by Marco Vassi
Jack smoked steadily. It was as he had always remembered it, those moments after sex. His soul was seared by the intense heat of what he had seen and felt, and yet he wasn’t sure whether fucking were nothing more than leaning over an abyss, to stare at the fearsome void which is sometimes called hell. If he had been removed and another man put there, would it have made any difference to Margaret? He doubted it, and was on the verge of resenting her when he realized that if she had been taken away and another woman slipped under him, it would not have mattered much to him either. His criteria were physical. Any woman’s ass would do if that ass attained a certain aesthetic minimum.
He decided that he was thinking too much and he put one hand over her shoulders and pulled her toward him.
“I’ve come to a conclusion,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked him.
“That liking the person you fuck is only important before and after the fucking. While it’s going on it can be anyone, so long as it’s the right anyone, if you know what I mean.”
She smiled and kissed his chest. “I know exactly what you mean, baby,” she told him. And then a spasm of excitement seized her and she sat straight up and turned to face him. “I mean, that’s the kind of thing I want to see written about. Sex is practically indescribable except in its physical manifestations, and those are limited. But all the stuff that surrounds sex, and interpenetrates it, the philosophy of sex…” she paused, “you know? Not theory, but the way of life of people who live in the sexual vibrations most of the time. What they think about it, and how they feel it, and how they discuss it. That’s what pornography should be. And if it were that, there wouldn’t be anything so interesting to read.”
“Well, you’ll have your chance soon,” he told her.
She put her hand on his shoulders and fixed his gaze with her own. “Will you help me?” she asked.
“You publish it, I’ll sell it,” he said. “I’m happy when you get all worked up over your ideas, but that’s not where I find my pleasure. As far as the office is concerned, it’s a job which allows me to travel, and to live well, and to fuck beautiful women, and to go to orgies. I’m not interested in what’s between the covers.”
“You’re deeper than that, Jack,” she said. “You can put on an act for people, but I know you have a soul.”
“That’s my hobby,” he added. “The cultivation of my soul.” He saw that his cigarette had burned out in the ashtray and he lit another one. He exhaled a cloud of smoke through his nostrils and went on, “You wouldn’t think it, but basically I’m a contemplative person.”
“Did you ever think of writing a book?” she asked.
“Sure,” he told her. “Don’t we all?”
“Why don’t you do it?” she prompted. “A book about contemplation and fucking.” She took his cock in one hand and held it until it began to stir. “Does that interest you?”
“And you’ll publish it?”
“And you’ll sell it.”
He laughed at the conjunction of intersecting circles.
“Is Al really going to give you your head in all this?” he asked.
“I’ll get head if I give him head.”
He raised his eyebrows. “So it’s like that?”
“How else could it be?”
“Poor Maggie,” he said. “I shudder to think of all the dirty things he makes you do.”
She squeezed his cock as it grew harder in her fingers.
She chuckled. “Dirty?” she said. “What’s dirty? I’m surprised at you, Jack. You know there’s no such thing as dirty.”
“But Al thinks there is, and when you do things he thinks are dirty, then you are being his dirty little girl. And you know that’s where he gets his kicks from, and that’s what you enjoy. You love it, being down there while he’s projecting the vilest possible images on you. It sort of tickles a jaded girl’s fancy, doesn’t it?”
“You really ought to write a book,” she told him, now stroking the erect cock up and down its entire length. “You know all the little secrets.”
“Shit, Maggie, there aren’t any secrets. There are just people who won’t open their eyes and admit what’s really going on inside them, that’s all.”
“And pornography ought to open their eyes,” she told him.
“I’ll think about it,” he told her. “Writing a book, that is.” His eyes went down to where her hands were fluttering over his thighs, caressing his balls, tugging his cock. He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him, his mouth seeking hers. She covered his lips with hers and she moaned as the warmth of his kiss flooded her senses. She felt relaxed, content. She was at ease with a man she liked and respected. She had come out the other side of her temporary insanity over Joan, and was going to get to work on her ideas, and Jack would help her.
He pulled her forward and she came up on her knees and straddled his thighs. She leaned into him, her breasts covering his face, and he kissed her between the firm, gently sagging orbs, his hands moving to rub her nipples. She whimpered with the pleasure of surrender to her mounting excitement and brought her hands under her buttocks. She spread her cunt lips with her fingers, and slowly lowered herself onto his waiting cock. He entered her evenly, and she felt the entire slide of his cock as it was coated and engulfed by her wet cunt.
“Oh Jack, that feels so good,” she whispered.
He cupped her buttocks with his hands and began to rock her gently. Her pelvis swung back and forth, causing her cunt to mouth his cock from a score of rapidly alternating angles. He shook his head as the sudden rush of pleasure flushed through him and started his ears ringing.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” she agreed, and rolled her beautiful body around and around, dancing on his cock.
He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the experience of Margaret’s delectable cunt sucking him wildly, her breasts sliding against his chest, her mouth hungrily seeking his, her hands flying up and down his back and into his hair. He was flooded with feelings that could not be contained, and he was moved to speak. But all the words that presented themselves to him seemed inadequate to describe the wonder of the moment. He gritted his teeth in frustration.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Margaret asked, falling, as she had done two years earlier, into endearments, the power of which she barely recognized.
