“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everything is the same as it always was.”
“Nothing’s the same as it ever was,” she said intensely and finished a medium-sized glass of scotch at a bound, went to the decanter again but poured less and moved back knowingly against the cushions. “Anyway, I came to tell you that there are no hard feelings at all and in many ways I admire you. Let’s go to a motel.”
“What?”
“Let’s go to a motel and shack up. I’d like to go to bed with you again; it’s been months since I got anything decent at all inside me and at least you were big; now you’re probably better. There are some awfully nice places on the highway coming in; Daddy and I passed them all to wind up at this disgusting hotel. Clean and neat and the air conditioners don’t make any sounds at all, I bet you.”
“But look,” I said, or rather some demented dwarf within me said, “we don’t have to go to a motel. We could do it here, right here.” I didn’t want to go to bed with her, the thought of it sending me into a storm of revulsion, a welter of loss, but there was no way of getting rid of her without being cooperative. That was the idea which afflicted me and which made everything possible: I was only trying to be cooperative. “It would only take a few minutes and nobody’s coming home for the rest of the day,” the dwarf said.
“It isn’t the same. Motels are really nice; you know, they’re simply made for fucking. All the time I was wondering what the hell motels were for when there were so many other nice places you could go to and what the hell was there to do anyway except look at television, but the first time I went to one around Christmas it all came to me. They’re the hottest thing going. There’s nothing you can do there but fuck.” She put a hand between her legs, stroked her genitals idly. “It makes me hot just to think about going to a motel with you. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay. Daddy gives me all the money I want and I saved up on my allowance for this. I’ll take care of everything.”
“But listen,” I said, “couldn’t we do it here? It would be the same thing and I told you no one’s coming home here all day and you could save the money. I mean, I could save the money; I wouldn’t let you pay.”
“I don’t want to fuck in any old house,” she said, “let married people fuck in their houses. Young people can do it in motels. Don’t you know that when some married couples have problems that way they take them to a motel? It’s a sure cure.”
I had no alternative. I could have asked her to leave, of course; in the long run, I understand now, it would have worked because I could have left her with no alternative. I could have spoken of relative impotence; I could, for that matter, have laid my reduced prick out on the table and jerked it off for her. All of these would have been better or, at least no worse. And yet, in the last analysis, of course, it would have made no difference at all.
It would have made no difference because we are what we are; there is no changing, there is no alternative; the compound of disgust, reflex and beliefs which all of us become is based upon the careful selection of only those experiences which will adjust the compound in a certain way. So nothing I could have done or said would have made any difference, would have changed the situation at all; even the memories of the throbbing wire, colliding with my bruised wrist changed nothing. The magazines lay safely upstairs; there would be better times ahead. And her breasts under the dress were the breasts I dreamed of, in and out of my slippery orgasms.
“All right,” I said, “the hell with it. We’ll go. But I’ll pay. I insist on paying.”
She rose from the couch, solid as rock and as unyielding and touched my elbow. “I know a little place, a very nice place, where we can save lots of money,” she said. “There’s no need for you to spend a whole lot.”
It was settled. In a spirit of assassin’s pact, we looked at one another as I circled the house picking up necessary objects, cleaning away unnecessary residue, denying her presence or my own impending absence as best I could while she followed me, her graceful thighs touching my buttocks gently, her hands murmuring something tuneless on my body. I took her by a firm, roseate upper arm and guided her to the door, swung the door open, put her outside the door, put myself beyond the door, closed and locked it and we went to her car, a small, ominous sedan parked on the other side of the street. When we got there she handed me the keys and indicated that I could drive and I shrugged—it was a minor skill I had picked up during the winter at the school but was still unlicensed—and decided to risk it. We got into the car. We closed the car. I started the car and we drove.
We drove once again through the familiar, ever-recapitulated landscape, the radio on this time giving the form of a musical comedy to our humble journey, the flat, grey roads which led out of the town lying in their smoke and ashes as cars fore and aft wandered past us, probably on better journeys. Out of town, Marie-Jean guided me to one of those small, dismal highways which leads either to a journey’s end or beginning, and straddling two lanes cautiously I went to fuller speed, feeling for the first time her capped fingernails grazing my thigh, heard the slow mutter of her voice as she mouthed the words of the song and turned against me, nestled into me, implanted her breasts into my shoulder, a soft, squeezing pressure held out against the hard asphalt of the road which reverberated through the wheels to my stricken hands. “I’m hot, aren’t you?” she said and again, “I really want a fucking, don’t you?” and I finally said yes and she quieted against me with the rolling of the roads, then, still pocketing her hand in my lap.
