Quiver (23 page)

Steak with creamy mushroom sauce. Doug, her husband, likes a decent steak—not that it is easy to find one in L.A. not like back home. The penis leaves her mouth, slides its head around both nipples then inserts itself between the cheeks of her ass. This time she hopes they’ve remembered to use enough lubricant. She is pushed onto the fake leopard-skin rug while two fingers worm themselves into her.

She can see Doug just behind the lights. He is staring at her, his face flushed. He’s started to look more like that recently. He looks too excited. It worries her.

“Cut! Goddamn! Wood problem!” Winston, a tall, shy medical student, whose athletic frame and outrageous college fees had landed him in the industry, is having problems
maintaining an erection. The makeup assistant wraps a short white robe around Candy while the fluffer attempts to encourage Winston’s cock into some semblance of verticality. Candy’s bored. The crew, used to temperamental members, light up cigarettes and huddle behind the camera, complaining about the union rates.

Doug checks that the reel is loaded properly, then hurries over to his wife. “You look great, darl, hot, hot, hot!”

“Do we have any mushrooms in the fridge?” she asks, hating to talk about her role on set.

It has only been three years since they left Tocumwal, Australia. “Exotic dancer” is what she’d told her mother, who was sensible enough to bank the checks and ask no questions. After all, Cheryl alias Candy had Doug with her, and Doug, although not the brightest, had the ferocious loyalty of a bulldog. Her Cheryl was going to be all right.

She’d made a couple of films in Canberra, low-budget, shot mainly in disused office space, a makeshift set and the obligatory bed. Her second film,
Gone with the Whip
, had suddenly taken off in America, winning her the title of second best butt in the industry. It was her ticket out. Besides, her American costar had told her that the money was better and you had some real status. Status is what Candy craved. She was a consummate performer who prided herself on her little tricks, the gestural hallmarks she had built up over the years. It had been Doug that had talked her into it. He had suggested that she audition in the first place. Both of them had been avid watchers of pornography in the early part of their marriage, and Candy had always boasted that she could do better than the pouting, buxom blondes who always looked vaguely bored. And she had.

“OK, let’s get this masterpiece under wraps!” the director, a failed documentary maker, announces, waving his arms uselessly in a vain attempt to boost the flagging morale. They saunter back to their positions and Candy leans across the ottoman.

Cock slides gracefully into ass. Cut to close shot of face, sweat on brow, full lips pushed forward, mouth half-open, tongue extending, spreading lips of cunt. Cut to close shot of other woman. Blonde, bigger breasts, shining, impossibly round and plastic, perfect moaning. Volume up. That’s it. That’s good. Moan louder.

“Are you coming to bed?” Doug is watching videos in the small lounge-room of their condominium. Candy stands in the doorway holding the dirty dinner plates, remnants of the mushroom sauce still clinging to the china. Doug doesn’t bother to turn away from the monitor.

“Later,” he mutters distractedly. Candy watches herself giving head to the blonde while being fucked by two men—one in the ass, the other vaginally. She remembers that at the time she’d been thinking about the sea. A dream she’d had about watching it dry up around her body. Funny thing was she’d been wearing her wedding dress. She glances across at the poster on the wall. They’d bought it just for a joke, at the last minute at the airport. “Discover the wonders of Tocumwal,” it boasts, above an image of a river with a platypus on its banks. Sometimes she misses home. Even the tedium of the one petrol station with the one pool table the kids used to hang out at. That was where she’d first met Doug, playing pool. He’d been on a delivery run for his uncle, from the next town up the highway, and he was handsome. Now she wouldn’t have said it
was love at first sight, but she had thought so then. Above the condominium the whirling of a patroling helicopter startles her back into the present.

Doug slips off the couch and crawls toward the screen, staring steadily at his wife as the blonde parts the two cheeks to reveal one cock thrust violently into her asshole while the other nudges blindly between her legs. He presses the remote control and replays the image, the sound of Candy’s faked orgasm reverberating off the low ceiling.

“You’ll wake the neighbors.”

He doesn’t reply. Candy shrugs, taking the plates into the tiny kitchen and stacking them into the dishwasher. The dishwasher. Her mum had always wanted one, and it had been the first thing Candy had bought with the profits of her first American movie,
Candy Does Randy
. Stupid title, but Randy, a jovial man in his late forties, a veteran of the industry and renowned for his oral skills, had made Candy laugh as he parodied the director, a young film grad, desperate to make an artistic impression.

