Twitch. Little brief leaps into the air, the penis like a terribly young ballet boy. Then the cock, rearing-crowing at full blush. Rampant. Tyrannical. The master baton.
Heavily throbbing, its jowls the testicles. The prince cock.
The monarch of all the ova he surveys- King Cock! Bow down, he cries, bow down. And I thought I might indeed be ready to bow down. Watching King Cock swelling and showing me its underbelly, as of a leviathan, methought I detected an answering ache in my gut. Actually, that was simply hunger for a good meal, but so intent was I on fracturing my frigidity that I did not want to recognize another elemental force at work. Thus-I bowed down.
In Brighton, Sussex, I took his Cornish promontory into my mouth.
It was good to chew on but gently, gently, dear reader. One must not promote panic in the sensitive male. One does not imply, no matter how sharply one at times feels it, that the male is about to be castrated. On the contrary, one implies, if one can, that it is a supreme privilege to be worthy of the male genitals. I thus implied with Stanley Widdemer. I swabbed my mouth with his uncircumcised plume and from moment to moment, as I salivated copiously, I gazed up adoringly with my green eyes at the groaning juvenile lead. He was convulsively clutching at the sand, his head arched back, his shoulders hunched. The feeling I had was that the juvenile lead was at my mercy. Thereupon I disgorged Stanley's naming blubber and took it into my hands, toying with it.
Stanley then looked like a fish out of water as I rolled his blubber between the palms of my hands under the metallic blue sky. I could hear the distant thunder of the surf. He made several attempts to disengage himself from my hands by seizing one of my breasts, but all I had to do to loosen his hold was to run my thumbnail several times from the base of his promontory to the crown. Then, making interesting infantile gurglings, some of which sounded distinctly like “mama, mama, mama,” he released my teat and sank back on the sand.
As if in slight but unmistakable punishment, I gave his distended music roll a light slap. Stanley Widdemer mooed. It was not the expansive moo of a cow. It was the somewhat curtailed moo the human male makes when he is figuratively, as the American would have it, hogtied. In ordinary circumstances I would at such a point have exploded. I would have thrown myself on Stanley Widdemer and bellowed for him to plunge in his lightning rod and shock the living piss out of me. But these were not ordinary circumstances. In the heat of the Brighton sun I was refrigerated. I was glacial.
And, I guess, I was being masochistic-I kept seeing Hugh Kinsteare's face, the blondness of his hair, the sweetness of his features, the ripple of his musculature. I wanted to weep, I wanted to sob unrelievedly. Instead, I grimaced. Instead, I made a small gouge into Widdemer's prick-and he writhed there on the sand in the noonday sun as though he were a snake gone utterly berserk. But no drums beat in me. No bagpipes skirled.
And I was only casually interested in the creature there on the sand making a bloody spectacle of himself. The sand was sweat-smeared all over him. He resembled, somehow, a praying mantis but he was not half so fierce. And he was disproportionately bloated between his legs-I was having rather morbid ideas, I must confess. The distended corpse of the prick, I thought. The two-by-four with delusions of grandeur. The sperm-logged belaying pin. A graduated inflation of a thermometer, marked off with empurpled degrees of passion… Then I heard Stanley whisper. “Finish me off, Victoria.” I sniggered. I felt as if I were the coldest bitch in the world. I felt as if I had Jesus Christ Himself disheveled there in the pit of the dune. “The truth, Stanley, the truth-” “Anything. But hurry.” His breathing was a rasp. His buttocks squirmed. “Do you really love me, Stanley? The truth, please. I'll know if you're lying.” “You will finish me off, then, will you not?” “Yes.”
“It is a he that I love you, Victoria.” “A large lie, Stanley?” “Yes.” “A fat, maggoty lie?” “Yes, Victoria.”
