by Marco Vassi
Margaret had decided to approach him and had set up an appointment. On the phone he had commented, “Decided to go over Lou’s head, eh?” and she had wondered at her own audacity.
The scene at his office was a different matter. After having her admitted, he studied her for a full minute, with a frank sexual appraisal that almost had her squirming, slowly smoking his cigar, flicking the ashes into a huge onyx ashtray which, except for a phone, was the only thing on his desk, a single slab of teak supported by one curved steel pillar in the center.
“Speak,” he said. “And skip any preliminaries. If you have business, come to the point.”
She had taken a deep breath, compressed her lips, crossed her legs, and then blurted out, “I want Lou’s job. I want control of Centaur.”
Al made a bland face. “I figured as much,” he said.
“It’s been a dead loss for months now,” she went on. “And Lou doesn’t have the foggiest notion of how to change the situation.”
“And you do?” Al replied, his voice edged with sarcasm.
“I think I can start a new trend in pornography. I think I can give the whole field a new face.”
“But can you make a profit?” he asked, openly twitting her, enjoying the role.
“If I succeed, I can make a fortune,” she said.
“And if you fail?” he said.
“Then you’re no worse off than you are now, are you?”
He gazed at her for a while through half-closed eyes. “And you don’t feel bad coming here behind Lou’s back, doing him in?”
Margaret shook her head. “I worried about it a long time, and then I realized that Lou has had his day. It’s sad to state it so baldly, but it’s a fact. He’s a tired man, he’s already had a couple of heart attacks. And he doesn’t understand that the country’s attitudes toward sex are changing radically. So what’s the point of his hanging onto a business that has outgrown him? What’s he got to look forward to there, dying behind his desk? I think I’m doing him a favor by pushing him out. He’s been talking about retiring to Puerto Rico for a long time now.”
“You have it all figured out, haven’t you?” he asked.
She lowered her eyes and her glance fell on his feet; he was wearing ankle-length desert boots. She reached down to her bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Do you want to look at my ideas?” she asked.
“I’d rather see your cunt,” he told her.
The words exploded like a fragmentation bomb in the room. The reverberations bounced off their minds for a long moment. And then Al leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk.
“I don’t want to see all that stuff you’ve written down. You wouldn’t come here with an offer like this if you didn’t have the whole thing figured out. You’re a smart woman, and you’ve been learning from Lou, so I can trust that you know what you’re doing. But I try not to bother myself with details. I go by my intuition. I give all the business facts to the accountants, and they figure out financial considerations.” He squinted into her gaze as though trying to see past her eyes and into her brain. “Sure, Lou is on the way out. We’ve all known that for a while, including Lou. But we go back a long time, him and me. So I’m not about to give him the bum’s rush. But I might suggest that he step down to make room for his charming and intelligent second-in-command.”
Margaret’s heart fluttered for several beats. She had come in to fight for the job, but had geared herself emotionally to being turned down.
“You mean you will back me?” she asked.
He leaned back in his chair again and looked at her steadily. The expression on his face was not hard to read, and his startling exclamation of a moment earlier was still ringing in her ears.
“What do you want me to do?” she said, her voice faltering.
“Why don’t you start by taking off your clothes,” he told her.
Margaret turned away from Lou now and looked back over the city again. A slight flush came to her cheeks as she remembered the rest of that afternoon, and that night. The inflection in Lou’s voice told her that Al had given him his notice, in one way or another, but she had no way of knowing whether Al had told him what Margaret had done to help bring that about.
She had stood naked in front of Al, her hair flowing down over her shoulders. He was almost sixty, heavy enough almost to be considered fat, and like many people who subconsciously fear their bodies, he was always immaculately groomed, even to having clear nail polish on all his fingernails. He looked at her with all the cupidity of an avaricious tourist in the marketplace of an impoverished village.
“Is this your standard business practice?” she asked.
“I’ve got what you want,” he told her. “Why shouldn’t I ask a price?” And then, standing up, he said, “On your hands and knees,” and she had gone down on the floor in front of him.
He strolled over to where she knelt in her position of humiliation and subservience. He lifted one foot and edged the tip of his boot into her cunt. He pulled it back and then shoved it in again, bruising the cunt lips.
“Pull your pussy open,” he ordered, “I want you to feel my shoe in your cunt.”
It was, from a sociological point of view, a bizarre scene. A fully-dressed, portly businessman standing over an attractive young woman, naked and kneeling, with his foot between her legs, the entire thing taking place in a plush office on the thirty-fifth floor of one of New York’s most elegant buildings.
“But existentially, it’s no more or less peculiar than anything else,” Margaret said to herself, rationalizing the situation neatly.
She reached behind her and pulled her cunt lips apart, revealing the still dry cavern to his unblinking eyes. He put the flat of his shoe on her ass and shoved forward, sending her sprawling on the rug. Her legs flew apart, and he stepped between them, standing near the crack between her buttocks. Then, slowly and deliberately, he began kicking her in the cunt, not hard enough to damage her, but hard enough to hurt and degrade. To her surprise, she felt her cunt begin to moisten, and in an instant she had begun to lift her ass slightly to allow the tip of his boot to hit her cunt more squarely.
