Chapter 4
"So tell me, Howard, you single, married, goin' steady, or what?" Murray asks.
"Single, no attachments, Murray; why do you ask?"
"What choo see is what choo get, more or less, if you want it that way, if you won't get all bent outta shape an' take it the wrong way, know what I'm sayin' here?"
"Telling me that some of this stuff is not adverse to having a nice time of an evening-the real thing instead of in front of a camera-if I understand you correctly."
"That's right, pal."
"Listen uh, pal; I hear what you're saying and when this is all over, maybe I'll give it a whirl.
"Right now, however, I've still got these twenty-five tapes to go through, before I can release them to you for distribution."
"Boo! Censorship! Foul! First Amendment violation!"
"Glad to see you're being so mature about this, Murray."
"Well whad'd joo expect? I gotta make a living, y'know. First y'take away three weeks out of a month's work, an' now you're tellin' me I can't sell the others either?
"Come on, Howard! I thought we were friends!"
Howard thinks this last over for a moment before replying, "We are, Murray, we are.
"This is for your own protection, don't cha see? "Say I release the resta your stuff, sight unseen. "Say it goes to California or wherever, gets reproduced a jillion times and goes into general distribution.
"And somebody discovers-oops! Somehow, underage stuff got through here, slipped between the cracks.
"Or somebody's eating or drinking something they shouldn't be-a sure-fire killer in every state in the union.
"Murray, relative to what we discussed before, you don't want, you can't have another hassle of any kind with the law.
"Look. Tell ya what I'm gonna do.
"I'll leave the twenty-five tapes here with you, I'll come back tomorrow and go over them-again with you.
"Chances are, they're all okay, right?"
"Absolutely."
"Well then, there we are, y'see?
"Clean bill of health and nothing comes back to haunt you. Plus, we can go over some more personal things, such as ways and means to get-and stay-in the good graces of one Randy Buck."
"And then there's that," Murray says, ruefully.
"Fraid so, old buddy.
"Look at it from Randy Buck's point of view, after all. What reason does he have to let you live right now-assuming of course, that the rumors about him are true?"
"I don't uh, I'm not quite sure-"
"Rhetorical question, Murray; don't stain yourself. I wouldn't have asked if I didn't know the answer.
"The reason is that a file exists and is proliferating, even as we speak, establishing a causal link between yourself and what has just befallen him."
"But I don't see-"
"Of course you don't, old buddy. This is where I come in.
"We are going to cause you-based on this present inquiry-to expand and amplify your statements in connection with the affaire Sally.
"This expansion, this ... clarification is to serve as the basis upon which one Isidore Zuckerman will review in detail-with me-the ramifications of anything untoward happening in your life, Murray, this being the diplomatic channel of communication to Randy Buck.
"In this manner will we ensure that the biography of one Murray Weiner, graphic social commentator on our times-ya like that?"
"It works for me," Murray concurs. "-will have many, many Chapters yet to run." "Amen," Murray says.
"So. I gonna leave ya now, as Dean Martin used to say. Oh, gimme that address for this Helen before I go."
Helen's house proves to be the bottom of duprex.
Helen herself proves to be heavily reminiscent of Dierdre, Susan's mother-right down to the housecoat she's wearing.
"What can I do for you Mister... Delaney?" Helen says, looking at the card he has handed her.
"Actually, I'm here to see Susan.
"We traced her to her possible connection with you by means of a videotape seized in conjunction with others in a matter of no concern to you."
"Damn right it's of no concern to me! Susan was over eighteen when that tape was made."
"Not a matter in contention here, I assure you, Helen."
"We're on a first name basis, are we?"
"Uh, somehow, I've come to feel as though I know you intimately."
Helen laughs, saying, "That's very well put uh-" consulting the card again, "Howard. Come in, won't you?"
Delaney steps into the entrance hail and Helen startles him by calling over her shoulder, "Susan! A gentleman is here to SEE you!"
"I don't KNOW any gentlemen!" comes a reply from somewhere in the house; in the same sing-song voice.
"Then it's time you got ac-QUAINT-ed."
Then, to Delaney, "Don't look so surprised, Howard; would it have done any good for me to deny knowing her or even to say she's not here and I have no idea where she is?"
"Not much," Delaney concedes. "Like the housecoat, by the way?"
"Do you really?" Helen says, modeling it for him. "Susan got it for me."
So that she could dress like Diedre, no doubt, Delaney reflects.
And-here she is. Susan.
