(1987) The Celestial Bed (7 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Sit back now, go limp, shut your eyes, give me your hands.’

Demski did as he was told, shifting towards her slightly, extending his hands, which were trembling once more. Gayle took his hands and placed them in her lap. His fingers were long, knobby, the nails manicured. She released his left hand and cupped his entire right hand in her own.

‘In your mind, just focus on the temperature of my hands on yours, and how it feels when I stroke you. Now we’ll be quiet.’

Softly her warm fingers stroked upward across his fingers and the smooth back of his hand to the hairs at his wrist. Gradually, she stroked downward, between the crevice separating his thumb and forefinger, between his bony fingers, then she slowly kneaded his entire hand. Slowly, she turned his hand over, palm upward, and resumed her light stroking and caresses.

Not until his right hand was limp and warm did she take his left hand in hers and begin to massage it on both sides.

Then she took both of his hands together inside her own and

cupped them warmly, moving her fingers, rubbing, stroking, kneading.

After perhaps twenty minutes she lowered his hands to her lap and released them.

‘All right, Adam, you can open your eyes now, and we can talk a little.’ She met his eyes. ‘How was that, how did it feel?’

‘I don’t know exactly. What can I say? It felt sort of good.’

Gayle moved her fingers over his left hand. ‘Were you aware of the different feelings when I touched your hand in different places? Did you feel pressures here on this bump, there on that crevice?’

‘Sure, it was nice.’

Gayle slipped one of her hands under his. ‘OK, do the same hand caress to me. Close your eyes, and I’ll close mine, and you do it to me the way I did it to you. For as long as you wish.’

After a brief hesitation, Demski began to rub and squeeze her hands. He continued to do so with more and more intensity.

Nearly ten minutes had gone by when Gayle laced her fingers between his and stopped him. ‘Okay, Adam, that’s fine. You can look at me. How did it feel? Did you get any special feeling from it?’

‘Well, I guess so. It was sort of — sort of — ‘ He couldn’t find the right word.

Gayle tried to find it for him.

‘Sensuous, maybe?’

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘There was more,’ Gayle said professionally. ‘Did my hands feel soft or weak or firm to you? Did you notice I had even the tiniest callus? Were you conscious of my fingernails, that they’re not too long but they have nail polish on them? And the backs of my hands, were they smooth or chapped? To most people a hand is a hand is a hand, something to eat with, write with, shake with. But there’s a lot more there. The purpose of this exercise, Adam, is to develop and heighten your sense of discrimination and focus. I want you to know more about your body, and my own. I want you to know shape and texture. Because if you do, you’ll start creating pictures in your head, and the more sensual pictures you create, the more alive you’re going to feel.’

‘I had sensual pictures doing it.’

‘Excellent,’ said Gayle. ‘The ridges of our hands, the smoothness of them, their texture, that can make you aware of yourself

and of me as human beings. We get too accustomed to ourselves and others. But as we do more touching, you’ll realise the richness and variations about your body and mine. You’ll know how different it is when you touch the hairline of my neck, then the hairline of my groin. You’ll stop being turned off from your body, and become more alert and awake to every sensuous experience. Like the face caress. That should be next, and we have time.’

‘What is it?’ Demski asked worriedly.

‘Just touching each other’s face, the various parts of our faces in different ways, feeling the bone structure, the skin, the fuzz. I’ve always thought the face caress an exquisite experience. Some patients have told me it reminds them of when they were children, the tender way they were touched then, but they haven’t been touched that way by anyone since. Let’s try it, Adam. First me to you, then you to me. Now shut your eyes.’

He did so, and Gayle moved more closely to him, and then reached up and began to massage his forehead softly, soon running the tips of her fingers over his nose and across his cheeks, flitting them across his quivering lips and down his chin.

She repeated this several times, and finally finished by cupping his face in her hands. ‘All right, Adam.’ When he opened his eyes, she could feel his warm breath on her cheek. ‘Well, Adam, what did you feel?’

At first he was unable to speak, and then he whispered, ‘Like I -I wanted to kiss you.’

