Russian Spring (17 page)

And all the while, Samantha Garry just sat there wide-eyed and listening, leaning ever closer to him, so that by the time he had wound down, her face was inches from his across the little table, and he could feel the soft breeze of her breath, and somehow, by some magic, sense the slow, even beating of her heart.

And just when he felt quite finished, she leaned even farther forward, and bridged the final distance, placing her palm against his cheek, and kissing him long and gently on the lips.

“That was quite a lovely story,” she said, “and you are quite a lovely man, Jerry Reed.”

Jerry screwed up his courage, placed his hand on hers beneath the table on the quick of him, and squeezed it hard. “Shall we?” he said.

“Oh indeed we shall, luv, I wouldn’t miss it now for the world.”

The hotel room was quite incredible, and under ordinary circumstances Sonya would have marveled at its grandeur and probably laughed at its baroque excess, but these were hardly ordinary circumstances, for this was hardly an ordinary man, and so she paid the setting of the magic moment little mind.

Sonya had known many men, and she had enjoyed the company
of most of them, and some of her lovers, like Pierre Glautier, had even been her friends. But there had really been only one man in her life who had ever caused her to ponder seriously the question of whether she might really be in love, and that had been Yuli Markovsky, and though at one point she had planned to marry Yuli, she had given him up for life in the West when push came to shove, and truth be told, had seldom looked back with regret.

But as she sat there listening to Jerry Reed, she found herself remembering Yuli, remembering his passion, remembering what he had said to her that awful last drunken night in Moscow.

“There is a dimension of life you are blind to, a passionate color your eyes don’t see,” Yuli had told her angrily, “the joy of dedication to a vision of something greater than yourself. . . .”

What Yuli had told her in anger then, she hadn’t understood or wanted to, but after listening to Jerry pour out his own passionate dreams so sweetly and so innocently, she understood it now.

There was a lot of Yuli in Jerry, but Jerry had something more—and something less too that somehow made him a finer and sweeter man.

Like Yuli, Jerry knew the joy of passionate dedication to something greater than himself, but unlike Yuli, Jerry had no burning desire for fame and fortune and personal power. Jerry truly
was
dedicated to something greater than himself; if he too wanted to push against the world and feel it move, it was not to hold the reins of the wild stallion of history in his hands and bend destiny to his will, but simply to be one of the people who made his vision of a golden age happen for the innocent joy of living to inhabit the world of his dreams. And if that vision itself was not one which Sonya could share, Jerry, unlike Yuli, drew a sweetness from its possession which she could feel, which in some way her heart could share, with which she could fall in love.

If indeed that was what this unknown feeling of aching tenderness really was, as she gathered him up in her arms and drew him down with her onto the big canopied bed.

Jerry Reed had not quite imagined what it would be like to fuck a porn-film starlet; he had expected it to be some kind of ultimate sexual experience, but none of his fantasies had been anything like this.

She had taken the lead and thrown him on the bed, and that he had expected, and she had undressed him with sure and frank hands, and that he had expected too. But when she stood up to undress for him, there was something so sweet and strangely tender and gentle about it, no cheap porn-disc striptease but the unhurried unfolding
of a bud into full rosy flower, a sweet revelation just for him, as if she had never revealed those hard-nippled little breasts, that secret pubic triangle, for the eyes of all those anonymous unknown strangers.

Nor had he imagined that they would stare at each other silently and not touching for such a long moment. Or that it would finally begin with a simple kiss.

They kissed, and she opened her mouth and reached for his tongue with hers as he had imagined she would, but then she demurely withdrew and seemed to open herself to him.

And before he quite knew what was happening, all those thoughts of fantastic blowjobs and arcane perversities were quite gone from his head, and he didn’t feel cheated at all, he didn’t regret it a bit, and she simply reclined beneath him, and took his cock in her hand, and guided him into her, and wrapped her legs around him.

It felt just fine with his cock snugly fitted inside her cunt in the most basic position there was, it felt right, and clean, and somehow like home.

