“I’m just trying to feel my wrist tendon,” she said, “to see what it might have felt like for you. Actually, you know, there is a little muscle high up on the outside of my forearm that is moving, almost at my elbow. That’s the one that’s more visible in my case. Feels kind of interesting.”
“Ooh, don’t say that or I’ll shoot.”
“Hah hah! I like a man who knows what he likes. Do you want to hear what I thought about when I came in the shower yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you. No, I know what I’ll tell you. First I’m going to tell you something else. First I’m going to tell you about how I masturbated in front of somebody. It’s short.”
“By all means, tell me.”
“Shall I tell you every nasty thing that comes into my head?”
“Yes.”
“I will then,” she said. “We went to the circus. It’s funny, it excites me quite a bit just to tell you that I’m going to tell you. Doing that is probably the best part. It’s just like that moment when you’re lumbering around on the bed to get into opposite directions to do sixty-nine, that feeling of parting my legs over a man’s face, before you put your hands on my back and pull me down, and my legs remember the feeling from the last time, the feeling of being locked into a preset position that is right for human bodies to be in, like putting a different lens on a camera, turning it until it clicks.”
“And I,” he said, “would feel the mattress change its slope, first on one side of my head, and then the other, as the weight of one of your knees and then the other pressed into it, and I’d look up at you and open my mouth and I’d slide my hands over your ass with my fingers splayed and hold your ass and pull you down to my tongue.”
“Kha.”
There was a pause.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the circus.”
“Okay. Excuse me. I’m going to have to get a fresh towel pretty soon. This guy took me to the circus.”
“The guy with the fancy stereo?”
“Another guy,” she said. “It wasn’t Ringling Brothers, it was some smaller-scale South American circus, with lots of elephants, and lots of women in spangles riding the elephants. It was incredibly hot in the tent, and everything had this reddish tint, because the sun was bright enough outside to make it through some of the tent seams, and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt but I was soaked, and so was Lawrence, who was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and so was everyone around us, including the performers. There was some Venezuelan act in which a woman spun hard balls around very fast on long strings while two men played percussion behind her, and the balls smacked against the floorboards in interesting rhythms around her legs, and she was streaming with sweat, and quite beautiful, but in a way that I thought was vaguely like me, and suddenly the two men would stop hitting the drums and she would freeze and make this kind of trilling scream, a beautiful strange wild sound. She was just covered with sweat, she looked really wild, and the two men behind her were exceedingly good-looking, wearing wide-brimmed black hats with chin straps, and I momentarily wanted to be her, and while they were taking their bows I adapted my time-tested striptease fantasy, and I thought that I was this woman in the black spangles, and I was spinning these balls very fast, faster than she could, so they were a blur, so fast that somehow, like in a cartoon fight when it’s just a blur from which things, pieces of clothing, fly outward, somehow my whole outfit was torn in pieces from my body, and flung out into the audience, so that when the drumming stopped and I froze suddenly and made my trilling scream, I was totally naked, and all these pieces of my costume were still floating aloft in all directions, and each man who caught some damp shred of costume was overpowered and took his place in line to fuck me, and the two percussionists played the drums the whole time, and then they stopped drumming and naturally they fucked me too. But that’s just an aside. The elephant acts were what were interesting. I’ve ridden on an elephant once or twice in my life, when I was small, and I remember touching the big lobes of its head, and let me tell you, the skin is not smooth, it’s warm and dry and quite bristly — that’s how I remember it, anyway. And these were not little elephants, these were big old elephants, with big tusks. Well, these women were sliding down the side of the elephants, riding on the elephants heads, with their legs between the elephants’ eyes, and repeatedly pivoting around on their bottoms on the elephants’ backs, and they were wearing flesh-colored stockings, or tights, so it was not skin to skin, but even so, those little leotards are cut extremely high in the back, and I really started to be concerned about their bottoms, about whether they were more uncomfortable than their smiles let on, and I started thinking about whether if I were dressed in a very high-cut leotard I would like the sensation of the elephant’s dry living skin on my bottom, and then, during the beginning of the very last big elephant promenade, one of the women was riding on the elephant’s back with one leg in the air, and as the elephant turned I saw this woman’s bottom, and even through the tights I could see that it was in fact red! She was the main elephant woman, I think. Anyhow, for the big finale she rode around on this elephant’s tusks for a minute or two, sat on his trunk, fine fine, all gracefully executed but surprisingly suggestive, and then she did this thing that really shocked me. She took hold of one of the tusks and one of the ears, or somehow swung herself up, and then she lifted one of her knees so that it went right into the elephant’s mouth, and she waited for a second for the elephant to clamp on to it, and then she threw her head back, and arched her back, and spread her arms wide, so she was held in the air supported entirely by her knee, which was stuffed in the elephant’s mouth! I mean, think about the saliva! Think about those elephant molars that are gently but firmly taking hold of your upper calf and your mid-thigh, while this elephant tongue is there lounging with its giant taste-buds against your knee! The elephant did a full turn while she was swooning like this. Then she got down and took a bow and patted the elephant under his eye.”
“Wow, that’s better than King Kong.”
“Well I was impressed. Lawrence had come up with the idea of going to the circus — this was our very first time out, by the way, though I’d known him for a while — so he was careful not to be too impressed. While we were walking out to the car he said, ‘I guess those elephants really respond to training.’ He thought the elephant wasn’t biting the woman’s leg, but rather that its tongue was actually hooked under her knee. I was dubious, but it was an interesting idea. It was touching to see how pleased Lawrence was that I’d liked the circus. We were standing out by my car in the parking lot, just drenched with sweat, he was plucking at his shirt and squinting at me, and we were supposed to go to this clam-shack place and have an early dinner on a picnic table outside, and I just didn’t want to do that. So I thought what the hell, and I said, ‘You look hot. Why don’t you come back to my apartment and you’ll have a shower, and I’ll have a shower and then I’ll make some dinner and we’ll do the clam shack another time, okay?’ He agreed instantly — he was delighted to have the responsibility for the success of this date taken out of his hands. So he had a shower, and I happened to have a pair of very baggy shorts with an elastic waistband that fit him fine, and a big T-shirt, and then I had a shower, and I put on a pair of shorts and a dark red T-shirt, and everything was fine.”