Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  Cock slides gracefully into ass. Cut to close shot of face, sweat on brow, full lips pushed forward, mouth half-open, tongue extending, spreading lips of cunt. Cut to close shot of other woman. Blonde, bigger breasts, shining, impossibly round and plastic, perfect moaning. Volume up. That’s it. That’s good. Moan louder.

  “Are you coming to bed?” Doug is watching videos in the small lounge-room of their condominium. Candy stands in the doorway holding the dirty dinner plates, remnants of the mushroom sauce still clinging to the china. Doug doesn’t bother to turn away from the monitor.

  “Later,” he mutters distractedly. Candy watches herself giving head to the blonde while being fucked by two men—one in the ass, the other vaginally. She remembers that at the time she’d been thinking about the sea. A dream she’d had about watching it dry up around her body. Funny thing was she’d been wearing her wedding dress. She glances across at the poster on the wall. They’d bought it just for a joke, at the last minute at the airport. “Discover the wonders of Tocumwal,” it boasts, above an image of a river with a platypus on its banks. Sometimes she misses home. Even the tedium of the one petrol station with the one pool table the kids used to hang out at. That was where she’d first met Doug, playing pool. He’d been on a delivery run for his uncle, from the next town up the highway, and he was handsome. Now she wouldn’t have said it was love at first sight, but she had thought so then. Above the condominium the whirling of a patroling helicopter startles her back into the present.

  Doug slips off the couch and crawls toward the screen, staring steadily at his wife as the blonde parts the two cheeks to reveal one cock thrust violently into her asshole while the other nudges blindly between her legs. He presses the remote control and replays the image, the sound of Candy’s faked orgasm reverberating off the low ceiling.

  “You’ll wake the neighbors.”

  He doesn’t reply. Candy shrugs, taking the plates into the tiny kitchen and stacking them into the dishwasher. The dishwasher. Her mum had always wanted one, and it had been the first thing Candy had bought with the profits of her first American movie, Candy Does Randy. Stupid title, but Randy, a jovial man in his late forties, a veteran of the industry and renowned for his oral skills, had made Candy laugh as he parodied the director, a young film grad, desperate to make an artistic impression.

  “Candy, make a killing then get out quick. Don’t become like me, a man on the end of a penis. It’s a living but it’s not a life.”

  Randy was the first one to introduce her to dictionaries. He used to read them between takes. “To lengthen my vocabulary,” he’d say with a wink, then throw words at her like trajectory or munificent, rolling them around his mouth like lollies. Candy would watch fascinated as, naked, he’d illustrate the rounded vowels with a flick of his hips—his erection bouncing as his hands curved in the air like a demented Indian dancer. It was Randy who got her hooked.

  “Mummification.”

  “Not now love, I’m watching.” He doesn’t even turn around. Doug had never used words much. For years Candy had projected a whole lexicon onto his grunts. And for years she’d been satisfied with that until now. The word “vilification” looms suddenly in her mind. For the past six months she’d progressed from the office edition of the Webster’s through to the Oxford Unabridged. But she had never succeeded in interesting Doug in even the shortest, most prosaic adjectives. The idea of using her newfound vocabulary excited her. It excited her sexually.

  She switches on the dishwasher and listens for a moment to the water rushing down the pipes. Her feet ache from the high heels, her cunt is sore and she misses her mother. The sound of a cracking whip comes from next door. The video must have reached the S & M scene. A naive young countess marries a cruel aristocrat who forces her to commit bizarre sexual acts. Or was it the vampires? Candy can’t remember. It had been her fourth or fifth film and, as most of them took only a week to shoot, she’d learned to develop amnesia in post-production. Besides, if she was ever confused she only had to ask Doug. He’d watched every film she’d made at least ten times, which surprised Candy as he’d been on the crew of all of them. Doug Perkins: clapper loader. It was a clause she insisted on in her contracts. But lately…salacious, marmoreal, transmogrification…She stretches the vowels out with her tongue. Even sounding the words silently makes her horny.

