Penthouse (3 page)

Perhaps she could wander back with Sammy as a pretext and see the vet another day soon. However, she could
hardly lug Sammy nearly a hundred blocks downtown for no particular reason these days, when Fen was home so much in the daytime.
Fen had been trained as a physician in Copenhagen, but he was a foreigner outside the AMA guild here in America. His various
impressive medical credentials were invalid in the United States. Therefore, at forty, Fen worked nights at the hospital as
a technician in the lab and studied insanely hard. When he was off, he came immediately home, and when Crystal got home from
her nurse’s job in a doctor’s office, he wolfed down the dinner she’d prepared and returned to his books. He set a stop clock
at 9:00
P
.
M
. with six hours on it—hours when he studied between sleeping fitfully, until he had used up all of them.

Crystal forgot Sammy and her surroundings as she puzzled over Fen. Her husband had been as handsome as a Teutonic god when
she met him. He was the color of tallow wax now, and his bloodshot gray eyes were ringed with blue bruises. A year ago he
was jumping on her constantly, engaging her in delicious sex—too much of it, so her pelvis burned and ached. This year, as
the September exam date approached, she had to waylay Fen into sex. She was resorting to being the aggressor—something new.
For example, jumping on his lap in front of the television set and massaging his thing out of its torpor.

At first she had credited her escalating desire to Fen’s neglect. But she felt the quiver of her sexual divining rod from
a source deeper underground, more mysterious than hitherto. She dreamed of her sexual organs blowing up like balloons at the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, billowing and bouncing as she moved about her day. The shoulder bag she took to work was stuffed
with underwear. Every time a handsome man twinkled his eyes at her, she
creamed and had to change panties. And only her tighter bras cinched in the disturbingly protuberant erection of her nipples,
which drenched her D-cup brassieres as well.
I’m all twat,
she thought half proudly, but wondering—a little worried, too—where her increased sexual urge would end.

Crystal had also noticed that the more wildly she thrashed on Fen’s axis of love, the more needy she got. Satisfaction seemed
to be losing its meaning for her. Instead, the act of sex hoisted her to a new plateau of heightened yearning. For the past
week, when she and Fen made love, Crystal grew wild for an encore. And this she did not usually get. The vet had been her
first infidelity. She and Fen made love in the morning when he was hyped from hitting the books. That one morning, as soon
as he’d pulled out of her, she bounced out of bed and took Sammy to Dr. Padillo’s. The appointment was for nine-thirty, and
there was no time to crown sex with Fen by masturbating on the bathroom rug. That was probably what set things off with Padillo—her
sheer, insatiable needs. But she wanted to be careful. With a doctor for a husband, so much was at stake that she was no longer
seeking out men.

Crystal doted on Sammy. She liked to think of herself as a dog person, but an attractive woman—let alone a gorgeous, leggy,
ripe-breasted sex siren like Crystal—could not walk a dog safely around the hospital at night. So she had decided to adopt
a cat. She wanted a crossbreed, and would have gone to a shelter except that Fen was afraid of bringing in some awful disease.
Instead she had heard about Dr. Padillo, this vet in the seventies on Amsterdam, who gave away homeless cats with all their
shots done free. Fen hated the cat. Crystal tried to placate Fen—she knew which side her bread was buttered on—but she would
not
budge on wanting a cat. It always calmed Crystal to think how she had got what she wanted—Fen. She used this ticket to lower
her hormonal temperature now. Crystal was a nurse whose fondest wish, like that of most of her profession, had been to marry
a doctor. As soon as Fen passed the licensing exams, he would be an M.D. Poor fellow—he had delusions about becoming an Albert
Schweitzer, but Crystal had more sensible plans. She was in the process of convincing him he could save just as many lives
on Park Avenue. Crystal was Manhattan-born and trained, and she had a survivor’s cynicism overlying her basically warm heart.
Crystal was positive that a mild-mannered, towhaired Danish pediatrician would have the mothers of the East Side eating out
of his hand.

