AND THEN HER MOUTH
Portia Klee Jordan
published by Xynobooks, LLC at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Portia Klee Jordan
Discover other titles by Xynobooks at Smashwords.com
AND THEN HER MOUTH
SOMETHING ABOUT A MAN WITH A LIMP
It held with long tradition in Eurotrash swing. It was the etiquette of their set.
“Mathilde, or something, I swear to sweet Jesus,” Lise breathed out at him, her hair like black night in a Veronica Lake sheet over half her fading face. He remembered the first time he noticed that expression, over a big bowl liquor glass filled with amber fluid, when she was young. When they were both younger. How the force of desire punched him back from the table like a fist. It knocked the wind out of him. They had been together for a little while; some nights, maybe a week in the islands, dewy with damp funk, fucking in that fervid, hazy scape, covering everything—the bed, their bodies, the air around them—with a fine sheen of cum and sweat. He had come to think of it as the manifestation, the light purple coat of love. He matched her and it was good; he was not going to let her go. And this costs.
She had been holding the glass up to her lips, like she did this night, and she stood by him in a little corner of the tiki-hut tourist trap bar they had taken up at, transfixed. Fogging her glass with her moist breathing, in and out, a little cloud of steam and passion forming and dissipating as she stared at something across the black-lacquered disco floor, over the Continental lounge lizard heads. He remembered with a slight, warm smile that it had been like a shock, it had hit him like a shock, when he realized she was gaze-locked with a rather ordinary looking American. A woman. That was the price. That was the first time.
For some reason, only when they traveled—which was fine with him. Perhaps even the pattern he would have picked. Tonight they were in a bar in Amsterdam when Lise decided on Mathilde—and whether or not her name was Ebba or Gerde, she was Mathilde tonight. Lise always picked the names and the women.
Some kind of wildness creeps over a traveler, some kind of freedom from societal mores and traditional codes, a beautiful, cunning wantonness surfaces even in women who have been flogged with fear from birth. Robert found it easy to approach women traveling. He was, after all, the prick-coded counterpart of an extremely attractive couple. Without fear of insulting them accidentally, without worrying about what words to choose to provide some cushion of decorum and safety, Robert approached these women in the bars casually and honestly, prowling. Lise had smiled into his ear one night, mouthing it, her hand milking his balls through thick trousers (he could feel her grin against his ear,) that he was the best pimp she had ever known. Then she sent him off with a squeeze to work his magic on “Sabine” or “Paquette” or, one very memorable evening, “Juana.”
Mathilde had jostled up against him, pushing her soft body into his shape as they performed the verbal dance on the padded railing and among the hot, drunk patrons squeezing them together. He could feel Lise on the other side of the fountain, smoldering into her globe glass, watching them. He knew she had already worked her left hand up under her tight skirt, and was stroking herself , her slender, pale fingers enraging the already purple, bulging lips of her cunt. He often suspected the deft, pulling circles of her fingers conducted the sentences he exchanged; that with the tempo of her hand Lise orchestrated the night and he was just the instrument of an engorged, hungry organ unable to move autonomously, to service her own desire. He could never have imagined a more just deity. He attended without hesitation.
Between them in the cab, Mathilde reeked softly of bar smoke, a beery floral perfume, and underarm sweat. Her breath was hissing and fast, mewling out of her open mouth as she panted with slightly drunken lust. He knew the words from those pimply, furtive days in boys’ middle school, “groping,” “fondling”—they alone elicited this dirty, prickling erection. But it was far more satisfying to be plying soft young flesh, pinching pink arm skin and stroking Mathilde’s breasts into damp, stiff peaks; wedging himself down to suckle on her cherry red nipples; feeling Lise through Mathilde’s body, rubbing up against her, grinding hips in awkwardly, crammed in the back seat of the cab as it careened through traffic, the driver unable to keep his eyes off the rearview.