Susan, in short shorts and tube top, even though it's winter.
"Susan, this is-"
"A cop, right?"
"Lawyer. State attorney's office, actually, assigned to the county's sexual battery unit."
"Too late."
"I know, and I'm, I'm ... sorry. For what's happened to you at home, that is. The unit was never informed at the time.
"Your mother is very concerned about you."
"Again, too late."
"Yes, well, I'm sure she'll be relieved to know where you are and that you're all right."
"Never better. Anything else?"
"You did drop out of school.?
"Over eighteen. Law says I can do that, mister lawyer."
"Not here to debate that, Susan. Your mother has filed a complaint-"
"Oh yeah? Funny, how she never had a complaint in the world when that animal Larry was around. She tell ya about Larry, did she? She tell ya what I used t'do with him-while she watched, while she joined in the fun and games?
"She proud of what she did and what she didn't do, is she, now?
"What did she complain about? She file a missing person report or something? Well, as you can see, I'm not missing. Got a few screws loose, maybe, couple bricks short of a full load, perhaps, but missing the whole bod? What's it look like t'you?"
"As an expression of her concern for you, Susan, she took information she apparently learned from you concerning the activities of certain of your former classmates and-"
"That hypocritical bitch! That defective excuse for a douchebag!
"She ah, she didn't cause Murray any trouble, did she? I mean, like, who the fuck is she to hassle anybody?"
"At uh, at considerable loss of time and money, Mr. Weiner was able to form a defense sufficiently strong that the state was able to dismiss the charges arising from the complaint, which your mother subsequently withdrew."
"When it was too late."
"As I say, she managed to put Mr. Weiher through a pretty good meat grinder."
"A man she never met, didn't know, didn't know anything about-his life, she manages to put in the dumper.
"Whereas the scumbag responsible for, for-never mind. You wouldn't believe me If! told you."
"Ah, but I would, Susan. I've seen the uh, home videos?"
Susan laughs derisively, then says, "She keeps those around then, does she? Gets her jollies off watching them?
"You two had sodas and popcorn going over them, didja?"
"I saw enough to come to some appreciation of the problem."
"Did you really, now?"
"Look, Susan, what should I tell your mother, other than the fact that I found you?"
"Since when is a lawyer on the state's payroll a messenger boy?"
"In return for her cooperation in saving the state a great deal of time and money, the state is prepared to go to considerable lengths in satisfying what it considers to be the legitimate concerns of a citizen.
"If you choose to view this as playing messenger boy, then so be it.
"I assure you, I am immune to such insults, if that was your intent."
"Nah! I got nuthin' against you; hell, I don't even know you.
"This is just the way I am whenever somebody brings up the subject of mommy dearest. And if you really understood what the fuck you were looking at on those tapes, you'd know why."
"Sexual battery can take many forms, Susan."
"And not all of them lead to bruises, is what you're tryna say, right?"
"On the contrary, they all do, one way or another; sometimes, the bruises we see are the least of the injuries sustained."
"That's clever, y'know? Pushing all the right buttons, are you? Calm, sympathetic, insightful, charitable, forgiving-only I don't buy it, Howie.
"What'd she do-seduce you?
"Convince you t'use the full resources of the state to find me, your badge or whatever to confront me?
"Been in that hot box of hers, haveya, Howie?"
"I don't think that's any of your-"
"You're right, Howie. It's not only none of my business, but I could care less, so how does that grab ya?
"But, getting back to your question, what do I want to tell my mother? What message shall we send with Howie when we wind him up and send him back for seconds?
"Ah, I have it!
"A picture is worth a thousand words, Howie, so how's about a little live action, Howie-baby?
"Something to report back to big mama, after you get back there and she takes the edge off and you get down to the talking phase between rounds.
"Sorry you won't be able to offer film at eleven, Howie, but we don't have a video camera in the house, or for that matter a VCR over the tube.
"Sounds positively uncivilized, doesn't it?
"Not to worry, though; I'm sure your powers of observation and memory will stand you in good stead.
"Come on upstairs with us."
"But I-"
"Useless to argue with her, when she gets like this, Howard, I can assure you. One does what one must, because one simply has no other choice."
Helen takes Susan's hand and the two women precede Delaney upstairs.
The two women go into a bedroom, where they strip at once, as quickly as possible.
And there is something about the bare reality, the glandular abundance, the absolute thereness of female flesh that no camera can capture, no screen can display.