Sammy looked more raccoon than cat. Crystal was proud when people asked if he was really a raccoon. She thought his lineage
must contain a raccoon ancestor somewhere. Fen maintained that this was genetically impossible, but how could the science
of genetics explain Crystal Fine Olsen herself ? Huguette, Crystal’s mother, a ballet teacher not yet in her fiftieth year,
was a majestically beautiful Haitian, black as ebony, thin as a rail. Her father was a Russian Jew with an intelligent, friendly,
generally dark, Mediterranean-style face and a slight, sinewy build. He sold marine insurance. He had gotten a free cruise
once on a boat to Bermuda, where her mother’s dance troupe had been performing. They married and settled in New York because
this was the city where they could live unremarked, an unconventional, interracial couple bypassed and, because they had severed
connections with family, atomized, yet neither heckled nor hurt. Then came
bebe
Crystal, their only child. Reuben Fine saw Crystal come down the slide in the delivery room. There was no questioning she
was
Huguette’s, or, he was confident, his. The translucent, pale-cream skin and pink-gold hair were remarkable features in themselves,
but considering
bebe’s
parents, a considerable shock. When Crystal’s eyes lost their baby blueness, they turned such a clear light green that in
some light the color fluctuated into blue. Huguette had saved a lock of that wondrous pink hair for Crystal, and in the summer,
when her hair lightened from eye-catching red to that preposterous, lustrous shade of bright pink that no chemical ever provided,
Crystal held up the ribbon with the fine baby hair to her own and saw they were quite identical, twenty-six years later.

Twelve weeks until those all-important exams. Fen thought he would pass them, but some foreign doctors took them again and
again and never passed, remaining measly, underpaid lab technicians forever. Crystal opened the Hallmark calendar that she
carried to recount the exact number of days until she would be Dr. Olsen’s wife. Each day brought her closer to the life that
Fen could help buy her.

Fen would try to make her declaw Sammy when Crystal got pregnant to protect the baby from scratches. Crystal’s cat, Fen sensed,
was what she most cherished. Crystal reached down and tickled Sammy’s whiskers. Sammy hunched his fat, round shoulders and
raised his raccoon face for more. “Even when I have a child [this was an absolute requirement for a pediatrician’s wife],
you’ll come first,” Crystal whispered. Then a thought picked at Crystal’s heart like a knife blade, as the strange urgency
rose in her again. Her mood darkened dramatically. “If I last that long,” she added under her breath.

Because lately when Crystal daydreamed, her mind concocted the most shocking sexual fantasies. They were
fueled by the totally unfamiliar, raging interior heat. She was a nurse trained at observation, and so she watched herself
at moments like this. It was not as though she indulged the yearning and stoked her own fire. The craving was in her, crying
out furiously to be slaked. Her inchoate longings threatened to engulf her sanity, to immolate her rational self. Ever since
she had acknowledged these feelings and cheated on Fen (just a little bit) with the vet, the surge of heat had caught her
increasingly unawares, sounding a terrifying alarm when she came within the purlieu of an attractive man.

Crystal was a pretty, smart girl who had never sold herself short because she had her sights set high. While other girls played
down virginity and gave themselves away to be popular with dates, Crystal had stayed intact. She’d adhered to her elders’
advice. “Keep your legs crossed, Crystal, and you’ll have your pick of them”—her mother had told her this from an early age.
Huguette did not mince words. She had been raped at nine and had had to masturbate a hideous and sadistic police official
to get her visa to the States at sixteen, and she drummed it into Crystal that men were animals. On this, as on other issues,
Huguette and Reuben, who was imbued with Orthodox Jewish thinking about the interactions between men and women, substantially
agreed. Crystal, an ambitious materialist true to the wholesome American female form, had been sailing through her third year
of marriage to Fen when the lightning struck. Suddenly she found herself ravaged by guilt, fear, and self-destructive fantasies.
Under the thin crust of a proper matron, Crystal was turning into a rapacious nymphomaniac. And Crystal knew it, being nobody’s
fool.

She did not even know that her womanhood ran this
deep until, mysteriously, the physical awareness cut through her everyday surface. Here it was again, the roar mounting her
pelvis, a fire curtain in her vagina. These were the strongest sensations she had felt in her life—Niagara Falls compared
to sex with Fen. And the fire issued solo, from her own trembling body. She longed for the heat to culminate just as, cascading
through her, it filled her with horrible dread.

