Quiver (16 page)

The fourth violinist’s bow drops to the floor; the bassist covers for him. As he reaches down he notices the slim ankles of the cellist. He imagines soft ridges of blond hair running inside thighs to a golden bush. As he sits there he glances across to the listening room again. The woman is taking the man into her mouth.

The fourth violinist imagines the feel of her mouth, the way her tongue would play under the ridge like a wind instrument. He wonders about the flautist.

The woman’s head bobs up and down as she takes all of it deep into her throat, the man flings back his head, his mouth open in ecstacy. As they reach the conclusion of the third movement he pulls her away, holding himself tightly at the base of his shaft, saving himself. The fourth violinist glances at the third violinist, instrument poised in mid-air, his face flushed. He too stares in the direction of the listening room.

W
HAT
M
RS
. P
OPE
F
EELS

The taste of him is youth, slightly pungent, the aroma of almonds and hot testicles. Velvet, heavy in the palm, pushing against my belly. The blind beast that splits the peach. What could I do? I dropped to my knees and tasted him.

He seeps a droplet of the ocean, and I suck. I swallow him. Feeling him quivering under the tongue, this makes me master. As I suck I see my husband, racing with the music. Waves of red and white spirals interlace with the music and press against my eyes.

He pushes against the back of my throat, his urgency becomes mine. Faster, faster, I press my clit against the back of my heel, rubbing against the soft Italian leather. Faster, faster, louder, the music, the salt, the chorus of male voices, the pulse of his seed, of my wet sex. He pulls away and turns me around. Parting my buttocks, he plunges in, drawing me down onto his lap. Into the sphere of his chest, his smell. Tongue in my ear, one hand holding me apart, the other squeezing my breasts, as if he is trying to feel all flesh at once. And I am big. I am bursting with juice. And he plunges and rises, guiding me over the tip, then slowly down onto the shaft. Fast, faster, faster still. All is wet. The walls of Jericho have tumbled down.

W
HAT THE
S
ILENT
Y
OUNG
M
AN
F
EELS

All I know is her flesh, the tone of her voice and her scent, her fingers wiser than mine. They don’t hesitate. Her cunt is a tight veil. I draw it across my face, my lips, over the skin of my body until she is welded to my belly. I want to fill every hole, her ass, her cunt, her ear, her mouth. To fuck you and
the strangeness inside you. Her breasts fill my hands, they are flesh at the end of a tight wet canal. We are riding the waves, and the ceiling drips song.

When I fuck you I am fucking your husband. I shut my eyes and it is his hands grasping the baton. The jerking stick, my cock, your music. Your moaning under our breath. This is what I feel.

W
HAT THE
H
USBAND
I
S
T
HINKING

Something’s missing in the string section. Come in, come in, you bastards. The third and fourth. They’re not even looking at their scores. I’ll tap the music stand. What are they staring at? Ahh at last, a note. Thank you, gentlemen…slowly, slowly, gently, gently, think about a tiny silver sea lapping between your toes, drawing up over the ankles, not too fast…washing up like waves of electricity over the knees.

H
ER

He’s lifting me up onto the broad windowsill, the hot air of the auditorium warms my buttocks. He parts my lips and buries his mouth, finding my clit, playing me with his tongue. I moan. My body trembles under his fingers. Just the tip, just the tip, then as I grow he takes all of me and sucks…It is as if he is inside all of me, as if my pleasure is his.

T
HE
S
ILENT
Y
OUNG
M
AN

The smell of her, the taste of her…the flesh quivers, a tiny penis, she is close to coming. I am pulling her to her feet, I’m
wrapping her legs around my hips. I press her against the wall and cut into her like a hot knife through butter.

T
HE
H
USBAND

Up over the waist, bring in drums, that’s it! That’s it! Nail the rhythm into the guts, into the very core of being! Faster! Faster! Faster! And cut! Now the death, now the silence rushing in.

H
ER

Ahhhhhh!

T
HE
S
ILENT
Y
OUNG
M
AN

Ahhhhhh!

T
HE
H
USBAND

Screams pierce the silence between crescendo and applause. I swing around, furious. A couple lie satiated, half naked, hanging out of the window of the listening room.