And Delaney can see Helen's point about the unarguable nature of the situation.
Because it is as choreographed, as flowingly inevitable and as natural as an expert ballet performance.
As the nude Susan strips the bed of its covers with a fluorish.
As the nude Helen, all bust and bum and bush, centers herself in the bed.
As Susan is upon her at once, her handling of the older woman's large breasts exactly the attentions Delaney himself would have paid them, under similar circumstances.
Indeed, Susan's entire technique seems to duplicate Delaney's own, so that he has this eerie ability to predict and almost to will the next move, and the next and the next.
And now, Susan is crouched before Helen's crotch, burrowing avidly into it, hands on the backs of Helen's hefty raised, spread thighs.
So that Delaney has a perfect view of Susan's ass hole and cunt, as Susan strums Helen's large (and Diedre-like) clit with her flickering tongue, almost as though Susan had been somehow present when Delaney did his thing with her mother, and is even now engaged in a mocking parody, a deliberate repetition, with Helen.
Ah, but here, now-a departure.
As Susan draws back and Helen lowers her legs.
As Susan reverses herself in the bed and straddles Helen's body, planting a knee on either side of her.
So that here, now, Susan's face is above Helen's snatch, while Susan's crotch hovers above Helen's face.
And now, Susan plunges her open mouth down onto Helen's bush, inserting her hands between Helen's thighs in a diving motion.
And now, Susan is wallowing in Helen's juicy cunt with her tongue, hands on the backs of her thighs, doubling her up, bringing her ass hole into oral range, taking advantage of the position to suck her bung.
As Helen reaches up with both hands, grabbing the belied flare of Susan's wide hips and lowering her pelvis carefully onto her face, or rather slightly in front of it, thus providing herself with a pair of oral targets of her own.
And now, Helen is exploring Susan's cunt lips and ass hole, joy buzzer and hot, juicy depths with her tongue.
As Delaney misses nothing of the action, checking it out from every angle, memorizing the scene in its detailed entirety, not for Diedre, whom he has not yet decided to see-or not to see-again, but rather for himself, for the library of his mind, where this is a tape which is surely to be summoned often, whenever inspiration lags or present company lacks.
Because this, this! is reality.
And not merely the physical, the pragmatic fact, the truth of its total thereness, either, but the aura, the tingling atmosphere of desire on desire, of desire knowing desire, of desire giving itself totally to its like.
Reverse mirror images, they are, the magic of like with like in full sexual action.
And there is about them a completeness which bespeaks an utter contentment in the midst of excitement, a deep satisfaction in the midst of deep and abiding hunger, a peace which is at the same time restless, insatiable.
And Delaney knows that he is in the presence of the pleasure beyond pleasure, its flame lambent within them both, fanned now to a roaring blaze by each others' lascivious presence, by their drooling desire to know each other, to know themself in the other, to realize-make real-their sexual ideal, which Delaney knows that Susan finds in her own mother, in that presence, naked, vulnerable, glandular, voluptuous and yes, perhaps even despite herself, lascivious, when they were in bed together, Larry separating them even as he brought them together, Larry calling the shots even as nature took its course, Larry the agent of the action and its controller.
Even as he was as well the spoiler and the despoiler of their lives.
Perhaps Susan would never have had the courage to go after her own mother, to commit that incest which Larry brought peripherally, just so far, into their bed, stopping short always of the actual act of the two of them working out as is now the case between Susan and Helen, filling in for Diedre at bottom half.
Or perhaps, but for Larry, such thoughts, such fascination, such obsession would never have occurred to, within Susan.
Who can say where the mind will run in the face of inescapable physical outrage?
Who knows what defense mechanisms the brain will invent to protect itself, to adapt to the atavistically unacceptable?
And what could he have done, Delaney asks himself, to prevent what happened?
What laws would he enact, what regulations would he advocate, promulgate, If given the power, even dictate, in order to ensure that the likes of a Larry can never again so bend that part of the world under his sway that, when he is finished, the lives of all within that microcosm are forever warped, forever ruined, forever beyond all hope of redemption?
Or is he barking up the wrong tree, off base in his understanding of human nature?
Because Murray was telling him the truth about the girls; he is absolutely convinced of this.
And surely they did not, do not all live in houses of aberration, of bizarre, salacious perversion.
And yet-and yet.
How explain their actions, their behavior in Murray's presence.
No Svengali he, and no Mack the Knife, either.
He has neither the power to convince nor to intimidate, has Murray.