  She puts the kettle on and glances back through the door. Doug watches his wife being suspended. She swings gently in her harness, her brown hair cascading down onto the fur rug. A large man in an executioner’s hood and bondage harness, his belly bulging over his erect penis, raises his hand and flicks a small whip across Candy’s buttocks. Doug moans without realizing it. Candy sits down on the couch and ruffles his hair.

  “Eugenics,” she whispers seductively using the lower descent she usually saves for the films. He moves closer to the screen, irritated. She tries running her toes down his back. “Inguinal, synergism, pianissimo.” Doug doesn’t even bother to turn around. On screen, her breasts bounce as she swings past the executioner. In the small lounge-room, makeup off and wrapped up in her favorite dressing gown, Candy tries to remember the last time they had a conversation. She can’t. He is always watching.

  She looks at the back of his head. A short dialogue would be nice, something like “osculate,” “sonorously,” “viscosity” would be just enough to get her off. Followed by a cuddle. She liked that the best, just being held. Recently she’d really needed it. She stretches then gets up.

  “See you in there.”

  He grunts and fast-forwards to the climax, where Candy is being fucked by a man standing on a chair while she sucks off another. Jissom spurts across her breasts and face. The money shot.

  It is only later, lying alone in the waterbed Doug had bought at a discount store, that Candy realizes that she can’t remember the last time Doug had even kissed her. Let alone made love to her.

  Through the wall she can still hear him groaning to the sound of her own faked orgasm as Candy does Randy while meeting the whip. “Serendipity,” she whispers to herself and cradles the pillow, rocking.

  THE PROMISCUITY OF BATS

  There were ten of them in total: five men and five women, busy festive shoppers. All of them had left their purchasing until the last minute—Christmas Eve. Stacey and Deidre were the last to get into the lift—on the sixteenth floor, haberdashery and household appliances. Both were laden with bags. Stacey was carrying two turkeys, four Christmas puddings and a Super-8 video camera for Jock. She glanced around. The elevator was packed, making body contact unavoidable.

  She noticed a small blond woman about five months pregnant. Next to her, pressed into a corner, was a tall, disheveled man of about thirty whose dress sense was still trapped in his adolescence. The way he nodded suggested that he was profoundly deaf. Next to him, clutching a roll of canvas, was another man, good looking, with pockmarked skin. Squashed behind him was an elegant woman in her late thirties, dressed in stylish European clothes. Stacey thought she might be a tourist; she was carrying a program advertising a series of concerts at the arts center. There was something smug about her that Stacey decided she didn’t like. She was talking to an older woman, a very statuesque blonde in her mid-forties, who handled herself with a great deal of confidence. Next to the elegant woman stood a handsome older man, obviously wealthy, judging from his clothes. He looked European and, from the territorial way he held the woman’s hand, Stacey correctly surmised that he was her husband. The large blonde turned to her companion.

  “It’s bats. There’s a whole colony of them on the site. Apparently they have special mating caves scattered all around the city. Just my luck to have one right on site.”

  “Mating caves?”

  “Bats are very promiscuous. I researched it, fascinating stuff. Of course, it varies from species to species. This is just your ordinary fruit bat. But with giant flying foxes, the rutting males fly into a cave full of sleeping females and start to emit loud cries to att
ract them. They continue to scream and flap their wings until finally they produce a long series of shrill shrieks, and in the middle of that the male suddenly grabs the female, wraps his wings around her and takes her from behind.”

  “I’ve had men like that.”

  “Haven’t we all,” the pregnant woman chimed in.

  The two men behind Stacey broke into laughter. She glanced around. From the look of his soiled, rough hands the taller man was obviously a gardener or workman of some sort. He stood grinning at the handsome man beside him. Stacey tried to guess his neighbor’s occupation but couldn’t place him; she noticed that he was holding a cardboard carton labeled ICE CREAM CONES—100. What a man like that would do with a hundred ice-cream cones, she couldn’t even begin to guess.

  “At the height of the rutting season, the cry of a single bat can cause every other male bat to become sexually excited, in a kind of mood transfer, and before you know it, the whole cave turns into a screaming orgy.”

  “Sounds like a great game of basketball,” the ice cream man, Jerome, interjected, grinning wickedly at Dee.

