The Devil's Sperm Is Cold (8 page)

But on her knees, her lips moist, her eyes on the edge of tears and her cunt feeling its emptiness, aching for Manuel to fill it, she couldn’t quite believe her own story. She stood up, ran a hand through her hair, lit a cigarette, and sat down in her editor’s chair. A sharp sob pierced her pussy, and she caught her breath. For five minutes she just smoked and stared into space, her mind empty. All she could do was jump from level to level, realizing that in one context what had happened was utterly trivial, and in another context, that it had shaken her to her very roots.

“He made me feel,” she said out loud, “more than just sensation, he gave me real feelings,” she added, echoing what Margaret had said about her that morning.

She put out the cigarette and lit another. She glanced at her wristwatch. It was seven-fifteen. She decided that the best thing she could do was to get back to work, to do something routine to put her back on a track she felt comfortable with. “I’ll work for an hour and then go have dinner,” she thought. “And then go home and have a hot bath, and watch television, and do all the inane things that will help put my head back in shape.”

The manuscript had been scattered over the desk top and she began to put it in order. Some of the sheets were wet from where her mouth, lying open, had dripped saliva. Once again she began to tremble. The impact of the experience assailed her once more. In terms of sexual detail, it was nothing, especially in comparison to things she had done with Lou, and just last night with Margaret. But there was a quality of contact, of emotion, that she didn’t get when in throes of orgasm with someone else.

“I felt more with Manuel’s cock rubbing against my panties than I have with cocks shoved all the way inside my cunt,” she concluded—and wondered precisely what that would entail when she saw him the next morning.

She stacked the sheets of the novel together, and she began to read.

“Laura knelt in front of the row of men. Naked, spent, she begged them with her eyes to leave her alone. They had been at her for twenty-four hours now, and she couldn’t count how many had been inside her how many times. Her cunt was a raw gash, and her ass was bleeding. But they were implacable. ‘Start sucking,’ one of them said. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth. Seventeen cocks. How would she be able to suck seventeen cocks after what she had just been through?”

Joan stood up abruptly.

“I don’t know, Laura girl,” she said out loud. “But I’ve got my own problems to deal with.”

And without bothering to put out the light, she picked up her coat, nodded her approval of her decision to do no more work that night, and walked out of the empty office, leaving the characters of fiction to their own perils and devices.

On the street, Manuel was a different man. It was as though some fierce and nameless animal suddenly came awake, and the same body which behaved in its civilized routine at the office downtown, now smoldered with an intensity that bespoke its true energy.

Manuel prowled the streets of East Harlem, walking without seeing or hearing, down the stone canyons that overflowed with teeming life, with men and women who had left the hot climate of their native island to find a life of bitter competition and grainy poverty that was more degrading than the hunger they had fled. The buildings seemed to ooze children and dogs and flies and unending mounds of garbage. It was almost midnight, and he had been on the move for over four hours, going from bar to bar, trying to get drunk, but becoming instead more and more sober, his thoughts lacerating him like icy rain.

He went down streets which would have caused apprehension even in a brace of armed policemen, and certainly in any of the average hardworking church-going members of the neighborhood. They held a sinister atmosphere that could almost be smelled, for in the shadowed hallways lurked junkies almost literally dying for a hit, ready to take a life for the necessary money; muggers who enjoyed the fear they caused as much as the property they stole; rapists who waited with sharp-eyed monomania; groups of psychopathic teenagers with switchblades at the ready; and random derelicts who sometimes carried guns.

But Manuel was impervious to harm, for he was shielded by his total introversion. From time to time he brought his fingers to his nostrils to sniff the rapidly fading aroma of Joan’s cunt.

“Oh, if only I had fucked her,” he thought again and again. “If I had just got my cock inside her, I would have made her mine.”

He replayed each second of the incident, starting from the moment he saw her masturbating to watching her kneeling in front of him, licking his rough sperm-soaked jeans with her tender pink tongue. And at any one of a thousand places, he told himself, he should have done something different. But she was so open, so fragile, so lovely, that he was unmanned. He drank and he walked and he thought, and he grew cold inside, the result of the repression of a fury and despair that echoed the thirty years of frustration within himself and oppression from without.

“I got to get her out of my mind,” he said to himself. And as the thought struck him, he saw the phone booth on the corner.

“I’ll call Alma,” he thought, the notion taking him by surprise, for he had not spoken to her for a year, since he had gone to work for Centaur Publications and become enamored of dating white women.

The phone rang six times before she answered.

“Whoever this is it better be important it’s after midnight,” she said all in one breath.

He hesitated. “Alma,” he said, and paused. He knew she recognized his voice because he could hear her gasp. “It’s Manuel,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Manuel,” she repeated. There was a long silence, and then she asked, “Are you in trouble?”

Manuel’s eyes misted over. He had forgotten how good-hearted and practical she was. He smiled to himself. “No, not with the police or anything. Just inside myself.”

