For a moment, she was going to, but instead she let her eyes roam, looking at the clear open space surrounding her. “I love it.” She squeezed her shoulders together. “I’m from the suburbs and these New York apartments make me claustrophobic.”
“This isn’t like a suburban home. In fact, I can’t think of anything more typically New York than a converted loft. The whole city is full of ex-rag-pickers who have entered the middle class. I know it’s all scrubbed but this still doesn’t feel like a residence to me. Can’t you see them”— he stretched out his arm and pointed to the empty space, between two of the columns, that bridged the living and eating areas—“the immigrant women in their caps, under rows of those big globe lights, sewing their garments?”
Patty liked this dramatic gesture and poetic idea. David had seemed sour at the party: a stiff, slightly obnoxious young man who believed he knew everything. That also attracted her. She liked to win the good opinion of difficult people, but this blushing and fanciful David was even better. Patty believed sensitive men were easier to go to bed with, because, though their performance was sometimes problematic, they made more lenient judgments. Patty looked at the empty space and tried to imagine David’s scene. She couldn’t. The dazzling floor, those delicate columns, the beautiful peacock-colored rugs, all spoke to her of money, ease, self-assurance; things that had eluded her since she came to New York. She had grown up in this kind of comfort in suburban Pennsylvania and, so far, no one she knew in New York had it. No, for Patty, this loft was not haunted by immigrant women.
She turned herself toward David, kicked off her shoes, and put both feet under her. This made her into a small package that David could easily imagine carrying to his bed. “I don’t like to think of them,” she said looking sad.
“My grandmother was one of them,” David said quietly.
“She worked here!” Patty’s eyes opened in alarm.
“No, no,” David said, laughing. “She worked in a sweatshop in the city. I don’t know where.”
“Maybe it was here,” Patty said, her eyes scanning the loft as if she might find David’s grandmother in the shadows.
“No, I doubt it,” David said. He thought this last remark of Patty’s impossibly dumb. His penis had begun to warm and swell in his pants (he could feel the tip press outward, like mercury rising to show fever) but this one dizzy comment chilled his passion. “Do you want more wine?” he asked. She nodded. He leaned forward to get the bottle. As he did, their bodies were now touching, and Patty’s hand landed on his thigh next to the thermometer of his lust. He almost tipped the bottle over, though her touch was gentle.
He steadied his grip and carefully poured her more wine. Her hand now crept onto his penis and passed down and then back up its length once, like a blessing. He tried to think of something to say. A casual remark. But nothing was in his mind other than the sensation of his rapidly rising mercury. Heat, growth, his pants suddenly tight: a clatter of feelings that pleasurably shouted down any thought.
He fought it off (he didn’t want to show pleasure, he never liked to) and managed to finish pouring and replace the bottle without letting a moan of smoky joy emit from the furnace below. He turned his head toward her, ready to say something noncommittal, but when his eyes met hers, he discovered she had leaned toward him, and now his lips were only inches from her wet and fluted mouth.
They kissed.
While they did, her hand covered his groin. She gripped him as if his penis were a handle with which she could pick him up and carry him anywhere. He felt intensely excited by this dominated sensation; that she was ruthlessly feeling the merchandise, ready to squeeze for a reward or depart as a punishment.
Now, as their mouths opened and flattened and pecked, he was growing, growing so hard that she could bunch his wool pants around his prick and stroke.
It’s wearing a mitten, he thought, and wanted to giggle at this silly idea. He was happy! He felt like a gurgling infant, secure in the grasp of this small woman who seemed to see right through his dark suit, tortoise glasses, dark beard, and formal manner. She knew how to handle him: with the confidence of a mother soothing her baby, and a whore’s precise manipulation. He was at her mercy.
He had become so fascinated by the drama below that he lost interest in returning her kiss and became a receptacle: her tongue probing his mouth restlessly. He closed his eyes and rested his head back on the couch. She leaned over him, her mouth covering his, her hand rubbing and stroking his penis. I’m being raped, he thought with a thrill of delight.
Her hand left. He felt his stiff member twitch, begging for more contact. But it was only a pause for her to unzip him. His pants sighed open as if exhausted by her. He felt cool air while her fingers scurried under the elastic band of his Jockey shorts, and, awkwardly, pulled them halfway down. She nudged his ass, again with a combination of motherliness and business practicality; with another yank his underpants were off. How completely he was in her spelclass="underline" flattened against the couch, his tail wagging in the air, waving shamelessly for love!
Her small hand took his penis by its base, and her fingers twined around it. While she kissed, pressed, tongued, and bit his lips and mouth, she ran her grip up and down its length. His position and her matter-of-fact manipulation struck David as comic, but nonetheless pleasurable. His penis arced in the cool air, yearning for more, and yet was soothed with each stroke. The world was obliterated but for one sensation: the planet had been reduced to an appendage.
Her mouth was gone. But he didn’t care. His head was thrown back, his legs spread and turned outward … and then, a hot liquid touched the head of his penis. When it departed, the cool air was cooler. And then lava covered him again, became a sea, a sauna, a sucking furnace, a bath — he opened his eyes and looked down to watch her blond head move up and down, her cheeks puffed, her lips opening and closing on the tip of his aching sex.
“This is rape,” Betty said. Laughing, she tried to wriggle away and, in the attempt, her short red curls tickled Tony’s neck. He was on top, pressing his pelvis onto hers, groaning melodramatically.
“Love me like a rock, oh baby,” Tony said, but in a basso classical actor’s voice. “Let me put the pedal to the metal.”
“What!” Betty laughed helplessly, her body trembling from her giggles.
“Whoa,” Tony said, gripping the bed to steady himself.
“Pedal to the what!”
“It’s a macho phrase, darling. Oh, that’s right, you didn’t come to the screening of Smokey and the Bandit. Pedal to the metal. It means floor it.”
“Floor what?”
“The car. The accelerator. My God!”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said, and now kissed him languishingly, her lips lingering as she ended the contact, pulling away reluctantly.
“More,” Tony said.