A Moment of Doubt (12 page)

Or sushi . . . ? What is the aggression quotient of sushiff

The screaming can be a problem. Is this a rural or an urban kill? They will have planned accordingly . . . .

I wake up in the middle of the night, or half wake up, and there it is. The shadows are there, the house creaks, the seagull lands on the roof and I twitch so violently my back goes out. I'm so exhausted from failing to avoid Marlene when I came in that I nod out in spite of my terror, and the whole scenario blossoms in my mind like a flower of blood in a foetid syringe . . . .

Removing the ice pick is best left to the hands of skilled personnel.

If the weapon of choice is a burnishing tool, the wounds must necessarily give more trouble, as the three-sided puncture conforming to the silhouette of the tool will bleed profusely, and give great diffculty of repair, even to the finest surgeon . . . .

Where might Martin Windrow have seen that? How about a mimeographed handbook found in the drawer of a right-wing extremist?

The kind of mercy Marlene won't show me . . . I can live with that . . . She's not showing me mercy so she can show me some real mercy . . . But the scenarios, they leave me alone when she's outraging my sensibilities and, I must admit, sometimes I make advances on my own. Nothing out of line, you understand, nothing that might undermine the landlord/tenant arrangement. Never sleep in her bed, for example, snuggling up together would violate everything, show us both the kind of tenderness neither of us could stand, although, given her head, Marlene might like to go along with that . . . As the years go by she could gradually ease the tenants out, one by one, insofar as rent control allows, and put a child in each vacated room . . . Redecorating them first . . . I'd keep my room as an office and studio, for the computer and phone lines, a mail drop. Maybe take her name, too. Get rid of Jas Jameson, detective writer, a name that bears the onus of years of fictional violence, of sexual outrage, and lately of fraudulent endeavors . . . .

A man gets tired. Tired of looking over his shoulder every time he goes out for the paper, tired of keeping a loaded pistol next to the cup of coffee on the arm of his favorite chair. Tired of keeping the volume down on the television, the stereo, the Sunday afternoon opera, so he can hear someone sneaking up on him. Tired of sending his little girls and his wife out of town at the least sign of trouble. Tired of forgetting what name the signatory is supposed to be on the check he's signing. Tired of looking out for the guy that's stronger than he is, tired of trying to second guess the weaker and stupider ones. Tired of winning all the time, knowing he only gets to lose once. Tired of resolving everything with violence, tired of bargaining with muscle. Tired, tired, tired . . . .

