Silence. He had to weigh those words, “I missed you.” He had to let them echo for a few seconds above the sound of the whirring fan. And then he resumed his rightful place as the man who would run my life. From an amused distance. Nevertheless, he was willing to run it, which is more than I could say for any other man thus far.
“What are you doing for bread?”
“Nothing.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At my mother’s house right now.”
“We gotta figure out what you’re going to do. You can’t live off your mother forever. Any ideas?” he asked.
“You know me, I always figured the world owed me a living,” I said.
“Maybe it does, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t pay up. Have to think of something...gotta have a gimmick, that’s what you need, a gimmick,” he said. He was sitting naked with his legs crossed, tapping his knee, smoking a Camel. He was getting that mischievous look, playing with me now.
“I know. You could start a circle jerk, advertise in Screw. You would be the supervisor. ‘Supervised circle jerks...’ No? OK, maybe not. Then let’s see...how about ‘Private Viewing of Blue Movies for an Elite Few’? You’d be amazed who’d pay to see sixteen-millimeter flicks, all those poor schmucks too uptight to go to Forty-Second Street. You could rake it in! What’s wrong with that idea?”
“I don’t even have an apartment, let alone enough chairs to accommodate a movie audience,” I said, pretending to take his silly suggestions seriously. I lit up a Newport. I was pouting. I hated his cheery attitude. And I already knew where this was going.
“You know I got a good friend, Susannah, you remember Susannah?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
Of course I did. The pretty, femme Susannah, with her honest-to-God dark corkscrew curls and her actual flouncy skirts, was the first woman I ever had. She was his southern belle contingent. Came up here just to see him maybe two or three times a year. It was preposterous. We all had to defer to her when she came, as if she were special, which was hardly the case, it was only that she was infrequent. Nevertheless, everybody had to make a big fuss over her. The last time I saw her, the three of us went back to Michael’s house, and Susannah got to be the center of everything as usual, as if Michael and I were extending ourselves as host and hostess. I had not planned it, but I found myself going down on Susannah, after it was instigated by Michael, who lay underneath her. She was acting wild in a demure sort of way, sitting up with her back to him and rotating awkwardly on top like a helpless mewling little thing. While this was happening, Michael kept smiling at me around the back of her head as if we were in cahoots. Then he pulled out and pushed her toward me.
(In spite of the company I had been keeping, I had never seen a vagina that close up before, let alone tasted one. Not what I expected, it was, somehow, much neater. I had assumed it would be a flaccid, fleshy, amorphous hole, but Susannah’s pulsed with muscle hidden inside. When I tentatively circled her clitoris with my tongue, it stood up, and I felt her whole vagina spasm ever so slightly. The clitoris embarrassed me; it seemed like such a vestigial little thing. Poor women, with our tiny imitations. Otherwise, from what I could see, with its swollen labia and its thick inner wall, the vagina was just like an inverted penis. ‘But what a powerful sex organ,’ I remember thinking, a little surprised and almost frightened by the gravitational pull of it.)
“Well, Susannah knows this madam,” Michael went on. “I told you when she’s in New York, she always turns a few tricks and makes enough to pay all her expenses. I could find out the name of the madam, if you’d be interested. Better yet, why not get in touch with Corinne? She’d fix you up. Corinne really likes you; yep, she’d do it in a New York minute.
“You and everybody else, me included, is already giving it away. But you’re lucky. You can get paid for it. Who’s going to object? Nobody around here. Do you care what the straight world thinks? Of course not. In fact, whenever it disapproves, I take it as a sign at least I’m doing something right. I don’t see why you shouldn’t get paid for it.”
This was one of Michael’s longer speeches. I understood he was encouraging me to be defiant. I got it. His motives were very nearly pure. But if I’d been capable then of being honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was hurt. I wished that he would claim me, possess me, swear he’d never love another. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that Michael did want to possess me in his way by sharing my experience, because I already knew what he had in mind. I knew that Michael’s own peculiar interpretation of pimping would never include taking money—he had such an aversion to money—but he’d insist on hearing all the details. ‘Vicarious’ was his favorite word.
“Do you think I could do it? I mean, I don’t know whether I’d be any good at it,” I said.
“You good at it? You got to be kidding. Anyway, from what Susannah and Corinne tell me, there’s nothing to it. These johns are all straight businessmen, married guys, looking for a piece of strange. They’re so excited by the idea, they come after a few strokes. Nothing to it,” he said.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it,” I said, still pouting.
We were sitting naked together, I on one bed, he on the other, maybe two feet apart, not speaking. The only lights were the pin light and the glowing tips of our cigarettes. The radio was playing another tune, a preview from Europe the DJ said, something about a horse in a desert. Dumb lyrics I suddenly realized in an unwelcome moment of lucidity. Dumb.
Michael reached for his suede book bag full of vibrators. He pulled out a huge machine, which was flat across the top.
“Look at this, it’s new on the market. Isn’t it a beauty?” he said, a small boy displaying his latest gadget.
“What does it do?”
“The vibrations are so strong, they make the whole inside of your pussy contract. You come in about ten seconds,” he said.
But then he put it away.
“That’s for later,” he said, a papa now, teaching his kid how to postpone gratification.
Also, the truth is he had only brandished the thing to get us on the subject of sex in the here and now. Neither one of us was in the mood for a vibrator. But Michael’s problem was that he was shy. He was really soft-spoken and shy, and he could never get over the fact that women were so willing to sleep with him. Even after years of various girlfriends threatening to commit suicide on his account, he was still stupefied by the pitch of their desire. Not many men are ready to unleash a woman, watch her go, the way Michael was. So it’s understandable he would feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice sometimes.
He grabbed my nipple, which was standing straight up thanks to the tickling breeze from the fan, between his thumb and middle finger. I felt my clitoris jump like a little fish. He took hold of my other nipple. Then I think he actually kissed me. It was more like one mouth bruising another, the way children do it, but it was a kiss. He pulled me close, settling down right on top, skin to skin, heart to heart. The kissing changed. We opened to each other. It all came back to me, how it used to be when we first met, before the drugs took over completely. I remembered. We were back. No wonder I loved him. After a few generic thrusts, he recovered this stroke he had. The way his whole body moved on top of me—the sweetest rub, then the lushest friction, then throbbing velvet torture. God please let me come. I felt completely subordinated, pinned helpless and squirming under his big body. I held on tight. I could hear myself squeaking, grunting, moaning. I hated those noises, but I couldn’t stop. He was watching me. I opened my eyes and there he was. My legs spread wide. After a while, he reached down with one hand and pushed them back closer together. Acute pleasure was forcing me to give myself