Chapter 9
Tension in Paradise
It was on a Friday afternoon (two days after our sight-seeing tour) that Rebecca and Janet dropped over. ... dressed for action. When I answered the door and saw them standing there in tight sheath dresses and smiling like thieves after a successful theft, my heart began pounding wildly and my knees went all weak and rubbery.
"Hi, Doris," Janet smiled. "Rebecca suggested we come over for awhile and. . join you."
Rebecca's ironic chuckle lifted the hairs at the nape of my neck as they walked past me. "Yes," she said, "and I really meant that, Doris. Both literally and figuratively. ... we'd like to get with you."
Well, as sometimes happens when something you've looked anxiously forward to finally begins, I was at a loss for words. I blushed like a school-girl and everything I said sounded either trite or downright foolish. Janet saved the day. She was familiar with my laconic lapses; she knew I was terribly excited.
"Let's all have a drink. D'you have any bourbon, Doris?"
"Oh, yes!" Rebecca exploded. "Mix us three bombs, Doris! That sounds like fun."
I mixed them. And they were "bombs", too. The activity gave me a chance to calm down a little, and it wasn't necessary that I talk. I silently thanked Janet for her presence of mind.
The bourbon made things right. I loosened up. Half way through a second drink I was in command again; I talked and joked and laughed effortlessly, and I looked forward to what I was sure would be a delicious experience with the easy aplomb of a tart about to take on her thousandth trick. (I was calmly excited.)
Rebecca seemed unusually talkative; I had the impression as I listened to her and watched her that she was as tense and tight as an over-wound watch. She gestured wildly with her hands on every point, and her eyes were so bright they actually glittered. But, as usual, I couldn't keep my eyes off her mouth. (Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresistible it is usually traceable to a single quality. This quality, often as not a physical defect, can assume such unreal proportions that in the mind of the beholder her staggering beauty is doubled and tripled. One can become addicted to this "single quality" just as surely as if one were in the clutches of a dangerous narcotic.)
"Drinking makes Rebecca really talkative, eh, Doris?" Janet remarked with a smile.
"Yes, but I like to listen to her. She's interesting," I replied.
"Thanks, Doris," Rebecca looked at me. "Sometimes I say anything at all ... though in a way I mean it too. You understand, don't you."
"Perfectly," I nodded. "You're utterly spontaneous, Rebecca. That's one thing I like about you. You're spontaneous and ruthlessly truthful. It's an irresistible combination."
"It's my philosophy, that's all," she shrugged. "When I was fourteen I worked out an ideal universe, all on my own. It was very simple: no property, no money, no laws, no police, no censors, no government, no soldiers, no executioners, no prisons, no schools. I eliminated every disturbing and restraining element. Perfect freedom. A vacuum. And in it I've been able to explode in any direction my whims take me."
"Sounds wonderful," I said, noticing that she'd allowed one amber-hued thigh to emerge from the folds of her robe. I caressed it with my eyes. But when she spoke again my gaze flew back to her mouth.
"I think most of us are terrorized half the time ... I mean we terrorize ourselves. We exist under a kind of psychic pressure, a soggy wet blanket that smothers us from the time we're born. And because we hate our condition, our situation, we hate ourselves. So we invent morals. We make droves and droves of impossible to follow rules. We're sick, but instead of admitting it and trying to honestly deal with it we retreat deeper and deeper into comfortable ruts of conformity and tradition and precedent and all the other blind alleys that dishonest people hide in. We resort to cliches. To shibboleths. We're afraid of sex because we're really afraid of the very life force that made us. We've become so damned sophisticated and obsessed with education that our teachers talk coldly of sexual thrills without ever having experienced any themselves. We're artificial. A guy named Darwin taught us that we're really only animals, and we waste our lives and turn ourselves neurotic trying to make a liar out of him. Why? To protect our kids from becoming brutalized or perverted? What a laugh! We give them toy machine-guns and hand-grenades for Christmas and make heroes out of hired killers on TV and then turn around and blame sex magazines for turning them into sadistic monsters. Sex gets blamed for everything! Any kid who wants it bad enough can get ahold of booze or cigarettes or even dope. The booze can poison him and kill him. The cigarettes can give him cancer. But the moralists don't deal in plain facts. They feel dirty and corrupt about their own sex-lives, so sex in any form ... magazines, books, movies, whatever, is what they attack. They hate and despise corruption, they claim. Yet any competent psychologist can tell them that what they actually hate and despise is the inadequacy of their own mean little lives."
Rebecca's tension had increased as she talked; her neck was corded and her fists were clenched. In empathy with her I felt tense myself. And Janet's breathing, I noticed, had become fast and irregular and the scar on her cheek was a livid red.
"You should write a book, Rebecca," Janet ventured, but the smile she'd affected to lighten her suggestion was as devoid of levity as Rebecca's words.
