“Hieeee, Sandy,” Diane responded with the same emotional pitch. They hugged each other like two long-lost sorority sisters.
“What kept you, Di? We thought Ricky must have pulled you over somewhere for a quick boink.” Sandra hesitated, deadpanned, then laughed boisterously, trying to bring me into it. The perfect hostess.
“You’ve met Ricky, I think,” Diane said, ebullient and breathless.
Sandra turned to face me, then took one giant step inside my comfort zone. “Hey, big guy. Long time, no see.”
She kissed me on the lips, her tongue darting for an entrance. I kept my eyes open. Sandra’s diamond earrings looked like swords upraised for battle. The taste of Sandra was all baking soda and tart lemon, effervescent as her personality. I flashed on the men she had lately entertained on video—putting the “ho spit” back in hospitality—and shuddered involuntarily. She probably thought it was from pleasure.
We could see our breaths in the winter air when she finally slipped from my tentative embrace, saying, “Watch the hands, Ricky.” She waited for my wounded expression, then brayed with laughter. The sleek, short dress fit her tight as leather, and was so low-cut you couldn’t properly explain yourself if you broke eye contact with her.
“Here, let me look at you in chandelier light,” Sandra said to Diane after shooing us inside. “Don’t you just love her new hair color, Ricky? Hair as beautiful as Diane’s should always be seen in chandelier light, don’t you think?” She stood facing Diane in the immense foyer, one hand on Diane’s shoulder. “Turn around,” she said, “slowly, so I can see you and get the full effect.” When she had Diane at one-hundred-eighty degrees, Sandra surreptitiously reached down and touched me between the legs with a randiness that could not have been accidental. I made a furtive scan of the vast room facing Diane, looking for mirrors, but saw none. “Very impressive,” said Sandra. “I like it.”
“Thank you.” Diane did a fake curtsy, her back still to us. I stepped away, but only after Sandra quit what she was doing and gave me a love tap.
“I love that bird thing, too,” Sandra remarked after Diane had completed a full circle. “Where can I get my hands on one like it?”
“It’s an aigrette,” Diane said. “One of a kind. An antique.”
“Di, I haven’t met the old bird yet that’s one of a kind. Here’s living proof.”
“Good evening and welcome!” Dr. Kokker’s velvety Liberace voice greeted us. He appeared from around a corner, a homunculus in a burgundy smoking jacket and tuxedo pants. He wore some kind of black leather slip-ons. Had his silent approach shown him an eyeful?
Sandra said, “Di was just modeling her new look for us, Kirk.”
“Oh, please, a repeat performance?” Kokker said. “Won’t you indulge me, just this once?” He stood next to me, his arm around my shoulder in a brotherly attitude.
“Better do it for him, Di,” Sandra said. “I hate when he begs.” So Diane began her slow pirouette again. This time when she hit six o’clock, Kokker reached over and groped me himself. I felt his nimble fingers before I bucked and staggered away, astonished.
Diane must have heard me. She spun around. “Ricky, are you all right?”
“Your husband was just allowing me to demonstrate the secret chiropractic handshake,” Kokker said amiably. Diane shrugged with a perplexed smile. “He’s a fortunate man, you husband,” Kokker went on. “You’re even lovelier than I imagined. Tell me, was the change in hair color my dear wife’s suggestion?”
“You’re very kind,” Diane said. “Indirectly, yes, I guess you could say so. I saw how beautiful Sandy looked in long platinum hair, and I figured it was about time for a change, so why not?”
“It was an impulse, then? An irresistible impulse to make yourself irresistible?” Kokker was known for his ability to schmooze his patients—and their lawyers—and his famous bedside manner was showing. He had Diane going. Her complexion glowed hot pink, set off against her corn-silk hair and the ruby aigrette.
“I love your shoes,” she said.
“Old Twinkle Toes is wearing his glass slippers,” Sandra said. “Don’t get him started.” Kokker shot her a reproving glance and said, “They’re Italian. Ruffinos. Men’s lounging slippers. A joy to the feet. You must try them on, Ricky. I’d say you take a nine D? That’s what I wear as well.” The chiropractor’s discerning eye had pinpointed my shoe size exactly. He’d probably already mentally measured Diane’s cup size, too.
“No, really. I couldn’t.”
“Nonsense. I insist. You and I have known each other for years, Ricky. I refuse to countenance this newfound shyness.”
“What’s the matter, Ricky? Foot odor?” Sandra chimed in. “His or yours?”
“Try them on, honey,” Diane said, nudging me. I’d never been so damned embarrassed since I was a child and my mother took me to buy school shoes. I realized the Crankenstein must be aggravating my irrational nervousness. The his and hers south-of-the-border handshakes hadn’t helped, either. I conceded defeat. Kokker slipped the Ruffinos off his ribbed-silk-stockinged feet and I tried them on. The warmth of his feet still clung to them. They fit like they’d been custom-designed for me.
“Walk in them,” Kokker said. So I paraded up and down, giving what I thought were appreciative nods of comfort. I felt like a perfect ass. Maybe that was the idea.
