groans, almost weeping with frustration. I can see his hands trembling, the sweat beading on his face.

  Elsa lies spread below me. Tentatively I run my hands along her legs. Silk. Such young skin. Her jet-black pubic hair lies in wisps, almost Asian in its sparseness. I can see her lips through the hair. Gently, I pull back her outer lips and feel her moisten, her clit a cherry.

  The room fills with our groaning. From between Elsa’s legs I can see Humphrey kneeling at the edge of the chalk circle, his back arched, his trousers down to his knees, his cock hard and shiny rising up through his fist. He leans forward, getting as close as he can to our bodies without crossing the chalk boundary. I can feel his breath on my back. Elsa shoves two more fingers into my ass, taking my whole cunt into her mouth. She licks my lips then pulls back, sucking my clit.

  Slowly I lower my face into her sex, tasting her clit with my tongue. Salty. Clean. I want to give her pleasure. I take her whole clit and play it across my tongue. I can feel her stiffen. More. I dig my nails into the cheeks of her ass and start sucking vigorously.

  Humphrey is close to coming, his cock enormous. A huge red pole rolling between his hands. Kneeling at the edge of the circle, he suddenly lashes his paint brush through the air. The yellow paint splashes up between our bodies. Elsa smears the paint across my breasts, drawing her own breasts across my belly. The paint feels wet and sticky.

  Humphrey watches in anger. Impotent, he flings another dash of paint across my back. Blue drips down between my buttocks and onto Elsa’s forehead. She smears it down over my ass and down the outside of my thighs. The streak of blue across her forehead has transformed her into a frenzied warrior queen.

  She massages the blue into the yellow, masking me. I can feel the paint solidify as it dries slowly, pulling back my skin. She has given me a mask. She has given me a license to be different.

  We roll over and over, landing in a pool of green paint. She’s on top now, her cunt spread above me. She manipulates me so that I slip up and down in the pool of paint as she pulls at my cunt with her mouth. The paint oozes between everything, between my fingers, between my toes, between my legs.

  Humphrey, now also naked and splattered with color, pulls at himself furiously. He rolls back his head in the way I know so well, in the throes of Pan. But I don’t want him to come, I don’t want him to come with us.

  I push my fingers into Elsa and take her clit between my teeth. We both start to come, and I am barely able to keep her in my mouth when Humphrey suddenly spurts a jet of sperm over the chalk border and across the room. It spills across my skin in a thin, hot stream.

  In the silence afterward we all start to laugh. Revenge—I was always lousy at it.

  THE MAN WHO LOVED SOUND

  Two men. One, large, on the brink of middle age, leans against an open window, smoking. Outside the afternoon traffic roars past, sending up clouds of dust into the sunlight that cuts into the dingy lounge room. He flicks ashes on the carpet.

  The second man, thin, crouches by a record player, his long arms wrapped around his knees. He rocks himself backward and forward over the worn rug, trying to stop himself from crying.

  The fat man leans across and squeezes the other’s skinny shoulder.

  The man in black denim stands slowly, swaying on his feet.

  QUIN

  My name’s Quin, “the Wolf” to some. They call me that because of my hair. I haven’t brushed it in years. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t clean. It is. I like to keep it clean for the ladies. They like to weave their fingers through it and pull hard, especially when they’re coming. I keep it matted, like an animal’s. A wild, untamed animal. That’s why they call me the Wolf.

  I don’t say much. I don’t need to. When I’m standing at the back of some gig in the dark with the music washing over me I’m in paradise. And the women sense it, they come to me without me even having to move a muscle. Instinct, that’s what they love, a man who knows his own pleasure.

  MACK

  I first saw Quin at a recording session. It was in the late seventies and I was twenty-six, young enough to still get excited when I heard those guitar riffs pounding at the studio window. I can’t remember the band now, but I remember Quin. He was curled up on the floor, crouching against the wall. His eyes were closed and that demented hair was snaking all over the large nose, the oily skin, the bat ears. Jerking rhythmically to the music, he looked like a gypsy violinist in a wedding somewhere in Prussia last century. I remember leaning across and shouting in the singer’s ear; “Get the fucking junkie out!” All the singer did was smile.

  “Quin, what were the last four bass chords?”

  Quin didn’t even bother to open his eyes. “A, E, B and F sharp.”

  That’s my man, best ears in the industry grafted onto the body of a spider.

  QUIN

  I don’t like to say much in case I miss something. I like listening—to every nuance, every tonal gradation. I live through my ears. The first thing I can remember is the sound of a beer can being ripped open, my Irish father celebrating my birth with a toast. In the background I could detect the rat-tat-tat of Yiddish as my mother, Esther, organized my circumcision with my grandfather. Some people have really sharp eyesight, others can feel emotions with their fingers. Me, I hear everything. Sometimes I think I can hear the ants in the soil. Mack thinks it’s a gift. I think it’s a handicap: I hear too much.