It is an image from my worst nightmare. It is not real. Her long red hair cascading down the wall. The older members of the orchestra start to cough, to avert their eyes. The younger members grin openly. It is a phantasm. The young man pulls himself out of my wife and smiles slowly. He takes a bow.

The whole auditorium is shaking with laughter.

There is no applause.

T
HE
L
OVER

A
ll that is visible is the radio alarm clock sitting on a table by the side of the bed. Its faint glow also illuminates the bed’s white quilted spread, which I have drawn up as far as my nose. It smells of her. And me. I lie there, feeling the tension ooze out of my feet, the muscles at the back of my neck, my stomach. We finished making love only ten minutes ago. But I like to lie here, alone in her flat after she’s gone to work. It gives me time to explore.

I swing my legs out of the bed. A thick rug of some foreign material lies in the middle of cool polished floorboards. When I sink my toes into it, the carpet releases an exotic fragrance. She once told me that nomads used to play chess on it. And here it is, marooned in a Tasmanian suburb.

There is a dresser against the wall, a heavy antique piece with brass claws for feet, clutching, alive. The dresser is strewn with tiny pots of cosmetics, necklaces glittering dimly in the dark, an abandoned velvet sash, a hairbrush that smells of old hair spray, perfume and the darker scent of olive skin and thick black hair. I hover for a moment, but it is not
makeup that I want: I want to see through her skin, just for a moment.

I move to the dresses swinging off a metal clothes rack—some scarlet, some beaded for the evening, some still wrapped in plastic and smelling acidic from the dry cleaners, others slightly sweaty, telling of some clandestine night in a dance club and their eventual fate, thrown to the floor of some strange bedroom.

I choose a summer frock. I draw it over my head. My penis, still damp from her, sticks slightly against the silk as I pull the fabric down over my body. The dress is tight around the shoulders and only just covers my nakedness. I don’t want to look in the mirror. I’m not a cross-dresser. I just want this moment—of being her, of feeling vulnerable in that pliant body. My hands trail up to the empty pockets where her breasts would sit.

Outside the traffic is a distant roar, outside it’s a Saturday night. People mill on the pavements in search of escape, a meal, an encounter that takes them out of their skin, out of their marriages, out of their lives. I lie down and fall asleep.

T
HE
B
OYFRIEND

Dee. That’s what he calls himself. Dee. I like it, it conjures up a certain masculinity I find irresistible. Nothing queeny about this guy—that’s what first attracted me to him. He appeared straight, as if his sexuality was a secondary issue in his life. As if he was comfortable with it, and didn’t have to flaunt it all over the clubs. He’s tall, with a really good body. One of those smooth chests you can just rub your chin down, and a wash-board stomach. Not a gym bunny, oh no, this body was built for heavy manual labor. A body that has purpose, that always
turns me on. Real muscles, not like those pumped up fluffy numbers. And his cock—you know, a heavy circumcised number with a decent-sized knob at the end. And low-slung balls; I like holding the weight of them in my hand.

It wasn’t love. I’d given up on that one! No, it was definitely lust. Uncomplicated, animal and entirely satisfying. Love was the last thing I needed, especially after the previous debacle. Put me in a room and I’m bound to zoom in on the nearest psychopath. I’m in love with trouble. Shrink tells me it’s my comfort zone. But Dee wasn’t trouble. He was just lovely. Some people are, you know, uncomplicated.

T
HE
L
OVER

I met him at La Cage. I go there occasionally. It’s just part of my personality. I don’t question it. I reckon there’s a lot of heartache out there from people living through their head and not their hearts. Me, I just live.

I noticed him straightaway—I guess it was his longish ginger hair. Not many men have good hair like that; it made him stand out. He looked a little less fashion-conscious than the rest. I liked that—a bit frayed around the edges, a little vulnerable. I walked up and stood next to him, and ordered a drink. I could feel him checking me out. His eyes running around the edge of my shirt and burrowing in between my legs. I’ve always liked this moment best. There’s never any doubt in my mind that they won’t want me. Some people just embody sex, and I’m one of them. I cultivate it. I’m not being arrogant or anything. It’s just plain fact. One that’s never failed me.

