This thing about the threesome is why you’re here, isn’t it? Or at least part of the reason. Andy found you, eight years ago on an airplane between Tucson and Dallas, and now he’s found this girl, the only woman in his mountain climbing club, a group so demanding that she is the only woman who has met the criteria to join. It’s been almost a year since he first mentioned her, since he lay across your own bed, 500 miles from here, and wondered idly what she did for a living, how this woman found so much time to train.
And then he asked her. Asked her one day as they were loading up after a climb what in the world she did for a living that would allow her to train every day. She said she had men, a few men, male friends who sponsored her athletic career. Just a few close male friends who were happy to help her. He didn’t totally understand what she meant. Andy is an attorney, well aware of the myriad penalties when one person fails to understand another. Was she a hooker? He knew you were the person to ask. He finished loading up his equipment and retreated to his car and dialed as he drove home to his house in the Maryland suburbs. Yeah, you said, she’s probably a hooker. Nothing else makes any sense.
You push your face into her breasts, feeling the softness as they separate on each side of your cheeks. She moans and you say, You don’t have to, meaning that you are a woman too, you understand that it is too early in the process for such ostentatious moaning. Sex is a long drive, it’s Maine to Florida and there is no sense in her carrying on like she’s in Georgia when you know damn well this is Connecticut at best. Don’t treat me like a man, you want to tell her. I’m not that dumb and it’s only two hundred dollars and Andy’s paying for it, after all. He wants us to like each other. She pulls away, as if she’s read your mind, and you roll onto your back.
Here’s the deal. He went to see her, he fucked her, and told her about you. She was very open to the idea of seeing a couple. She liked to do women – the only trouble was the women she saw were always dragged there by their husbands. They weren’t really into it and things could get awkward. Two women putting on a show for the benefit of a man, who needed that? When he told you this, you said maybe it would make more sense for you to go see her first by yourself. There needed to be a spark between the two of you, otherwise, she was right, it was just a show. By yourself? Your offer clearly surprises him. He’d like to be there, but you know he’s out of town all that week. She is going down on you now, she has pushed your legs apart and she’s very direct. She doesn’t do it like he does it, no moseying around, no circling, no lifting of the head to talk. She is very direct, her tongue pointed and focused, and involuntarily you glance at her bedside clock. You have been here ten minutes.
There are ropes around her bedroom, ropes and an ice ax, the accoutrements of her sport, and as she pushes through the layers and goes deeper you close your eyes. Your hands find a rope stretched across the headboard behind you, a rope she has probably tied there for just this purpose or one very like it, and you reach back and grasp it. She’s good, she knows what she’s doing: people need something to hang onto. Next week Andy will be back from France and he will fly down to see you. Over dinner the two of you will discuss his last climb. He has this friend Mike whom he adores. Mike is older, balding and chubby and unassuming, but a hell of a climber. Andy likes to lead the climbs. He feels nervous when someone else goes first and he has described the risks of his sport to you many times. How the lead man finds a ledge or a little toehold, drives a spike, threads through the rope, how the lead man is responsible for everyone below. He told you this the first time you met him, on the plane, told you how catastrophic it would be for the lead to fall. You sat in the airplane seat somewhere in the air between Tucson and Dallas and listened to him describe how the chain of people are attached – attached to each other for reasons of safety or maybe just for the promise that they won’t, come the worst, die alone. This, he said, this is what matters. If the leader fell everyone else would follow suit, ripped from the rock, one by one.
But on this particular climb Mike was leading and that’s okay. Andy trusts Mike. They were right on that edge where things were starting to get interesting. Mike had hoisted himself over a ledge and was watching as Andy followed, as he eased his way past that point where just for a moment you dangle. They were very high and very far from home. Mike had grinned down at him and said, God, I love doing dangerous things with competent people.
You’re loud when you come. You make a noise – you suspect not a pretty noise – and your body goes rigid, pushing you away from her like a swimmer pushes off from a wall. You hold it for a minute, you say my god, more to yourself than to her. It was so sharp, so fast, it was on you without warning. She is crouched between your legs, resting her head, against your knee. Her hair is still damp. But wasn’t that a great thing for him to say – doing dangerous things with competent people? Andy will ask you and he will nudge the last piece of calamari toward you as if you were in a scene from Lady and the Tramp. You run your hands under her slip. You don’t have to, she says. What is it about this that she’s not getting? I want to do this, you tell her. Let me.
He said she smelled good. She does. Your face falls forward and you’re momentarily dizzy. You slide your elbows under her thighs and settle into a rhythm. She shudders – it seems real – and your mind wanders. Your mind always wanders when you’re going down on someone, it’s the only time in your life when you could honestly be called contemplative. It’s easy to fall into women, you think, It’s easy to let go and fall into them. Women, you think, we are gravity personified. You flash on an island where you once vacationed, a teacher you had in college, how much time is left in the parking meter downstairs. Once, at a Halloween fair at your kids’ school a psychic told you that you’d been male in a past lifetime. A silly psychic – somebody’s mother in a scarf – but she leaned toward you and whispered, Last time through, you were a man. You still remember, don’t you? Silly as hell, but it would explain a lot. It would explain why you’re willing to forgive them so much.