She stared at him. ‘Why not? Go ahead.’

He pushed his face toward hers, and brushed his lips against her lips.

‘Was that what you wanted to do?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Or did you want to kiss me in different ways?’

‘I — I don’t know what ways.’

‘A woman likes to be kissed in other ways, too. On the eyelids, tip of the nose, cleft of the chin, hollow of the throat, and on her earlobes, in her ears, behind her ears. Have you ever done that?’

‘No.’

‘Do it now, to me. Kissing can be almost as intimate as intercourse. Start with my eyelids.’

She closed her eyes and felt his nervous lips flutter at them, then waited as he made small pecks at her ears, cheeks, nose, chin. She

was tempted to grab him, press his mouth against her own, open his mouth and her own and give him a tongue kiss. Just to loosen him up. But she didn’t succumb to it. That would be going too fast, pushing it too hard.

When he was done, she said, ‘Now it’s your turn to give me a face caress.’

His fingers went over her face, tentatively exploring and rubbing every feature, for many minutes.

At last, she opened her eyes. ‘How was it, Adam?’

He smiled with less effort. T liked it.’

‘So did I.’

‘Sort of — uh — sensuous,’ he added.

‘That’s what I thought.’ She sat back. ‘Well, there you are. First two exercises behind you. And nothing scary at all. Maybe you even found it fun.’

‘It was fun, I admit.’ He wriggled forward, reaching for his jacket behind him. ‘I guess I should go.’ He paused. ‘What — what do we do at the next session?’

‘Foot bath. Then — ‘ Gayle was thinking. ‘Maybe we’ll move right into body imaging.’

‘Body imaging?’

‘We both stand in front of a full-length mirror and tell what we like and don’t like about our own bodies. We’ll both be nude.’

His expression did not hide his concern. ‘We’ll undress? I thought you said that would come later.’

‘Usually it does. A little later. But I was just thinking it would make it easier for both of us, definitely show more progress, if we were able to work together without anything on.’ She searched his face. ‘How do you feel about that, Adam?’

‘I — I’m not sure.’

‘Well, let me discuss it with Dr Freeberg first.’

‘If we do that - how will it help me?’

Gayle smiled enigmatically: ‘You’ll see.’

In the quiet of his computerised modern rectory in the rear of his Church of the Resurrection - actually a suite of rooms where the Reverend Mr Josh Scrafield both lived and worked — Darlene Young efficiently continued to go through the routine of preparing her employer for his weekly television broadcast. As she secured Scrafield’s clerical collar to his starched white

shirt, and helped him into the coat of his conservative dark suit, Darlene was again conscious of her employer’s size and strength, which by now she knew all too well. Scrafield was a powerful man physically, over six feet tall and muscular, who considered his body a temple and who worked out with barbells four times a week with a local exercise coach. She knew, for he had told her so many times, that his temple must be cleansed and strengthened regularly, so that he could stand as an inspiration to the weak and frail of his ever-expanding flock of followers. Scrafield liked to say that he perceived the fears and lusts of his followers, and it was only to understand their temptations fully that he brought himself - forced himself as he put it — at least once a week, to yield to her tender ministrations.

When she had applied for the job as Scrafield’s secretary, and been hired, her double role of servicing had been understood from the start. Nor had Darlene minded. Scrafield had been single, and Darlene herself long divorced. In her late thirties, Darlene had wanted a man. Scrafield had not been unattractive. His thick eyebrows over oddly Mongolian eyes, fierce riveting black eyes, his pinched nose, jutting jaw, and mesmerising voice (a grandiloquence of speech) had proved utterly seductive. She had been devoted to him, and to his generosity, and she had shown qualities of cleverness that matched his own and this had gained her a promotion to publicist and television producer and allowed her to hire a secretary for herself. By then, she had become less enchanted with him, had tried to overlook his vanity, cunning, and what she suspected was a certain insincerity about his calling. Scrafield’s real religion, she guessed, was his ambition to be Somebody.

Now that she had him neatly dressed, except for his trousers, she began to remove his trousers from the hanger.