We drove in suspension like that for a long, long time; hearing newscasts, advertisements, music, advertisements, several bulletins, transcriptions of interviews, battling with the misty aspect of diseased trucks that wandered by us, and as the soot and heat steamed up from the road I felt myself to be literally transfixed into a station somewhere between consciousness and passage, locked in an endless gloom with only a small spread of light at the farthest corridor to tell me who I might be or where I might be going. Her mouth slid down, dreamlike, to my lap and began to explore me tentatively; I thrust like a lunatic against her, dreaming of tubes, until I realized that there could be no contact and that it was only a cheat; her breasts moved higher to touch my neck and I sensed, then, a suspicion of skin as if she had bared them for me and was more than grazing, but I would not look. The sun, contrary to astronomical evaluation, seemed to rise higher and higher rather than settling and the interior of the car ticked. “It’s only about a mile away, now,” she said and I was shocked at the presence of a human voice in the car; we had been suspended so long by radio and by the sounds of the highway that the reality of direct, untranscribed human speech seemed to be something entirely new. “No,” she said, “I was all wrong; it’s right here, we made it.” She pointed toward an agglomerated pink structure, several boxes nestled unevenly upon one another in a row to our right a few hundred feet ahead. FARMER’S HIGHWAY REST, it said. “That’s it.”
I took my foot off the gas pedal with surprise that I was capable of movement at all and with a feeling of physical wrenching slowed the car and curved it into a grey, cobblestoned path, stopped it before a dreary, central box that bore a sign in red and white: OFFICE WELCOME. “You’re supposed to register; the man always registers,” she whispered to me but for a few moments, stricken by the accumulated tensions of the voyage I was unable to move, in a kind of shock that there was, after all, an end to transition, but then Marie-Jean did something urgent to me and I found myself able to move. I heaved my way out of the car, leaving the keys dangle and stumbled into the office.
A rustic before the counter, all spangles and checks between the scarred wooden surface, wanted to know if I was interested in a “special” or a “regular”; I told him that it made no difference and he gave me a special; he then asked for my license plate which I gave him without trepidation and finally wanted to know if I was married. Strangely, this question which is the punch line of every good and bad joke about motels which I have subsequently heard, within them and without, struck me as entirely routine, legitimate and matter-of-fact; I told him that I was and that this would be the second night after our honeymoon. He seemed to lose interest at that point—not that he had any particularly in the first place—told me that his name was Elmer and that he raised tomatoes in addition to eking out a very modest life with this motel, and made me sign two cards. He asked me for ten dollars, I gave him eleven to show my appreciation for tomato-growing and he handed me the keys to unit 27 which, it appeared, was on the ground level of the “third barricade.” I thanked him, returned to the car and tossed the keys to Marie-Jean. She gasped.
“Did anything happen?” she said.
“Yes. We got the room.”
“Oh. I was so worried. Everything’s all right then?”
I had never been to a motel before. “What could be wrong? I thought that you loved these places.”
She had no answer to that, moving away from me slightly as I brought the car awkwardly before unit 25 and told her that we could probably walk the 8 feet to our own cabin. She nodded and said something about baggage and took an eyeglass case from the glove compartment. “That will have to do,” she said.
“What’s the difference?”
“The police watch these things,” she said, astonishing me. “They’re so hot that the cops have to watch for them. All kinds of things go on in these places; I’d hate to tell you.”
We got out of the car, myself stiffly, Marie-Jean with at least as much distress as I had experienced the first time, and she handed me her eyeglass case which I put into an inner coat pocket. Her hand brushed mine tentatively, then moved as if flight and commingling were somehow antithetical and we went to unit 27 which appeared indistinguishable from 26 and 28 although, perhaps, bearing a slightly more used appearance. I had some difficulty with the key, jabbing it over and over again at the lock, trying to force an entrance, and then made it all in a rush and we staggered into the cool, damp cavern of the room, the sound of birds and of television sets overwhelming us in the darkness.
“It stinks,” Marie-Jean said and closed the door behind us, went to the window and began to experiment with an ominous device encased in tin which bore a warning DO NOT DISMANTLE. I found some lights and turned them into an uneven glow which filtered through the wetness of the room and the device in the corner began to hum. Marie-Jean tucked the shades even tighter into the windows and then put on the television set in the corner where some kind of a sporting tournament seemed to be in progress.
