Chapter 2
Dim light woke me. I felt the shaking of the train, heard the endless clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.
Time passed.
Again, I woke. This time stronger light was coming through the drawn blind. I felt the light upon my face. It was day out there. I felt sluggish, and I peeled my eyes open slowly. I made an effort to roll onto my side so that I could see out the window. Some weight, something heavy and soft, was pressing down into me and keeping me from moving. What was it? I moved my arms to investigate. What ...
And at that moment I remembered Marianne. An uncomfortable flush of embarrassment rushed through me. At the same moment, I realized what the weight was which held me down, and I recalled the details of the night before. I looked down at the untidy, black head nuzzled into my shoulder, and I felt horror. Who was this woman? Good God, here I was waking up in bed with a woman whose name I only just barely knew ... What was the matter with me? It was ... it was disgusting really. Disgusting. With a shudder, I remembered what we had done. We didn't even know one another, and we had sat there doing those awful things ... I recalled pumping my sperm across her big breasts and then licking it off. Jesus! What must she think of me? What must I think of myself?
Perhaps I ought to make something clear. This was not the first time I had ever woken up in bed with a woman I didn't know-not, thank God, that it had happened very of ten-I could hardly have avoided the situation through all of ten years of bachelorhood in Boston. What astounded and shocked me was the memory of a passion so unbridled as had been mine the night before. I truly had gone far beyond the limits of decency. Decency! Funny that there should be such a concept in relation to events like that, but there is. Or, at least, I have always imposed codes of behavior upon myself. Sex with an unknown woman ought to be antiseptic, professional, and, in any ultimate sense, passionless. I don't say professional to refer to sex with what our Victorian forebearers used to call ladies of the evening. No, I mean professional in the sense of one who has studied all the Joy of Sex literature, one who's achievement is not that he loves his bedmate but that he can make her come thirty-three times in forty-five minutes. One-night-stand sex, I have al. ways felt, is little different from masturbation. Now, it must be clear by this time that I love masturbation, but I would say that I have rarely felt I was doing anything else when with a woman. I hold out the possibility that there is something more to the business than I have experienced, but I have always believed that we ought to begin things-if we have to begin them in bed-with a sense of decency. One ought to do nothing but what is normal. One ought to be deodorized, cleanly shaven, freshly trimmed as regards hair and beard, sufficiently tanned, and masterfully competent. That is only courteous, after all. We may fuck more regularly than did our ancestors although even that is doubtful-but I have always felt constrained to fuck politely.
And that frenzied lust of the night before had been anything but polite. Chivalry had been the last thing I was caring about as I-Oh, God-as I pressed my face deep into her sweating, runny cunt and beat myself off. Remembering her coated membranes glued to my lips, her hair stuffing my nostrils, I shuddered. I could still smell her, on my body, in the room. It was awful. Such lechery. I had a sudden picture of my straining cockhead and the long, agonizing streamers of sperm gushing from its tip to splash against her open cunt. All that sperm, all that white sperm coating her slick cunt. Jesus, it was terrible what I had done. I tried carefully to pull away from this horrid woman. I was beginning to sweat. My movement wakened her though, just a bit, and she murmured something, rubbed her moist face into my shoulder harder, and tightened her grip around my waist. I was trapped.
I lay as still as I could, hardly breathing, dreading the moment when I must face her. How could I have acted so? I'm just not that sort of a man. I care about women. I'd rather have a woman as a friend. I'd rather treat her with respect than suck my own come off her rolling body. If ever I did such a thing with a woman, she'd never ... But wait a minute! I had done those things. Right here, last night. No. Maybe I hadn't. I couldn't have! Not me, not Arthur Alexander, not cautious, civilized, retiring, precise Arthur Alexander. It must have been a dream, an especially satisfying masturbation. I dreamed it all. Of course, that was it! It was just a fantasy. Just a-
Marianne stirred again. This time she slid one thigh up across my groin. I felt the sharp pressure of her crinkly sex-hair against my hip.
No, damn it, it had not been a dream. There was a woman in bed with me. Her name was Marianne, Marianne ... something. She was Greek. Yes, and she spoke French. We had spoken French together. She liked Hamsun and Durrell. She had talked of Cavafy. Now, that was an interesting juxtaposition: Scandanavia and Africa. I wonder ... No, but get back to the point. She had given me drinks. I had cut my thumb. And then ... and then ... I recalled the thick hair in her pretty armpits, and I wondered what it smelled like. Idly, I mused that it might be nice to kiss and suck her there, to take the soft flesh and hair into my mouth and lick it as I trembled a finger tip just on the end of her clit. She'd like that perhaps. She'd arch her pelvis up toward my hand, seeking more pressure, her own lips near my ear, breathing my name, breathing hot breath, breathing ... and her tongue.
