The Devil's Sperm Is Cold (21 page)

“I’m going to fuck you all night long,” she whispered in his ear.

He bucked up into her, his cock swimming in her brimming cunt.

“And then you’ll write it for me,” she said, her fingers cupped under his buttocks, pulling him into her, her ass a blur of churning white flesh in the dark room. “Then you can tell it, and reveal how beautiful it is, oh how terribly beautiful it is.” Her words were lost in the rising wave of deep noises that surged from her chest. She was fucking him frantically now, veering toward frenzy.

As often happens to a man when the woman he is with flies off into a space of solipsistic passion and becomes a boiling sea of lascivious expression, Jack was disconnected from his body. It continued to respond as it had been doing, and his cock grew stone hard as Margaret split herself upon it. But his mind was detached, as though it were somehow something outside the animal that lay there in that delirious embrace. He could look down on both of them from the ceiling, and saw Margaret writhing on top of him, her back curving, her legs kicking.

He observed calmly as the two people on the bed built toward climax. For her it was a kind of erotic vomiting, an emission of expressions that she had not let herself have for a long time. And for him it was an almost painful culmination, without any ejaculation.

“How odd this sex thing is,” he thought. “How frantic we become at times, and yet it is empty. An exercise in futility which serves as a metaphor for our whole life. For what is life but a vain gesture by three-dimensional shadows which think themselves real?”

Margaret collapsed against him. She was covered with cold sweat. She did not know what was going on inside him, but had been taken by the chilling notion that she was fucking a corpse, and that she herself had already died, and the two of them were fucking in a crypt. To the degree that she had been overflowing with sensation and feeling, she was now devoid of any sense of contact with any object, including her body.

“Jack,” she said in a small, still voice. “It’s all cold and black. I’m holding you and I’m all alone. Your cock is inside me but I don’t exist. There’s a wind blowing through everything. Where am I, Jack, where am I?”

He came back from his meditation and felt the frightened woman in his arms. He blinked and opened his eyes wide and watched the light patterns on the ceiling. He had a palpable sense of the scope of the galaxy, and was, for a few moments, experientially one with the vastness and silence of the universe.

Then he stroked her head gently.

“Then he stroked her head gently,” he said.

He put his other hand, on the small of her back.

“He put his other hand on the small of her back,” he said.

“You’re safe in my arms, my love,” he said.

“‘You’re safe in my arms, my love, he said,’” he said.

Margaret let out a long vibrant sigh.

“The book,” she said. “We are the book.”

And Jack, who was feeling the fact that he had not yet come, rolled slowly over, holding Margaret to him, so that she finally lay under him. And when he began to probe her cunt tentatively with his cock, her legs spread apart, and her mind resolved the split that had kept her from beginning to understand who she was.

“It’s all a fiction,” she whispered as he slid the full length of his cock inside her.

“That’s a fact,” he replied, as she closed her eyes again and entered the esoteric temple of sex for the third, but not the final, time that night.

Al Leeds led a complex existence. At the age of fifty-nine he was worth, were he to liquidate all his assets, somewhere in the area of five million dollars, cash. The amount he controlled was at least twenty times that. He reminded himself at least once a day that at the age of twenty-three he had been a copy boy for the Herald Tribune, earning seventeen dollars a week for sixty hours work.

His rise in wealth he attributed to a single factor—luck. At one point he accidentally became privy to a deal that involved a certain shuffling of securities, and he was nicely rewarded for remaining silent. As a result, he had later been approached to serve as the front man for an operation that tested his ability to remain cool under intense police pressure. He had since moved horizontally, being placed in nominal control of bigger and bigger enterprises, some legitimate, some not, advancing as his ability to take orders and channel them was more thoroughly proved at each step. He had two indispensable qualities: he was entirely self-serving, which kept him from ever playing favorites; and he was free from any taint of greed, he merely accepted and enjoyed what fell his way and did not reach for more. When things were slow, he patted his belly, lapsed into a numb trance, and watched time pass.