The shaving was a ritual. Robert remembered the provincial French girl, her first time overseas, they had picked up in a Japanese saki house. The look of pure terror on her face when Lise had produced the straight razor was thrown into sharp relief by the dissolving hysterics they had all collapsed into once its purpose was explained to her. Lise shaved Mathilde with care and erotic dexterity; Robert had become so entranced with the cold sharp metal/hot tender skin contrasts of this particular foreplay, it aroused him like no other fetish. Mathilde’s naked cunt, just the smallest obligatory nick smiling in a thin red line, readied, washed and pampered for his probing, fingering, fucking—the anticipation almost overwhelmed him.
Mathilde stood in a little pool of her own excitement in the center of their rented flat, looking at both of them with limpid, large wet eyes. She was stripping, pushing at her clothes, stretching them tightly over her round proportions, oozing out of a slip, her hands coaxing her breasts from a sweat-soaked brassiere, her skin glowing hotly in the warm yellow light. Her hands. Her hands releasing her body, the smell of her sex, the odor of wet pussy waving out around her as she turned her back to them, looking coyly over her shoulder through a halo of golden hair at them in periphery, pushing panties down over the globes of her asscheeks and then bending over, her legs splitting like the white skin of a pomegranate as her head bent to the ground, the fruit and smell of her cunt revealed to them like a jewel. Robert heard the slight gasp and felt Lise give out a tiny shudder beside him—a sure sign of something she called “the psychological orgasm.” He smiled to himself. His own silk pants were spotted with fluid leaking from his cock, bathing the head, making the once soothing material clingy and itchy. His mouth was watering.
He went to Mathilde in the middle of the room, gazing at the proffered ass, loosening his pants, undoing his shirt. He laid his hot hand on the white skin, and thought he detected a color change, a flush. A little heat wave recorded on her ass. Robert stroked her gently, and then as his desire grew, he plied the flesh with his hands, making it jiggle, assessing the power and softness about to engulf his now violently hard prick. Mathilde snorted out a tiny laugh as she lost her balance, staggering in front of him, still bent forward, reaching out to steady herself with her hands. Offering herself up to him.
A drop of liquid spattered the hardwood floor between his feet. He let his hand move over Mathilde’s thigh, finally allowing himself the luxury of her pussy—Lise’s hand covered his at this, his favorite moment. A new surge of blood, a muscle spasm flexed him when he realized the splash at his feet was from Mathilde’s literally dripping cunt. He traced a snail-thin trail of wetness up the inside of Mathilde’s leg, Lise pressed tight behind him, small “mmmm”s of pleasure issuing from her mouth and from Mathilde, who was pushing back against his arm with need. His and Lise’s fingers dipped into Mathilde simultaneously, and they each began stroking her lips with unique rhythms of want. Robert began swaying gently back and forth in the rocking of fuck, his cock beating a slow tempo on Mathilde’s ass, Lise naked behind him, pressed up against his back. His fingers stroked over Lise’s fingers, over Mathilde’s slick sex, over her gaping, hungry hole. Mathilde whimpered a little every time his fingers paused at the entrance to her deepest self. He teased her, dipping first his fingers, then the head of his penis into her folds; stroking his shaft along her lips, under Lise’s hand, against her clitoris in tiny circles. Her clit was swollen and throbbing. Then, holding onto her hips, he let Lise’s hand guide him inside Mathilde, and thrust into her, her swallowing cunt rippling along his shaft as he was gulped deeper inside, every inch of his cock embraced.
Lise was humping up against him now. He could just feel her hand as it twirled around her own cunt, brushing his buttocks as she stroked herself into orgasm. Her breasts slid against his skin as she pounded into him, one hand in the stroking fucking he was serving Mathilde, the other in her own pussy. She would slip the masturbating hand between the cheeks of his ass or over his balls occasionally, smearing him with her thick lubricant. As he began heaving faster and harder into Mathilde, Lise racked with pleasure behind him, squealing with her first orgasm.
The air hit his back like cool water as she left him, moving around in front of him, positioning herself under Mathilde’s head. Robert looked into Lise’s face, flushed and damp, her hair a wild mass behind her. She smiled at him thickly, slightly—another spasming pump of cum-hunger dragged at his dick like it was being sucked up from inside him. He loved watching women eat Lise’s pussy.
