The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  No problem, I lived alone, just the dog and me. We left the bar and descended some stairs off the lobby to a glass door that opened on San Antonio’s famous Riverwalk. We passed a couple of the young people from her group and she pointedly drew my arm around her, but they barely looked at us as we went by.

  I was reminded of a time, back in “the day,” when I had thrown my books at the principal and dropped out of high school. On my way out, defiantly lighting a cigarette, I had paused to cuss out some old antagonists. As they had comprehended the situation, their eyes sort of glazed over and they’d walked away. I had been no longer a part of their reality; I’d ceased to exist in their world. I remembered wishing that someone had told me that it could be that easy! While my parents had shortly pressed me into entering another school to finish up, the small bit of bravado had constituted a rite of passage. I wondered whether Justine might be feeling something of the same nature.

  We paused on the Riverwalk, regarded as highly romantic by tourists, though less so to locals. Until an evening such as this, one which seemed “the goal in sight again.” I could almost believe the proposition that we are able to choose among our possible futures, that I had somehow found my way to that moment. Yes, I was indeed basking in the envious glances of men, as well as those of outright hatred from some women—we all have our little agendas. But I did feel that I had to exorcise one last demon of sanity before giving myself over, altogether, to midlife crisis.

  I used to joke with my late wife about her “Three Faces of Linda”: the exotic dancer seen on the stage, the flirtatious courtesan who was her clubroom persona, and, of course, the “real” Linda, predictably a bit shy and withdrawn. Those personalities had generally occupied discrete blocs of time. This creature, on the other hand… I had watched the tough young punker waver into something indefinable within spans of seconds, then morph into a being as kittenish as Seabrook had drawn her “composite” predecessor. I looked down into those pale green panther’s eyes, which again seemed as primordial as her Arabian jewelry.

  “Who are you, really?” I wondered rhetorically then, in all hopeless honesty, just blurted out, “And what in the world do you want with me?”

  The enigmatic eyes moistened, as they seemed to divine all my shades of meaning. “Where is it written that same is good?” Thus dismissing ages, acculturations, et cetera, she snuggled tighter under my arm. “Something wonderful is happening,” and that was all

  she would say as we drove to my house—in a neighborhood where it’s best not to be after dark unless both the cops and the gangs know you.

  In my defense, I will tell you that the childlike joy in that expression resonated with a hope long absent from my heart. I do possess some sense of responsibility, beyond simply not wanting to deal with the guilt later, but this was of a different order. If I had banished the demon from one shoulder, an angel on the other was still being troublesome. The old folks would have said it was warning me, If you don’t live up to that, if you let her down, it’s the sort of thing for which you will surely be damned. Please don’t laugh at me; I’m as serious as death.

  Still, I gave myself over—what did you really expect? Uncharted territory it would be, then. In my experience, when you notice something magical, something the poets would sing as evidence a union is meant to be, it’s best not to tell Girlfriend about it. Women generally don’t appreciate anything that far outside their control, inclusive even of acts of God Almighty. So here was one who just seemed to say to go with it? I had no more questions. Right then at least. Questions would soon multiply like a mutated virus.

  ————————

  IT WOULD BE ABSURDLY COY to refrain from the most intimate details of what was happening to me. From what I was to learn of the viewpoint of Justine’s exhibitionistic little soul, it would be flatly disingenuous.

  Someone wanting you that bad can raise the dead. While I had not yet been disposed to just go on out to the cemetery and lie down, I’d been emotionally and sexually shut off for a long time. Even my bedroom had certain tomblike qualities. Due to curiosities of old house construction and expansion, it was a fully enclosed inside room, without outside walls. No sound or vibration disturbed its silence. Hidden away in decaying south San Antonio, the place must have seemed to her like the dark side of the moon.

  Drawing a deep breath, she stepped to the center of the room and stood looking at the bed, as though caressing the image of what we were about to do on it. She then loosened her skirt and let it fall to reveal that she had worn nothing beneath it.

