“But why should that involve the doctor?” I asked.
“It will be his busiest day,” Chief Purser Yenta assured me. “First there will be the seasickness.”
“Seasickness? But We’re still in port.”
“Some people become seasick the minute their feet touch the deck of a ship. In my experience, these are invariably the people who make it a duty to attend bon voyage parties. And then, of course,” Yenta continued, “there are the drunks. And the accidents. The accident rate on the day of sailing is ten times as high as when we’re at sea. People trip over luggage, fall down ship’s ladders, smash glasses in bon voyage toasts and cut themselves on them, get bitten by one another’s pets, get into fist fights over their accommodations, poke each other’s eyes out with ‘farewell bouquets,’ and-—well, I could go on, but I think you get the picture.”
“I get the picture,” I assured Yenta. “Why don’t we get together the day after tomorrow?” I suggested to Dr. Quotabusta.
“Sure.” He said good night and left us.
Yenta led me down to my stateroom, which was on D Deck, inside, and far from one of the choicest. I was too tired to care. I zonked out as soon as my head hit the pillow.
I woke up late the next morning to a cacophony of sound. There were at least two bands playing, people shouting, others singing, champagne corks popping, and repeated choruses of “Bon Voyage!” But it wasn’t the din that awakened me. Noise never does. I can sleep through an eight-speaker stereo rendition of the 1812 Overture with real cannons. What had awakened me was the weight of two bodies of opposite genders sprawling on top of me and making violent movements as they tore at each other’s clothes in the dimness of the unlighted stateroom.
“Bun Voyage!” a female voice panted. A brassiere went sailing into the darkness.
“Bon Voyage!” a male voice echoed more correctly. An undershirt followed in the wake of the brassiere.
“Excuse me,” I muttered dazedly, my voice muffled by a mouthful of long, red hair.
“There’s no need to be apoplectic,” the girl replied, smothering me as she shifted her weight to her back —which was on my face—and stuck her legs straight up in the air so that she could wriggle out of a body stocking.
“What did you say?” the man asked.
“You said ‘Excuse me,’ and I said not to be apoplectic.”
“You mean ‘apologetic,’ ” he deduced. “But I didn’t say ‘Excuse me,’ Gloria.”
I tried to interject a comment here, but her shoulder blade was still stopping up my mouth.
“My name isn’t Gloria,” she said. “I wish you’d try to get it straight, Henry.”
“My name isn’t Henry. And I am trying.”
“You are?” The redhead kicked off the body stocking and shifted her weight. I was able to breathe again.
“Then how come I can’t seem to find your generals?” she inquired.
“You mean my privates,” he translated. “Listen. Let’s take a look at this. I’m not Henry, and you’re not Gloria. Right?”
“What’s in a name? A nose by any other name still smells.” The redhead wriggled provocatively. Her warm, soft bottom snuggled insinuatingly around my own “generals.”
“Excuse me,” I tried again.
“What for? I liked it,” the redhead said. “That’s a very erroneous zone.”
“I must have gotten into the wrong cabin,” the man said. “I’m supposed to be seeing Gloria off.”
“You should have mentioned it before we drank all that champagne,” the girl told him. “It lowered my insistence.”
“The champagne was for Gloria,” he remembered. “She gets sexy and her tongue gets all twisted up when she drinks champagne, too. It’s pretty dark in here, and that’s why I thought—-”
“It’s not the champagne. I always gargle my words. My analyst says it’s how I release digression.”
“You mean ‘aggression.’ ”
“No. Digression. I digress a lot when I free-dissociate. It’s funny how when you have an erotic mechanism like mine, people think you’re gargling words even when you’re not.”
“Gloria will be wondering what happened to me.”
‘Tm more interested in what’s happening to me. Keep doing what you’re doing with your hand. You’re very manically dextrous.”
My own hand, incidentally, had come to rest on her left breast, where it was tracing the outline of a large, round aureole—one of the half-dollar sized variety-— and tingling to the swelling reaction of a long, sharp-tipped nipple. The breast itself was very firm, high on the torso, and separated from its mate by a deep cleft of pronounced cleavage. The respiration was deep and rhythmic, and on the inhale the flesh swelled to proportions that overspilled my grasping palm.
“My hand is in my lap,” the man said, mystified.
“I mean your other hand. I love having my memories squeezed.”
“My other hand is in my lap, too . . . I can’t seem to get aroused.” He sighed. “I guess it’s guilt. I really should leave and find Gloria.”
“Maybe if you masticated,” she suggested.
“You mean get my teeth into it?”
“Let me try.” She grasped my penis, which jumped at her touch. “I don’t see what the problem is. You feel pretty lumescent to me.”
“I glow in the dark?” He was startled.
“No. But you certainly grow in the dark. It’s really very frigid.”
‘I’m not as a rule . . . Maybe it’s the champagne. . . . Listen, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I’m going to leave.” His weight shifted so that he was no longer lying on top of her as she sprawled atop me. It felt as if he was sitting up in the bed.
“Just a minute,” she insisted. “I don’t want to lose the neurotic progress we’ve made.” She arched the lower portion of her body and then relaxed it. When she settled, I was firmly embedded inside her.
“Sorry. I’m going.” His weight lifted entirely as he got to his feet and padded across the stateroom, plucking his clothes out of the darkness.
“You forgot something!” the redhead exclaimed, the tight glove of her honeybox clutching me so fiercely that I automatically began pumping up and down. “You left your peanuts behind.”
My “peanuts” was moving like a piston inside her now.
“If I see Henry,” the man called, “I’ll tell him you’re waiting for him in Stateroom Seventeen C.”
“Seventeen B,” she corrected him.
“Seventeen D,” I corrected her.
“Henry?” she inquired as the door opened and closed behind the man. “Is that you? If it is, I must say your lustmaking has improved! Oh, Henry!”
“My name is Steve.” I introduced myself, bouncing up and down like a berserk pogo-stick. “Steve Victor.”
“I’m Blaze Buxbocks,” she introduced herself. “Daddy is Buxbocks Bock Beer. You know, ‘Buxbocks, the low-cal beer with the high-powered bubbles.’ What do you do for a loving?”
“What I’m doing!” I sat up a little, hanging onto her luscious bosom with both hands as I continued to pound away at her.
“The thing I like about cruises is that it’s so easy to get to know people at a deep level quickly,” Blaze confided, reaching behind her to tickle my scrotum as she rode up and down on the length of my erection. “I mean, I feel like I know you very intermittently, even though we’ve just met.”
“I guess we have reached a pretty high degree of familiarity.” I reached down and stroked her clitoris, which made her squeal and jump so that her legs shot straight out and locked around my neck.
“Like they say,” Blaze panted. “Familiarity breeds content.” She bent her head toward me.
I met it halfway and we kissed. Her lips were searing, her tongue a darting flame. It moved inside my mouth as if it was imitating my movements deep in- side her.