Chapter 6

Wanda Fleurette sat back in her chair, abstractedly wiping semen from her belly and licking it off her fingers. She would have much preferred to get a mouthful of it direct from the source, but she liked the taste of it so much that this was better than nothing.

She sighed. She would have loved to fuck Bill Wilson. She would have loved to fuck him all afternoon, taking only occasional time-outs to blow him. He had such a nice, big prick. More than that, he had control over it, and it seemed to work extraordinarily well. Not man men could have gotten one up so shortly after Julia had drained them; not many men his age, anyway, but Wanda's vocation seldom brought her in contact with younger ones nowadays.

However, she'd made a rule, and she had no intention of breaking it: not until a client reached the third level of adjustment, when he became a Probationary Adjustee, did he get the privilege of screwing her. It was a good rule. By the time the subject reached that level, he had gone through at least ten-well, to put it bluntly, cockteasing sessions with Wanda. By then she became a total obsession with the average man, and the consummation-even if she did say so herself-always exceeded the expectation.

By that time, too, the subject had become an accomplished lover, worthy of Wanda's talents, having been given expert guidance by Julia and Kathi and other talented members of the organization. The system worked well. The wimps-Wanda didn't care for that word, but it had infiltrated her vocabulary from Kathi's-were weeded out early in the rigorous training process, and no man who had ever achieved the stage of fucking Wanda had ever dropped out.

She sighed as she licked another smear of semen from her fingers, wondering if she'd sold out her ideals. She believed passionately that repression was wrong, that it was the source of all the evil in the world. Evil began with man's effort to hide his animal nature. He tried to hide it with clothing, with abstract ideas, with religions, with plastic and metal extensions of his ego. To admit that he was an animal, with the sexual and excretory functions of an animal, would be to admit that he would one day die. Death was the unspeakable secret underlying censorship and repression.

The deniers of life, the censors of art, the repressors of sex-they were the same ones who sup ported wars, applauded violence, clamored for executions. They walked, they talked, and in the darkened privacy of their bedrooms they even fucked, but they were dead. Fear had already I killed them, the fear of showing pain or pleasure, the fear of exhibiting anything to the world but a buttoned-down, plasticized facade of unfeeling Belf-containment.

It was easy for these naysayers to drop the bombs or turn the machineguns on their fellow creatures, because they saw themselves and their fellow creatures as odorless, sexless, plastic mannikins, mere embodiments of a variety of abstractions. Whatever unsettled this view of things had to be suppressed. Wanda had taken it as her mission in life to shake them up and topple their false idols.

Nevertheless, here she was using repression as a tool, forcing people like Bill Wilson to frustration when her heart ached to relieve them and satisfy them. Why couldn't people just fuck and be happy?

She knew now that they couldn't. She'd come a long way from her early idealism, inspired largely by her reading of the works of Wilhelm Reich when she'd been an impressionable freshman at Wellesley. In order to accept her ideas, they had to be led by the nose, bullied, coerced-in a word, repressed. For their own good, of course. She sighed again.

Originally, she had wanted to establish a commune devoted to the practice and promulgation of her ideas. If the world could see that her philosophy worked on a small scale, she reasoned, then it could be persuaded to adopt it universally. That's what she'd thought when she was twenty-two, anyway.

She'd started off by giving lectures, free, wherever she could get a hall, to whoever would listen. They had been dull lectures, she knew that now, dry and academic, but they had sometimes produced explosive results. The world wasn't ready for their content, nor was it ready for her insistence on calling a spade a spade. People could accept the idea of a pretty young girl giving a lecture on "sexual intercourse;" they couldn't accept the same girl giving a lecture on "fucking."

Minor riots had erupted. She'd been arrested a dozen times. Her academic credentials were impressive, though, and nobody had wanted to go to the time and trouble of prosecuting her seriously. Those credentials hadn't protected her, however, from being forcibly gang-banged by the police force of an Indiana town who wanted to see if she practiced what she preached.

During those early years, she'd attracted a small but devoted following. Their contributions had enabled her to keep traveling and lecturing. Eventually her following and her bank account had grown to the point where she'd been able to rent a house and set up her commune.