His image of himself was at variance with the world’s image of him. To others, he was fat, ugly and mean; to himself he was a man robbed by destiny of physical attractiveness but compensated by that same destiny with immense wealth and power. He was able to buy the counterfeit of any human feeling by paying people to exhaust themselves at his bidding, while he chose from their outpouring of expressions those gestures and sensations that he desired. This was inevitably done in a sexual context.

From his religious training as a child, he carried away one thing, a deep appreciation of Ecclesiastes, whose wisdom he translated into a single sentence. “We all go to the same grave,” Al Leeds told himself, “so it doesn’t really matter what we do until we get there.” He had found nothing in his experience to contradict that insight. He held in contempt anyone infected with abstract morality, or anyone who followed a moral code because of fear of divine retribution. He had on one wall of his office two wooden plaques. The top one was inscribed with the words of Mammy Yokum: “Good is better than evil because it’s nicer.” The one under it had the words of Leo Durocher: “Nice guys finish last.” That pretty much summed it up for Al.

He now sat in a small room which adjoined the basement in Helene Benson’s Brooklyn brownstone. Helene sat next to him in a deep armchair. They were looking through the one-way mirror at a woman of about twenty-five who was lying in the middle of the floor fucking herself with a huge dildo. Al smoked a cigar and watched with lidded eyes. His breathing was slow and regular, his heartbeat normal. Helene was slightly distracted. She had had an intermittent pain in one of her back teeth for over a day, and like all people who have reduced their lives to monitoring the state of their physical bodies, everything that happened outside of her was seen as a mere backdrop to the internal phenomena.

Al visited the place from time to time. He owned the building, and Helene was on his payroll. The orgies she held and the swingers’ parties she organized were sponsored by an organization called Siege, part of a nationwide network joined by a magazine, membership cards, and word-of-mouth recognition. It was one of the offshoots of the conglomerate of companies of which Al’s distribution wing formed one portion. The people who belonged were all innocent of anything more far-reaching than their immediate gratification; they had no notion that even orgies were part of big business.

Al never took part in any of the parties himself but often sat in the small hidden room and watched. Occasionally, if he saw someone who tickled his appetite, he would have Helene approach the woman and discreetly proposition her. If the quarry showed some interest, she met Al. And usually he was able to estimate within fifty dollars exactly how much he had to offer to get the woman to do what he wanted.

“I’m very rich and I will pay you to do things which will probably disgust you,” was a line he used frequently. He enjoyed it best when there was a tension between revulsion and greed.

The girl in the next room was one such. She was now lying on her back, the dildo two-thirds inside her. It was a perfect replica of a cock in shape and detail, but it was eighteen inches long and four inches wide. She had jammed it in as far as it would go and with both hands was twisting it around violently, her legs split in a wide V. From the contortions of her torso and the expressions on her face and the deep groans that spilled from her lips, one would be certain she was experiencing profound sexual revelations.

But Al was bored. “She’s too pat,” he said.

Helene had offered the woman two hundred and fifty dollars to fuck herself for a half hour with a dildo, knowing that a man would be watching from another room, and deciding whether he wanted to use her personally. “If he takes you,” Helene had confided, “it means another five hundred on top of what you get for the first part. But you have to be really good and convince him that you want him to use you.” It was a cross between what’s told an actress who is trying out for a part, and the bait that is given to housewives on daytime quiz shows, in which they get a chance to win extraordinary prizes if they answer one question correctly.

“I think she’s sincere,” Helene told him. “She’s married, and her husband brought her to our last party. She’s just starting to break loose. And if he knew she was doing this he’d have a stroke. I think she understands what it is to be dirt, and she likes the smell of money. I think you can use her,”—all this delivered in the tones of an agent selling a particular model to an ad agency.

