by Nic Kelman
You want to devour her. You can’t get enough of her in your mouth — her neck, her arms, her belly. You could eat her pussy for hours. With your girlfriend you always did it out of fairness. She went down on you so you went down on her or you wanted her to go down on you so you went down on her. You don’t mind it — you know some guys who don’t like to do it but do it anyway for the same reason you do — no, you don’t mind it, but it never turned you on like this. All you can think about is having her in your mouth. You make her lie back on the bed, spread her arms out on the bed, and just let you pull her pussy to your mouth. Beneath your hands, the skin on her thighs is so smooth it makes you think of fax paper. You can feel the calluses on your palms scraping it as you hold her legs. You hear your stubble scratch against her right leg. Worried you might hurt her, you push her legs farther open. The tendons on her inner thighs flex out like little steel cables and where they end, where they push out the farthest forming little cups of skin above and below, the mound of her pussy drops down towards her ass. She has shaved herself completely bare, you hope that’s what she’s done, and the slit between her legs is so delicate it looks like someone has cut her with a scalpel. Carefully, gently, you pull the slit open with your fingertips revealing the folds of tan flesh inside. You never noticed how clumsy your fingers were before, how enormous, how ugly. Like a gorilla’s, you find yourself thinking. You look at her spread open like that for a second, like a sea creature, like an anemone in that moment it reaches out to swallow a fish, and then you glance up her body. She isn’t moving, she stares at the ceiling, you can’t see her face. Then you put your mouth on her. For a second you are relieved to feel the odd piece of stubble pricking your lips. For a second you wonder if your girlfriend would shave herself like this. And then you are lost.
Suddenly she taps you on the shoulder, taps you on the shoulder as if you were in a line for a bus and she needed information. You look up at her, one of your ape fingers still inside her. And she says, “If you want to fuck me you should do it now — you only have fifteen minutes left.” You can’t believe it. You can’t believe you have been doing what you have been doing for forty-five minutes. You feel like you have only just begun. And you find yourself wondering how she has been keeping track of time.
You don’t really want to stop what you’ve been doing but you feel that you should, that you didn’t pay to make her feel good, that you should get what you actually paid for. You only have to make a slight motion towards flipping her over and she is immediately on her hands and knees, thrusting her shoulder blades and her ass in the air, keeping her belly low. As you go to put yourself inside her from behind, you follow the curved groove of her sunken spine with your eyes down to the small of her back where it ends in a tiny, flat V of skin rising up like an arrowhead, its sides carved out by the two hemispheres that began sloping up at her hips, its point the beginning of the cleft of her ass — small, round, taut as a balloon — and again you are overcome by the urge to put her in your mouth. Without realizing what you are doing you find yourself licking her asshole. Tomorrow, on the plane, as you think back over the experience, as you try to reconstruct every detail, you will suddenly remember your body did this, and you will wonder where you were when it happened. There and then, on the plane, as the stewardess asks you if you want beef or chicken, the thought of it will make you ill. But here and now, in your hotel room, this thing you would never do makes you want to cum. You push yourself inside her, grab her waist with your hands, your hands that almost encompass her waist in their grip, and thrust in and out of her. The tip of your cock pushes against the roof of her uterus and every time it does she lets out a little squeal. You can’t tell if it’s from pain or pleasure but you think it’s probably both. You worry a little bit about breaking her, about crushing her rib cage as you squeeze her little breasts that feel as firm as oranges, about snapping her arm as you pull her back onto you, about suffocating her when — after just five or six strokes — you cum and collapse on top of her.
But she is fine. She lets you lie on top of her for a second, carefully pulls you out of her making sure the condom stays in place, wipes her hand on the sheets, and squirms out from under you. You cannot move. You watch her dress. She disappears into the bathroom for a minute to fix her hair and makeup but it doesn’t take long and when she is done, when you still haven’t moved, she says, “I have to go.”
You pull yourself up from the bed, out from under the enormous weight crushing you to the bed, and, in a daze, give her her cash. It’s less than a quarter of what you had in your wallet for just one day’s expenses.
She takes it without ceremony and puts it in her purse. You are still naked. At the door, after she’s opened it a crack, she turns and says, “I’m sorry I reminded you about time — they always do what you did and forget about time and then get mad when they find out time is gone.”
“Oh don’t worry about it!” you say congenially, you say wanting her to know you’re not the same as the other men, that you’d never get mad. She just nods and says, “If you want me again, ask for Jin,” and is gone.
When you get back in bed you wish you felt worse about this. You wish you felt terrible, in fact. But you don’t. Instead you feel fucking fantastic. Reborn. Your head is clear, you can actually feel the sheets touching your entire body.