Some of the inmates of the commune were married men who'd abandoned their families and given her all their money in return for the privilege of frolicking with her groupies. Their scandalized relatives began exerting pressures. In addition, some of her followers made their contributions to the cause from the proceeds of prostitution-an evil that she didn't explicitly condemn because she knew that it would vanish once there world embraced her ideal of free love.

The result of all this was that her commune-it was called the Natural Meditation Center-was raided as a disorderly house. A varied assortment of drugs was found. Some of the girls were ridiculously under aged. Everybody was sent up, with the exception of Wanda, who was fortunately out of state at the time, lecturing in New Jersey.

It was while spreading the word at the Jersey Shore that Wanda was introduced to a whole new world of possibilities by Frank Weston, a seedy ex-newspaperman with a flair for public relations. He made an effort to jazz up her lectures He tried to coach her toward a looser style. He took her to see a few freewheeling, glory-stomping revivalists. She had never seen these Bible-belters in action, and she was impressed by their style and the effect it had on their followers. He took her to rock concerts where she saw how music and lights and visual projections could be used to excite a crowd. He showed her how carnival barkers used accomplices called shills in their audience to get the action going. She learned fast. Her lectures became shows that started drawing crowds. She gathered a new and larger band of disciples to replace those who had fallen into the clutches of the vice squad.

It was hype, it was hard sell, it was the commercialization and carnivalization of her most cherished beliefs-but this, after all, was America, where even the most humble child may one day grow up to be given the opportunity of selling out.

It was during this phase that Wanda attracted her most important Seeker, as she called her converts even then-although Frank Weston had the annoying habit of referring to them as "Suckers" in private-an eccentric millionaire named Teddy Sculthorpe.

Teddy was ripe for her teachings. At the age of twelve, he had been seduced by his slightly older sister. After a brief affair, she had cut Teddy off at the well, driving him to distraction. She was a wild, irrepressible-some said insane creature, as undaunted by larceny and arson as she was by incest. She subsequently married a junkie jazz-musician, was involved in the Cuban Revolution, and did all sorts of things that other rich girls only dream about. She never saw Teddy after her first marriage, but he continued to love her in a more than brotherly way.

Teddy eventually married a cool, refined icicle, a girl so cultured that she could say "motherfucker," as she often did, and make it sound elegant. After a few years of marriage to this nonesuch, Teddy was not unaccountably stricken with impotence. Having tried all else, his wife attempted to cure it by interesting him in pornography. She went to a shop on Forty-Second Street and told the proprietor, "I would like to purchase two hundred dollars' worth of profusely illustrated dirty books. Please deliver them to the Sculthorpe residence."

While examining this collection, Teddy came across a picture book featuring his own long-lost sister involved in every conceivable permutation of the sex act. It proved to be an immediate cure for his impotence, but it was not an unmixed blessing: he couldn't get a hard-on unless he was actually looking at the pictures.

Fortunately, he could screw his wife while doing this. She was in the habit of lying stiff as a board, eyes closed, while Teddy labored over her, occasionally making a little puppy-whimper in her throat that reassured him she wasn't really dead. Teddy would study the book, open beside the bed, while he fucked her.

This scene of domestic bliss was replayed many times, until the night came when Teddy, tipsy from a party, riffled the pages too loudly. His wife opened her eyes and seized the book. Recognizing the subject of the photographic essay from family portraits, his wife denounced him as an unspeakable pervert and divorced him. She went to live on the Riviera with a succession of young Latin lovers who, presumably, didn't have to look at pictures of their sisters in order to get it up.

Into this dark night of Teddy's soul came the shadow of a succubus, in the form of his sister's daughter, Kathi. She appeared at his door one day bearing a note from her mother, Julia: "Please take good care of my child, Teddy. I can no longer cope."

Teddy had been wishing that Julia would re turn to him. When he had wished for Julia, he hadn't been wishing for the unknown woman of thirty-five she then was, nor for the woman in her mid-twenties who'd posed for those obscene pictures, nor for the woman who'd run away to Cuba when she was eighteen, but for the wickedly carefree companion of his childhood: and here she was.