“They charge you a quarter an hour for the sound,” she said, “but we can beat them because who needs to listen anyway?” She adjusted the dial, her earlier spirits almost completely recovered and went to the door where she pressed a small button which, she said, locked us in and the world out. She shrugged and faced me. “Do you want to fuck?” she said.
“All right. If you want.”
“That’s why we’re here so we might as well.”
“I don’t care,” I said pointlessly. “No objection.” I watched her take off her clothing then in a feeling of total suspension, her breasts which hung from the release of her brassiere somehow not her breasts but those obscene, semi-detached cylinders which I had hung on my walls, the nipples not made of flesh but of paper, the glossy thighs emerging from the tube of her unrolled pants much as my detumescent prick might have scattered its last wandering shots emerging from its snug home. In a continued mood of abstraction I took off my own clothing, watching the sporting tournament where several men appeared to be trying to surpass others with the exercise of their limbs, then stood before her in the cooling, damp breezes of the room feeling like a dwarf suspended in putty, everything an abstraction but the central aspect.
“You’ve gotten bigger,” she said. “Screwing will do that to you.” She lay down on the bed and for the first time before me, then, a woman exposed the full flower of her thighs, that moist, reaching cove where all ceremonies end, the dampness and bleakness of her hair commingling with the preparatory juices that already seemed to move idly within her. “I’m pretty hot, you better come right here,” she said.
From this angle her breasts had flattened out to near invisibility, becoming a part of the bedsheets rather than her body; her thighs too had spread to a plane of dwindling; only her huge, strangely muscled orifice itself lay before me, an unwinking eye, center of all things, blinking and winking with its special knowledge. I had never seen a woman that way before; I had never conceived from the magazines that they looked this way and in all my previous experience it had only been the weapon’s knowledge, never my own. What my genitals knew then, my sensibility was first attuning to and this filled me with a feeling of horror: how had they stood it? How had they managed? Was that all there was to it? But the body, on its own faithless round, had already moved beyond me, moved to the bed and I pushed myself upon her, feeling the wetness of the contact above and below, heard her sigh and begin to turn against me. Fuck me, you bastard son of a bitch, she said. And in the slow, gathering wandering that came from that, the last battle began.
I rolled with her in an anxiety of pace, trying to order myself above as we were ordered below, the small, slow connection of organs working on various levels of wetness and as I did so, I could hear her murmur, unsilenced in the blankness continuing at rising pitch: fuck me, fuck me, and the joining was accomplished rapidly, so rapidly that her grasp of need was met with my own breath of astonishment as the conjoinment was made, and slowly then I rose on knees and elbows above her, a small heightening, a feeling of ascension and I began to work in her, feeling her tube shudder and close under me, her tube reaching to clamp me and I began slowly, my erection already accomplished, to work on her, hearing her vague mutterings not as words but as a collection of emotions refracted through my own despair. You can’t do it, you can’t do it, you son of a bitch, is what she was saying or what I took her to be saying and the distended pupil of my left eye, caught on the wall, swung idly over to the television set and I glimpsed then the apotheosis of sporting event while under me a different series of events took place: she was so moist that she expelled me, dripping on to the sheets and I had to begin entrance over again, this entrance somewhat more difficult because the wrenching and tumbling of her body made that accomplishment almost irrelevant to the higher need.
I got it in, finally, my bulging eyeballs receding from the television set to her breasts, flat against her body and gleaming with perspiration, shoved up against me and in other circumstances it might have ticked me into orgasm, severed as they seemed to be from the rest of her body, the nipples little more than commas impressed against the sleekness of flesh. But she was talking again: talking too much and too frantically and I felt my quickening recede, felt my impending orgasm diminished and the screen shifted and began to play a biscuit commercial while in a small explosion of attention I let my two hands wander over her body, balancing desperately on my knees as I did so and I heard her cries begin to mingle and to find words again.
