“I can’t. I can’t move.”
She giggled. “This could be very embarrassing. I told you, you’ll cool off and get out if you’ll only relax. Why don’t you put my breasts in your mouth and just relax on them? Boys seem to like that.”
“I want to get out,” I said and at that moment, the Singing Strings, all 106 of them, apparently in some unprecedented cinematic transition, broke out into an unmuted throb, a series of pulses so sharp as to break the tenor equipment of the speaker and fill the car with rattlings of sound.
“My God,” Jane said, “someone’s trying to come and see us. We better really get out of here. Can you drive?”
“It’s just the speaker. Now let me do this.” I felt myself overcome by rage, but as profound as that was, the pain was still there at the rock-center of the scene, flooding into my organ, making it even more turgid, things more rigid. I managed to get both hands in position, squashing what little there was of her breasts with my upper arms and seized what I could find of my organ, pulling and pulling desperately. She gave a high wheeze, somewhere between a shriek and a sigh and began to settle under me like a blanket.
“God that’s lovely,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing there but it’s just lovely. More, more.”
“I’m trying to get out.”
“With the fingers, squeeze around that way. Oh, God, that’s really terrific now. I can see the movie and everything. The speaker is broken. The movie is good. You’ve got to squeeze more. Oh, I’m coming, I’m coming. That’s it. That’s it. I’m coming.”
And come she did in a series of thick waves and flashes of thumping which somehow disgorged my prick at her moment of climax and left it, sopping wetly, on the shiny cushions of the rental car. The speaker clattered in the blackness and, rubbing my fingers in her hole, I obliged her to an orgasm. She fell back, her eyes gripped by the screen.
“That was good,” she said. “That was really terrific.”
Speechless, I used a shirttail to clean off the residue of my orgasm, managed to adjust my garments without undue rolling, poked an elbow against the window painfully and subsided in the seat, watching several ballerinas on the screen attempt to persuade a choreographer that they were usable. I was quite incapable of thought.
“Well?” she said when the ballerinas had made their case and, embracing one another, had vanished in favor of an operatic singer who appeared to be having romantic difficulties with the choreographer, “what about it?”
“What about what?”
“Aren’t you going to go out and get us something to eat? You said you would, you know. I’m hungry. I fixed you and all, the least you can do is bring some food back.”
I managed to get the door open and inspecting her for a considerable time—she had heaved herself to a sitting position and was working halfheartedly on her brassiere while searching the dashboard for a fresh piece of gum—I got out into the dirt of the enclosure itself, standing uneasily on the ragged ground, trying to find my balance. Now, in the speakerless silence the screen had assumed a kind of beauty, its figures in being devoid of noise seemed to lack context as well. Moving in a sea as mysterious and as possessed of its fulfillment as I had moved in my sea sleeps many years ago. I stumbled away from it, my back to the screen, my eyes to the moon, feeling a special tendril of fiery knowledge cross between my smuggled goods in the trunk and my exhausted loins as I trudged to the food counter.
And, too, I am with Marcia the redundant in a classroom this time in the pitch of a winter evening, the two of us huddled over the desk, quite naked, her eyes roaming the ceiling while I inspect her nipples with microscopic urgency and work on the alternating surfaces of her stomach and thighs with a woe compounded out of lust and fright. We have no business doing it in this building, but she has assured me that faculty and staff themselves are aware of the student need to disseminate knowledge in its oldest form in the very seat of learning and that to copulate in the classrooms is, in the last analysis, only to join in the hidden and therefore more necessary, purposes of the institution itself. I am sliding, sliding, all lost in the glistening wetness, my tool a tangle, my eyes bulging and behind them I am playing the pictures and images while I work at her with a fool’s persistence.
“Higher, higher,” she mutters and for a moment I think she means a greater thrust and I attempt to spread her deeper and deeper yet upon the desk but her frantic, tickling fingers below tell me that there is something else she has in mind and I find withdrawal forced, a sudden retraction, a sudden drawing. Pouring sweat and mingled juices, my prick looks for a better home and she guides me with her hands to the cleft between her breasts, centering me with an indulgent palm while with the other she tugs at a breast and then, the first hand freed, takes the other in her hand and forms for me a tight channel, a wedge almost, through which I guide the small, desperate prow of my ship.