“Candy, make a killing then get out quick. Don’t become like me, a man on the end of a penis. It’s a living but it’s not a life.”

Randy was the first one to introduce her to dictionaries. He used to read them between takes. “To lengthen my vocabulary,” he’d say with a wink, then throw words at her like
trajectory
or
munificent
, rolling them around his mouth like lollies. Candy would watch fascinated as, naked, he’d illustrate the rounded vowels with a flick of his hips—his erection bouncing as his hands curved in the air like a demented Indian dancer. It was Randy who got her hooked.

“Mummification.”

“Not now love, I’m watching.” He doesn’t even turn around. Doug had never used words much. For years Candy had projected a whole lexicon onto his grunts. And for years she’d been satisfied with that until now. The word “vilification” looms suddenly in her mind. For the past six months she’d progressed from the office edition of the
Webster’s
through to the
Oxford Unabridged
. But she had never succeeded in interesting Doug in even the shortest, most prosaic adjectives. The idea of using her newfound vocabulary excited her. It excited her sexually.

She switches on the dishwasher and listens for a moment to the water rushing down the pipes. Her feet ache from the high heels, her cunt is sore and she misses her mother. The sound of a cracking whip comes from next door. The video must have reached the S & M scene. A naive young countess marries a cruel aristocrat who forces her to commit bizarre sexual acts. Or was it the vampires? Candy can’t remember. It had been her fourth or fifth film and, as most of them took only a week to shoot, she’d learned to develop amnesia in post-production. Besides, if she was ever confused she only had to ask Doug. He’d watched every film she’d made at least ten times, which surprised Candy as he’d been on the crew of all of them. Doug Perkins: clapper loader. It was a clause she insisted on in her contracts. But lately…salacious, marmoreal, transmogrification…She stretches the vowels out with her tongue. Even sounding the words silently makes her horny.

She puts the kettle on and glances back through the door. Doug watches his wife being suspended. She swings gently in her harness, her brown hair cascading down onto the fur rug. A large man in an executioner’s hood and bondage harness, his belly bulging over his erect penis, raises his hand and flicks a
small whip across Candy’s buttocks. Doug moans without realizing it. Candy sits down on the couch and ruffles his hair.

“Eugenics,” she whispers seductively using the lower descent she usually saves for the films. He moves closer to the screen, irritated. She tries running her toes down his back. “Inguinal, synergism,
pianissimo
.” Doug doesn’t even bother to turn around. On screen, her breasts bounce as she swings past the executioner. In the small lounge-room, makeup off and wrapped up in her favorite dressing gown, Candy tries to remember the last time they had a conversation. She can’t. He is always watching.

She looks at the back of his head. A short dialogue would be nice, something like “osculate,” “sonorously,” “viscosity” would be just enough to get her off. Followed by a cuddle. She liked that the best, just being held. Recently she’d really needed it. She stretches then gets up.

“See you in there.”

He grunts and fast-forwards to the climax, where Candy is being fucked by a man standing on a chair while she sucks off another. Jissom spurts across her breasts and face. The money shot.

It is only later, lying alone in the waterbed Doug had bought at a discount store, that Candy realizes that she can’t remember the last time Doug had even kissed her. Let alone made love to her.

Through the wall she can still hear him groaning to the sound of her own faked orgasm as Candy does Randy while meeting the whip. “Serendipity,” she whispers to herself and cradles the pillow, rocking.

T
here were ten of them in total: five men and five women, busy festive shoppers. All of them had left their purchasing until the last minute—Christmas Eve. Stacey and Deidre were the last to get into the lift—on the sixteenth floor, haberdashery and household appliances. Both were laden with bags. Stacey was carrying two turkeys, four Christmas puddings and a Super-8 video camera for Jock. She glanced around. The elevator was packed, making body contact unavoidable.

She noticed a small blond woman about five months pregnant. Next to her, pressed into a corner, was a tall, disheveled man of about thirty whose dress sense was still trapped in his adolescence. The way he nodded suggested that he was profoundly deaf. Next to him, clutching a roll of canvas, was another man, good looking, with pockmarked skin. Squashed behind him was an elegant woman in her late thirties, dressed in stylish European clothes. Stacey thought she might be a tourist; she was carrying a program advertising a series of concerts at the arts center. There was something smug about her that Stacey decided she didn’t like. She was talking to an older woman, a very statuesque blonde in her mid-forties, who handled
herself with a great deal of confidence. Next to the elegant woman stood a handsome older man, obviously wealthy, judging from his clothes. He looked European and, from the territorial way he held the woman’s hand, Stacey correctly surmised that he was her husband. The large blonde turned to her companion.