She doesn’t come. This bothers you. You got the impression from Andy she was an easy come. Hell, got the impression from him she was coming all over the place. Does she like men better than women? Your mouth is between her legs as you’re asking, you mumble the question into her crotch and suddenly the two of you are shrieking with laughter.
A funny time to ask, she says.
But no, you say, rising up, giving up. I’m absolutely dead serious. What makes you come?
I came a little bit when you did, she says.
Oh, come on. Please. Don’t give me that shit. Don’t talk to me like I’m a man. Show me. Show me what you do when you’re alone.
She shakes her head. You’ve embarrassed her. She asks what she can do for you. She asks this over and over. You keep forgetting. There is $240 dollars – for you have insisted that Andy tip her – in an envelope in your purse. There’s no need to make it reciprocal. Show me, you say again, more sharply, and she opens the top drawer of her bedside table and pulls out a small white vibrator, the cheap kind that takes AA batteries, and she clamps it between her legs.
What exactly does he want? He has a wife and girlfriend and a hooker, as well as some hunchback secretary from another floor who once blew him in the office parking deck and an Asian lady who jerks him off in a massage parlor out by the airport. He calls her the happy ending lady and he does a funny imitation of her voice. She rubs him the normal way and then she giggles and snorts and asks him, You want happy ending?
Andrea has pulled herself into fetal position, eyes clamped shut. She does not move or make a noise. Surely between the five of you he would be sated and yet you know people are never sated, neither women nor men, and your mind shifts briefly to your other boyfriend, the one in New York. You wonder what he would think of this, but it’s not really his sort of thing, is it? No, he wants something else.
A simple convulsion, one single spasm, and she’s done.
I liked watching, you tell her, and s
he says yeah, she likes watching too. She likes everything about sex. That all she wants is sex and time to climb and enough money for an apartment where she can see the river. I don’t want many things, she tells you, but the things I want, I want a lot. She glances at the clock and offers to fuck you. No, you say, I’m fine. I like to come once hard, and then just roll around. This is perfect for me.
He wants to see me fuck you, she says. That’s part of what he wants, but I guess he told you that.
Don’t worry about it. When the time comes, he’ll do whatever we say.
She shrugs. I guess so. He seems like a nice enough guy.
You’re stunned by how quickly she’s dismissed him. It’s the last thing you expected her to say. This man has been the best lover you’ve ever had. You expected – what did you expect? You expected that she would congratulate you for having left no stone unturned, for having found this man among all the men who don’t know what to do and who don’t care that they don’t know what to do. That fluttery thing with his tongue. My God, there are times even after eight years that you think your heart will stop. How can she say he seems like a nice guy?
You have a strange and sudden urge to weep. You’re from a small town. Your mother was a second-grade teacher. The truth of the matter is you’ve been over your head for some time now. I’m not used to all this, you tell her but, God, she says, who is? She opens her arms, you roll toward her. Who among us was raised for this? She was born in Nebraska.
The next week you will confront him, in a restaurant miles from here, in an Asian restaurant in your hometown where you like the calamari. He will hand you that line about dangerous games with competent people and you will snap back at him You didn’t give her the full treatment. The minute she said that he was a nice guy you knew it, that he’d gone down on her but he hadn’t given her the full treatment. He didn’t do the flutter thing.
I only do the flutter thing with you, he says.
You will walk back from the restaurant to your house holding hands. You’ll talk about your jobs, your children. His daughter’s volleyball team went to the state finals. She is fifteen, beautiful but very tall and he thinks the boys will stay away for several more years because of this. You call him sweetie and rub his head. He is a good father, in his way. When his girls leave home it will break his heart.
And so, she says, we’ll all get together?
Of course, you say, we’ll get together. You’ve already put the envelope on her table while she was peeing. She is barefoot now as she walks you to the door, slightly shorter than you as she hugs you goodbye.
On the drive back through Northern Virginia you dig through your purse for your cell phone. You call your friend, the one you’re staying with tonight, the one you always stay with when you come to DC. She’s married, she says it’s good but a lot of work and she told you, just this morning over cereal, that she thinks you use sex to avoid intimacy. She answers on the first ring. You tell her the Monet exhibit was incredible and offer to stop at the grocery. Does she need anything, a bottle of wine perhaps?
No, she says, she has enough. She’s doing tuna out on the grill because you liked it that way the last time. She is sweet like this. Whenever you come up she puts a terrycloth robe on your bed, she gets in your favorite green tea, even though it means driving to a second grocery. It is nice that you have called to offer to pick up something on the way in and it is nice that she already has everything she needs. The rituals of domesticity are so soothing. Men probably do this, you think, they probably call their wives on the way home from hookers.