And it is as close, then, as close as I can ever come, before or since, to the sensation of the magazines, for here it is all before me, her breasts, held in that full, cupped aspect, almost dislodged from her body, her face a disordered irrelevancy behind the spread of her hair, and I feel myself reaching, reaching, grown to enormous size and power within her and she reaches forward grateful lips to touch me with teeth-and-tongue, adding a slow insistence to my rhythm. I can see vaguely below her cupped and held breasts the shuddering of her thighs and trembling of that nervous skin caught between them but it means nothing to me; I am surrounded by breasts and breasts, nestled in them, lost in them and as she increases the tension on them to make a cylinder I feel myself lengthen toward a final extension and come easily, gratefully, missing her withdrawn face, my hands reaching to touch the side of her breasts with appreciation while she mutters encouragement to me and I leak out the last drops.
After a long time I fall away from her, my buttocks brushing chalk, sliding to a stop on the wood and she looks up at me easily, her eyes glistening with an emotion come close to tenderness. “Oh, wasn’t that wonderful?” she says, “When my breasts are held that way, they look just like all the breasts in those magazines, don’t they? Don’t they?” I tell her this is so and bury my apologetic prick in her bush, waiting for the lights to come on, waiting for the assailant to come.
Somewhere in the middle of that year—I am not sure when and it hardly matters—I received a letter from Marie-Jean, the only piece of extra-familial correspondence which came into my mailbox that year:
“... I obtained your address from my father who with no difficulty attained it from your mother. I guess you suppose you’re lucky to be up there, ha, ha, but I wanted to write you this letter to tell you that although you are gone you are not forgotten, at least not by me although you would like to think so. For what you did to me I can never forgive you even though you can forgive yourself so easily for a thousand things; I want you to know that Marie-Jean thinks of you all the time and that Marie-Jean will never relax kind for what you did to her. What form that for a moment until she has paid you back in payment will take and when it will happen is none of your business; it could happen at any minute or not for the next 100 years but it will happen and it will serve you right. Not only did you dishonor and shame me, you dishonored and shamed my father by having your mother take up his time only because then you could be safe in taking me into the cornfields. My father is a fine man, an innocent man, a widower who means everything to me but is not a man who knows people of your type and your mother’s and thus could not deal with you or protect himself but I can protect him double and I will. No matter what happens to us there will be a time of getting even. I do not want you to answer this letter as if you do I will find it necessary for me to tear it up ...”
And yet another fulfillment: straight as an arrow, proud as a blade, I am hunched on the main quadrangle of the “campus” itself, giving it in this noon of the night to the proudest, most preposterous of all the bitches I have met this year; a girl named Elena with breasts which thrust up as squarely as they thrust out, breasts whose resilience increases out of clothes, thighs whose slight flabbiness only made more needful and urgent those muscular exercises which comprised her special contribution to the craft of copulation, her feet pointed at the moon at the same angle that my buttocks were and there was, around us, no intimation of substance or of presence, only the two of us in the spring night, the campus hushed around us, all groans and quivers in the cathedral or the cemetery. It was Elena’s special innovation to do it in the center of this quadrangle itself at safe hours; expressing, as she said, her feelings for the environment in the best way possible and she was extremely difficult, not out of prudence, but by virtue of sheer weight of numbers; there was always a waiting list of 30 or more for Elena’s embrace and there was no way to hasten one’s progress on that list because she was strictly fair about the process; so fair that some escorts, having painfully waited out their ascension, wanted to do it a second time but on another night and Elena felt that not to give an option would be to render herself a bit of a slut. So it was a question of patience, patience, but in the last analysis she was worth it; the most “special” of all the special people who inhabited the campus, she conceded darkly that she had been there for five years and had worked with difficulty to her position of queen ex-officio; a position whose only benefit was that she was able, in essence, to talk for the student body at the occasional faculty confrontations which were part of the progressive spirit. I had waited and waited, working out my time with the Janes and the Viviennes, waited for so long that it seemed to me that Elena was a hoax and the waiting list was a ploy, but one night she called me in my room to say that she was finally able to take me up on dinner the following evening and now at last I had her; I had the queen on her campus itself, and it was almost worth it because she not only did not block out my fantasies or twist her body unconsciously against them as some of the others had but rather, with a tenderness and understanding I had thought impossible in women, had seemingly understood almost from the start what I wanted and had allowed me to stretch out not on top but alongside her, a fist held in readiness, while she dwarfed my organ in her bulky pouch and produced her breasts, one by one, for me to nibble. I was as loose, swinging and free at ease as if I had been doing it into a magazine; her body, a long, coiled tube, seemed ready to spring to my convenience at any moment. So we sighed and mumbled the night away, our limbs tumbled like glass on the shores of that campus, her breasts bulging hugely and contentedly against all my surfaces and until the sun came we lay there, every confrontation a joy, every joy a refreshment and then, as the sun began to moan darkly in the distance she came upon the oldest, coldest and boldest variation of them all; what she did was to take her breasts in either hand and pointing them toward me, she—
My voice was thick, seemingly unattached to my frame, the frame distended at some impossible distance from the chair but I had to say it. I had to speak. And so I did. “No more,” I said, and broke my pen in two. “No more tonight, D’Arcy. We will continue tomorrow.”