Robert pulled Mathilde back, rolling her hips, his cock slurping out of her grabbing grasp loiteringly. He watched as his slime-shiny prick pulled out, Mathilde’s cunt lips clinging to it like grapevines, and disappeared again, the delicious feeling of his cockhead pushing open vacuum-tight spongy spaces, caressed by this wet, engulfing cradle of life and desire. He bent himself over her and folded his arm down around Mathilde’s hip, and began petting her lips and her mound, fingering her clitoris in light, upward strokes. Mathilde gasped when he touched a spot just under her pubic bone and to the side of her clit; he planted his middle finger there and began the expert twirl Lise had shown him. He cocked his head, listening to Mathilde’s muffled yowling, and lifted his eyes to Lise’s face, easing into a slow pump.
He watched Lise pull her knees up to her chest, rubbing her breasts with the tops of her thighs, pushing her pouting sex out between the backsides of her legs. The musky, dark smell of her twat wafted around his head like a veil. He asked Mathilde to pull her hair back. He told her he wanted to see it, so lovely. With one pink hand clutching her yellow hair at the nape of her neck, Mathilde angled her head slightly against Lise’s olive thigh and glanced at him over her downy cheek, out of the side of her eye. She smiled very sweetly, Robert thought. He brought her hips back sharply onto his pelvis, impaling her, and she gasped. He smiled back.
Mathilde slowly pushed her tongue between Lise’s cum-drenched nether lips, parting them, peeling them apart like a nut shell. Robert knew that languorous, half-lidded feeling, wanting to lick sex like a dog, long strokes of the tongue loyally lapping pussy. Mathilde salivated and sprayed like citrus, juicing Lise’s cunt to an even gaudier sheen. Lise gasped and arched, splaying her legs, pushing herself up into Mathilde’s eating mouth. Almost as if he had telepathically communicated it, Mathilde acted Robert’s fever to suck, lipped Lise’s clitoris into her mouth and began tongueing her to orgasm, plunging her mouth into Lise’s hole, bringing it back up again to tease at the button, fucking with her tongue.
Robert squeezed Mathilde’s clit between two fingers, tweaking in earnest. Mathilde bumped her head against Lise’s thigh, slack-jawed and oblivious at the moment of her impending pleasure. Lise grabbed Mathilde’s head and held her, crooning to her to cum. Robert rocked his penis deep inside her, thrusting up against the pelvic crib, into his cupping hand kneading her cunt. Squeezing it, extruding the orgasm from inside of her—Robert watched a brief string of spit drool down onto Mathilde’s back from his lip and sucked it in under his teeth. Then he felt the compressing ripple, the wave begin, spreading out from Mathilde’s deepest center, cumming and cumming, gumming his prick ever inward like a toothless maw; and the fast gush of her spending washing his balls and hips in spurts. A squirter.
That urgent yank pulled at him again from inside, the preciousness of a woman’s orgasm manifesting itself physically making his head spin in the near-nausea of sentimentality. Gripped with new desire, he pulled out of her cunt, looking down at her delicious bottom, proffered at the altar of his passion. The purple, puckered asshole glistened up at him, slick and inviting, the promise of almost unbearable heat and pressure from that forbidden portal luring him.
He looked into Lise’s face, his eyes caressing the length of her body, settling on the blond head buried with renewed vigor in ready pussy . He gently began probing his hungry head against Mathilde’s anus, a question, a request. She pushed back at him. An answer. An eager reply.
Robert spit in his palm and rubbed the gooey mass over the head of his cock, and fed his prick into Mathilde, stretching her, slowly, excruciatingly, pushing forward into her ass as she groaned, her whimpers muffled by labia. He began fucking in earnest, pushing in, pulling out, feeling that sweetest burning crest in his bowels. Robert staved himself into honeyed, round buttocks, hinging his arms out in an effort to pull Mathilde ever farther down onto the pounding piston of his extended carnal appetite. His fingers pockmarked her ass, leaving impressions like they would in pliant dough, pulling her into the shape that best conformed to his need. And all the time, he watched her give Lise head, Lise’s face contorted in ecstasy, Lise’s nipples bright and rigid, Lise bucking her hips high as she started to cum. Mathilde’s red mouth in almost-profile, showing him. Mathilde’s red red tongue, plumbing, torturing Lise’s clit, lapping inner lips, fucking and plunging, stroking and teasing, and then, blessing her with release, engulfing the clitoris like a penis and sucking Lise off until she came, rocketing, clenching, cumming, cumming. He could feel it rising in himself now, undeniable, unrequited. Deeper, deeper into that hot hole, a purging and a burning, the muscle at the entrance to her ass bearing down, impossibly close now, yanking, rutting, exploding, exploding, great huge gobs of himself shooting up from down in him, drawing his balls up against his body, spurting, his head thrown back in mad delirium.
