by John Updike
“I washed like you told me to.”
“You could have used warm water.”
“I did, I thought.”
She bent down, but to pick up the towel. She handed it to him. “Dry yourself, can’t you?”
“Jesus, you’re fussy.” He must counterattack. “How about you?” he asked. “Don’t you want to use the bathroom?”
“No.”
“Don’t you need to go wee-wee or anything, standing around on the street for hours?”
“No, thank you.”
“It’s a perfectly good bathroom.”
Just when he had figured her as mechanically one-track, she changed her mind. “O.K. I will.” She went into the bathroom. She closed the door! So he couldn’t watch. No free pleasures, he saw, was one of the rules. Naked, he sat on the bed, picked the Blake from the bureau top, and read,
The Lamb misus’d breeds Public strife
And yet forgives the Butcher’s Knife.
The Bat that flits at close of Eve
Has left the Brain that won’t Believe.
The toilet flushed; the faucets purred. She emerged still wearing those bothersome, unlovely boots, and gave his limp penis a glance he thought scornful. Only the alcohol helped him ask, “Want to lie down?”
Without voicing assent, she sat on the bed stiffly and let herself be pulled horizontal. Her skin felt too young, too firm and smooth. Passing his hands down the mathematically perfect curves of her sides and buttocks, he calculated that the journey of happiness from these hands into his head and from there down his spine to his prick was, rendered tenuous and errant by his drunkenness, too long. He stroked her breasts, so firmly and finely tipped as to feel conical. His sense of breasts had been shaped by his overflowing wife. Once when she was nursing one of their babies he had sucked a mouthful of milk from her and, not swallowing, filled her own mouth with it, so she, too, could know the taste. By comparison this kid’s tits were so firm as to feel unkind. Her belly was flat, with the sheen of a tabletop beneath his fingers, and the hair of her pussy was thick, stiff, brushlike. The first time he had slept with a woman not his wife, she had been a mutual friend, a shy and guilty woman who had undressed out of sight and come back to him wearing her slip over nothing; touched, her pussy beneath the nylon had been so startlingly soft he had exclaimed, “Oh,” and she with him—“Oh!”—as if together on a walk they had simultaneously sighted a rare flower, or a sun-splashed bed of moss.
Ann, stroked, took this as the signal to set her own hand, cool and unfeeling, on his prick. Too rapidly she twitched the loose skin back and forth; he huddled inside his drunkenness and giggled.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“You’re so nice,” he lied. It came to him that the part-time penmanship teacher would sometimes touch him, reaching over his shoulder to roughly grab his wrist and push and pull his hand back and forth to give him the idea of not writing with his wrist and fingers but with his forearm.
Ann sat up to continue with better leverage her attack on his prick. It tickled, twittered, and stung; his consciousness drew back, higher, as a man climbs higher into the bleachers for a more analytical view of the game. Either this girl had no aptitude for her profession, or love cannot be aped. She flicked her head haughtily, stopped her futile agitation of his penis, put her mouth to his ear, and whispered with that slithering urgency she affected, “Do you like me?”
“Sure.”
“Well, look at it.” She flipped it. He looked. It lay sideways, enviably asleep. She asked, “How long do you expect me to keep at it?”
“Not long,” he said pleasantly; her fingers, inert, felt pleasant. “You can go now. I’ll get you your thirty dollars. Sorry I’m such a flop.”
Her face, softer in shadow, pondered. “Ed, look. I’ll stay, but it’ll take a little more.”
“How much more, for how long?” The prompt specificity of his question took her aback. He helped her, though he was new at this and she wasn’t. “How about one hour,” he proposed, “for thirty more? In an hour the drinks should wear off enough so I can get it up. I’m sorry, I’d like to fuck you, I really would.”
Displeasingly, her whisper hoarsened, becoming theatrical, seductive. “How about being Frenched? Like that? For twenty more I’ll French you. Would you like that, Ed?”
