“Holograms . . . ?”
The duck-and-chicken show was replaced by a small pig and a scrofulous monkey.
“You think this is weird?” Jerry said with a world-weary leer. “Hey, I can show you really weird if I can find the place, and I think it’s right around here somewhere. . . .”
They left the bar, and wandered around in Pigalle looking for the place that André Deutcher had taken Jerry to that very first night in Paris before Jerry managed to remember that it was called “La Bande Dessinée” and got Samantha to ask someone for directions.
They got seated just as the clown in the Superman suit was dropping down onto the stage where the naked redheaded woman lay waiting on the couch for his advent.
“Hey, luv,” Samantha said with a little sneer, “should I stop you if I’ve seen this act before?”
Jerry said nothing. He just sat there smugly waiting for her reaction when the Man of Steel grew his huge silver cock, nor was he disappointed as her jaw fell open, and she goggled at him with much the same look of wide-eyed amazement he must have given André Deutcher.
She squealed when Superman climaxed and rocketed backward off the redhead, she broke up when the woman turned into Minnie Mouse, she kept laughing through the whole cartoon-character orgy, and she gave Jerry the strangest look of perplexity when Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and Hitler and the rest showed up for some live action.
“Holograms . . . ,” he whispered to her, “all done with holograms.”
“Fuck a duck!”
“That was the last place,” Jerry reminded her, and they broke up into laughter.
But when the orgy of the media images faded into the sexual phantasm of the living Indian temple frieze, she grew quiet, and when Greek gods and goddesses began making love, her hand found his, and by the time the erotic holograms had metamorphosed into the penultimate psychedelic love-in, her thigh was pressed against his, and after it all ended, the dirty-talking porn star from London sat there staring at him with the tender-eyed innocence of the little girl even she must once have been.
“That was wonderful, Jerry,” she said simply and quietly, snuggling against him. “Shouldn’t we go someplace quiet now, maybe? Someplace simple and romantic where we can just sit and talk?”
“Funny you should ask,” Jerry said. “I know just the place.”
Sonya had heard of the Hotel Ritz but she had never been inside the place before and she didn’t need much acting talent for “Samantha Garry” to go all goggle-eyed, for this monument to nineteenth-century rococo-plutocrat opulence and excess made the Czar’s Winter Palace and Versailles seem almost like modest understatement, all the more so because the Ritz was a place where people actually paid enormous sums of money to stay, not a museum. It was places like this that made her understand the French Revolution and made her proud to be reminded that she was a citizen of a socialist country.
And at the moment, that was about all she had to feel proud of, for while Jerry Reed still maintained his enthusiastic belief that she was a porn starlet from London, the whole Samantha Garry act was by now wearing rather thin on her conscience.
Back there at the ESA party, what seemed a long, long time ago, Jerry Reed had been just an abstraction, a relief from boredom, an opportunity to bed her first American, and a chance to test the limits of her command of English in the bargain. She had created “Samantha” out of bits and pieces of movies she had seen and books she had read and her catty concept of what Pierre’s London sexpot would have to be like, and she had dragged Jerry Reed around to hideous places out of an article Pierre had written called “Sleaze-Pits of Paris” just to see how badly a dirty lady from London could shock the archetypal naive American.
But she had forgotten that the archetypal naive American was also supposed to be what they called “a good sport,” which Jerry had certainly been, and she had not at all expected him to take to a creature like Samantha with such openhearted good humor, and she had certainly not expected to be so charmed herself by the way he so gallantly refrained from crudely hustling such a lewd and loose lady.
Nor had she at all expected to feel what she had felt when he took her to La Bande Dessinée and concluded their crawl through the low spots by showing his dirty lady from London a moment of truly moving erotic beauty. If this had been meant to seduce her, it had succeeded beautifully and fairly, and if it had all been innocently playful, why that was even more endearing. One way or the other, Sonya very much wanted to make love to this man now.
But the problem was that she wanted to make love to him as herself, as Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin, not Samantha Garry, and she could see no way of revealing herself without losing him, without making him feel naive and stupid and outraged at being made to play the buffoon by a treacherous Russian.
The Hemingway Bar was at the other side of the hotel, and considering the overripe grandeur one promenaded through to reach it, the place was unexpectedly tiny and modest, with a little bar and a single bartender, a few stools, a handful of small tables, a bust of Ernest Hemingway, and ancient black-and-white photos of the American writer on the walls. The only people in the bar at the moment were two elderly couples seated together in the far corner.
It was an entirely unexpected, perfect quiet place for intimate talk. Once again, Jerry Reed had managed to surprise and delight her.
“So luv,” she said, when they had ordered themselves some Cognac, “how’s about you tell me a bit about yourself before we get to the old in-and-out? I’ve told you all my own down and dirty. . . .”
Which was the biggest lie of all, of course, but there seemed nothing for it now but to stay in character as Samantha and encourage him to do the talking, for the truth of it was that she found herself really wanting to know more about this man, and not just because she had never before met an American. There was something about Jerry Reed that did not compute. He seemed like a naive American tourist, but the currency problem had banished that species from Europe. He didn’t seem rich, and he didn’t seem like a corporate type, and yet here he was in Paris anyway.