SOMETHING ABOUT A MAN WITH A LIMP
It was in the first year after my marriage that I remembered Mr. Gifford. He was my band instructor in Jr. High, and I guess I have to confess now that I had a little crush on him. All the kids loved Mr. Gifford.
This was in the 80s, when schools were just starting to become more like war zones, but the insubordination of the kids hadn’t escalated to the level of physical threats or violence, or to bringing guns to class. Already, though, school was a place where we tried to see how much we could get away with, and teachers were there just so we could learn how far we could push adults, now fallen from the pedestal of perfection we had seen them upon in elementary school. I remember Mrs. Jimenez running from home room, crying, when Lance Schroeder had gone too far. But that’s another story.
Anyways, Mr. Gifford was the band teacher, and he was about 5’3” and carried a cane. He had a pronounced limp, dark hair and dark eyes, and this image filled my earliest fantasies during puberty. I played flute. Except for some of the brass and all of the percussion guys (big surprise, I know,) nobody gave Mr. Gifford a hard time. We all loved him. And I loved him most of all.
I was in the orchestra for a show, and that’s how I met John, my husband. He was the make-up artist, and I remember seeing him from a distance for the first time, touching up Desiree DeLalia’s cheekbones. He had pulled his wheelchair close to her dressing table, and one of the wheels was run over the hem of her gown. His dark face looked particularly stormy under his shock of salt and pepper hair while he was concentrating on finding a compromise between what the difficult prima donna wanted to look like and what she was supposed to look like for H.M.S. Pinafore.
As usual, Desiree was having a tantrum about something, and John was trying to appease her. We couldn’t hear what was going on, exactly, except for Desiree’s high pitched screeching and John’s low, calming tones. Finally, Desiree got in a huff, ready to let him have it, I guess, and as she bolted up, the waist of her skirt ripped from the bodice, pulled by the weight of John’s chair, all the way around. She was speechless with indignation and embarrassment (and had the cheesiest thighs I’d ever seen, other than my Mom’s,) and almost tripped getting away. And John was sitting there, “Laughing my ass off!” as he told it later on.
Now, I have a type. I guess a lot of people run around saying “I have a type,” but I really do. I like big, blond, blue-eyed guys. I’ve never dated anyone else.
My first boyfriend was an All-American, and in the fall I would worship Gary from the stands where the band sat, me and Ann Barnum, the other flutist, huddled over a cup of hot chocolate, crying hysterically over him like a couple of preteens at an Elvis concert when he got carried off the field one game. He was cheerful and very gentlemanly, opening doors for me and taking me to get ice cream shakes. And then after, in the back seat of his ‘66 Mustang, he had the same honest approach when divesting me, first, of my little button-front sweaters, and then my many complicated brassieres, and finally, on prom night, my virginity.
To be such a big boy, Gary’s penis was really kind of small, which is a good thing, when I think about it now. It was pale and pink, and stood up violently from a thatch of light golden pubic hair, looking quite proud of itself for no particular reason. The shiny look of desire and good-natured arrogance beaming from his face was probably laughable, as I look back on it. But at the time, I was carried away by his manly self-confidence.