“And what was the he, Stanley?” “A ploy.” “An age-old stratagem to lure both male and female into the zodiac of fuck, so to speak, Stanley?” “So to speak.” “Do you love your mother, Stanley?” Silence. I flicked a forefinger at his balls. He winced, but his erection remained undismayed. “Yes,” he said. “I love my mother.” Then he wrapped a fist about his charger and began to thrust with his loins. I waited, amused. What I expected, occurred. He groaned, stopped. “Victoria,” he said.
“Yes?” “If I think about my mother, I'll never come,” he said. His voice held a note of hysteria. Ah, those juvenile leads.
“I'll simply have a permanent erection. I can't stand that.” “All right, Stanley. You have been truthful, and you may possibly present an impressive and stimulating picture.” I had bethought to myself, gentle reader, that the sight of sperm pumping out of the male generative organ might conceivably stimulate me. It was easily done-the pumping, I mean. I coolly took Stanley's redoubtable ark in hand, bent it back so that its dorsal side was flush with his belly, and I exerted simple pressure against his apparatus with the heel of my hand. Stanley's mouth gaped. His eyeballs rolled upward. He bleated. And I applied a little more pressure. He bleated a second time. I increased the pressure. He bleated a third time-and then he shipped a flood. It was as if a tidal wave had accumulated within his testicles and were now smashing through Stanley Widdemer's grand canal. I directed the flood toward the parched sand, but I felt nothing more than a mild disdain. My groin-to stretch a figure- continued to yawn at sex. The juvenile lead smiled at me-gratefully. I lifted an eyebrow and reconstituted myself in my bathing clothes. I might just as well, I thought, go back to the hotel and rejoin the rest of Maytemper's Mummers. There certainly was no point in collecting empty shells any more. The ghost of Kinsteares continued to rule my sexual roost.
10
I venture upon this chapter, my dear reader, with considerable trepidation. It is not matter suitable to delicate digestions, and may well horrify the overrefined, but it was part of the life I lived, and justifiably may be set down to insure the reader's all-inclusive grasp of reality-otherwise my story would be grievously incomplete. My life situation was, if I may faintly belabor the point, inadequate after the death of Hugh Kinsteares. Whoever the man or woman, whatever the place, I could generate no erotic response-I remained in mourning for the demise of the one man I have loved in this life aside from my brother James. How that mourning was terminated is the gist of this chapter -and I shall make no apologies for it, the method, that is. I do most certainly apologize for any stomach I may turn, and to any sensibility I may offend. While it is not my purpose to put down matter that may shock the ingenuous ear, I have no recourse other than to inscribe the truth as it occurred-we must at least be faithful to the proper recording of an event lest the event itself deceive us. I insist I shall not be deceived and, if I may identify with the reader momentarily, I feel that the reader, too, is opposed to deception. Nevertheless, as I say, I proceed with trepidation. While truth may be experienced precisely, and undoubtedly is, the accurate rendering of it is another story-so frequently will that be at variance with the morals of the day and will be characterized as either overly puritanical or overly bestial. In any case, I will take my chances with the devoted reader and get on with the story… Maytemper's Mummers were still in Brighton, having gained a large measure of success. After one of the afternoon performances of As You Like It, I sat down to the dressing-room table -a dressing room, of course, I shared with the other females of the cast-and went about the process of removing my makeup in the gaslight. I was feeling unusually taciturn, practically sullen-when the doorman from the stage door came in and put an engraved card on the vanity before me. The leading lady, Sylvia Knox-Drendendorff-who owned execrably bad teeth whose stench preceded her-leaned her nose over my shoulder and read the card aloud: “Sir Lawrence Terstyke, Bart., Merlin House, Sussex.” On the obverse side in rather a childlike scrawl it was evidently Sir Lawrence who had inscribed-to Knox-Drendendorff's post-adolescent glee-that my acting had made a very considerable impression upon him, and that he begged to make my acquaintance-he would be waiting with his coach-and-four just outside the stage door. “Ah,” said Sylvia Knox-Drendendorff in her rather shrill voice, but one could not fault her on her thespian ability. She tapped me lightly on the shoulder with her fan.