Chapter 6
She was there, and she said yes, come pick me up. He did, and on the way over, he thought how very badly he needed to be fixed. It was more than desire; it was compulsion, almost animal lust. And all from the physical presence of Peggy Stone, a very attractive woman with loads and loads of sexual appeal. Brenda was waiting.
In the car, she said: '"Guess what, darling?"
"What, darling?"
"I'm out of commission. Right on time, too."
Bill's face fell with disappointment. Actually, he decided, he should be happy. It was her intention to make him happy by telling him in her cute way that another month had gone by without her getting impregnated. But the way he felt now, it was hardly welcome news.
"I'm sorry, Bill," she said, seeing his face. When she said that, he felt like a heel.
"I'm sorry for making you sorry," he said, reaching out with his hand to pat her on the shoulder.
"I can ... make you okay," she said. "You know."
He knew all right. "You don't have to, baby. It isn't any kick for you. We'll listen to some records and relax."
"After I do something for you. You might not believe it, darling, but it'll make me happy to see you happy."
"I am happy."
"I mean I'll get a kick giving you a kick. Hurry up."
He drove faster, thinking he really shouldn't let her do whatever she was going to do, because it wasn't mutual, it wasn't lovemaking, it wasn't something that could conceivably satisfy her.
But he picked up speed.
He even ran a stop sign.
In the apartment, as soon as he closed the door, she came into his arms, and they kissed, their lips hanging and clinging together. Brenda had opened her heavy coat, and he could feel the warmth emanating from her breasts, the pleasing roundness of her lower belly. A warm animal-in the physical sense, all women were.
"Take off your coat before you catch cold," he said, removing it from her shoulders. He hung it in the closet with his. "How about a drink to warm you?"
"Some of that rum," she said. "That's good when you're cold." She was right One-hundred-fifty-proof rum would melt down an iceberg. It was smooth, delicious and had the kick of a low-megaton atom bomb. An old marine buddy had brought him several bottles back from Panama last year.
He poured out two large glasses, went into the kitchen and got some ice cubes. He ran them through the electric crusher and put the shaved slivers in the glasses. Cold as it was outside, the rum would still have a stomach-warming effect.
"Here. Drink it slowly; remember what it did the last time." She had gotten miserably, helplessly drunk. He had had to undress her and let her sleep it off.
Worse, he had to call the dormitory and cook up some fantastic story as to why she couldn't come back. Brenda grinned.
"Don't worry, you won't have to put me to bed again. Just sit next to me." She patted the couch with her hand. He sat, and they drank, their hips touching lightly. "This gives you a nice feeling."
"So does Sterno, if you ever drank it."
"Have you?"
"No. I drank after-shave lotion once, though. It was terrible." He told her about the time on Okinawa when they drank a quart's worth of Palmolive aftershave and got very sick, mostly because of the heat.
When he kissed her, he tasted rum mingled with the sweetness of lipstick. Her lips had that cloying, sticky quality that comes of thickly applied lipstick. She seldom painted herself so heavily, but today she had. Bill felt the tip of her tongue running and flicking against his lip, making the inside of his mouth tingle.
"Stop torturing us," he said.
"No torture meant, dear. Honest." She touched his tongue with hers, and he felt a tremulous wave of desire surge through him. He held her tighter, closer against his body. Her heartbeat was tripping madly, like his own. .
"Undress me, darling."
"But you're driving yourself crazy, Brenda."
"I know what I'm doing. Undress me."
His hands trembled as he worked at the buttons of her blouse. Her breasts were soft under the material. She wore no brassiere, so when he parted the buttons from their buttonholes, there they were, two hemispheres of perfect flesh, with their exciting little pink-colored nipples. He ran his hands over them briefly, then stopped when he heard her breathing change to gasping.
Poor kid.
"All of me, Bill. All of me." There was urgency in her voice now, and her gasps were becoming more hoarse and throaty. His hands unzipped and yanked her skirt off. Then her pants. She stood in black wool knee socks and loafers.
The rest of Brenda was very bereft of clothing. Her voluptuous body was made more exciting to look at by the knee-high black socks; it all reminded Bill vaguely of whips and raw-fleshed, squirming buttocks.
She came into his arms.
She was musky and warm.
Her body exuded sex.