And if at first he felt rather intimidated to be fucking a woman of such experience, if in the first few moments he almost came in his excitement and feared that he would fail her, that all passed as she paused and slowed his rhythm, and he found himself in control of himself, seeking to please her, falling into a steady, easy, rolling motion that brought her easily to her first orgasm after an unhurried while.

After that, he simply kept going in an even, measured pace, fucking, no, making love, with a confidence and grace he had never known before, forgetting all his fears, losing himself in her cries of pleasure, finding himself in possession of skills he had understood but had never quite mastered before, until finally she smiled up at him, and, stroking his balls gently, whispered, “Let it go, luv, come inside me now.”

And almost at once, looking right into her eyes, he gratefully and peacefully did, and collapsed dreamily down onto her soft breasts, into her waiting arms.

Sonya Gagarin lay there awake for a long while with Jerry Reed asleep in her arms before finally drifting off to sleep. She had made love with many men, with men of twenty-two nationalities now by current count, and if in the tender afterglow some romantic impulse wanted to convince her that Jerry had been the best, she was not quite capable of that level of self-deception.

She had had Italians who were far more conventionally romantic, and Germans with twice the athletic endurance, and Frenchmen who
had more savoir-faire, and a Swede who had read her better, and Pierre Glautier knew techniques that poor dear Jerry had probably never dreamed of.

But if Jerry Reed was not the best lover of her life, and this had not been her best sexual experience, still, love-making had never before
felt
this good. Jerry had been so sincere, so careful of her own pleasure, that it seemed he had had to seek her permission to enjoy his own. He was such a little boy at heart. And perhaps there was something more.

There was a sweetness to him that was not quite innocence, for after all this
was
no naive little boy, but a man with a vision, a man who quite sincerely and openly sought to change the world, indeed who dreamed of building whole new worlds in space, worlds that had never been, of traveling to unknown lands circling foreign suns.

And in some strange way, she sensed that this made him a brother in spirit to the little girl in Lenino who had dreamed of traveling to the bright unknown worlds of adventure in the mysterious and wonderful West. And with Jerry in her arms, that girl still lived.

Was it this, not military might or economic power or technological skill that had once made Americans the envied darlings of the world? Was it this that had taken them to the Moon? Was it this that had made Russians seek their acceptance in their heart of hearts even as they feared and hated the Yankee imperialists?

Was it this that she was falling in love with?

Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin gently stroked the hair of her American lover. He stirred in his sleep, but did not awaken, and she was grateful for that as a chill went through her.

Yes, Sonya, you are falling in love, she admitted to herself. But in a very real sense, this man does not even know that you exist.

How ever will you tell him the truth when the morning comes?

“The Animal Liberation Front today claimed to have been responsible for yesterday’s explosion at the Agromax Labs in Nebraska. ‘Beakless chickens that mature in three weeks and giant trout that could never survive in the wild are obscene enough,’ their faxed manifesto declared, ‘but the cows that Agromax has turned into insensate meat-factories are mammals just like us. How long before the Dr. Frankensteins of genetic engineering turn their beady eyes on the human genome?’ ”

—
CNN

VI

“You’re really a
Russian?
But . . . but Samantha Garry . . . that
accent
 . . . ”

“You think Russians cannot do accents? Besides which, ducks, having never been to Old Blighty, how do you know whether this isn’t the old phony baloney out of the movies, eh mate?”

Jerry Reed laughed. He had been awoken with a kiss and a confession.

The kiss had come from his porn starlet from London of the night before, and the confession had come from another woman, who had sat up in bed after the kiss with the strangest expression of trepidation on her beautiful face, and babbled it all out nervously to him in English of quite a different accent—American almost, or Canadian, with only the slightest hint of a foreign flavor in its rhythm.

