A Moment of Doubt (2 page)

“Epic, isn't it, Mr. Windrow?” Thimbelina had turned to appraise the scenario of his own creation again. “A beautiful thing, wasted now, soon to be . . .” He turned again to the window. Tiny, staring at Windrow, began to use his free hand to play with his own ass.

I can't take it anymore, either, and pace out to the mailbox. Several of my subscriptions have expired. A check, overdue for six months, arrives miraculously. This will allow me to survive for another week, if I don't pay the rent, which has been due for three weeks. I hate to do this to my landlady. She's a doll and would probably allow me to fuck her for a discount, perhaps for the whole thing. She doesn't even need the money. But she owns my home, what can I do but put up with her conditions? A catalog for gardening tools, and a flyer inquiring after a lost child. Actually, she'd love to throw me out because she's read my last couple of detective novels, but she's afraid to do so for the same reason. Someone stupidly gave them to her as ‘light' entertainment during one of her periodic trips to Club Med. About a week later she remembered where
she'd seen the name before. All those checks! Month after month, for years! She'd no idea she's harboring an artist, she thought I was just a bum. Wait till she realizes the difference. She's begun to get the idea already, by getting me to autograph certain pages of
So Long, Pockface
, detailing in some detail a rather arcane codex to the Kama Sutra made up entirely out of my imagination. She thought she knew that book backwards and forwards, as it were, the Kama Sutra I mean. She has taken, it seems, the trouble to know my books backwards and forwards, at least it would seem so by the way she quotes them to me and makes coy little references to events and remarks in them, but most of these naturally go right over my head, since she obviously knows the books very well, much better than I, at least, know them. She could let on to me about the page numbers of purple-assed baboons in bondage, coyly, and I'd be none the wiser. I try to make the books interesting, to a certain cut of mind, but I can't be expected to remember how or why I have done so in the past. It's hit or miss anyway, so far as I'm concerned. Usually I just try to write dreamy, with lots of knives and forks and trains and assholes and stuff, so that it seems a certain kind of inevitability is involved, an inexorable kind of plant life is growing up between the words as you read them, or as you leave them in the dark, folded against one another, behind you as you go, so that, even as you refer backwards to a passage you've already read, to clarify the one you're reading now, the older one seems unrecognizable as you reread it, and you can't reconcile what's on the page in front of you with your own until now very clear memory of it, which after all was just installed there moments or at the most a few days before, while you were on the A train ignoring the fat lady, blind, with a stick and a cup in one hand, groping the air in front of her with the other,
making her way up the car singing “Over the Rainbow,” in the most plaintive voice you've ever heard, the crustiest New Yorkers dropping coins in her cup. It's like the first time you ever heard Judy Garland sing the tune, knowing she was fucked up on pills already and slated to die a horrible death in between the recording and your audition of it, while you were still suckling papaya juice in a childhood island paradise, hopelessly ignorant of the ways and steel teeth and leafy humid dick-shaped tendrils of the world.
Vagina dentata
, let's don't forget all that, too, Kama Sutra, while we're at it. That's the kind of writing I try to do.

Of course, the simpler you keep it, the better off you are. But no matter how you feel about it, you always want to emend, amend, interlineate, stipulate, regrind, make corollaries, footnote, restart, delete, and generally inflate your original train of thought.

“It's not unlike having a giant turbine carefully wrapped in your colon, Mr. Windrow, with all of the Hoover Dam coping with all of the snowmelt of the springtime Sierra Nevada coursing through it, and your prostate lights up like the city of Las Vegas, and your balls tingle like Tijuana next to it, and you recreate the river, plunging through the tubes, into the gorge below . . .”

