Willard and His Bowling Trophies (3 page)

Whipping her did not turn him on nearly as much as tying her up and gagging her, but he went on doing it as part of the ritual that led up to their very pathetic sex act because he liked to hear her moan from behind the gag.

The thing that she really didn’t like about it was being gagged but that was the part of it that turned him on the most and the part of it that he was the worst at doing because he got so excited and nervous when he did it. She could never figure out why he concentrated so much on the gagging and he never told her because he didn’t know himself.

Sometimes he tried to figure out why he liked gagging her but he couldn’t find a rational reason. He just liked it and did it.

Many times after he had finished tying her up, which was always what he did first, she would say, “Please don’t gag me. It’s all right to tie me up and to whip me but please don’t gag me. Please. I don’t like it,” but he would do it anyway and most of the time he bungled it and sometimes he hurt her and it was very seldom that she liked being gagged and those few, very rare times were only because she remembered liking it in the beginning.

Then he put the belt down beside her on the bed. That part was over.

Her eyes were beautiful above the gag, he thought, so sensitive and intelligent staring at him.

He untied her feet.

“ ‘Let us put little garlands of celery upon our brows and hold high festival to Dionysus,’ ” Bob said to her, quoting the
Greek Anthology
from memory.

“Pretty, huh?” he said.

She closed her eyes.

Rubber

Bob still had his clothes on but he could feel the erection in his pants. It bulged and pressed hard against his leg. Now the time was nearing that he really dreaded.

The only way he could enter her vagina with his penis so that she wouldn’t get the warts again was to use a rubber which he hated and she hated.

He walked over to a dresser and hidden under his socks was a package of rubbers. He fumbled a rubber out of the package. He felt dirty touching it.

Constance was watching him from the bed.

She knew how much he hated using them.

Bob came back to the bed. He took his clothes off. He had a tall, healthy body. Looking at his body, there was no way of knowing that he had warts in his penis.

He took the foil-packed rubber and broke the foil and took the horrible thing out and was slightly nauseated by the smell of the thing. He really hated that rubber smell. He shuddered when he fit the rubber over his penis and did not look at Constance while he was doing it.

Putting the rubber on always embarrassed him and she looked away, too, not wanting to see this embarrassment.

The rubber was on and he felt like a damn fool.

The Logan brothers waiting

The comic-book-reading Logan brother put the comic book down on the bed beside him. He stared at the cover. The hero on it looked somber as a stale cookie.

The beer-drinking Logan brother finished one beer and started on another one. He liked feeling the cold of the can in his hand. It was one of the few pleasures he had left after three years of looking for the stolen bowling trophies.

The pacing Logan brother was walking up and down the tiny room. He had a revolver in his hand. He kept opening and closing the loaded cylinder, staring at the bullets. He was anxious to use the gun. He wanted to kill the people who had taken his beloved bowling trophies.

They would pay dearly . . .

With their lives!

Soon the telephone would ring. It sat darkly on a table like graves waiting to be dug.

The comic-book-reading Logan brother reopened the comic book to an ad for selling salve in your spare time and on your way home from school. He read the ad very carefully. He wondered how it would be to sell salve.

Kissing

She hated the feeling of the rubber going into her vagina. She really had to be moist or it would hurt. He had such a beautiful penis. It had been so long since she had felt it inside of her. All she had felt for almost a year now was the rubber instead of him. It was a nightmare and he couldn’t do anything right any more.

Oh, God!

She rubbed her gagged mouth against his mouth in a tender kissing gesture.

‘Painting a lion from the claw’

He couldn’t feel her and it always made him sad but that was nothing new because just about everything made him sad now. The rubber took away all the intimacy and eternity of her vagina. He hungered like a lost star for the evening sky of her inner touch.

He was gently inside of her but he couldn’t feel her. She was lost from him, so he thought about the
Greek Anthology
and remembered words from ancient rimes that said, “Painting a lion from the claw.”

What did it mean to him thinking about that as he rested upon her, trying to make love? What good would it do him to think of things like that?

He didn’t know.

Willard, the bowling trophies and

Greta Garbo

They were talking as they came up the stairs.

“Greta Garbo looked so beautiful,” John said.

“She was really a great actress,” Pat said.

“Too bad Connie and Bob couldn’t come with us,” John said.

John’s key opened the front door lock and Pat pushed the door open. Across the room was the darkened outline of Willard like a dwarf tree and the religiously glowing bowling trophies.

The
click
of the light switch exploded Willard and the trophies into their full presence and the glory in that presence.

Willard looked curious. Sometimes the expression on Willard’s face would change. He was artfully constructed.

“Hi, Willard,” Pat said. “You would have loved Greta Garbo. Hey, we should have taken Willard to see Greta Garbo.”

“Next time,” John said. “We’ll put Willard in a child’s dress and get him in free. I can carry him in my arms. Nobody will notice.”

“What about his beak?” Pat said.

“We’ll think of something,” John said.

The birth of Willard

Willard was made by an artist who lived in some isolated mountains in a part of California that was hard to find.

The artist was in his late thirties and had had a very fucked-up life with many bad love affairs and much torment but he had somehow kept it together and was now supporting himself from his sculpture and he had a woman who took care of his basic physical and spiritual wants without fooling with his head too much.

Willard came to him in a dream, a dream that was composed of miniature silver and gold temples built but never used and waiting for a religion.

Willard just walked right into the dream as if he had lived there forever with his long black legs and strangely-patterned body and of course his dynamic beak and his face that could almost change expressions.

Willard walked over and took a good look at the miniature silver and gold temples. Willard liked them. They would be his family and his home.

