He learned quickly, learned how to operate before he really knew what he was doing. He learned how to predict that a man would want to suck him and he learned how to make it evident that he could be safely approached. Something about it bothered him, something that many of the men projected, and he would try to give it up just as he had tried to give up masturbation, and with no greater success.
Ultimately — he was surprised in retrospect that it took as long as it did — he met a man who wanted reciprocity. A man who sucked him well enough and then pulled out his own penis and demanded that Peter give what he had just received.
“I never do that,” he said.
“You do today,” the man said, and grabbed Peter by the hair.
He struggled, but knew as he did so that he was going to do as the man desired. The man was twice his size and built like an ox, and Peter knew the man could make him do anything he wanted.
Besides, he wanted to know what it was like. All these men wanted to do it. What did they get out of it? What was it like to have a cock in your mouth and suck it? What did it feel like, what did it taste like?
He had to do it, so here was the perfect excuse to find out.
He found out he liked it.
“... have to admit he attempts more than any other American playwright. The man tries.”
“He tries my patience.”
“He’s ambitious, Warren.”
“Don’t you think you might be confusing ambition with pretense? God knows he selects the loftiest themes imaginable, but to praise him for that is like giving a man a medal for climbing fifty feet up Mount Everest. What’s so ambitious about coming out against witchhunts? And the analogy doesn’t even hold, you know. Those girls in Salem were witches. Damn silly reason to hang them, but facts are facts.
“As far as ambition goes, the most ambitious thing the man ever did was marry Marilyn Monroe, and I don’t think he handled that so triumphantly. He did not do well by the lady, but then nobody did.”
“You one of her fans, Warren?”
“How could I be otherwise? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. What self-respecting faggot can fail to respond to that? Garland, Monroe—”
“Why is that, Warren?” This from Hugh.
“Why the attraction? Lord, I don’t know. The usual argument is identification. Another one is that we hate women and want to see them fail, so we treasure the failures. Or that they embody (a) all the qualities the typical faggot’s mother lacked or (b) all the qualities she had. You pays your money and you takes your choice. None of it makes much sense to me. But we like the losers, the fey doomed ones. The Ophelias.”
“What do you think of Miller, Hugh?”
“I haven’t seen that many of his plays, and none of them recently. I remember enjoying A View from the Bridge.”
“Better than most,” Warren conceded.
“But I can’t really judge him, I’m afraid.”
“You can judge him as a craftsman, can’t you?”
“Oh, definitely not. Playwriting is a completely different discipline and one I know nothing about.”
“You’ve never written a play?”
“Wouldn’t know where to start.”
“But your dialogue—”
“Dialogue is a completely different matter on the stage and between book covers. It has an entirely different task to perform. In a book...”
Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe and Gretchen Vann.
Was that how he had chosen her? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. That was Gretch well enough. She was a loser, fey, doomed, and it was there in her haunted eyes in the best of times. Was that the aspect of her that had appealed to him?
He wondered. In a way he had not chosen her at all. She had chosen him, warming to him that afternoon when he had stopped at her shop on the Towpath, keeping him there in bubbling conversation all afternoon, then taking him back to her apartment in the Shithouse and leading him promptly to bed.
He’d never expected it would end in bed; when it did, he never thought it would lead to more than a quick tumble, of little good to either of them. He had not thought of her that way while they talked, probably because of the difference in their ages. He had been with girls before, perhaps half a dozen of them (although she was the first he ever lived with), but all his female sexual partners had been in his own age group.
Perhaps that had made it easier for him to relax in her presence. They got to know each other through conversation uncomplicated by sexual overtones; the undertones were there but he wasn’t listening to them. He talked to her, more at ease with her than with any other man or woman, and he listened to her and was struck by her wit and warmth and verve.
If she surprised him by taking him to bed, once there he surprised himself. Her body was exciting, soft skin over firm flesh, the curves of her hips, the sweet plain of her belly, but while recognizing this he felt no great desire for her. His detachment was cerebral; his loins had other ideas and wanted her with an urgent and yet confident potency he had never enjoyed before. He lay upon her and moved in and out of her warmth with long, deep, tantalizingly slow strokes, each movement heightening his passion but bringing him no closer to fulfillment. Her first orgasm thrilled him with a sense of heady masculine power; he had experienced nothing like it before. He thought he ought to stop, that she was finished and it would be boorish to continue. His body had other ideas and he went on thrusting at her and breathing the hot female smell of her. He moved faster and harder, hammering himself into her, and she quivered and moaned in serial orgasm until he emptied himself utterly into her.
“Oh, baby,” she told him afterward, cuddling his head to her little breasts. “Baby, if I had the strength to move, I’d lock the door and swallow the key. I’ve got me a sweet young stud and I’m not letting go of him. Are you always so great? Be a gentleman and lie and tell me I had something to do with it.”
“You had everything to do with it. It’s not a lie. It was... I can’t fit words to it.”
“Baby says the sweetest things. Oh, I knew you’d be good for me the minute I saw you. You’re so beautiful and you turned me on so much, and I knew you would want me a little. But talk about beyond the lady’s wildest dreams. The sun and the moon and all the fucking stars. I don’t think I’ll ever let you out of this room. You can go but your cock stays right here.”
“I want to keep it company.”
“I’d never let it be lonely. Oh, my God! How can you be ready already? I have a feeling we’re going to screw all night. How do you want to do it? Think of a fantasy and we’ll work it out. Oh, just stay like that. Let me get on top, let Mama do the work. Baby worked hard and baby deserves a rest. God, you feel good inside me. You’re so beautiful. Do you like this? And this? Oh baby, Petey baby, you’re divine, you know that?”
There were still times like that. They would go weeks without having each other, especially when drugs them too far inside their own heads for the sexual apparatus to function. Then the mood would be suddenly right and they would take each other in frenzied coupling. At such times they thrilled each other as neither had ever been thrilled by anyone else. The rest of the world looked at them and saw a depraved older woman and a young man who lived off her; no one knew how tightly they were bound to each other.