“Inside, inside you bastard,” she said, and I tried to go inside but there was a retarding slickness which sought to expel me again and all that I could do was butt up it helplessly again, feeling myself drawn into those waters. “Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for, can’t you even do it?” and I felt then the drawing, the drawing itself. It was as if she had turned herself inside out to accommodate me and now was turning back again and I could feel myself sliding damply, wetly, desperately up to her core and at the same time there were frantic thumps on the ceiling and cries of children; a family was heading out for the highways, apparently. The thought of these consequences, all the eventual consequences of my own emission strewn aimlessly all over the landscape kicked me into further determination and I began to work over her in earnest, freeing a hand to grapple with her breasts while I bent slowly in a kind of inclination. And still the orgasm was retarded; I wanted nothing more, then, but to finish as quickly as possible and withdraw: to return in comity to that car and giving her the wheel that time permit the reversal of a journey which would leave me spent but not undone hovering over my magazines in the evening’s glaze, but she wouldn’t release me and I realized then with a kind of primal and final horror that she wasn’t going to release me; that she wanted all of me, all of me inside her. That she was drawing, drawing me from the very center. And I shouted then, a shout somewhere between pain and dread but she clamped and would not let me out and forced me, busily, to continue with the grapple.
I think I saw it all, then, you son of a bitch, working over her as I did: I think that in the center of her cries and moans, her lunging and despair, I saw the totality, the sum, the oft-evaded center of everything which had happened to me already. I think I must have seen that she was not a tube but a girl, that her breasts were not severed but rather attached by muscle and blood and extension to the drawings of her breath herself and that finally, denuded of all but need, I was being forced on that last journey defenseless. But I must not have seen it too well; I must have gripped all of it only through retrospection for what I tried to do, putting my palms flat to the wall and raising myself above her was to seek a kind of withdrawal. I wanted to remove myself from her. I wanted to tear myself free, tear myself into some small space where I could consider what was happening to me; what had happened to me for a long, solitary time but she wouldn’t let me, the pulsing was both outward with her thighs and inward with the mechanics of her cunt itself and I was helpless, I was helpless. And now, as I poised above her, broken arrow, trying to work myself through the blank space of the final seconds with this girl and behind it all the dull realization that it would never happen, that she had brought me too far and therefore beyond the possibility of function, something must have smashed within me, scattering its fragments throughout and I heard her; I truly heard her then, crying with her full voice in the darkness.
“You’re going to do it, now, you bastard,” she was muttering to me, “you’re going to really do it; you’re going to do it with a woman not yourself, you’re going to force yourself into a woman, not yourself, you’re going to come into a woman, not yourself; you’re going to break through, you son of a bitch, into free high ground.” And she said this to me, all sprinkled with obscenities which I cannot recapitulate, let alone bring myself to utter, I felt the rage within me: the One, free final rage; a cooling rage that removed the last elements of my turgidity and left me in control in some dark space above her; a taloned bird swooping in the night, a plunging beak moving to grab her. “You will, you will,” she said, “I’m a woman, not a god damned picture,” and I had no way of knowing if she was saying this or if the dwarf’s voice inside was addressing me but it was all the same, all the same. I felt myself retracting, sliding out inch-by-inch, all the time playing the idiot’s game of bucking and necessity so that she would not know what was not happening inside her. And so my chest pummeled hers, my uninterested hands sliding through the gift of her breasts and her mouth opened; she passed beyond speech, she passed into a different time.
And I was an eaglet suspended above the lost dominions of the sea; I was a roc, that legendary, frantic bird, scuttling over an egg on an abandoned island, I was a sea-creature, suspended in the aqueous death: I was all of these both far above and below of her, struggling past the network of my sensibility and then her voice cried out in sheer, grave horror that struck me like a lance and brought me past all of this: “You can’t do it, you son of a bitch!” she was saying to me, “you can’t do it to a woman, you need your pictures!” and her voice was as I had never heard it before, strained and low.
So I poised above her, then, poised above her in the astonishment of flight, her body wide and open before me, her breasts small, encompassed flowers and as the last piece of me slipped free I found myself, by that individuality, thrust into the oldest, coldest and finest insight of all and on the television screen two of the sportsmen began to struggle with one another with clubs and somewhere above us there was a splashing of water and the very eaves themselves groaned; the machine in the corner giving out drafts of fresh air, and suspended at that height above her I brought my fists down once, twice, three times, violently upon her throat, feeling her spread at last and those juices of completion surge forward from her.
I brought it into her then with all the cunning force of accumulation, plunging my need into hers, severing her from herself so that, like me, she flew at some fine, high, dreadful angle from her history, raising to crash again and again, thighs and before me, fell all the way back, her eyes open and shoulders working in dreadful comity and she fell astonished, her head split with the general cleavage, her body open and pulsing and the grey flickers of the television set passing over her: I put it into her once, twice, and again and then, for the first time, as if I had put a twenty-five cent piece into the television set of sensibility, the sound came on. I heard the screams. I felt the rush. And in that last high twisting, I began to understand what had happened to me that afternoon.
