THE TWO MEN SAT at a table several yards removed from the cluster of happy-hourers at the bar. One of the men looked to be in his late 40s, with a high-domed forehead topped with thinning, straw-colored hair. The other, probably 22, was reddish and slumped in his chair like a wilted hot dog. “You need another drink,” the older man said. “You need to relax. Let me tell you a story about orgasms.”
“Jesus, Del,” the young man muttered.“You’re new to all this.”
“My girlfriend and I have been – ”
“Drinking, I mean. You’ve always been the straight arrow type. Let’s get this waitress – Miss! Get this fellow another one. I’m set, thanks.” The waitress was costumed in the saloon’s pirate motif, assuming pirates showed generous cleavage and allowed a callipygian moonset to peer below a short, frilly skirt. Del stared after her, shaking his head. “That’s what I’m talking about. That young woman earns her money, and I hope she makes a lot of it off of horndogs like me. But is she happy?”
“Who the fuck cares.”
“Come on, Jeremy, get in the spirit. The bitch broke up with you. So ask the waitress out. At least you’ll have some tits to play with while you’re in mourning.”
“Shelley is not a bitch. She had every right to be upset.”
“Because she caught you jerking off? In my day – ”
“Your day wasn’t all that long ago. Dad told me your wife walked out on you because of all your affairs. I don’t know why you should be trying to give advice to me.”
Del grinned his appreciation. “You’re my favorite nephew – ”
“I’m your only nephew.”
“ – but sometimes I need to whack you upside the head with a reality check. I love women, and I’m not going to apologize for that. But we’re talking about wanking, not screwing, so I’m going to tell you the story of a friend of mine, a guy who made your masturbation habits look like child’s play. Stack, we called him, because every time a pretty gal walked by he’d moan something like, ‘Christ, she’s stacked’ and we’d see that right hand of his drift to the front of his trousers. One day he quit just watching and made a date with one of this women, and next thing you know he’s strolling the aisle in a rented tux, Lucy by his side. Let me tell you about Lucy.”
*
Lucy (Del continued) was about as beautiful a creature as you could hope to imagine. Her eyes were like coffee and cream, and when she looked at you and smiled you almost forgot to gaze down at those perfect melons and the curvy everything that took off from there. When she walked toward you, every ripple of her dress undulated in the direction of her love box, and when she walked away those tight, thrusting ass cheeks waved a regretful good-bye. Gorgeous. A paradigm of objectification. Perfection.
And a total non-stop bitch. Does all that loveliness suck the niceness out of a person? She must have seemed nice enough for him to marry her, or maybe he was too distracted to notice at first, but soon enough everything he did was wrong.
She came from privilege, grew up in Connecticut just outside of Manhattan, had a CEO-type father who dumped his wife but denied his daughter nothing. Maybe Stack thought he was going to get a piece of that money. Stack thought wrong.
Let me give you the low-down on Stack. I’m sure in his more lucid moments, he didn’t believe that marijuana was invented solely for his pleasure, but he didn’t have many lucid moments. When he went to work on a joint, that thing vanished. No roach, no nothing – just a brown stain on his finger and thumb where the weed had been.
But Stack wasn’t your stoner of cliché. He grew up in Westchester, north enough in the county to be the child of artists too self-involved to pay much attention to their bright little brat. One sculpted, one painted. Can’t remember which did which. Stack was the world’s most gregarious kid. I met him when we were both about 14 and he showed me how to crash the cocktail parties always taking place in the neighborhood. He started as a drinker but switched to weed with a vengeance about the same time he got his license to drive. Which was a good thing – a slow-moving pothead is a better highway neighbor than an aggressive drunk.
Stack haunted thrift stores to feed what had become a jacket-and-tie look habit – developed mainly, I think, to piss off his folks, but it also it worked for him through school, marking him as industrious and responsible. He got a degree in – what else? – philosophy, and got a job with an insurance firm, actually doing pretty well as a salesman because he had this whole “destiny doesn’t care if you live or die” rap he laid on potential customers, and it scared them into signing.
The doper of cliché gets hungry when he’s high. Not Stack. Stack got horny. And Stack loved porn. He lived by himself in a garage apartment to which he never brought his girls, so it was stacked with smut books and fuck films. He bragged that he could operate the VCR remote with one hand, jerk off with the other, and still find fingers free with which to refresh the needed lube. Life was sweet, and then the internet came in and made it sweeter still. All his porn could be stored on a hard drive, and maybe that’s why he started thinking about getting married.
Now, I don’t really know his dating history. I don’t know if he even had one. He sat out high school social events where girls were involved, and college seemed to be a couple of flings, enough to put virginity behind him. But I think he was perfectly happy getting sexual release from his hand, and figured that any other use for a woman wasn’t worth the trouble.
Lucy came from a whole different place. She was from Greenwich but, as Stack used to say, “southern Greenwich, where the ladies expect you to treat them as Southern Belles.” Lucy knew that a husband provided two things only: a job that supports you, and personal valet service. He claims that she actually referred to herself as “li’l ol’ me.”