“I’ll order you a pair,” Kokker offered. “No, two pair. A small token of appreciation for our many years of professional association. Or call it a belated housewarming gift.”
“No really, I couldn’t.”
“Oh, please. Don’t deny me my little pleasures.”
“God, will you stop with the begging, already,” Sandra wailed, holding her ears in mock horror. “I hear enough of that when we’re in bed together. Take the damn dago shoes, Ricky. He won’t let up until you do.”
“I always get what I want,” Kokker said, gazing into my eyes. “Ask Sandra if you don’t believe me.”
“Maybe Ricky needs a drink to loosen up,” Sandra offered. “What’s everybody drinking?”
My eyes darted to Diane. She had looked forward to this evening. I didn’t want to spoil it by making her uncomfortable. She didn’t approve of my drinking. It was that simple.
“Ricky and I don’t drink,” Diane answered for both of us. “Club soda would be fine.”
“Sounds great,” I added uneasily. But Sandra wasn’t satisfied.
“God, Ricky, you’re not in the house of the Borgias, you know. We haven’t poisoned anybody yet.”
“But the night is young,” Dr. Kokker added. Everybody got a laugh out of that one.
“Actually, I’d love to see how you’ve featured the new pieces, Sandy,” Diane said.
“Why don’t I have Hephzibah bring our drinks into the drawing room while I give you the tour, then?”
We all took off for the house tour, stopping at all points of interest. I recognized the Bern bears hat rack, curule chairs, walnut armoire, oak writing desk, refectory table, and Windsor sextet. Without Sandra as a guide, we would have needed a map to find any of them; the huge house swallowed up furniture the way hell swallows up souls. It was like a private tour of Versailles.
The master bath was a trip. I couldn’t take my eyes away from a sea-green marble sybarite’s tub big enough to swim laps in, sunken into the black mirrored floor. Kokker had installed a waterfall cascade that extended nearly to the ceiling like a jade terrace.
“You have such excellent taste, Sandra,” Diane was saying. “Imagine having the wherewithal to decorate on such a broad canvas and to have created such a showplace, every room a masterpiece. You must be very proud.”
“We couldn’t have done it without your lovely contributions, my dear,” Kokker chimed in. “While we’re here, let me show you something.” He snapped his fingers.
Instantly the sound of rushing waters filled the room with a Babel of voices talking backward. Water cascaded from a hidden fountainhead high above us, c
hanneling into the mouth of the tub, the force of its currents creating a whirlpool.
The disembodied voices confused and disturbed me, as if they contained every affront and every cruelty I had ever heard or ever would hear, all run together in liquid execration. Diane seemed oblivious to them, so I put them off as the latest effects of the Crankenstein. Kokker and Sandra appeared to be watching us, eager for any reaction. Steam rose from the roiling water in the tub.
“Anyone care for a dip?” Kokker called out over the racket. Diane paused as if she were considering it, then looked to me. Kokker persisted. “Shame to waste all this hot water. Ricky?”
“I didn’t bring a suit,” I said.
“Hell’s bells, Ricky, wear the suit you were born with,” Sandra scoffed. “God, you people are puritanical. I’ll go first.” She kicked off her heels and tested the swirling water with one glitter-polished big toe. “Come here, Ricky,” she said. I glanced at Diane, who had a blank expression on her face, staring down into the blue-green water already beginning to calm in the tub.
Kokker clapped his hands and the water came alive in a sea of champagne Jacuzzi bubbles. Sandra had turned her back to me. “I’m waiting, Ricky,” she said. “Unzip me.”
So I unzipped her out of the tight little cocktail dress. She wriggled until it fell to the floor. My shaking fingers had more trouble undoing the four-inch span of bra strap behind her back. She had to help me. I felt my wife’s eyes boring into my back like twin laser beams. But when I turned to her, she had already begun to undress.
“In the Soviet Union we had communal baths,” she was telling Kokker, who stared at her with undisguised glee. “I can still remember them as a child when my mother took me there. The women’s body hair looked so gross to me. She had to warn me not to stare.”
“None of us minds if you stare tonight, Di,” Sandra called out. “The ‘no gawking’ sign is off.” In a breathless tone she added, “That goes for you too, Ricky.”
The background voices had become a murmur, barely perceptible behind the Jacuzzi rush of water. I began to suspect Kokker was piping in some kind of subliminal mind-control device for overcoming human will, suppressing the higher faculties of judgment and discretion. I knew that casual public nudity would have been totally out of the question for Diane under ordinary circumstances. The jumble of whispers and sighs was enough to stir the mind into a disquieted state as turbid as the waters before us.
I stared straight ahead, dumb with animal excitement, head lowered, mouth agape—pretending not to notice Sandra’s nude form in the periphery of my vision yet able to focus on nothing else. She eased herself into the torrents of the Jacuzzi surf until her breasts buoyed out like twin pontoons. Looking over her shoulder, she called, “Come join me?”
I turned to search Diane’s expression. In her blue eyes, lit by the refraction from the water with sparkles of gold like the dawn sky of creation morning, she showed me a defiance I had never met in her before—yet knew at once had dwelt there all along. If I live to be a hundred, I will always carry with me the way she looked directly into my eyes while, standing next to Kokker, she shrugged her breasts free of her bra.