  Turning about slowly, displaying herself for me, she shed her jacket and lifted a questioning eyebrow. Wearing only her body jewelry and heels, she was easily as sensational as any showgirl I’d ever had a lech on. Still, I responded that I wanted her to be as naked as possible. Dropping her eyes, she breathed a soft, “I understand,” unwinding the heavy chain and taking off her bracelets. She also relinquished a tiny chain that draped about her hips. Her nipples were unpierced, as I’d learned when I caressed them at the bar. But, as she lifted her leg to remove the painful thong band, I saw the glint of metal below her reddish pelt of pubic hair.

  “No tattoos?” I wondered, as she kicked off her shoes and moved to the bed. She sprawled across it on her belly and propped herself up on her elbows with her chin held by her fingers, regarding herself in the full-length mirrors on my closet. Fixing me with her eyes in the reflection, she pointedly spread her thighs.

  “The only dead-on work is done in Europe,” she explained, assessing me in return. “I’d have to get way up on something, to let it be put on me.” I took off my coat and moved around the bed to mute the lights, hoping to give myself every possible edge in comparison to her hard young body. As I reached for the lamp on the nightstand, she grabbed my butt with both hands, pulling herself to her knees. She loosened my belt and aggressively shoved down my trousers. Pressing my hands behind my back, she began to demonstrate the utility of the ornament on her pierced tongue.

  I was erect in a matter of seconds and, not wanting to risk losing it, hastily pinned her back against the bed, losing more clothes as I could. I cursed under my breath as I remembered to reach for the condom, which, hope springing eternal, I kept on the nightstand. But she seized my wrist and nipped at my pectoral with her teeth. “Nay, please! I don’t want that,” she hissed.

  While I hated the thought of trying to keep it up to get the damned thing on, I felt obliged to protest, “Unfortunately, I know that it’s perfectly safe, Justine, but you don’t know me, now do you?” God, I felt so responsible, it made me sick.

  “A good time at a party? Not. This is some kinda real, and I wanna feel you come inside me,” she breathed, smothering any further discussion with her mouth. I didn’t recall ever being kissed quite like that before. She was a starving succubus, gnawing and sucking on sustenance long denied, squirming against me, as if trying to claw open and crawl inside my skin.

  Handling Justine’s sweet, firm flesh alone would have impacted, not to mention the way she held the rungs on the headboard in a facsimile of bondage. She moaned and writhed as I ate her pussy, lapping up her abundant lubrication. This was perhaps less a product of any expertise on my part, than of her labial ring’s configuration. A thick protrusion on one side was designed to remain in more or less constant contact with her clitoris.

  When I did grab some neckties, strategically left (like the condom) on the headboard since I rarely wear them, and bound her hands, she gasped in the semblance of innocent anticipation, “Are you gonna hurt me now?” This set me on fire and, when I told her no, not then, she teasingly purred, “But you will, sometime? Tell!”

  As I whispered to her fantasies of sufferings to come, she rolled over on her belly again, flexing her buttocks irresistibly. When I spread her and touched the tender flesh, she whimpered and involuntarily flinched away, but I seized her hips and dragged her back. The long muscles in her back quivered and she sobbed uncontrollably into the pillow
as I penetrated her anus.

  “Dead right! Make me feel it, make me feel every motherfuckin’ second of it!” She screamed and cried and cursed, bucking furiously as I reached under her to manipulate the cunning little ring against her clit. She came repeatedly and violently and I was astonished to sense at least two of the “Faces of Justine,” the tough punker and the playlike victim, momentarily merge.

  It was like having two women simultaneously, superimposed on one another. Her spasms subsiding, she turned on her back, easing me out of her before I could come and looked up at me, eyes wet and lips parted in an expression of absolute surrender. In that moment, I knew I could do anything whatsoever to her. She looped her bound wrists around my neck and sought my mouth, lifting her hips for me to enter her vaginally.