You can't imagine how many times I've slaved over that passage. Tweaking it, stuffi
ng it, charging it with emotion, meaning, sex . . . I type almost as fast as I lie, about 90 words a minute . . . . It's hard, it's a bitch concentrating on this stuff, especially the first time through, especially with the landlady breezing in and out all the time in her diaphanous kimono, buttonless, sashless, undergarmentless, her hair just so, lips wet and slightly
parted, you can't miss them, especially when you're on the john in the little closet at the end of the hall, reading a computer magazine, and in she comes, there's only one way to get from the hallway to the bathtub in the next room, and that's through the john. So she's always, it seems, just going in to have a bath, and you somehow forgot to shoot the bolt in the door, or just stepping out of the bath, wet and fresh, hair up in a towel, another wrapped around her. The second towel always covers her breasts very well, she's shy about them, though I personally think they're magnificent . . . Restif de la Bretonne declared a woman's breasts as proof for the existence of God and I believe him . . . But the bottom of the towel never quite does the job. It stops midway along the cheeks of her ass, even when she's standing in front of me and leaning back, trying to pull the hem down over her buns, excusing herself to me for interrupting me in the ‘library', as she calls it, seeing as how every time she does this I'm trying to get some reading done, and squeezing past me toward the hall door. This is no easy feat. She has to step over me, sitting on the john with my pants around my ankles, over my knees to get in between me and the hall door, which of course opens inward, awkward. Naturally, she's tall. And always, always she gets wedged between the door and my face, so that, the eighth or ninth time this happened, instead of excusing myself and blushing and absentmindedly standing up and leaning back against the toilet tank, knocking all the old copies of
Reader's Digest
stacked on top of it to the floor, so that she could see damn well I had this immense hardon, the eighth or ninth time I say, I just sat there, just sat there, and stared at this clean, damp, silken bush not one inch from my nose. I could smell her, I could practically taste her. She's dragging the towel down to cover her ass and making all these
flustered excuses, so that the front of the towel actually picks up and droops down onto the top of my head, I'm surrounded by her smells and her textiles, so that, still reading the computer magazine in my left hand, I put my right finger up her slippery, tight cunt, and thumb her clitoris. Isaac Newton discovered gravity, right?

Her breath hisses past her teeth. It sounds like a case of whiskey sliding across the countertop at the liquor store, New Year's Eve, paid for. Good whiskey. Noting my place in the article on CP/M utilities, I manipulate her labia. She moves her hips elliptically, suggestive. The penis, throwing off its downcast attitude, leaps up past the rim of the toilet, almost tearing off the prepuce on the bottom edge of the seat. It stands there, lurid, colorful and erect. It looks like Coit Tower at Christmastime, or most other municipally festive monuments, for that matter, at that time of the year. Think of the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, the Washington Monument, Le Tour Eiffel, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, think of the Master Builder high atop the scaffold dropping the wreath over the tip of his spire and try not to laugh, go ahead, this is the twentieth century, go ahead. I'm busy. Marlene—you might as well know her name, she frequently has rooms to let—right away Marlene has her tongue rimming the lips of her open mouth and her breath coming and going like a beautiful apoplectic executive's, jogging up the Kearney steps with a hangover, one hand gripping the doorknob and the other buried in a fistful of my hair. She clutches my mouth to her cunt and begs me to suck. Lick, suck, please, she said. The towel opens along an inverted V up her side and falls off as she places one of her large, highly arched, beautifully veined, perfectly formed feet on the toilet tank behind me, to facilitate the advantage I already have of being slightly beneath her, so that, looking up, I have this vision of a purplish-pink, steaming, smoking, dripping, paradisical garden, hung all round by dusky damp tendrils of mercy and passion, which is what any good optimist should see when he looks up, to heaven, but rarely does.

She clutches my face to her cunt and it's time to go to work. Rain begins to fall on the roof. Marlene screams for no apparent reason. I play a game, like mumble-de-peg or backgammon or any of those stupid frolics kids waste their time on, with pegs and holes, or parking attendants with slots and cars. The finger goes in her asshole, the thumb in her cunt, and my tongue finds her clitoris. The latter is presented to the teeth for little nips. She hisses and howls. My hand and face are soaked. A telephone rings down the hall. The doorbell chimes simultaneously. The rain increases. Now she has both her hands full of my hair, and rubs my skull against her crotch like she's grating cheese. I roll the folded computer magazine into the kerf of her ass and tilt it in and out of the juices now so copiously flooding my hand, my face, her thighs. I riffle the pages like a deck of cards against her anus. With a shout she stumbles against the door and the frosted glass rattles in its sash, her foot slips off the toilet tank and hits the handle. The john flushes with a roar, and her screams announce her orgasm over the sound of the rushing waters with the combined terror and adrenaline of all the assholes who ever threw themselves over Niagara Falls in barrels. I am wrested off the toilet and into the wall with a crash, my head and shoulders jammed in between the bowl and the paper roll, down to the floor, still gnawing away, all my knuckles buried in her streaming orifices, her ass clutched to my face, gasping for air, for life, for meaning itself, where there is little or none, but more than most places.

