Hot Properties (51 page)

Gelb lay between her legs, his head moving up and down while he worked his mouth over her clitoris. The warmth spread from there, radiating into her belly, down her thighs, her breasts feeling the heat wave over her like a rising tide. She felt gentle on the sea of sensation, floating there blissfully, basking in the sun of its relaxation. She could rest in the midst of its excitement forever, she felt, without the surf picking her up to crash on the shore.

She glanced down at him. His cold eyes were staring at her from under his eyebrows while he licked, checking on her progress. He was so achievement-oriented that he never seemed to relax, to let any experience simply be itself, a man forever tugging at the sleeves, straightening the tie, tucking in the shirt of life; always dressing for a job interview, desperate to make a good impression, or at least an impression. A-for-effort Gelb, she thought, and he began to move his tongue rapidly sideways, pushing her knob one way, then the other, and suddenly she
was
riding a wave, cresting up in the air, the sky spinning, her arms reaching for an anchor to hug. …

When she was done, he moved up to her navel and kissed it, smiling like a prankster. “Good, huh?” he asked.

“Yep,” she answered. “We’re getting better.”

“Oh, you’re so full of shit. I got you and you know it.”

“Oh, shut up.” She sighed. “What am I going to do about David?”

“Leave him,” he said, and put a hand around a breast, squeezing it, staring at the effect on her nipple.

“I just pack and say ’bye?”

“Yeah!”

“Is that how you’re going to do it with Elaine?”

Gelb looked at her angrily. “I have kids!” he claimed.

“Oh, please. You don’t give a shit about your kids.”

He sat up, staring furiously. She smiled sweetly. He frowned at his lack of effect. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes I do. You’ve got a great life. You’re the most important man in your held, your wife is beautiful and she loves you—”

“Bull—”

“—
she
loves you, your kids adore you, and you have a beautiful mistress who writes brilliantly. You don’t care what you feel about people, you only care what they feel about you, and you’re the center of everyone’s attention, which is the closest you can come to happiness.”

“You didn’t say you love me.”

“I don’t. I’m attracted to you. I like power-hungry greedy bastards like you. David’s just like you—only younger and not as mean.”

“You like talking tough, don’t you? But you’re whistling in the dark. You’re conventional. You want the three kids and the station wagon—”

“And a big fluffy dog to slobber on the upholstery.”

“Right,” Gelb said, smirking. This kind of exchange had become a game with them. She liked it, the saying of horribly selfish unsayable things. The abandon of it was thrilling, like their sex, heightened by the constant knowledge of the taboos they were breaking.

“So what I want to know,” Patty said, “is when you dump me? When does a mistress get too old? Forty?”

“Thirty-five,” Gelb said matter-of-factly.

“You mean it, don’t you?” Patty said aloud as it occurred to her. “You’re really not kidding.”

“Of course I’m kidding, love,” he said tenderly, but he moved off the bed toward the dresser, fumbling in a pocket for cigarettes. “You’re the one who doesn’t love me, remember? You’re going to bed with me so your book’ll do well.” Gelb puffed furiously on the cigarette once, glanced at his wristwatch stretched out on the dresser like a sun-bather, and said, reaching for his pants, “I’ve gotta get back to the office.”

She stayed in bed until long after he was gone. She stared down at her naked body. Small, white, young. There was some tiring in the skin, the beginnings of looseness—but she was beautiful. She looked too small, however, her belly button innocent and lonely, hovering quizzically above the center of all the fuss—asking her unanswerable questions about all the grief of love and men.

David looked them in their eyes, searching for a hint that they knew. He paced up and down the broad, crowded, messy street, his legs so weak from dreadful anticipation that he had to stop every twenty paces or so and lean against a building or sit on a stoop. He had arrived on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-third fifteen minutes early, located the phone booths she mentioned, and now watched them anxiously, terrified to make the final call and equally worried that somehow, impossibly, all the phones would be busy at the appointed hour and stay so for too long. In fact, they were rarely in use so far, but he kept his eyes on them, vowing to take possession of one if he saw a rush to use them.

