Hottest Blood

by Jeff Gelb

  “It?” she queried. She had a new-found confidence. For the first time in a long time, she had something that Bradley seriously desired.

  “I mean, are you ready?” he corrected himself. He stood up. He was very heavily build, broad-shouldered man of fifty-five. He was silver-haired, with a leonine head that would have looked handsome as a piece of garden statuary. He was one of the original Boston Ellises—shipping magnates, landowners, newspaper publishers—and now the largest single broker of laser technology in the Western world.

  He slowly approached her. He wore a blue-and-white-striped cotton shirt, pleated blue slacks, and fancy maroon suspenders. It was a look that the Ellises cherished: the look of a hands-on newspaper publisher, or a wheeler and dealer in smoke-filled rooms. It was dated, but it had its own special Bostonian charisma.

  “Show me,” he said. He spoke in a low, soft rumble. Helen felt what he said, rather than heard it. IT was like distant thunder approaching.

  “In the bedroom,” she said. “Not here.”

  He looked around the library with its shelves of antique leatherbound books and its gloomy paints of Ellis ancestors. In one corner of the library, close to the window, stood the same flatbed printing press that Bradley’s great-great-grandfather had used to print the first editions of the Beacon Hill Messenger.

  “What better place than here?” he wanted to know. She may have had something that he seriously desired, but his wish was still her command.

  She let the scarlet silk robe slip from her shoulders and whisper to the floor, where it lay like a shining pool of sudden blood. Underneath, she wore a scarlet quarter-cup bra that lifted and divided her large white breasts but didn’t cover them. Her nipples wrinkled as dark pink as raspberries.

  But it was the scarlet silk triangle between her legs that kept Bradley’s attention riveted. He tugged his necktie loose and opened his collar, and his breathing came harsh and shallow.

  “Show me,” he repeated.

  “You’re not frightened?” she asked him. Somehow she sensed that he might be.

  He fixed her with a quick, black-eyed stare. “Frightened? What the fuck are you talking about? You may have been the one who suggested it, but I’m the one who paid for it. Show me.”

  She tugged loose the scarlet string of her panties, and they fell to the floor around her left ankle, a token shackle of discarded silk.

  “Jesus,” whispered Bradley. “It’s fantastic.”

  Helen had bared her pale, plump-lipped, immaculately waxed sex. But immediately above her own sex was another, just as plumb, just as inviting, just as moist. Only an oval scar showed where Dr. Arcolio had sewn it into her lower abdomen, a scar no more disfiguring than a mild first-degree burn.

  Eyes wide, speechless, Bradley knelt on the carpet in front of her and placed the palms of his hands against her thighs. He stared at her twin vulvas in ferocious delight.

  “It’s fantastic. It’s fantastic! It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  He paused and looked up at her, suddenly little-boyish. “Can I touch it? Does it feel like the other one?”

  “Of course you can touch it,” said Helen. “You paid for it. It’s yours.”

  Trembling, Bradley stroked the smooth lips of her new sex. “You can feel that? You can really feel it?”

  “Of course. It feels good.”

  He touched her second clitoris, until it began to stiffen. Then he slipped his middle finger into the warm, moist depths of her second vagina.

  “It’s fantastic. It feels just the same. It’s incredible. Jesus! It’s incredible!”

  He strode to the library door, kicked it shut, and then turned the key. He strode back to the middle of the room, snapping off his suspenders, tearing off his shirt, stumbling out of his pants. By the time he had reached Helen he was naked except for his large striped shorts. He pulled those off, revealing a massive crimson erection.

  He pushed her onto the carpet and he thrust himself furiously into her, no preliminaries, no foreplay, just raging, explosive lust. First he pushed himself into her new vagina, then into her own vagina, then into her bottom. He went from one to the other like a starving man who couldn’t choose between meat, bread, and candy.