“It’s too much,” he said as his hands continued to guide her movement, pumping her into him. “I want to tell it to you, and let it out of me, but it all sounds foolish before I say it.”
“Oh my precious lover,” she crooned, slipping utterly into a mood of verbal abandonment, and pushed him back until he lay on the bed and she stretched out full on top of him. “Don’t do anything now, don’t say anything now. Just feel me. Let me give it to you. Let me fuck it to you.”
The sounds burst from his lips as she began to ooze all over him, her cunt swarming completely over his cock, her ass rising and falling, clenching and opening. He babbled and moaned and yelled and let himself go mad for a while, not caring for anything except that he was drowning in the woman who was lavishing herself upon him.
“I’m going to fuck you all night long,” she whispered in his ear.
He bucked up into her, his cock swimming in her brimming cunt.
“And then you’ll write it for me,” she said, her fingers cupped under his buttocks, pulling him into her, her ass a blur of churning white flesh in the dark room. “Then you can tell it, and reveal how beautiful it is, oh how terribly beautiful it is.” Her words were lost in the rising wave of deep noises that surged from her chest. She was fucking him frantically now, veering toward frenzy.
As often happens to a man when the woman he is with flies off into a space of solipsistic passion and becomes a boiling sea of lascivious expression, Jack was disconnected from his body. It continued to respond as it had been doing, and his cock grew stone hard as Margaret split herself upon it. But his mind was detached, a
s though it were somehow something outside the animal that lay there in that delirious embrace. He could look down on both of them from the ceiling, and saw Margaret writhing on top of him, her back curving, her legs kicking.
He observed calmly as the two people on the bed built toward climax. For her it was a kind of erotic vomiting, an emission of expressions that she had not let herself have for a long time. And for him it was an almost painful culmination, without any ejaculation.
“How odd this sex thing is,” he thought. “How frantic we become at times, and yet it is empty. An exercise in futility which serves as a metaphor for our whole life. For what is life but a vain gesture by three-dimensional shadows which think themselves real?”
Margaret collapsed against him. She was covered with cold sweat. She did not know what was going on inside him, but had been taken by the chilling notion that she was fucking a corpse, and that she herself had already died, and the two of them were fucking in a crypt. To the degree that she had been overflowing with sensation and feeling, she was now devoid of any sense of contact with any object, including her body.
“Jack,” she said in a small, still voice. “It’s all cold and black. I’m holding you and I’m all alone. Your cock is inside me but I don’t exist. There’s a wind blowing through everything. Where am I, Jack, where am I?”
He came back from his meditation and felt the frightened woman in his arms. He blinked and opened his eyes wide and watched the light patterns on the ceiling. He had a palpable sense of the scope of the galaxy, and was, for a few moments, experientially one with the vastness and silence of the universe.
Then he stroked her head gently.
“Then he stroked her head gently,” he said.
He put his other hand, on the small of her back.
“He put his other hand on the small of her back,” he said.
“You’re safe in my arms, my love,” he said.
“‘You’re safe in my arms, my love, he said,’” he said.
Margaret let out a long vibrant sigh.
“The book,” she said. “We are the book.”
And Jack, who was feeling the fact that he had not yet come, rolled slowly over, holding Margaret to him, so that she finally lay under him. And when he began to probe her cunt tentatively with his cock, her legs spread apart, and her mind resolved the split that had kept her from beginning to understand who she was.
“It’s all a fiction,” she whispered as he slid the full length of his cock inside her.
“That’s a fact,” he replied, as she closed her eyes again and entered the esoteric temple of sex for the third, but not the final, time that night.
NINE
Al Leeds led a complex existence. At the age of fifty-nine he was worth, were he to liquidate all his assets, somewhere in the area of five million dollars, cash. The amount he controlled was at least twenty times that. He reminded himself at least once a day that at the age of twenty-three he had been a copy boy for the Herald Tribune, earning seventeen dollars a week for sixty hours work.
His rise in wealth he attributed to a single factor—luck. At one point he accidentally became privy to a deal that involved a certain shuffling of securities, and he was nicely rewarded for remaining silent. As a result, he had later been approached to serve as the front man for an operation that tested his ability to remain cool under intense police pressure. He had since moved horizontally, being placed in nominal control of bigger and bigger enterprises, some legitimate, some not, advancing as his ability to take orders and channel them was more thoroughly proved at each step. He had two indispensable qualities: he was entirely self-serving, which kept him from ever playing favorites; and he was free from any taint of greed, he merely accepted and enjoyed what fell his way and did not reach for more. When things were slow, he patted his belly, lapsed into a numb trance, and watched time pass.
His image of himself was at variance with the world’s image of him. To others, he was fat, ugly and mean; to himself he was a man robbed by destiny of physical attractiveness but compensated by that same destiny with immense wealth and power. He was able to buy the counterfeit of any human feeling by paying people to exhaust themselves at his bidding, while he chose from their outpouring of expressions those gestures and sensations that he desired. This was inevitably done in a sexual context.