The next morning the artist took some papier-mâché and rags and paint and stuff and re-created Willard from his dream until Willard was standing there, separated and made real, ready to occupy his own life.

The history of the Logan brothers

The Logan brothers had come from a simple, very large family. Besides the three brothers and their mother and father, there were also three sisters. The sisters did not bowl. They had another specialty which will be gone into later.

Their father worked in a filling station as a mechanic. He was very good with cars. Transmissions were his specialty. People said that he had a Midas touch when it came to working with transmissions.

He had such a way with transmissions that he once fixed a transmission so well that when the man who owned the car, the chief of police, got into it and turned the engine on and shifted gears, he started crying because the transmission was in such great shape. The chief was not a man known for easy tears.

Mother Logan was a pleasant woman who minded her own business and did a lot of baking. She just loved to have her oven on. The house was always filled with cakes and pies and cookies.

The Logan brothers had a typical uneventful American childhood. They were no rougher or gentler than other boys. They had their share of illnesses and broken arms and getting into minor trouble or pleasing their parents with one thing or another.

Once they all got together and built their mother a birdhouse to put outside the window she looked out from while she was mixing her doughs, crusts, batters, and frostings. The birdhouse pleased her a great deal.

Unfortunately, birds did not like the house and not a single bird ever used it, but still it was something to look at and she would look at it while she baked away.

Birds are not necessary for baking.

The only outstanding characteristic of the Logan brothers was their interest in bowling. The brothers just loved to bowl and they were good at it, too. There was a bowling alley a few blocks away from their house and it was like a second home to them.

Those bowling alleys were as familiar to them as their mother’s baking. They all got shivers up and down their spines every time they touched a bowling ball, and the sound of crashing pins was music to their ears.

They formed a junior high school bowling team that won the state championship with a team average of 152, which of course led them to winning the first of their many bowling trophies. They thought that the most beautiful thing they had ever seen was that trophy.

You could say with a great deal of conviction that those boys had very little else except bowling on their minds.

At home with the bowling trophies

By the time the Logan brothers were in their middle twenties, they had accumulated over fifty bowling trophies. They continued living in their parents’ house and found various jobs in town and never went out with girls and devoted themselves like monks to bowling and like bankers to the gathering of trophies.

They used to sit around the house at night when they weren’t out bowling and drink beer and stare affectionately at their bowling trophies.

The trophies were housed in a magnificent oak cabinet that was polished to such a shine that it was like a form of wooden gold. The glass doors to the cabinet were breathtaking. It is very rare for the doors to a cabinet to take your breath away.

The house was usually filled with the scent of something being baked in the kitchen and their father was always watching television after another day of fixing transmissions.

The Logan brothers had a good life because they were doing exactly what they wanted to do and they had their bowling trophies to show how good they were at their life.

Coming

It was pleasure, frustration and hatred when he came inside of her. There was a mud-like oozing explosion of release. Then the feeling of sperm confined against the end of his penis, held prisoner in the rubber. Sometimes he almost got sick at his stomach or felt like crying.

She had gotten so that she could come sometimes when he came. It was hard but sometimes she could do it. It always made her feel weird now when she came to his coming which was in the form of rubber. She felt as if she were making love to somebody who lived in another country.

Before the venereal warts visited their lives, sex had been to them like having a beautiful picnic in a field of comets. But now he spread-eagled her on the bed, tying her arms and legs to the four posts of the bed or he tied her hands behind her back. She didn’t like to have her hands tied that way because it was very uncomfortable.

She didn’t mind being spread-eagled if he didn’t stretch her arms and legs out too tight, but sometimes he did. She “preferred” to have her hands tied directly above her head, but that didn’t turn him on very often, so . . . actually, what she wanted was a long vacation from bondage and minor-league sadism. There was very little thrill to it anymore and she wished that he didn’t have the warts in his penis and he hadn’t changed sexually and they could go back to fucking like they used to. She was not a sexual prude but she did not like their whole sex life devoted to sadism.

If only her novel had been a commercial success as well as a critical success and she hadn’t felt so depressed and insecure that she had one-night-standed with the lawyer, even though she loved Bob very much, and brought the venereal warts home with her. Also, because her novel had failed, she had to go back to modeling, which she hated. She felt that it degraded her but Bob couldn’t work anymore because he was too abstract and she had to support him.

So now . . .

“Constance Marlow’s novel
After Class
shows great promise and it is a privilege to welcome her to American letters.”

— The New York Times Book Review

she “preferred” to have her hands tied

“Miss Marlow’s book is a delight to read in a very sad way.”

— Saturday Review

directly above her head

“Hurray for Constance Marlow!”

— Chicago Tribune

but that didn’t turn him on . . . so

“A brilliant young stylist goes to the head of her literary generation.”

— Los Angeles Times

so . . .

Ritual

It always happened this way: After he came his penis would slowly soften inside of her and their bodies would be very quiet together like two haunted houses staring across a weedy vacant lot at each other. Then
always with a slight feeling of abstract disgust, he would pull out of her, get up and take the rubber off, carefully not looking at it, with his back to her and leave the room, and he would walk dream-like down the hall to the toilet. He hated the way the wet warm rubber occupied his hand like a dirty joke from outer space.

Carefully looking away, he would drop the rubber into the toilet and flush it, feeling by now terrible as if he had been part of something very obscene.

He would wash his penis very, very carefully, still not looking at it, and then dry it with a special towel that he wouldn’t allow Constance to use because he was afraid she might get the warts again and he couldn’t stand that.