You sing with the radio. An oldies station. Abba, Joni Mitchell, and then the Mamas and the Papas. You roll your neck from side to side, getting out the kinks. Your tongue is sore from licking her. Sore, right in the root and it will be sore all the next day. You’re lifted, in the way that only sex can lift you. Chemicals have poured into your system, the adrenaline, the endorphins, the alcohol from the beer wedged between your thighs, and colors seem brighter and you know every word of every song that comes onto this radio station. You see, just for a moment, the inter-connectedness of everything, the delicate way we’re all webbed together, and you send up a quick wordless prayer for your boyfriend’s wife. Maybe you’ll stop and get another bottle of wine after all, for who can say what is enough?
The traffic has come to a standstill as it often does on 1–95 just south of DC in the late afternoon. There is a man in a convertible beside you. He smiles, you smile. If you break down right here, if you have a flat tire or an overheated engine, this man and perhaps others will stop and offer to help you. Men like you. Men are nice to you. They will always stop and help, they will give you the last bite of calamari and pay other women to go down on you. That’s your karma for this particular lifetime. It’s very beautiful here, very safe. You’re a safe woman, men can see that at a glance. They will let you into buildings where you have no business being. The man in the convertible edges slightly past you. It’s hard to say what will happen next.
The Penis of My Beloved
Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia
During my Beloved’s lifetime his penis was of great importance to me – how could it be otherwise? Of course there was much more to my Beloved than his penis. For instance there was his tongue. I don’t merely refer to his skill at licking, but also to all the words he said to me (except, obviously, while licking). Words are so important to a woman during love, just as they are in the everyday aspects of life. Also, there were his dark eyes, which spoke volumes of silent poetry. Also, there were his arms which held me. I need not enumerate more – there was all of Oliver. When my Beloved suddenly died of a heart attack, how desperately I craved to have him back again, alive.
This was possible due to advances in rapid cloning. However, a whole body cost a small fortune. Oliver and I had never given much thought to the morrow. Even by availing myself of a special offer from the Bodies’r’Us Clinic, and by paying on the instalment plan, the most I could afford was the cloning of a small part of Oliver.
Which part should it be? His right hand, sustained by an artificial blood supply and activated to a limited extent by a nerve impulse box with control buttons? Even a whole hand was out of my financial reach.
Should it be his tongue, likewise sustained by a costly blood supply?
Minus mouth and throat and vocal cords, a tongue could never say anything even if it wanted to, although it ought to be able to lick, for such is the nature of tongues. Body parts are aware of the role they play in the entirety of the body, consequently this memory lingers on even when they’re amputated or dissected, or in this case cloned. Oh yes, his tongue ought to be able to lick, although the sensation might seem to me more like a warm slug than his robust tongue of yore.
How about one of his eyes, which spoke volumes? The eye could rest upon an eggcup and form an image of me. Before going to bed I could perform a striptease for his eye. Yet to be perfectly frank, what could his eye do for me? Also, although I had no intention of ever being unfaithful to my Beloved, a naked eyeball might seem like a spy camera keeping watch. This wasn’t the kind of continuing intimacy I craved.
Really, my choice could only be the penis, especially as the cost was based upon the “normal” size when flaccid rather than erect. In this instance the money I would be paying in any event for the blood supply, so as to keep the part alive, would provide a special bonus benefit, namely erection when the penis was caressed. You couldn’t say about any other cloned body part that your investment could grow ten-fold, as it were!
“You mightn’t realize,” the cloning salesman said to me, “that a penis becomes stiff not because of blood pumped actively into it by an excited body, but because certain penile muscles relax, which allows the blood to flow in and fill it. Normally the muscles are tense and inhibit the volume of blood – otherwise men would have permanent erections.”
“So if you feel nervous and tense, you never get an erection?”
The salesma
n flushed, as though I had touched on a sore point. He was a young man with ginger hair and many freckles. The wallpaper of the consultation room was Klimt, so we were surrounded by hybrids of slender women and flowers.
“Madam, it’s simply that you might be expecting too much. We can’t absolutely guarantee erection, for that would be to alter the biology of the penis. In effect we would be providing you with a bio-dildo rather than with a genuine cloned organ – and we don’t supply such things. Prostho-porn isn’t our profession.” This was spoken a shade tartly. The salesman may have been upset by my previous remark, supposing that it reflected upon his own virility.
I was sure that my Beloved’s cloned penis would remember my own particular touch and wouldn’t feel inhibited.
I made like a wide-eyed innocent. “Is ‘prostho-porn’ anyone’s profession?”
“I’ve heard that in China . . .” The salesman lowered his voice. “Multiple cloned cunts of pop stars in pleasure parlours . . .” Now he seemed mollified and was all smiles again. “This won’t be the case here! Your commission will be unique to you.”
“I should hope so!”
It goes without saying that I’d arranged for sample cells from all of Oliver’s important organs and limbs to be frozen in liquid nitrogen – which wasn’t too expensive – before the majority of his dear chilled body finally entered the furnace at the crematorium. I’d read that in another few years it might be possible to coax a finger or a penis, say, to diversify and regenerate from itself an entire body, but apparently this was a speculative line of research pursued by only a handful of maverick scientists. Small wonder: it’s much more common for a body to lose a penis than for a penis to lose a body. So I was skeptical of this possibility. In the meantime my dream of recreating the entirety of Oliver, to rejoin his penis, would remain a dream because of the cost.
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