Naked and lazy, he shifted position on the bed. Impotent or not, he was the boss. In daylight transactions he hated haggling; but this was different. She was so young she could be teased. Her youth furthermore made her an enemy. For this was the era of student revolts, of contempt for the old virtues, of energy-worship. “Twenty more!” he protested. “That makes eighty all told. You’ll bankrupt me. Why would a nice girl like you want to come in off the street and bankrupt some poor john?”
She ignored his irony, asking with her closest approximation to true excitement, “How much cash you got?”
“Want me to count it?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Like I said, I was Christmas shopping. Jesus. Hold on. Don’t go away mad.”
He hoisted himself from the bed, located his pants draped on the back of the plush-covered armchair, found the wallet within them, and counted the bills. One hundred ten, one twenty, twenty-two, three. “O.K.,” he told her. “Eighty-four dollars total. I can just spare eighty. That’s for one hour, starting now, not when you came in, and including you Frenching me. Agreed?”
“O.K.”
He considered asking that she remove her boots in the bargain; but he feared she would put a price on that, and, though he could inflict upon her the suspense of haggling, he would always end, he knew, by meeting her price. Also, there was a mystery about the boots that made him squeamish. To watch him count his money, Ann had lifted herself on the bed, up on her knees like a little girl playing jacks. Ed touched her cold shoulder, silently bidding her to hold the position, and then fit himself into her pose so a nipple met his mouth. He lapped, sucked, rubbed. She said, “Ow.”
He removed his mouth an inch. “What do you mean, ‘Ow’?”
“Didn’t you shave today?”
“Not since this morning. Can you notice?”
“Feel it,” she said.
He rubbed his own chin and upper lip. “That can’t hurt,” he told her.
“It does.”
He looked up, and her face and torso held a stillness that for the first time, it seemed to his sheepish sense, admitted a glimmer of erotic heat into the frozen space between them. Since he could not impress her by anger, not being angry, nor by being himself, since he had sold himself short by applying to her at all, he would act out compliance. He would overwhelm her with docility. “I’ll go shave, then.”
She did not object.
He asked, before moving, “Will the shaving time come out of my hour?”
She said, not even audibly bored, her voice was so flat, “If you’re going to do it, Ed, do it.”
Standing again above the basin’s bright moon, he felt his genitals stir, sweeten, with the idea of it: the idea of shaving, so domestically, to oblige this ungrateful stringy whore in the next room, street-cold still clinging to her skin. When he returned, his cheeks gleaming, his loins bobbling, she observed his excitement and in an act of swift capture produced from somewhere (her boot?) a prophylactic and snapped it into place around his semi-erect prick and lay on her back with legs spread. Though he held stiff enough to enter her and momentarily think, I’m fucking this woman, the scent and pinch of rubber, and an inelasticity within her, and something unready and resentful in himself—and she couldn’t care less, was the successor thought—combined to dwindle him. His few dud thrusts were like blank explosions by whose flash he exposed the full extent of their interlocked abasement. Apologetically, he withdrew, and tugged off the condom and, not knowing upon what hotel surface he could place it without offending her stern standards of hygiene, held the limp little second skin dangling in his hand as he stretched out sorrowfully beside her def
eated female form. “Those things cost, you know,” she said.
What shall we do? Ann lay in a sulk, but he imagined a rift in the surface of her impatience, a ledge to which he might cling. With his free hand (the other arm tucked back under his head so the condom hung cleanly over the edge of the bed) he stroked the long cold curve of her side, illumined by the window with Venetian blinds. He told her, “You’re gorgeous.”
As if equivalently, she asked him, “You married?”
“Sure.” She might have thought this was the door, at last, to the confident intimacy between them that he, she must now realize, needed. But it opened instead on a cul-de-sac, the marriage that had put them here; they lay inside his wife’s sexual nature as in a padded, bolted dungeon. Ed could have attempted to share this vision with Ann, but attempted more simply to return the friendliness she seemed now willing, if only out of fear of being trapped with him forever, to concede. He asked her, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.” A new tone, bitter. Did she feel so soon blighted, hopelessly fallen? Her beakish, colorless profile lifted above him, into the square cloud of light leaking from the circumambient city. “You?”
“Fortyish.”
“The prime of life.”
