Then he regained his power, becoming serious in order to sit me down gently on the rickety wooden chair by the kitchen window. I smoked my after-work cigarette, complaining about the idiots I worked with. He knelt at my mound, opened my lips, and suckled my clit until I felt faint. I told him to stop. He stopped his sucking and leaped up on to his feet and put on his best society lady posture. “Yes, my queen,” he said, bowing before me.
With one eyebrow raised abnormally high, he pranced around the room speaking Briticisms, his hands fluttering like butterflies, while his bright red penis pointed the way. I laughed as I studied him. He was beautiful in his girlie man sort of way, and I tackled him on to the bed. He played hard to get until I mounted him, pinned him down. I could do that; we were practically the same size.
He lay helpless beneath me, eyes closed, moaning away as I squeezed and rode his dick like I had learned to ride a horse as a wannabe child jockey at our house upstate. English style, back straight, propped up on my feet, legs bent at my sides. I’d push my self up and down, up and down. I concentrated and stared at him below me, leaning back and turning around to caress his delicate balls. They felt cool to my hands, like little plastic bags of sand to play with.
I looked down and saw his feet. His long toes were curled in arthritic pleasure. It was the pleasure of being encompassed by my insides. He was my captive animal, trapped beneath my long, strong legs he loved so much, his
chaleco de salvavidas,
as he liked to call them.
Wanting to somehow participate, he lifted his upper torso to my left breast and sucked me, the saliva popping loudly in his mouth. He’d look up at me occasionally with one of my reddened nipples in between his teeth. I liked it when he did that, with that look of complete submission. At that moment I was Mother Mary giving milk to her baby Jesus. I was omnipotent and feverish, on a sort of low-grade heroine haze. And then suddenly I tired and alighted off him, lying down and spreading myself out for him. I felt shaky, anaemic.
He tried to eat me again but my body couldn’t take any more, and I captured his eager head in between my hands like the saviour and lifted it to give him my breath. We kissed furiously, mouths stretched open to their full capacity, teeth knocking, unfurling our tongues like safety ropes.
Then his cell phone rang. I hated that thing. He stiffened for a bit, as if feeling a change in the air. He looked over at it, contemplated getting it, then thought again. He looked at me instead. Then he let himself inside me elegantly, as his eyes peered into mine. It was like he was looking right through me, intuiting my life’s accumulation of sadness. I tried holding my eyes right back to his like I usually did, my lioness instinct. But this time I wanted to hide. I didn’t know why, but I felt shaken by the way he looked at that phone. I lowered my lashes instead.
The urge to cry was rising in me fast. I thought of my mother, her pain in love, her long-time fear of ageing, of dying alone. I thought of how she finally decided to face this fear by violently making it come true. I felt myself shrinking in his sentient gaze. As he pumped me, his eyes were welling up with tears along with mine. I held back and fought the demon. I didn’t want him to know how much I loved him yet or how happy I really was despite my current state. How I wanted to become part of his world and abandon mine!
Deep within me, David twisted and coiled himself, sensually taking in the texture of my inner walls. Then he stopped and said, “Let’s get on our sides. But keep me inside of you.”
I went with him, face to face, as he grabbed my left buttock, and carried me into a half-turn on to our sides. Never disconnecting our selves, David had somehow managed to go even deeper in that new position. We rocked back and forth tensely; his cock massaged my clit, our bodies aching in perfect symmetry. There was so much moisture. He pulled out, buried his head at my breasts again, allowing for us to dry off a bit.
When he re-entered me, he pulsed three times and whimpered at the sensation. That was all he could stand and I was ready too. We came in muted silence, and I allowed myself one stray tear to travel down my face as David shut his eyes and rolled over on his back. I quickly wiped it off.
“You OK?” he asked, catching his breath. He stared up at the white glare of my high antique tin ceilings. I had always thought they looked like dozens of tiny breasts lined up in quadrants. He placed a hand on my leg for reassurance. He wasn’t one to touch after sex, too busy recoiling into himself.
“I thought about my mom and got emotional,” I mumbled.
