“And you’re trying to find him?”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He died of... that disease.”
“Yeah, well, lots of people did. I lost a lot of friends.”
It was interesting, he thought. The man looked so intimidating, with his big shaved head and his muscles and his dress, but underneath he was gentle.
“I just wanted to... to see some of the places he liked. That was a whole side of his life I couldn’t share with him, and I just...”
He let his voice trail off, waiting.
“I can’t take you downstairs,” the fellow said. He drew the door open, motioned for him to come over and look. Inside, a flight of stairs descended, lit by low-wattage bulbs. Downstairs, music played, almost drowned out by the sound of men talking and dancing.
“That’s the best I can do, Pops. I’ll tell you what you’d see downstairs. There’s a big room with stuff hanging on the walls, and a lot of men in leather and denim drinking and talking, maybe dancing a little. And there’s a back room, but we don’t need to get into that.”
And what were the hours?
“He said sometimes he would stay all night,” he said. “The sun would be up by the time he left.”
“Yeah, well, maybe we don’t always close when we’re supposed to. But we’re usually locked up by six, anyway.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much. I’m sure my son would have liked you.”
“Maybe I knew him. What was his name?”
“Herbert,” he said. “Herbert Asbury.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” the fellow said, “but there’s a lot of guys I know by sight, that I never get their names. So maybe I did know him. One thing, I’ll bet he was a nice fellow.”
He was lying on his back, his arms at his sides. She had removed the hood and the restraints, and he’d been entirely passive during the process, neither helping nor resisting.
She asked him how he felt.
He thought it over, then told her he didn’t know.
Then he said, “You know, I thought I’d been around. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this. If anybody told me I’d consent to this, I’d have said they were crazy.”
“And if they told you you’d love it?”
“You think I loved it?”
She dipped her fingers in the pool of ejaculate, held her hand in front of his face. “This didn’t come from me,” she said. He was silent, and she said, “I should make you eat it.”
He made a face.
“But I’m too greedy,” she said, and sucked her fingers clean. “There’s more, you know, in case you change your mind. You came enough to start your own sperm bank. I tied you up and fucked you in the ass and you loved it.”
“If I could have gotten loose—”
“But you couldn’t.”
“No.”
“So there was nothing to do but enjoy it.”
“That doesn’t mean I want to do it again.”
“Ever?”
Again, he considered the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “God knows I don’t want to do it again now. I hope you didn’t break anything up there.”
“You didn’t bleed.”
“Yeah, I seem to recall that you promised me I wouldn’t.”
“I used a lot of lubricant. And I used the smallest one.”
“That was the smallest one? Well, thank God for small favors. I don’t want to think what it would have been like with the big one.”
“But you will think about it,” she said. “Later, you won’t be able to keep from thinking about it. You’ll wonder.”
“Jesus, who are you? The devil?”
“Just a woman.”
“You really own an art gallery? You’re not—”
“Not what?”
“Someone who does this for a living?”
“Someone told me I would make a good dominatrix. But she was wrong. I couldn’t possibly do that.”
“What was that we were just doing?”
“But that was because I wanted you,” she said. “I took one look at you and I knew just what I wanted to do with you, and that you’d love it. And that I’d love it.”
“Whatever you are,” he said, “you’re something. Well, I guess I’d better—”
He started to get up, but she stopped him with a hand on his chest.
She said, “You’re released from your promise. You’re under no restraints, and of course you can go if you want to. But wouldn’t you like to stay awhile?”
“And do what?”
“Look at me,” she said. She cupped her breasts, opened her legs. “You can probably think of something you’d like to do with me.”
“And if I was eighteen years old I could probably do it, but—”
“You don’t have to be hard, Franny. You don’t have to use your cock. You’ve got a beautiful mouth, you’ve got lovely hands, and I’ve got a whole closet full of toys for us to play with. Unless you don’t think that would be any fun.”
For answer he rolled over and took her breast in his mouth. He sucked her for a while, then stopped for a moment. “I was just thinking,” he said. “I was trying to think if I ever had sex with a woman without kissing her, and I don’t think I ever did.”
“Even whores?”
“I never went with one.”
“Not even once?”
“Never had the urge.”
“And you always kissed your wife?”
“Maybe waking up in the middle of the night, you know, and just going into it straight from sleep. But aside from that, no.”
“And you think we should kiss, Franny?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. What do you think?”
“Maybe another time,” she said. “When we know each other better.”
seventeen
It was, no question, the best day of his life.
First the auction. It had been genuinely exciting, in a way a writer’s life never was.
Oh, there was pleasure in the work itself. That was where the real satisfaction lay. You imagined something and put words together, and you opened a door in the imagination and walked down an untrodden path, and it led to another door. And you opened that, and went off to see where it led, and day by day and page by page an entire alternate universe manifested itself before you.
Sometimes you struggled, and stared for hours at the empty page that reflected the barren imagination. Sometimes, like Flaubert, you spent the morning inserting a comma and the afternoon taking it out.
Sometimes you were able to write, but the words tasted like ashes in the mouth. You tapped at the keys like a field hand chopping cotton, like a factory worker on the assembly line. Somehow the words got on the page, and afterward they turned out as often as not to be as good as words that sang as you typed them, but they weren’t much fun to write.
And sometimes, sometimes, the book came utterly to life and wrote itself. The words came too quickly for the fingers to keep pace with them. Characters spoke their own perfect dialogue spontaneously, and you were the court stenographer, dutifully recording everything they said. Plots, hopelessly tangled, worked themselves out before your eyes, like the Gordian knot magically untying itself. It was you doing it of course, or otherwise you wouldn’t walk away from the keyboard exhausted, drained, empty. But it was a part of your consciousness that consciousness knew nothing of, and it was sheer joy when it took over and ran the show for you.
But was it exciting?
Maybe, maybe it was. But not like this.
And it had been the best sort of excitement, because the exhilaration of climbing higher and higher was not balanced by a fear of falling. Each bid brought another roll of the dice, but he wasn’t going double or nothing, he wasn’t risking anything. He was already a winner. The only question was the amount of his prize.