Meanwhile they went round and round like partners in a slow dance. I have been too proud of my humanism, perhaps, and all along not paid enough attention to the base. This is probably a good lesson for me. I’m very privileged. I think I won’t be too gentle with poor dying Jane. That would be wrong. On her deathbed we’ll roll in the hay. Yes, he thought, there must be positions not too uncomfortable for dying persons. I’ll find out what these are and send her out in style. We must not be too fastidious about ourselves, or stuck-up because we aren’t dogs.
All the time he was thinking this he and the bear continued to circle, though Ashenden had almost forgotten where he was, and with whom. But then the bear leaned on him with all her weight and he began to buckle, his dreamy confidence and the thought of his strength deserting him. The bear whipped its paw behind Ashenden’s back to keep him from falling, and it was like being dipped, supported in a dance, the she-bear leading and Brewster balanced against the huge beamy strength of her paw. With her free paw she snagged one sleeve of Ashenden’s Harris tweed jacket and started to drag his hand toward her cunt.
He kneed her stomach and kicked at her crotch.
“
.”
“Let go,” he cried, “let go of me,” but the bear, provoked by the pleasure of Ashenden’s harmless, off-balance blows and homing in on itself, continued to pull at his arm caught in the sling of his sleeve, and in seconds had plunged Brewster’s hand into her wet nest.
There was a quality of steamy mound, a transitional texture between skin and meat, as if the bear’s twat were something butchered perhaps, a mysterious cut tumid with blood and the color of a strawberry ice-cream soda, a sexual steak. Those were its lips. He had grazed them with his knuckles going in, and the bear jerked forward, a shudder of flesh, a spasm, a bump, a grind. Frenzied, it drew his hand on. He made a fist but the bear groaned and tugged more fiercely at Ashenden’s sleeve. He was inside. It was like being up to his wrist in dung, in a hot jello of baking brick fretted with awful straw. The bear’s vaginal muscles contracted; the pressure was terrific, and the bones in his hand massively cramped. He tried to pull his fist out but it was welded to the bear’s cunt. Then the bear’s muscles relaxed and he forced his fist open inside her, his hand opening in a thick medium of mucoid strings, wet gutty filaments, moist pipes like the fingers for terrible gloves. Appalled, he pulled back with all his might and his wrist and hand, greased by bear, slid out, trailing a horrible suction, a concupiscent comet. He waved the hand in front of his face and the stink came off his fingertips like flames from a shaken candelabra, an odor of metal fruit, of something boiled years, of the center of the earth, filthy laundry, powerful as the stench of jewels and rare metals, of atoms and the waves of light.
“Oh Jesus,” he said, gagging, “oh Jesus, oh God.”
“û(r)m,” the bear said, “wr
nff.”
Brewster sank to his knees in a position of prayer and the bear abruptly sat, its stubby legs spread, her swollen cunt in her lap like a bouquet of flowers.
It was as if he had looked up the dress of someone old. He couldn’t look away and the bear, making powerful internal adjustments, obscenely posed, flexing her muscular rut, shivering, her genitalia suddenly and invisibly engined, a performance coy and proud. Finally he managed to turn his head, and with an almost lazy power and swiftness the bear reached out with one paw and plucked his cock out of his torn trousers. Ashenden winced — not in pain, the paw’s blow had been gentle and as accurate as a surgical thrust, his penis hooked, almost comfortable, a heel in a shoe, snug in the bear’s curved claws smooth and cool as piano keys — and looked down.
“OERƏKH.”
His penis was erect. “That’s Jane’s, not yours!” he shouted. “My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing!”
The bear snorted and swiped with the broad edge of her fore-paw against each side of Ashenden’s peter. Her fur, lanolized by estrus, was incredibly soft, the two swift strokes gestures of forbidden brunette possibility.
And of all the things he’d said and thought and felt that night, this was the most reasonable, the most elegantly strategic: that he would have to satisfy the bear, make love to the bear, fuck the bear. And this was the challenge which had at last defined itself, the test he’d longed for and was now to have. Here was the problem: Not whether it was possible for a mere man of something less than one hundred and eighty pounds to make love to an enormous monster of almost half a ton; not whether a normal man like himself could negotiate the barbarous terrains of the beast or bring the bear off before it killed him; but merely how he, Brewster Ashenden of the air, water, fire and earth Ashendens, one of the most fastidious men alive, could bring himself to do it — how, in short, he could get it up for a bear!
But he had forgotten, and now remembered: it was already up. And if he had told the bear it was for Jane and not for it, he had spoken in frenzy, in terror and error and shock. It occurred to him that he had not been thinking of Jane at all, that she was as distant from his mind at this moment as the warranties he possessed for all the electric blankets, clock radios and space heaters he’d picked up for opening accounts in banks, as distant as the owner’s manuals stuffed into drawers for all that stuff, as forgotten as all the tennis matches he’d played on the grass courts of his friends, as the faults in those matches, as all the strolls to fences and nets to retrieve opponents’ balls, the miles he’d walked doing such things. Then why was he hard? And he thought of hanged men, of bowels slipped in extremis, of the erectile pressures of the doomed, of men in electric chairs or sinking in ships or singed in burning buildings, of men struck by lightning in open fields, and of all the random, irrelevant erections he’d had as an adolescent (once as he leaned forward to pick up a bowling ball in the basement alley of a friend from boarding school), hardness there when you woke up in the morning, pressures on the kidney that triggered the organ next to it, that signaled the one next to it, that gave the blood its go-ahead, the invisible nexus of conditions. “That’s Jane’s” he’d said, “not yours. My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing.” Oh, God. It didn’t. He’d lied to a bear! He’d brought Jane’s name into it like a lout in a parlor car. There was sin around like weather, like knots in shoes.
“What the hell am I talking about?” he yelled, and charged the bear.
And it leaned back from its sitting position and went down on its back slowly, slowly, its body sighing backward, ajar as a door stirred by wind, and Ashenden belly-flopped on top of it — with its paws in the air he was a foot taller than the bear at either end, and this contributed to his sin, as if it were some child he tumbled — pressed on its swollen pussy as over a barrel. He felt nothing.