“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s funny.”
“Poor Doug,” she said, and immediately resumed her optical foreplay with the brute.
I swallowed the dregs from my glass, ate the olive, fired up another cancer stick, and got quietly off the stool and wove my way to the can. Where I took a leak and, of course, managed to dribble on myself before I got the shriveled-up, uncooperative old soldier safely tucked away again inside his Fruit of the Loom bunker. When I turned on the sink tap, water splashed up out of the bowl and wet my shirtfront. Naturally.
“You’re pathetic, Kent,” somebody said.
I looked up. In the mirror a bleary-eyed, smoke-haloed gent was giving me the eye. Looked just like me, poor bugger, poor Doug. I winked at him; he winked right back.
“A cliché,” he said, “that’s what you are. The cynical, drunken newspaperman. A bloody cliché.”
“Right,” I said. “Absolutely right.”
“You were born a cliché,” the face said. “From the moment you popped out of the old lady with the umbilical cord wrapped around your scrawny neck and your wizened little puss blue from cyanosis, you were doomed to lead the kind of miserable life you’ve led. A cliché using a series of clichés to grow into an even bigger cliché, and never once rising above the sum of your parts. You’re a self-fulfilled prophecy, Kent, that’s what you are.”
“You bet,” I said. “Fucking A.”
“That’s why you ended up here — in Pomo, in Gunderson’s, in this smelly crapper talking to your fuzzy, clichéd image in the mirror. You couldn’t have ended up anywhere else. You’ll sink lower, too, and when you finally die it will be in the most clichéd way possible. You pathetic schmuck, you.”
Squinting, I saluted the son of a bitch. Squinting, the son of a bitch saluted me.
I wove back out to the bar. Storm, as expected, had moved in on the strange beast; she was sitting on the stool next to him, her head close to his, her hand already on his thigh. Kent, I thought, you ought to be a weather forecaster. You can predict a Storm with the best of ’em.
I kept on weaving to the door. Nobody noticed, of course. Nobody paid the slightest attention as the crusading editor, the self-pitying gutter philosopher, the cliché supreme stumbled out into the night in search of more salve and another stick for his heavy, heavy bag.
Storm Carey
The Hunger wanted so badly to fuck him, this new one in town. He’d been on the edge of my mind since the bank, and when he walked into the lounge I thought it must be fated for the Hunger to get its wish. It thought so, too. Its demands were immediate. As I watched the stranger hunched over the bar sipping his beer, the demands grew feverish. Never satisfied, wanting more, wanting new, wanting... what? What else besides what I kept feeding it?
Almost from my first awareness of the Hunger, two months after Neal’s fatal coronary, I thought of it as a mouth, a thick-lipped, nibbling mouth deep within my body. Shrunken at first, the nibbles tiny, then expanding as its need grew, opening wider, nibbling more insistently, probing with something like a tongue as it moved down through my chest, hardening my nipples, down, tightening my stomach and groin, down, fiery breath making me wet, fiery tongue licking...
Cunnilingus from within. That was the sensation and that was how I described it to the shrink I visited for a while in San Francisco. She was very interested in the concept; what woman wouldn’t be? Her interpretation was that the Hunger was grief-born, grief-sustained. Neal and I had been deeply, passionately in love, had enjoyed fabulous sex together throughout our marriage; his sudden death not only left an enormous gap in my life, but in my sex life as well, and so psychologically I had created the Hunger in an effort to fill the emptiness for brief periods. All the men were substitutes, surrogates: Through them I was trying to resurrect both Neal and the powerful physical intimacy we’d shared. But, of course, that was impossible, which was why the sex with them was never satisfying (and why it left me feeling cheap and disgusted with myself), why the Hunger renewed its hot, nibbling demands again so soon afterward.
All well and good — a reasonable analysis as far as it went. But the Hunger was more than just sexual need, more than a yearning for Neal and what we’d had for nine years, more than a gap filler and a psychological desire for love and intense human connection. The Hunger was something dark, too, hidden behind the mouth’s thick lips and searching tongue. Something I couldn’t reach or understand, and until I did, something I couldn’t hope to satisfy. The Hunger’s purely sexual demands frightened me, but not half so much as its unknown dark part. I tried to explain this to the shrink, and she seemed sympathetic, but her opinion was that it was, in fact, sexuaclass="underline" the so-called dark side of sex, childhood fears, religious and societal taboos, all that. When she kept trying to convince me of this, I ended our sessions. She was wrong; whatever the dark element was, it was not sexually related. And not she nor anyone else could help me find out what it really was. I was the only one who could do that, and someday I would.
But not tonight. Tonight the Hunger was all sex, raging sex, with no hint of anything else.
I couldn’t sit still any longer. When Doug Kent got up and lurched away to the men’s room, it was like a release. I slid off the stool, smoothed the tight skirt down over my hips. It was an effort not to seem too eager as I walked over and sat next to the Hunger’s new target.
He knew I was there — he couldn’t help knowing — but he neither moved nor looked at me until I said, “Don’t you like my scent?” His sideways glance then was without apparent interest, and there was no change in his expression even after he’d examined my face and the hollow between my breasts. Not even the faintest spark of lust that usually flares in men’s eyes. His were so pale in the dim light that the irises blended into the whites, to the point of invisibility; it was like meeting the gaze of a blind man. They gave me a small frisson.
“It’s very expensive,” I said.
“What is?”
“My perfume. It’s called Paris Nights.”
“Your husband give it to you?”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“Boyfriend, then.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Guy you’re with’s a relative, is that it?”
“No. A casual acquaintance. You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t remember what it was.”
“I asked if you liked my scent.”
“Perfume’s okay. It’s the other one I don’t like.”
“Other one?”
“Gin. Smell of gin on a woman’s breath turns me off.”
“I have a bottle of Listerine in my bathroom.”
“I’d still smell the gin.”
“There are other ways to keep that from happening.”
“Direct as hell, aren’t you?”
“Yes. When I see something I want.”
“Something. Uh-huh.”
“I meant someone.”
“Sure you did. Do I look like a necrophiliac?”
“... Now, what is that supposed to mean?”
“I like my women active, not passed out.”
“I won’t pass out. I haven’t had that much to drink.”
“Your eyes and your voice say different.”
I put my hand on his thigh, stroked it gently. “I promise to be alert and very active.”
“Give it up, lady.” He pushed my hand away.
“Oh, now. You’re not even a little interested?”
“Not even a little.”
“Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”
“Too attractive.”
“Another cryptic statement. This one meaning?”