So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented
colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell.
Herman
Melville, Moby Dick
I
went to see
I
was more than a half-hour late. She said
that Marsha would be there to visit her in a few minutes, and that I should go
before she got there. She asked me if I
would get a telephone number for her, in her address book on her chest of
drawers in the house on
On
the way out of the hospital, I ran into Marsha and her husband in the
lobby. Marsha excused herself and went
upstairs leaving me there with her husband.
He was an ex-football player.
I
asked, “How’s
everything?”
He
shrugged his shoulders.
“How’s
Marsha?”
“Same.”
“Uh huh.”
“I
wouldn’t say that.”
“What
do you mean?”
“Well,
they kick me out when they get together in the afternoons.”
“Oh. I didn’t know. I mean she didn’t say anything about it.”
“What?”
“I
mean I didn’t know that they saw each other so much.”
“Oh
it’s no more than two or three times a week.”
There was no irony in his voice.
I
asked, “Did you
see the Mets game?”
“Yeah.”
He
didn’t seem interested in the Mets. I
changed the subject back to his wife, abruptly, “I suppose your wife stays up there
half the night.”
He
said, “She
doesn’t spend as much time with me, as she does with that...” He didn’t finish.
I
asked, flat-footed, “Do
you think they are doing anything?”
He
didn’t say anything.
I
persisted, “Well?”
“I’m
sworn to silence, man. My lips are
sealed.
I
lied, “I know
they’re lesbians. I mean bisexual.” He remained silent and after a long and
uncomfortable pause, I mumbled, “Well, take it easy.” I turned my back on him and walked through
the automatic glass doors of the hospital, and ran into a nurse who was
picketing outside. Her protest sign catapulted
into a hedge. We both landed on our
butts on the sidewalk, unhurt. She apologized profusely and I accepted her
apology, even though I was certain that it was my fault. I felt better.
Helen
and Tilly were in
Jack came in through the back door, silently, stealthily, feeling
like a thief. He came in at exactly twenty minutes to eight, he knew,
because the first thing he saw was the huge clock over the refrigerator, and he
noticed it, right off.
The
house was gloomy and there were a lot of dishes in the kitchen sink. The radio was playing upstairs. Two wine glasses and a half empty jug of Almaden sat on the table. He reasoned that Helen and Tilly had left them there just before they had gone to
visit
He
knew that whenever they left the house empty, they double-locked the front door
and left the radio on, because they had been robbed seven times in three years. He thought it would be pleasant for a thief
to drink a glass of wine in the kitchen, listening to the music from the radio
upstairs to get relaxed before robbing the joint.
It
was Sitar music. Probably
I
got an old jelly jar down from the cupboard, causing cockroaches to scurry to
safety, sat down in the shadows and poured wine into it. I sat there drinking in the dark. The wine, the music and the singing sent a
flame into my belly. The silence of the
kitchen seemed to distill a feminine essence from the walls, the pictures, the furniture.
Little
muscles in my rib cage began to vibrate and waves of sexual energy spread into
my pelvis and thighs. But the energy
dissipated upwards into my neck and face, and downwards into my calves, and a
tiny knot began to form in my stomach.
I
got up and walked to the foot of the staircase.
As I went up the stairs to
When
I reached her room, a rush of blood went to my head and the little address
book, sitting demurely on the dresser, seemed like a precious document.
I
emptied the jelly jar, stopped, closed my eyes, and for many delicious seconds,
listened to the frenzied singing of the women.
Then I picked up the little book and began to glance at the names.
Her
ex-husband’s name was there. And Tilly’s name: Ann Tillotson
Hutchinson. I placed the empty jar on
the dresser and put the book in my jacket pocket.
The
hall was dark, but the summer twilight streamed through the skylight and
filled Tilly’s room with an unnatural golden-red
light.
A
squawking sound sent an explosion of electricity into my solar plexus. It came from Tilly’s
room. It sounded like a window
opening. I was petrified. I squared my body, getting ready to intercept
a thief coming through the window. But the only sounds were music and the
women.
The
large mirror on the dresser in Tilly’s room reflected
red from twilight clouds back onto the brass bed and into my eyes. The light was dazzling and I studied the room
in the mirror five or ten seconds before I saw them.
Tilly’s naked back was facing the mirror and Vida’s chin
was resting on her shoulder. I almost
cried out loud with surprise. Vida’s
eyes were closed and her head was moving from side to side. She had a stupid
looking smile on her face.
In
the mirror, I followed Tilly’s long, slim arm to
where it disappeared into Vida’s black bush.
The bush was illuminated by a bright patch of light, while the rest of
her body was bathed in twilight. I could
see the pink vulva clearly, as it strained against the thrusting stump that
rhythmically disappeared almost to the elbow and then reappeared. The handless arm popped out, and like a giant
penis, massaged the lips and clitoris.
The
music was loud and I was hidden in total darkness. They kissed passionately. Vida fell back on
the bed and they began to French kiss. Tilly grabbed her black, bushy pony tail with her left hand
and guided her stiff, eternally erect penis under Vida’s buttocks. The pink
vulva was in full view in the large splash of light from the mirror, and the
clitoris was a long, wet line that looked like a Judy Chicago plate
design.
The
gleaming stump found the anus and there was a dull grunt as she slipped it into
the hole and began a steady, rhythmic, in and out motion. She disengaged her mouth from Vida’s and went
down, never stopping the gentle, rhythmic movement of her stump.