"Love me like always," she said softly, and when he hesitated, Brenda guided his hands to her naked breasts, even placed his fingers around her nipples. Blood surged into them, and they swelled into hard pebble-like tips. She leaned her head back, her eyes narrowed into smoky slits of passion.
Bill felt her naked pelvis grind against him, spreading its warmth through his clothing, getting to him fast. He knew that she could feel his response, and that it caused her to grind with more intensity and eagerness.
There was a peculiar look in her eyes, her lips.
"Let me see you," she said. Her voice came out in chunks of something that should have been solid. He began to undress, but she stopped him with her hand.
"No-I just want to see you!" Her fingers pulled the zipper of his khakis down, found him.
Exposed him.
"Like that." Her body shook now.
He felt her fingers searching him. They were clever, dextrous fingers, roaming on familiar ground. His body began to tremble as hers did. They kissed for a moment, then he saw her, felt her slide downward, her hands against the sides of her swollen breasts.
It was very warm.
Warmer than anything he had ever felt.
And with Brenda, it was a brand new, never-experienced sort of contact, one that filled him with an almost sickening desire. She moved slowly, pressing her soft, smooth breasts against him, surrounding him.
Slowly.
He was reaching the explosion point, and she knew it. She stopped. When her face was level with his, her eyes were closed, and her lips had fallen into telltale slackness. He let her hands shove him gently but insistently against the couch, onto his back, and once more, her head disappeared from his view.
It was enough to tear the top of his head off.
"Ummm," a moaning, languid sound. A choking sound.
"Brenda-" Her name was a barely articulate sound, coming from his strangled, tight throat out of dry lips.
"Umm, good. So good." Her head bobbed gently, like a buoy in gently flowing water. His hands came to rest on top of her silk-haired head, encouraging, pushing, prodding....
Then she stopped.
It was agony.
It was Hell.
"I love you, darling Bill. Do you love me?" Her lips were deep red and thick-painted, shining with moisture.
"God, yes!" he heard himself gasp.
"Then do something for me, please?" It was a plea, but a command too, and Bill knew damned good and well that he would do it, whatever it was.
"Yeah." Damn right. Anything, anything at all, but quick.
"Take me. Do it Greek! I want you like that, bad."
Gods! What was happening to her? What was happening to him? All very profound questions that he stopped asking when she turned a pair of white, shaking buttocks toward him for his inspection.
"Let me lie down," she said. It was more a gasping whimper than a flat statement. Bill got up off the couch, let her lie down on her tummy.
God, what magnificence!
Almost as good from the back as from the front. His hands stroked her buttocks eagerly, feeling their curvature, their smooth-grained texture, their female warmth. He liked the way they separated, the way the cleavage continued down to the shadowy depths of thighs and silk-haired womanhood.
"Now," she whispered tensely, "do it now." He removed his khakis, and lay on top of her. It was a funny, wonderful feeling, the way her buttock'-: arched upward and lifted his body at the stomach. He felt her tremble expectantly under him.
It was slow.
Excrutiatingly delicious.
He sensed her pain, her pleasure, her ambivalence of sensation, which melted slowly into pleasure created by the new, the bizarre-accompanied by a host of psychic twists and turns of her passion-clouded mind.
Her buttocks moved gently, swayingly against his stomach, and their meshing was complete. Her gasps came in quick, hot bursts, and she raised herself on her naked, firm haunches and thrust back and forth at him, forcing him to hold on to her swelled hips with his hands.
"Oooh God!" she screamed, and accelerated her movements against him. It was heaven from the back door. It was the rear entrance to paradise, an infinitely better entrance on Brenda than many women have in the more acceptable sense.
And what went on inside Brenda's throbbing, pretty little head? Simple. A choking sense of the pleasure that she was exciting in her lover, especially now that her thighs were clamped tightly together, which in turn sent a cascade of ecstasy coursing through her.
She achieved the seemingly impossible by having an orgasm, and when she felt Bill surging inside her, the novelty of the embrace made her lose her breath. So hot. So delightful!
"Darling," she moaned into the couch, "darling, darling, it was wonderful."
They slept for a couple of hours, and Bill kept seeing the events in his mind, even while sleeping soundly. He remembered describing her buttocks as a sensualist's paradise, hardly realizing that one day he was to know just how true that was.
Idly, he wondered if Paul Stone did things like that with Peggy.
