The Devil's Sperm Is Cold (13 page)

Lou let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a grunt. “You certainly know how to act naive,” he said. “You know perfectly well what he told me.”

“You’d better spell it out for me, Lou. A lot happened when I saw Al.”

Lou smiled. “Oh yes, he told me all about that part of it too. But by the time he started to tell me about what happened when he brought you to that orgy club, I turned down the volume on the set.” He shook his head. “You must want Centaur pretty bad.”

“It’s not Centaur I want,” she told him. “I just want a chance to work out my idea. I’ve been telling you that for a year and a half now. But you’ve been so fucking bullheaded you wouldn’t listen to me. And I couldn’t go on with the editorial stranglehold you have on the place. So I had to go over your head. I had to push you out of the way. And you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I knew what you were up to,” he told her. “I have my people who tell me things. I even knew the day you were going to see him, four days before you went.”

“And you didn’t try to stop me?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I wanted to get pushed aside.”

She felt the premonition of her victory before Lou put it into words. “And what else did Al say this morning?” she asked, “Aside from telling you how I served as a sponge for all the degenerates in his private club?”

Lou blew out a cloud of smoke, watching it dissipate in the clear night air. “Al and I have known each other a long time,” he said. “We don’t have to use too many words.” He paused, turned to her, and with a disquietingly cheerful smile he added, “The place is yours in a month.”

The words, spoken so simply, crowning as they did such a long period of preparation, made her eyes sting with tears of surprise. She found she had trouble catching her breath, and she simply stood there, not speaking. Finally, she found her composure, and then her voice.

“I’m really sorry I had to get it this way,” she said.

“Balls,” he told her. “It’s the same way I got it. It’s the same way you get anything in this world. You always have to take it away from somebody else.”

The thoughts rushed through her mind with the force of a cataract. She started at once to formulate her plans, to look over her materials, her staff, to mentally list the writers she wanted to contact, the people she wanted to fire and hire. And in the middle of it, she thought of Joan.

“And Joan,” she said to herself. “Joan will be with me from the first.”

Lou drank another swig from his glass, took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. He had intuitively known from the first day he hired Margaret that she would take over from him, and he had watched her grow in her work, become clearer, surer, until she was chomping at the bit to run the whole show herself. His preparations for leaving had long since been made, and he was ready to enter a long, rich retirement.

“What will you do now?” she asked. “I mean, you won’t have anything more to do with Centaur, will you?”

“Al offered me a deal with his men’s magazines, but I have plans for a house right on the beach in Puerto Rico that interests me a hell of a lot more. I intend to devote myself to my hobbies. And to have a place for you to escape to when it’s your turn to put your head on the block.”

“Do you feel betrayed?” she asked.

“No,” he told her. “But a bit disappointed. I was hoping you could win Al over without becoming his whore.”

She tossed her chin in the air in a gesture of humorous contention. “Lou, with your hiring practices, how can you say such a thing with a straight face?”

But his response was brittle and caught her up short, sending a momentary fright down her spine. “You’re not getting any good deal with him,” he said harshly. “If you think working under me was a pain in the ass, wait until you have to deal with Al directly. Oh, in the beginning he’ll make you think he’s giving you what you want, that he really doesn’t care what you do so long as your books show more black than red. But after a bit, some of his people will be dropping by, and they will make suggestions, and explain how such and such can’t be done because of market changes. And you’ll compromise a little here, and a little there, because he holds the purse strings and you have no choice and it doesn’t seem too much at first. And one day you will wake up and find out that you have become me. That after all the twisting and turning, you are just another puppet in a long line of mannequins who dance to someone else’s tune. Just the way Al does to the people above him.”

Margaret blinked, the sudden bleakness of his vision taking away the rush of euphoria. Lou was deadly serious, his voice bitter. She had never seen him so strong in his expression.

“Maybe during the next month, as I’m showing you the ropes of what it means to be boss, I’ll tell you some of what you won’t find in any official accounts. You’re a very smart woman, and ambitious, and you want to accomplish something, but you may be in for a few surprises. You may learn that what you sucked Al’s cock to get is an empty promise.”