I
could see her profile facing the cunt, licking, nose fucking, and all the while
thrusting her arm in and out of the anus and twisting it from side to side as it
went in and out.
Vida’s
shaking orgasm took everyone by surprise and I suddenly I realized that I had
to get out of there without being detected.
They moved into 69 position and very quickly,
Vida began to mount to another orgasm. I
watched another frightening display of feminine bestiality.
Tilly sat up and they licked her stump and then each
other’s faces and then locked themselves together again, face-to-cunt.
I
wanted to start back down stairs, but my feet were glued to the carpet and I
watched them for a full five minutes, as they seemed to tear each other
apart. Then, suddenly, Vida disengaged
herself, arched her back and face to the ceiling, and began a whining, begging
chant: “Do me. Do it.
Do me.”
The
same gleam came into Tilly’s eyes that I had seen
when I first saw her cutting the hedge.
She raised her wet stump, until it was in front of her face, all wet and
red at the tip, sucked it, and then went down again, resting her forehead on
Vida’s stomach, while she massaged her vulva with her stump.
The
red tip moved slowly, down into the black triangle of hair, insinuated itself
into the pink folds in a twisting movement, and disappeared again, almost to
the elbow. Vida collapsed like a rag
doll onto her back across the bed, and swung her legs onto Tilly’s
shoulders.
Tilly got down onto her knees, on the floor. Her blood-engorged, maniacally grinning face
appeared between Vida’s thighs and the fucking became truly furious.
The
needle came to the end of the long playing LP and the arm returned
automatically to its cradle. The room
filled with subdued shrieking noises.
I
was afraid that my stifled gasping for breath would start the walls rattling,
and that I would be discovered by them, there, with my pants down around my ankles,
so to speak, in the darkened corridor.
But
Vida was beginning another orgasm and they couldn’t hear anything. “Oh” and “Don’t Stop” and “There.”
Suddenly
she put a pillow over her face to muffle her screams.
I
was walking backwards, very slowly, and couldn’t see them anymore. The brass
bed squeaked on the floor and, from under the pillow, Vida began to grunt and
squeal like a pig and an image entered my mind:
a bunch of squealing baby pigs that I had seen a couple of weeks before,
on a Gunsmoke episode, where Matt Dillon and Kitty
chased piglets around the saloon, through the swinging doors, and outside onto
the boardwalk. They fell into the mud in
the street below, laughing uproariously at one another.
The
squealing broke into a melodramatic, muffled shriek that cracked at the top of
Vida’s throat and lasted for about twenty or thirty seconds.
During
the shriek, I walked backwards, quite fast, down the stairs holding firmly to
the railing because the wine had gone to my head. I tested the sureness of each backward step
before letting go of the railing. Then,
at the bottom of the stairs, while the shriek was ending, I lost my balance and
fell into a floor lamp. I caught the
stem, just before the lamp hit the ground.
I
became perfectly silent, listening for a sign that they had heard me, but the
fucking sounds and the moaning had started again. I heard the bed moving again on the hardwood
floor above me, and what I imagined to be more stump fucking, as I walked
through the kitchen, towards the back door.
On
the gravel driveway, the cool Bay Area night fog and the darkening sky seemed
like a personal gift from the Gods to my crimson, hot face.
In
the car, driving down
I
looked out of the rear view mirror and saw the
Jack
yelled nonsensical obscenities to himself until he was halfway to the Yellow
Cab Barn and then he realized that he wasn’t supposed to work that night, and
that he had never had any intention of working that night and that he was
supposed to be going back to where he had just come from, next door, where he lived.
He
let out another roar of laughter and he stopped at the first pay phone he saw
to give Turnbull a call. Turnbull wasn’t
home and it was probably just as well because he needed to think.
He
drove up the driveway making as much noise as possible and cleared his throat
loudly as he got out of the car. He
swore to himself that he could hear them lying in bed, silently listening to
him.
Once
in his little room with the stuck-open window, he got out his notebook and
wrote a description of what had happened and it seemed to purge him of his
Romanticism, although, of course, it didn’t.
He
heard their window open and the low murmur of their conversation and then,
about twenty minutes later, both of their cars starting and leaving, “the scene
of the crime” as he thought of it, all while he was writing the
description.
He
stopped thinking about Vida after that night, completely. He just expelled her from his thoughts and
for many years after that night he expended much energy fighting homosexuality
in the most subterranean and subtle ways but never obviously, never
openly.
He
didn’t really seem to be aware of the reason for it. He certainly never coupled that night with
his opinions, and even more certainly not with the Iranian woman. Much later, years after the incident, the
only trace of the incident was a kind of snicker that came involuntarily to his
face when
He
even wrote about half of a very hostile book on the subject of
homosexuality. But it was never
published, and he probably didn’t intend that it should be. It was a very good book too, with long
quotations from all of the major authorities (it wasn’t, however,
original.)
It
had the effect of clarifying his own thoughts and of organizing his feelings,
and when that was accomplished, he abandoned the book, rather selfishly, and
confined himself to subtle and gentle persuasions of his friends and acquaintances,
and to the most reasonable arguments that he could mount.
This
went on for the rest of his short life and it was said that he was quite
effective and not obsessed, but as far as I know, no one was ever converted
either to or from homosexuality, by his arguments.