Against the Day (172 page)

“Cyprian, I have spoken and spoken to
you about this, and still you disobey me,” whispered Yashmeen, in satin domino,
speaking from behind a lace veil that covered her face from hairline to just
below her chin, “have you no shame? You know you shall have to suffer the
consequences now. Come along, both of you.” She took Cyprian firmly by the
elbow and steered him through the crowd, some of whom took the opportunity to
caress the misbehaving creature as he tried to pass. Cyprian could scarcely
breathe, not only from the constriction of his corset, and Yashmeen’s
intentions toward his body, but mostly from Reef’s presence, the dark energy
just behind him, almost touching. They had never been all together quite like
this till now, the proceedings had been limited to the two heterosexual legs of
the triangle. What could she possibly have in mind? Would he be obliged to
kneel and watch them coupling? Would she abuse him as she was used to, but
openly in front of Reef, and would he be able to bear that humiliation? He did
not quite dare to hope.

   
They
found an upper room, full of gilt furniture and dark heavy velvet

hangings. Pale
amoretti,
who over the generations had
seen it all, lounged

about the ceiling, nudging, smirking, grooming the feathers
of one another’s little wings, passing worldweary remarks at the unfolding
spectacle below, which would not in fact depart unduly from the erotic
vernacular of these islands.

Yashmeen reclined among the cushions
of a red velvet divan, allowing the already precarious hem of her costume to
slide upward and reveal her muchcommentedupon legs in black silk hosiery, which
she now pretended to inspect and adjust. Reef took a step forward, maybe two,
to improve his view. “No, stay where you are. Just there
. . .
good, don’t move. Cyprian,
tesoro,
you know where
you
must be.” Bowing his head, gracefully lifting his skirts as if to curtsy,
Cyprian sank to his knees in a great rustling of silk taffeta. As Yashmeen had
arranged them, he could not help noticing, his face was now level with and
quite close to Reef’s penis, which Reef, at Yashmeen’s suggestion, was removing
from his trousers.

It did not take nearly as long as
Cyprian would have wished. He had grown fond over the years of preliminaries
but now was able to get in no more thana few trailing tonguekisses, a quick
electrifying blink or two from his long eyelashes to the underside of the
heated organ before hearing Yashmeen’s command, “Quickly now. Into his mouth
Reef in one stroke, no more, and then you must be perfectly still and allow
this wicked little
fellatrice
to do all the work. And you, Cyprian, when
he spends you must not swallow any of it, you must keep it all in your mouth,
is that understood?” By now she could barely maintain the tone of command,
having aroused herself with kidgloved fingers busy at clitoral bud and parted
labia now sleekly framed among the foam of lace around her hips. “You are both
my
. . .
my . . .” She could not
quite pursue her thought, as Reef, having lost all control, came bursting in a
great pungent flood, which Cyprian did his best to accommodate as he had been
ordered to.

“Now come here, Cyprian, crawl to me,
and heaven help you if you try to swallow, or let a drop fall, bring me that
impudent little face, put your mouth here, yes just here,” as her strong thighs
closed pitilessly on his head, his scented wig askew, her own adored hair, and
her hands at the back of his neck keeping him where he was. “Now use your
tongue, your lips, whatever you must, but I want all of it, out of your mouth
and inside me, yes for you are nothing here but a little gobetween, you see,
you shall never, never, enjoy the privilege of having anything but your wicked
mouth where it is now, and I do hope Cyprian you are not touching yourself
without my permission, because I shall be ever so angry if you
. . .
yes, dear creature
. . .
exactly
. . . .
” She was wordless for a while, and Cyprian lost track of
the time,

surrendering altogether to her scent, her taste, Reef’s
taste, the muscular enclosure of her thighs, until she parted them briefly and
he thought he heard footfalls on the carpet behind him, and then large
lawbreaking hands were lifting his gown. Without being told he arched his back
and felt Reef, ready to roll once again, pull down the exquisite drawers
Yashmeen’s seamstress had stitched together all of Venetian lace from Melville
& Ziffer, praying that nothing would tear, and then the hard hands on his
bared hindquarters as Reef laughed and slapped him there. “Well if
this
ain’t
just the sweetest thing.” In one painful, well, not really painful slow lunge,
Reef entered him
. . . .
But here let
us reluctantly leave them, for biomechanics is one thing but intimacy quite
another, isn’t it, yes and by now Reef and Yashmeen were smiling too directly
at one another, with Cyprian feeling too absurdly grateful here held between
them so securely as to make the vigorous seeingto he was now receiving seem
almost—though only almost—incidental.

From then till
Ascension Day
, the day
Venice got remarried each year to the sea, as the two young men, one who had
never imagined the other, one who had gone beyond imagining and now only hoped
that nothing would turn out to be too “real,” made firm the third connection in
their triad, both wondered how close to “love” any of this might be venturing.

“It’s only gratitude, really,”
Cyprian shrugged. “She was in a predicament once, it happened that I knew where
one of the exits was, of course it all looks like a miracle to her, but I know
better, and you should too, I suppose.”

“I’ve seen ’em swept up,” Reef
argued. “This is the article, all right.”

Assuming it was no more than the kind
of flirtatious dialogue he’d long grown used to, “You have developed a clinical
eye for
. . .
this condition?”

   
“Love,
ol’ buddy. Word make you nervous?”

   
“More
like impatient.”

   
“O.K.
We’ll see. Don’t suppose you’re a betting man
. . .
?”

   
“A
traveler on a budget right at the moment, I’m afraid.”

Reef was chuckling, apparently to
himself. “Don’t worry, buckaroo, your money’s safe from me. Just, when you
finally do get that face powder all out of your eyes, don’t come asking me for
no free advice, ’cause I sure won’t know what to say.”