  Music is different: It’s color. It’s blue laced with silver. It’s lightning in a storm. It’s an orgasm through the veins. When I’m listening to music, I shut my eyes and pretend that my body is cat-gut stretched over a drum. In moments like this I am nothing but pure vibration. In moments like this I forget thought.

  That’s why I’ve dedicated my life to music, to the recording and preservation of acoustic beauty. I put that in my résumé when I applied for the job at Mack’s studio. That’s why he employed me, so he can point me out to visiting artists and say, “That’s Quin. Mention digital audio technology around him and he’ll cut your balls off, but if you’re into acoustics he’s the best in Australia.”

  Mack’s a victim of history. He solidified years ago, but he respects me. I like that. It gives me somewhere to touch down.

  MACK

  Digital audio technology. Yeah, been around for a while and it ain’t going away. Quin loathed it with a vengeance. He said it minimized sound, flattened it and spat it out onto a disk at the other end. He blamed the media giants and fabricated his own conspiracy theory. But what could I do? I’m a businessman. I had business to do and the clients wanted the latest. So I converted all the studios to DAT—all except Quin’s. Maybe I have a soft spot for the past. Superstition has always been my wea
kness; my old dad used to say, a little bit of the past will help with the future. Dad used to sell clothes wringers under Central Station. Then they introduced washing machines and he went bankrupt. Anyway, Quin had become a mascot for the studio, and mascots have their uses.

  QUIN

  My homemade record player has twelve valves that all glow in the dark. Little red throbbing beacons. It takes half an hour to warm them up before I can put the needle down on the spinning black disc. I only listen to records. They really knew how to record bands then—now it’s all sound reproduced by computers, no soul, no space between the musicians.

  Women? It’s simple: I’ve never had a problem.

  Every encounter is sonorous. On the skin, on the lips, on the cock. Like sediment it builds up, and the women can smell it on you. Of course, working in the rock ‘n’ roll industry helps. Like, you’ve been in the studio with the band for a week running, day and night, and the girlfriends, well, they start to feel neglected. So I play this tune in my head: You-poor-little-furry-thing-you-need-some-loving-I’m-here-for-you-I’m-here-to-serve-every-part-of-your-delicious-body-yes-I-will.

  Over and over; mantra-like. And the women, they start quivering. Their antennae spin frantically and bend in my direction. Before they know it they’re leaning toward the mixing desk, those low, silent frequencies converging, drawing them closer and closer. The boyfriend, the singer, disappears into the toilets to do a line of coke. I balance the descent as she slips me her telephone number written in lipstick on the back of a matchbox.

  Later at my place, I lay her down between the speakers, undressing her on the lounge-room floor. It’s my ritual. There is a great symmetry in repetition. If I have any musical talent it is this, drawing out pleasure through the skin. A tattoo of rhythm. Of timbre.

  After the crescendo, the woman lies like the hull of a ship, lit by the glowing valves of my record player. Buttocks pushing up octaves, nipples cutting through the descent. She is pinned by the music; her wings bash against the bass like a dying butterfly that has burst into color before its final fatal flight.

  MACK

  Quin had this thing about the female voice, the alto to be precise. Shirley Bassey, Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand—all were tonal pleasure for Quin. Just as some men are tit men, Quin was a voice man.

  He had the weirdest record collection I’d ever seen, as well as this ancient system with valves, for Christ’s sake! But his speakers were strawberry and cream. The edges of the acoustic space were razor sharp, especially on classical recordings: you knew where the bassoonist was sitting; it picked up the fourth violinist scratching his four o’clock beard. I’m telling you, you could hear the conductor draw breath just before his baton swished through the air.

  I used to love sitting there, beer in one hand, joint in the other, just listening with the man. No women, no babies, no barking dogs, just Quin and his moldy furniture—the ultimate bachelor.

  QUIN

  I always leave work around five a.m., that way I avoid the white noise of this city. Discordant, man-made, eating up nature, swallowing birdsong, the wind, the percussion of rain.

  I’ve fitted the car with mufflers and sealed the windows; it’s my time capsule of tranquility. My silence. Mornings. Me and my car, we’re black against the dawn. I drive over the bridge at Rozelle, past the new museum of fire towering like a huge red ghost. Every time my car accelerates over that bridge, I’m flying.

  There’s a moment just before sunrise when the birds stop singing, just for a second. Peace, like before the Word. I, Quin, name this moment the blue note. It’s a B flat, played gently on a clarinet. I know it, I can feel it resonate in the cells of my being.

  So, we’re talking about the winter before last. I’d been working my guts out, sixteen hours a day for two weeks, with Taunting Tongues, an a cappella group: two bass, three tenor and ten sopranos. I’m just putting down the bass when the studio phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Adrian?”

  The voice rises and quivers on the last syllable, a middle C caught between the diaphragm and the chest. Alto? Mezzo-soprano? She’s treacle down the throat and I have to hear more.