"Why? Nobody would read it. Not unless I filled it with either violence of phony sex. I wanted to write once. I wanted to paint. I wanted to become an artist in every sense of the word. But after being told by several successful writers that their secret was to simply write conformist soap-operas with a dash of sex, I gave up the idea. There's enough of that stuff around now. I don't fit the pattern of the book-a-month-club writer any more than I fit the sex-in-its-proper place baloney devised by censors and moralists. It's the same with Painting. If I were to paint a nude of a man as he really is, I couldn't find a buyer for it anywhere. The consumers of art, with rare exceptions, aren't looking for honesty or truth. They couldn't hang it on their living-room walls, it might pervert the minds of their children. But who are they kidding? They know that kids are going to learn all about life and sex anyhow. But instead of teaching them through the examples of art and literature and beauty they let their kids pick it up as they have for many, many generations ... from the gutter ... through filthy, sadistic jokes. It's whispered furtively that self-love is evil, so ninety nine percent of our adolescents secretly imagine themselves to be debased. And when sex is taught it's treated with the sangfroid of an appendectomy. It's an operation, performed purely and simply for the results of conception. All its aspects of tenderness and beauty and creativity are twisted into mathematical calculations and laboratory statistics. No thanks, Janet. No writing for me. I'll pacify my creative urges by living my own life as freely and artfully as I'm able. I love life. I love the thing that gave me life. Sex. I'm not afraid of it. There is nothing evil or immoral about two persons or twenty persons getting together for pleasure. The only time that sex is immoral is when it's a forced issue ... when there's unwanted violence or force connected with it. As long as there is mutual pleasure and a feeling of sharing and cooperation there is nothing basically lewd about any act of sex."
"Let's act then!" I exclaimed. I was feverish!
The heat in Rebecca's words had radiated outward and I'd absorbed it as surely and directly as if I'd been standing before a blazing fire! Towards the end of her volatile monologue her voice had grown nasal and sing-song; the effect had stimulated me as a sexual fillip, and the words "Let's act then" had sprung from my lips with the spontaneity of a reflex-action. One quick glance at Janet told me I wasn't alone in my feelings; the scar on her cheek was purple now and she was breathing high in her chest. Her eyes were mere slits.
"Undress me then, both of you," Rebecca rose and stood facing us. "But take your time, please. We're in no rush. I love being attended. Toyed with. Made over. But do go slowly."
Janet's breath exploded as she rose; I was trembling like a dried leaf in the wind and had to catch hold of Janet's arm for support as I stood up. We reached for Rebecca with the hesitant eagerness of beggars reaching for alms. Her blouse. I managed the top three buttons. Janet the two lower. Her brassiere. Janet unhooked it. I lifted it from her and let it drop to the divan. Her breasts. I gazed at them and wet my lips and it was only by an extreme effort of will that I could restrain myself from burying my face between them and holding those massive nipples with my tongue. Rebecca smiled and touched them herself, running her fingers lightly over and around the nipples so that they began to move and crawl erect; in a matter of seconds they stood out like two large red erasers and my fingers fairly trembled to touch them.
Her skirt. Janet unbuttoned it and unzipped it. I slipped it down, letting my fingers trace the outside edge of one thigh as I did so. Rebecca stepped out of it. I bent to pick it up, and in so doing I caught a whispered hint of the vapor given off by nylons and garter-belt and ... Rebecca. I straightened quickly, my head swimming. She smiled. She knew what had happened. She stepped back two paces and said, "Look at me. Do you think I have a provocative body?"
She was teasing again; I'm sure Janet knew it too. But who cared? It was delightful being so teased. I devoured her with my eyes, aware (and not caring) that a gooey stream of spittle was beginning to run from a corner of my mouth and down my chin. I nodded and tried to say yes, but all that came out was a hiss; Janet cleared her throat and managed a garbled affirmation: "Uh-huh, you sure have, Rebecca."
"Shall we leave my nylons and heels on?" she asked.
"Yes, please," I said, "and your garter-belt too."
"How about these," she put her hands to her waist, "my panties?"
"I'll get them!" Janet's action suited her words as she quickly kneeled and slipped down Rebecca's panties, and then, like an adult administering an affectionate peck at the drooling lips of a child, Janet's face was hidden for a brief lip-smacking instant and, noncommittantly, Rebecca's strident chuckle rippled forth (like a series of cascading grunts).
"Now you two," she said. "It's your turn to undress each other. I'll watch."
We worked swiftly, mechanically. We'd both been titillated beyond endurance by Rebecca's heated monologue and by undressing her. Our minds were on Rebecca and Rebecca alone, and any unnecessary delays or detours were no doubt as odious to Janet as they were to me. A hot, pulsing chill-thrill passed through me though when Janet, drawing my own panties, repeated the same pecking tribute she'd given Rebecca. And I opened like a night flower.
As Janet and I finished undressing one another, Rebecca put one hand on each hip and stood with her thighs parted widely. The position was aggressive; even her expression was a bit scornful and domineering as she chuckled deep in her throat and said, "Okay, let's play. Help yourselves, girls. But be gentle. I don't like roughness. And I do so love to be kissed and kissed and kissed."
That's all I needed. I stood there for a brief moment and took her in: those nylon-clad thighs and calves, those high spiked-heels, that tiny waist with its puckered navel, those ripe breasts with their rose-bud nipples, those lovely deep-rounded buttocks, that sensual face with its intense dark eyes and full-lipped, succulent mouth. I felt a sudden visceral trembling. I saw Janet kneel and heard her moan once as she began. And then I began-and it was like no other beginning and no other end that I had ever imagined. I was in paradise.