“I really do not know how to tell you this, Jerry, I’ve been lying awake here for an hour trying to think of something clever, but there isn’t anything clever to say, I’ve been far too clever already, so all I can do is tell you the truth and get it over with one way or the other, and the truth is that my name is Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin, not Samantha Garry, and I am not a porn star, just a translator for Red Star, S.A.,
in Brussels
, and I am from Moscow, not London, and I am Russian, not English, and I was bored at that party, and you were
the only interesting man there, and it started as a joke, but now I do not think it is a joke, though I am not saying I am falling in love with you, you understand, and so there you have it, and I’m sorry, which is not to say it wasn’t fun. . . . ”

And, having spat it all out in a single lump, she had crossed her arms over her bare breasts and heaved a great theatrical sigh of relief. “There, now that is over,” she had said in the same accent, but in quite a more confident tone of voice, the confident tone of the apparently nonexistent Samantha Garry. “So what do you think? Do you want to throw me out of your bed, or should we make love again?”

Jerry hadn’t known what to think. Indeed, she had hit him with it before he was awake enough to think at all, before he was even awake enough to
consider
being pissed off.

And now that she had made him laugh by becoming for a moment the Samantha Garry of the night before, it was pretty hard to work up any anger at her, especially when she was feeling him up under the bedclothes and looking at him with those big green eyes.

“I guess I’ve got to admit you did a pretty good porn starlet,” he said.

She licked her lips and snuggled closer to him. “For a tool of the Pentagon,” she said, “you weren’t so bad yourself.”

“Tool of the Pentagon?”

“Don’t you remember? You told Samantha Garry everything last night. All about your job in California building satellite sleds for Battlestar America, and how
ESA
wishes to hire you away to work on—”

“Oh my God!” Jerry moaned. He remembered all right now. He had told this woman the whole story of his life thinking she was a British porn star, and now it turns out that she’s a
Russian!

Sonya Gagarin laughed. “Shall I tell you what you are thinking?” she said. “You are thinking, what if this woman is a Russian spy.”

Jerry blushed. “It sounds kinda dumb when you put it like that. . . ,” he had to admit.

“Why, not at all, Jerry,” Sonya Gagarin said slyly. “After all, I had you completely fooled last night, now didn’t I, so I could be fooling you now too, yes? For all you know I could indeed be an agent of the
KGB
. . . . ” She gave him a little wink. “Or worse still, of the
CIA
! In which case . . . ”

“In which case . . . ?”

“In which case, it’s far too late for you to do anything about it, now isn’t it, luv?” she said, stroking his cock teasingly. “So, as they no doubt say in the porn business, you might as well lean back and enjoy it.”

“You’re not really a Russian spy, now are you?” Jerry Reed said over the grotesquely expensive lunch of lobster bisque, raw oysters, Sevruga caviar, and champagne they had put on the room-service tab after the long morning’s love-making.

“Of course not, Jerry,” Sonya said seriously. “I am who I told you I am, just a girl from Moscow with a job in Brussels, halfway through a two-week vacation, and out to have fun. . . . ”

“There’s got to be more to you than that.”

“Does there?” Sonya said somewhat wistfully.

“Sure there does,” Jerry said.

“Why?”

“Because there’s more than that to everyone.”

They had made love all morning, and when the room-service waiter had arrived, Sonya had gone into the bathroom and Jerry had put on his robe to let him in. Now they were seated across the little dining table from each other, Jerry in his robe, and Sonya naked, and all at once feeling quite exposed.

“Not to me . . . ,” she said, suddenly feeling rather depressed without quite knowing why. “Not really. I’m not like you, I don’t have a vision of the way things ought to be, I don’t want to change the world. . . . ”

“No girlhood dreams?”

“Well of course! But nothing very grand, nothing that I haven’t already achieved. . . . ”

“Tell me about it.”

“There’s really not very much to tell.”

Jerry winked at her. He stood up, took off his robe, dropped it on the floor. “Come on, Sonya,” he said. “I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours.”

Sonya laughed. Jerry sat down again, leaned back, picked up his glass of champagne, swirled it around, looked straight at her. “Come on, luv, as yer friend Samantha would say,” he said in a truly dreadful British accent that touched her heart, “tell me all the secrets of your soul.”