Did she like to fuck? She loved to fuck. Sex snapped the bitch switch off and an aggressive, adventurous, insatiable, moist Lucy emerged, according to my friend, and who am I to doubt him? I saw him on many a day after she’d given him a working over. She reduced him to a happy wreck.
One day he sat with me in this bar, probably at this very table, hunched over and holding himself upright by gripping the edge of the table. “I had no idea,” he moaned, “that the pinky could be an erogenous zone.”
“I suppose it depends where you put it,” I said.
“She didn’t put it anywhere at first. She just – stared at it.”
I picked his hand up from the table and fixed my eye on its smallest digit. “Like this?”
He wrenched out of my grasp. “Don’t touch me there!” He dropped his voice to a sullen whine. “That’s where she touched me. I’m still ... I have to protect it. She, she just stared at it and said nothing and stared at it some more and I started to feel creepy.
“‘What’s going on?’ I asked her. I must’ve laughed, nervously or something, because she laughed back at me – but in this feral pussycat way.
“She put her pinky up against my pinky and gave it the littlest kind of stroke and electricity shot up my arm. Then she spiraled the tip of her finger around it. Then she brought it to her lips and licked it so lightly I wasn’t sure I was really feeling anything, although that could have been because my dick was as hard as it’s ever been, so hard I think it was yelling at me.”
Stack is no stranger to hyperbole – it’s the philosopher in him, I suppose – so I usually discount his rantings by forty to fifty percent. There was something in his eye this time, though ... I believed him.
And I’m going to spare you the complete version of the story. Tell it well and any guy will come in his pants. I did. You would, and I don’t want to embarrass you. So I’m living out the business of how she removes her blouse and the custom-made magnetic clasp on her floral-pattern bra, and at least two chapters on her tits because each one of them is so talented and unique that it needs a chapter all its own.
You don’t expect to get to the pussy of a woman like this very quickly, and you would be correct in so thinking. Even though her dress is off, she’s wearing a slip. A slip! A simple band of elastic cinched at the waist, but it travels the Alps of her ass more slowly than Hannibal and with the invitation of conquest. We don’t have to deal with stockings or stilettos, because those stay on, although Stack said it was hard to explain how he got a small, circular bruise on each side of his neck, like Frankenstein bolts. “She dug in her heels there,” he confided, “but what do I tell people at the office?’
We’re left with a lady naked but for legwear and panties, and with Lucy that’s so sexy it’s more naked than with most women fully revealed. “Because she had the ability,” (Stack is talking again), “she had the ability to secrete her sex-moisture on cue. I’m not talking about something tacky like squirting. I mean the good ol’ viscous stuff, the stuff that thickens into little threads when you press it between your fingers.”
This is not gross. This is the language of physical love, you philistine. This is a woman capable of kissing the gusset of her panties with her pussy lips and leaving an ever-widening hello. Does desire have a more fervent face than that? “She’s daring you to slide those panties down by giving you a show you don’t want to miss, but one that always sent me right over the edge.
“And we haven’t even got to what she learned to do with the muscles in there. Forget the Kegels – she not only learned to grip like fist, she also got this whole ripple thing.” What? All right, all right. I’m getting to it.
So the question is: With a wife like that, why would you ever want to jerk off? I know I don’t have to ask you that, and you wouldn’t have to explain it to me. Jerking off is its own entirely different sensual art form, the one you don’t have to share, the one where you can indulge fantasies you’d never dare confess.
Even a mutual is pretty much sex. In Stack’s case, sex with Lucy may have been glorious, but it only happened maybe two or three times a month. Otherwise she either was extremely bitchy or only mildly bitchy.
She told him she never masturbated. She refused to masturbate in front of him. And she found the idea of him masturbating totally threatening. I can see her point: it would be like telling Shakespeare you wanted Nora Roberts to add a monologue. But the two shouldn’t be connected! Her problem was in attaching shame to the act of self abuse. The woman had a big hangup in that department.
And here’s Stack, whose greatest pleasure is to fire up the bong, line up his favorite porn, and edge to a magnificent orgasm. A magnificent jerk-off orgasm. Which as you know is different from a straight-fuck orgasm and an ass-fuck orgasm and a blowjob orgasm and the great little orgasm you get if you’re lucky enough to find a girl you can tit-fuck.
Trouble is, there more elaborate your jerk-off routine, the more likely you’re going to get caught when you share a living space. She was supposed to be out all evening, but the event got cancelled. Ordinarily she’d call on her way home, but they’d had a quarrel that morning. When she walked in on him, he had his dick in both hands, a rubber band around his balls, the room reeked of her rosemary restorative hand cream, and “Double-D Dildo Girls” was up on the 54-inch plasma, at a particularly lively scene, he told me, with one girl riding a Sybian while two others worked her tits.
You’re kidding! It’s an elaborate sex machine. The woman straddles an electrified hump with vibrating appliances in the middle, so she can fit a rotating rubber dick inside her while a studded ridge agitates her clit. You never watched any Sybian porn? Good stuff, man. Those orgasms are real. I get jealous watching that stuff.
