He was always leery when she stripped him. He was not of notable endowment, and Barbara who weighed and measured everything else about him, from his taste in music to the objects of his charitable bounty, must have weighed and measured his cock as well. And doubtless found it wanting. Thankfully, she had never mentioned it. Blessedly, he lived in a culture that decreed that women display their breasts and men secrete their cocks, at least in circumstances short of the carnal or the uronic.
The shower curtain slid smoothly over its rod, releasing sodden smoke that was the stuff of deviltry and witchcraft. Briefly, he thought of cannibals. “Come on,” Barbara said, and stepped into the tub and disappeared in the cloud of steam. “D.T.,” she warned from within when he failed to follow.
Cupping his genitals to keep them from becoming cooked, D.T. clambered in to join her. Gritting his teeth against the solid swords of water, pulling the curtain shut behind him, darkening the shower into a London fog, he waited for instructions.
“Turn around.”
He did and felt her hands slip easily over his back, their kneading surges oiled by a scented soap Barbara had ordered from a catalogue of imported erotica. Within a minute he was drugged by her firm ministrations of his torso, by the assault of the shower, by her delicate probing of his soapy ass. He felt like home-baked bread, hoped that Barbara would soon eat him.
“Now the front.”
He turned again and watched the sudsy water find its way around the bulges of her body and drip like albino urine from her pubic brush. As he gazed on her, she soaped him thoroughly, beginning at his chin and neck. When she reached his waist she sank to her knees onto the flowery non-skid appliqués on the floor of the tub. She lingered on his genitals, her work efficient not seductive, causing D.T. to wonder not for the first time if she found them foul.
“D.T.?” Barbara’s voice slipped through the cheering shower like a whispered secret.
“Hmm?”
“What’s a scrotum?”
“What?”
“What’s a scrotum? Bernie said something about his scrotum today and I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I was going to look it up, but since you’re here …”
D.T. reached for her hand and guided it. “This.”
“The balls?”
“No. The sack.”
“Oh.”
“What brought up the fascinating subject of Bernie’s scrotum?”
“He got hot sand all over it.”
“Dangerous, those nude beaches. Warning: May be hazardous to your scrotum.”
He looked down into Barbara’s smile. “See my sunburn?” she said, and raised a breast. Below the deep brown of her normal tan, the pink white circle around her aureole peered at him like a bloodshot eye. He winked back. They played with each other longer.
“Does this hurt?” Barbara asked, squeezing.
“No.”
“This?”
“Yes. God.” He curled.
“Is that what happens when you get hit in the balls?”
“That. Worse.”
“Why does it hurt so bad?”
“Who knows? As an aid to propagation of the species, probably. A function formerly held in high regard.”
“Is this where sperm comes from?”
“I think so.”
“Don’t you know?”
“I think I do.”
“Why are there two?”
“Fail-safe, maybe. Or maybe one for boy babies and one for girl babies.”
She pinched something near his knee. “Why does one hang lower than the other?”
“Jesus, Barbara.”
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“You don’t know nearly enough about your body, D.T.”
“I’ll get to my body as soon as I’m through with my mind.”
Barbara washed his ankles and between his toes and then stood up and trailed her fingers through his frothy and newly labelled scrotum. “Do you still masturbate?” Her face was an inch from his.
“Still?”
“Well, all men masturbate, don’t they? I read they did.”
“Not all. Most, probably. When they get the time.”
“You mean you never have?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“When’s the last time?”
“Last night. And then again this morning.”
“You.” She poked him, and turned her back. “Do me,” she said.
He fished the soap off the floor of the tub and did her, back first, lingering at her favorite places and at his own as well. By the time he was finished they both breathed deeply, through parted dripping lips. “Do you want to do it here?” she asked.
“No.”
“On the bathroom floor?”
“The bed.”
“Okay, but next time in the tub.”
“Sure.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He took her hand and helped her from the tub. Then Barbara assumed the lead, firmed her grip on his hand, and started toward the bedroom. “Do you want a towel?” D.T. asked her glistening back. She shook her head and increased her speed, her footprints on the carpet like the tracks of Crusoe’s Friday.
Still pulling him like a Flexible Flyer, she belly-flopped onto his unmade bed, then turned onto her back and tugged him down on top of her. Once fused, their wet bodies bucked and smacked like printing presses, as though each cell was frantic for a mate. D.T. kissed her, tasted the tang of salt and the fatty paste of soap. His thick tongue slipped between her lips and she closed her teeth until he squirmed, then sucked his tongue until he could taste its root. He backed away and took a breath.
Slithering beneath him, Barbara arranged their bodies so that his prick pressed squarely on the bristly carpet that hid and warmed her sex. He gnawed her neck and ground his pelvis onto her, then ground again, alert to what she wanted, then alert to something else. The sensation was different from the usual slab of fur, a gritty scrape along the shaft of his prick. Sand. From the nude beach. Perhaps the grains that had singed poor Bernie’s scrotum. The thought of Barbara and Bernie naked lit him.
