Slave Lover (7 page)

“Oh shit,” she thought, “this is going to be unpleasant.”

He kissed her for over two hours, pressing, insisting, insinuating. He licked her lips, thrust his tongue into her throat. He sucked on her mouth and spit on her tongue. He drooled into her. She would have bitten off his tongue if she could.

His moans and sighs and grunts were as repulsive as his actions. His enjoyment was gluttonous, regressive, beyond simple self-indulgence. He gloried in the degree to which he could impose himself on her.

His basic scenario seemed to be, from what she could glean from his mutterings and exclamations, that of teenage virgin and college football star necking on the couch. Her passivity signified the trembling fear of the young girl giving in to her most forbidden, secret, and luscious desires. He not only had her, but he was simultaneously bragging about his conquest to the other players on the team. He was fucking her in public. He was bringing the proud and pristine pussy to its metaphoric knees. Then he was giving her to his friends, watching her gang-banged. He was sullying purity itself and so revenging himself on the God that disappointed him by not existing.

Fatigue finally overtook him and he rolled over and lay there for several minutes. Then he got up, and drew a bottle out of one of the pockets of his coat. It was whiskey. He began sipping at it and smoking a cigar. He frowned and flung himself into an armchair. He started addressing imaginary enemies.

“They laugh at me, they pinch their noses with their fingers when I pass by. Rotten cunts. But I’ll show them. I’ll buy them all. I’ll make them beg.”

The tears of self-pity followed the anger, and within a half hour he was ready to visit his girlfriend again. During this time Constance had been able to piece together a fairly cohesive, if basic, psychological profile of the man, although she wryly admitted to herself that it would do her no good whatsoever, seeing as how she couldn’t move or talk.

With his renewed ardor, Henry’s kisses became unusually prolonged and passionate. Constance now had to contend with the stench of cigar and booze as well as Henry’s ordinarily oppressive manner. She imagined that the teenager was at the point of allowing greater liberties, for Henry’s hands began to slide down her chest and finally cupped her breasts. He let out an anguished cry and for the next half hour rode the transports of rapture which that relatively simple touch inspired.

“If he weren’t so dangerous, he’d be harmless,” Constance thought.

The conclusion came further down as he finally allowed his hand to cup her cunt and one finger to slip into the moist slit. In grand style, he shoved the entire pudgy middle finger into her and finger-fucked her with a fine frenzy for almost an hour, all the while kissing her madly.

“If he weren’t such a distorted little creep, he’d be a great lover.”

He balled himself into a knot of sexual tension, working harder and harder, sluicing the secretion-logged digit in and out of her juicing cunt with an energetic abandon. Constance found herself responding simply on the level of pure heat, the movement creating so much friction that she wondered whether her clit might burst into flames and Henry’s fancy frothing write a new chapter on survival techniques for the Boy-and-Girl Scouts Manual.

He wrapped his legs around one of her thighs and rubbed himself on her vigorously, the rocking of his pelvis beating in counterpoint to the dancing of his finger and the swimming of his mouth and tongue.

His orgasm was frightening. The stupendous fear, guilt, and horror hiding behind the mountain of fat and the brutal tendencies and the infantile behavior, exploded as the sluggish gobs of thick sperm oozed from his half-erect cock.

Crushing remorse speared him at the very instant after orgasm.

He rose to his knees. His gorge rose.

Constance was sure it wasn’t intentional, but when he vomited, his mouth was directly above hers, and since her jaw was paralyzed, she couldn’t close it.

“This is too much,” she said to herself as she squeezed her brain tight and forced herself to become unconscious. And yet, as she went under, the hot, flaky mass cascading over her face like thick communion wafers in a heavy sauce, her last thought was, “Poor man. He’s going to hate himself even more after this.”

It was a week before Chet began to be concerned. Constance often disappeared for several days when she was on a story and didn’t always remember to let him know where she was going. But seven days was longer than he was comfortable with. Finally, he went to her apartment and let himself in with the spare key which he promised to use only with her permission or in emergencies. She had wanted him to have access to her place, but also wanted him to respect her privacy.