He has no idea how long she stood and watched him watching and stroking. He had the volume up and never heard the door. He had no idea she was there until he felt a tree smash against the side of his head, which turned out to be her huge Armani handbag with its big metal clasp. Knocked him off the couch and practically took off his earlobe, so now there’s blood gushing on carpet and furniture and he’s trying to figure out what hit him while she’s continuing to hit him again and again, screaming so unintelligibly that he thinks it’s another Sybian girl having the orgasm of her life. Also, you know how hopeful a hard-on can be. His dick is bobbing in front of him, wanting to know if this is part of the excitement, his trousers are around his ankles, he has a hand over his wounded ear, and he’s seeing stars as he tries to get up and gets clobbered again.
By the time she quits, it’s like a gangland murder scene. He crawls towards the garage, not really thinking through the mechanics of escape, while she collapses in a kitchen chair and sobs and sobs. He’s a monster. A pervert. A selfish, horrible excuse for a human being. And on and on.
He pulls up his pants, tucks his penis away – that orgasm has been sucked back inside way beyond his testicles – gets a wet cloth to his ear and sits across from her.
It’s the moment of reckoning. He knew, at that moment, that he still loved her deeply. That the marriage of stoner and bitch creates its own weird balance. He knew that he was able to put up with her in a way no earlier boyfriend could, and he’s rewarded, a few times a month, with the greatest sex anyone ever could enjoy. And she wasn’t hurting for money, and he’d miss that, too.
So he sits there and studies her and considers this, their worst confrontation. She’s flushed and breathing hard but still those eyes are caressing his heart. He’s suddenly aware that the porn film is still going in the living room, and they both can hear porn-actress orgasm cries echoing. Lucy, he tells me, was a quiet, intense moaner who showed her orgasm in those eyes. He, too, made little noise, finding it distracted from the mission at hand. But here’s Ashley Whatsit in the next room screaming with painstricken joy.
“I’ll turn that off,” he says, and does so. She hasn’t moved when he gets back. “You’re wondering why I did this,” he begins. She lowers her head and stares at the floor. He knows that tears are welling. She’s entering the remorse phase of the encounter. “I do owe you that explanation,” he goes on, “and I want to tell you the truth. Even though you may not think very highly of me in the end.”
This, he told me, was a calculated move, keeping her expectations in limbo. “Don’t hate me,” he says, “but I was planning on getting you a Sybian for your birthday – that’s the machine the woman in the movie was riding. I wanted to see what it was like because I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of a freak – or think that I thought that you were. All I wanted, all I really, really wanted was to make you happy.”
He can sense her skepticism. He ups the ante. “I don’t believe you’re as happy as you deserve to be,” he goes on. “I know that marriage to me isn’t a bed of roses. I figured that the one time you’re truly happy is when we’re having sex. When I see you working towards an orgasm, you look so happy that it makes me happy, too. Your eyes darken and your head lolls back and you’re a picture of total bliss. How often can we enjoy that? A fellow at work told me that his wife told him that a friend of hers got to try one of these and was all but ready to get ride of her husband. I’m not that easily threatened, but it’s a very big investment, so I decided to do some research.”
He takes the chance of easing to her side, embracing her with the arm that wasn’t stanching his ear. She relaxes a bit into him. “And honestly, honey, watching that got me so hot because I was imagining what you would look like on top of it, and I couldn’t keep my hand off of myself. I’ll replace the hand cream, I promise.”
When you live a life as filled with suspicion as hers, you choose carefully what to believe. She chose to believe him, and next thing he knew he’d invested in spanking new Sybian with extra accessories, which seriously ate into his pot budget for the next few weeks.
*
Del leaned back and signaled for another round, bringing the pneumatic barmaid back for another view. “You’re lovely,” he told her.
“You’re just looking at my tits,” she said.
“I started there, but believe, I worked my way beyond.”
She bounced away, pocketing a generous tip while Jeremy groaned in embarrassment. “I’m going home,” he declared. “I’m going back to Audrey and tell her I made a terrible mistake. I’m going to tell her I spent the evening with you, and she’ll be so sympathetic with my pain that she’ll forgive me for everything else. Honestly, you made all that shit up.”
“All I did was embellish. The only truth about the world of sex is that there’s always room for surprises. You want me to go to your house with you and talk to her?”
“God, no.”
“Just tell her that her happiness is what’s most important. That letting you masturbate is liberating. That bliss remains elusive. Speaking of which.” Del signaled again to the barmaid, who soon bounded near.
“What can I get you?”
“It’s no secret,” said Del, “that I’ve been admiring you all evening. I know I’m a much older man, but that’s why my aesthetic sense is so finely tuned. Might we enjoy drinks together some time?”
“I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean no.”
“Doesn’t mean yes, either.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
She giggled and playfully slapped Del’s arm. “Keep trying,” she said, and was gone.
Del smiled at his nephew. “That’s all we can do,” he said.
– 2 September 2010
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