She sucked her breath in. “But why would he do that?” she asked. “He’s a businessman. If he puts me in charge, he’d be a fool to interfere with what I want to do. Are you telling me he lied?”

“No,” said Lou. “The funny thing is that Al believes what he says when he says it. He himself doesn’t understand, or doesn’t like to admit to himself, that he’s nothing but an instrument of the machine too, and he doesn’t have the power to make promises like that. He’s got lawyers who tell him when to squat, and accountants who tell him when to shit, and dark men with silk suits and sunglasses who pay visits from time to time and when they show up he acts like their shoe-shine boy.” He shook his head. “You’ll call me a male chauvinist, but I think women shouldn’t get mixed up in big business. You don’t have the vaguest idea what’s involved. You don’t understand that the basic support of any financial empire is the gun.”

Lou fell silent and they stood side by side, watching the dance of car lights many stories beneath them. Margaret shivered as the chill night air began to raise bumps on her skin.

“Can we go inside?” she said.

“Sure,” Lou replied, and he took her elbow and led her into the huge living room, closed the glass sliding door behind them and led her to a chair in front of the fireplace.

“How about another drink?” he asked. “Maybe a hot toddy?”

She smiled weakly, and while he went into the next room to fix the drink, she stared into the flames, sunk in her own thoughts. She could still remember how she gagged when Al plugged her throat with the crown of his cock and spilled his sperm into her gullet. Even his cum tasted vile. She shivered with the memory of revulsion, and the memory of the pleasure she took in that revulsion. She had been reckless, certain that if she came on strong with her mind and hot with her body, she would get what she wanted. And she did. But as with Pandora’s box, the imagined treasures inside might all be monstrous afflictions.

“No,” she told herself, “I mustn’t let myself feel defeated before I even begin. Lou’s an old man on the way out. He’s describing his trip. It’s up to me to make my own.”

Lou returned and put the glass of hot brew on the table next to her. “I have something I want to show you,” he said in a semiconspiratorial tone.

She looked up at him, his balding crown, his suit which was never pressed, and she smiled. “Lou, you’re incorrigible,” she said.

“Well, sometimes it’s good to relax and enjoy this stuff we make a living out of,” he told her. “Otherwise there’s no pleasure at all anywhere in life.” He flicked a switch and the lights dimmed; another switch and the screen slid down over the far wall; a third switch and the projector began to roll.

On the square of canvas, five figures jumped into life. Two men were standing over a trio of women who knelt in front of them, their heads covered with black masks which left only their mouths exposed. They seemed young, and the sight of their firm bodies with naked breasts and tight asses, the triple triangle of pubic bushes, contrasted against the implied bondage of the masks, with their mouths open and moist, not knowing what was to be done with them, was a blend of what Lou considered aesthetic content with erotic appeal. The men wore black chaps cut away at the crotch, showing their big, dangling cocks and their rough, muscular buttocks. They were bare-chested, and their hairy pectoral muscles bulged with the evidence of weight lifting.

“Oh Lou, this is all old stuff,” she said.

“Give them a chance,” he replied, “they haven’t even begun yet.”

“But what’s the point?” she persisted. “The girls are anonymous, the men are standard types. Of what conceivable interest can their activities be to anyone, much less me? What are they going to do, whippings and water games? That’s all regressive acting-out.”

Lou frowned. “That analyst you’re seeing is going to rob you of your capacity for sexual enjoyment,” he said. “You keep labeling perfectly lovely activities with those negative terms, and before you know it you’ll start thinking that sex is beneath your dignity.”

“That kind of sex is beneath my dignity,” she said.

“Oh really,” he intoned drily. “I have a few films in my archives that suggest quite the opposite.”

“I didn’t say I was against doing it,” she retorted. “I just don’t find any particular point in watching it. Not unless I can find something in the people I’m watching that I can sympathize with. As it is, those people aren’t actually people for me, they’re just fleshy robots.”