  Her demeanor neutralized any residual performance anxiety, and I discovered with delight that another labial ring, located farther down, performed for me the same function as the clit ring did for her. The contractions of her vaginal muscles gently nursed me toward climax. She kept her eyes open, their pale green fire burning into my soul as her slow undulations became unendurable. When she brought me off, she stretched all her muscles and came again with a long luxuriant moan.

  Directly she was drifting off, oblivious to the tickle and stickiness of the fluids we had generated. The sequence of choice left me more bemused at her apparent indifference to hygiene, but it was not something I was going to struggle with. As I pulled her on top of me, so that she might go to sleep without the burden of my weight on her, something happened that went beyond sex. Some more etheric fluid filled my heart.

  Holding her, just holding her was like… like coming home after a long trip. Yes, like coming home is all I can call it. I don’t mean that she was like my wife, or JJ, or others I’ve been with. The piercing and her other exotica, her morphing personas, all made her far different. But the greatest difference was the quiet conviction: Yes, this is what I’m used to. This is familiar, and safe, and… home.

  II

  Circumstance

  WRAPPED IN JUSTINE’S ARMS AND LEGS, MY thoughts did finally drift back to JJ, nonetheless. Unworthy as it might be seen, I’m afraid that it was rather along the lines of gloating at her probable disbelief, could she but have seen me then! I’m talking serious disbelief here, hard-core denial. JJ’s truths, her sense of reality, seemed to reside in whatever notions were most comfortable and convenient for the parochial minds of the moment. Truthfully, she had turned out to be not so different from the way I’d previously remembered her—from the portentous year of 1963, that single long storm of synchronicity, in personal lives as much as world affairs.

  In our later era, I first became uneasy when dragged to view a popular film that left the screen awash with passivity. My perception was that the male lead wussied out after claiming cosmic certainty that comes only once. What was supposed to be attractive about failure to embrace his lover’s confession of compliance?

  Not me, surely, but my JJ was careful to make no such confession. It became obvious that she would not leave her husband. Her basic conservatism reasserted itself, her discomfort with stirring things up, a pastime in which I take positive delight.

  To my credit, I refrained from making the acquaintance of more bartenders over these issues. For the first time in my life, I caved and sought counseling. Those of us, and this is not at all gender-specific, who spend our lives pretending to be tough guys may ultimately determine that we have maintained our image at a terrible price.

  The counselor, a Pakistani Sufi woman skilled in regression techniques, taught me much about the frailties of memory. Unexpectedly, I discovered a dark arc into which I could never see to resolve its contents. I’d not denied the reality of repression for other people, but finding its trail within myself was disconcerting.

  In deep hypnosis, I discovered how I’d “consolidated” some temporal facts. If asked before how many times, as a teen, I’d run over to JJ’s house on foot, I’d have answered maybe a dozen. Standing on her lawn in the hypnotic re-creation of the breakup, her dropping her chin when I tried to kiss her, I realized that I had been there scores of times not including all the lonely “drive-bys” of later years. However, when the counselor gave me an exercise of writing a chronology of my early romance with JJ, I found that some sequences and juxtapositions made no sense at all.

  There was a lucid recollection of sitting at a downtown shoeshine stand—Fort Worth, Texas, having no “uptown.” Built into an unused doorway no larger than a closet, it was wallpapered with an eclectic collection of scripture, joke-shop obscenities, and magazine cheesecake. It was situated in a zone of derelict hotels, which would later be abolished when it was deemed that the emotional stability of the city’s middle class demanded prettification.

  My mission had been to pay the outrageous sum of two whole dollars for a shine. Included in the fee would be directions to any contraband about which I might inquire, specifically, more persuasive identification than my doctored driver’s license.

  All this had all been preparatory to a proposed venture in underage marriage with JJ. I had been in a delinquent frame of mind, mild by today’s standards—the proverbial teenager in leather jacket… although, in my defense, I did have an old HarleyDavidson to go with it! When she became pregnant late in 1963, presumably by my successor, who briefly balked at marriage, a grand gesture had seemed indicated.