  Frightened at first, taken aback by the fury of his sexual attack, Helen didn’t feel anything but friction and spasm. But as Bradley thrust and thrust and grunted with exertion, she began to experience a sensation between her legs that was quite unlike anything that she had ever felt before; a sensation that was doubled in intensity, trebled. A sensation so overwhelming that she gripped the rug with both hands, unsure if the pleasure wasn’t going to be too great for her mind to be able to accept. As Bradley plunged into her second vagina again and again, she felt as if she were going to go mad, or die.

  Then, like a woman caught swimming in a warm black tropical swell, she was carried away.

  She opened her eyes to hear Bradley on the telephone. He was still naked, his heavy body white and hairy, his penis hanging down like a plum in a sock.

  “George? Listen George, you have to get up here. You have to get up here now! It’s the most fantastic thing you ever experienced in your life. George, don’t argue, just drop everything and get your ass up here as fast as you can. And don’t forget your toothbrush: You won’t be going home tonight, I promise you!”

  Just before dawn, she opened her eyes. She was lying naked in the middle of the emperor-sized bed. On her right side, Bradley was pressed up close to her, snoring heavily, his hand possessively cupping her second sex. On her left side, George Cartin was snoring in a different key, as if he were dreaming, and his hand was cupping her original sex. Her bottom felt sore and stretched, and her mouth was dry with that unmistakable arid taste of swallowed semen.

  She felt strange; almost as if she were more than one woman. Her second vagina had brought her a curious duality of personality, as well as a duality of body. But she felt more secure. Bradley had told her over and over that she was wonderful, that she was spectacular, that he would never think of leaving her, ever.

  Dr. Arcolio, she thought, you would be proud of me.

  Winter again. She met Dr. Arcolio at Hamersley’s. Dr. Arcolio had put on a little weight. Helen was thinner, almost gaunt, and she had lost weight off her breasts.

  She toyed with a plate of sautéed skate. There were shadows under her eyes the same color as the brown butter.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her. He had ordered smoked and grilled game hen with peach chutney and was eating at a furious speed. “You’ve had no rejection, everything’s great.”

  She put down her fork. “It’s not enough,” she said, and he heard the same dull note of despair that he had heard when she first consulted him.

  “You have two vaginas and it’s not enough?” he hissed at her. A bearded man at the next table turned and stared at him in astonishment.

  Helen said, “It was wonderful to start with. We made love five or six times a day. He adored it. He made me walk around naked for days on end, so that he could stare at me and put his fingers up me whenever he felt like it. I gave him shows, like erotic performances, with candles and vibrators, and once I did it with his two Great Danes.”

  Dr. Arcolio swallowed his mouthful with difficulty. “Wow,” was all he could say.

  There were tears hovering on the edge of Helen’s eyes. “I did all of that but it wasn’t enough. It just wasn’t enough. Now he scarcely bothers anymore. He says we’ve done everything that we could possibly do. We had an argument last week and he called me a freak.”

  Dr. Arcolio laid his hand on top of hers, trying to be comforting. “I had a feeling this might happen. I talked to a sex-therapist friend of mine a little while ago. She said that once you start going down this road with human sexuality—once you get into sadomasochism or you start nipple-piercing or labia-piercing or tattooing or any other kind of heavyweight perversion—it becomes an obsession, and you never get satisfied. You start chasing a mi
rage of ultimate excitement that doesn’t exist. Good sex is being exciting with what you’ve got.”

  He sat back and fastidiously wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I can have you in for corrective surgery early next week. Fifty thousand in advance, fifty thousand on completion, scarcely any scar.”

  Helen frowned. “You can get donors that quick?”

  “I’m sorry?” said Dr. Arcolio. “You won’t need any more donors. We’ll simply take out the second vagina and close up.”

  “Doctor, I believe we’re talking at cross-purposes here,” Helen told him. “I don’t want this second vagina removed. I want two more.”

  There was a very long silence. Dr. Arcolio licked his lips, and then drank a glass of water, and then licked his lips again. “You want what, did you say?”

  “Two more. You can do it, can’t you? One in the lower half of each breast. Bradley will adore it. Then I can have one man in each breast, and three inside, and two in my mouth, and Bradley will adore it.”