Hazily, Brenda wondered if Lee Cushing's wife liked it that way.
Dreamily, they slept on, lost in their private, semiconscious thoughts, clinging to one another, while the sun sank and plunged the room into shadowy darkness.
Lee drove home, wondering if Joan would be in a better mood, if this time she really would climb off his back and let him shape his own destiny.
Joan wondered what to wear to the party the next night. As important as brains were among the men, clothes still remained important among the women. Joan did not have closets overflowing and choked with dresses, but what she had was good, some even elegant.
Lee seldom went out, and when he did, Joan always seemed to have the proper dress to suit the occasion.
For some reason, her clothes always looked flashy and in poor taste to her whenever she reviewed them for a Stone party. In her mind's imaginative eye, she could see Paul Stone III, giving her the hypercritical fish-eye. It was ridiculous. Paul Stone was not an old man, or anywhere near it. Perhaps it was his authority, Joan decided. Whatever it was, she wanted to please Stone. It was important for her to secure his approval and notice, for Lee's sake. Since Lee seemed totally disinterested in what Stone thought of him, Joan felt compelled to take over that function.
God knows it would be difficult enough just to make Lee amiable company-to convince him that he had to put up a good pretense of enjoying himself, of being charming. Lee was not the least bit hesitant in revealing his true sentiments.
Lee called it honesty.
Joan called it indifference, rudeness.
It didn't matter. Definitions were relatively unimportant, she thought, choosing an unadorned black dress with a straight line that did more for her curves and lines than she realized. The dress tended to accentuate the soft round curves of buttocks, the long gracefully muscled thighs and legs. It showed her. The real her.
When Paul Stone came home, Peggy had already prepared everything, given instructions to the serving girl, and was in the shower. He could hear the soft hiss of water coming from the bathroom.
One thing about Peggy, he thought. She was a damned efficient woman, someone he could depend on in the final analysis. A man needed a wife like that. If there were one bit of advice he could give to a young man about to get married, or considering doing so, it would be to look at the woman objectively, shut out all illusions of romantic attraction and ask, "Is this woman going to be an asset to my career, or a hinderance? Or nothing, one way or the other?" Thank God Peggy was an asset. She knew how to act as a hostess, knew how to dress, how to conduct herself at other functions, and had a certain charming air about her wherever they were seen together. Except for her occasional rantings-about "Woman's needs," she was a good wife.
In these infrequent moments of evaluation, Paul Stone felt vague, almost indefinable pangs of guilt. There was a certain amount of truth in Peggy's accusations that could not be ignored. And there was that semi-conscious feeling of obligation toward her, due to the fact that they had no children after ten years of being married. In the beginning, he had discouraged a family, as it would make his career attainments that much more difficult to achieve. Peggy had gone along with him.
Years melted away, and still no children.
Now, Peggy was thirty-four, he almost forty, and children seemed out of the question. Besides, he was busier, if anything, than he had been in those early, comparatively carefree days. God, he remembered them! A wave of something like nostalgia or regret swept through Paul, then. They were good days. Insane, highly impractical, but a certain basic goodness....
No time for that now.
He put his brief case inside the study and trudged to the bedroom. It was Friday evening, and he was not going to work, there was the entire weekend for that. No, he would shower and lie down for an hour before dressing. And Peggy seemed to have done everything necessary for the party. Perhaps she would lie down as well.
Then he could make up for the other night. He had been stupid.
Granted, she had behaved irrationally, but he had been undeniably stupid not to appease her. It would have gone a long way toward cementing the growing breach in their relationship. Paul Stone felt something of an obligation to his wife, and having sex with her was a part of it. Somewhere along the line, over the course of years, he had lost interest in her. God knows she tries, he thought, but something's missing somewhere.
There were times when he felt old.
But other times, most of the time, he was full of the veritable juices of desire. He had always been faithful to Peggy, not without temptation. Several young female students, a secretary, all were choice morsels of the past who had made it plain enough that they were available for Dr. Stone.
The shower turned off.
Peggy came out of the bathroom.
A white nappy towel covered her from the breast-tops to patches of thigh two inches above the knee. Her skin was aglow from being rubbed down by the towel, and her hair hung loosely over her shoulders. It struck Paul that he had a desirable wife. At moments like this, it was not too difficult to evoke desire within himself.