‘Not yet,’ he said, waving them aside. ‘You know I like to keep them pressed until the last minute.’

With that, she knew what she had known the last several months. She knew what was in store for her.

Dressed, but still in his boxer shorts, Scrafield was walking to his gargantuan desk, large enough to satisfy a Mussolini.

‘I want to run through the script for tonight one more time,’ he was saying, as he lowered himself behind the desk, took up the script, and wheeled his chair towards her. ‘Do you mind listening?’

‘I look forward to it,’ said Darlene.

‘If any of it sounds wrong, you let me know.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘All right,’ said Scrafield, clearing his throat, ‘let’s run through it.’

She sat on an ottoman, near him, as he began to read aloud from the script in his deepened and more theatrical voice.

‘Brothers and Sisters,’ the Reverend Mr Scrafield began, ‘once more I have come upon new information about the latest threat that is quietly but inexorably setting about to destroy our families and the very foundations of the American way of life.

‘This insidious and cancerous growth that has invaded the schools of our youngest - the schools our children attend, namely, grammar schools and high schools — is known as sex education. This blatant and provocative teaching is being pressed on our young and unformed heirs.

‘Speak to anyone who favours sex education in our classrooms instead of in our homes, and more often than not you will find yourself talking to someone who also favours unrestricted abortion, dangerous gay rights, atheism, and Communism.

‘Tonight, my Brothers and Sisters, I want you to listen to some facts - actual facts - that have come to light on the matter of sex education.

‘According to the latest available statistics, for youngsters between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, there were 1,181,000 pregnancies in a single year - roughly half of them leading to abortions, and half to births.

‘Obviously, these unwanted pregnancies were provoked by the kind of sex education going on throughout the states of America — the teachings, by untrained or ill-trained instructors, on every sexual subject from the use of contraceptives to sexual techniques to orgasms. This, in the face of the facts produced by a recent Yankelovich, Skelly, White survey that 84 per cent of parents of teenagers polled feel that it is up to them to inform their children about sexual matters, a responsibility that should be borne only by caring families and not by politicised schools.

‘Let me reveal to you a horror story that has recently been exposed in our own backyard. In the high school of San Marcos, California, over 20 per cent of the young girl students were found to be pregnant by the year 1984. When the school board learned

that fact, the members were quick to reassess the school’s sex education programme and modify it sharply.

‘When you learn the shocking statistic that 48 per cent of the states have no guideline policies on sex teachings, and leave policymaking up to local school boards, then you realise that you must have a voice in the decision-making by letting your school board know you have an eye on it and will hold its members accountable for sinful behaviour they promote under the guise of education.

‘We must all act in concert with The Women’s Committee for Responsible Government, which has already sued the state of California for spending public money on subversive sex education in our schools. We must join hand in hand to stop this systematic corruption of the innocent. We, too, must become the Godfearing, God-loving moral majority of this wonderful nation.’

Scrafield droned on and on, and Darlene Young dutifully and attentively listened.

When he had concluded, Scrafield set his script aside and looked up. ‘What do you think, Darlene?’

‘Very good, very frightening,’ she said. ‘Are those statistics actually true?’

‘True blue, you bet. You ought to know. You hired that researcher, Chet Hunter, to research it for me. He’s got a reputation for accuracy.’

‘Yes, he’s good.’

Scrafield studied his wristwatch. ‘We’ve still got fifteen minutes or more before the limo comes by to take us to the television studio. I could use a little relaxation, I guess, before going on the air. You up to it, baby?’

She nodded with fake enthusiasm. ‘You know I am.’

As Scrafield reached down to the fly of his shorts, she wondered fleetingly why this change had taken place a few months ago. It had always been his habit, in times before, and always before he went on the air, to take her to bed. He had claimed he needed loosening up. He would take her to bed for a quickie.

But lately there was no more bed. There was only this. She wondered if, turning forty, she had become less attractive to him. Her blonde hair bleached brighter, her face puffier, her large breasts drooping further, and a bit thicker around the waistline and hips. Or was it simply that he had tired of her somewhat,