  “You want me to transplant vaginas into your breasts?Helen, for God’s sake, what I’ve done already is advanced enough. Not to mention ethically appalling and totally illegal. This time, Helen, no. No way. You can send all of your incrimination particulars about my transsexual surgery to the D.A. or wherever you damn well like. But no. I’m not doing it. Absolutely not.”

  Bradley’s Christmas treat that year was to invite six of his friends for a stag supper. They ate flame-grilled steak, and drank four jugs of dry martinis between them, and then they roared and laughed and tilted into the bedroom, where Helen was waiting for them, naked, not moving.

  They took one look at her and they stopped roaring. They approached her in disbelief, and stared are her, and she remained quite still, with everything exposed.

  In drunken wide-eyed wonder, two of them clambered astride her. One of them was the president of a Boston savings bank. Helen didn’t know the other one, but he had a ginger mustache and ginger hair on his thighs. They took hold of her nipples between finger and thumb and lifted up her heavy breasts, as if they were lifting up dish covers at an expensive restaurant.

  “My God,” said the president of the savings bank. “It’s true. It’s fucking true.”

  With gradually mounting grunts of excitement, the two men pushed their reddened erections deep into the slippery apertures that had opened up beneath Helen’s nipples.

  They forced themselves deep into her breasts, deep into soft warm tissue, and twisted her nipples until she winced with pain.

  Two more crammed themselves into her mouth, so that she could scarcely breathe. But what did it matter? Bradley was whooping with delight, Bradley loved her, Bradley wanted her. Bradley would never grow tired of her now, not after this. And even if he did, she could always find new ways to please him.

  He didn’t grow tired of her. But then he didn’t have very much longer to live. On September 12, two years later, Helen woke to find that Bradley was lying dead, his cold hand cupping her original vulva.

  Bradley was buried in the grounds of the Dedham-style house overlooking the Charles River, in accordance with that strange pretense that the dead can still see, or even care where they are.

  Dr. Arcolio came to the house and drank champagne and ate little bits of fish and artichoke and messy little barbecued ribs. Everybody spoke in very hushed voices. Helen Ellis had kept to herself throughout the funereal and had been heavily veiled in black. Now she had retreated to her private apartments and left Bradley’s family and business friends and political henchmen to enjoy his wake without her participation.

  After a while, however, Dr. Arcolio climbed the echoing marble stairs and tiptoed along to her room. He tapped three times on the door before he heard her say, indistinctly, “Who is it? Go away.”

  “It’s Eugene Arcolio. Can I talk to you?”

  There was no reply, but after a very long time, the doors were opened, and left open, and Dr. Arcolio assumed that this must be an invitation for him to go inside.

  Cautiously, he entered. Helen was sitting by the window on a stuff upright chair. She was still veiled.

  “What do you want?” she asked him. Her voice was muffled, distorted.

  He shrugged. “I just came by to say congratulations.”

  “Congratulations?”

  “Sure…you got what you wanted, didn’t you? The house, the money. Everything.”

  Helen turned her head toward him and then lifted her veil. He wasn’t shocked. He knew what to expect. After all, he had undertaken all the surgery himself.

  In each of her cheeks, a vulva gaped. Each vulva was pouting and moist, a surrealistic parody of a Rustler centerspread. A barely comprehensible collage of livid flesh and composed beauty and absolute horror.

  It had been Helen’s last act of complete subservience, to sacrifice her looks, so that Bradley and his friends had been able to penetrate not only her body but her face.

  Dr. Arcolio had pleaded with her not to do it, but she had threatened suicide, and then murder, and then she had threatened to tell the media what he had done to her already.

  “It’s reversible,” he had reassured himself as he meticulously sewed vaginal muscles into the linings of her cheeks. “It’s totally reversible.”

  Helen looked up at him. “You think I got what I wanted?” Every time she spoke, the vaginal lips parted slightly.

  He had to turn away. The sight of what he had done to her was more than he could bear.