He let himself into the flat, half fearing he might find a partially decomposed body. Instead, the place looked normal. And that was the trouble. It didn’t have the neat look of a place that had been tidied up by someone who was going to be gone for a week. Rather, there was the same casual dishevelled air it would if Constance had just run out for a container of milk. The bed was unmade, the lights on, and when he went into the kitchen he heard the hum of the radio. It had overheated and blown a tube, but was still switched on. He turned it off and gazed around. Bread, now moldy, sat on the table. An opened bottle of beer, now warm and flat, stood next to it.

Chet sat down heavily, his elbows suddenly weak. There was no doubt in his mind. Constance had been snatched. And it could only be due to her work on the story of the disappearing women.

“The Slavers!” he said out loud, and a cold thrill ran down his spine.

He knew it was a meaningless gesture, but he called the police and reported her absence. He said nothing about his idea. It would only confuse the issue and to no point. Also, he didn’t want to get involved in such a public way. He reasoned that if anyone could help, it would be the FBI. He resolved to gather all the data he had put together for Constance on the disappearances and, if she did not return within a week, bring it to the bureau.

The police came, poked around, wrote steadily in their notebooks, and left. Chet was free to roam around the apartment. He knew there would be nothing by way of a clue, yet he felt he should search anyway. It took him two hours to look through Constance’s clothing, books, papers, toilet articles. The only thing of any interest was a packet of love letters written to a man she had been having an affair with years earlier. He couldn’t resist the temptation to read some, and when he had, he wished he hadn’t.

“Do you know what you did to me last night?” one read in part. “When you plunged your donkey cock into my cunt and I tore the skin off your back with my nails, I died a thousand times. Worlds were born and died. I wanted to swallow you whole. I gave myself to you completely and eternally. And no matter what I shall ever feel with any other man, he will never have me as you did. Never, I swear it.”

He snickered and smirked but part of him was hurt. It also made him think back to his early loves, when each woman shone painfully bright in her uniqueness and each love was the birth of a new reality. And while he understood, conceptually, that everyone who loves feels the same, yet his heart kept whispering that this was the first time in the history of the world that precisely such a love had been known. Then there had come the so-called sexual revolution, when one did not speak of a woman but of a cunt, and love was considered an antiquated euphemism for fucking. Chet had fucked his brains out, almost literally, until he had attained the ideal of the brief epoch that defined the late 1960s: he was no longer able to tell one woman from another. When he met Constance, he was trying to recapture the earlier innocence, knowing that that was impossible.

“Yet,” he had reasoned, “if I live according to the way I used to feel, perhaps I will get some of my belief back.”

It hadn’t occurred to him that Constance had a parallel evolution. And as he looked down at the picture of her on her dresser, he wondered if he really knew her at all.

“What is it?” he thought, “three years? How little time that is in relation to one’s entire life. It’s less than a tenth for me. When I match her against my parents, my old friends, ex-lovers that I still maintain a relationship with; when I match her against myself, then she’s practically a stranger. I’ve met a handful of her friends. I don’t know her former lovers. I’ve never seen her parents. I know nothing of her childhood except a few superficial facts.”

Chet was forced by her disappearance to look with unusually honest examination into just what it was that existed between the two of them. And it dawned on him that he was not relating so much to her as to his relationship to her. That is, he was involved more in the structure of what they did together than in her herself and in herself. There had been flashes from time to time when he was able to distance himself and view her as though she were a stranger, but even that was a theatrical gimmick and partook more of the superstructure than of the actual contact.

Ultimately, he found, that sex with her had ceased to be an erotic act as such, for it lost the necessary tension of surrender to the forbidden. In return for the loss of the erotic mood, he received good, healthy, pleasurable fucking. It was obvious that eroticism was an ego function, having to do with conquest, mastery, show, and questions of curiosity and novelty. A cunt is a cunt but to slip one’s fingers into a cunt one has not known before contains a basic appeal that no amount of pious intentions regarding the bond with one’s beloved can obviate.