“Don’t like it too much, bitch,” he said, “or you’ll get carried away.”
Having no pretensions about compassion or decency, Al used his wealth and power to buy people to do his bidding, and through that had learned some rock-bottom truths about the reflex behavior of human beings, for he was often able to study them as dispassionately as a biologist viewing microbes through a microscope. And one of the things he had learned was that when, through one means or another, a woman’s deep sexual energy is contacted, she will go wild with expression and cease to manifest the psychological states of disgust and loathing which he thrived on. Al was a connoisseur of the vile, and for his pleasure to be complete he required complete control of the situation.
He turned his ankle so that the toe of his boot slid in sideways, penetrating into the damp hair and beyond into the outer folds of her cunt. He applied a steady pressure until his shoe was embedded several inches into her hole, and she cooperated by lifting her ass higher off the floor and spreading her legs wider, giving him not only the physical satisfaction but a strong, voyeuristic rush.
“Never seen it to fail,” he said. “You’re all sluts. The more elegant you are outside, the dirtier you are underneath.”
“We’re born between piss and shit, Al,” she told him, quoting St. Augustine.
Her reply, of course, angered him, and next to hatred, Al loved anger. He pulled his boot back, leaving her quivering in midair. He walked around in front of her, stopping by her head. He slid his boot under her face.
“Lick it,” he said.
“My God, he certainly is one for stereotypes,” Margaret said to herself, attempting to rescue the situation with a flourish of mental superiority. But the brute reality of the moment intervened heavily. She could not escape from the fact that she was lying naked on her belly in front of a despicable m
an, licking her cunt juices off his boot.
He stepped back. “Roll over,” he said. She rolled onto her back.
“Get your hand in your cunt,” he said, “I want to see you come. And please, don’t fake it. I won’t accept anything that isn’t authentic.”
She blacked out his presence from her mind and began to masturbate, doing it as she did when she was alone, beginning slowly around the inner thighs, stroking the space around her cunt, then rubbing the cunt lips themselves, touching her clitoris from time to time, and then more frequently, slipping her finger into her cunt, wetting it, rubbing her clitoris again, sliding her palm up and down over her whole cunt.
“Put your other hand under your ass,” he told her. “Put a finger in your asshole.”
She did as she was told, and now was starting to pump her pelvis, back and forth, her ass contracting and releasing, her right hand working at her cunt, her left hand fingering her anus. She rolled from side to side and a sharp moan escaped her lips. She had succeeded in forgetting Al’s presence, but he reminded her by putting his boot on her face. She knew what he wanted without his asking, and she began to lick the bottom of his boot, lapping it with her tongue, wetting it with long, thick strokes. He pushed down harder, squashing her face under his foot.
And as he stepped on her and spat on her belly and her breasts, she put all her attention on her cunt, urging the sensations on, working them up, until the first tremors began and her thighs began to shake and tremble, and her legs clamped tight, and her hand slid up and down more furiously over her clitoris, and with a sob and a shudder she flexed into a brief tantalizing orgasm which, under less austere circumstances, would have been only the prelude to a series of climaxes that would have had her screaming with release.
Al knew that, too, and as his boot bruised her lips he said, “That’s just the beginning. I know you can come better than that.”
He stepped back from her and, to her dismay, he began to undress, revealing the corpulence he had learned to revel in. “And while you’re having a good time fucking yourself with your finger,” he went on, “I’m going to have you lick every square inch of my body.”
Then, grotesquely, he smiled. “But now, you don’t have to do this, you know. You can leave at any time. This is only if you want the key to Lou’s private bathroom and his big office.”
She looked back up at him coolly. “I’ll do what you want,” she said, “and even get a perverse pleasure out of it, and know that that’s your kick, watching me get off on your sick game. But I’ll tell you one thing. If you double-cross me, if you put me through this and then back out of the deal, I’ll get you. I don’t know how, but I’ll get you. And when I do I’ll cut your balls off with a rusty razor blade and make you eat them. You understand me, you rotten son of a bitch?”
Al chuckled. “You’re really very beautiful when you get angry,” he said. And then, squatting over her, added, “Now why don’t you get your cunt moving again and close your eyes. And keep your mouth open. I have something for you.”
Now Margaret turned back away from Lou to look out over the balcony again. She waited a long while before asking, “Oh? And what did Al say?”
Lou let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a grunt. “You certainly know how to act naive,” he said. “You know perfectly well what he told me.”
“You’d better spell it out for me, Lou. A lot happened when I saw Al.”
Lou smiled. “Oh yes, he told me all about that part of it too. But by the time he started to tell me about what happened when he brought you to that orgy club, I turned down the volume on the set.” He shook his head. “You must want Centaur pretty bad.”
“It’s not Centaur I want,” she told him. “I just want a chance to work out my idea. I’ve been telling you that for a year and a half now. But you’ve been so fucking bullheaded you wouldn’t listen to me. And I couldn’t go on with the editorial stranglehold you have on the place. So I had to go over your head. I had to push you out of the way. And you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I knew what you were up to,” he told her. “I have my people who tell me things. I even knew the day you were going to see him, four days before you went.”