As they spoke, the quintet on the screen was rearranging itself. One of the girls had been made to lie down, the second started licking her cunt, while the third sat on her face. One of the men put his cock in the mouth of the girl who was sitting on the first girl’s face, while the second man fucked the ass of the girl who was eating the first girl’s cunt. The five of them moved with slow awkward rhythms, testing the viability of the configuration before letting themselves swing more freely. There was little sound. Only a few moans and the barely audible swish of skin against skin.

“You have good microphones,” Margaret commented.

“The trouble with you,” Lou said to her, not taking his eyes off the screen, “is that you’re still in the romantic era. Pornography is in an abstract phase right now. Those people up there aren’t to be probed or dissected for their life histories. They are bodies, beautiful bodies in suggestive costumes and interesting poses. And they are doing something quite splendid with their hands and mouths and cocks and cunts and asses. They are giving themselves up to a shared experience. We are witnessing a delicate and charming communion. And there is nothing to identify with except the thing itself. I mean, of what possible concern can it be to anyone that that man now sliding his fist into that girl’s cunt is a motorcycle mechanic, or that the girl who is accepting his offering works as a clerk at a McDonald’s hamburger stand? What do you want to know, their opinions about the war? Or what religion they were raised in?”

Margaret, her eyes also watching the screen, listened to the slightly caustic edge in Lou’s voice, and heard the validity of his argument. But she was not ready to let it lie there. “The act itself is lovely, Lou,” she said after a few moments. “I don’t argue with that. But it’s cold, alienated. I agree that sociology and history are dull, but psychology isn’t. This is the century of psychology, and that’s where the true art is being formed. What about these people’s motives, their thoughts, their fears, their loathings, their passions?”

“Wait,” Lou urged. “Wait until they get warmed up. Then you’ll see it all. You’ll see it on their faces, hear it in their voices, discern it in every gesture and movement of their bodies.”

“But they aren’t real.” Margaret protested.

“Well, what the fuck is real?” Lou asked. He pointed at the screen with his eyes. “Look at that girl in the middle. Think of what she’s experiencing. That huge cock reaming her ass alone is enough to send her into spasms of self-forgetfulness. Look at it sliding in and out between her cheeks. See her hands pulling her ass apart? She wants it to go on endlessly. She is at the point of fulfillment, and inside her she is living out all her dramas. And that’s only the one orifice. That’s just what most women settle for, if they can get even that much—women who need to put sex in the context of daily life, of what is called ‘relationship’…as though everything in life weren’t already a relationship. This woman has left all that tedium behind. She is, to use your terms, ‘alienated, unreal.’ And yet listen to her as she begs for that cock to split her wider, to dig into her more deeply. And that’s only the first cock. The second one is jammed into her cunt. The man under her is catching all her movements on his rod as she rolls her ass around to fuck the cock that’s plowing her from behind. If you look closely you can see her pussy juices running down the shaft and onto his balls. In a minute she’ll switch her attention from her ass to her cunt and start to come. And then, as she comes, she will bunch her ass and feel that first cock even more sharply, and go crazy switching back and forth, until the crack between her legs is on fire, and she almost disjoints herself trying to impale herself more and more fully on those two engines of fulfillment. Well? What sort of context would you want to put that into? She doesn’t even know the names of the men who are fucking her. She’s just an ordinary girl, twenty-two, wanting to explore her body. And I gave her the opportunity—the set, the actors, the script, the audience. And what do you think would happen if a prospective husband saw this film a year from now? He would grow purple with jealousy and green with rage. Why? Because he sees her as a ‘person,’ and that idiotic bit of sentimentality would prevent that beautiful female animal from touching such heights and depths of experience that she would cease flowing with life and become another automation, able only to read about what she isn’t doing herself.

“And that’s only two out of four who are working on her. Look at what the women are doing. One very expertly licking and sucking her nipples, sending maddening sensations throughout her entire body, feeding her frenzy. And the other woman is covering her mouth with her pungent cunt, smothering the girl in juice and aroma and vibration. What an extraordinary treat! To be filled and covered with all that flesh and warmth. And as the lucky girl humps herself wild on two cocks, thrashes about under the ministrations of a tongue on her nipples, she is curling her own tongue into a juicy cunt, sucking it greedily, exhausting herself in a crescendo of lust.”