Yet, she represented certain values that he felt he had to incorporate, although even there it was uncertain as to whether they were nothing more than reflections of an essential insecurity concerning his vision of existence. He was, in fact, afraid to come to a conclusion concerning the nature of things for that would have implied a decision about how he would live his life, the subsequent betrayal of which would have rendered him radically impotent. It was better to pretend not to know, and accept the essential paradox of relationship which makes us progressively uninteresting to one another the more real we become. For, beyond illusion, which is distance, only self-reflective unity exists. He was faced with the conflict between the comforts of eternity and the poignant beauty of mortality.

He tidied up the apartment, put out the lights, and locked the place behind him as he left. Each phase of his departure was etched in hyperrealistic awareness, for the ritual was suffused with a searing sense of finality. Perhaps Constance was dead. He realized that he was not overly upset at the idea. He only felt the turmoil of his emotions when he thought on how she might have died.

“Or she might be installed in a harem somewhere,” he said to himself and found himself smiling at the image of Constance dressed as Lana Turner and leading palace intrigues with susceptible eunuchs.

It was necessary for him to get laid, that much he knew. Whatever Constance’s fate, whatever he decided to do about finding her, the night could not pass without relief. He took a taxi to Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, and plunged into the world of dark, callous eroticism. He did not know precisely what he wanted, but understood that under the circumstances the best approach would be to pay for it. That was tactically the cleanest form of exchange at the moment, and, for all he knew then, the only honest basis upon which a sexual exchange might take place.

“What do you get out of it?” a woman once asked after he had fucked her for four hours and taken her to exotic realms.

“The pleasure of knowing that I can do it to you,” he had replied spontaneously and then been amazed at his own answer.

“It seems like pretty thin gruel to sustain you for all that exertion,” she noted.

This night he wanted no pretences. He wanted to buy flesh because only in that way could he control what went on. It was his gratification he was interested in, not Constance’s at this point, and he was struck by seeing that he bore her no little resentment for what he called creeping entropy in their relationship, even though the responsibility for softheadedness was just as much his. He was tired of making love to a person, he wanted to fuck a thing.

The street caught at him as he stepped out of the cab. It was a raw spring night, the smell of the new season an elusive scent beneath the heavy curtain of engine exhaust. No climactic, meteorological, or seasonal nuances survived the city with any significant success. The sky threatened rain, but the sky was an invisible presence behind the midtown glare reflected on the unnaturally low ceiling of inversion.

He walked to Forty-sixth Street and then down to Broadway, savoring the subtle shifts in ambience that occurred each block as the neighborhood went from sleazy to pretentious to gaudy. The side streets boasted the legitimate theatres, fossils still capable of stirring their bones, while the Great White Way was a slash of movie houses, cut-rate junk shops, dingy restaurants, and traffic. When he turned up Forty-second Street again, going west, the very air became charged with soft violence. The dozen or fifteen movie theatres showed hardcore porn or obscure adventure films, kung fu melodramas or new-wave black gangster thrillers. The block held sporting goods stores, which prominently displayed knives, a shooting gallery and amusement parlor, quick-food shops, which made the Broadway restaurants seem centers of high cuisine by comparison, and a moiling stream of drunks, deadbeats, pimps, hustlers, hookers, and boy prostitutes. It was an avenue of pure tawdry experience, and Chet walked through the scene as though he were in a museum.

Back on Eighth Avenue, the ambience shifted downward into a serious business. Chet eyed twenty or thirty women, mostly black, mostly ugly and scarred, mostly tending toward bulkiness. One caught his attention and he veered toward her. She might have been nineteen or twenty, tall and thin, with an outrageously high and lean ass. She wore a skirt that came almost to her crotch, and a red sweater that outlined pear-sized breasts. Her face was round and her lips full and soft. She was highly appealing and Chet was already picturing her bent over a hotel room bed, the dark crevice of her buttocks opening onto a moist pink cunt.