“Must be a woman,” she said, and the bitterness in her voice almost seared the wire. “One of your fancy ladies from downtown.”

He hung his head. He had forgotten this too; that the other side of Alma’s enormous warmth and acceptance was a hardness that cut like razor blades. He almost hung up on the spot. Sensing his response, she relented. She could picture him as she always did, a little boy in a man’s body, someone she wanted to hold to her breasts, to comfort, and then to give herself to in an explosion of passion, totally, without reserve, with love and desire.

“Manuel,” she whispered. “Do you need to see me?”

“Yes,” he said, noting how she had said “need,” not “want.”

“Well, come on,” she said, “you know the address.”

“All right,” he said, “all right, thank you.”

“Knock off that ‘thank you’ shit,” she told him. “We been too close for that kind of stuff now.”

He hung up and his hand was sweating from holding the receiver so tightly. After what he and Alma had known together, he knew that calling her was more than going to see an old friend for comfort, or an old lover for a pleasant lay. She had loved him so fiercely that it had bent his heart; and deep within him he knew that she fulfilled everything he might want in a woman, except that she didn’t flood him with the terrible excitement he got from just looking at Joan. He and Alma had fucked, and it had been good, but it did not make him swoon. And when they split up she had said, “Don’t ever call me unless you’re serious. I don’t want to play this game again.”

As his steps went in the direction of her apartment, he kept saying to himself, “It’s not too late; you don’t have to show up. Just go home. Go to a whorehouse and get laid. Forget it.” But he was like a man in the grip of a hypnotic force, and he walked mechanically the eight blocks to her place, and climbed the four flights of the ancient tenement. Up the narrow staircase with its polished wooden banisters and a smell that had not changed for over sixty years. The building had been a home for waves of Jews, Irish, Italians, and now housed Puerto Ricans with the same gentle indifference, its water and steam pipes complaining a bit more loudly, the cracks in its walls a bit wider, but still sturdy with the craftsmanship of an earlier century.

She answered his first knock.

And when the door opened, he could not believe his eyes.

The girl he had known a year earlier was an entirely different creature. The plump, pleasant woman who wore print cotton dresses was now thin, her hair piled high on her head, wearing a black silk robe. She had no makeup except for a swatch of violet eye shadow on each eyebrow, and sported a single silver earring in her right ear. From behind her came the faint aroma of marijuana.

He stood there stupidly, blinking, until, laughing, Alma grabbed his arms and said, “Come in, you lunk, I can’t say hello properly in the hallway.”

She pulled him into the apartment and slammed the police lock closed behind him. If her personal appearance had startled him, the decor of the pad was equally surprising. The interior walls had all been knocked out, and the plaster removed from the supporting walls, leaving exposed brick which had been washed with acid and shellacked. In the process, a fireplace had been uncovered, and it now held a low glowing fire. Originally a railroad flat, the place was now a single loft, perhaps a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, and all the furniture was in keeping with the sense of spaciousness, including a white net hammock that spanned one entire corner. From a stereo he could not yet see, Cat Stevens sang his need for a hard-headed woman.

He could not catch up with the rush of sensations that flooded him. But Alma made up for his astonishment by putting her arms around his neck, pressing the full length of her body against his, and covering his mouth with her own. The effect was eerie, for it was the same woman he had made love to many times, and yet it was someone different. He ran his hands down her back, remembering the curve of her spine, and then he cupped her ass in his palms and pulled her pelvis toward him. Her buttocks were large and wide, but now they stood out in contrast to the rest of her, which was some forty pounds lighter than it had been. Even her breasts improved with the contrast, for whereas they had been part of her general softness, they now stood out against her slim rib cage, two hot mounds of yielding flesh that pressed into his chest. His mouth opened and her tongue immediately snaked inside, licking his teeth, his palate, and then pushing far back toward his throat, a thick pulsing organ with a wild sensual intelligence.

They held each other for a long, long time and then separated.

“Whew,” was all he could say.

It did not take long for them to get comfortable, lying by the fire with shoes and socks off, hot coffee in front of them, cigarettes sending off curls of yellow smoke. And they told each another their stories, encapsulating time with language.

Manuel told her about his job, about his plan to buy land and, finally, about his infatuation for Joan. He didn’t go into the details of what had happened, but only told her that it had been totally frustrating, and he was so confused he didn’t know whether he wanted to go back. “You see,” he said, “it is hard for me to keep my manhood in the white man’s world. They treat me like a pet monkey. But in the back of my head, I know what I am there for, so I can keep my dignity. But when something happens, like with this woman, then the bottom is pulled out.”