Kathi's eyes weren't blue, they were gray, and they didn't have the crazy look that had characterized Julia's. In every other respect she looked the same, though, especially after Teddy had arranged to have her hair fixed the way her mother had always worn it, in brow-concealing bangs. In personality, though, they diverged radically. Julia had been wild and unconventional, always taking the lead in their childhood escapades, whether it was climbing trees or shoplifting or burning down the garage with Uncle Dick's new Cadillac in it. Kathi was quiet and demure and well-behaved.

Teddy began devoting most of his time and attention to her. He bought her ten times more clothing and candy and toys and books and games and pets than any child could have handled. He took her to zoos and parks and movies and amusement piers. He lay awake nights, racking his brain for fresh ways of amusing her. She didn't object, as her mother had never paid her any attention at all.

Teddy's self-confidence had always been minimal. Most of his time and money had always been spent on new ways of avoiding people, because he could never say no to anybody. His wife's angry departure had torn away his last meager shreds of self-esteem. Her parting words had convinced him that he was the vilest creature on earth. As he continued to play his new role of doting uncle, however, he revised his estimate of himself upward: he couldn't be as bad as he thought he was, because Kathi Palmer didn't tempt him sexually.

But he mistrusted his subconscious. Prowling deep down inside his soul's .cage might be some beast that lusted for his little darling. He could never free himself wholly from the fear that it might break out. As a precaution, he destroyed his thumb-worn, dog-eared, yellow-stained copy of Julia, the book in which his sister so abundantly appeared.

He would scrupulously avoid touching his niece, beyond an occasional pat on the head that resembled nothing so much as a man testing the temperature of a hot skillet with his fingertips. He found it impossible to conceal his nervous confusion-his terror, even-when she gave him a sudden, spontaneous kiss.

As Kathi grew older, he insisted that she wear more modest clothes than she wanted to. This led to some friction, but she was invariably able to get her own way. From time to time he would talk to her about sin. He would express, without quite knowing what he was talking about, the hope that she would always be a good girl. He would hint darkly of the horrors of passion.

Sex had blighted his life, but at long last he believed that he had ascended to a serene plane of disinterested contemplation beyond the torments of tumescence. Thus he was congratulating himself when Kathi's body, like a bomb that had been ticking in his home for four years, exploded into nubility.

The beast in Teddy's subconscious came roaring and ravening out of its flimsy cage. He was tempted far more than he had feared he would be tempted. The maids sometimes looked at him strangely, wondering why he tore his blankets and chewed his pillows at night, wondering how he was able to use up so much Kleenex when he didn't even have a cold. Never in his life had he even imagined such lust as he now felt for his sixteen-year-old niece.

Kathi had Julia's face. She had Julia's voice. She even had some of Julia's facial expressions and mannerisms-but she was more beautiful, more shapely, more desirable. Worst of all, she was a much nicer person than her mother could ever have been.

At first Teddy's lectures to his niece about sin had been merely confusing, but now they began to become totally incoherent. While he spoke he would sweat. He would turn pale. He would wring his hands. He would rumple his hair, shade his eyes, bang his fist into his palm. He would groan. He would never say much. Kathi would sometimes interrupt one of his lectures to ask him, with genuine concern in her lucent gray eyes, if he was feeling well.

Kathi, beautiful, pubescent Kathi, trembling on the brink of a voluptuous womanhood that would one day have the power to snarl traffic Clear gray eyes that could stop your heart cold and turn your tongue to spaghetti. Her legs-no one could write about her legs. Thinking about them is dangerous. They extended from the vicinity of her hips to the surface of the ground, but they did so with such a smooth and harmonious arrangement of curve and plane and dimple and hollow that they showed you what God had in mind when he thought up the idea of female human legs; and showed you that he botched the job of making them for most females. She had a pair of tits that could fog a pair of spectacles at fifty yards. The ass men of the ancient world worshipped a goddess, Venus Callipygia, Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks: could those poor benighted heathens have caught a glimpse of Kathi's luscious buns, even veiled by skintight, threadbare jeans with an applique rose in the cleft, they would have broken up the statues of their goddess for bird-gravel and begged her to pose for new ones. Her face suggested early madonnas, not quite roundish, like her mother's, more oval, with soft planes, with a straight, classical nose. Mingled with all this perfection was one fault, one that Teddy never noticed, one that any man would overlook: Kathi was so dumb that she couldn't have found her voluptuous ass with both hands.

