by Marco Vassi
“Manuel,” she whispered. “Do you need to see me?”
“Yes,” he said, noting how she had said “need,” not “want.”
“Well, come on,” she said, “you know the address.”
“All right,” he said, “all right, thank you.”
“Knock off that ‘thank you’ shit,” she told him. “We been too close for that kind of stuff now.”
He hung up and his hand was sweating from holding the receiver so tightly. After what he and Alma had known together, he knew that calling her was more than going to see an old friend for comfort, or an old lover for a pleasant lay. She had loved him so fiercely that it had bent his heart; and deep within him he knew that she fulfilled everything he might want in a woman, except that she didn’t flood him with the terrible excitement he got from just looking at Joan. He and Alma had fucked, and it had been good, but it did not make him swoon. And when they split up she had said, “Don’t ever call me unless you’re serious. I don’t want to play this game again.”
As his steps went in the direction of her apartment, he kept saying to himself, “It’s not too late; you don’t have to show up. Just go home. Go to a whorehouse and get laid. Forget it.” But he was like a man in the grip of a hypnotic force, and he walked mechanically the eight blocks to her place, and climbed the four flights of the ancient tenement. Up the narrow staircase with its polished wooden banisters and a smell that had not changed for over sixty years. The building had been a home for waves of Jews, Irish, Italians, and now housed Puerto Ricans with the same gentle indifference, its water and steam pipes complaining a bit more loudly, the cracks in its walls a bit wider, but still sturdy with the craftsmanship of an earlier century.
She answered his first knock.
And when the door opened, he could not believe his eyes.
The girl he had known a year earlier was an entirely different creature. The plump, pleasant woman who wore print cotton dresses was now thin, her hair piled high on her head, wearing a black silk robe. She had no makeup except for a swatch of violet eye shadow on each eyebrow, and sported a single silver earring in her right ear. From behind her came the faint aroma of marijuana.
He stood there stupidly, blinking, until, laughing, Alma grabbed his arms and said, “Come in, you lunk, I can’t say hello properly in the hallway.”
She pulled him into the apartment and slammed the police lock closed behind him. If her personal appearance had startled him, the decor of the pad was equally surprising. The interior walls had all been knocked out, and the plaster removed from the supporting walls, leaving exposed brick which had been washed with acid and shellacked. In the process, a fireplace had been uncovered, and it now held a low glowing fire. Originally a railroad flat, the place was now a single loft, perhaps a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, and all the furniture was in keeping with the sense of spaciousness, including a white net hammock that spanned one entire corner. From a stereo he could not yet see, Cat Stevens sang his need for a hard-headed woman.
He could not catch up with the rush of sensations that flooded him. But Alma made up for his astonishment by putting her arms around his neck, pressing the full length of her body against his, and covering his mouth with her own. The effect was eerie, for it was the same woman he had made love to many times, and yet it was someone different. He ran his hands down her back, remembering the curve of her spine, and then he cupped her ass in his palms and pulled her pelvis toward him. Her buttocks were large and wide, but now they stood out in contrast to the rest of her, which was some forty pounds lighter than it had been. Even her breasts improved with the contrast, for whereas they had been part of her general softness, they now stood out against her slim rib cage, two hot mounds of yielding flesh that pressed into his chest. His mouth opened and her tongue immediately snaked inside, licking his teeth, his palate, and then pushing far back toward his throat, a thick pulsing organ with a wild sensual intelligence.
They held each other for a long, long time and then separated.
“Whew,” was all he could say.
It did not take long for them to get comfortable, lying by the fire with shoes and socks off, hot coffee in front of them, cigarettes sending off curls of yellow smoke. And they told each another their stories, encapsulating time with language.
Manuel told her about his job, about his plan to buy land and, finally, about his infatuation for Joan. He didn’t go into the details of what had happened, but only told her that it had been totally frustrating, and he was so confused he didn’t know whether he wanted to go back. “You see,” he said, “it is hard for me to keep my manhood in the white man’s world. They treat me like a pet monkey. But in the back of my head, I know what I am there for, so I can keep my dignity. But when something happens, like with this woman, then the bottom is pulled out.”
“I know what it is like,” she agreed. “After you left, I decided I had to find out more about this new country. You know, we came here when we were children, but all the years we spent in the barrio might well have been spent in Puerto Rico. The rest of the city was a mystery to me. So, every night after work, I went to different places. And, finally, I discovered Greenwich Village.” She smiled to herself, remembering something she didn’t articulate. “I met a musician, and he introduced me to grass, and to fancy parties, and to very sophisticated people. Well, I started to change fast. I lost weight, I learned how to dress to please myself and not my mother, I began to think about how I wanted my pad to look. And then I got lucky. Someone approached me about bringing certain packages in from Puerto Rico. Since I’m a woman and since I have family both here and there, it was likely I wouldn’t be searched. So I made a half-dozen trips within three months, and all of a sudden I was twenty thousand dollars richer. I quit that miserable job in the bank, and I’ve been hanging out ever since.”
