She had reached for the phone three times before going through with it. 'If I panic I can just hang up,' she thought as it rang on the other end. 'Maybe he won't even be at home.'
But the man answered. His voice was like rose thorns dipped in honey. 'Hello,' he said.
She didn't reply, and all at once felt very foolish.
'Is anybody there?' the voice went on.
'Yes,' she said, the word sticking in her throat. She coughed once and said again, 'Yes, I'm here,' and then blushed at the phrase.
'Well, what do you want?' he said.
She blinked at the effrontery of his question. 'I. . . don't know what to say,' she muttered. The deference in her attitude surprised her. In the clear light of electronic impersonality the basic monkey male-female gestures stood out sharply. In a bit, if she got to know him better, she would use her power of redress before law as a fulcrum to wield the lever of dominance in her relationship with him. Her brief exposure to the liberation thinking of the intensely political town had already served to give her a focus on the structure of society as a struggle for supremacy.
'Are you nervous?' he said.
'Yes,' she told him, and relaxed at the saying of it. 'I suppose I am.'
'That's all right,' he continued. 'A lot of women are. They get tight inside when it comes time to come out and ask for it.'
'Ask for what?' she replied, immediately regretting her reflexive feigned obtuseness.
'You want to get fucked, don't you?' he said. There was no leer in his question; it was purely informational. She became aware that she was sitting on her bed, wearing only her panties. The man's presence appeared in the room and he ceased to be a disembodied voice only; she saw him sitting across from her as they talked, and imagined his eyes on her, imagined that he was actually going to reach over and pull her into him. With her free hand she absentmindedly reached up and brushed the nipple of one breast.
'Maybe I do,' she said. 'Do you want to fuck me?' she went on, getting into the swing of the dialogue.
'Are you married?' he said.
'Why do you want to know that?'
'I'd like to know something about you before I answer your question,' he said. 'You know, I get a lot of kook calls.'
'Kook calls!' she exploded, 'I like that!'
'I don't,' he responded gently. It's a waste of time, don't you know?' She felt as though she had been walking along the shallow bottom of a swimming pool and suddenly stepped into a deep hole. She could find nothing to say. 'A lot of women are afraid,' he continued. They think up all kinds of things. Wonder if I'm a maniac waiting to carve them to pieces, or a fiend who's going to tie them up and beat them. But, really, I don't ever do anything that the woman doesn't want me to do. And that gets far out enough for me most of the time.' He paused. 'Like I said, are you married?'
'No,' she said. 'But I'm living with someone.'
'And he doesn't do it for you any more?'
She bit off an impulse to tell him that she had only called out of curiosity and had no intention of seeing him. And then he cut in, 'Well, but that's none of my business.' He made a sucking sound which could have been a drag on a cigarette. 'So, would you rather come to my place?' he asked.
'No,' she said, 'I mean, I don't know.'
'Listen,' he said, 'I'm six-three, I weigh two hundred and twenty pounds, I have the biggest cock you ever saw, and I can fuck four or five hours without stopping. I like cunt, especially when it's juicy and fresh. I like chicks who aren't afraid to yell and kick their legs. I'll eat your pussy for hours, just chew on it, and lick it, and you don't have to do a thing, just lie back and spread your legs and let it drip.'
His words pressed heavily on her chest and she sank more deeply into the pillows. Her knees began trembling and she let her thighs fall open. She could see the great brute body on top of her, the immense cock jamming her mouth. She had an uncanny sense of its texture and the taste of the first drop of pre-seminal fluid that would form at the very tip. She rubbed her hand down back over her breast and down her stomach to her crotch, letting it lie lightly over her cunt. She was excited by the excitement.
'Of course you like it,' he said, his voice intimate in her ear. 'I can tell by how you're breathing. What woman doesn't want to be fucked?' Her thoughts sped to the two women's meetings she had attended, and remembered the venom in the voice of one of them who had remarked, 'They think we just go around panting all the time, just waiting for them to grace us with their stupid cocks.' She felt that the truth of the matter lay between the stud she was talking to and the lesbian who had flashed such bitter hatred. For her, fucking was the supreme experience, and as far as she knew, dildos included, it was impossible to fuck without a cock. All the sensuality that two women could give one another might surpass in breadth what usually went on between a man and a woman, but there came a point when the vessel yearned to be filled in a simple natural fashion, with the thick pulsating organ that had been fashioned for just that purpose. She wondered how so natural a deed could have come to have such sinister social overtones.
Til give you what you only get in fantasies, all the things you think are perverted and dirty. I can teach you how to accept all the parts of yourself that you have cut off. You'll find yourself licking the floor and sucking my feet, begging me to let you eat my arse out. I'll come in you from behind and make you climb the wall. When you leave here you won't be able to pee for a week without remembering what I did to you, and then you'll be ready to come back.'
Her mind half on his words, half on her thoughts, Cynthia began to rub her cunt through the silk of her panties. She felt the hardness of the mound, the softness of the lips under it. The warm flush of pleasure charged her loins and her fingers started to move with more precise purpose, tracing the vertical slit down to the musty spaces between her buttocks. She reached up and brought her hand over the elastic top, and then slid it down the inside of the fabric until she touched the opening of her cunt, the wet pubic hair.
'You will come until you think you can't come any more, and then I'll take you places you didn't even suspect, places where everything is teeth and nails and shrieks. I'll take you to the jungle, baby, and throw you to the tigers. And when you get hooked, I'll get some friends to come over, and we'll smother you with hard-ons. Three or four men, all like me, putting it in you everyplace, in your arse, in your mouth, in your cunt, between your tits, all at once. Hands and tongues and cocks all over you. And you down there rolling and lapping and swallowing everything we give you.' He waited a beat. 'Did you ever have somebody piss in your throat after he came in your mouth?'