As you drift off to sleep you realize the concierge hadn’t misunderstood, hadn’t made a mistake at all. This must have been what Saswat was talking about. The best fucking hookers. The two older men simply knew what you needed better than you knew yourself.
The next day you buy your girlfriend a gift before you leave, an antique necklace. You were going to get her something anyway, you just spend a little more than you had originally planned.
You were in Pusan.
The example worked. The ship was finished on time. You saved 25 million dollars. You were a hero. The ship’s cartel took you and your boss out to a restaurant that overlooked the entire city. At one point, as they served the nine dozen Wellfleet oysters, Saswat leaned over and said quietly in your ear, “Welcome to the club.” You had been thinking about the man you fired, about whether he would ever eat in a restaurant like this, drink wine like this wine, but when Saswat said that, you stopped feeling guilty, alone. You at last felt like you had a companion, someone who understood.
It was a clear night. Afterwards they took you to a loud strip club, sent you to the Champagne Room with a girl named something-andy. The next morning you had a vague memory of her blowing you there, but you couldn’t be certain, you were very drunk. And as you lay there that Saturday morning, your girlfriend’s arm draped over your chest, the sunlight diffused over both of you by the curtains, as you lay there you thought about the last time you were that drunk, about Jin standing there outside your door, about how she looked standing there outside your door, about how she smelled standing there outside your door, how there was no other smell there, no other smell at all.
“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians . . . ” — Iliad 1:1
It is late. You are in a town in the middle of nowhere. You had managed to find a day to fly out here by yourself, to get away from everything and everyone you know and rent a truck and take a look at an enormous piece of land that happened to be for sale. You want a ranch. Somewhere no one can bother you. Somewhere with no data lines of any kind. Somewhere you can shoot anyone you didn’t invite.
And afterwards, once the sun had gone down, you had driven the thirty or so miles to the nearest town to get some dinner. For the first time in about seventeen years you don’t know where you’ll be staying the night and you are surprised how good that feels. It’s something you never would have thought could make you feel anything but anxious.
So you park at the only restaurant in town, a diner with rigs parked nearby. It’s not a truck stop per se, just one of those places truckers stop because there’s nowhere els
e.
You sit down in a booth and the waitress brings you a menu. She doesn’t say anything to you, doesn’t even give you a second look. And you are surprised how much it irritates you to be treated like that, like anyone else. It’s something you thought would never make you feel anything but relaxed.
And as you are looking at the menu you catch the door open out of the corner of your eye and the person who comes in walks right up next to you and says, “Excuse me.”
You look up. Standing there is a large man, much larger than you, wearing a grimy T-shirt and blue jeans and a belt buckle that says ALLIE’S GATOR FARM. His worn black baseball cap says CATERPILLAR in yellow letters and you are suddenly very aware that yours is not only new but says ALPHA-GENESIS.
“Yes?” you say.
“You’re in my booth,” the man says. He’s not picking a fight, just stating a fact, like you’ve made a genuine mistake, like you stopped to ask him directions and he’s telling you you took a wrong turn.
“Oh,” you say. “Well I don’t mind if we share, that’s no problem,” you say with the friendly smile that has closed more deals than you can remember. Well, unless you actually try to remember.
He looks over at the empty side of the booth and then looks back at you and says, “No, I don’t think so. I think I’d like my booth to myself just right now.” And again he looks at you without hostility. He’s simply telling you what you need to know.
You look around the diner. You know where this would have to go from here. So you don’t say anything more. You just get up and, with no other booths free, start to walk over to the counter. But he says, “Hey!” as you walk away.
And this time when you turn around you’re ready to take a stand right there in your new sneakers. This has gone far enough, you think, I don’t care what happens, you think, I’m not going to let this redneck push me around anymore.
But he’s holding your coat out to you. “You forgot your coat,” he says.
“Thanks,” you say, taking it from him.
“No problem,” he says, sinking into your booth. “What is that anyway? Calf? It’s nice, real soft.”
“No,” you say, “I think it’s sheep.”
“Huh,” he says picking up his menu, “I didn’t know they could make sheep that soft.”
As you sit down at the counter, sit down on one of the metal stools with their worn-out padding, and pick up a menu, you hear the waitress go up to him behind you and say, “Hey, Jake, how you doing? Usual?” and the reply, “Howdy, Lu-Ann, yes please, if you don’t mind.”
And as you eat your third-rate chicken-fried steak it occurs to you that the way you feel has nothing to do with your job or with all the responsibilities you have made for yourself outside your job. You realize that the way you feel will never go away. You realize that, as long as you are around other men, it can never stop.
There are certain mammals that have a little hook at the end of their penis. Their couplings are so violent they could never copulate successfully without it. But sometimes, when they mate, they become caught. Unable to separate they cannot forage or sleep or run. And so they die like that. Joined.
