The Hinky Bearskin Rug (13 page)

Yet in that
unclean academy it seemed that the whores did not desire desire, not even abed.
I found them distasteful. They were little better than drabs. They were dirty,
coarse, and lowborn, as were their customers, and the girls were further
cheapened by their work. The sauciest opera dancer was as an angel floating
above the sewer where they plied their trade. They did not even serve
gentlemen.

I spied on
them whenever they occupied my bed. There they performed prodigies of contortion
— and yet felt nothing. As my mistress promised, their desires were in my view.

But not one of
them desired congress.

In a moment of
hurt, I had declared to my mistress that all women were like this, though I
hadn’t believed it.

But what if it
were true? In despair I wondered, are none of these women ever carried forward,
flesh upon flesh, in the sweaty tangle of the moment? Is there no whore who
jousts for jousting’s sake?

I couldn’t
believe it.

Yet the more
time I spent wading through these women’s lives with my coat-skirts
fastidiously raised, as it were, the more certain it seemed that I would never
be free.

They were
pathetic wretches. They went hungry. Some racked their bellies with back-alley
physicks, trying to rid themselves of child. Some were beaten by their abbess
or by their patrons. All were broken to their labor, broken as a dung-hauler’s
horse is broken, without regard for their pleasure.

Reluctantly I
acknowledged that one’s desire might lie in abeyance while the necessities of
life went unfilled.

I fear my porn is a poor effort. Yet I feel this has
merit if perhaps only to myself.

That first
fortnight bored me and disgusted me. I was sure that my mistress meant me to
stay imprisoned forever. Nothing could be less to the taste of a man of my
pride than to pander to whores’ desires. Faugh, what petty desires! They
desired to drink themselves insensible, or to dress well, or to scratch out the
eyes of some other member of their tawdry sisterhood.

And then I met
Maggie. A senior whore, she had been stolen by the abbess from a rival, so she
claimed, and was paid better than the others, which boast got her hair pulled.
She was thirty if a day, pock marked, with a screeching voice, drooping dugs,
and a paint-raddled face. She constantly bickered with her fellows and stole
from their hidden stores of money. She lied. She drove secret bargains with her
patrons to cheat the abbess of her share whenever she performed special
favours. She was none too clean in her habits.

Yet she was
lusty. How my Maggie loved to bounce! She brought first to my brass bed a man
in orders, perhaps some country vicar up from his respectable village, and
fucked him soundly.

To my
astonishment, I found myself attracted. O wonderful moment! My body, it seemed,
came back to me: my heart beat again, I panted, my pulse hammered in my ears, I
felt the slide of skin upon skin and a fiery bodily urge.

At first I
thought it was my own body.

Then I
realized it could not be, for I’d no power over my limbs.

Was it the
stout old vicar’s lust I felt?

But as Maggie
threw her leg over his belly and took him, first fore, then aft, riding as if
the very devil had his horn in her, I came to understand that it was her body I
felt:
her
heartbeat,
her
pulse,
her
unclean skin burning with irresistable pleasure.

And I stopped
thinking of her inferiority.

By day I lay
like her secret shadow under the coverlet, exulting in sensations —
her
sensations — as she pleasured
herself. At night I learned her trade from the inside out. I, who had
condescended to patronize so many of her kind, knowing nothing of what it cost
or paid such a creature, I became one with her, and willingly. For to share in
her panting, the rise of her greedy hunger, the sharp peaks which visited her
over and over, more often and more powerfully than those crises which had
satisfied me in my proper person as Lord Pontarsais — ass that I had been — this
sharing was glorious.

I was being
broken to my work, like that cart horse.

I began to
understand, I thought, what my mistress had meant to teach me with her terrible
curse.

A woman’s
lusts are different. Her need is particular to her sex, and quite unlike the
need of man. How pleased I was with this insight! To learn this, my mistress
had sent me to a harsh school.

Had she
presented herself to me, how I could not yet picture, perhaps by laying herself
in this bed once more, yes, that was a pleasant thought, then I might willingly
have shared her flesh, traced the secret pulse in her veins, rejoiced with her,
perhaps even while another man pleasured her.

But she never
came for me.

Not ever.

I had been
abandoned to my fate.

In time,
Maggie moved on. I never knew if she left the academy for a private patron, or
retired wealthy, or, more likely, harmed herself irreparably through overwork
or drink or quarrelsomeness and sank back into the stews again. She was
replaced by other whores, less lusty.

But I was
never again aloof from their flesh. From Maggie onward, I lay alert to the
slightest stirring of desire in whatever woman had my bed. Only when that woman
felt desire could I feel alive.

I was no
longer a man, and not yet an incubus.

In the months
to come I was to discover that I had many other powers. There is a space inside
every human mind, vaster than all the cosmos, like a library, or a forest, or
the stacked and ordered spheres of the heavens, and this space is constructed
of all that has been put into that mind, whether by bible or by painting or by
plays or mummery or by the day-in, day-out practices of life itself. It is
unimaginably crowded.

My hundredth
woman calls it demonspace. But it is no more than the inside of her mind and
mine, the sum of all we have ever thought or dreamt.

Moreover, this
space has no order, except as the mind imagines it. To a creature like myself,
an invader creeping in at the portal of desire, all is a jumble, except for the
bright, clear call of lust, like a hunting horn, showing how I may share a
woman’s body for just so long as she feels pleasure. While I occupy that space,
I see the map to her satisfaction clearly traced. I know what other man’s face
she may see while she is servicing her husband. I can assume that face. I can
become him, and perform prodigies he never could.