“Depends.” He rubbed his mouth across her nipples, then his cheek, asking, “That smooth enough?”
“It’s better.”
“You like it? I mean, normally, does it leave you cold, turn you off, or what?”
She didn’t answer; he had trespassed, he realized, into another dark clause of their contract: her pleasure was not at issue. Able to do no right, and therefore no wrong, he slid his face from her breast to her belly and, as she lay back, past her wiry pubic bush to her thigh. He rested his head there. He laid the condom on the sheet beside her waist and with his hands parted her thighs; she complied guardedly. An edge of one boot scraped his ear as he moved his head back, as when reading a telephone book, to see better. Between her legs lay darkness. He stroked her mons veneris, and the tendoned furred hollows on either side; he ran his thumb the length of her labia, parted them, softly sank his thumb in the cleft in which, against all tides of propriety and reasonableness, a little moisture was welling. He withdrew his thumb and inserted his middle finger, his thumb finding socket on her anus.
The diffuse light was gathering to his eyes now, and he saw the silver plane of the inner thigh turned to the window, and the same light sliding on his tapering forearm and moving wrist, and the two bright round corners of her buttocks beneath, and the pale meadow of her foreshortened belly, the taut hills of her breasts, the far underside of her chin. From the angle of her chin she was gazing out the window, at the strange night sky of N——, like the sky of no other city, brown and golden, starless, permeated with the aureole of its own swamp-fire static. Through the warp and blur of alcohol the inner configurations of her cunt, the granular walls, the elusive slippery hooded central hardness, began to cut an image in his mind, and to give him a jeweller’s intent, steady joy.
She spoke. Her voice floated hoarse across the silver terrain of her body. Her words were most surprising. “Do you ever,” she asked, hesitating before finishing, “use your tongue?”
“Sure,” he said.
Bending his face to her aperture, he felt blow through his skull the wind of all those who had passed this way before him. Yet, though no doubt men had flooded this space with their spunk and Heaven knew what perversities had been visited upon her by strangers struggling to feel alive, her cunt did not taste of anything; it was clean of any scent, even that of deodorant, and its surround of brushlike hair had the prickly innocence of a child’s haircut or of the pelt of a young nocturnal omnivore such as a raccoon. He regretted that in the politics of their positioning his mouth did not come at it upside down but more awkwardly, frontally, with his body trailing between and beyond her legs like an unusably heavy kite tail, and with his neck bent back to the point of aching. Seeking to penetrate, his tongue tensed behind it the entire length of his spine. Opening his eyes, he saw a confused wealth of light-struck filaments that might be vegetation on Mars, or mildew under the microscope.
A miracle, she seemed to be moving. In response. She was. She was heaving her hips to help his tongue go deeper. He suspected a put-on. He was willing to believe that he could arouse his shy, plump mistress: he was a popularizer of astronomy and she his research assistant, and when she would swing her crotch around to his face its spread wet halves would swamp his consciousness like a star map of both hemispheres, not only the stars one saw but the Southern constellations—Lupus, Phoenix, Fornax. But this waxen street-lily surely was beyond him, another galaxy, far out. Yet the girl lifted her pelvis and rotated it and forcefully sighed. She had been so unemphatic and forbidding in all else, he doubted she would fake this. The thought that he was giving her pleasure invited cruelty, as a clean sheet invites mussing. His prick was becoming a weapon; in the air beyond the foot of the bed he felt it enlarging, presenting more surface to the air. He pulled himself up, still drunker than he should be, his shaved chin wet with her, and asked, “Didn’t you say you’d French me?”
