She cringed at the truth. I took both her hands. Her palms were stiff and sweaty.
“You really don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?” I said. “Look, all I’m saying is
it’s all right.
I’m thinking about making it with someone I just met. You know that for openers, you expect it. You’d be insulted if I
didn’t
want to, wouldn’t you? You don’t think it makes me a shit, do you?”
“Just a man,” she said.
“Okay. So why judge yourself harder than you judge me? Fucking is fun. We both know that, I hope. You don’t put me down for wanting to enjoy your body. So why should you think I’d think any the less of you for wanting to do what I
want
you to want to do?”
She looked at me wide-eyed. I could sense that I had gotten to her mind, but there seemed to be a whole lot of weird garbage between her head and her cunt. This was all really starting to bring me down.
I smiled a mock-coy smile. “Okay,” I said, “so relax. I promise I won’t even make a pass at you. I dig you. We’ll forget about sex until we’ve come to a more complete understanding of the ethical structure of the universe.”
“Very funny.”
“No, I mean it,” I said soberly. “You’re a woman, but you’re also a human being. I’m not going to con you into doing something you don’t want to do. I’m perfectly willing to pass up a little fun to prove that to you.”
She looked at me long and hard. She frowned. She smiled. Her lower lip trembled.
“I... I think we’re starting to carry this intellectualizing a little too far...” she said. Paused.
And leaned over and kissed me on the lips. My mouth was caught closed. Her mouth was open. She opened my lips with hers and jammed her tongue into my mouth, moved it around powerfully, almost athletically. Our tongues met for a moment, disputed the territory. Our lips parted. We looked into each other’s eyes.
It had been a very clumsy kiss, but coming from this girl at this time, in this situation, I appreciated it for the brave and magnificent gesture it was, and in the brief moment when our lips parted, I loved her for it.
“Arlene Cooper,” I said, “there’s a woman inside you.”
She smiled a sweet little girl smile, took off her glasses, and placed them on the table. Somehow, in context, it was a terrifically sexy thing to do, turned me on better than a fullscale strip.
We reached for each other, our lips met, and again her tongue forced itself into my mouth, huge and stiff and awkward. I forced it back with my own; she resisted for a moment, then understood. All at once, her mouth went nice and woman-soft, and her lips welcomed my tongue in, and my arms were tight around her, and her hands moved slightly over my back. I ran a hand over her breasts: full and sighing but constricted by her brassiere. I caressed her tongue with mine and stroked her outer thigh. She was wearing a girdle. She moved liquidly against me, moaned softly into my mouth. I pulled my lips slowly from hers and the kiss ended with the tips of our tongues touching outside our mouths.
We faced each other inches apart. Her green eyes had gone soft. I had gone hard. Electricity at last in the air between us. She smiled shyly. I smiled back, squeezed her hands.
“We could go into the bedroom...” I suggested softly.
She looked down, squeezed my hands back and, without looking at me, nodded yes.
“I’ve got a ten o’clock class tomorrow,” she said as we stood before the bed. “Could you set the alarm for 8:30....”
A mood-breaker, but necessary, I suppose. “I’ve got to be at work by nine,” I said. “It’s already set for eight, okay?”
She nodded, reached to turn out the light on the night table. I grabbed her hand before she could reach the switch. Our eyes met in argument. I won.
I pulled back the covers and sat down on the bed. She turned her back on me and kicked off her shoes. I took off my shoes and socks. Still with her back to me, she unbuttoned her blouse, took it off, and tossed it over her shoulder onto the night table. Her brassiere was white and faded and cut deep into the pale flesh of her back. I took off my shirt and undershirt and threw them over her blouse. She undid her skirt, stepped through it and put it on the night table. I took off my pants and sat on the bed in my shorts digging her as she detached the tops of here stockings from her girdle and rolled them off her legs functionally and unsensually. She unhooked her bra, took it off. I could see the red marks across her back. I took off my shorts and enjoyed my nakedness as she struggled out of her girdle. More red welts above her soft, full ass.
She paused, then turned, and I saw her nakedness for a moment: heavy full breasts with pale pink nipples, the slightest concavity to her belly, smooth firm thighs, whispy red pubic hair, an uptight smile as she looked at my body stretched out on the bed, a tremor in her lower lip as her eyes passed briefly across my hard-on.