  “No, but keep talking.”

  “Who is this?” I’m holding my breath, I’m holding myself. This is the most perfect alto I’ve ever heard. Don’t hang up, don’t hang up. I want to see your mouth, your lips, your palate, the cleft under your tongue. My cock’s quivering with each tonal nuance. Baby, please.

  “You have a beautiful voice.”

  “Adrian? Is that you, you louse?”

  “You have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.”

  “OK, I’m hanging up.”

  “No you don’t, not before you say something else. C’mon, baby, say something.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Quin.”

  “Qu-in.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Felicity.”

  “Fe-li-city—as in felicitas, as in happiness.”

  She’s like fingers, lubricated, tight, moving. Hitting the note with every vowel.

  “Quin, are you still there?”

  It’s too late, I’m throbbing in rhythm with her consonants.

  “Yes,” I whispered, scared my breath will give me away.

  “I’d like to meet you, Quin.”

  MACK

  Yeah, July, what a shit of a month. I mean, we actually had a winter that year. Even the Japanese tourists were whining. I remember that day vividly. I was sitting there in the conference room, rolling a few numbers with what’s-his-name from Virgin, when Quin comes rushing in. This in itself was enough to make me swivel round. Quin never rushes, he glides, like a bat, with those huge red ears pulsating.

  “Mack,” he says, “I’ve met this woman.” I glance across at the record executive sitting opposite, his London pallor and Oxford accent sabotaging his snakeskin boots. I could see from his expression he thought Quin was crazy, maybe even homicidal. Then again, it was good dope.

  “Quin, can’t you see we’re doing business here?”

  “Yeah.”

  Quin throws himself onto the fun-fur couch. He takes a deep drag of the joint and exhales into the Englishman’s face. Forty thousand dollars worth of studio time just went up in smoke, I’m thinking.

  “So is she soprano, mezzo-soprano or alto?” As if I cared, but Quin looks dangerous, like really inspired. Always humor an obsessive, you learn that in this industry.

  “Mezzo-soprano slipping into contralto on every syllable beginning with F. Hot, very hot.”

  I should have known then.

  QUIN

  The next morning I’m up at ten for the first time in four years. Hair runs in the family on both sides. I need a shave. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but today I want to feel smooth, just in case. I shake a razor blade clean of foam and slowly begin.

  A beam of sunlight travels across the sink and my hands, bouncing off the water. It gets me thinking about God, the cosmos and the harmonics between C and C sharp. A high electronic frequency makes me shake my head. Perhaps it’s a new frequency, one of limbo, of all those souls caught between material and spiritual worlds. Even the very name of the shaving foam seems mystical. I forget what I’m doing and cut myself. The thick welling of blood reminds me of my mortality. Not that I’m religious. What hope do I have with a Catholic father and a Jewish mother? I only believe in impulse. The power, the flesh. The only part of the Bible I remember is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

  It’s my personal philosophy: Being only came into existence once it had been given a tone. Naming was important, but already it had the constructs of culture imposed. I am heard, therefore I exist.

  MACK

  He told me they had their first meeting in the State Library. Sick. I mean what are you going to get up to in a large stone mausoleum? But then it is kind of kinky. All that whispering and toes under the table. I mean, h
ey, whatever turns you on. I know someone who even had a orgy in a deep freeze. Now that’s perverse.

  QUIN

  I like it in here, especially in summer when the cold air off the stone hits you as you walk in from the sun. But now it’s winter.

  I’m waiting at a table, newspapers scattered in front of me. I am sick with nerves, like my cool has evaporated. For the first time in my life I feel, well, vulnerable. I have asked her to say my name out loud. I’d recognize that voice anywhere.

  When I close my eyes now and visualize that moment, I see myself sitting there in my good blue shirt and black jeans. I’m little, like I’ve shrunk under the skin. Fear did this. I am frightened of rejection. All around me half-caught whispered phrases like “Sarah’s graduating next year. She’s pregnant, haven’t you heard?” “We’ve got the mortgage to pay off and Tom still hasn’t got a job” bounce off the walls and fall into my lap. Insidious, empty sounds.

  I’m drumming my fingers, a little march of wood. A woman walks past in a tailored suit. This babe is on a mission. Tall, brunette, breasts visible under the blazer. Her high heels ricochet from wall to wall; “speak to me,” taps the refrain from my fingers. She moves closer, trailing her fingers across a shelf of encyclopedias.

  I can smell her perfume, fruity with an edge of spice. Speak to me, speak to me. She walks right past, oblivious. I shrink further into myself. I am a shadowy ghost-man, hazy around the edges.

  “Quin?”

  Music. The beating of angel wings, the sound of a fountain, heat across the throat. I swing around. A woman stands just behind me. Solid, middle-aged with a body that has made a comfortable pact with gravity. White skin, a nest of jet-black hair piled on top of her head. Everything is buried except her eyes, which are undeniably beautiful.