But what was I thinking of? I didn't even know this woman. In a moment, she would wake up, and she would be sickened to remember what had occurred. The sight of me would appall her. With icy formality, she would banish me from her compartment-if I were lucky. If I were unlucky, and there was no reason why I ought not to be, I realized that she would call for the conductor and together they would alert the police. An hour from now, I would be in jail on a charge of rape. No decent woman would allow me to do what I had done to her last night and get away with it.
But hadn't she begun it?
It was a small voice which whispered this to me as I lay and sweated and heard the judge reading the charge. It was a small voice, but it told the truth. She had started it.
I had heard about women like that. She was what was the word?-a nymphomaniac. She couldn't help herself, poor woman. She was sick. It was like a disease with her, really. Sad. And so attractive too.
It was obvious that she couldn't get enough. All that talk about beating off while she reads. Pure sophistry! The poor thing can't stop thinking about sex, that's all. I wonder what they can do for you when you're like that. It must be an awful burden to bear. Needing to do things with every man you come across. It would be terrible. The shame she must feel! And how-exhausting it must be. Poor thing.
"Darling?"
Oh, God! She's waking up! What will I do?
"Darling?"
"Yes?"
She raised a lined, puffy face and looked toward me. She said something, but it must have been in Greek.
"What?"
But she dropped her face back and was asleep almost before her head touched my shoulder.
She looked so helpless, so open. Nearly every other woman I have known would have popped up and done something about her appearance. I mean, we were, after all, strangers. She hardly looked fit to receive a stranger. But there was something touching about it anyway. I hadn't noticed it last night, but she could be kind of cute. She had looked like a little kid just then.
Ha! Some little kid. I remembered the feeling of her tight, hot mouth slipping slowly down over my cock, the sensation of her tongue brushing itself against my tingling flesh. There had been something turned inward about her as she sucked my stiff flesh. I felt that she was all alone then, totally concentrated, completely defenseless. It had been both absorbing for her and obsequious. I realized she was sucked my sex with desire for it to penetrate all through her being-and it had just been for a moment of time. I tried to picture it again: her bent head, her hunched shoulders, her naked, splayed legs hugging my calves, the jiggle of the train throwing her slightly backward and forward with my stiff penis up and up in her mouth. I had felt tall then, towering over her, always in command, willing her to suck me. Her slow laving was a worship of this stiff thing I had, and a worship of me, its possessor. I wielded the rod: I thrust into her wet, tender mouth my emotionless, illimitable cock. I fucked her in the mouth, making her face crush itself against my hard pubic bone. I forced her to suck me; and would have made her drink me too. I would have gobbed her throat with thick semen, jetting it deeper and deeper into her poor body until she was swimming with it, until it rose up behind her eyes and dribbled from her nostrils. I would have done this, but I chose to strip her of her clothing instead. I chose to make use of her tits. I chose to ejaculate my sperm across those big globes with their tight, pale nipples. I chose to withhold my hot come from her mouth and to water her instead on the outside. I wanted her to have it on her. I wanted my sticky semen to cover her so that she could feel me dripping and oozing across her big jugs, and I wanted to suck it back into myself once more, to pump it through another time. I wanted to use her but to give her nothing. I wanted to suck her, to lick her, to taste her, but I wanted the skin I used to be running with my juice, my come, my sex. She was nothing to me. She meant nothing to me. She was a cunt only. A big cunt. She had breasts and a mouth. That was all. Just a cunt, a cunt to worship myself with, a cunt for my pleasure. A cunt, a big pair of knockers, a round ass, a mouth to suck me with: what more was there to her? I knew her not at all. I neither liked nor disliked her. She was a cunt, and she would be used as a cunt and I did.
And I realized I was tumescent. I would use her again.
It was her wet breath misting me perhaps, or her squashed soft breast against my ribcage. In any case, my sex once more desired release through the medium of her body. One hand lay lightly on the neat small of her back, just before her flesh swelled outward into her hips. Her flesh was very hot underneath the covering of sheets and blankets. My fingers slid easily, my palm rubbing just at the ends of the light hairs which downed her spine. Presently, as my caress continued in its small circle, she breathed deeply, sighed, and placed a flaccid kiss upon my chest. The thigh she had draped over me snuggled closer, hugging my hips. "Don't stop," she commanded me without waking up.
Putting aside all my doubts about the situation I fixed my mind on the image of what her rear must look like just now. I saw her strong thighs rising, one next to mine, the other laid across me rising in their sweeping lines of opulent flesh to the deep crease which must divide her white ass. I thought of what her big cunt would look like from behind that way, of her ass again-always of her ass. Her ass would be pale, and wide, and loose against me. Her big ass, her fine ass, her magnificent ass!