Then she threw herself on top of me, flipped off the light, tangled my hair in her hands and whispered with a forced throatiness: “Let’s fuck!”
In the darkness, I felt her body moving on mine in jerky, exaggerated rhythms. She kissed me, started to push her tongue inside my mouth—I clamped my arms around her, rolled her over and beneath me, pulled my mouth away from hers and flicked my tongue inside her ear. I felt her shudder.
Quickly, I began stroking the inside of her thighs with one hand, kissed her and began moving my tongue inside her mouth in slow pelvic rotations and she sighed soundlessly and began moving her hips to the touch of my hand in a softer, more deeply-felt rhythm.
I ran my other hand up and down between the cleft of her breasts and over her soft stomach, up, down, and around, up, down, and around, keeping time with the motions of my hand between her legs, my tongue in her mouth.
Our mouths parted softly around her moan; her belly under my hand began to tremble like a luffing sail—her legs clamped tight around my other hand and she began to buck her hips awkwardly. She reached down and grabbed the shaft of my cock in one hand and began milking it savagely. Dammit, we were fighting each other; she was breaking my slow and building rhythm with hard staccato frenzy and her pumping hand was bringing me along too fast! Too fast!
Still stroking her thighs with one hand, trying to get her to go with my rhythm, I reached down with my other hand and the two of us fumbled with my parts in silence, then with hers, then everything together. Feeling myself in danger of letting go, I finally got her hand away and got myself inside. She bucked me out. “Shit!” I cursed audibly, and bumbled my way inside again, planted myself firmly with a heavy thrust of my hips.
I began moving my hips slowly, slowly, slow it down, baby! She slowed down, trying to match my rhythm, but she wasn’t making it, she wasn’t grooving with my moves; now she was a half-beat ahead of me, now a half-beat behind. Damn!
She began to moan loudly, wordlessly. I felt myself moving towards the crest, but only from the waist down. I couldn’t tell
where
she was at.
Then suddenly, she clamped her legs around my waist, hard. She started to squeeze my body with her thighs as if she were trying to get out the stuff at the bottom of a toothpaste tube—harder and harder, faster and faster, like an engine out of control.
All at once, with no warning, I came; soundlessly, hardly feeling it. And she was still moaning and squeezing me with her legs frantically. I felt myself starting to lose it....
Goddamn, I would not let this chick do that to me! From somewhere deep inside, maybe from the pit of pure fury, I found the stuff to keep myself going. I began thrusting, harder and harder against her pounding rhythm, faster and faster, sheer brute force, knowing it was now or never, feeling myself starting to go soft, pounding ahead on memory alone. Bang! Bang! Bang!
Finally, she let loose a nasal scream, her body gave a tremendous heave, and it was over. Just as I felt myself leaving her.
Reflexively, I half-rolled off her, then paused, kissed her lightly on the cheek, perhaps more than half-sarcastically; then I did roll off and pulled the covers over our panting bodies. I reached for the light switch; her hands caught mine and pulled it back.
“Please...” she said softly.
I sighed, pulled my hand back under the covers, and we lay there for long moments, not speaking, not touching.
Jeez, what a bummer! I thought, remembering Robin, remembering just about every lay I could to avoid thinking about what had just happened. Like fucking some out of control milking machine... I felt used up, fucked out, spent and sticky....
“Thank you,” she finally said softly, breaking the ugly silence.
“For
what?”
I answered coldly.
“For... what you did... for helping me come after... after the way it was for you....”
All the anger and frustration went out of me like air out of a balloon. Oh you poor kid... you poor lost sorry kid....
“I’m... I’m not very good at it,” she said. “I know I’m not very good at it—”
I hated myself for it, but I dissolved into a sloppy mass of tenderness. What could I say? What could I do? I moved closer to her, letting her feel my skin against her. She was tense and rigid. What the hell could I say...?
“You... you seem to like it...” I finally managed lamely.
“I... I do like it. I like the way it feels... But I can’t... I can’t...” I felt her choke back a sob. I put my arm around her and pulled her head down on my chest.