“I’m not sure what you mean. . . , ” Jerry said.
Sonya gave him a Samantha laugh. “Well, ducks,” she said, “to begin with, what’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like Paris?”
Jerry laughed. “I’m being seduced,” he told her.
Samantha placed a hand on his thigh under the table. “I mean aside from tonight, luv,” she purred at him. “What’s brought you to Paris?”
“I told you, I’m being seduced. By headhunters.”
She goggled at him. “You’ve got a bit of crumpet from New Guinea with a bloody bone through her nose stashed somewhere and you haven’t told me!”
Jerry laughed again. “Not by cannibals,” he said, “by headhunters from ESA, from the European Space Agency.”
“Do tell. . . . ”
“You really want to hear this?” Jerry said dubiously. “I mean, I can’t explain without getting kind of technical, and I don’t want to bore you. . . . ”
Samantha worked her hand deeper into his crotch and stared straight into his eyes, gave him the sweetest little smile, and all at once seemed unexpectedly serious. “Don’t you worry your sweet little buns about that, luv,” she said softly.
Jerry stared back at her for a long silent moment, as something began to open up inside him. Looking into her big green eyes, he realized all at once how alone he had really been here in Paris, how much had happened to him, how momentous a decision he would soon be forced to make, how much he really needed someone, anyone, to talk to.
“Go ahead, Jerry,” Samantha said, “tell me all the secrets of your soul.”
He sighed, he shrugged, and he did.
He told her about his job at Rockwell. He told her about Project Daedalus and he told her about meeting André Deutcher back in Los Angeles. He told her about the job they were offering, and the salary, and the apartments they had showed him.
And as he sat there sip
ping Cognac and talking and she sat there listening raptly without saying a word, the strangest and most wonderful thing began to happen. It all started to come out, not linearly and sequentially, but hologrammically, spiraling inward from the peripheral mundanities toward the center of his heart, toward the core of his being, as he found himself speaking of things he had never spoken about to a woman before, things he had never found a woman who would sit still and listen to before, and thought he never would.
He found himself telling a porn-film starlet from London about Rob Post and the death of the American civilian space program, about his father’s science-fiction collection and a four-year-old boy watching the Moon Landing over a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream. He told her about his lost dreams of going to the Moon and walking on the surface of Mars. He told her of his frustration at being born out of his proper time, of knowing he would die long before man’s starships would reach out into the wide galactic main to discover the unthinkably advanced civilizations that must surely be out there somewhere on planets circling far-distant suns.
He spoke for a long, long time, or so it seemed to him, forgetting where he was and who he was talking to, and even the touch of her hand on his cock and what he had hoped was to come, as he relived his own life’s journey from the moment the Eagle landed to the decision it had brought him to now.
And all the while, Samantha Garry just sat there wide-eyed and listening, leaning ever closer to him, so that by the time he had wound down, her face was inches from his across the little table, and he could feel the soft breeze of her breath, and somehow, by some magic, sense the slow, even beating of her heart.
And just when he felt quite finished, she leaned even farther forward, and bridged the final distance, placing her palm against his cheek, and kissing him long and gently on the lips.
“That was quite a lovely story,” she said, “and you are quite a lovely man, Jerry Reed.”
Jerry screwed up his courage, placed his hand on hers beneath the table on the quick of him, and squeezed it hard. “Shall we?” he said.
“Oh indeed we shall, luv, I wouldn’t miss it now for the world.”
The hotel room was quite incredible, and under ordinary circumstances Sonya would have marveled at its grandeur and probably laughed at its baroque excess, but these were hardly ordinary circumstances, for this was hardly an ordinary man, and so she paid the setting of the magic moment little mind.
Sonya had known many men, and she had enjoyed the company of most of them, and some of her lovers, like Pierre Glautier, had even been her friends. But there had really been only one man in her life who had ever caused her to ponder seriously the question of whether she might really be in love, and that had been Yuli Markovsky, and though at one point she had planned to marry Yuli, she had given him up for life in the West when push came to shove, and truth be told, had seldom looked back with regret.
But as she sat there listening to Jerry Reed, she found herself remembering Yuli, remembering his passion, remembering what he had said to her that awful last drunken night in Moscow.
“There is a dimension of life you are blind to, a passionate color your eyes don’t see,” Yuli had told her angrily, “the joy of dedication to a vision of something greater than yourself. . . .”
What Yuli had told her in anger then, she hadn’t understood or wanted to, but after listening to Jerry pour out his own passionate dreams so sweetly and so innocently, she understood it now.
There was a lot of Yuli in Jerry, but Jerry had something more—and something less too that somehow made him a finer and sweeter man.
