Her body was hard-looking. Her ass, which I saw first, was round and smooth and looked as hard as a football player’s shoulder. There was a deep cleft between the cheeks, as though she were in a permanent clench, but there was none of the muscle rippling that goes with clenching.
Her legs were graceful, but slender, tapering away to narrow ankles, looking like a runner’s legs, lean and graceful and functional. Her belly wasn’t merely flat, it was slightly sunken, with a knob of bone on either side, way down near the top of the leg, like mountain peaks on either side of a crater of the moon.
Her pubic hair was thick and black and snarled, but when she lifted her arms in folding the stretch pants I was surprised to see that she shaved her armpits. People use the word underarm these days, because armpit sounds ugly, but if you’ll look at one you’ll see that it is ugly, that it is the only part of the human body, bar none, that nothing can make less than ugly, and you will see that it is in truth an armpit and it doesn’t matter what anybody says. And she had shaved hers, which I think had more to do with self-image than any attempted impact on the customers. She didn’t care about the customers, they barely existed for her.
Once again I was barely existing. Translucent, perhaps even transparent. And terribly unimportant.
It is the worst thing in the world to be unimportant.
She gave me her meaningless smile when she was done arranging her clothes, and reached for my hand to lead me to the bed. I gestured at her bra, saying, “What about that?”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said, and put one knee on the bed, and moved forward over the knee, bending over it as she got onto the bed, and then I knew I wanted to fuck her that way, but I was embarrassed to ask.
Besides, there was still the bra, and I was already in that conversation. I said, “I want to see them,” and tried a smile of my own.
“They’re just titties, dear,” she said.
I just remembered that I left something out. The minute we walked in the door she held her hand out for the money. I gave her two tens and she put them in the top drawer of the dresser. Then everything else followed as I said.
I wonder why I left that out?
Anyway, she said, “They’re just titties, dear,” and beckoned to me to come up and get on top of her.
I did, and she put her legs on either side of me. I put my right hand along the side of her left breast, against the cloth of the yellow bra, and I said, “I want to suck them.”
“I don’t do that, dear,” she said. Still with the smile, still with the soft voice. But her eyes said she didn’t want to be argued with.
So did her hand. She reached down between her legs to where my cock was hanging and grabbed it and gave it a surprisingly hard yank. It hurt, and it felt good in a weird way, and it surprised the hell out of me. “Come on, dear,” she said. “Stick that thing in.”
So I stuck that thing in. Her cunt was so different from Betsy’s, that surprised me too. Betsy’s cunt is soft and warm and moist, but the hooker’s cunt was hobnailed, it seemed to have hard little bumps all over the inside that really worked against my cock. It was the loveliest sensation Oscar ever experienced.
It was too lovely. She was about to earn her money at a rate of about five dollars a second, so after a couple of strokes I bit my lower lip and I stopped moving, leaving it inside her to the hilt.
I was lying on top of her now, my face buried in the pillow beside her head, my eyes squeezed shut. When I stopped she said, “What’s the matter, dear?” and because of our positions it sounded as though she was behind me. It was strange to feel her under me and hear her behind me.
I lifted up on my elbows and smiled down at her, trying for some empathy, some human contact, some compassion and understanding. “I don’t want to come too soon,” I said. My lip hurt where I’d bit it.
“You’re here to enjoy yourself, dear,” she said, and closed her eyes and set her jaw, and with a look of total concentration on her face, the smile gone for once, she began to do fast, hard, intricate work with a lot of muscles in her lower torso, and my peashooter shot, and I groaned, “Damn it!” and fell full weight on top of her.
After that, I had the feeling she was counting to a hundred and would then tell me it was time to get up, so I got up when I figured she was at about eighty-five. She washed my cock again, and then squatted over the basin to wash herself, and I thought now that she looked like a mongrel dog in an African village, and I thought the bouffant hairdo was pathetic and ridiculous, and I knew I’d been successfully humiliated, and I was horribly afraid that was what I’d gone out for.
I was also sober.
Thus ends my first infidelity. Do you hear that, Betsy? My honest to God one and only first. All others existed only on the thin mattress of my mind. Or possibly the mind in Oscar.
I left, without having been beaten all the way to death, and drove home with my groin itching, I don’t know why. I drank myself to sleep, and that ended Friday.
Saturday I was numb. I woke up late, I wandered around, I tried to write a letter to Betsy but didn’t really want to write to her, and finally I wrote that chapter about kissing Kay and Dick’s literary theories and Thanksgiving Day and all that other stuff, never once mentioning what had happened, what had really and truly happened. I’m not sure why I did that. I think Saturday was just the day between the shock and the reality, a sort of eye of the storm. I seemed sure of myself and gutsy and brisk and capable of steering my craft safely through all shoals, or at least I seemed that way to me. I think I knew it wasn’t real, but it was all I had.
I seem to have done another fifteen pages. Another fifteen useless pages, of course.
No. Not entirely useless. Tonight I will write the real Chapter 2, in which Paul gets drunk, angry, laid and maudlin, and I will be able to use a lot of the sex scene description from this chapter. I’ll just switch it from first person to third person and leave out the pornography.
I think Paul will make her come.
2
Paul was mostly drunk, but not entirely drunk. He was just sober enough to know he was drunk, which is what saved him. Because he was also driving the car, and if he hadn’t been sober enough to know he was too drunk to be driving the car he would almost surely have had an accident.
As it was, he reached New York safely, drove crosstown through the grid of streets from the Midtown Tunnel, and parked on West 47th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. He got out, locked the car, and went looking for a whore.
It was well after midnight by now. The first shock of Beth’s disappearance had worn off, he had made his first frantic useless attempts to contact her — a call to her parents upstate had done him no good since she hadn’t arrived yet and hadn’t even told her parents she was coming — he had drunk himself into a state of partial anesthesia, and he had decided he was angry.
After all, a man had a right to privacy, didn’t he? Didn’t he? So what if he kept a make believe diary full of make believe affairs and seductions. In a way, Beth ought to be thankful they were make believe. It was entirely possible that having had this outlet for his polygamous impulses over the years had been good for their marriage. It might have helped the marriage, in fact, by using up all his stray impulses to stray, giving him a safe and unimportant outlet for those natural feelings that come over every man on earth at one time or another in his married life.