“And you didn’t try to stop me?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I wanted to get pushed aside.”
She felt the premonition of her victory before Lou put it into words. “And what else did Al say this morning?” she asked, “Aside from telling you how I served as a sponge for all the degenerates in his private club?”
Lou blew out a cloud of smoke, watching it dissipate in the clear night air. “Al and I have known each other a long time,” he said. “We don’t have to use too many words.” He paused, turned to her, and with a disquietingly cheerful smile he added, “The place is yours in a month.”
The words, spoken so simply, crowning as they did such a long period of preparation, made her eyes sting with tears of surprise. She found she had trouble catching her breath, and she simply stood there, not speaking. Finally, she found her composure, and then her voice.
“I’m really sorry I had to get it this way,” she said.
“Balls,” he told her. “It’s the same way I got it. It’s the same way you get anything in this world. You always have to take it away from somebody else.”
The thoughts rushed through her mind with the force of a cataract. She started at once to formulate her plans, to look over her materials, her staff, to mentally list the writers she wanted to contact, the people she wanted to fire and hire. And in the middle of it, she thought of Joan.
“And Joan,” she said to herself. “Joan will be with me from the first.”
Lou drank another swig from his glass, took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. He had intuitively known from the first day he hired Margaret that she would take over from him, and he had watched her grow in her work, become clearer, surer, until she was chomping at the bit to run the whole show herself. His preparations for leaving had long since been made, and he was ready to enter a long, rich retirement.
“What will you do now?” she asked. “I mean, you won’t have anything more to do with Centaur, will you?”
“Al offered me a deal with his men’s magazines, but I have plans for a house right on the beach in Puerto Rico that interests me a hell of a lot more. I intend to devote myself to my hobbies. And to have a place for you to escape to when it’s your turn to put your head on the block.”
“Do you feel betrayed?” she asked.
“No,” he told her. “But a bit disappointed. I was hoping you could win Al over without becoming his whore.”
She tossed her chin in the air in a gesture of humorous contention. “Lou, with your hiring practices, how can you say such a thing with a straight face?”
But his response was brittle and caught her up short, sending a momentary fright down her spine. “You’re not getting any good deal with him,” he said harshly. “If you think working under me was a pain in the ass, wait until you have to deal with Al directly. Oh, in the beginning he’ll make you think he’s giving you what you want, that he really doesn’t care what you do so long as your books show more black than red. But after a bit, some of his people will be dropping by, and they will make suggestions, and explain how such and such can’t be done because of market changes. And you’ll compromise a little here, and a little there, because he holds the purse strings and you have no choice and it doesn’t seem too much at first. And one day you will wake up and find out that you have become me. That after all the twisting and turning, you are just another puppet in a long line of mannequins who dance to someone else’s tune. Just the way Al does to the people above him.”
Margaret blinked, the sudden bleakness of his vision taking away the rush of euphoria. Lou was deadly serious, his voice bitter. She had never seen him so strong in his expression.
“Maybe during the next month, as I’m showing you the ropes of what it means to be boss, I
’ll tell you some of what you won’t find in any official accounts. You’re a very smart woman, and ambitious, and you want to accomplish something, but you may be in for a few surprises. You may learn that what you sucked Al’s cock to get is an empty promise.”
She sucked her breath in. “But why would he do that?” she asked. “He’s a businessman. If he puts me in charge, he’d be a fool to interfere with what I want to do. Are you telling me he lied?”
“No,” said Lou. “The funny thing is that Al believes what he says when he says it. He himself doesn’t understand, or doesn’t like to admit to himself, that he’s nothing but an instrument of the machine too, and he doesn’t have the power to make promises like that. He’s got lawyers who tell him when to squat, and accountants who tell him when to shit, and dark men with silk suits and sunglasses who pay visits from time to time and when they show up he acts like their shoe-shine boy.” He shook his head. “You’ll call me a male chauvinist, but I think women shouldn’t get mixed up in big business. You don’t have the vaguest idea what’s involved. You don’t understand that the basic support of any financial empire is the gun.”
Lou fell silent and they stood side by side, watching the dance of car lights many stories beneath them. Margaret shivered as the chill night air began to raise bumps on her skin.
“Can we go inside?” she said.
“Sure,” Lou replied, and he took her elbow and led her into the huge living room, closed the glass sliding door behind them and led her to a chair in front of the fireplace.
“How about another drink?” he asked. “Maybe a hot toddy?”
She smiled weakly, and while he went into the next room to fix the drink, she stared into the flames, sunk in her own thoughts. She could still remember how she gagged when Al plugged her throat with the crown of his cock and spilled his sperm into her gullet. Even his cum tasted vile. She shivered with the memory of revulsion, and the memory of the pleasure she took in that revulsion. She had been reckless, certain that if she came on strong with her mind and hot with her body, she would get what she wanted. And she did. But as with Pandora’s box, the imagined treasures inside might all be monstrous afflictions.