I come home a little drunk, on me it looks tired. The Plymouth is still parked up the street, a shadow in the passenger seat. The yellow Mercedes is gone. The Moral Imperative. Marlene is in the parlor on a big Victorian sofa reading
Vogue
. She's on her belly turning pages, her legs up in the air waving idly back and forth. The lavender house dress with yellow flowers . . . . There's a thin-stemmed glass of red wine on the rug nearby. I am tired. Her strawberry hair with the blonde tail and the violet eyes and the absolutely clear complexion . . . . Here lay a woman whose husband decided he was gay and left her, it took her years to get her self-esteem back. Even though she knew better she could not refrain from blaming herself, and he, married to the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, whom he loved in fact, he was too confused to help her, he couldn't even help himself, he could only follow
his desires, and these led him far, far from her arms, or the arms of any woman. This is a tough thing for anyone to take. It's worse than divorcing an asshole you made a mistake with, and more complicated than deserting someone you love for someone you love more. No matter how enlightened, the loved one abandoned in favor of a change in gender suffers greatly from a profound sense of inadequacy, compounded by their sense of loss. Marlene's been working on it, and she's coming along nicely. She has the advantage of being attractive, which has brought her plenty of experience in dealing with the vicissitudes of love—translated, this means that all men are assholes. We've been working on that. Compassion is the key. Compassion, time, and realism in the matter of resisting her charms. I go into the parlor and sit on the edge of the sofa. She continues to read. The hem of the dress is high up her thighs and she caresses my cheek with her toes. Her ass is irresistible, it curves up and away from her thighs beneath the dacron of the dress, but she's been resisting advances from me on that score, she never liked the idea of sodomy, and now that her husband has gone fag, even though it's been two and a half years, the suggestion makes her suspicious, and she balks. But Marlene is a passionate woman . . . . I need to do some research . . . . I run the palm of my hand along the nodes of her spine to the top of the low back of her dress and find the tab of the zipper there. I push my hand further until my fingers tangle in her blond tail and massage the base of her neck. She drops her head and turns against my hand. My hand comes back down her spine and brings the tab of the zipper with it. A
V
opens along her back, and the flesh is warm to the touch. The zipper stops just at the base of her spine and I rub her there. She drops her knee off the couch and puts her foot into my crotch.
Her behind begins to move off the couch, she's face down in
Vogue
now, making little sounds as she breathes. I lift the hem of her dress. Her ass is exposed, her cunt below it. Ah good, I think, it's still there, intact. I cup her vulva with the palm of my hand and she moves against it, my fingers cover her clitoris, separate the lips, my thumb finds her anus and she puckers up, as if giving a kiss, and the tip of my thumb slips in . . . . Now my other hand has found her breast and nipple, she crushes a cosmetics advertisement in her fingers, the telephone rings in my room upstairs, and I insert a finger in her vagina. It's very wet. I lubricate the outer lips by moving the finger in and out, in and out . . . . The thumb goes in a little more, the nail disappears, the first knuckle, and I hear the modem upstairs taking the call. Now Marlene has twisted around and is pulling at my belt. She has my cock in her mouth and upstairs the printer goes to standby with a barely audible tweet. She's voracious, I arch against her mouth and substitute my index finger for my thumb in her anus, she does not resist. On the contrary, she moves her hips in a circular motion that helps the ringfinger enter as well. The thumb finds her clitoris, the forefinger her cunt, my wrist is killing me.
Vogue
hits the floor. Her teeth rake my foreskin. The printer upstairs tweets loudly and begins to print. I pull my cock out of her mouth and enter her cunt, from behind. It's still intact, it's still perfect, it's a reason to live. I'm grateful and relieved . . . . She shouts and thrusts against me, nearly throwing me off the couch. I grip her hips and dig in my heels, holding on for my life. The woman comes almost immediately, long before I'm ready, with a scream. Time passes, we work at it, then she comes again. We're out of practice, we need to spend more time together. Sweat has appeared on my forehead, a bead drops off my nose onto her back. Marlene drops
her head with a groan to the cabbage rose cushions, and raises her hips in the air. Below me I can see her asshole, I can hear it whispering to me, here, stupid, it's saying, put something here, it puckers come-hitherly. I pull my gleaming cock out of her cunt and place the length of it between the cheeks of her ass. I slide it back and forth, and wonder if I'll ever last long enough to get it into her, this is all rather exciting. But I'm hesitant, I don't want to risk all the progress we've made. Not for a mere thrill . . .
. As if reading my thoughts Marlene reaches behind and places the tip of my penis against her anus. Even though the printer upstairs is a dot matrix job, very fast, still it's printing madly. Somebody's downloading a large file into my system. She presses the tip down, and thrusts her behind upwards. It's tight. She quickly removes her hand, spits into it, and brings the spittle back. She moistens the tip lovingly, taking care that the points of her nails don't scratch too much, just a little . . . . This is a thing not to be rushed, but pressing down the length of my cock and raising my hips lets the head slip in. Marlene groans and strokes the remaining length. I try to move the tip in and out a little bit, to get her used to it. The printer pauses for a form feed, which advances the paper to the next page, and starts to print again. Then Marlene encircles the base of my cock with her thumb and forefinger and pulls the entire length of it into her ass in one long, slow glide. Reverse peristalsis. Look it up. We groan together, as if we've heard a bad pun. She digs her nails and teeth into the arm of the couch, with her other hand she pulls at my scrotum. I cannot make it last, and quickly I'm hunched over her back, buried in her ass, saddling her entirely with my weight, both hands clutching at her breasts, sighing and coming like a repressed priest. Marlene comes again, with a little help from her hand, and we yell together. The
telephone downstairs begins to ring. We ignore it. After awhile it stops ringing.