Manuel looked at her with awe and embarrassment. He had called her thinking she would be the timid overweight girl he had loved but could not take seriously as a mate, and that she would be overjoyed to see him. Instead he found a sharp beautiful woman who treated him with a certain warmth, but definitely with deference. He felt clumsy and oafish in front of this woman of the world.
He didn’t realize he had fallen so silent and was staring moodily into the flames until she rubbed the back of his neck with her hand.
“Hey,” she said, “where you off to in your head?”
He could find no words. Depressed by what had happened with Joan, he was almost paralyzed at finding Alma as far, if not farther, beyond his grasp than the sexy editor at the office. But almost without his being aware at first of what was happening. Alma slipped her hand inside his shirt and was slowly and gently rubbing the firm pectoral muscles, tickling his hair, and grazing his nipples. He got aroused before he was conscious of his growing erection. He turned to look at her.
“What are you doing?” he asked tenderly.
“Remembering how good you feel,” she told him. “Remembering what a strong, handsome, fierce lover you are.”
“Don’t pity me, Alma,” he said.
She pinched his skin hard enough to make him wince and grab her wrist. “The only pity here is coming from you, and it’s all for yourself. What’s the matter with you? You have a little run-in with a chick where you work and it destroys you? In the old days you used to eat women like that for breakfast. When you were with me you used to go downtown and pluck them off the streets and fuck them in the back seats of their cars, those little white girls with their itchy asses.”
“I know,” he agreed. “I guess I’m just getting old enough to feel lonely, that’s all.”
“That’s why you came to see me, isn’t it?” she asked with a quaver in her voice.
“Sure,” he said. “And I’m really glad to see you doing so well.”
She shook him roughly. “Why are you talking to me like I was a stranger?”
“Well,” he told her, “you’re in a different world now. You got money, you go
t new ways, you got fancy lovers.” He looked at her sadly. “It’s nice of you to take me in off the street for a night, but there is nothing for me here.”
She pulled away from him, lay back on the rug, and looked up at him through half-closed eyes. “I loved you so much,” she began, “that when you went away I just wanted to die for a long time. But I lived, and I changed. And I’ve been making my way. And now you’re back, and you’re pissed off because I’m not the way I was when you left. And you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Well, I’ll tell you something. All this while I’ve been going through changes, I’ve been thinking, ‘If Manuel comes back, I’ll be a real woman for him, a beautiful woman who can stand on her own two feet.’ But I didn’t think you would come back. I just kept loving you anyway, way in the back of my heart, thinking I would never see you again. And now you are here. And if you want me again, you can have me. I’m not going to play games with you about that. I still want you. And I have money, yes, and I have new ways, yes, and they are all yours if you want them. And I have lovers, yes, because I am a woman and not a child. And if you come back into my life, I’ll make every other man I know disappear, like that!” She snapped her fingers. “But you got to show me something. You got to show me that you want me. You got to win me. You got to fuck me so I forget every other cock that’s been inside me. And if you want to do that, here I am, baby. And if you don’t, you can go out the same door you came in.”
Manuel rocked back and forth as she delivered her speech, words that jumped like sparks from her mouth. At the same time that they intimidated him, they turned him on, making him at once afraid and desirous of the strange and familiar woman who was stretched out in front of him.
“Manuel,” she urged. “Don’t have such a stiff neck. Just take me in your arms, and find out what is here. Don’t try to think about it. You can’t know if the meat is good until you taste it.”
His heart skipped a beat. She was ravishingly beautiful, her dark lustrous skin picking up the highlights from the fire, her eyes liquid with yearning, her body arched toward him, her mouth slightly open and moist.
She traced her fingers across the top of his thigh and then sat up abruptly, bringing her face to his ear, biting the outer ridge and running her tongue into the sensitive center, breathing lightly. “Do you think I’ve forgotten how your mouth feels on my nipples, how your fingers feel in my cunt, how your cock tastes on my tongue? Do you think I could forget how I cried each time you entered me? Do you know how deeply I loved you? And now, after a lot of men and a lot of experience, I am not the naive girl I was. I am a woman who has tasted a few things, and I tell you, nothing is as sweet as feeling you come inside me, and squeezing my thighs together, and sucking the juice from your cock. It’s only to you that I have ever opened in that way, because it’s only with you that I want to make a baby.”
She kissed his cheeks and lips and she smiled. “I’m still the old-fashioned woman under this chic dress,” she said. “I still want to have a man make me his. I still want to feel his seed grow inside me.” She ran her hand down his broad chest, over his belly, and onto his crotch, where his cock stirred lazily under her touch.
“My cunt is hungry for you, Manuel. Feed my cunt. Give it what it wants.”
He wanted her with growing lust mixed with astonishment. “Can it be that she still feels this way for me after all this time?” he thought.
As though reading his thought, she whispered, “Do you imagine your feeling for me is dead?”
Manuel let go of his doubts, his hesitation, and with a single gesture took Alma in his arms and pressed his lips to hers. At once, they merged into a single sensation, losing all sense of separateness as two beings. Manuel remembered how often they had verged on this, and how desperately he had wanted this, not to remain outside the woman, fucking her, but for both of them to enter the space of fucking together, so there was no one fucking and no one being fucked, but rather a fucking which happened of its own accord, in which they were both taken up and transported to a state of bliss.