As if abruptly awakened, Ann seemed to find her body heavy. She pushed her weight up onto her arms as he relaxed his length into the trough of warmth she had left on the narrow, single bed. She tucked back her hair from her temples. She straightened his stiffened prick with her fingers and bent her lips to the glans. Her lips made a silent O as he pushed up. Her head bobbed in and out of the cloud of light. She moved her mouth up and down as rapidly and ruthlessly as she had her hand; he watched with drowsy amazement, wondering what book of instructions she had read. This fanciful impression, that she had learned to perform this service from a manual and was performing it mechanically, an application of purely exterior knowledge, with none of the empathy for the other sex that Eros in blindness bestows, excited him, so he did not lose his erection to his schoolmarm’s rote blowing. How many times a night did she do this? He saw, dismally but indulgently, his prick as a product, mass-produced and mass-consumed in a few monotonous ways. Poor dear child. With a distant affection he let his fingertips drift to one nipple and followed its sympathetic rise and fall; so Galileo followed the rhythmic radiance of Jupiter’s revolving satellites. Hard and small and perfect and glossy and cool, her nipple. Hers, an outpost of her nervous system. He was growing accustomed to her, her temperature, texture, manner, pulse, and saliva. His hard prick glittered when her profile did not eclipse it.
Time slipped by for him, but a meter in her head told her she had Frenched twenty dollars’ worth. Swiftly, as a fisherman transfers the kicking fish to the net, she lifted the circle of her lips from his phallus, retrieved the condom from the bedsheet, deftly rerolled it, slipped it down upon his cock, and set herself astride, handsome and voracious in silhouette. She told him, with a trace of her old slithering, too-practiced urgency—modified in tone, however, by something unpracticed, young, experimental, and actually interested—“We’ll try it with me on top.” She lowered herself carefully, and he was inside her. Magnetically his fingertips had never left her nipple.
“That’s a good way,” he told her, just to say something, so she wouldn’t feel utterly alone.
She moved her cunt and her body with it up and down with the same unfeeling presto that must be, he deduced, the tempo most men like; how had he been misled into languorous full pulls and voyeuristic lingering? Too many prefatory years, he supposed, of fantasy and masturbation. Mr. Push-pull lives in here, he remembered his penmanship teacher shouting to the class, “in here” being the circle she had had them pen, in wet ink on blue-lined paper, with rigid wrists and forearms.
Though Ann’s fucking felt like an attack, his prick held its own, and his hypnotic touch on her nipple also held. They were a strange serene boat, its engine pumping, gliding it could be forever through the glowing tan fog of the city night. With his other hand, again to let her know she was not wholly alone with the mechanical problem sh
e was being paid to solve, he patted, then pushed her bottom. He thought, I haven’t fucked a woman this young for years, and knew he was home. The canal lock had lifted, scenic point in the mountain pass had been attained, it was all downhill, he would have to come. The girl was virtually jumping now, out of a squat and back into it. Her boots were rough on his sides, her hair swung like a mop, her skin felt cool as a snake’s: never mind, he would come, he would give it to her, the gift we are made to give, the seething scum the universe exists to float.
She squatted deep. His sleepy prick released a little shivery dream. Not a thumping come, but distinct and, for such a drunk, triumphant. Her shoulders and face were above him, dark, as the madonna in the icon is dark in that Russian movie where the damned hero attempts to pray.
But her darkness held a smile. She was above him like a mother nursing, darkness satisfied and proud, having been challenged and found not wanting.
“Oh, thank you,” he said. “Thank you. Sorry to have made you work so hard. Sorry to be so much trouble. Usually I come like a flash. My wife bitches about it.”
She did not bother to doubt this. There was no way he could win promotion from her classroom of the sexually defective. Indeed, had he not shown that only the most patient manipulation could enroll him among fornicators? Ann lifted her loins from his, with a delicate shrug of disentanglement—a giantess wading through muck on her knees. A novel sensation told him that she was not carrying his seed away with her, as his wife or mistress would. Rather, she had sealed it in at its source: sticky consequences. He disdained to remove the condom. She had enlisted him in a certain hostility toward the third member of their party, the pivotal presence in the room, though silent—his willful, erratic prick. Stew in your own juice.
Ann, too, acted lazy. Instead of wading on, out of his narrow bed, she lay down beside him in her boots. He felt why: it was warm here, and enclosed, and now she knew him, and was not frightened of him. He asked her, “Aren’t you anxious to get back out on the street?” He giggled, as if the joke were still on himself. “And get away,” he continued, “from these awful out-of-town husbands who are too drunk to fuck decently?”