In between his starts and stops he looked up at the buildings, many of them lofts or brownstones, their shades drawn, wondering in which one she was located. He stared at the blank, dirty windows, the traffic groaning and roaring beside him, and thought: No one would hear the screams. They were anonymous, these buildings, all the entrances desolate, monitored by intercoms, no doormen, no happy tenants with busy comings and goings. Maybe they were all whorehouses, each room occupied by sex: Perverts Row.

He walked himself toward the phone booths, grabbing on to the parking meters for support. He had prayed that the booth next to his would be empty, but the moment after he had situated himself, quarter ready to put in, a man got into the one next to him, able to overhear. But that was silly: his end of the conversation wasn’t worth eavesdropping on. “Do it,” he said to himself, and dialed. It rang three, four times, and he began to relax. She wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have to go through—

“Hello?”

“This is … this is Bill.”

“You’re early,” she said. “Call back in five minutes.”

He hung up. They hadn’t finished chopping up the last one, he thought, but this time the fear really did seem ridiculous. In her hello there was the harried tone of a shopkeeper juggling customers, bored with the work—despite all the rhetoric, he knew she was just a whore. She’d do what he wanted. In any event, she certainly wouldn’t really hurt him.

Now the wait was unbearable because he was eager. He called back in three minutes. She was in control now. “I’m in 684 West Twenty-Third, next to the florist behind you about twenty feet.” He had noticed the building, suspected it of being likely. “I’m in three A. See you in a minute.”

He hung up and walked quickly, not meeting anyone’s eyes, into the building and stood in its tiny vestibule, looked at the intercom system, none of the apartment buzzers supplied with names, and rang three A. The buzz back was instantaneous. He moved quickly to open the locked door and bumped into a man with a horrendously guilty look in his eyes who quickly brushed by him and out.

That was her last customer, he thought, and, getting into the small elevator that was right there, having left off the guilty man, he recalled what he could of his face: pale, unshaven, the eyes worriedly not meeting his, a miserable, hunted look. It made him feel better. And as he rode up, he wondered why. All his reactions were the opposite of what they should be. But nothing about this obsession, and his pursuit of it, had ever made sense. Except now, walking down the narrow hallway, past, to his surprise, a laundry room (what the hell was it doing in a common hallway on the third floor?) and up to a quite ordinary door, at last he felt it was over. He would know now, and even if his fate were to be a terrible one, the awful wondering, the constant doubts would be gone. He rang the bell gladly.

Fred sat up in the bed, feeling foolish. He had finally moved toward Marion on the couch and started to kiss her. He had tried to put a lot of movement and passion into it, but it felt fake, and Marion saved the moment by smiling. “I think we’d better just get into bed,” she said. “We’re not strangers.”

He had undressed in the bedroom, their old bedroom, unchanged from when he had last slept there, while Marion disappeared into the bathroom. He wondered whether she was planning something, going to come out in some sort of sexy nightgown. He hoped not. It would seem pathetic, just like his maneuver on the couch. Whatever their situation, they certainly weren’t courting.

She didn’t. She came out in her robe, naked underneath, walking to the bed and shedding it before quickly crawling under the covers and snuggling into his arms. “What were you doing in there?”

“Putting in my diaphragm,” she said. “I didn’t want to stop to do it later.”

He had always complained about the effects of breaking off foreplay for the sake of contraception, so this too was another sweet attempt on her part to make things between them amicable. To improve on the past. It was their enemy. All the things they had done and the way they had done them were to be avoided. He felt the weight of her head on his chest heavily. The task semed too great.

He shook off this feeling, moved her head away, and again began kissing with mock passion. She went along this time, brushing a leg against his penis while he pressed his upper thigh against her groin. After a while the self-consciousness passed, he felt aroused, and she seemed to be also. He began to hope again that it might work.

He threw the covers off them. The lights were still on— she had usually insisted they be turned off and he realized that the fact they weren’t was another concession to him. He looked at her body. She kept her eyes closed, her hands urging him to return. He looked at her belly, her flabby maternal stomach, her thick bush of hair. It was the body of a real woman, not the models of magazines, but the real comfortable female form of nature. He loved it. Staring at it in the bright light, leaning down to kiss it, moving his hands under her soft substantial buttock, feeling the warmth and give and pliancy of her fat felt good.