Was that first time any good for me? I don’t know how to answer that question. Sex has always been more about how I feel on the inside than how I feel on the outside. My feeling for Gary was very strong indeed. He had grappled me over into the corner of the back seat, and I was panting there, breathing moistly, fast and hard in anticipation. Then I felt his body hulking over me, and a huge pressure against my backside as he began to surge into my virgin pussy. I remember breathing very deeply, and very fast, because I had learned somewhere that it would help allay pain, but I needn’t have worried too much. We were both ready, and what Gary lacked in finesse, he made up for with genuine caring. When he finally pulled out and came on my ass (the dribblings of which he cleaned off of me himself with a Kleenex,) I was just starting to figure out what all the fuss was about. It actually took me about two more boyfriends to get there.
So John was not what I was used to eyeballing in any way. It wasn’t the fact that he had cerebral palsy, and so was confined to a wheelchair most of the time. My mother had been an in-home nurse, and I knew enough to realize that C.P. wouldn’t impair John’s sexual drive or ability much at all.
It also wasn’t his personality. Quite frankly, John was one of the most open, honest, gregarious and funny people I’d ever met. He always had a ready smile or a quick quip for somebody who was blue. And he was genuinely concerned about the people across whose paths he happened to roll (he was also great with kids.)
Nope; I have to admit it. It was completely because of the way he looked. I had been conditioned over and over again to respond to just one kind of stimulus in bed: a big blond man. John was black Irish, and dark; so much so, that most people mistook him for Hispanic when they met him. His black eyes were ringed with long black lashes, and he had a satyr’s mouth, heavy and curvy and quick to smile. His teeth were impossibly white in all that dark skin, and when he was drunk or brooding he could look out at you from under his unruly, full shock of black, black hair (sprinkled with white, now) in a manner that pierced right through to your very core, as though he knew what you were thinking, or could read your mind.
Who could resist, right? But I was so used to hanging out with big, meaty Midwestern blondes that I couldn’t appreciate John’s appeal. Until the closing night of Pinafore, I didn’t think much about John at all.
Desiree had a cast party (“Oh, yes; we’ll give the riff-raff a thrill!”—I’m sure that was her take) on the last night of the production, and we all of us went, with the secret intent of finding something incriminating in one of Desiree’s drawers to humiliate her with later on, or some such thing. She came from money and lived like it. I’m sure her own contributions fleshed out what Daddy had left her quite adequately. There was, however, something too precious about her, like she’d never worked a day and was still the little princess papa had left behind while he amassed a fortune in the diamond mines.
I ended up in a corner, drinking, with John and Cliff, the guy who ran the light board for the show. It became very comfortable there for all of us, and pretty soon, people would drift in and out of our little klatch, but we were obviously pretty firmly rooted to the spot. Desiree, endlessly pretentious, had gotten caterers (caterers at a cast party! I can’t even begin to tell you) and we’d basically taken out an exclusive contract with this one, Tony, who gave up on trying to serve anybody else as he replenished the supplies in our corner alone.
Before long, I was sitting in John’s lap like a girl dandled from Santa Claus’ knee. Cliff was running his hands through my hair and giving me a back rub, and through my little tipsy haze, I suddenly became aware that John had stopped gabbing and was looking at me intently. Then I felt his hard-on.
Later on, John told me that was the moment he fell in love with me. He says he was sitting there, getting excited in a general way (“Pussy ain’t got no face!”,) and when I turned in his wheelchair, my ass rubbing deliciously against his erect penis again, with the comprehension of his desire starting to dawn on my slightly drunk face, he says I was never as beautiful as I was at that moment—except, perhaps, for our wedding day. What I remember is that I was stunned—stunned to find myself in this man’s lap; stunned that I was having such a great time and had somehow managed to be the center of attention somewhere; and really REALLY surprised that I was turned on too, and it wasn’t just the alcohol.
As a matter of fact, the huge rush of lust that swept over me was unlike anything I had ever felt, from Gary’s Mustang on. I downed the last of my rum and coke and set it on Tony’s passing tray, and I grabbed John’s collar—not like a man about to fight, but more like a desperate car-crash victim—and choked out “I want you” in a breathy rush. Cliff helped me off of John’s lap. He and I went off to find a bedroom (and to this day I’m not sure if Cliff remembers any of this,) and when we got back, John was on his feet, leaning on his cane, coming after us.
