One night, she told him a story that infuriated him. She had been at a ski lodge with some married friends — this was only the year before — they had rented a lodge up in Vermont someplace; she didn’t remember the name of the town, she was an idiot when it came to geography. The woman was six months pregnant; they were older than she was, the man must’ve been about twenty-nine or thirty. And they’d been drinking wine and lying before the fire, the pregnant wife on the couch and her husband lying alongside the couch, just beneath her, on the rug, you know, on the floor. And Molly was on the other side of the fireplace, also lying on the floor, on a bearskin rug they had there on the floor.
The wife fell asleep.
The fire was still going.
Molly almost fell asleep herself.
Then she heard a kind of moaning sound from across the room where the husband was lying, you know, and she opened her eyes and looked across at him, and he had his cock in his hand and he was masturbating. She watched him masturbating. And then she lifted her skirt and stuck her hand inside her panties, and she began masturbating, too. The two of them were six feet apart from each other, the fire crackling and spitting in the fireplace between them, and they kept looking at each other and masturbating. She watched him coming, she saw his cock spurting. They never said a word to each other; he never made a move to come over to her where she was lying on the bearskin rug across the room. And the next morning it was as if nothing had happened. Everybody went about his or her business as usual. But it was the best orgasm Molly had ever had in her life.
“Come here,” he said.
“Are you angry?” she said.
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do? Spank me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I want you to,” she said.
She lay obediently across his knees. He yanked up her skirt and pulled her panties down onto her thighs. Her legs were trembling slightly. He was suddenly very hard. He raised his hand, hesitated a moment (she trembled again), and then brought it down sharply. She moaned. He slapped her again, harder this time. And again. She lifted her buttocks to him, anticipating each slap.
“My handprints are all over your ass,” he said.
“I want them there,” she said.
She thrilled him, she delighted him, she shocked him sometimes, but he had not yet told her he loved her. “I love your mouth,” he said, “I love your ass, I love your breasts, I love your cunt (“My quim, my quim”), your quim, I love every inch of you,” but he never said, “I love you.” Perhaps he didn’t love her; perhaps he loved only the sexual fantasy she represented. Or perhaps he was afraid of loving her. In any event, he never said the words, and she never asked him to. Nor did she reveal herself completely to him. Revealing herself, the complicated and very important self who was the true Molly Regen, would come only later, when she was more certain of him. For now, she was only what he wanted her to be — herself, to be sure, but not her complete self.
He asked her one night to dress for an orgy, to put on whatever she thought she might wear to an orgy if ever they were lucky enough to get invited to one. He had in mind black garter belt and panties, lacy black bra, perhaps a black chemise. He guessed he had in mind spread-eagling her on the bed, tying her hands and feet to the corner posts, vulnerable white thighs pale above the ribbed tops of her black nylons, tufts of blond hair curling around the edges of her panties — your average red-blooded American boy’s fantasy of male dominance. She disappeared into the bathroom at the end of the hall and was gone for an hour. He lay on the bed, listening to the sounds of traffic downstairs on First Avenue, visions of sugarplum fairies dancing in his head. When at last she came into the bedroom, she scared him half to death.
She had done herself up like a Charles Addams character. Her face was powdered a deadly white, her cheeks faintly rouged, lips glowing with lipstick dark as blood, eyelids shadowed with a green deeper than her eyes, their slant exaggerated by lines of mascara that swept upward from the outer edges, blond hair cascading on either side of her face. She was wearing a black cape he’d seen hanging in the closet off her living room, something she’d picked up in a thrift shop someplace and had never worn till that moment. A single ornate catch held it fastened at the throat.
As she walked into the room, the cape flared.
She was naked above the waist, her large nipples rouged with bright crimson, a knotted strand of pearls hanging between her freckled breasts. She was wearing black tights and black high-heeled pumps. She drew the cape closed around her and came to the bed and sat on the edge of it. She stared at him. She said, “I won’t take off the cape,” and he was suddenly erect.
She held the cape wrapped tightly around her while he kissed her blood-black lips and her closed eyes, kissed the hollow of her throat above the ornate catch, kissed her temples and her hair, her hands hidden somewhere deep in the folds of the garment, clutching the heavy wool to her. This was the beginning of September, the nights were still warm; a thin sheen of perspiration beaded her upper lip, but she would not remove the cape; she lay within it like a butterfly in a cocoon, unyielding, a chrysallis that finally opened black wings against the white sheet. Her breasts were covered with sweat. She had slashed open the crotch of the tights and rouged her nether lips, the black nylon framing in parentheses a dazzling female autumn, golden pubic hair and crimson vulva; he entered her trembling.
David’s law student friend once posed the riddle, “What’s the difference between Jewish girls and cancer?” David pondered it; he had always loved riddles, especially his father’s. At last he gave up. “What?” he said. His friend grinned. “Cancer sucks,” he said.
Wrong, David thought.
Molly’s mouth was a thirsting abyss that engendered and enlarged, enhanced and engaged, employed and enjoined, enfolded and engulfed, englutted and engorged, enraptured and enravished, enfeebled and enslaved — he got carried away just thinking about her mouth!
“Where’d you learn how to do this?” he asked her.
“Well, what business is that of yours?” she said.
Before Molly, he had never particularly enjoyed being the donor when it came to oral sex. But Molly — ah, Molly. He loved the look of her down there, the pale crisp pubic hair curling around her pink interior lips, fold upon secret fold, a mysterious female labyrinth. He loved the scent of her as well. “Once you get past the smell, you’ve got it licked,” his law school friend said in a rare foray into Morris Weber territory. Wrong again, David thought. Gently parting her lips with his fingers, unfolding her secrets to him, bringing his mouth to where she waited expectantly open to him, the glistening coral moistness of her, the summery bouquet of her, the sight of her, the fragrance of her, caused his senses to reel, and he became confused and grew dizzy in her proximity and thought he could hear in the distant reaches of his memory the echo of a scratchy phonograph record on a windup machine, could see a lonely strand of endless beach, a single drifting cloud, could feel moist sea wind on his face.