“I can’t seem to... connect up,” she said. “I can feel what happens to me but... I can’t feel a man.... It’s good for me, but I know....”
She began to cry lightly. “I know I’m a terrible fuck,” she said.
“Aw, you’re not that bad,” I said, stroking her hair.
“Don’t lie to me!”
“All right, I won’t.”
“I know what my problem is,” she said. “Harvey says I can’t give myself to a man because I cling too tightly to my ego. I’m afraid of merging my consciousness with a man’s. That’s why I can’t let go—” Now she had stopped crying, drying her honest tears with the cruddy towel of textbook intellectualizing. Shit!
“Screw Harvey Brustein!” I snarled. “Shove his Total Consciousness up his anal-retentive syndrome!”
“Stop it! Harvey’s helped me and no one else ever has. Before I came to the Foundation, I couldn’t even come.”
Do you believe it? I felt like a character in some idiotic Feiffer cartoon. For a hundred dollars a month, you too can learn to come... Just you and me and Harvey makes three. But if that filthy mother were
really
in bed with us, I’d tear off his right arm and beat him to death with it! Stinking son of a bitch!
“Stick with me, baby,” I said, “and we’ll have you seeing novas.” Now why the hell did I say
that?
Was my manhood involved or what? Well maybe it was—if I couldn’t do more for her with my dick than Harvey could with his gibbering, it was time to hang up!
“You mean... after... this... you still want to... to see me again?”
“After all, practice makes perfect,” I heard myself say. What the fuck was I getting myself into?
She kissed me lightly on the lips, so grateful I wanted to cry, and all the hassle I saw coming suddenly seemed worth it.
“You know, you’re the only man I could ever talk about it afterward with who even cared—”
I hugged her to me, the poor sorry bitch. A bad fuck with a good heart. Shit! How did I get into these things? You should kiss this poor creature goodbye, I told myself. Swine if you do, I answered back. Conscience, yet!
“Tom,” she said, “I’d like to ask you a big favor.”
I felt the cold breath of still more trouble down the back of my neck. Nevertheless, I said: “Ask away.”
“Come to my therapy group this Friday,” she said.
“No dice. I’m not about to let Harvey and company waltz through my head.”
“For me... please? It could be what I need for a real breakthrough, having someone in my group who understands first hand... who cares...”
Damn! Right in the old ego, not to mention the old conscience. Ooooh, that fucker Brustein! What this chick really needs is some Acapulco Gold and a solid weekend of getting her brains fucked out. Literally getting those damned Foundation-ridden brains of hers fucked out of her system.
Yeah... Well, why not? Okay, go to the damn therapy group and show it up for what it is and then take her home for the weekend and fuck some sense into her!
“Okay, baby.” I said. “But I warn you, I go in there out for blood.”
She kissed my forehead. “Tom Hollander,” she said, “you’re not half as tough as you come on. You’re an old-fashioned gentleman, is what you are.”
Do you believe that? How could I let a chick who said something like that to me go down for the third time? How could I let her throw her life away sucking up old Harvey’s junk?
But as we drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms, I seemed to remember that I had once thought I could win Anne away from smack... and how
that
ended up....
But it wasn’t really the same thing... no, not the same thing at all....
Somehow, it seemed appropriate that the room Arlene led me into had no windows. In fact, it had nothing but cheap gray fiberboard walls, a frosted-globe light fixture, institutional carpeting on the floor, and a semicircle of eight green metal folding chairs, each with a cheap ashtray beneath it.
Arlene and I were the first to arrive. “Welcome to Room 101,” I said. I sat down on the chair at the left end of the semicircle. Arlene sat down two seats away.
“What’s that for?” I said. “I used Ban this morning.”
“One of the rules,” Arlene said. “Two people who are... involved with each other can’t sit together. If they did, they might give each other support.”
“Wouldn’t that be a disaster?” I said. Arlene seemed about twelve light-years away behind her glasses; seemed to be no human connection between us at all now. I was really starting to feel like an asshole for letting myself get sucked into this thing.
Starting?
“What do the rules say about freebies?” I asked. “I hope I’m not expected to pay for this.”