Still in flight, his high voice cadenced and fluttered against the panels of the room but now, with the necessary biographer withdrawn the words meant nothing, and no sense; no form or reason. It wandered on pointlessly, reduced to the verbal rhythm of its constructions, stopped on an obscenity and then glided to a halt. He cleared his throat. He pulled at an ear and then again on his beard, his eyes wide and full. Then he turned to me.
“You stopped me,” he said.
“I had to.”
“I was talking about the key event of that important year and you stopped me. You who said that all he wanted was the full information underlying my ‘immortality,’ my ‘quest.’ You stopped me.”
“I spoke. I had to. There will be no more of this this evening. In another time.”
“But you bastard,” D’Arcy said, and his voice was a shriek, “if you could stop me in the middle of what I was saying then, it indicates that you have no understanding, absolutely no understanding of everything that I’m trying to do. How could you? I don’t even remember—”
“I understand very well,” I said sadly, “and that is why I stopped you. It doesn’t change the reality of what happened, D’Arcy. You must avoid this falling into the biographical fallacy. It still happened; it doesn’t make it any less viable.”
“Aha!” he said and a kind of sheer cunning drifted down from his eyes toward his intense mouth, his crooked frame. “All of a sudden, we talk in polysyllables. No longer are we the fawning, respectful, careful biographer. All of a sudden we are something else.”
“I am the same, D’Arcy. Only you have changed. The reality remains constant. It is only your way of seeing it which has altered. Everything is as it was. This wine had made me very sleepy and I must rest.”
“Since when do you do this to me? Since when can this happen? I renounce you, you son of a bitch bastard. I don’t want a biographer anymore. I don’t want any part of you. The biography is finished, it is over. Leave my house at once.”
I laughed softly, so as not to disturb him at all, trying to make my chuckles and gasps as soothing as possible. “I can’t leave your house, D’Arcy,” I said. “You know better than that.”
“You can’t leave? What do you mean, you can’t leave?”
I closed my book with a snap, tossed the broken pieces of pen into the fire and closed the decanter. “I must rest,” I said. “Tomorrow. We will continue tomorrow on more progressive territory. This line of reminiscence was doing neither you nor me any good, D’Arcy. We must consider it from a different angle tomorrow.”
He ran his hands through his beard desperately; gestured then, as if he would strike me. But as I caught him, then, with the full cold light of knowledge in my eyes, pinning him in frieze against the mirror, he must have thought better of it because his hands fell from his face, dropping to his sides and something seemed to go out of him then, all of it seemed to drift away leaving only heat and loss and he stretched out fully on the bed then in what might have been an imposture of sleep except that in a moment his eyelids were fully down and his blank face inspected the ceiling incuriously. I sighed, a gross sigh mingled of pain and pity alike and uncapped the decanter quietly, poured myself a final glass and finished it slowly, wondering.
In sleep D’Arcy’s face was robbed of all but that feral knowledge which had come so late to him; a heightened, compressed focus of the features seemed to imbue him with an insight far beyond his gains and as I watched him I felt drifting out of me, as smoke rings, the first apprehension of the final disaster.
NINE
This morning, finally, there was a conference. It came only at my frantic repeated requests to the attendants; insistences and threats aided by vague Greco-Latin mumblings of habeas corpus and kyrie eleison and mens sanal and obiter dicta. But finally they came, the three of them, and escorted me into the large room of which I had heard my roommates murmur, the room where issues were settled once and for all in this institution, and in this room there was the doctor with whom I had spoken previously and a large, thick, squarish man who wore an expression which I took to be vaguely legal. The attendants placed me in a chair before them and left, slamming doors roundly, and I permitted myself to light a cigarette before them without permission, looking at the water pitcher on the table which seemed somehow reminiscent of D’Arcy’s decantrum. Under the circumstances—considering the history, that is—my control was superb, my sensibility and countenance icy. I could tell that this was truly the room of last opinions because I could feel myself slowly coming together in there, the first time in many, many months that I approximated, in spirit and in essence, that fine, high purpose with which I had started so long ago, my tragic adventure.