Kokker hurried, eager to undress. In a moment, he stood naked, staring at Diane. I couldn’t look away from him. He had the body of an endomorph, his flabby drooping breasts almost as big as a woman’s. There was a pyramid-shaped outline of grizzled stubble where his pubes should have been. The rest of his body was hairless and gray as a porpoise. The colorless tip of his flaccid penis, limp as a banana peel, barely peeked out from beneath the folds of his abdomen, which seemed to support his sagging Buddha belly like a hammock.
“Kirk always says it’s not size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts. Right, Kirk?”
“Last one in is a rotten egg,” Kokker said before gingerly climbing into the Jacuzzi.
Diane stepped out of her panties and stood there nude, in full view of these near-strangers. Only the uncomfortable flexing of her toes on the polished floor betrayed her reticence. Hephzibah, who had entered the room without my noticing, appeared behind her like a demon about to take her soul. Instead, she took her panties, dangling them from one disdainful index finger.
Someone had done a high-priced nail job on Hephzibah. She walked to a dressing area where she dropped Diane’s panties into a wicker basket. I wondered what Kokker had to pay her for that kind of “picking up after.” As I watched, Diane, my demure spouse, then stepped down into the steamy tub and took her place beside Kokker.
The only one still wearing his skivvies, I stood hesitating. “C’mon, Dick, show us what you’ve got,” Sandra challenged, leaning back and tracing lazy arcs in the water with her outstretched arms.
“That’s right, Ricky,” Kokker chided. “Don’t be shy. I’ve seen it all before. I’m a doctor.”
“And I’m a doctor’s assistant,” Sandra added.
So I peeled off my Fruit of the Looms. Sandra applauded noisily and let out an estrogen-laced war whoop. Diane and Kokker were already engrossed in private conversation; I couldn’t make out anything they were saying to each other.
Even when I stood at-ease, as now, the Crankenstein kept Big Rick suspended in a bashful, half-mast equilibrium. Hands on hips, I struck a pose tubside, giving everybody a better look. Diane glanced at me for a moment, then rolled her eyes and looked away.
Kokker did something to dim the lights. A heating coil built in below the tub basin began to glow ruby red through thick translucent glass and coursing water. In the near-darkness, the water reminded me of molten lava.
“You could blot out the sun with that thing, Dick,” Sandra said in a voice heavy with lust. She slid over, making just enough room for me between her and Diane, then suggested, “Let’s sit boy girl, boy girl.”
“Hot enough for you?” Kokker asked.
“We’ll all be red as lobsters,” Diane said, turning her head to direct her remarks to Kokker while studiously ignoring me. Two could play that game. I accepted Sandra’s invitation and sat down next to her. A few moments later I heard a clink of crystal stemware on the stone floor behind me. Hephzibah circled around, serving our drinks.
“I don’t know how all of you feel, but why don’t we simply dine in here this evening?” Kokker, the gracious host, proposed. Why did I think he’d planned it that way all along?
“No one could ever accuse us of being overdressed,” Diane responded, submerged neck-deep in the overheated water, still training her face toward him and away from me.
The water temperature was pushing the pain envelope. We all sat for a considerable time, overcome by the torpor: four frogs being boiled in a kettle. Kokker didn’t make a move to lower the heat until Diane’s discomfort raised her up out of the water. She turned and reached for her drink, exposing the full curves of her breasts and their dark, blushing circles to him in the firelight. Kokker’s eyes followed them as though they were two polestars to navigate by.
“Could we turn it down a little?” Diane asked, making no attempt to cover herself. Kokker adjusted the heat. The engulfing redness dimmed, leaving the water opaque and greenish-black, like a tropical ocean by night.
Diane edged closer to Kokker in the tub, drink in hand. She caught my eye for an instant with what seemed a defiant glare, making no effort to hide her bare breasts below the water line as she made easy social conversation with Kokker. I slid to press my hip and thigh against hers, but she sprang away, sitting cheek-to-cheek with Kokker instead. There we sat, Diane and I, each daring the other to greater and greater marital infractions, heedless of our vows. I reached for my own drink as though it were a weapon.
Kokker’s mixologist had trouble distinguishing club soda from Absolut. My first sip almost gagged me. I looked at my glass, held its cold condensation against my forehead, and then took a greedy swig from it. A familiar warmth, deeper and more satisfying than the hot tub could offer, began to seep from within.
“Proper etiquette dictates that a lady
should always be seated to the right of her host,” Kokker was saying.
“I guess I’m a lady, then,” Diane responded.
“Interestingly enough,” Kokker went on, “in olden days any lady a man seated to his left was no lady. At least that’s what I retain from reading Amy Vanderbilt.”
“I guess that means any man sitting at the hostess’s left flank is no gentleman, either,” Sandra said, looking at me.
“Busted,” I said. That was about the time Sandra started jacking me off underwater, watching my face for a reaction. Trying to act nonchalant, I took another man-sized pull on my drink and felt its warmth spread through me.
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