He rolled to his side and slid down her body until his tongue could lap her fresh-baked breast. He nibbled lightly at the nipple, playfully, then more roughly, then drew as much of the firm sack into his mouth as it would hold. He made more noises, released it, watched it tremble. As he flicked his tongue at the nipple once again, Barbara’s moan erupted over him like a tribal command. He slipped his hand between her legs and separated the pucker of her flesh and buried one finger, and then another, leery for a moment that Barbara would make him stop and trim his nails, as she had the first time he had probed her similarly.
Her sticky inner glue threatened not to let him leave. He nipped at her breasts, one and then the other, while propelling his coated fingers so far into her she hollowed out and gobbled him. As she raised her hips to meet his fistic thrusts, the telephone rang. He disbelieved it until it rang again.
“No,” Barbara said.
“I have to.”
“No.” She clamped her legs around his wrist, double-locking him inside her.
“We’ve been through all that, Barbara. Something might have happened.”
“What’s going to happen? You know it’s always nothing but neuroses.”
Barbara’s abandonment of this inconvenient segment of the sisterhood amused him briefly. “That’s not the point. I just can’t not know.”
“Please? Just this once?”
He rolled to his back and cast his free hand in the direction of the intruding instrument. After one misfire he grasped it. “Hello.” The word was a demand, not an invitation. Barbara rolled and wrenched his wrist.
“Jones?”
“That’s me.”
“Jones, the divorce lawyer?”
“Hello, Del.”
Barbara swore softly and released him. He rolled to his side, away from her and toward the teleph
one. Behind him, he felt her leave the bed.
“How’d you know who it was?”
“I’ve been expecting your call, Delbert. I’ve dealt with guys like you before.”
He wondered where Barbara had gone, if she was leaving the apartment, if he should go after her. But more than that he wondered what Delbert Finders was up to, how much he was prepared to risk to get D.T. to abandon his young wife to the hazard of her marriage.
“I know she spent the night at your place, Jones. I followed you from the hospital.”
“You must be good at it; I tried to check.”
“I’m good at lots of things, pal. You get in her pants? Huh? You roll around on that big belly and suck on them big floppy tits? Huh, Jones? Big Lawyer-Man. She show you how good I taught her to fuck?”
Behind him, Barbara slipped back onto the bed and crawled toward him over wadded covers. His body bounced. A hand gripped his hip and rolled him to his back.
Humming a toneless tune, Barbara straddled him, crouched, balanced on one hand and two knees. Her other hand grasped something round, a jar, a can, something. And she clenched another object, pirate-like, between her teeth. It looked very much like a knife.
“I didn’t lay a hand on Lucinda, Del. Which is more than you can say, isn’t it? There’s a long line of people down at that hospital, Delbert, ready and willing to testify to what you did to your wife last night. Now what the hell do you want?”
Barbara sat back on her haunches, pressed her bottom to his thighs. Freed, her other hand removed the object from between her teeth and joined its mate at the jar. It really was a knife. She wouldn’t do anything stupid, would she? Even in fun? The knife dipped slowly toward the crucible.
“The thing is, Lucy don’t know what she’s doing. She don’t want no divorce; she’s got no need to get one. I give her everything she needs. Hell, I even give her a baby like she wanted. So the best thing for you to do is tell her to forget it. Tell her to come back home.”
“I’m filing the papers on Monday, Finders. You’ll be served within a week.”
The knife emerged from the jar, laden with a whitish substance. Barbara gazed on the buttery mound as though to read its powers, inhale its scents, then lowered the teeming blade toward his naked chest.
“You best not serve papers on me, Jones, not if you want to stay healthy. I’ll give you what you got last night and then some. That car of yours ever hits a tree it’ll fold up on you like a paper bag. Take ’em a day to get you out.”
“You’re already on probation, Finders. If you mess with Lucinda or me again I go to the D.A. and have your probation revoked. We’ll see how tough you are after a few months in the joint.”
“Jail don’t scare me none. Cops, neither.”
With a single swipe, Barbara buttered his breastbone, the exact center of his hairless chest, with whatever was on the knife. The broad white stripe traversed his sternum and pointed toward his groin. The knife returned to the jar. He sniffed, then cupped the phone and asked Barbara what it was. Stonily, she ignored him.
“Where is she, Jones? She still there with you? You going to keep her around to service you awhile, like a whore with your initials on her ass?”
“She’s not here. I don’t know where she is.”
“Crap.”
“It’s true.”
He dipped a finger in the sauce and tasted it. Of course. Barbara’s physic, her balm, next to sex and sweat her cure for everything that ailed her: yogurt, bran, gorp, coconut, raisins, whatever else anyone had ever thought was healthy. She smeared it on everything from ice cream to mashed potatoes. Now she was smearing it on him.
The knife returned, the wide line lengthened. With another dip it was at his navel, clogging it. With another it was at his groin. His body hair occupied the paste like worms. Barbara paused to inspect her work.
“You talk to her, Jones. Tell her this divorce stuff is for shit. Tell her she’ll be just fine if she comes back where she belongs. Tell her if she comes home I won’t whip her no more. Tell her that. Tell her from now on I won’t drink nothing but beer. No more pills. No coke. Nothing like that. You tell her I won’t hurt her no more.”