Teddy's little lectures about sex would have puzzled anybody, but they confused Kathi hopelessly. She didn't even know they were about sex, as a brighter child might have guessed. They painted a murky picture of something that might happen to her, or would happen to her, or had happened to her, something that had happened to him, something that had happened to her mother, something that was vaguely connected with the human body.

This was not only confusing, it was also alarming, since something had been happening to her body for the past couple of years and it had now reached an acute stage. It involved certain inward itchings and squirmings and tinglings and yearnings that had no precise focus but were nonetheless powerful. She suspected that Uncle Teddy might be warning her about some hereditary disease, and she was afraid that she was coming down with the symptoms. She wanted to comfort him and soothe him, seeking solace in return, sitting in his lap the way he would never permit her to do and smoothing his hair. Thinking about this brought on a fresh attack of itching and squirming and tingling and yearning.

Direct questioning, either about the lectures or about the strange percolations in her body, was impossible, she'd learned that long ago. Such questions would be referred to the dour and sour and monosyllabic housekeeper, Mrs. Ermold, whom she detested. On the question about bleeding, for instance-that one had come up about three years ago-Mrs. Ermond had merely grunted as if her worst fears had been confirmed, provided her with the appropriate countermeasures, told her how to use them, and advised her not to worry about it. "It happens," Mrs. Ermold had explained.

Sometimes her questions would have a disturbing effect on Uncle Teddy. He would start looking green around the edges, then he would excuse himself hastily and run for the bathroom. She feared that questions about her body and its symptoms had the power to bring on attack of the same hereditary disease in her uncle. Sneaking close to the bathroom door on such occasions, she would hear pitiful groans and strange thumping sounds. Her heart would go out to her afflicted uncle, and she would resolve never again to ask him why she was growing hair between her legs, nor try to show him the disturbing growth.

She couldn't ask any of the adults in the household. She couldn't ask her schoolmates, either, because she didn't have any. Julia had never bothered to send her to school, partly on ideological grounds-her mother believed that schooling destroyed spontaneity-and partly because they traveled around so much. Teddy had tried to remedy her educational deficiencies with tutors, and there was some talk of sending her to a private school next year, but in the meantime she had no one to ask but the "nice" girls that Uncle Teddy had arranged for her to meet. They were mostly younger than she was, they went in for crinolines and patent-leather pumps, and they knew less about it than she did. A truly nice girl, to Uncle Teddy's way of thinking, would have been raised in a Skinner Box to the age of fourteen.

There was one exception, a girl named Edith Snedeker, who wasn't as nice as she seemed. When Kathi was fourteen, Edith, then only twelve, had informed her that boys have appendages called wieners-" 'cause they look like hot dogs," explained Edith, who'd actually seen a few-and that they derive considerable enjoyment from rubbing their wieners against a girl's slit. The girls were at the time concealed behind one of the many junked cars that cluttered Teddy's suburban estate, and Edith had felt free to hike up her crinolines, pull down her ruffled panties, and show Kathi her slit, which was quite hairless.

Edith wanted Kathi to display her slit, too, ostensibly to make sure her eager pupil got its location right, but Kathi was extremely reluctant. She had all that darned hair on it! And she was certain that Edith would laugh at her, or even tell people about the freakish friend she had who was developing into a gorilla. Edith was extremely insistent, though, claiming unfairness, "I showed you mine, now you got to show me yours"-and threatening to withhold further information about the wonders of nature.

At last Kathi consented, pulling down the jeans she was almost busting out of-she resisted Uncle Teddy's efforts to dress her like Edith-and displaying her shameful wedge of fuzz. Edith's reaction was totally unexpected. She was vastly impressed. This only happened, Edith explained, when a girl was old enough to make babies. The younger girl was jealous, but Kathi consoled her with the information that this hair had started to grow when she was only slightly older than Edit was now.

Edith returned to her role of instructor. The boy rubs his wiener against the girl's slit until a white cream appears.

"How?" Kathi asked.

"How, what?"

"Where does this white cream come from?"

"I don't know. I guess it comes out of your slit."

"Oh," said Kathi, pondering.

"Anyway, the girl takes this white cream and puts it up her asshole, and it makes a baby inside her," Edith explained.