“It’s bats. There’s a whole colony of them on the site. Apparently they have special mating caves scattered all around the city. Just my luck to have one right on site.”

“Mating caves?”

“Bats are very promiscuous. I researched it, fascinating stuff. Of course, it varies from species to species. This is just your ordinary fruit bat. But with giant flying foxes, the rutting males fly into a cave full of sleeping females and start to emit loud cries to attract them. They continue to scream and flap their wings until finally they produce a long series of shrill shrieks, and in the middle of that the male suddenly grabs the female, wraps his wings around her and takes her from behind.”

“I’ve had men like that.”

“Haven’t we all,” the pregnant woman chimed in.

The two men behind Stacey broke into laughter. She glanced around. From the look of his soiled, rough hands the taller man was obviously a gardener or workman of some sort. He stood grinning at the handsome man beside him. Stacey tried to guess his neighbor’s occupation but couldn’t place him; she noticed that he was holding a cardboard carton labeled
ICE CREAM CONES
—100. What a man like that would do with a hundred ice-cream cones, she couldn’t even begin to guess.

“At the height of the rutting season, the cry of a single bat can cause every other male bat to become sexually excited, in a kind of mood transfer, and before you know it, the whole cave turns into a screaming orgy.”

“Sounds like a great game of basketball,” the ice cream man, Jerome, interjected, grinning wickedly at Dee.

“Or war,” Humphrey wryly threw in, surprising the other men in the lift, who had him marked as aloof. Deidre, suffering slightly from claustrophobia, dipped her head in the direction of the sniggering men. Karl looked across. Australian men are so infantile, he thought, and was momentarily thankful for what he perceived as his European sophistication.

“Or just rampaging testosterone in general,” said Sandra, the blonde, as she glanced at Deidre. They were about the same age, but Sandra would have categorized Deidre as someone who was in need of sexual liberation—except for the red scarf that peeped out flamboyantly from under her very conservative suit. The facade is not what it seems, Sandra noted correctly. Meanwhile, her friend Katherine was acutely aware of Humphrey, whose intense gaze hadn’t left her body since the moment she had entered the elevator. Normally this would have irritated Katherine, but since she had become alienated from her husband, all kinds of curious emotional and sexual liaisons had infiltrated her life. She was convinced that some great spiritual patterning lay underneath these couplings, like a wonderful message. If only she could break the code. She returned Humphrey’s gaze, but found that she couldn’t continue to look into those eyes without an embarrassing sense of sexual arousal.

Jodie just wanted to sit down. The baby pressed down on her bladder and her feet were aching. Next year Adrian could do the Christmas shopping, she’d be too busy with the child. On the other side of the elevator, Quin was desperately trying to decipher the smiles and the moving lips around him. He liked the look of the tall, older blonde. She reminded him of
his ex-lover; he liked mature women and she smelled good. Deafness had sharpened his remaining senses, and he was convinced that he could smell the faint scent of sex under her perfume. He calculated that an encounter must have taken place an hour before. Lunchtime.

And there was something about the middle-aged, well-dressed man that was familiar, as if he was a distant friend Quin had forgotten about. He glanced down at the man’s hands; beautifully maintained, they were the hands of a musician. Quin looked back at the face. With a start, he recognized him as Karl Pope. Quin had one of his early recordings on record. Carnegie Hall, 1973. He wished now that he could speak, but he didn’t trust his diction, knowing that if he formed words they would sound loud and discordant. He loved this man’s work, and basked for a moment in the presence of the famous. He glanced up at the elevator indicator, now traveling between the fifteenth and fourteenth floors. Something had changed in the way the elevator was descending, he had felt it in the floor through his feet. He was highly attuned to vibrations, not just of physical objects but also between people. It had been astonishing to discover that attraction between people could translate into slight dips in air temperature, or a sudden barely discernible acceleration of air movement. For example, there was a palpable concentration of heat between the tall blonde’s friend clutching the concert program and the artist in the corner. The elevator suddenly shuddered to a halt.