through my blood. “You guys hate us, don’t you?” she said musingly. “Cocks hate cunts.”
“But they love mouths,” I crooned to her, and fell into a state of beatitude as her lips absent-mindedly enclosed me, and her brown hand, narrow as a hoof, worked the skin at the base up and down, into a moist tingle mounting heavenwards.
“We hate you, too,” she told me afterwards, when I was too languid to hurt her. “You own us, but we hate your guts.” She had come back from the bathroom, after a tumult of flushed toilet and expectorated mouthwash, in a clearheaded, combative mood.
“Who’s this ‘you’?”
“You rich creeps. I never got into one of your houses before. Usually the tricks are guys with no background, Irish or eyetie, you know, who have a little money they can’t hang on to. They don’t want to hang on to it. They’re too Catholic. Down deep they think it’s holy to be poor. Only the Jews and you Wasps aren’t ashamed to hang on to money, to sit in heaps of it and roll in it and smear it all over yourselves—disgusting! You think you’re so great God likes your being stinking rich.”
“Darling, I agree. I must learn to spend. That thing you just did was worth every welder.”
“Two hundred.”
“It’s usually a hundred fifty.”
“You had a lot of come today. I nearly choked.”
“I love it when you nearly choke.”
“I know you do, you prick. That’s what my father began by having me do, blow him.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked into the past, preparing to match my confession with her own.
“Hey,” I said, “do I need to hear this? I’m no therapist. I’ll start charging you by the hour.”
“I was eight. My head came up to just the right height on him. He said to do it, I didn’t know, I thought it might be normal. He was my father, he said it was all right, who else could I trust?”
“You could have gone to your mother.”
“Tchaa!”—a catlike snarl. “She was worthless. She would have slapped me and called me a liar. She didn’t want to know. He was all she had, too.”
“I’m sorry, dear, for calling you a liar.”
“O.K. I appreciate your saying that. I’m a hooker and I steal, but I don’t generally lie. It’s too confusing, it makes another world. So I stick with the truth, generally. Except when I said you were stubby. You have a nice prick.”
“Don’t break my heart.”
“You can’t take a compliment, can you? You hate me too much. You hate needing me. Guys do. It must feel funny, having that business hanging down outside you have to keep feeding.”
“I feed you,” I said, and felt compelled to embrace her, her pliant slim waist, the long brown supple abdominal stretch between the wispy ghosts of her bathing suit, and I felt her harden, in fright at my confessed need and in calculation of how best to employ it to her advantage. I was her slave, my slave’s slave. I whispered into her ear how I wanted before I died to pump a ton of jism into her, into her mouth, into her little puckered asshole, into her huge warm cosmic cunt, pump it all as some kind of glutinous silvery bridge to the next world, and she was saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” automatically, calculating how to put my craziness into a profitable harness.
Our mothers wipe our bottoms and praise our first babbled words, our nurses at the finale tidy up and maternally murmur amid the mess of our dying, but the women who out of whatever motive swallow our seed through one of their holes deliver the acceptance that matters. They drink our groins’ milky tears. Through the bodies of women men conduct what tortured dealings they can with the universe, producing serial murder and morganatic marriages and a Morgan Library’s worth of love letters, novels, and death threats. Women don’t ask for this, true. But what do women ask for? as a maligned sage at the far end of the last century infamously inquired in all innocence.
Between bouts of lovemaking Deirdre and I have taken to exploring the house together, naked. I turn the thermostat way up for the adventure. Gloria kept a thrifty cold house, and when I wasn’t looking would sneak our bedroom window open an inch or two even in the bitterest January weather. She would even raise the storm window, which she ordinarily said she couldn’t do because the little spring catches would