"If she doesn't put the white cream up her asshole, then it doesn't make a baby?"

"I guess not," said Edith and, reluctant to be questioned further on her weak points, added a new bit of information: "This is called fucking."

Kathi wondered aloud if this had any etymological connection with motherfuckingsonofabitch, a word that meant one of her mother's ex-husbands or soon-to-be-ex-boyfriends, and Edith was able to separate the word into its-component parts for her.

"Why don't you pretend your finger is a wiener and fuck me with it?" Kathi suggested. "'. want to see this white cream."

"It won't work, unless it's a wiener."

"How come? It comes out of my slit, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, but if you could just make it come out of your slit, then why do ladies need husbands to make babies?" countered Edith.

"Do it anyway," Kathi urged, standing up and taking her jeans all the way off. "I want to see what it feels like."

Edith was glad to oblige. Kathi leaned back against the car and spread her legs out, gathering up the tails of her shirt to keep them out of the younger girl's way. Edith placed the side of her forefinger lengthwise to her slit and began rubbing lightly.

"How does it feel?" Edith asked.

"It tickles. It feels good. Only push it harder," Kathi said.

Edith pressed her finger tighter against the lips. Kathi began to feel warm and squirmy inside, vaguely feverish outside. Edith's little blonde head, complete with braids, was lowered, her big brown eyes fixed on what she was doing. She seemed to be enjoying this satisfaction of her curiosity as much as Kathi was enjoying the less intellectual aspects of the contact.

"You're getting wet!" Edith exclaimed. "You're not going to pee, are you?"

"No, no, it's not that, I don't know what it is, it's something else."

"Don't pee on me," Edith warned, "or I'll tell."

"I won't, I won't, I promise."

"It's getting wetter," Edith reported.

"Ohhhh."

"Are you okay?"

"Yesssss! Do it!"

"It's not pee. It feels sticky," Edith observed, "Maybe it's the white cream!"

Edith held up her finger to examine it. Kathi saw that it glistened with some transparent fluid, not white cream at all.

"You have to rub it harder," Kathi suggested hopefully. "Then maybe it will turn white."

Edith didn't take the hint. Still curious, she raised the wet finger to her pert little freckled nose and sniffed it. "Oh, ick!" she squealed. "It smells like cod liver oil!"

Kathi was immensely annoyed. She'd taken a bath that morning. She didn't dare show her irritation, though, because she hoped that she could coax Edith back into rubbing her slit some more. She touched herself with her own finger. She was amazed at how loose she felt, how wet she was. The harder she pressed, the more her finger sank inside. It was as if an unknown cave had opened up. She was a little bit afraid.

"You're sticking your finger right inside it," Edith observed.

"Oooh. Yes. You do it."

"It stinks."

"Please, Edith, please. It feels better when you do it."

"Maybe it is cod liver oil, and that's what happens when you take too much of it, it comes out of your slit."

"Please, do it, Edith. You can wash your hands later. I'll even let you put on some of my perfume, the Shalimar that Uncle Teddy gave me."

"Well, okay," said Edith, "but this time you have to rub my slit, too. And not with your cod liver oil finger, either. I'm going to pretend that it's Donnie Osmond's wiener. What are you going to pretend?"

Kathi didn't know. She hadn't been pretending anything. She'd just been feeling. The thought of a wiener filled her with vague alarm when she applied it to anyone specific. She couldn't help picturing it exactly as Edith had described it, as a smooth red hot dog growing out of a man's middle, and she couldn't keep her perverse imagination from supplying it with a bun, relish, and mustard. She would have to get a look at a real one, somehow. It would be fruitless to ask Uncle Teddy if she could see his, she knew that, but maybe she could somehow arrange to peek at him.

Imagining that it was Uncle Teddy's wiener made the prospect seem far less scary, because he was the least intimidating man she knew. He reminded her of her teddy bear, and she thought he had been named most appropriately. Not that he was round and fuzzy; on the contrary, he was long and lank and pale and seemed to have been constructed without bones. But their personalities were similar.

She couldn't tell Edith what she was thinking. She didn't know why, but she knew that it would be wrong to imagine that her uncle was fucking her. Never a fast thinker, she could only say: "I'll pretend that it's Edith Snedeker's finger."