"Hello, didn't hear you come in," Peggy said. She stepped lightly across the carpeted bedroom floor, breasts pushing strongly against the towel.
"You were in the shower," he answered. "The table looks nice, dear."
"Thank you. Alice'll be here at seven to get things set up for serving. I don't think there's anything left to do but wait."
There wasn't.
Paul had checked.
He was a thorough man, to an annoying degree. The food was in the refrigerator, waiting to be heated; the hois d' oeuvres were out, and the liquor was out, complete with ice, glasses and mixers. He started to say, "I know," but stopped himself in time.
"You're a dear. I'm going to shower and shave. Then suppose we rest? We have a couple of hours."
Peggy looked at him.
He looked at her.
She nodded.
"Yes, Paul, that would be nice. I'll fix you a drink while you're shaving."
She heard him run the water, then close the shower curtain. It was hard to believe: her husband actually suggesting that they have a roll in the hay before the company arrived. It was totally unlike him. Perhaps it was his way of saying he was sorry, or even more incredible, maybe he was just plain horny. It was hard to conceive of Paul having such human needs as sex. After a while, you started thinking of him as a flawlessly functioning, sterile, antiseptic unit of some kind or another. When he did or said something that smacked of human weakness, it knocked you for a loop.
But now he was going to have her.
God, she thought, it's like going to the Bahamas. It's a real big deal, like the old joke tonight's the night. If those other academic sterile units who called themselves wives knew how important sex was to her, they'd probably nominate her for a community witch burning. But it was better to be burned than to burn constantly, inside.
While the needle-spray beat down on his back, Paul felt his muscles and nerves slowly uncoil into relaxation. The warmth of the water had a drug-like effect, lulling him so that everything seemed distant and pleasantly unreal. It was like being in a vacuum of blessed indifference.
Even Peggy, out there, waiting, was an unreal prospect.
He could quite easily forget her, in here.
He looked at his body. His stomach was flat, his chest hard, his legs firm; not the remotest trace of middle-age spread or decay. Considering the pitifully small amount of physical exercise he got, it was incredible. Finally, he turned off the shower, and stepped out of the tub; as soon as he did, reality came rushing back-choosing a man for the associate professorship, next month's article, the board meeting with the administration, all of it. Sometimes it all seemed like a chore. It was ironic how you sweated and compromised to attain a certain plateau of success, and when you were there, you looked down, and envied those below you, with their blissful absence of man-killing responsibilities and obligations.
He shaved extra close to the skin, finished off with a cold rinse and a handful of Canoe after-shave. It burned. It was expensive. It was profoundly good stuff that he had received last year from a colleague at another university.
When he came out of the bathroom, Peggy was waiting for him. She still wore the towel.
"Here's your drink, Paul." It sat on the night table on his side of the bed. He sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for it. Frozen daquiri. A good one, that went down like silk and hit your stomach like warm, liquid fire. Nice.
"Thanks."
"How was your day?" Peggy asked.
"Fine. How was yours? And yesterday? I didn't see you long enough to talk."
"Today there was the party business. You know. Yesterday, I met a student in your department. The battery went dead in the car, and he was most helpful, not even knowing who I was until I happened to introduce myself."
"Really?" Paul was polite, only mildly interested.
"Bill Holloway. That was his name. Older, about twenty-four or five."
"Oh yes. I believe he's in Cushing's 445 class. I seem to remember the name." Paul took a swallow of his drink. "I have so little contact with students any more."
"Want another drink?" Peggy asked, taking the glass from him.
"No, that's fine. Thanks."
The conversation ground to a halt. They sat on the edge of the bed, looking at one another, and each realized how uncomfortable they felt. Such a wide impasse between them....
Perhaps closable, or the illusion of such, in the depths of physical togetherness, in the clutches of one another's arms, their lips together, searching, clinging, exploring.
Perhaps.
Paul closed his eyes, and with his hands yanked at the towel. It came off, and Peggy Stone was quite naked.
Extremely naked.
As naked as one can get.
Peggy, with her rich abundance of breasts and hips and thighs, Peggy with her groping hands all over Paul's body, gasping for contact, love-starved, sex-starved, Peggy who had lately been given to solitary bathroom fantasies....
"Ahhh God I" she gasped. She squirmed hotly against Paul, drinking in the long-absent sensation of a naked male against her, a naked male with a degree of enthusiasm.