“And
. . .
the two of you . . .” managing to raise both eyebrows in what he
hoped Reef would read as sympathy.

   
“Better
ask her,” Reef with at least two expressions struggling for space on

his face. “I’m just here on the extended tour, you might call
it.”

   
“Reef
is in the nature of a holiday,” she had admitted to Cyprian, “from all

you complexos, so fascinating when encountered in the salons
of the swank, yet in private able to grow tiresome with such remarkable speed.”

One day Cyprian had just emerged from
about an hour of smoking and soaking in the tub when Reef strolled in. “She’s
not here,” Cyprian said. “She’s off shopping.”

“Ain’t her I’m lookin for.” Cyprian
had scarcely taken note of Reef’s expressively erect penis, before Reef had
seized his hair and was pushing him to his bare knees.

   
“We
mustn’t, you know
. . .
she’ll be
ever so angry
. . . .
”

“What about it? lettin a woman ramrod
you around like ’at all the time, hell if you’d just once talk back to her
. . .
They
want
to be told what’s
what, ain’t you figured that one out?”

Once Cyprian would have snapped back,
“Oh? Have you been ordering her around on a regular basis, I must’ve failed to
notice that.” But now, kneeling demurely, he was content to take Reef’s penis
into his mouth and gaze upward through his lashes at Reef’s distant face,
slightly hazed by tears of desire.

Before long Reef was off on one of
his rodeo rides and Cyprian was screaming into a lace pillow, as usual, and the
air was vivid with smells of lilacs and shit and frangipani. Sunlight off the
canal glimmered into the windows. Yashmeen was gone all afternoon.

   
“Our
little secret, I imagine.”

   
“Don’t
it ever—”

   
“What?”

“Guess I’m just curious. How a man
can let somebody do that to him, without even—”

   
“Maybe
you’re not just somebody, Reef.”

“Never mind that, now. I’m sayin if
it was me, I’d want to kill anybody tried that on me. Hell, I’d
have
to
kill ’em.”

   
“Well
don’t worry, I’m not about to harm you. Dangerous as I am.”

   
“You
don’t feel like that you’ve been
. . .
I
mean don’t it hurt?”

   
“It
hurts, and it doesn’t hurt.”

“Japanese talk. Thanks. Knew a
certain Nip mystic, back in San Francisco, used to talk like ’at all the time.”

“The only way to find out if, and how
much, and all that, Reef, is to try it, but you’d probably take offense if I
even suggested that.” Once he would have been flirting all out, but now—
“So I shan’t.”

Reef squinted. “You’re not talkin
about”—he made circling gestures with his fingers, “you doin me, nothin
like that.” Cyprian shrugged. “Not exactly no whanger you got there.”

   
“That
much less to be afraid of. Isn’t it?”

“Afraid? Son, it ain’t the pain,
hell, livin is pain. But a man’s honor— When it’s your honor, it’s life
and death. You don’t have that, where you’re from? England?”

“Perhaps I’ve only failed to see a
connection between honor and desire, Reef.”

Disingenuous
as always—for Cyprian had in fact begun to appreciate that out “in the
field” it was precisely his strong desire to be taken that offered him a
practical edge, released him from wasting time and energy over questions of
rectal integrity, or who in a given encounter would be dominant— that
whatever “honor” meant, it no longer had much to do with these outmoded sexual
protocols. Let others, if they wished, keep floundering along in the old
swamps—Cyprian worked better on firmer ground.

On
the other hand, it encouraged people who didn’t know him well to confuse
submissiveness with sympathy, especially those with the curious belief that
sodomites, having few troubles of their own, could never become bored listening
to the difficulties of others.

In
many respects a product of his home island, not given to nasal intrusion,
Cyprian, bewildered as always by the American willingness to confess anything
to any stranger at any length, now found himself more and more an audience for
Reef’s confidences.

“And
there was the days when I used to see em on the trains, sometimes be sittin
right next to em, these young fellas who were out riding county to county,
crossin em state lines, supposed to be looking for work but really just crazy
to get away from the whole thing. Ain’t that they hate the kids. They’ll show
you tintypes of the kids more often than not, hell, they love em
chavalitos.
Maybe they even love the wife, they’ll show you her picture, too, sometimes
there in a pose, or got something on, or not on, that the authorities might
call ‘calculated to arouse,’ and it’s clear as a drugstore’s front window, ‘Not
bad, right? and if you as a normal enough fellow think she looks even a little
wicked, well, odds have just improved there’ll be somebody else too, back
there, with the same opinion, just as normal as you, who, maybe even right this
minute, this complete stranger, is doin me a favor and he don’t even know it.’

“If
they only could be a little calmer in their mind, they sure wouldn’t get into
no discussion about their wife’s pussy. But they ’s always too wrapped up, so
desperate to talk that it didn’t matter what I thought, they expected
me
to
understand, it must have looked to them like that I did. Each time something
would keep me from passin remarks. Maybe I was havin one of those

psychic predictions about the day when I’d be joinin them.

   
“They
always looked so worried. Some of em you couldn’t buy a smile. Sat there under
their hatbrims, reachin down, drinkin up one longneck after another from the
case we’d all chipped in on and brought aboard at the last trackside saloon we
managed to stop at. Or two. Sometimes it’d be almost a kind of party, a
convention, Grand Army of the Matrimonial Republic, tellin each other war
stories of the lines they’d had to fall back from, sometimes slow enough,
sometimes in a blind panic they’d pretend was somethin else, ‘Guess I went a
little crazy there,’ or ‘Can’t remember much of that week,’ or ‘I stayed pretty
fucked up for a while.’

“Well and now here we are, not all
that many years later, and it’s my turn in the other seat, to bend the ear of
the feller sitting next to the window, the one who got on back at the last
station, namely, you.”