“You want to talk about it?”
I tried to decipher his tone before answering. Then I thought about the phone call he received during sex. Who could it have been? Why did he even consider stopping to answer?
“No, it’s OK. It’s passed now,” I lied.
“Some water?” he asked.
“Oh yeah, parched is an understatement,” I answered.
I forced myself up with him and went for a cigarette while he took his phone with him into the bathroom. It was probably Sergi. I had heard David whispering on the phone with him late at night. When he came out of the bathroom, I asked him who had called.
“It was Sergi. He likes to reminisce when he’s drunk.”
It was 3 a.m. Spain time, 9 p.m. ours.
“Doesn’t he have anyone else to call?”
It wasn’t just the question, but the way my voice shot it out. It had a tone of desperation. I felt threatened. It was the tone that my mother had used a million times on my father when he told her he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner or that he had another important business trip.
I was envious of a something I couldn’t even put into words or quite understand about him and Sergi. It was just a gut feeling I had. There was nothing I wanted more than to be proven wrong.
He was calm. “A mutual friend of ours is arriving into town tomorrow, Anna. That’s what he was really calling about. Miguel Velásquez. He’s an old friend of the family who’s here on business. He’s an art dealer.”
“Great,” I said, trying to keep my sanity. “Where shall we take him?”
We arranged to meet Miguel the next night at a high-end, big-chef restaurant on the newly reformed Clinton Street. We went through three bottles of South Africa’s finest wines, since this was thankfully on Miguel.
It was my first time seeing David with a close friend, riding down the green, comforting path of memory lane. Miguel was jet-set handsome with perfectly styled salt-and-pepper hair. He was married to a rich Catalana who stayed at home and raised their two boys while he frolicked around the globe. He was cordial to me but didn’t go beyond the niceties to make me feel like part of the old clan.
His attention was all on David. He had a fountain of questions about David’s work and about his mother and her health. Miguel asked if she had remarried since David’s father passed away. Like a pair of old women, they unearthed fresh and hardened dirt about themselves and their mutual friends.
Sergi’s name was splattered over practically every adventurous tale there was to tell.
Remember when you and Sergi had that party for . . . or when Sergi and you and those girls . . . You and Sergi disappeared with those Swiss dudes . . . Whatever happened to them!
It was obvious the Canettis were the life of the party.
“Yeah, whatever happened to them?” I interjected, giving him a shove and raising an eyebrow.
“Nothing!” David said and laughed. “Nice purple mouth you got there, Anna. Why don’t you have some more wine?”
My teeth and lips tend to suck up the tannins. I must have looked like a fool. And he was trying to change the subject.
“Aw come on, man,” Miguel egged on. “Those guys were like in love with you and Sergi. You guys were such the cock-teasers!” said Miguel. He glanced over at me to try to detect a reaction.
My blood was boiling, but my face muscles were contained.
Their banter was so drenched in homoeroticisms, they might have as well been fencing with their dicks.
I changed the subject to something neutral. I asked about the art Miguel was viewing in New York. Mentally, I prepared myself to confront David when we were alone.
I knew that I was quieter than usual on our walk home.
After we saw Miguel into a cab uptown, David tried a million times to jump-start conversations about Miguel’s shallow art world. But all his attempts fell flat. I was trying to breathe and shoo away the black birds of paranoia circling me. We tired from our walk and hailed a short cab ride home.
We slid into the back seat, and I gave the driver directions. I turned to David.
“Tell me more about your experimentation with Sergi.”
He was instantly defensive. “Why are you making such a big deal about him? Do you think I’m gay or something?”
“I don’t know. What the hell did happen with those Swiss guys then?”
“I told you, nothing, we just did lines together. What’s wrong with you, Anna?”
“I just want you to tell me more about how you and Sergi first fooled around with each other.”
We got back to my apartment and opened another bottle. I listened. I had no choice. I tried to appear calm. He delivered his words casually, like canapés swallowed with champagne. My own sepia-coloured movie reel rolled in my head as he spoke.
