Rank noticed my look and answered the unasked question it signified. “Yes, it leads outside all right,” he told me. “There’s a ladder going down from it. You know, the kind that can be raised and lowered. Actually, it’s an emergency fire exit for this level of the house. A built-in safety feature. When I design a house, I try not to overlook any details.”
“And where does that lead?” Misty pointed to the other door.
“That's a small john," Rank told her. “And if you two will excuse me now, I think I’ll put it to use.” Rank gave us a ‘bless-you-my-children’ smile and went into the lavatory. The lock clicked behind him.
“Alone at last.” Misty found the lighting dial on the wall and turned it. It was a dimmer. She turned the lights down very low. “Now, Steveykins," she announced. Now it was! I put my arms around her and kissed her. Her bare shoulders were like velvet where my hands moved over them. I could feel the warmth of her body through the skimpy cocktail dress she was wearing. Her lips were warm, eager, clinging, parted slightly, conveniently.
When the kiss was over we sank -- or maybe crumpled is the more accurate word—to the couch together. Misty’s ebony hair fanned out over the maroon velvet. I kissed her again and her nails dug into the back of my neck. I nipped her lip gently by way of response and the length of her body arched against mine.
“Welcome back to Hollywood,” she whispered. Her hands moved around to the front of my jacket and I wriggled to make it easier for her to take it off. Then her fingers were at the front of my shirt, pushing the tie out of the way, fumbling the buttons open. She pushed the shirt aside and her lips moved tantalizingly over my chest, her sharp little teeth playing with the nipples.
I returned the favor. I pushed down the top of Misty’s strapless dress, reached around behind her to unsnap he bra, pulled it off and threw it aside. In the dim light plump breasts shimmered like bronze gelatin. She must have been sunbathing in the nude, fort hey were as tawny tan as the rest of her body. There was a light sprinkling of freckles like a signpost just over the roseate and nipple of one of the breasts. I brushed the freckles with my lips and the pink roseate seemed to widen and turn a deeper shade. The crest, sharp as a pencil-point, was a blood red color and I could sense its ache as it strained to reach my mouth. I enveloped it, and a good deal of bust flesh with it, and Misty’s sudden gasp made it swell even more against the eager laving of my tongue. She clutched at me so frantically that for a moment it seemed I would suffocate in the burning flesh of her bosom.
She squirmed away from me for a moment now and sat up. Her breasts bobbled freely. Her hair cascaded over their nakedness. The rigid nipples peeped out from between the strands. The effect was more erotic than if they had remained completely uncovered.
She bent over me and unbuckled my belt. She pushed down my pants and jockey shorts and leaned back, her slant eyes glittering. “Ahh,” she murmured. She knelt over me again, crouching so that she faced my feet. As I felt the first long swipe of her tongue, I reacted widly and grabbed for her.
My hands clutched at the silk of her dress where it covered the fleshy, compact globes of her derriere. I felt them rotating in my hands as Misty undulated her hips, flipped the skirt of the dress up out of the way. Misty’s truly beautiful bottom was quivering, like a Mixmaster gone berserk. It gave me pause. Flashes of it had appeared in so many movies, it was probably the most famous derriere in the world. Movie-going males from Azuza to Zamboanga had been stimulated by it. The weight of erotic fantasy it had inspired was so impressive as to be overwhelming. I was momentarily overwhelmed. It was like stroking a national institution. It was like being confronted by Abe Lincoln’s ghost close-up, face to face, and being expected to pull his beard. One feels shy at such a moment. I felt shy. But I got over it.
I grabbed it with both hands and was caught up in the vibration. Misty dived lower, her mouth like a suction pump, her tongue an instrument of exquisite arousal. I pulled her legs out from under her. The skirt fell back down and covered my head. It didn’t matter. Even under the blanket it formed I had no trouble finding the quivering sentinel standing guard at the pulsating gateway nestled at the apex of her being. I glued my lips there, a mindless bee gorging at a sweet-bursting blossom of honeysuckle.
We stayed like that a long time, exciting each other to a fever pitch, and then denying fruition at the last moment so that the excitation could be prolonged and raised to a still higher pitch. Finally Misty could stand it no longer. She scrambled away from me and flung herself down on her back, her legs like parentheses awaiting the insertion of the word. I had the word all right as I moved to take her, but the parenthetical ecstacy suddenly took on a complexity that neither one of us could have expected. What happened—quickly and simultaneously -- was this:
From the adjacent bathroom there was the sound of the toilet being flushed, a low, gurgling sound, mounting, growing in volume, mounting. . . As the noise grew louder, there was the sound of door slamming. The flushing sound still hadn’t reached its full volume when, as I raised myself over Misty, from the corner of my eye I spotted the ladder being lowered outside the plate glass window and saw Dwight Floyd Rank scampering down it. Just as he reached bottom, just as the flushing noise seemed to reach a Niagara-like peak, just as I slammed eagerly into the waiting passion-basket of America’s sex symbol, Misty Milo, it happened.
She was wedged into the angle between the couch and the glass wall, practically on the floor. As I took her—-quite athletically, I'm afraid—the vigor of the movement did indeed knock her to the floor. The couch came out from under us. The flushing toilet roared. There was an earthquake-like rumble. And then the house started rolling down the side of the mountain, picking up speed as it went.
“WOW!” Misty exclaimed.
She exploded! I exploded! And the house exploded out from under us.
CHAPTER THREE
THE THING about Pompeii, or the Frisco ‘quake, or the Johnstown flood, or any other catastrophe, is that the minor embarrassments are lost to the history books because of the scope of the major disaster. How many adulterous lovers were caught with their togas down when the volcano erupted? How many victims were trapped in the john during the earthquake? Was there perhaps some luckless hospital patient in the middle of an enema when the dam burst? It seems likely, that for a few people at least, the last Kansas tornado, or Miami hurricane, was a personally drastic case of coitus interruptus—or, perhaps, colitis interruptus. Yes, the gods choose their moments of havoc with a macabre and lewd wink sometimes.
It was such a moment now. It was such a moment for many, people, Misty and myself among them. Indeed, as the house slid, toppled and then actually rolled down the mountain, the general reaction pointed up the fact that fear of humiliation may well be greater than fear for one’s physical safety among the over-civilized. It was a moment when sophistication might well have meant suicide, and yet the impulse toward sophisticated behavior prevailed.
On all three levels of the house, there were those who scampered for their trousers and those who scampered for their bras. Some grabbed for draperies with which to cover themselves. Others tried to hide their nudity—the proof of the compromising positions in which they’d been found-— behind furniture, or under bedclothes, or in closets. Still others, however, in the throes of some Freudian life-urge, stubbornly continued their activity, as if determined to gain ultimate satisfaction before being smashed to smithereens.