A stricken look passed over Crystal’s face. Thus, rife confusion ended her smug doctor’s daydream. Postscripting it, the rushing
yawn inside her reoccurred. She was in an airplane, watching the purple shadow of a vast cloud blanket her being. She became
a cavernous space invaded by blazing golden rockets. The blood pulsed out of her brain and the upper part of her body into
her vagina, until she felt herself a torrent of physical craving.

Crystal felt utterly helpless to block her perturbed emotions, and yet cannily capable of acting them out. Soon, like a milkpod,
she began to send up a body language of subtle messages, like individual seeds, into the subway car. To relieve the engorged
churning of her sex, she bucked her torso forward and back as if riding horseback, her misbehavior camouflaged by the motion
of the train.

Her feeling surpassed normal sexual stimulation, Crystal was sure. It was like the appetency of a bloodthirsty goddess, and
rendered her divinely unafraid. Lust would swallow her like a crumb of bread unless she obeyed it, but how? A tail-snapping
dragon muzzled her, dragged her underground and quickly taught her. Now Crystal began a more insistent gyration of her pelvis.
Surreptitiously, she desired to be seen. Recklessness was her only choice, other than being immolated from the inside out
by her own
strange, sexy flames. She shut her eyes, rocking to an invisible rhythm.

With Crystal’s next jerking rotation forward, Sammy’s carrier plummeted to the train floor. In an instant he flung himself
at Crystal’s shoulders like a flying squirrel before it clattered. He reproached her with a sharp cry into her right ear and
caught his extended claws in a twist of her pink-red mane.

As her brain switched on again, the sensation receded. Crystal glanced around hesitantly, looking for signs of anybody’s noticing
her odd conduct. The cat’s spill had been a momentary diversion for the dozen or so bored fellow riders in the car, but their
faces quickly resettled into dead-pan. The car heaved and doors smashed open. Crystal put her gloves in her shoulder bag,
pried Sammy off, and maneuvered him like a jack back into the box. Settling the carrier under her arm, she edged out with
practiced speed just in time.

Walking briskly to compensate for the encumbrance of the carrier, Crystal proceeded to four metal elevators covered with graffiti
in the dim underground. The razorlike jaws of one were snapping shut. Next to it another, four times the size of a conventional
elevator, was open. It contained one middle-aged woman. Top-heavy with a French-twist wig, she chanted to herself from a bedraggled
paperbound book. Depressing but not dangerous, but Crystal had a dread of people addled like that—that they would attack with
a knife to her throat, avenging their madness against her sanity. Nonchalantly, so as not to rile the woman, Crystal shifted
in front of another elevator. Somewhat uncertainly, as their radars tried to pick up the reason Crystal rejected the open
elevator, several other
people nonetheless pushed in with the chanter. When the elevator banged shut, it left Crystal and Sammy alone.

Instinctively, Crystal put the cat down to free her hands and be less vulnerable. She positioned herself equidistant from
each possible next set of doors to fling open.

“Too heavy for you?” said a masculine voice behind her. The man approaching had sat catercorner from Crystal in the subway
car. A shiny hard hat had been dangling between his legs, giving rise to a comparison with a penis and its helmet in Crystal’s
twitching mind.

He was better-looking standing. A dark-green khaki shirt with the Army Corps of Engineers insignia hung as an outer jacket
on a broad-shouldered, muscular torso. A wide, pewter-buckled belt rode on top of his tight jeans, which, in turn, were tucked
into rugged cowboy boots. He spoke softly, as though they had been carrying on a conversation. The way his blue eyes penetrated,
Crystal imagined that this was how it had been.
Aha,
she thought excitedly,
this stranger caught a seed from my milkpod.

If the other subway riders had seen only a peaches-and-cream beauty with a behemoth cat, Corporal Cowboy saw a woman dripping
with sexual invitation. “Don’t deny you were eyeing me on the train,” he said.

“I didn’t even notice you,” humphed Crystal without a blink. She swung her sheet of hair over one shoulder nervously, and
they both watched as it spread in a silky mat of tendrils across her chest. Her breasts looked like fat bunnies nesting in
soft grass. “Like hell, lady,” said Corporal Cowboy. “You sent out the signals for a three-alarm fire. Look, I don’t start
my job for another three hours. How about my coming your way?”