Her apartment on East Ninety-first is a one-bedroom, for which Kate — she tells him as she opens a can of food for the cat — paid a hundred and ten thousand dollars four years ago, and which she is now trying to sell for seventy-nine thousand, if she can get it, so she can move to the West Side and be closer to the theater section. The cat keeps rubbing against her as Kate uses the can opener. Kate keeps saying, “Yes, darling, yes, baby,” tossing the lid of the can into the garbage pail under the sink, and then spooning its contents into a red plastic bowl, “Yes, baby,” all the while telling David that the closest offer she’s had so far is forty-five thousand, which means she’d be losing thirty-four thousand non-tax-deductible dollars, “Yes, baby, here you are,” she says and sets the bowl down on the floor near the refrigerator and comes immediately to David and drapes her arms over his shoulders and leans into him and kisses him.
Sitting beside her on her bed, his arm around her, Arthur K hears his sister’s plaintive cry for help, I wish someone would give me lessons, and the words break his heart. She is so very beautiful and innocent and vulnerable that he is enraged by just the notion of someone like Howard Kaplan kissing her and telling her later that she doesn’t even know how. Sitting beside her on her bed, his arm around her, her head on his shoulder, the bedside lamp bathing them in a soft indulgent glow, he keeps patting her shoulder and saying, “No, no, Sis, don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about,” all at once afraid her crying will awaken their parents down the hall, though surely there is nothing wrong going on here in her room, a brother comforting his sister is all, there is nothing wrong with that. So why is he worried about them waking up?
“I can teach you in a minute,” he hears himself say.
And she answers, “Then do it.”
“Yes, do it,” Kate says, her mouth under his, her lips murmuring against his lips, “Do it, do it.” They have kissed their way to the sofa against one wall of the living room, awkwardly moving in embrace toward the sofa heaped with pillows against the wall. The wall itself is hung with three sheets of the shows in which she’s performed, the Cats poster in the center with its big yellow eyes pupiled with dancers in black, and the Miss Saigon poster with its rising helicopter that looks like Asian calligraphy, falling blindly onto the pillows, their lips entangled, “Yes, do it,” she keeps saying, though he scarcely knows what he is doing anymore, his hands all over her, his lips on hers, do it, do it, and the Les Misérables poster with its French waif and her dark soulful eyes.
Her blue eyes are wide in expectation. Her long blond hair frames her face, delicate strands electrifying the back of his hand when he brushes her hair away to reveal the pale oval of her face. From the corner of his eye, below, he can see the flimsy pink nightgown with its intricately laced hem where the blue robe has parted over it, her long white legs. He catches a fleeting glimpse of her left breast as she turns to him, the robe gapping slightly, and is suddenly enraged by what Howard Kaplan did to her, or tried to do to her, hurting her that way, the anger coursing through his veins, causing his temples to throb, causing his cock to swell suddenly inside his pants.
“Part your lips, Veronica,” he says like the good older brother he is, and she lifts her face to his and does exactly as he says.
Her kiss is surprisingly adept. He wonders, but merely for an instant, if she was lying to him about Howard telling her she didn’t know how to kiss. Then again, what the hell does Howard know, the jackass? His sister — he remembers that she is his sister and that he is merely performing a brotherly service that will enable her to cope more effectively in any future boy-girl relationship — his sister immediately and expertly draws in her breath in the same instant that he does, their simultaneous inhalations creating a tight seal that fiercely joins their lips and causes him to remember, yet again, that she is, after all, his sister, although the insistently clamoring erection in his pants seems determined to prove otherwise.
Nonetheless, he is here to teach her, sister or no, and so he gently inserts his tongue into her mouth, meaning to pull away an instant later — but the seal is so tight — to explain that tongues play as important a role as lips in this serious business of kissing, fully intending to explain the procedure step by step, but suddenly her own tongue is alive in his mouth, actively seeking his tongue, coiling around his tongue like a serpent, even though she said she didn’t know how to kiss. Or, more accurately, all she said was that Howard told her she didn’t know how to kiss, she didn’t say that she herself believed she didn’t know how to kiss.
In fact, she now seems ferociously determined to demonstrate that Howard was wrong, that for all her tender years — but she’s fifteen, after all, and so was Shirley in the backseat of his father’s Pontiac who dug her fingernails into the back of his hand the moment he cupped her chin preparatory to kissing her and ordered him to take her home right that very minute. His sister Veronica, his little sister Veronica, his blue-eyed blond and beautiful baby sister Veronica is the same age as big-titted Shirley Fein who’d sent him home all desolate and forlorn, a condition his sister with her questing mouth and writhing tongue is rapidly reversing. The hard-on he’d had in the Pontiac, subsequently shriveled by Shirley’s rejection, surprisingly revived when his sister leaned in to accept his kiss and the robe momentarily opened to show that single small white breast with its little pink nipple — she is his sister, he keeps reminding himself, she is his goddamn sister.
Which is perhaps why his indecorous and inappropriate hard-on causes a sudden wave of terror to sweep over him, almost nauseating — suppose his parents wake up? Because now, you see, this isn’t just a dutiful brother comforting a distraught sister, patting her shoulder and trying to still her fears of inadequate osculatory technique. This is a seventeen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl kissing passionately, their arms wrapped around each other — yes, but don’t forget we’re just sitting here, we’re not lying on the bed, we’re not pressed against each other or anything, no matter how it may look, the robe somehow having ridden up over the lace-hemmed nightgown, the nightgown itself having somehow ridden up over Veronica’s long white naked legs. Suppose his mother, God forbid, comes down the hall and finds them, well, kissing this way, suppose his mother sees the hard-on straining in his pants, a hard-on provoked by the sight of his own sister’s girlish breast and nipple, a hard-on bulging not inches from where Veronica’s hand rests upon his leg, her robe somehow slipping off her left shoulder now to fully expose this time the breast and nipple he merely glimpsed earlier.
In that instant he becomes utterly confused.
“It was like a dream,” he will later tell David. “I don’t know where I am in the dream, I don’t know who it is I’m with, there is just...”
...this beautiful girl whose mouth is insistently, whose tongue is demandingly, forgets in that instant, but only for an instant, that she truly is his sister, her hard pink nipple erect under his grasping fingers, fearful she will reach up at once to remove his hand as forcefully as Shirley had when he, but she doesn’t. Instead, her own hand drops to where his cock is seething inside his pants, and suddenly he doesn’t care if she’s his sister or his aunt or his mother or his grandmother, suddenly his hands are inside the robe and under the gown and she reaches past him and over him, turning slightly, lifting herself slightly, her right hand still tight on his cock inside his pants, and turns out the light with her free hand, and then lies beside him in the dark and opens her robe to him and opens herself to him.