"That's dumb," said Edith, who always said what she thought. Kathi would have liked to have told her that she thought it was even dumber to think about Donnie Osmond, but living with touchy and unpredictable people like her mother and Uncle Teddy had already taught her a lot about tact. She didn't want to do anything that would imperil the continuance of this unexpectedly delightful game.

While Edith pulled up her skirt to display the bare little purse between her skinny legs, Kathi sniffed at her finger. Darn jit, Edith was right! Maybe her description had been a little extreme, but a definitely fishy odor lingered about her finger. It reminded her more of oysters. As a matter-of-fact, the firm but mushy texture of her slit, after Edith had rubbed it for a while, reminded her of the texture of oysters.

"Oysters," Kathi said with a touch of defiance.

"What about them?"

"That's what it smells like."

"They're icky, too. I had one once and I hated it. I bet mine won't smell like fish."

Kathi saw that it would be unwise to pursue this line with her exasperating little friend. She reached out with her left hand, the one she hadn't used to sample the odor of her own slit, and began fingering Edith's.

"Ow!" Edith cried. "Don't poke it. Rub it, like I told you."

"Okay. But I want you to poke me. I want you to push your finger into it," Kathi urged. "Only do it slow, okay?"

Edith grumbled that poking wasn't fucking, as she knew it, that fucking was rubbing, but she obliged Kathi's whim.

"You've got a regular hole in it," Edith reported when her finger had sunk in to the second joint.

"Unnnnhhhh," Kathi said.

"Are you going to be sick? Don't you be sick on me, or I'll tell."

"Do ... this," Kathi said, and, taking Edith's thumb-she noticed that it wasn't a very clean thumb, but she didn't give a damn at this stage-she pressed it against the top of her slit.

She didn't know why she'd done that; but somehow she knew that it had needed doing. The result was electrifying. Edith's probing finger felt good, but it was nothing compared to the pressing of her thumb. All the squirms and yearns and itches and wriggles and tingles coalesced at this point of ineffable contact.

"You've got like a little bitty wiener there," said Edith. "Maybe you're part boy. Maybe we should rub our slits together, maybe that will make the white cream come."

"Do you like it, when I rub you?"

"Yeah, sort of. Not as much as you do. I mean, I don't feel like moaning and groaning and wiggling around and looking like I'm going to be sick. But it feels nice. Sort of," she said.

"Stick it in deeper, Edith, stick your finger in-ow!"

"That's as far as it goes," Edith said. "Ow, shit, shit, shit! I want it in deeper, it itches in there!"

"It doesn't go any deeper."

"Try!" Kathi begged.

The little blonde girl was dubious, but she shrugged, took a firm grip on her pink lower lip with her upper teeth, and poked her finger firmly against the obstruction in Kathi's slit.

Kathi knew that Edith could do it. She didn't know how she knew, she just knew. And she was right! She could feel the tip of Edith's finger squeezing in deeper, piercing her like a sweet little arrow, and she wondered if that's why Cupid was pictured with arrows, if that's what love was all about.

"You look like it hurts," Edith said.

"It does! It doesn't! I don't know what it feels like. Just do it, all right?"

There was an opening in there, sure enough, but it barely seemed big enough to accommodate Edith's little forefinger. She could feel it stretching, though, making way for the delicious intrusion. She put her free hand back on Edith's, making sure the other girl remembered to rub the swollen little button at the top of her slit, and that seemed to make the going easier. She kept rubbing away at Edith's slit, but it didn't get wet, nor did it open up significantly.

"I'm getting tired of this dumb game," said Edith. "Let's go watch The Dating Game on TV."

"Please ... more...."

But Edith wanted no more. She would not he urged, cajoled, persuaded-not even at the price of the whole bottle of Shalimar. They went inside to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watch TV while Kathi squirmed and itched and burned.

They drifted progressively further apart after that, and two years later, when Edith was fourteen, she dropped completely out of sight. A scrap of overheard conversation between Mrs. Ermold and a maid from another estate led her to believe that Edith, with the assistance of a young scapegrace named Victor Mosbacher, had succeeded in making a baby. Apparently she had ignored her own advice and rubbed that white cream up her ass.