Like Yuli, Jerry knew the joy of passionate dedication to something greater than himself, but unlike Yuli, Jerry had no burning desire for fame and fortune and personal power. Jerry truly was dedicated to something greater than himself; if he too wanted to push against the world and feel it move, it was not to hold the reins of the wild stallion of history in his hands and bend destiny to his will, but simply to be one of the people who made his vision of a golden age happen for the innocent joy of living to inhabit the world of his dreams. And if that vision itself was not one which Sonya could share, Jerry, unlike Yuli, drew a sweetness from its possession which she could feel, which in some way her heart could share, with which she could fall in love.
If indeed that was what this unknown feeling of aching tenderness really was, as she gathered him up in her arms and drew him down with her onto the big canopied bed.
Jerry Reed had not quite imagined what it would be like to fuck a porn-film starlet; he had expected it to be some kind of ultimate sexual experience, but none of his fantasies had been anything like this.
She had taken the lead and thrown him on the bed, and that he had expected, and she had undressed him with sure and frank hands, and that he had expected too. But when she stood up to undress for him, there was something so sweet and strangely tender and gentle about it, no cheap porn-disc striptease but the unhurried unfolding of a bud into full rosy flower, a sweet revelation just for him, as if she had never revealed those hard-nippled little breasts, that secret pubic triangle, for the eyes of all those anonymous unknown strangers.
Nor had he imagined that they would stare at each other silently and not touching for such a long moment. Or that it would finally begin with a simple kiss.
They kissed, and she opened her mouth and reached for his tongue with hers as he had imagined she would, but then she demurely withdrew and seemed to open herself to him.
And before he quite knew what was happening, all those thoughts of fantastic blowjobs and arcane perversities were quite gone from his head, and he didn’t feel cheated at all, he didn’t regret it a bit, and she simply reclined beneath him, and took his cock in her hand, and guided him into her, and wrapped her legs around him.
It felt just fine with his cock snugly fitted inside her cunt in the most basic position there was, it felt right, and clean, and somehow like home.
And if at first he felt rather intimidated to be fucking a woman of such experience, if in the first few moments he almost came in his excitement and feared that he would fail her, that all passed as she paused and slowed his rhythm, and he found himself in control of himself, seeking to please her, falling into a steady, easy, rolling motion that brought her easily to her first orgasm after an unhurried while.
After that, he simply kept going in an even, measured pace, fucking, no, making love, with a confidence and grace he had never known before, forgetting all his fears, losing himself in her cries of pleasure, finding himself in possession of skills he had understood but had never quite mastered before, until finally she smiled up at him, and, stroking his balls gently, whispered, “Let it go, luv, come inside me now.”
And almost at once, looking right into her eyes, he gratefully and peacefully did, and collapsed dreamily down onto her soft breasts, into her waiting arms.
Sonya Gagarin lay there awake for a long while with Jerry Reed asleep in her arms before finally drifting off to sleep. She had made love with many men, with men of twenty-two nationalities now by current count, and if in the tender afterglow some romantic impulse wanted to convince her that Jerry had been the best, she was not quite capable of that level of self-deception.
She had had Italians who were far more conventionally romantic, and Germans with twice the athletic endurance, and Frenchmen who had more savoir-faire, and a Swede who had read her better, and Pierre Glautier knew techniques that poor dear Jerry had probably never dreamed of.
But if Jerry Reed was not the best lover of her life, and this had not been her best sexual experience, still, love-making had never before felt this good. Jerry had been so sincere, so careful of her own pleasure, that it seemed he had had to seek her permission to enjoy his own. He was such a little boy at heart. And perhaps there was something more.
There was a sweetness to him that was not quite innocence, for after all this was no naive little boy, but a man with a vision, a man who quite sincerely and openly sought to
change the world, indeed who dreamed of building whole new worlds in space, worlds that had never been, of traveling to unknown lands circling foreign suns.
And in some strange way, she sensed that this made him a brother in spirit to the little girl in Lenino who had dreamed of traveling to the bright unknown worlds of adventure in the mysterious and wonderful West. And with Jerry in her arms, that girl still lived.
Was it this, not military might or economic power or technological skill that had once made Americans the envied darlings of the world? Was it this that had taken them to the Moon? Was it this that had made Russians seek their acceptance in their heart of hearts even as they feared and hated the Yankee imperialists?
Was it this that she was falling in love with?
Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin gently stroked the hair of her American lover. He stirred in his sleep, but did not awaken, and she was grateful for that as a chill went through her.
Yes, Sonya, you are falling in love, she admitted to herself. But in a very real sense, this man does not even know that you exist.
How ever will you tell him the truth when the morning comes?
* * *
“The Animal Liberation Front today claimed to have been responsible for yesterday’s explosion at the Agromax Labs in Nebraska. ‘Beakless chickens that mature in three weeks and giant trout that could never survive in the wild are obscene enough,’ their faxed manifesto declared, ‘but the cows that Agromax has turned into insensate meat-factories are mammals just like us. How long before the Dr. Frankensteins of genetic engineering turn their beady eyes on the human genome?’ ”
—CNN
Russian Spring Page 13