There’s something about a man with a limp. It’s not just the dramatic eye-patch on the debonair and dangerous hero, either. At the same time it’s wounded and asks you for help, that limp, it’s also decadent and twisted. I’ve always been enamored with the potential decline and downfall of our civilization. I think the harbinger of this event is a man with a limp.
John didn’t say anything, but grabbed my hand as he hobbled into the dark corridor. Cliff was behind us, breathing hard and heavy like a charging bull. I had never been so wet. As I walked down the hall, I could feel my sex swelling up as the blood gorged my lips, and the slickness on the inside of my thighs almost made me swoon.
We all tumbled into the oversized closet that Cliff and I had scoped out. I think it was one of those “convertible” spaces: breakfast nook! den! office! extra ...bedroom! Nobody seemed to take any notice of us, either, which was also vastly entertaining. When I tell people who were at that party about how John and I really met (most others get an edited version,) their eyes always bug out as they shout, “Where was I?!?”
Cliff closed the door, and then it was hands, hands everywhere. I could smell John’s cologne on his skin, and that’s where I kept my head, buried in his neck as Cliff pulled my sandals, shorts, and panties off, his hands moving over my ass as he parted my cheeks and played with me. John was pushed down onto a couch or something while I buried my face in his lap, my lips and fingers working to free his hard cock from his zipper. I felt Cliff’s hot dick head bumping against my ass, and I spread my legs, letting him find entry and push up into my sopping pussy. Then I took John’s prick deep into my throat and began slurping gently and sloppily, hungry, lots of spit pooling down around his balls which I then lapped up.
It was incredible, getting fucked hard and sucking cock until I came. Cliff’s hand was buried in my twat, playing with my clit, and John’s fingers were on my D-cup titties, kneading and twiddling my nipples. I gasped around John’s thick penis, as wave after wave of pleasure rippled over me.
After my third (or so) orgasm in less than five minutes, I started concentrating on making those guys come all over me as hard as they could. I was swept up in the image of my ass and my face coated with their spew. I tongued and sucked John’s rod, and his hands moved up into my hair, guiding my mouth over him, pushing me down onto the shaft until my lips hit his balls. Cliff was ramming it to my dripping cooze as I clamped my sugar walls down over his pistoning spear, and he groaned out loud as his thrusts came harder and faster. I clutched John’s hips and he bucked up into my mouth, and with a shout he started shooting into my throat. I pulled my face off of him and used a couple of fingers to jack him all over my face.
Only a second later, Cliff yodeled out something indecipherable, and with a sucking sound, his cock pulled out of my pussy and I felt his hot spunk spattering my behind. I wiggled my hips, my ass high in the air, and he slapped his cock against me, milking the last few drops out onto my skin.
I had never had a threesome before, and sometimes John and I are chagrined that that was our first time. Although we both had super-charged feelings of passion for each other, however, we categorize that whole night as a fuck, and mark the anniversary of when we started dating from a couple of months after that. It was a mystery to me, for a long time, what it was I saw in John that made me fall for him, and feel about him in a way that was so different from all the other guys I fancied I was in love with.
Then I remembered Mr. Gifford.
He was leaning up against a wall in the alley between 3rd and 4th streets, smoking a butt he’d just stabbed with a five-inch stiletto heel and brought to his hand from the gutter, wearing a purple plastic jacket and a pleated, silver mini-skirt, when she saw him. He had borrowed the shoes from somebody named Patricia: her name. That skinny kind. Stingy patent running along the arch of his foot like a fast car takes a curve, and toes so pointed they defied three-dimensionality with their flat, sharp angles.
“Gotta lite,” he said.
If you already have a picture of somebody falling in love at first sight, take this one of Patricia instead. He didn’t say anything else, but compelled her with those absinthe eyes, that serpentine smile. She wavered out to him, cupping a matchbook in her palm. She fumbled the cover, bent it over to sandwich the match from the back side just like the instructions said not to, snapped the thing inside the cardboard a couple of times, destroyed it. Like some hypnotized retard she went through three matches that way before she was able to hold fire out to him. She’d never learned to light matches the right way. She always did it wrong.