  The problem was that the timing made such a version of the enterprise thoroughly implausible. The vision seemed to incorporate elements from a full year before the pregnancy that had supposedly triggered my derring-do. I could not so much as recall whether I had succeeded in obtaining the items sought or not. Still, the vivid memory remained, and could not be denied. Perched on the high shoeshine chair, I had been happily inspecting a brand-new book, acquired only just before I’d arrived at the shine stand.

  It was the copy of the I Ching that I have to this day: the Bollingen single-volume edition with a foreword by Carl Jung. Intrigued by Philip K. Dick’s use of the book in his classic of that year, The Man in the High Castle, I’d been determined to possess it. Knowing full well that my life would end without JJ, I suppose I’d hoped that it might open for me the gate to another reality, as it had for the characters in Dick’s fiction. Failing that, perhaps its oracular powers might enlighten me as to how to win her back against all odds.

  I had gotten downtown early in order to search it out, combining the physical and metaphysical in my quest as I was to do again—more years later than I could have conceived of at the time. Entering at the side door of old Barber’s Bookstore, a local institution nearly unto today, I had an experience of the synchronicity upon which the ancient Chinese tome was allegedly based. High on a shelf just inside the door, I had spied the object of my search.

  I must claim that it most plaintively called out to me, because I promptly tucked it beneath my leather jacket and stepped back onto the sidewalk before the door even had time to close. Continuing on my mission, I had passed a newsstand. The papers left no doubt of this vision’s date. Their headlines had been full of the missiles of October.

  ————————

  THE OLD I CHING, rebound a couple of times, lay on my nightstand even then. It had been my quiet friend throughout the years. More recently, it had acquired a cherished companion—not a book that I sought out, but one that had found me. The night-light painted this other friend’s faded dust cover with new life, while Justine stirred softly against me—and I remembered my times with JJ.

  JJ never would have carried on in bed like this little babe! In the nearer time, the fault was partially of the environment. The logistics of my job and house being inconvenient for nooners, we often had been reduced to a downtown whore-motel. The concierges, a couple fresh from the Indian subcontinent, kept it clean enough in spite of its chronic limitations. One rainy afternoon, we had been making love “Southern style”; that is to say, as befit a man of my age—slow and deliberatel
y.

  “How do you imagine they arrive at the particular figure of thirteen dollars for two hours?” I had wondered at this finer point of pandering for some time.

  “However they do it, you get what you pay for,” she’d griped. “The carpets are soaked whenever it rains.”

  “Your feet are never on the floor, anyway,” I teased. “No more inconvenient than playing with each other in your parents’ living room.” I recalled to her one of my fonder memories from our adolescent romance. When she couldn’t get out of the house, we would sit in front of the television in the darkened living area and “mess around,” as we’d called it back then. At that age reaching inside her clothes, running my hand down her belly to touch her forbidden parts, had been as near acute a thrill as the sex act itself. “We would get in a serious lip-lock,” I described, leading her through the motions, “then I would slowly slide your panties off…” I was remembering the way her toes would curl when I stroked her smooth, bared flanks.

  “And sit on them!” Flushing, she was starting to squirm in response to the fantasized revisitation. “It was usually my shorts, and you would hide them, so there I’d be, bare-assed—what if my stepparents had ever walked in?”

  “I imagine they had at least some idea of what was going on. Besides, that very thought was what gave you a gigantic orgasm every time”—I’d laughed, playing with her pussy—”just about like the way you’re going to come right now if you’ll let yourself go!” The prediction had been directly fulfilled, which hadn’t kept her from chiding me.

  “You’re bad, you know it? You’re having simply too much fun with all this.” That sort of remark would bother me. Something in her tone told me it wasn’t really a joke, so much as recognition that I appealed to a part of her that she’d never truly allowed to be free. I could only immediately remember one occasion that JJ had ever departed from a sort of sedate resignation—a capitulation dressed up as sardonic, but not really.