She was tensing against his investigations, embarrassed (he realized for the first time) by her body, assuming he didn’t want it. But he did! He kissed and moved back to look, seeing things he had never noticed, feeling her sex, utterly different. Soft and warm. Home. He wanted to be inside her. Kept safe inside. No longer fighting the hard ungiving world.

She seemed relieved when he entered her. She hugged him to her gratefully. The ease of her body seemed designed for him, from the glove of her wet vagina to the soft pillows of her breasts. To be inside her forever in this blissful peace was all he wanted, all he wanted from life and the world; acceptance and comfort; a place to be, nothing more, just be, without effort or pain.

Marion urged him with her hips. He began to move. He felt reproved by her movement, assumed she had been displeased by his stillness, his willingness to remain parked inside. He moved. Withdrew and pressed back in hard. She liked that. For all her gentleness, she liked him to move hard and fast. Had said so in therapy in fact, complained (to his astonishment) that he liked foreplay too much, that she liked to screw vigorously.

She had tried so hard—shouldn’t he? He pushed himself, pulling out and then slamming back in, each time harder, surprised that she liked the force, and never reacted with pain, even though it felt to him that their pelvic bones must be bruised and battered by now.

And the itch had begun. The restless tickling yearning of his penis, desperate for more and more sensation while he felt its liquids gather and hope for escape. He tried somehow to restrain it despite the powerful tease of moving out and then quickly into the softest, most desirable home in the world. When he felt the cool air on his balls and most of the length of his penis, only the head peeking inside at the warm fires, the longing to return was overwhelming. And then the relief, after the collision of their privates, the sweet relief of complete docking in the harbor was so quickly taken away by her desire for more and more and more …

He started to come without warning. He tried to cut it off, freezing his movements, but she pulled at him, and the liquid dribbled out of him guiltily, guests skulking out early from a party, hiding their escape from the host.

The fuel was gone but she wanted to continue. He pushed in and out, praying he would stay hard. Suddenly everything felt uncomfortable. Her substantial thighs pressing against him were hot and irritating. Her big belly and wide hips seemed too crowded to penetrate. Each time he tried to press farther in, they seemed to frustrate him, the goal of her pelvic bone receding. I’m losing it, he thought, listening to her breathing to judge if she was near climax. He reached down with a hand to infiltrate it in the traffic jam below and speed things up, but she angrily grabbed his hand and moved it away, putting her hands on his ass and pushing him in at her, irritably.

He pushed. He pushed. There was no goddamn way past all the flesh and hair. Everything was awkward. No place to rest his head: having to hold the upper part of his body up, as though he were exercising, not making love.

She began to moan. They were choked sounds—coughs repressed at a concert. Quick, short sounds increasing in frequency. He gathered himself for a final effort and pushed in hard—feeling nothing, the bottom half of his body numb—but she did let out one long last satisfied moan. The tension in her body evaporated and it was over. Thank God.

By the time Lois called back, he knew. After her hello, * he made the accusation immediately: “You’re in love with somebody else,” he said coldly.

“Uh … yeah,” she agreed,

“All right,” he said. “Good-bye.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and laughed. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“I’m not hanging up. But I’m not kidding.”

“You can’t blame me!”

“I’m not blaming you.”

“You dumped me. You didn’t even call to say you were dumping me!”

“I didn’t dump you. Jesus Christ, what a phrase! I needed time to think. I told you that.”

“Oh, I see,” she answered sarcastically, challenging him. “And now you’ve figured it out?”

Well, she had him there. He was dead wrong, as wrong as a human being could be: his position was illogical, arrogant, deceitful, probably insincere, certainly selfish. “Who is he?” Tony asked. “How serious is this?”

“Uh … what do you mean? What do you—I’m not gonna report to you. What’s the matter with you? I really expected you to have …” She stopped.