“I know what it is like,” she agreed. “After you left, I decided I had to find out more about this new country. You know, we came here when we were children, but all the years we spent in the barrio might well have been spent in Puerto Rico. The rest of the city was a mystery to me. So, every night after work, I went to different places. And, finally, I discovered Greenwich Village.” She smiled to herself, remembering something she didn’t articulate. “I met a musician, and he introduced me to grass, and to fancy parties, and to very sophisticated people. Well, I started to change fast. I lost weight, I learned how to dress to please myself and not my mother, I began to think about how I wanted my pad to look. And then I got lucky. Someone approached me about bringing certain packages in from Puerto Rico. Since I’m a woman and since I have family both here and there, it was likely I wouldn’t be searched. So I made a half-dozen trips within three months, and all of a sudden I was twenty thousand dollars richer. I quit that miserable job in the bank, and I’ve been hanging out ever since.”

Manuel looked at her with awe and embarrassment. He had called her thinking she would be the timid overweight girl he had loved but could not take seriously as a mate, and that she would be overjoyed to see him. Instead he found a sharp beautiful woman who treated him with a certain warmth, but definitely with deference. He felt clumsy and oafish in front of this woman of the world.

He didn’t realize he had fallen so silent and was staring moodily into the flames until she rubbed the back of his neck with her hand.

“Hey,” she said, “where you off to in your head?”

He could find no words. Depressed by what had happened with Joan, he was almost paralyzed at finding Alma as far, if not farther, beyond his grasp than the sexy editor at the office. But almost without his being aware at first of what was happening. Alma slipped her hand inside his shirt and was slowly and gently rubbing the firm pectoral muscles, tickling his hair, and grazing his nipples. He got aroused before he was conscious of his growing erection. He turned to look at her.

“What are you doing?” he asked tenderly.

“Remembering how good you feel,” she told him. “Remembering what a strong, handsome, fierce lover you are.”

“Don’t pity me, Alma,” he said.

She pinched his skin hard enough to make him wince and grab her wrist. “The only pity here is coming from you, and it’s all for yourself. What’s the matter with you? You have a little run-in with a chick where you work and it destroys you? In the old days you used to eat women like that for breakfast. When you were with me you used to go downtown and pluck them off the streets and fuck them in the back seats of their cars, those little white girls with their itchy asses.”

“I know,” he agreed. “I guess I’m just getting old enough to feel lonely, that’s all.”

“That’s why you came to see me, isn’t it?” she asked with a quaver in her voice.

“Sure,” he said. “And I’m really glad to see you doing so well.”

She shook him roughly. “Why are you talking to me like I was a stranger?”

“Well,” he told her, “you’re in a different world now. You got money, you got new ways, you got fancy lovers.” He looked at her sadly. “It’s nice of you to take me in off the street for a night, but there is nothing for me here.”

She pulled away from him, lay back on the rug, and looked up at him through half-closed eyes. “I loved you so much,” she began, “that when you went away I just wanted to die for a long time. But I lived, and I changed. And I’ve been making my way. And now you’re back, and you’re pissed off because I’m not the way I was when you left. And you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Well, I’ll tell you something. All this while I’ve been going through changes, I’ve been thinking, ‘If Manuel comes back, I’ll be a real woman for him, a beautiful woman who can stand on her own two feet.’ But I didn’t think you would come back. I just kept loving you anyway, way in the back of my heart, thinking I would never see you again. And now you are here. And if you want me again, you can have me. I’m not going to play games with you about that. I still want you. And I have money, yes, and I have new ways, yes, and they are all yours if you want them. And I have lovers, yes, because I am a woman and not a child. And if you come back into my life, I’ll make every other man I know disappear, like that!” She snapped her fingers. “But you got to show me something. You got to show me that you want me. You got to win me. You got to fuck me so I forget every other cock that’s been inside me. And if you want to do that, here I am, baby. And if you don’t, you can go out the same door you came in.”

Manuel rocked back and forth as she delivered her speech, words that jumped like sparks from her mouth. At the same time that they intimidated him, they turned him on, making him at once afraid and desirous of the strange and familiar woman who was stretched out in front of him.

“Manuel,” she urged. “Don’t have such a stiff neck. Just take me in your arms, and find out what is here. Don’t try to think about it. You can’t know if the meat is good until you taste it.”

His heart skipped a beat. She was ravishingly beautiful, her dark lustrous skin picking up the highlights from the fire, her eyes liquid with yearning, her body arched toward him, her mouth slightly open and moist.

She traced her fingers across the top of his thigh and then sat up abruptly, bringing her face to his ear, biting the outer ridge and running her tongue into the sensitive center, breathing lightly. “Do you think I’ve forgotten how your mouth feels on my nipples, how your fingers feel in my cunt, how your cock tastes on my tongue? Do you think I could forget how I cried each time you entered me? Do you know how deeply I loved you? And now, after a lot of men and a lot of experience, I am not the naive girl I was. I am a woman who has tasted a few things, and I tell you, nothing is as sweet as feeling you come inside me, and squeezing my thighs together, and sucking the juice from your cock. It’s only to you that I have ever opened in that way, because it’s only with you that I want to make a baby.”