Her mouth opened and sucked his tongue inside. The breath was pulled from his chest, and she breathed the air from his lungs, filling herself, and then emptying herself back into him, so that the same air went from body to body, without being dispersed. Her tongue pushed his back, hot and wet, forcing itself into his mouth, sending vibrations of pleasure down into his belly. He crushed her to him, his powerful arms enveloping her entirely, and she stretched out her legs so as to lie more easily against him. The two of them sank slowly to the floor, until they lay side by side, thighs touching thighs, his cock bulging out and into the hollow between her legs, her lush breasts flattened against his firm chest, their mouths hungrily eating at one another, trying to overcome a year’s fast with a single meal.
Alma pulled back, reeling from his kiss. Manuel’s face was a hollow mask of lust. His eyes were turgid with smoldering sex. Something deeper than he had planned on had been triggered in him, and his response had taken him far past the mildly erotic experience he had been expecting.
“My God, you can still do it to me like that,” she gasped. “I was so afraid that after all this, maybe I wouldn’t find you enough for me. That maybe I had become too sophisticated for you. But not down deep where it counts; down there, I’m still your woman.”
He looked at the woman in front of him. She had become undone, her hair falling out of its knot and starting to pile down her shoulders, her black robe slipping down her arms.
“I want to see you,” he said, “I want to see your cunt. I want to see that giant bush of black hair.”
She took his hand and guided it slowly under the robe, letting his fingers slide up her smooth thighs, and toward the moist center of her body. He could feel the warmth increasing as he approached her pussy, and then the first tickling of the pubic hair, the lustrous bush that went from halfway up her belly, down over her cunt, and into the cleft of her ass.
“I didn’t realize how much I’d missed you until now,” he said.
“This is what you missed,” she said, and led his fingers into the wet crack itself, past the crinkled outer lips, past the slippery inner lips, through the serrated hole at the core, and then into the hot wide cavern inside.
“This is what you missed,” she repeated, “this hot cunt that’s been waiting for you, that’s been aching to feel you inside.” She licked his throat as his hand went inside her. “Feel me now, Manuel; put your strong hands inside my creamy pussy. Make me moan the way you used to.”
Manuel needed little more urging, and he crooked his fingers into her cunt, reacquainting himself with its ridges and contours, and then pulled out to caress the tiny button at the top of the opening, the small clitoris that contained more capacity for sensation than any other organ of the body. As he touched her there, she groaned and her knees rose up toward her chest. He slid his hand down, the middle finger curving over the crack between her buttocks, and the rest of his hand rubbing the inward curve of the two cheeks on either side. He moved up and down, up and down, until she was crowing with pleasure. He stopped from time to time to tickle the small puckered hole that lay at the heart of his explorations, and then slipped up to finger her cunt again, returning at last to her clitoris, taking it between his fingers and rolling it around until she kicked with excitement. She was open and wet for him, letting him play with her however he wanted.
“Is it different with me than with other men?” he asked.
“You fool,” she replied. “Is it different with me than with other women? Is it like this with your Joan?”
He thought about it a moment. Yes, it was different with Alma. The false excitation was not there. There was no pretense, no sense of outrage or rape or seduction. It was not dirty. It was simply the full energy of a man and a woman going out to mingle and rejoice in the sheer joy of existence. He thought of Joan, and his brow furrowed. No, it could never be with Alma like it had been in the office. For what he had experienced with Joan was t
he pleasure of eating the forbidden fruit. It was in the realm of the mind, not of the body. It was something that was at the same time more and less than sex. But this, with Alma, was sex itself. It was healthy and right. And he could give himself without reserve, without tension, without considering anything with his brain.
He brought his hand up and began to slide her robe off the rest of her body. She wriggled and helped him with the task, and in a moment she was naked. He bit his lip between his teeth, for he had not been ready for the sheer luxury of her beauty. She saw him looking at her in that way, and her heart leapt with joy that he was so taken with her. It occurred to Manuel that nothing in the world, not a sunset, not a storm at sea, not a universe filled with galaxies, could begin to compare with the naked body of a beautiful woman for absolute splendor. It was the summation of all creation.
“I am all for you,” she said. “Please, take me, however you want.”
He bent forward and covered one breast with his lips. The flesh was firm and smooth on his tongue, and the pear-shaped tit slid easily between his teeth and filled his mouth. He licked the nipple, forcing his face into her chest. She put her hands on the back of his head and drew him to her even more closely. He licked the underside of her breast again and again, ending always at the very tip of her nipple, while with his left hand he squeezed and caressed her other breast, and with his right hand he continued to stroke her between her legs, getting her wetter and hotter with each moment. Her head rolled from side to side, her buttocks squeezed and relaxed, and her legs kicked lazily from side to side as he covered her with kisses.
“You too,” she said, “take your clothes off too.”
He started to undress, but she pushed him back. “Stand up,” she said. “I want to see you naked standing over me. I want to lie at your feet.”