“I’m not telling her anything.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because it would be a lie. Because punks like you beat their women forever, until someone puts you where the only woman is a dream.”
Barbara wielded the knife again, and this time dabbed his cock. Again, and yet again, the applications as precise as pastry, until it was a bright white shaft with a blood red tip, a beacon or a buoy. She tossed the jar off the bed and the knife right after it. Crouching again, she began to lick away the gruel, beginning where she had begun. Her tongue singed him like a brand, moved teasingly toward his sex.
Muscles and tendons twitched untouched. His body arced like a tumbler’s. She raised her head and blew on his groin, hot streaks of air that electrified him, caused his foot to jerk. Her head moved lower. Like Pinocchio’s nose, as cursed and as untamed, his plastered cock surged toward her parted lips, its tip as red and close to bursting as a thermometer on the door to Hell.
“What’s that, Mister Lawyer? You say something?”
“I’m through listening to you, Finders. As of tomorrow there’ll be a restraining order in effect, signed by a judge, directing you to stay the hell away from Lucinda. You violate it and you’re in contempt of court and the cops come looking. You’ll be a two-time loser, Delbert. It’ll be bye-bye for a long time.”
“You best not file those papers, you cocksucker. I’ll kill your ass if you do. I got nothing going for me anyway, what the hell do I care if I rot in jail?”
“You feel pretty sorry for yourself, Delbert.”
She was going to do it. At long last. As soon as the paste was licked away she would take him in her mouth, do what he had silently willed her to do for months, reward his rectitude. A few licks more. A swallow. Now. In a way he owed it all to Del.
“I’m going to give you something to feel sorry for, asshole. If Lucy isn’t back here by tomorrow I’ll make last night look like a love tap. I’ll mash her up so bad you won’t know her from your dog. And if something happens to that little baby she’s got in there, well, the blame’s right on you, Lawyer-Man. So you just tell Lucy to get her sweet ass back here. Now. Or I find her and make her wish she had. And then I come looking for you.”
The line clicked dead. He dropped the receiver and twisted to his side, dislodging Barbara from her perch, then curled fetally and closed his eyes.
“D.T.? What’s wrong?” Barbara’s voice mixed hurt and fear.
“I’m sorry. I …”
“Who was on the phone?”
“The guy who beat up his wife.”
“Oh.”
Barbara curled against his back and began to stroke his shoulder. “Did he threaten you?”
“I guess.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“Try to forget about it.”
Barbara stroked him for long dead minutes. He lay there, smelling a hint of peach, feeling the stiff stickiness of yogurt and saliva, still afraid. It seemed an age before she spoke again.
“D.T.?” She mumbled his name and nuzzled his neck.
“Hmm?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Promise you’ll tell the truth?”
“Sure. Maybe.”
“Swear to God?”
“Swear to Joe Montana.”
“What’s the D.T. stand for?”
“De Tumescent,” he said, and proved it.
DISCOVERY
NINE
He was an hour more than fashionably late. As he climbed the flagstone steps to the tall oak door he again regretted accepting the invitation, and again concluded he had had no choice. The party was Joyce Tuttle’s, and she was the only friend acquired during his marriage to Michele who continued to acknowledge his existence.
>
Joyce had been a helpful confidante to both of them during the long process of their unraveling. She had spent one particularly morose evening alone with D.T., in a bar no one had ever heard of in a place he could never find again, listening to what Joyce called “his side of it”—legitimizing his mistreatment, validating his excuses, accepting his allocation of fault, enduring his wild wallow in self-pity. It had been the one truly rending evening of the whole experience for him, and so he owed her one and Joyce had decided this was it. She had supplemented the printed invitation with a telephone call urging him to come, and he had promised he would, even after learning that Michele would be there, too.
When he reached the door he saw that a document was nailed to it, at eye level, in the tradition of Martin Luther, impossible to miss. When he recognized it he smiled. Joyce Tuttle had just been divorced herself, after a decade of marriage to a marble statue. This was her first postmarital bash, her announcement of a ringless finger, and the document on the door was the official confirmation of her status, signed by the circuit judge, certified by the county clerk. D.T. pressed the ivory bell button. Wriggling inside his best wool suit, shrugging his topcoat higher on his neck to keep the November wind from inching down his back like a stranger’s hand, he fought back an urge to flee.
The door was opened by a uniformed maid, who welcomed him and took his coat and directed him to the living room, all without uttering a word of English. He regarded the foyer as a gauntlet, his destination as a cell. He walked toward the white noise of congeniality knowing that most of the people he would soon encounter had advised Michele that she was mad to marry him.
The house was mammoth and contemporary. Christmas decorations abounded, though it was three days to Thanksgiving. The air was scented artificially of pine, and frequently rent by giggles. The gleaming hardwood floors were warmed here and there by rugs from sheep or Persia. Above the enamel walls a fabric made the ceiling look just tilled. Indirect lights cast a glow no less romantic than the slowly setting sun.
The Ditto List Page 15
