Concepcion now seemed more urgent and interested. She suggested, though still nervously, that I might like something in addition to her halfhearted massaging of my back and shoulders. I turned to face her and asked what she had in mind. She made her offer of an extra, her special. This was to mouth my penis which, although it had originally met with her diffidence, was nonetheless erect. “But you must wear a condom,” she said, with the firmness of a primary-school teacher instructing a child. She then disappeared for what seemed a long time. Returning suddenly, she pointed to my trinity.
“You washed it just now?” she asked, pausing a moment. I nodded. Kneeling before me, she tried to unroll a condom onto the relevant part of my body, making a hash of the job. “Quick, you do it,” she said, giving me a small push with one hand while offering the rubber with the other.
I obliged and she started to work with her tongue. Abruptly changing her approach, she told me to lie down on my back, straddling me on all fours and swivelling her body around so that I was staring at her rear. She peered at me between her legs. “You do to me.”
“What?” I said.
“You …” She contorted her upside-down face, searching for the right word. We looked at each other for a few seconds, mutually non-plussed. She waggled her bottom and stuck out her tongue, making circular movements with her head. “Ah”, I said and focused on her backside, my nose level with her entry and exit points. Her anus, a few centimetres away, was pinkish-brown and puckered round the edge. It was neat and charming enough as far as anuses go, and apparently very clean, but I was not greatly attracted to the reciprocal tongue exercises she had proposed. “No,” I said. Peeking through her legs, her face registered an upside-down version of disappointment.
Anus-licking or something of that nature was apparently her particular domain, being relatively safe and uncomplicated.
I renegotiated for a more conventional mode of sexual expression, in which I could be more vigorously engaged.
The lady illustrated an extreme nervousness over actual intercourse: not repulsion or inhibition at the deed itself, but fear that someone would walk into the room which, following the perverse rule in these places, could not be locked. She was equally anxious that the business arrangement be carried out. “I haven’t done this before,” she announced breathlessly, meaning that she had never participated in full commercial sex. This surprised and slightly disconcerted me, as neither had I.
We embraced awkwardly in a standing position, but not without my somehow standing on one of her small feet. “Ouch,” said my partner, recoiling and then re-embracing. Almost immediately, she had a hasty afterthought and disappeared. She scurried across the room and put the cubicle’s pouffe against the door, first stuffing a towel underneath the door so that it would jam if anyone attempted to open it from the outside. This was a cautionary practice which I subsequently found to be near universal. She had obviously consulted her peers on this, even if she were feeling her way in a new field.
All this stumbling and bumbling did nothing to help me sustain my erection … My partner obliged by poking and pulling at my trinity until vigour was restored. She lay down on the mattress. “Quick,” she said again, hastily raising her short skirt and removing her knickers. We clumsily engaged after some more fumbling with limbs, clothes and organs. “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly, expelling me in a peremptory manner before wriggling away, “the sheet will be stained.” And indeed, the sheet was rucked up between us, part of our coital tangle.
She repositioned herself on the edge of the mattress so that the crucial zone was off the sheet and my lower limbs on the carpet. We started again.
Meanwhile, somebody was clunking something down the passageway and talking in a low voice; probably the cleaning lady dragging a vacuum cleaner.
“Oh,” she said, over my shoulder, “they’re coming in!” and ejected me once more. “No, its alright,” she said as the noise passed. “Quick, come back,” and she reinserted me.
We resumed our love-making which, despite her injunctions, was relatively prolonged. I had caught some of her nervousness and could not concentrate on the act. Also, my knees were getting sore from the friction from the carpet. “Can’t we use the mattress?” I asked. “Yes, but I am so worried,” said my partner. She pushed me away yet again and spread a towel, turning over to do so, and we re-engaged in that position. More indeterminate noises could be heard from outside the cubicle. Immediately, she squirmed and tried to say something about the door, but I held her tight despite her wriggling and, after some more confused communication, at long last consummation-at any rate, my consummation-was achieved.
“Phew,” Concepcion said, getting up immediately and looking relieved, as if she had delivered a speech at some important occasion, like a wedding or college speech day. She seemed quite glad that it was all over. She scuttled about, straightening the sheet and restoring her underwear and so forth. I laughed at her amateurishness. “If you find it all so terrifying, don’t do it.” She smiled at me happily. She was obviously relieved that I was not cross, considering the inelegance of our congress. “You should give me more because it was the first time”, she said, taking advantage of the good humour.
“You should be my boyfriend”, she went on, persisting gently and repeating herself, “I have two children. I have to employ a maid to look after them while I am working here”.
Concepcion then sat down next to me and began an unflattering examination of my body. “What’s that?” she said suspiciously, pointing to some blemish in my groin area. “And that,” she continued, looking critically at the sore patches on the inside of my knees, still stinging from the carpet.
“I didn’t want to touch your back,” she said candidly, “It doesn’t look nice.” Then, worried that she had offended me, she said, “Sorry, don’t mean that.
You’re not cross?” She peered at me intently, her face pushed close to mine to judge my expression in the gloom of the cubicle, like a cat hoping to wake its owner and be fed.
“Be my boyfriend.” She leant forward enticingly. “Be my boyfriend,” she wheedled again, pressing her body against mine. I leant back, but Concepcion moved further forward until she lay on top of me, her face still close to mine. She came off as much more confident with her clothes on. I found her urging appealing and instinctively wanted to protect her from her past mistakes and present predicament, but afterwards, my natural impulse to incorporate her into my life wore off. Her insistence might have indicated some stronger need for money for drugs than for her children. This thought made me wary of entering into a relationship because I was new to the guild of massage women like her and could not easily judge how stable or controlled they were. In any event, she lived in Sabah and I in Singapore, and my romantic urge to be involved with her soon faded in the pragmatic light of day outside the centre.
And so I entered into the world of the massage women-a twilight, windowless world, not of the extremes of eroticism but of the fumbling accommodation of desire with commerce … and sometime intimacy, however awkward and confused.
This world was not, of course, the centre of my existence, as I had loves, work and interests outside the twilight. But it was much of their world. My experience in it was maybe five, at most ten per-cent of my life, if such things may be quantified. But it was significantly more emotionally, for I liked the massage women very much and saw in them as pleasant a division of my fellow human beings as any. Since I inevitably preferred some of the massage women much more over others and spent my time mostly with this preferred subset, my overall impression of them is no doubt a little slanted and rose-tinted, just as their experience of men was skewed towards the sensual and the strayer … with not a few of the inadequate. Still, I felt soft towards them all and forgiving of their frailties, more forgiving than I would have been of people in other occupations.