This is the
power of the incubus: to ferret out what pleases any woman and to provide it,
however impossible. For in that space, we are as gods, she and I. Whatever she
can imagine, I can perform. If she has desires even she will not confess, I can
find them and make them flesh, surprising her and delighting her.

But I run
ahead of my story.

These powers
did not come under my control all in a flash.

The bitterest
year of all my decades of sexual servitude was that year in the Cheapside
academy. For as much as I came to know and sympathize with the women trapped in
that loathesome life, as much as they were able to teach me, I failed them.

I pleased not
one of them.

At this date,
I have carried a little more than a hundred women to that jeweled isle where
there is no fear or pain or shame. They have lent me their breath, their pulse,
their pleasure, their release. I have made stars fall for them. I have made
mares of them and mounted them as their stallion. I have brought the dead back
into their arms for one more tender tumble, and, borrowing secrets from their
memories, I have made them believe that I was the departed, and that he loved
them still. All this and more can I do.

But I cannot
turn back the clock to repay Maggie or any of her poor sisters for the things
they gave to me.

That failure
will live with me the rest of eternity, I think. For surely, if the body of
Randy Darner, third Earl Pontarsais should perish, in that moment I will slip
into the nearest bed, wherever it may be, and serve out more shameful centuries
until some angel comes to set me free.

And will she
pass over my failure? Or will she grant me absolution at last?

o0o

Jewel’s belly
had gone hot and runny. Her head was on fire with pictures of Randy: Randy in
an old-timey English cat house, Randy locked out in the darkness, slamming
mothlike against the window while the girls did their job, Randy waiting for
forgiveness from a bitch who would never come back to see how much he had
learned. Her breastbone burned. She remembered making love to him on the snowy
Field Museum porch, in view of the frozen lake, pouring her heat into him. In
demonspace Randy had been cold and she burning, but the snow had come out of
the depths of her own mind. Randy had only showed it to her. Randy could always
find her, no matter what frozen hell she was in.

A kind of
high, soundless singing started up in the back of her head, like a choir of
cicadas. It made her feel fuzzy and open and pleasantly full and a little
sap-headed.

I owe him,
she thought.

Thursday was a Velvita day. When she put on the big fluffy
robe and walked into makeup, Lena already felt like a porn star. It was a slow
process. The body makeup. An hour on her hair and hands. Sewing the costume on
her. When she looked in the mirror and licked her lips, Velvita Fromage looked
back: wicked, contented, in control.

Her scene
today had been developed between her and Onika the week before. It was written
for Velvita and Sancho, kind of a spooky but emotional scenario about a
historical re-enacter and the ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier. Velvita had
doubts about some of the plotty stuff — you didn’t want so much plot that it
delayed the sex scenes — but once she and Sancho were in it, it flowed
naturally, The situation created the characters. The dialogue cued the sex.
Perfect.

This time it
was a little more than perfect. Maybe Sancho was getting into the role of
Zebediah. Maybe her imagination got fired up with the Puritan-girl costume.
Maybe it was the tickly fake white bearskin rug.

Whatever.
Velvita found herself getting
into
it.

And at the
critical moment, just when she knew she was going to come her brains out and
give Onika footage that would sell a hundred thousand copies, she felt herself
slip sideways on the bearskin rug and slide deep into a crevasse between the
hairs.

What the—?

Down,
sideways, round and round like a Cheerio in a toilet bowl. Loop-de-loop like
the The Demon roller coaster at Six Flags. She giggled and shrieked and
squealed.

And she sailed
out off the end of the invisible roller coaster and into the arms of a
gorgeous, unfamiliar, naked man.

His arm
circled her waist. The merry-go-round struck up a waltz.
I’m dreaming,
Velvita thought,
that’s
why this isn’t scary.
She looked up into the stranger’s face.

His big black
eyes burned down into hers with compelling intensity. They danced, and the swooping
music and the lift of his hand in the small of her back seemed to hit her right
in the sweet spot. She remembered that the cameras would be watching, and the
exhibitionist in her let out a whoop, and a cyclone orgasm whirled her in
circles around her mysterious black-eyed partner.

While she
reeled with sexual aftershock, he spoke.

My name is Randy. I need your help to
get out of here.

o0o

Jewel reported
to work at Baysdorter Boncil Thursday feeling more in control. For one thing,
she’d got off last night, which always settled her nerves. Plus she was back in
her navy polyester, which gave her its own brand of control and power.

So when Steven
called her into his office first thing, she thought she was ready.

He said
without any buildup whatever, “There are naked pictures of you all over the
Internet.”

Her mouth
dropped open. “Excuse me?” Delayed shock hit her like a slow, wet fish in the
face.

He checked her
out with a slapworthy leer. “You have nice nipples for a cop. They look great
with clothespins.” He rattled off the www-dot-blah-blah-blah in a gloating
voice.

A hot flush
crept up her back.
How did he find out
about that?
And,
So he really does
know why I’m here.

She snapped
back, “And you do so many cops.”

“Well....” He
leered wider.

She felt like punching
him.
What happened to Mr.
I’m-too-sexy-for-my-suit?
“What
do
you want? Besides a chance to exercise your Turette’s?”

“Be nice, or
I’ll see to it your superiors have that URL.”

“Too late.
It’s old news in my shop. You got a better threat?”