I remember holding your hand in Avignon.
We walked through the medieval streets, close like canyons, twisting our ankles on the cobblestones. The sun was orange, yellow, made everything beautiful, the laundry strung from window to window, the stray dogs pissing in the gutters.
We had always talked about going there when we were in college. You had done your thesis on the papal period, wanted to see all the places that were so important, the places that had only been words and silver halides to you. This was a dream come true for you.
At that palace like a fortress, like some vampire’s hall, you told me what happened here, who was killed there. On the walls, from where we could see the collapsed bridge, you sang the song. Your French was perfect. A little English girl was there and when she heard you singing, she ran away from her mother and asked you if you could teach her the song. You held her tiny hands while you listened to her, took her request as seriously as she did, laughed and looked at me when she was done asking. The wind blew your hair into your face but I think you saw me smile. You taught her the song and her mother thanked you as if you had done her the greatest favor, endured the greatest injustice.
We stayed in a suite at the Louis XIV. The night we arrived there was champagne waiting for us in the room. I had asked for it. The night we arrived you tried to pour it down your naked breast into my open mouth, but instead of cascading off your nipple, the stream split there, clung to the underside of your breast, ran down your body to where it touched the bed. I licked up what I could as it flowed but it made the mattress wet anyway.
I bought you everything you wanted. Everything. The Crusader’s cross hammered out in silver, inlaid with onyx. The Regency armoire that cost as much to ship back as to buy. A letter of excommunication signed by Pope Innocent VI.
But you said you didn’t want the bracelet. You looked at it very closely but then stood upright and said, “No, I don’t really want it.” You didn’t know I saw you touch the glass bangle you were wearing as you spoke, the bangle I had brought you back from a business trip to London. You probably didn’t know you touched it yourself.
You seemed so happy. I enjoyed your company so much. I wasn’t particularly interested in the medieval history of the papacy but it made you so excited, made you come so much alive, that I could listen to you talk about it for hours. Your eyes lit up when you talked about it, shone, not like when you talked about your work at the PR firm. I remembered why I’d taken you so far to ask you a question I already knew the answer to.
The last night there, after dinner, near a lead fountain in the middle of a crossroads, I asked you to marry me. You said yes, of course. And that was what was supposed to happen. There was nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all. I felt fine.
On the flight back you looked at the ring every so often, hoped the woman next to you would say how pretty it was, ask you about it. But she was much older, she read and she ate and she said nothing. At last, somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you put your arms around my neck and sighed and closed your eyes and said, “It’s like a fairy tale.” I kissed your brow and moved your left arm a little so I could see the report I was trying to read.
But I do remember holding your hand in Avignon.
“‘To me you are the most hateful of all the kings the gods love. Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, and wars and battles; and if you are very strong indeed, that is a god’s gift.’” — Agamemnon to Achilles, Iliad 1:176
You wake in the night sometimes, your heart pounding with that fear, that terror that you are not secure, that you are exposed, that for all your money and servants and employees, tomorrow you may be out on the street — working in a factory, driving a bus — fighting with a woman as old as you are about whether or not you can afford to see a movie. Just a lousy movie. You lie there and stare at where the ceiling would be in the dark and you realize that there is someone next to you. But you don’t know who. You weren’t even that drunk. There were, as always, several candidates — temps, struggling actresses, younger sisters. They couldn’t wait to talk to you, to listen to you, to find you fascinating. And now one of them lies next to you. Half your age, you know that, she must be. But that is all you know. Her face, her name, her body are gone.
And you hate yourself for being weak, for taking the drug again, for smoking the cigarette you had forborne. You wish she wasn’t there, whoever she is.
In the morning, you wake and she is in your shower. You wonder what she looks like but it doesn’t matter, no matter what she looks like she must go. But then the shower is turned off and she steps into your room, drying her whole body with a hand towel, unashamed of her nakedness. Not like the women you know your own age, that can’t wait to hide their sagging flesh, turn off lights, wear long skirts. And her wet hair and the glistening of her nipples in the mo
rning sun and her anklet or her tattoo or her pierced tongue or whatever it is makes you shiver and you know you will not tell her to leave, that you will listen to her babble over lunch and nod and smile. But not because you are trying to please her. Because watching her really does make you smile, indulging her really does make you happy for a moment. Watching something free, unweighted, like setting a dog loose on a beach. You are too tired to run like that, too anxious to enjoy the sun and the waves, but seeing the animal relax, take pleasure, at least helps you remember what it was like. In the earning of things you have lost the ability to enjoy them. And others can only enjoy them because they did not earn them.
If you are running with a friend and the two of you can have a conversation as you’re running, you can be sure you’re not getting anything out of the run.