I think I mentioned before my affection for a beautiful posterior. Marianne's, as I recalled it in her tight slacks of the night before, was sufficient to restore the life of a man ten years dead. I slipped my hand down across one of her cheeks until I held the whole of her wealth of heavy flesh in my grasp. What delight! I felt her small hairs. Her skin was smooth and humid from the heat. I trailed my fingertips lower until they brushed down onto the back of her thigh. Those creases are as beautiful to touch as to see, and they are as engrossing to see as to kiss, but perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. This was my first exploration of Marianne's ass, and for all I knew, it would be my last. Accordingly, I took my time.
There is something about an ass-how can I explain it? When, perhaps I need no explanation. We're all ass-men, aren't we, as offensive as that expression may be. I think it is that the ass is the foundation of it an, literally as well as figuratively. Of course, it is, as they used to say, the sit-me-down-upon. That makes it the physical foundation. The legs rise into the ass. The back descends to the ass. From behind, a woman is a beautiful object (as, certainly, she is from before). But the ass is something else as well. Animals fuck from behind. Apes fuck from behind. For how many hundreds of millions of years has the sight of a lovely ass been sufficient to excite a male? And not just the sight. With my antiseptic lovers of the past, sight had to suffice. But it is smell that does the trick. No self-respecting dog keeps his nose out of his bitch's ass, nor would the bitch make a point of perfuming herself with the essence of roses. There was a woman once, a swampy hippie, who had the most delicious odor ... She also made good sauerbraten. She was a bore, though, in the end (or, it was in the end that she wasn't a bore; she was a bore eventually). But the smell of an excited cunt mixed with the smell of a loose asshole: ah! C'est bon!
And one may always anticipate. Here was Marianne's great ass under my fingers. She had smelled good last night. I was sure she smelled and looked-and tasted-as exciting from behind as she did from the front. I dipped a long finger unctuously along her crease until I slid it across the crinkled hole of her ass itself. Her breathing changed again then, and she slipped her thighs more widely apart, at the same time tilting her hips backward so that her bottom was more openly stretched. From then on, her shammed sleep fooled me not one bit.
I proceeded in my manipulations, and her breathing grew more quick. The top of her crease dove between her cheeks at a certain angle, and then it dipped around her tail-bone and slid down toward the back of her cunt. That's where her asshole lay, and that's where a faint film of sweat had gathered, due, no doubt, to the heat of her body under its coverings. My middle fingertip slid across the smooth rim of her asshole again and again, as though it had been oiled. There was a soft padding of hair around her asshole, and this crinkled against the smooth skin of her cheeks, but the main attraction was the gradually loosening rim of her hole itself. Before long, I had dipped one joint of my finger into her body and was rubbing repeatedly at the muscular walls inside her. Marianne's face pressed deeper into me, as she elevated her hips the more, and I enjoyed the sensation of manipulating her entire body with the intrusion of one small finger in her ass. I felt as though I were shaking her soul as I wriggled and twisted my way more deeply down her tight, narrow passage. Now two joints were inside of her. She was pinioned by me, helpless, flung. Her hips pumped upwards and then down, pressing first her ass against my palm, and then her cunt against my hip. Her asshole was eating my finger. She was working me into her rectum with the clinging rim of her hole. I allowed myself to be sucked in. Allowed? No. I pressed in my stiff finger myself, fucking into her ass until I was all the way there, until her bowels opened up and I was into their recesses.
And now I really had her. Now she could not move away from my finger. Now she was planted. Now she was fucked. I controlled her quite. I rubbed myself up and down in her slick, tight passage, masturbating her asshole, causing with each plunge a great exhalation and a moan. Her legs were twitching and thrashing. Her torso bumped and heaved upon mine. Her mouth sucked my skin, bit, clung, kissed, panted, and then sucked again. Her arms hugged me tighter and tighter. She began a breathless litany of "Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes yes!"
I felt her frenzied squirming to place her clit in contact with something that would rub it harder and harder as she was being ploughed in the asshole. I took pity on her. It was awkward, but I managed to worm my unoccupied hand under her soft belly and down to the nest of hair she kept between her heaving thighs. As my fingers closed over the whole hot mound of her sex, she groaned against me and her mouth came up to plant itself, wet and frantic, upon my own. Our teeth rubbed against each other, our gums were slippery upon one another: the kiss was hurried, inexpert, searching for something beyond the possibility. She needed to have it all, all sensation, all the holes of her body filled with me. Her tongue battered at my lips, slobbering her saliva across the lower portion of my face. Her moaning was almost constant now, and she flung her body wildly. My finger in her asshole was growing stiff with its exertions, but I continued to masturbate her clinging anal canal while the bulk of my titillation was undertaken by the fingers I used upon her clit. And her clit, allow me to say, was enormous. I had never encountered such excitement in a woman, nor an organ which could swell to such a size. It was nearly as big as a marble, trembling erotically at the top of her loose and running lips. Oh, the joy of caressing her there!