David explained that he never believed he was a homosexual. He worshipped girls in his classes when he was young, but absolutely no one paid him or Sergi any mind. They were hideous then, he claimed, and foreigners in a xenophobic country to boot. They were simply desperately horny, pimply little bastards who only had each other for company. Sergi’s mother, their father’s first wife, had died during childbirth. So Sergi lived with an aunt in his early years. He became too much to handle as a pre-teen, and his aunt sent him back to live with his father, his father’s new wife and his half-brother.
The first time Sergi and David touched each other, they’d been sitting in front of their television set in their small apartment in Paris. While David’s mother smoked cigarettes in the courtyard and their father banged university students in exchange for discounted books in the back of his shop, the boys gave one another their first blow job.
The television had been turned to one of Europe’s many soft-core porn channels, where shapely naked women lathered one another in the shower. The boys’ virginal cocks pulsed and rose, begging to be set free from their pants. Through the zipper of his blue jeans, Sergi, the taller and more handsome one, released his cock and stroked it wildly to its fullness while he stared straight ahead at the telly. His bottom lip jutted out as he bit down and broke through the violet skin of chapped lips. A rebel strand of wheat-coloured hair es caped from a thick mass of an overgrown pageboy haircut and dipped in and out of the pock hole on his upper cheekbone, a mark left from a severe case of the measles. David’s cock swelled in sync from the excitement of seeing dozens of hardened nipples. The sound of his mother’s voice giggled in the distance while Sergi worked on himself with a passionate energy that David had never witnessed before in his brother. Tense and excited, David took his out too. The boys, both sixteen, sat alongside each other on a couch too small for their rapidly growing limbs. They looked over at one another, glassy-eyed and trembling, as they pulled at their reddened cocks together. Sergi, who always felt he could control David, asked him in a desperate and unequivocally commanding voice to “Kiss it, now.” And David, without hesitation, leaned over and took in the warmth and mixture of perspiration and detergent smell of his best friend and half-brother’s manliness.
David propelled himself up and down on Sergi only a pair of times before David, overcome with emotion, ejaculated burning droplets of embarrassment at the newness of it all. Sergi pushed David off and finished himself off with his own hand, feeling over whelmed with the sight of David’s come and now his own all over his trousers.
With a hand over his mouth, David pointed and laughed at the mess and Sergi, registering what had happened, stayed perfectly still. He gave David a shove and told him to go and get something to clean it up before David’s mother walked in. David brought back some napkins, they cleaned themselves up, and they switched the channel to some American gangster flick.
I realized then that Sergi hadn’t blown David and that, in game theory, he owed him one. But I didn’t want to know any more.
David left for Barcelona a day before New York had its first big snowfall. He had an important engagement to attend back home at the Círculo de Lectores. I assured him I would join him as soon as I could figure out what to do about work. My first days and nights alone again were spent obsessing over Sergi and David. I imagined the wild, sexual adventures that awaited them when they reunited in Spain again.
After the reality that David had left set in, I spiralled from ecstasy to a one-lane freeway towards depression. I had been on a four-month hiatus from its dark fog, and now I was back. I began seeing my shrink again. I told Laura about my feelings of jealousy about David’s experimentations and his intimate relationship with Sergi.
Sitting in front of me, on her hunter-green chair, in a long, flowing khaki-coloured skirt and brown riding boots, Laura was serene. She joined in the Greek chorus of those around me who pooh-poohed my irrational fear of thinking David a closet homosexual.
“This is natural behaviour for men. They’re just as capable of experimenting with the same sex as women are,” she said. She paused and asked, “You’ve been with women, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it different or more acceptable that you did?”
“I don’t know. It’s just
different
.”
“It’s the same. Just be grateful that he told you,” she said. “This proves a wonderful aspect of his open character. He’s sharing him self, his past, who he is with you.”
“I guess so.”
“He’s chosen
you,
Anna. Trust him, trust yourself. OK?”
“OK.”
Time was up and having him so far away didn’t help my overactive imagination when I
wasn’t
seated in my shrink’s chair.