“This is a triumph of therapy,” I tell her. “I pronounce you cured of all emotional maladies.”

“Mmmmmmm . . . ,” she coos, and buries my face in her hair, and bites my shoulder.

“Let's get married,” I say cozily, into her hair. “I want you to make an honest tenant out of me.”

“Oh, darling,” Marlene says, “it'd be too beneath me, marrying one of my tenants. What would the girls next door say?”

“They charge by the half hour for this sort of thing I believe,” I suggested, “and think you're a fool for not doing the same.”

“That's a good idea,” Marlene said thoughtfully. “I can't believe I never thought of it.”

“I can't believe I suggested it.”

A serious expression cast a shadow over her face. “Jas?” she said quietly.

“Yes, dear?”

“You didn't do that just because you wanted to, did you.”

“Do what?”

“Ass-fuck me.”

I was silent. The very sounds of the words in her lovely mouth caused nerves to twitch in my spent dick.

“Jas?”

I gave her my most incredulous look. “Are you mad? Do you know how good that felt?”

“How good?”

“Why, why . . .”

“You're a writer, come on: How good did it feel?”

“Why, well, er . . .”

“You see?”

“Wait, wait. I'm . . . I'm shy . . .”

“Shy!”

“Actually, I was wondering what that printer is up to.”

“Well, you should. Nobody can trust a printer.”

“No, no. The machine upstairs. Can't you hear it?”

She listened, then shrugged. “So? It's always sounding like that up there.”

“But I'm not there.”

“What difference does that make? It's a computer, isn't it?”

“Well, sure, but . . .”

“But so it doesn't need you to work, does it?”

“Why of course it does! Like any machine, a computer is only as good as the person who's running it. Without someone around to keep an eye on things, it would soon go off the rails . . .”

“So you say. It sounds to me like it's getting along just fine without you.”

We listened for a while. Whatever was going on up there, form feeds and pages were flying over the platen, like pigeons in Manhattan. BOOK.SUB, looking after business. A 24-hour service.

After a time she asked me, “What's going on, then?”

“Beats me.”

“Aren't you curious?”

I thought a moment. It seemed to me that in fact I no longer cared about what was going on upstairs. I felt as if that room up there belonged to somebody else. It was filled with someone else's books and electronics, and what went on there was no business of mine. I suspected that whatever went on up there, so long as it did not affect my life adversely, even were the activity profitable or nefarious, the less I knew about it the better off I would be.

The more I thought about this proposition the better I liked it. My distance from the room upstairs and its contents seemed to increase as I contemplated it. At length, I could hardly remember what it was that went on up there. I recalled experiencing the same feelings when I gave up television, in 1972. At first there was a feeling of self-loathing and disgust. Then a great emptiness overcame me, and I felt as if I had no purpose in life. But gradually I saw that I could learn to do new things. I realized that I had made myself a great gift of freedom in the form of Time. And after that first minute of doubt and dreadful introspection, I never looked back. Perhaps Marlene and I could strike a deal with the contents of the room upstairs. Perhaps we could close it up and just collect the rent. I looked around Marlene's Victorian living room. The cabbage rose wall paper, the walnut armoire, the sideboard, the sliding doors that separated us from the dining room, now open, the waxed dining room table, the cabbage rose couch, magenta, lavender and cream . . . .

I kissed Marlene on the lips of her mouth, something I could not remember, to tell you the truth, having ever taken the trouble to do. I could tell right away this was a mistake, and kissed her again. Her lips were very soft, and currently displayed that fullness and color so peculiar to her features after sex, attributes I could dote on, I realized, for years to come.