  “Or war,” Humphrey wryly threw in, surprising the other men in the lift, who had him marked as aloof. Deidre, suffering slightly from claustrophobia, dipped her head in the direction of the sniggering men. Karl looked across. Australian men are so infantile, he thought, and was momentarily thankful for what he perceived as his European sophistication.

  “Or just rampaging testosterone in general,” said Sandra, the blonde, as she glanced at Deidre. They were about the same age, but Sandra would have categorized Deidre as someone who was in need of sexual liberation—except for the red scarf that peeped out flamboyantly from under her very conservative suit. The facade is not what it seems, Sandra noted correctly. Meanwhile, her friend Katherine was acutely aware of Humphrey, whose intense gaze hadn’t left her body since the moment she had entered the elevator. Normally this would have irritated Katherine, but since she had become alienated from her husband, all kinds of curious emotional and sexual liaisons had infiltrated her life. She was convinced that some great spiritual patterning lay underneath these couplings, like a wonderful message. If only she could break the code. She returned Humphrey’s gaze, but found that she couldn’t continue to look into those eyes without an embarrassing sense of sexual arousal.

  Jodie just wanted to sit down. The baby pressed down on her bladder and her feet were aching. Next year Adrian could do the Christmas shopping, she’d be too busy with the child. On the other side of the elevator, Quin was desperately trying to decipher the smiles and the moving lips around him. He liked the look of the tall, older blonde. She reminded him of his ex-lover; he liked mature women and she smelled good. Deafness had sharpened his remaining senses, and he was convinced that he could smell the faint scent of sex under her perfume. He calculated that an encounter must have taken place an hour before. Lunchtime.

  And there was something about the middle-aged, well-dressed man that was familiar, as if he was a distant friend Quin had forgotten about. He glanced down at the man’s hands; beautifully maintained, they were the hands of a musician. Quin looked back at the face. With a start, he recognized him as Karl Pope. Quin had one of his early recordings on record. Carnegie Hall, 1973. He wished now that he could speak, but he didn’t trust his diction, knowing that if he formed words they would sound loud and discordant. He loved this man’s work, and basked for a moment in the presence of the famous. He glanced up at the elevator indicator, now traveling between the fifteenth and fourteenth floors. Something had changed in the way the elevator was descending, he had felt it in the floor through his feet. He was highly attuned to vibrations, not just of physical objects but also between people. It had been astonishing to discover that attraction between people could translate into slight dips in air temperature, or a sudden barely discernible acceleration of air movement. For example, there was a palpable concentration of heat between the tall blonde’s friend clutching the concert program and the artist in the corner. The elevator suddenly shuddered to a halt.

  Stacey looked across at Humphrey, who glanced at Katherine, who in turn peered up at Sandra. Katherine was trying not to panic; there were too many people in the elevator to be comfortable, even if you did find one of them very attractive. Sandra always embodied such a sensible approach to life, Katherine couldn’t imagine her ever getting up to any sexually compromising situation, even when trapped in an enclosed space.

  Dee glanced at Jerome’s crotch, then looked up at his mouth—blatantly sexual, with heavy lips that seemed to be begging to be corrupted. Dee’s hands tightened around the four bottles of champagne he clutched to his chest. In his jacket pocket there were ten tabs of ecstasy tucked away. He looked back at Jerome’s mouth.

  Jerome was used to being looked at by men and women, and he returned Dee’s insolent gaze. Dee didn’t look homosexual; there was nothing feminine about his approach, just a sensual curiosity that intrigued Jerome. He liked Dee’s hands. The long, worn fingers seemed to suggest that his livelihood was working with the soil. He’d never had a man, but he’d fantasized about it and there was a similarity of physique between them that appealed to the narcissist in him.

  Deidre was starting to quake internally. The elevator had been stationary for over a minute and she knew that Mischa was waiting for her down in the car park. She had the result of her blood test in her handbag. She was pregnant at last. She glanced down at her mobile. She could always use that if things got worse. The elevator jolted, descended a couple of feet and then with the screeching of metal came to another halt. Jodie, terrified, grabbed hold of Quin, who steadied her with an embarrassed grin.