And he was wrong about being in control of his situation at any point along the way.
Not his direction, but rather some inner voice of which his was, for the most part, the coincidental echo, did they listen to, did they follow, did they obey.
No, it is clear to Delaney now that Murray was not the cause, but rather the occasion of the girls' doing as they did.
And yet, that made him no less guilty. Because one of the earliest admonitions he can recall, not of the law, but of catachism, was to flee the occasion of sin.
Because it is entirely possible that all, the most crass, most cynical of manipulators is himself manipulated by the occasion, by the opportunity, by the thereness of that which goes beyond mere temptation.
Temptation implies choice, and to flee the occasion of sin, given a free will, seems to Delaney a very cowardly thing to do. No, far from fleeing, Delaney chose first to face, then to succumb to temptation.
Because, after all, who can tempt us but ourselves?
So that in surrendering to temptatipn, what was he being, to whom was he surrendering if not himself?
And what is this he is seeing, if not self serving, serving and servicing self?
Look, just look! at their tongues, at the least of their body movements now.
What is action here, what reaction?
Who is doing what to whom first, or are they not instead doing it to themselves, the other become but an extension of oneself?
Hotter and hotter the two women become, as Delaney watches, their bodies glistening now, live statues in marble in the soft light of the bedroom, drifting in through the slats of the partially drawn Venetian blinds.
For them, he no longer exists, is not there, he knows.
Susan may have started out to shock him and, through him, her mother; but this is something completely different now, has evolved into something so fundamentally erotic, so completely self involved as to preclude anybody or anything else entering into that closed, closed and sealed universe they have created for themselves, within themselves.
As they climb the rainbow of their shared arousal.
As they rise from level to level of erotic sensation.
As delight becomes ecstasy, ecstasy rapture.
And perhaps this is a part of it too, Delaney reflects.
One begins with a plan, not as positive action, but as reaction, as a refection of the frustrations, anxieties, weaknesses and shortcomings which prompted it.
One goes from there to a clever or stupid, ingenious or brutal operating concept, a means of overcoming or at least defying the present situation.
But, at a certain point, the objective clarifies, simplifies, shows itself for what it really is, which is the pursuit and the attainment of the ultimate pleasure.
And so it is with these two.
Delaney cannot say what it is that prompts Helen to go along as she does with Susan.
Perhaps it is mere opportunism on her part, a chance to take advantage of whatever it is that Susan sees in her-and Delaney knows very well what that is-the better, the more frequently to know the pleasure beyond pleasure, to know it in that form which is most acceptable to herself.
But, whatever the case, regardless of who is manipulating whom, they have reached that stage, that level at which there can be question of manipulation, but only that of sensation, of degree of sensation, of proximity to their capacity to contain the ever-rising tide of lascivious feeling.
And now, as Delaney watches, as he puts his face right down there, a mechanic checking the undercarriage of a vehicle on a rack, he sees their motion become erratic, sees their pussies convulse graspingly to extract from their ever-working tongues that last full measure of pleasure.
Orgasm after orgasm convulses them both.
Again and again they experience that exquisite, irresistible, all-encompassing twinge of the supreme experience.
What would they not do, what would Delaney not do, in order to experience that, in order to guarantee the occasion of experiencing that?
Surely, that is the rare and precious grail, the alchemist's gold, the ultimate and in fact only true goal of human existence.
And it's right there, there within themselves, given the right partner, the right means of extracting it, drawing it out, calling it forth.
Delaney sees that now, sees that there is no pretense, no fakery, no performance involved here.
There is only the pleasure and the pleasure and the pleasure, going on and on within the sweating, writhing bodies, pinned, anchored to each other by their tongues.
And yet, even as they drift together back down from their shared sexual paradise, Delaney knows that Susan has accomplished what she has set out to do, has fulfilled the prompting of her ulterior motive.
Because she has shown Delaney herself, her true and undisguised self, in the throes of her genuine experience of the ultimate pleasure-attained, achieved with and by means of this woman who so very much resembles Diedre.
But will Delaney go along with the program here?
And if he does, what will he say, how will he describe what he has just seen?
Will he tell Diedre of Susan's (to him) blatant desire for her?
Will he risk what could well prove to be yet another degree of degradation of Diedre, a triumph, in absentia and after the fact, on the part of the perverted, quite possibly even demented Larry?
And now, he watches them as Susan lets herself collapse to one side of Helen, still reversed-and covers her eyes with her forearm, sobbing.