So he turns around, and finally I see his face. Late twenties,
aquiline nose, good skin, a full mouth and green eyes, with a heap of irony glittering in there. My kind of boy.

“Simon,” he tells me. “Simon. But don’t tell me yours. Let’s stay strangers for a while at least.” And I know I have to have him.

L
OOKING FOR
S
TRANGE

They break into a commission flat, an ugly place just behind the club. Dee’s heart is thumping, despite a pretense of indifference. He doesn’t know this man, but he wants him, and the danger of the situation thrills him as much as it thrills Simon. It is Simon’s idea to come here. He does it regularly, he tells Dee casually. You just break in and fuck in the bed. It’s wild, and totally alien—plus there’s the added thrill of the possibility of being caught. He wets his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. The gesture is deliberate but slight enough to seem natural. It gives Dee an immediate erection.

Small rooms, damp walls, small town poverty. Simon takes Dee’s hand and quickly leads him to the bedroom.

A single futon on the floor, an old cot pushed up against the wall, the wooden bars broken in places.

Simon throws a teddy bear off the bed, and suddenly drops to his knee in front of Dee. Biting the skin around his waist, he unzips the tight jeans. Dee’s cock springs out, proud and rudely pink under the naked lightbulb. He looks down and weaves his fingers through a mass of ginger hair, as Simon takes his cock into his mouth, tasting the ridge, then greedily taking it deep into his throat. Dee tilts his head back, luxuriating in the sensation of being sucked, Simon’s hands reaching so confidently around his waist and gripping his ass.

There is a poster pinned to the ceiling, an old one of Tom
Cruise.
I’m going to come staring at Tom Cruise
, Dee finds himself thinking, and wrenches himself away. He pulls Simon down onto the bed, tugging off his T-shirt. Tracing the fine down of golden hair around his nipples, he buries his face into Simon’s armpit, filling his nostrils with the pungent smell of male sweat: stronger, sweeter—younger than his own. He reaches down and roughly pulls off Simon’s beaten leather pants. Simon’s cock, smaller than his, rubs against the shaft of his own thick member. A valley of white freckled skin, the testicles covered in sparse golden hair. Dee holds Simon’s cock and rubs it gently across his lips and eyelids. It never ceases to amaze him, this similarity of flesh. The same, but different. The knob is slightly wet. He teases him by using it to trace the outline of his lips, his stubble. Simon gasps, and pulls Dee up to his face.

Dee lies with his full body weight resting on Simon. Nipple to nipple, cock to cock. He loses himself in the green of Simon’s irises. A clear deep green, freckled with gray. He closes his eyes and feels Simon’s lips on his, his tongue entering him like a cock, probing his mouth, his throat. He lifts Simon’s legs high over his shoulders. Reaching into his back pocket for a condom, he pins Simon down as he rolls the condom carefully over himself.

“We could get caught any minute,” Simon’s voice is thick with lust.

“Isn’t that what you want?” Dee whispers hoarsely into Simon’s ear as he enters him, plunging deep into his taut ass.

T
HE
G
IRLFRIEND

We’ve been lovers for eighteen months now. How would I describe him? Silent, one of those working-class
Australians—you know, not really trained in the art of being emotionally expressive. I guess that’s what I liked about him in the first place. His difficulty. His toughness.

Dee works with his hands. You can tell straightaway by the way they hang down, strong, veined.

He’s a landscape gardener, works for the council. I’d sometimes see him in the botanical gardens in his dark cotton overalls, on his knees, weeding a flower bed or attending to the herb garden. Then later, at my place, he’d make love to me with the soil still under his fingernails, smelling of eucalyptus.

We met at a dinner party. I didn’t mean to fall in love with a landscape gardener. But, as much as I’d like it to be, love is not logical. My colleagues at the law firm think I’m a control freak. I like things to be neat—everything in its place. Dee is my only exception. He refuses to fit anywhere: not into my longterm plans, not into my social activities, not into my definition of what a lover should be. He sets his own terms and I acquiesce. After all, arbitration is my forte. Is this love or masochism?