She moved her finger in and out of her cunt, penetrating an inch and slipping up to rub her clitoris, giving herself the sensations she wanted and revelling in the geography of the canyon between her legs, its strong supple walls and delicate ridges. The fact that her cunt was awesome and beautiful came to life in her consciousness, and she was enveloped in the joy of loving it. As she finger-fucked she considered for an instant that he might be masturbating at the other end of the wire, and the thought enflamed her. She strained to catch some clue in his voice.
'Can you come over now?' he said. 'I can meet you some place public, and if you don't like me you can leave without trouble. Otherwise I can take you to my place and fuck you clear up to your eyes.'
She tried to speak but didn't want to interrupt the flow towards climax. Her hand flew faster between her thighs, her pelvis rocked up and down, and her belly clutched and released in a series of spasms. Half sitting, half lying, the phone in one hand, her breasts lolling on her chest, the nipples wrinkled, her mouth open and her tongue sliding from side to side, unabashedly fingering herself to bring herself to orgasm, she presented a classic picture of depravity.
'Are you still there?' he said, and she let out a small sharp cry, at first guarded, and changing into an open bleat of pleasure. She was coming and she didn't care that he knew what she was doing. He was outside of her, a force without a face, and she sagged into the open enjoyment of the exquisite moment. His voice took on a note of suave complacency and he said, 'Well go ahead then, frig yourself crazy.'
As a dog that has long been pent up and brought to an open meadow will strain at the leash and then bound wildly into the free space when the latch is removed, she sprang from his words and sank into her own orgasm. She moaned and cupped her cunt as the crucial excitement level was reached, and let herself pump spasmodically as the tension was released. Her heart welled like water from a deep spring, and her mind vibrated until it had shaken itself free of all thoughts.
A long time passed, and the only sounds were of her breath and the puffs he seemed to be taking on a cigarette. Then he spoke, calmly, reassuringly.
'You see what can happen just over the telephone. Imagine if we really work together; think how far you can go. Admit it now, haven't you just experienced things you never have before?'
She pulled herself together. 'Yes,' she said.
'You owe it to yourself to see me,' he added. 'I'm very reasonable.'
'You sound like a psychologist,' she said.
'In fact, I used to be. Now I'm a therapist.'
'You call this therapy?' she said, shaking her head to clear it.
'Why not?' he countered. 'The biggest problem in the country is sex. People are either puritans or pigs. When I fuck somebody, they learn something about themselves. And what is therapy if it isn't a means to self-knowledge?'
The thought struck her like a clap across the back of the neck. 'You don't by any chance charge money for this?'
He laughed. Tm too experienced to be giving it away any more,' he said. Tucking a woman the way she needs to be fucked, usually against her resistance, is hard work.'
'Christ,' she said. 'What do you do for pleasure?'
He didn't answer. 'It doesn't sound to me like you're going to come and meet me tonight,' he said.
'I'm sorry,' she replied.
'Me too,' he said. 'I'll just have to put you on my long list of kook calls,' and then hung up, leaving her hanging, feeling as though he had stuck a long rusty pin into her as his final gesture, his act of revenge.
'It was delicious,' said Aaron. 'I take back all the unkind things I've said about food fanatics.'
Cynthia regarded the man she had been living with for three years. Her stomach was full and she felt the sweet contentment of sexual satiation coupled with physical well-being. She was intensely aware of Conrad's eyes, and his look which never rested from seizing her body. He was looking at her nipples, while not staring. There was a lack of focus in his face, and she marvelled that he appeared so soft, almost like a girl, his long blond hair a glimmering waterfall, his expression as peaceful as a child's sleep. Aaron, as usual of late, was looking at nothing. The drama in his mind held all his attention, and his face was vacant, also peaceful, but like that of someone massively dosed with a strong tranquilizer, or of someone recently lobotomised. And co-existing with this emptiness was a scintillating vibration of animal energy. Even sitting still he exuded the air of a football player who has just crossed into the goal after a ninety-yard run. When she examined herself honestly, as she was coming more and more to do, especially after her long talks with Conrad, she admitted that it was Aaron's primitive force which kept her glued to him. Her knees still grew weak when she just thought of him on top of her and in her. She would have let him fuck her in the middle of University Avenue on a Saturday afternoon if he wanted to. She knew she could leave him, but while with him had no desire to be able to resist him.
She understood that some basic decency would keep him from ever attaining a position of power or wealth, and after their move to Berkeley had made peace with her fate. Aaron would make a career in the ghetto schools, and she would make a baby or two, and they would age quietly. A distant voice within her cried out against the decision, shouting something about a greater fullness possible for a woman than as the attachment that went with the man. But no viable alternative seemed possible, and she did not even have the vocabulary to think about the question in a vigorous manner. She dismissed all her vague misgivings, and wrote her mother a letter telling her about the move, talking in terms of 'wanting to be a little closer to playgrounds and parks,' and hinting very strongly that she and Aaron would soon be giving their relationship legal status. She judged that they were on their way to becoming a classic couple.
But after a month in their new apartment, she knew that they had, unknowingly although in full view of themselves, stepped in exactly the opposite direction to that which they thought they were choosing. The question of marriage, which was never openly spoken about but which permeated their psychic and emotional atmosphere, and served as a barometer which indicated and forecast cycles in their relationship, lost its flexibility and play; it ceased being an issue which served largely as a frequency upon which to pass communications, and became a weapon which glowed dully in the corner, waiting to be used in one way or the other. Aaron's energetic ennui, which he hoped to sublimate into the ritual of social acquiescence, blossomed into a burning restlessness; and Cynthia's doubts about her condition as a woman materialised into small volatile acts of secret sabotage. She had never told Aaron about the phone call.