But wait. She's found my cock. My hips are over the bowl and I'm upside down head first into a pile of
Reader's Digests
with asswipe unrolling into my face. But she's standing over me with this incredible leer on her face, her lips distorted into a Mardi Gras of lust, the blood teeming beneath her features, her lips swollen, her cheeks inflamed, my balls in her hands. She turns and bends over my cock and sets to work. She takes the whole thing into her mouth, its head rings her epiglottis like a test of strength in a carnival, we can both feel it, my balls heatedly throwing on a load of come like ten frantic sweating eight-armed Martians filling ten eight-doored baggage cars with huge sacks of letters with eight stamps written by octillions of people . . . . Her teeth drag off a layer of molecules on its way out. I howl in pain and pleasure— which is which? The rain is pouring on the roof now, the doorbell, audible throughout the four-story house, rings loud and long. People next door and on the street probably think someone's getting murdered in here, and they're right in a way, somebody is getting murdered here, in a parallel universe, underneath a computer magazine on my desk, somebody has to be getting murdered, it's absolutely necessary, this thing has gone on for too long, for pages already, without so much as an iota of gore, kill now, stupid, now, kill before it's too late, kill before they notice you can't write, or that they can't read, or that their dicks are hard and they're on a bus where everyone can see and they're too weak to be buying and transporting this kind of trash because they can't stop themselves from reading it and getting hardons on buses because, after all, it's so fucking long between stops . . . .

My load chokes her, and if she dies, I can stop writing for the day. She makes that wonderful sound you frequently hear in bars, when some Perrier goes down the
wrong way. The trouble with the cricoid. Good title for a medical thriller. But she's an animal, her natural voracity overcomes the mere mechanics of the situation, by sheer desire and talent and uninhibited abandon she is able to warp the plumbing into the fulfillment of her lust. As a result, still the come comes. She's opened a direct conduit from my balls to her tonsils, and it's like her tonsils are singing in the shower, turning in it, cupping their little hands up to the flow, directing it toward their faces, their breasts, their cunts—they're teenaged twin sisters—their hair, their necks, presenting their lovely long perfectly curved throats to it, bathing, exulting, lavishly reveling in the preposterous, opulent, hot supply of fresh, high-pressure, municipal sperm, on the planet Spermola.

I discover I've been shouting a bit myself. Two stories below people are pounding on the door and frantically ringing the doorbell. You'd think they'd be used to this sort of thing by now. But people who don't fuck all the time have no imagination, and no standard of comparison. Above me hovers the most fuckable asshole I've seen in a long time. It looks like the Masonic eye, radiating from atop a pyramid formed by two white, smooth thighs, it looks like an energy portal to another high-energy universe, a place where entropy is more than just a way of life, capable of sucking in everything that gets near it, particularly my cock, if I could get it up again, but likely also everything else in the room, the toilet paper, the
Reader's Digests
, the computer magazine, the five or six bits of change that have fallen out of my jeans onto the toilet tank, the floor, and into the bowl itself. Marlene's busy licking my balls, getting physical, cooing over what they've just done like good little students. And I'm gazing up at her lovely asshole like it's Halley's comet and I'm Halley, or it's Juliet's balcony and I'm Romeo, etc., only
marginally aware that my back's killing me, or that the neighbors have begun to batter the front door down, or that I've managed to pass the last few moments quite content to live with the fact that I've not killed anyone yet today, and may not get around to it . . . .