  “I didn’t get what I wanted,” she said, and tears began to slide down her cheeks, and drip from the curved pink labia minora. “I wanted vaginas everywhere, all over me, so that Bradley could have twenty friends for the night, a hundred of them all at once, in my face, in my thighs, in my stomach, under my arms. He wanted a sex object, Eugene, and I would have been happy, you know, being his sex object.”

  Dr. Arcolio said, “I’m sorry. I think this was my fault, as much as yours. In fact, I think it was all my fault.”

  That afternoon he went back to his office overlooking Brookline Square where Helen Ellis had first consulted him. He stood by the window for a long time.

  Was it right to give people what they wanted, if what they wanted was perverse and self-sacrificial, and it flew in the face of God’s creation?

  Was it right to mutilate a beautiful woman, even if she craved mutilation?

  How far did his responsibilities go? Was he a butcher, or was he a saint? Was he close to Heaven; or dancing on the manhole cover of Hell? OR was he nothing more than a surgical parody of Ann Landers, solving marital problems with a scalpel, instead of sensible suggestions?

  He lit the first cigarette he had smoked in almost a month and sat at his desk in the gathering gloom. Then, when it was almost dark, his secretary, Esther, knocked on the door, opened it, and said, “Doctor?”

  “What is it, Esther? I’m busy.”

  “Mr. Pierce and Mr. De Scenza. They came for their six o’clock appointment.”

  Dr. Arcolio crushed out his cigarette and waved the smoke away. “Oh, shit. All right. Show them in.”

  John Piece and Philip De Scenza came into his office and stood in front of his desk like two schoolboys summoned to report to the principal. John Pierce was young and blond and wore an unstructured Italian suit with rolled-up sleeved. Philip De Scenza was older and heavier and darker, in a hand-knitted plum-colored sweater and baggy brown slacks.

  Dr. Arcolio reached across his desk and shook their hands. “How are you? Sorry…I’ve been a little preoccupied this afternoon.”

  “Oh…we understand,” said Philip De Scenza. “We’ve been pretty busy ourselves.”

  “How are things coming along?” asked Dr. Arcolio. “Have you experienced any problems? Any pain?”

  John Pierce shyly shook his head. Philip De Scenza made a circle with his finger and his thumb and said, “Perfect, Doctor. Two thousand percent perfect. Fucking-A, if you don’t mind my saying so!”

  Dr. Arcolio stood up and cleared
his throat. “You’d better let me take a look, then. Do you want a screen?”

  “A screen?” John Pierce giggled.

  Philip De Scenza dismissively flapped his hand. “We don’t need a screen.”

  While Dr. Arcolio waited, John Pierce unbuckled his belt, tugged down his zipper, and wriggled out of his toothpaste-striped boxer shorts.

  “Would you bend over please?” asked Dr. Arcolio. John Pierce gave a little cough and did as he was told.

  Dr. Arcolio spread his muscular bottom to reveal two perfect crimson anuses, both tightly wincing, one above the other. Around the upper anus there was a star-shaped pattern of more than ninety stitches, but they had all healed perfectly, and there were only the faintest diagonal scars across his buttocks.

  “Good,” said Dr. Arcolio, “that’s fine. You can pull up your pants again now.”

  He turned to Philip De Scenza, and all he had to do was raise an eyebrow. Philip De Scenza lifted his sweater, dropped his pants, and stood proudly brandishing his improved equipment: one dark penis, like a heavy fruit, surmounted by yet another dark penis; and four hairy testicles hanging at the sides.

  “Any difficulties?” asked Dr. Arcolio, lifting both penises with professional detachment and examining them carefully. Both began to stiffen a little.

  “Timing, that’s all.” Philip De Scenza shrugged, with a sideways smile at his friend. “I still haven’t managed a simultaneous climax. By the time I’ve finished, poor John’s usually getting quite sore.”

  “General comfort?” asked Dr. Arcolio tightly.

  “Oh, fine…just so long as I don’t wear my pants too tailored.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. Arcolio dully. “You can zip yourself up again now.”

  “Over so soon?” Philip De Scenza flirted. “That’s not very good value, Doctor. A hundred dollars for two seconds’ fondle. You should be ashamed of yourself.”