  “Thanks,” she said. He gestured wildly in response, and Jodie realized that he was deaf. Meanwhile, Sandra braced herself against the wall.

  “A temporary halt, I hope,” she remarked wryly. They waited in silence for another ten seconds; time seemed to stretch into infinity. Outside it was summer, and many of them were wearing thin summer dresses or T-shirts under which body hair was visible. Humphrey could see Katherine’s nipples clearly under the silk shirt, her pale skin luminous against her red hair. He wanted to make her blush, he wanted to see crimson seep into those cheeks. He wondered about spanking her, imagining what that flesh would feel like under his palm. He felt a terrible desire to pull her pants down to the ground, to publicly humiliate her in front of all these people.

  Dee offered Jerome a cigarette, who smiled and took one.

  “No smoking,” Deidre snapped, her hysteria mounting. If only the elevator would move! Dee shrugged and Jerome couldn’t help but notice the beauty of his fingers wrapped around the packet.

  The elevator shuddered then dropped several feet in free fall. For a second everyone held their breath, then almost palpably they exhaled together.

  “We’re stuck, the elevator’s stuck,” Humphrey announced rather unnecessarily.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Deidre’s voice was tight with tension. Dee pressed the control button; no response. “Well, how long do we wait until it’s official?” Katherine tried to inject some humor into the situation.

  “Allow me,” Humphrey squeezed past her, the soft, pendulous weight of her breasts brushing across his chest sending a shudder down to his groin.

  Please don’t get an erection, please, he thought to himself. His cock, ignoring all rational pleas, rose to the occasion and butted its head fast against his trousers.

  “If I get to the panel in the ceiling, I might be able to reactivate the elevator. I did a stint many years ago as an apprentice electrician,” he announced to the rest of them, feeling uncommonly manly. Dee offered to give him a leg up and, with the others pressed against the walls of the elevator, they formed a triangle in the center of the floor. Humphrey stood on top of Dee’s back to lift off the metal panel in the ceiling. With Humphrey thus elevated, his state of excitement was obvious, and made rather a favorable impression on the women, Katherine in particular, who was partial
to the larger male.

  Humphrey unscrewed the panel with the help of a key ring, shifted it across and stared at the complex junction of colored wires. None of them seemed to enter and exit at any logical point. He pulled tentatively at a green wire. He had been bluffing. The throbbing attraction he felt for the elegant redhead had temporarily sent him into a delusion of grandeur. He would save them all and, forever thankful, she would sink to her knees and throw her head into his lap, sobbing with gratitude. He peered down; her mouth did seem invitingly close to his crotch. His cock rose another ten centimeters. There was an audible sigh of awe that rippled gently but perceptibly through the female onlookers. Dee, kneeling and staring down at the floor, wondered what all the fuss was about, while Quin noticed a definite change in the air pressure. Humphrey pulled at the wire a little more sharply, and suddenly the elevator was plunged into utter darkness.

  The screams and gasps calmed down. Stacey was now beginning to enjoy the drama of the situation. She calmly reached into her large shopping bag for the Christmas candle she’d bought. Holding it up high, she lit it with Jock’s lighter, the one he’d bought her for good luck. The pale light illuminated the faces of the trapped shoppers.

  “That should do for a while,” she announced, looking like an oversized angel of mercy towering above the others, beacon held high, radiating calmness.

  “Hello? Hello?” A thin voice with an Indian accent piped up from an intercom speaker set in the wall.

  “This is a representative from the general office speaking. I just want to let you folks know that we have everything under control. The technicians are working on restoring power within half an hour. We suggest you relax and try not to panic. We will now play some relaxing music to help you with this task.”

  The sound of waves crashing and the high sonic booming of whales singing flooded through the elevator. Jodie let go of Quin’s elbow and sank to the floor, resigning herself to a long wait. Dee felt quite elated; he’d taken advantage of the black-out and had run his hand across the front of Jerome’s trousers. Instead of being pushed away, Jerome had pressed his hand down firmly, and Dee had clearly felt his penis hardening under his touch. They now stood chastely side by side peering nonchalantly into the dark. A plan was forming in Dee’s mind. He felt in his pocket—the tabs of ecstasy were still there.