Her hands cupped him tenderly, possessively, and he fell against the mattress dizzily, while she touched him in an infinite number of ways.
Clever ways.
Paul was being caressed by the hands of experience, instinct and hunger. Peggy was a damned resourceful girl, and he was beginning to like it just fine.
She fell on top of him.
Her nipples dug into his chest.
Her stomach rubbed evocatively against his, and her whole body became a flurry of sensuous movement. With a heaving movement, she hiked up until her breast dangled over his lips like offered fruit.
He took it.
Ran his tongue lovingly over the raspberry tip, felt it swell and fill with longing, while his hand instinctively reached for the other breast and held it, cupped it, hefted it for weight and substance.
Now, in late afternoon, he was young again.
Her hands brought his youth into bloom.
The warm liquor worked inside, while her hands worked outside, and their bodies cavorted fitfully on the bed. The lush abundance of her body surprised him. He hadn't thought of it in those terms for a long, long time, and wherever his hands searched, they found flesh. Good solid female flesh. Flesh that seemed much younger than its thirty-four years.
"Paul!" It was a high, piercing whimper that started down in her chest and escaped through moist, red lips. He kissed her. Her tongue searched the back of his mouth while his teeth nibbled gently at her lower lip. She moaned gently into his mouth, filling him with her sighs and pants, while his hands warmed to the task of exciting her.
It wasn't much of a task.
But Peggy was a lot of woman, and there was a lot of ground to cover. It was pleasurable ground, to be sure. His lips traveled along the length of one leg, kissed the hard calves and worked up to the firm, but softer, more yielding thigh. The nerves and muscles quivered to his touch. Higher up, she was dewy with readiness, musky with woman's passion. Awareness of that fact filled him with a butterfly feeling of excitement.
His hands were still fluttering when she guided him slowly, lined him up for the final embrace, her hips and buttocks working rhythmically, his hands on them now, pushing prodding....
"Ooooh PAUL! PAUL! PAUL!" His name forced itself out of her lips with the same rhythm with which her body moved over his. Slow, grinding, revolving. Deliberate. Heated, but calculated.
She was good.
Her thighs were good against his ribs, her buttocks good in his hands as he pushed them down, her breasts good against his chest. It was good. Paul let his head relax against the pillow while her body smacked flesh-ily against his, her thighs holding him with sweet possessiveness. They closed and opened, and his gasps began to match hers with intensity and tempo. It was all done rhythmically-sounds, movements, caresses.
Slow.
Damnably slow. Deliciously slow.
"Paul, hard, Paul, now Paul!" He heard the mattress creak beneath him as their bodies accelerated against one another, as Peggy's gasps softened into inward sighs and that moment of utter loneliness, of solitary reaching for sublimity took them.
Then it was together again.
His fingers kneaded, then pinched the wealth of buttocks-flesh under them. He pulled the cheeks apart, reveled in the splendor of their smoothness, in the thigh's working against him, opening and closing, with a spasmodic gasping motion. He was aware of being surrounded by warm moist passion, of gorging it hungrily with himself.
Then he was aware of only oblivion.
Her screams of pleasure were warm, distant, and only the quickening of their bodie" wa" real. Her palms were hot against his buttocks while his palms were hot against hers, a mutual embrace that brought them close together.
It was a simultaneous explosion.
He saw stars.
If they weren't actually stars, they were something damned close to them, he thought. He tingled, exploded, felt warm, drifting, going somewhere into deep, languorous slumber, and then it was over. He became aware of the weight of her body; it was burdensome, heavy, uncomfortable.
"Thank you, Paul," he heard her sigh, "thank you so much." Then she was asleep.
He looked into her face The eves were shut tight and there was a shadow of a smile on her face, as though she were reliving the pleasure of their act all over again. Quite possibly, she was.
He looked at the clock.
Almost six. Pretty soon, he would have to get dressed and pick up the serving girl, Alice's assistant, at six-thirty. Alice had her own car, but catagorically refused lo pick up the girl who worked with her, and who thus had no way of getting to the Stones' house unless Paul picked her up. It was annoying, because it smacked of inefficiency. And anything inefficient was back there in the bedroom. He had enjoyed her. Efficiency was always possible, even in very human situations. There was no reason why people felt compelled to excuse their incompetence by resorting to pleas of human error and humanity.