“Usually I get the nuts and bolts out of the way, and then I test the waters to see whether I do want to come.”
“What color is your hair?” he asked.
“It’s a light brown. It’s wavy. But it’s fairly short. What color is yours?”
“It’s black,” he said. “So now tell me the things you have to do that you remembered last night in the shower.”
“Oh, work things. Letters I should write — I should be writing them right now.”
“No you should not.”
“And I need to repaint the hall in my apartment. Ah, now I remember one of my sexual images from yesterday. The people before me put up this dreadful wallpaper, a kind of metallic wallpaper, with a design of a tree and a split-rail fence with a wagon wheel leaning on it, repeating over and over. Bad.”
“Doesn’t sound good.”
“So I painted it when I moved in,” she said. “I painted it a color called Paper Lantern — and I put on two coats. Someone said, ‘You know that you’re painting over metallic wallpaper, that’s going to come through-hoo,’ but I just couldn’t make myself steam off all that old paper— the design would imprint itself in my psyche if I did that, it would rise up when I’m eighty years old, on my death bed. So I just painted it over, with two heavy coats. And the first year it was fine. But then we had that killer summer, and somehow the humidity sweated the metallic pattern back out, so that now you can make out the split-rail fence and the wagon wheel. But it’s very faint. Now in fact I kind of like it. But I really should repaint it. So in the shower I had this image of painting the hall wall with a roller. What a waste of time. And then I thought, wait, I have the money, this time I’ll hire people to paint it for me. And so three painters materialized, and then suddenly there was a large hole in the wall, about three feet off the floor, big enough so that I could fit through so that my legs were standing in the front hall and yet my head and upper body were in the living room. The hole was finished off and lined with sheepskin. I had nothing on. My hands were resting on two full paint cans. But the strange thing was the cans of paint were warm. There was one painter doing the living room, and the other two were doing the hall, where my lower body was. The painter I could see didn’t seem to notice me. He was painting a wall with his back to me. The painters in the hall were using rollers, but they were those little detail rollers that you use for trim work, that are about three inches wide, the darlingest little rollers, that can go everywhere. Somehow I knew that one of these hall painters was mistakenly using the wrong color, it’s a color I used in the living room, called Opulent Opal — apparently he’d taken the wrong can of paint from his truck. Very careless. The other one was more conscientious — he was using the glossy Paper Lantern on the trim. These are Sherwin Williams’s paint names, not mine, by the way. Anyway I called out, ‘Ah, people, sirs? Please be sure to use the right color! There is a potential for confusion!’ But they were talking and they didn’t hear me. I could hear their sticky little rollers moving over that wall, ssshp, ssshp, ssshp, and they were having an idle conversation about the chick they saw on the lake that weekend riding in the back of an inboard motorboat in a pair of overalls with no top, so her tits flopped around behind the fasteners on the top flap, and then they made reference to the time on one job when one of them evidently quote ‘ate out’ the woman whose house they were painting and then she jerked him off onto a cracked slate hearthstone because she was paranoid about hurting the finish on the antique pine floors, and again I called out, as nicely as I could, ‘Guys, please, make sure you’re painting the right colors!’ and this time, instead of answering, one of them simply took his little roller and got it very heavy with the semi-gloss Paper Lantern and touched it to the right side, you know, the … cheek, of my ass, and then I could feel him rolling a stripe of paint right down my leg, over my calf, right down to my Achilles tendon, and then rolling right back up again. Like the seam of a pre-war stocking, except wide. Then he worked the roller a little on the tray, loading it up again, and he started on my other asscheek, and went very deliberately down and up again. At first he pressed quite lightly, so I could just barely feel the sodden fluff touching my skin on my upper thigh, and the roller barely rolled, but then as he traveled down he pressed harder, and some of the paint was squeezed from the roller and dripped down my leg ahead of it. It was so surprisingly warm. They’d had the paint cans in the back of their truck, which was parked in the sun. When the roller traveled over the backs of each of my knees it felt very very nice. I felt myself arching myself up slightly, like a cat who’s being stroked. Meanwhile the third painter, who was in the room that my head and my upper self were in, was still blithely painting away, with his back to me, so at least part of the job was moving steadily forward. And I expected that the two of them in the hall would now get back to work. But instead I felt a pair of hands on each leg, and I was lifted for a moment, and a paint can was slid under each of my feet. This was not a particularly comfortable position. The rims of the paint cans hurt the balls of my feet slightly, and my legs were farther apart than I was used to standing, and the small of my back was pressing against the sheepskin lining of the hole in the wall. Not comfortable, but tolerable. And then I felt knuckles brush against the inside of my thighs — and I knew that the first hall roller was now beginning to paint a stripe of Paper Lantern that started just at the top of my pubic hair and rolled very slowly over my clit and the rest of it, like some heavy steady piece of road equipment, and then back over my clit. And at the same time, the other hall painter had loaded his roller with the wrong paint, the Opulent Opal, and he’d turned his roller sideways and he was now pushing a horizontal stripe over my ass, at first a light stripe, and then, on the return, a harder stripe, and then he rolled down in between, and I called out, ‘No no, I’m telling you that’s the wrong paint!’ but he was very deliberately working the roller in the region of my, what shall we call it, my ‘tockhole,’ without seeming to hear me. Nontoxic paint, of course. And then I heard him put down the roller and he planted his hands high on my ass, holding my hips, and then he did an amazing thing. I felt his whole weight go on his hands, and on my back too, and he was apparently supporting himself like a gymnast, entirely on his hands, with his knees bent and his legs apart, and then a second later I felt this burning blunt nub press against my Opulent Opal tockhole, and then kind of urge itself a little ways in. I went, ‘Yew!’ and the painter in the living room turned in surprise and registered my existence for the first time. My hands were still planted on the cans of paint. And back in the hall, while the one gymnast painter was sinking himself unapologetically deep into my ass, I felt the other, the one who’d responsibly used the right kind of paint all along, now use his thumbs to hold my real … self open, my lips, and then I felt him slide slowly up my real hole. I said, ‘Vvoo!’ The living room painter’s eyes got big, and he studied my face with this look, like, ‘What exercise tape has this lady been using?’ I’m afraid that by now I was curling my upper lip with pleasure. My expression in fact was exactly the one I would have had if I had been biting open a condom packet with my teeth, that gnashy look, but the thing was—there was no condom packet. My painter loaded up his roller with wall paint, this was a warm neutral gray, and I mean warm, and he came over and he lay down on the floor underneath me, in the opposite direction, with his head touching the baseboard, so I could see his face and his paint-spattered glasses between my breasts, and he touched the roller to one of my nipples, and then rolled up between my breasts and down and over the other nipple, and as he was doing that he used his foot to pull another paint can into position, and then, still lying on his back, he lifted his hips up in the air with both boots resting on the can of paint sort of like a circus elephant on one of those little stools, you know? And he brought out his cock. The hall ass painter took this moment to remove his hands from my back, so that all his weight was directed through his thigh muscles and his cock into my ass, while at the same time the leg painter, who was standing, pulled almost all the way out of me and then he slid himself all the way back in so that I could feel the muscles of his legs hit against me, and I opened my mouth to say, ‘Hooh!’ which is I think almost certainly what I would say if all that was going on in my front hall, but of course as soon as I opened my mouth the cock of the man underneath me slid right inside, so all I could do was hum, and then all three of them came in me, one right after another, first the one in my mouth, surprisingly enough, then the one in my pussy, then finally the one in my ass.”