The last time Ferris saw Ava, he had anal intercourse with her while Vince had vaginal intercourse with her. As Ferris waits for Vince to move out of the doorway so he can remove his shoes and continue the conversation with Ava, he recognizes that something about that night was disturbing enough that he’s completely blocked it out. He can’t, for instance, remember the physical configuration of it. And that in itself is strange. In the past few days, a thousand other details of those years have flooded his memory, but not that one. It has vanished, including any memory of pleasure.
When he first met Ava, more than twenty-some years ago, he thought she was the prettiest – no, the most beautiful – woman he’d ever seen. And movie-star beautiful rather than modelbeautiful. She was tall, dark-haired, and darker eyed, with full breasts and hips, statuesque. Her breasts were too large for modelling, and she carried and cared for herself indifferently – without any sense of glamour. She rarely wore make-up and Ferris couldn’t recall seeing her in high heels. Here, he can’t even remember seeing her dressed up except the day she and Vince got married. That was the day Ferris met her.
It took a while, but when he got to know Ava, he liked her. She seemed bright enough even though she didn’t talk much. Ferris put that down to the fact that no one talked much around Vince. He dominated most conversations, and when he talked, you listened.
He never asked them when they got into group screwing, which of them initiated it, or exactly why they were doing it, but it had started before he entered their orbit. A few years after they got married, Vince began to talk about it – proudly, as if it were a badge of their openness and modernity. At first Ferris thought he was bullshitting. Talk is cheap, and Vince was a talker. And even if he was telling the truth, well, so what? It was the aftermath of the 1960s, when everybody thought they had the duty – and maybe even a basic right – to grope anyone they found attractive in whatever configuration appealed to them at the moment. The more bizarre the better.
Oh, Ferris had his fantasies about such things, but in strictly democratic terms, as a foursome, in which he and whatever partner he was with would sleep with others. Like most men (and maybe women) in those days, he was as interested as the next person in sleeping with new partners, but giving up bodily possession of his own in the deal was just too threatening. He’d occasionally entertained fantasies of a threesome involving two women, but not with much enthusiasm. He assumed that such a configuration would be centred on the male, and he had enough doubts about his stamina and gifts as a lover that he didn’t indulge the fantasies very far. Two men and a woman hadn’t occurred to him.
The first time Vince asked Ferris to join them, he said no. Thankfully, Vince didn’t persist beyond calling him a reactionary. Ferris didn’t say so, but he was quite willing to be reactionary. It was easier just to screw around, thanks. He preferred to have his adventures one-on-one, where the social politics were a little easier to sort out.
Ferris dutifully removes his shoes and tries to evaluate what he’s seen so far – Vince’s relative silence on the drive over, the look on Ava’s face as she greeted him. He’s asked for the visit, so he can’t fault them if they don’t want to be hospitable. It occurs to him that he’d asked Vince, and that Vince has never denied him anything. Judging from Ava, she has misgivings about him being there.
Well, what should I expect, Ferris muses as he parks his shoes beside Vince’s larger ones and picks up the bouquet. He’s already frustrated by the palpable barrier between them, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. Lord only knows why it’s really there – it’s been ten years, they’ve had a rough time domestically, and he still knows nothing definite about why.
He has a theory, if you can call it that, based on what Vince told him on the phone. Eight years ago they adopted a foster child about a year younger than Bobby, an eleven-year-old girl with learning disabilities. It was Vince’s way of bringing his work home, and Ferris’s guess is that it went badly. How or why, he doesn’t have a clue. It occurs to him now that the one time he talked to Ava, also on the phone, they were probably in the midst of that mess.
There is another possibility, a simpler one. Maybe they’re just wary of him and of what he might want. That makes a certain sense, except that wariness isn’t something he’s seen in either of them before. When you’ve been in every nook and cranny of another person’s body, and that person has shown no hint of reluctance or displeasure, you don’t expect them to respond to you with suspicion, not even after ten years. Or at least Ferris doesn’t.
He’s a bit simple-minded about certain things, our Ferris. He thinks, for instance, that intimacies are permanent even though he will tell you that nothing lasts forever. Some tangled circuit in his brain insists, against logic and common sense, that anyone who has cared for him once always will. He understands that the world and human beings aren’t perfect, but he retains a perfect ego anyway. Is this familiar to anyone out there? Is there another name for this? Stupidity?
Ferris follows Vince into the tiny kitchen. Vince, Ferris notes, brushes past Ava without touching her. Ferris stops in front of her and presents her with the bouquet. He most definitely does want to touch her, to look at her, to see for himself. For a moment he just looks at her, and she stares back without taking the flowers out of his hand, a slight smile on her lips that doesn’t touch her eyes. He brushes back a stray lock of her hair and leans in to kiss her cheek.
“Well,” she says, taking a step backward but not quite flinching, “do come in and sit down. Would you like some tea or coffee?”
The three of them negotiate a pot of herbal tea, and while Ava finds a vase for the bouquet, Ferris looks around. Despite the hominess of the cottage, it is Spartan. There are no paintings or prints on the walls, and no personal mementos to be seen. Vince and Ava, Bobby, the foster daughter, and everyone else – parents and friends alike – have been disappeared.
Ferris ambles over to the couch, sits down, and surveys the cottage. The orderliness of it is startling. The Vince he knows isn’t like this, not in any way. He’s always been a bouncer – a project here, an idea there – the projects never quite complete, the ideas never entirely coherent. Ava lived amidst his chaos without any evident discomfort, or, now that he considers it, deep interest. She wasn’t a compulsive housekeeper or much of a cook. She seemed to be in her own private universe, even as a parent – not that he saw much parenting or much of Bobby – the boy was always visiting “elsewhere” when Ferris visited. Ferris suspected that Ava was competent but slightly indifferent as mothers go. But if she didn’t exert much control in the household, in the bedroom she was definitely in charge – and the bedroom had very elastic proportions.
There was the time she greeted him on arrival with a blowjob: no formalities permitted, not a word of explanation. Ferris stood in the doorway with his back to the road, his arms braced against the doorjambs and watched her slip his cock in and out of her throat with an exquisitely firm touch grasping and sucking on the in-stroke, and vibrating her tongue across his glans on the out.
Anyone driving by would have recognized exactly what she was up to, but it didn’t take very long, and the road remained empty. When she was finished, she stood up, kissed him, and slipped his own come into his mouth. Then, grinning, she told him it was an experiment – she wanted to see how fast she could make him come.
Watching Vince and Ava dither in the kitchen, Ferris has another moment of doubt. Why did he come here? With some fatuous hope that nothing changes? Aside from a salting of grey hair, Ava seems to be the same woman – physically. But she is wary, chastened, closed, and now it comes to him, unerotic. Why?