From his religious training as a child, he carried away one thing, a deep appreciation of Ecclesiastes, whose wisdom he translated into a single sentence. “We all go to the same grave,” Al Leeds told himself, “so it doesn’t really matter what we do until we get there.” He had found nothing in his experience to contradict that insight. He held in contempt anyone infected with abstract morality, or anyone who followed a moral code because of fear of divine retribution. He had on one wall of his office two wooden plaques. The top one was inscribed with the words of Mammy Yokum: “Good is better than evil because it’s nicer.” The one under it had the words of Leo Durocher: “Nice guys finish last.” That pretty much summed it up for Al.
He now sat in a small room which adjoined the basement in Helene Benson’s Brooklyn brownstone. Helene sat next to him in a deep armchair. They were looking through the one-way mirror at a woman of about twenty-five who was lying in the middle of the floor fucking herself with a huge dildo. Al smoked a cigar and watched with lidded eyes. His breathing was slow and regular, his heartbeat normal. Helene was slightly distracted. She had had an intermittent pain in one of her back teeth for over a day, and like all people who have reduced their lives to monitoring the state of their physical bodies, everything that happened outside of her was seen as a mere backdrop to the internal phenomena.
Al visited the place from time to time. He owned the building, and Helene was on his payroll. The orgies she held and the swingers’ parties she organized were sponsored by an organization called Siege, part of a nationwide network joined by a magazine, membership cards, and word-of-mouth recognition. It was one of the offshoots of the conglomerate of companies of which Al’s distribution wing formed one portion. The people who belonged were all innocent of anything more far-reaching than their immediate gratification; they had no notion that even orgies were part of big business.
Al never took part in any of the parties himself but often sat in the small hidden room and watched. Occasionally, if he saw someone who tickled his appetite, he would have Helene approach the woman and discreetly proposition her. If the quarry showed some interest, she met Al. And usually he was able to estimate within fifty dollars exactly how much he had to offer to get the woman to do what he wanted.
“I’m very rich and I will pay you to do things which will probably disgust you,” was a line he used frequently. He enjoyed it best when there was a tension between revulsion and greed.
The girl in the next room was one such. She was now lying on her back, the dildo two-thirds inside her. It was a perfect replica of a cock in shape and detail, but it was eighteen inches long and four inches wide. She had jammed it in as far as it would go and with both hands was twisting it around violently, her legs split in a wide V. From the contortions of her torso and the expressions on her face and the deep groans that spilled from her lips, one would be certain she was experiencing profound sexual revelations.
But Al was bored. “She’s too pat,” he said.
Helene had offered the woman two hundred and fifty dollars to fuck herself for a half hour with a dildo, knowing that a man would be watching from another room, and deciding whether he wanted to use her personally. “If he takes you,” Helene had confided, “it means another five hundred on top of what you get for the first part. But you have to be really good and convince him that you want him to use you.” It was a cross between what’s told an actress who is trying out for a part, and the bait that is given to housewives on daytime quiz shows, in which they get a chance to win extraordinary prizes if they answer one question correctly.
“I think she’s sincere,” Helene told him. “She’s married, and her husba
nd brought her to our last party. She’s just starting to break loose. And if he knew she was doing this he’d have a stroke. I think she understands what it is to be dirt, and she likes the smell of money. I think you can use her,”—all this delivered in the tones of an agent selling a particular model to an ad agency.
Al peered through the glass more intently. The woman was now on her knees facing away from him. He could look straight into the crack of her ass. She had grabbed the dildo from between her thighs and was ramming it into her cunt. Her cunt lips yawned obscenely around the thick bulk of the rubber shaft. She looked over her shoulder at herself in the mirror, her face distorted with dry lust, brought to a head by the knowledge that someone was looking at her, that she was being paid to exhibit herself in this way. Like so many others who act out the manifestations of the sexual Zeitgeist without any understanding of what forces compel them to act as they do, she had no way to explain her behavior except to tell herself that she was depraved. Technically speaking, of course, this was not so. She did not have the depth of intelligence to grasp what true depravity involved. But that she believed it was enough for Al, for it was a woman’s sense of her own lowness that he most appreciated. He was incapable of enjoying sex unless it involved the degradation of the person he was doing it with. He stared with unblinking eyes at the woman who did not know that he sat behind the mirror she was using to watch her exposed ass and violated cunt.
Al leaned back after a few moments, leaving the woman to continue without the benefit of his unacknowledged attention.
“Did that other one ever come back?” he asked.
Helene raised one eyebrow. “She works for you,” she said.
“For me?” he repeated, and for the first time that day a twinge of sensation shot through his cock.
“Well, for Lou,” Helene told him. “That’s the same as working for you, isn’t it?” She lit a cigarette and when she sucked in the smoke, she pulled it over the area of her aching tooth. “Jack invited her. You know, Lou’s salesman. And she’s one of the copy editors in the office.”