Al peered through the glass more intently. The woman was now on her knees facing away from him. He could look straight into the crack of her ass. She had grabbed the dildo from between her thighs and was ramming it into her cunt. Her cunt lips yawned obscenely around the thick bulk of the rubber shaft. She looked over her shoulder at herself in the mirror, her face distorted with dry lust, brought to a head by the knowledge that someone was looking at her, that she was being paid to exhibit herself in this way. Like so many others who act out the manifestations of the sexual Zeitgeist without any understanding of what forces compel them to act as they do, she had no way to explain her behavior except to tell herself that she was depraved. Technically speaking, of course, this was not so. She did not have the depth of intelligence to grasp what true depravity involved. But that she believed it was enough for Al, for it was a woman’s sense of her own lowness that he most appreciated. He was incapable of enjoying sex unless it involved the degradation of the person he was doing it with. He stared with unblinking eyes at the woman who did not know that he sat behind the mirror she was using to watch her exposed ass and violated cunt.

Al leaned back after a few moments, leaving the woman to continue without the benefit of his unacknowledged attention.

“Did that other one ever come back?” he asked.

Helene raised one eyebrow. “She works for you,” she said.

“For me?” he repeated, and for the first time that day a twinge of sensation shot through his cock.

“Well, for Lou,” Helene told him. “That’s the same as working for you, isn’t it?” She lit a cigarette and when she sucked in the smoke, she pulled it over the area of her aching tooth. “Jack invited her. You know, Lou’s salesman. And she’s one of the copy editors in the office.”

Al cocked his head to one side. He was in an attitude of thought but what was going on in his mind was more like a form of preconceptual scheming.

“So, if you want her, ask Lou. I don’t think she’ll be coming back here. It was just a curiosity visit.”

“She was good,” Al said. “Still fresh. And dirty. You know what I mean? Clean outside and dirty inside. She’d do anything, and hate it, and love it. And then come back, and beg for more, and need it. She’s a smut junkie. Her head is filled with pictures, and she wants to act them out. And she’s so prim and luscious.” He looked over at Helene. “Can you imagine how lovely she would look with my cock in her mouth?”

Helene stifled her retort. It did not pay to be too blunt with Al. But she could not resist letting some air out of his balloon. “I sat on her face,” Helene said, “and her mouth didn’t feel any different from any other mouth.”

“That’s because you’re only interested in the physical,” he told her. “You don’t understand about the imagination.”

In the next room the woman had pulled the dildo from her cunt and was licking it clean of her own secretions. She had shoved it into her throat and gagged violently. She was picturing herself, naked, open, a vile rubber cock in her mouth, being watched by she didn’t know who or how many. And she intruded into her own imagery by asking herself why she was doing what she was doing. When Helene had put the proposition to her, an unmistakable twinge of forbidden pleasure had spanned her thighs. The whole notion of exhibiting herself and prostituting herself touched a vital chord inside her. And the fact that her husband wouldn’t know, that this would be her secret, pushed her over the edge. She was a strikingly attractive woman, with red hair, breasts exactly the size of her cupped hands, deep thighs, sparse pubic hair, a large spongy cunt, and buttocks that curved a full hundred and eighty degrees. When she had married Jim, she had no idea of how sexy she was, and he had brought her out, little by little, and finally introduced her to swinging.

“Baby, you don’t know how much it would turn me on to see another man’s cock in your mouth,” he had told her.

And then he brought her to the orgy, where she had almost gone berserk at the glimpse of the seemingly infinite sexual panorama that opened before her. Of course, Al had spotted that. It was an old story. And he had pointed her out as the one for Helene to ask. In a rush of enthusiasm, the woman had said yes.

If anything troubled her now it was not that she was debasing herself too much, but that it wasn’t enough. In the four days since the invitation, she had lived in a sea of fantasies. Her imagination became sore with attempting to picture what would be done to her, what she would be made to do. And she carried on a silent conversation with her husband in her mind. “Want to see me with another cock in my mouth? Wait until you see me with three men in me at once. Wait until you see me with my tongue up another man’s ass.”