But when he was several feet away, he stopped. She looked at him with the way that street whores have, a mixture of defense and invitation, a hint that what the man thinks he’s buying and what she’s selling are probably two different things, and the faint prospect of her actually, in the heat of the embrace, giving herself to him in some dimensional manner. At the very corner of her mouth there was a small, open sore, no larger than a fly, but unmistakably oozing. It could have been a fever blister that just broke, an innocent infection, or the mark of some virulent venereal disease. He teetered for an instant on the brink of asking her outright, but the sheer shamefulness of the entire situation suddenly stripped him of momentum, and he turned abruptly and walked away.

The whore looked after him for a few seconds. Her feet hurt, she had a toothache, and the four men she’d had that evening were all somewhat repulsive. The chance at a good-looking young man had come as a small but real flutter of pleasure, and his brusque flight was felt as a personal rejection.

Chet flagged down another cab and rode to the Village. For someone in his mood, it was definitely not a place to hunt for women. He was impatient, pugnaciously introspective, and horny, and all three traits did not recommend a man to the ordinary female of that area for whom a certain sophisticated pacing was an essential ingredient of the transaction preceding their taking their clothes off and wailing with guttural abandon on the slippery cock of some grunting stranger. Yet, the Village suited another aspect of his mood, for it provided a perfect cruising ground both in the homosexual and nautical senses of the term. It was possible to float through the streets and swim in the stares of those who were on similar errands of ambiguity. Each eye contact was its own form of erotic exchange which did not have to lead anywhere. The glances were like salvos hurled from soul to soul, and one could return fire, or withhold it, surrender, or sail in for the kill.

He found himself drawn down Christopher Street, that sluice of gay eroticism down which are swept the mincing, strutting, shuffling, and simply walking random population of the homosexual world. Dressed in Levi’s, leathers, or elegant rags, they provide a unique current of energy, which manifests a buoyancy in sharp contrast to the usual sluggish movements of the city’s millions. It is the closest thing to a tribal consciousness visibly available to a casual observer.

Chet was a closet queen. His homosexual encounters were known to no one, not even his therapist. He preferred it that way; it wasn’t a question of guilt. The appeal of the scene was less in the act itself than in the absolute privacy, forbiddenness, and squalor of its context. He thought that people who preached gay liberation were stark raving mad. The idea of a sanctioned homosexuality seemed to exhibit the essence of the banal sensibility. What more flaccid, hairy, angular, foolish, and distasteful scene could one imagine than the sight of two men in a licit and legal sixty-nine? The demythification of sex through the upsurge of organizations and magazines and movies had already gone a long way toward destroying the fires of eroticism in the land. If homosexuality fell from its privileged perch and became the common property of the masses, there would be almost nothing left for a man of discretion to amuse himself with.

Chet stopped first at Ty’s, once a quiet and top-notch leather bar, but since its discovery by the action parasites it had quadrupled its clientele and been reduced to a tenth of its former quality. Now, as a result of the homosexual equivalent of bussing, a kind of subcultural miscegenation had set in and a degenerate breed had been born. Wall flowers with imitation leather jackets wearing the latest coded handkerchief-and-key-ring signals were piled like a day’s catch of clams onto the barroom floor, all waiting for someone to brush up against them and provide the first foetid flowering of the evening.

He had three beers, stayed long enough to let the music and vibrations settle into his bones, and having effected something of a transition from his straight identity by this brief run through the sheep dip, headed west to the bookstore.

With curtains on the windows and no sign to explain what happened inside, it was a pit stop for most of the men who cruised the area. The front was a medium-sized space devoted mostly to magazines and a few books. There was also a long glass counter displaying dildoes, vibrators, lubricants, inhalers, handcuffs, and assorted paraphernalia. If one knew the proper way to ask, one could buy poppers from the clerk who kept them in a refrigerator under the counter.