Men in dresses had never done much for Patricia. The In Your Face aesthetic aside, a boy in a bra pretty much left her cold. But that night with Marcel, she stood there, dumbfounded by his incredible beauty, and held a fourth match under his flaring cigarette until the flame burned down to her fingers, then dropped it like it was something that had bitten her unprovoked. And everything changed. She couldn’t draw, but she decided in that instant that if she could, she would have devoted the rest of her life to drawing the conflict between good and evil in all its many incarnations, just because the devil would always look like Marcel Hughes.
Marcel was the only drag queen she’d ever met who didn’t wear make-up (of course, Marcel was the only drag queen she’d ever met, period ...but she’d seen HBO’s Real Sex, and Last Exit To Brooklyn, and Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert. So she could presume that she wasn’t coming from a position of total ignorance,) and that was what made him so devastatingly beautiful. His eyes were narcotic as Carmen’s, and his skin as inspiring as Helen Of Troy’s. It hugged his bones like they had been anodized, like his dermis was actually some advanced metal, crafted specifically to corrupt all of humankind on sight alone. His lips were carved with curves more diabolical than Mae West’s, and Hugh Grant’s career would have been toppled by Marcel’s achingly boyish forelock, if Divine Brown hadn’t gotten to him first. To have called him androgynous would have denied all of his unquestionable masculinity. To have said he was cruel would have been a gross understatement. To suggest that Patricia loved him, inaccurate. She worshipped him.
And by now you probably understand where Patricia was coming from. She was so ordinary. Her life had no glamour. Shit, her life barely had Town & Country. The average woman in America has been described as beige: brown hair and eyes, about 5’2” and 145 pounds, a size 14. That was Patricia. She was average.
Marcel said, “We need to do something about your hair, sweetpea,” and then took a long, heartstopping drag on his Bogart fag. She was speechless. For the next thirty minutes, while Marcel smoked butt after butt, he held forth like an evangelical preacher on the necessity of embracing entropy. She was totally entranced.
“Where do people think all this light would be coming from if there were no darkness, hmmm?” he asked.
“What’s day without night? Is everyone really so absolutely unaware that hell is what makes heaven possible? Hey, Kennie,” he said in acknowledgement to a passing woman. Patricia wondered indistinctly if perhaps Marcel knew everyone in Venice. As people passed them, there in the shadow of parking garage number three, he nodded to each one, used pet monikers with a familiar purr. “Patricia, honey,” he said. She didn’t remember having told him her name. “Go home to your husband, there’s a good girl. Bring some smokes the next time you walk behind the Promenade.”
How had he known she was married?
That night, Patricia sat in front of her dressing table mirror for a long time, thinking about the things Marcel had said. The way he looked in the shadowy light. The smell of his perfume. The perfect arc of his well-plucked eyebrow. The delicacy of his manicured hands. The light caught her wedding ring and she blushed.
Ah.
She was still sitting, looking into the glass, over rows of antique perfume bottles she had picked at garage sales and auctions, when Gerald came home. Then she figured out what she wanted.
“Gerald, hon? I’m in the bedroom,” she called out, fishing around for makeup in the vanity. Where are those fishnets Louise gave me when we got married, she thought, rapidly pulling lingerie onto the little velvet-covered stool. Gerald’s benign, round, Middle Eastern face peeped around the door. “Hon—” he froze in utter amazement, blinking at the sight of Patricia, parading around, covered in the secret things that hadn’t seen light since their honeymoon. “Patricia.”
He said it softly, his eyes bugging ever so slightly, the nasal quality of his voice petting her name sound with its caressing, mechanical hum.
“Patricia. Whatever are you up to?”
She turned and looked at him, a man she had not assessed sexually in over ten years. He was soft and purple, his dark curly hair topping an ageless face, his innocent, bespectacled looks implausibly erotic. “Come here,” Patricia murmured, dangerously, in a whisper she didn’t recognize as her own. “Put this on. And don’t give me any trouble.” She held out a sheer, gauzy red teddy, with openings for the nipples and genitals.
He almost hesitated.
Patricia was barely cognizant of her old self, she was so wrapped up in this new feeling. She felt cold and hot, powerful and yearning, and absolutely sure of how to sate the desire creating a yawning pit in her belly.