But after arriving at Helene’s, getting undressed, and performing for her hidden fan, she was becoming anxious. For there is just so much juice that can be derived from any sexual structure, and even lying spread-eagled with a giant dildo up one’s cunt before the eyes of an anonymous lecher had its limitations as a source of excitement. Her worst fear was beginning to be realized—that she would let herself go to the farthest extremes of excess, and that nothing would happen.

“Her time’s almost up,” Helene said. “Do you want her?”

“I suppose I’ll take her,” Al said. “Maybe I’ll have Mike and Larry work her over, get her to screaming a little bit.” He relit his cigar. “I suppose if she is loosened up she won’t be too bad.”

Helene shook her head. “Well for God’s sake, Al, what do you want? The poor bitch is practically tearing her tendons as it is.”

“No,” he said in a voice that, for him, was loud, although it barely rose above conversational strength, “it’s not the physical part. You keep misunderstanding that. It’s the look in their eyes. It’s when they realize they are helpless, when they know they are lost—even though they aren’t tied down, and no one is forcing them—when they discover that they weren’t doing it just for money, but because they like it. They like to lie at my feet and see the contempt in my face, and then wriggle up and lap at my cock. It’s not the sensation. I’ve had every conceivable sexual sensation, at least a thousand times each. I don’t care about their bodies. I want to suck their souls.”

He got up heavily, walked over to the counter at the back of the room, and poured a cup of coffee from the pot that had been steaming on a small hot plate. He put in four teaspoons of sugar, sipped it, made a face, and sat down again.

“What’s her name? The one that works for Lou?”

“Joan,” Helene told him. And then added, “By the way, I hear Lou is on his way out.”

“That’s right,” Al said.

“And Margaret is taking over?” Her tone contained a balance of surprise and envy. “She must be very good.”

Al saw no reason to expose the sexual aspect of his arrangement with Margaret, so he pretended that Helene’s last remark referred only to Margaret’s editorial and business abilities.

“She’ll do all right,” he said. “She still has a few fancy ideas about dirty books, but she’ll adjust. And maybe even give the place some class. Lou was getting tired. He wants to cash in and go enjoy himself in the sun. I’m half tempted to do the same thing.”

“So this girl Joan is now Margaret’s property,” Helene said, not bothering to hide the cattiness in her voice. “Do you think she’ll let you have her?”

“I went to see an analyst once,” Al said in a seeming non sequitur. “I lay on his couch every day for three weeks and then I got annoyed. I asked him to tell me, as succinctly as possible, what he saw in me. He told me, ‘You have such an extraordinarily low self-esteem that the only way you can feel decent is to watch someone else get lower than you are.’ It cost me almost two thousand dollars for that sentence, but it was worth it. Now I understand why I do what I do, and a couple of grand isn’t too high a price for peace of mind.” He turned to face Helene and squinted at her through the smoke rising from his coffee. “People who work for me do what I tell them,” he said, “or else they no longer work for me.”

Helene heard the assertion of supremacy in his voice and she realized she had pushed just a little too hard. Changing the subject quickly, she asked, “What do you want to do with her?” and pointed to the woman in the next room who was now lying face down on the rug, not moving.

Al gazed on the inert form. He had lost count of how many thousands of naked women he had seen, and yet, the sight was always exciting, if it was a new woman each time. He had tried to pierce to the heart of what the attraction was, for it pulled him powerfully even when he wasn’t horny. He looked at the body. Two legs, nicely tapered, but nothing extraordinary. Her back and arms and hair left him cold. Then his eyes went to her ass. And that was it, that was the source. There was something in the shape of a woman’s ass that contained a profound secret. Yet it seemed simplicity itself. Two globes and the space separating them. There was no way to grasp what precisely held so much fascination that each new ass seized his will, as though it were the first one he had ever looked at.