And now words were pouring from her, senseless, endless, without thought: "Yes, darling, yes! You are making it come. Oh, you are so hard in me. In my ass. In my asshole. In my asshole! You are in my asshole and making me come! I-oh, Jesus!-I love it. Yes, my asshole! Oh, my ass. Make my ass come. Make it come! Oh, darling, make it come for me!"
I redoubled my efforts, fucking her before and behind with an energy which came from her excitement. My imagination soared. My cock was stiff as a board against her thigh. My own hips were beating a pulse of their own against her wrenching flesh. My finger was almost numb up her asshole with the tightness of her clenching and the long, loose sucking which alternated with it. It was actually as though her asshole were dragging me deeper inside her bowels-and then she came. Her teeth happened to be on my chin at the time, and they bit hard as the climax swept across her. Fortunately, my face was slippery with sweat and her saliva, so no damage was done. But her orgasm was such as to blind her to all other things except her own pleasure.
As her terrific convulsions ceased, I pulled my long, sticky finger from her asshole, feeling her channel clench itself all behind my length. And then I was out of her body, and she curled herself into a fetal ball and was asleep before I realized what was happening.
She had rolled so her back was toward me. I looked down at her unconscious head almost with love. There was again that complete defenselessness which I had noted before. This woman was extraordinary! At one moment, she was begging me to fuck her asshole harder with my finger, and in the next, totally calm, she was asleep, leaving me to think and do anything I wished. She never seemed to need the business of defending herself, such a business as most of us spend most of our time doing.
But I was unrelieved. My cock was rigid still, although it might have lost some of its tightness after her orgasm. But the memory of her still stirred inside me and kept my sperm anxious to be out and away. Likewise, the smell of her cunt and asshole, newly anointing my hands, enlivened me.
I began rubbing the underside of my wide cockhead against her back. I didn't want to waken her, but I wanted to maintain some sort of contact with her while I masturbated. The feeling of her warm skin was enough to make me realize that it wouldn't be very long. I tightened my hand around myself, pumped up and down a few times, and almost immediately I felt the gathering of sperm and the beginning of the orgasm. It came out of me fatly and hard, and I looked down to watch the semen splash against her back from the red opening at the end of my straining sex. There wasn't much-I had been rather active over the last twelve hours-but the sensation was terrific. All my needs seemed to have been fulfilled. And I have always enjoyed watching come run across a woman's body.
Or, let me say that at that time of my life which I have to remember as the beginning of my life-I had always dreamed of watching come puddle and smear. Everything I had done with Marianne in the last twelve hours had been like some long fantasy to me. I had always wanted to do those things, but I had grown accustomed to the realization that I never would. Additionally, and I do not think I am reading anything into the event from the point of view of what I now know happened after all this, I began to feel the first stirrings of an understanding of what sex is really all about. Never before had it occurred to me that such intimacy was possible with anyone who was not even a particularly strong acquaintance. I knew not the first thing about Marianne, but, for example, my hang-up about masturbation my love of it, that is-was being fulfilled without guilt or remorse on either side. The fact that she liked it herself took away any of the lingering doubts of my maturity which I had always harbored because of my practice. Now I could indulge in it with a clear conscience. Not that that in itself was to the good. The benefit of all that was that I could then operate with her-at least upon the sexual level-as fitted my true personality. I didn't have to pretend, and therefore I was free both to enjoy the present and to anticipate some real growth in the future. What had always been a' practice that stirred but was ultimately disappointing-sex, I am speaking of-now promised to be much more.
I suppose that I too must have slept, with my wilting cock glued to her back. At least, I recall nothing more until I realized that she was awake and dressed; that the sun was streaming through the opened window, that the Swiss mountains were everywhere for the eye to see, and that it must be nearly the middle of the morning.
"Hi,"
Her voice was cheerful, her smile frank, and her face lovely.
"Hello."
"Want something to eat?"
"Well," I looked around to get my bearing some more. "Where are we?"
"Between here and there. We'll be in Geneva in a little under two hours."
This reminder of our imminent parting did me no good, but the day was bright, and there seemed to be no recrimination in her manner. I decided to take my cue from her.
"Sure," I answered her former question. "Let's eat."