Little Deaths, page 40
Julie looked grim. ‘Uh-huh. And no one knows better than I do that you can achieve real intimacy with someone without ever touching them in just that very way. How could you? My own sister.’
‘Come on. You mean to say you’ve never noticed how much this man enjoys female energy?’
She blinked at me. ‘What?’
‘He’s a woman lover. Not a womanizer, but a woman lover. He loves women. He loves the whole idea of women. He loves them as a concept, he loves them as a reality, and he loves them individually and in groups. This guy is one hundred percent pro-female, and you should count yourself blessed.’ I grinned. ‘Why else do you think he’s so willing—and good—at cunnilingus?’
Julie’s face got so red I was afraid she might have a nosebleed or cry blood or something. ‘B.J.! Have you been spying on us?’
‘No, ‘I lied, ‘I just know you. You wouldn’t bother with a guy who wouldn’t. Or who wasn’t any good at it.’
She put a hand over her mouth as if she were shocked and then suddenly started to giggle.
‘Only men who really love women will do that,’ I said confidently.
Julie giggled some more. ‘Who says’
‘Women who get it.’
‘B.J.!’
‘What the fuck are you acting shocked about. We’re both over thirty and in case you didn’t know, I’m not a virgin either.’
Julie’s giggles trailed off. ‘Actually, B.J., I’ve been kind of waiting for you to tell me that you’re gay.’
‘You know, that’s the second time you’ve brought that up. Why do you keep saying that? And why would you think it’s your business?’
She floundered some more.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I don’t need your permission to have a sex life of my own.’
‘Well, I’d be supportive, you know. No matter what you are.’
‘Gosh, thanks, it’s nice to know I have your blessing. Never mind,’ I added as she started to say something. ‘Do you want to stay in here all night? Or would you like to go eat dinner with your boyfriend?’
She followed me out of the bathroom and by the time she sat down she was almost all smiles. This didn’t make Pilar, Carol, and Fay any too happy, as I’d known it wouldn’t and I had to let Carol get me alone in the bathroom after the next round of drinks.
‘I know, I know,’ I told her. ‘If she doesn’t trot off on her own, we’ll have to give her a shot of the pheromones. And I have to tell you, she’s not too likely to trot off on her own. I mean, if he were your boyfriend, would you?’
Carol ran a hand through her short blonde hair, making it stand wildly on end. ‘How are we going to manage with her along for the ride?’
‘With a few pheromones in her, I don’t think that’ll be the problem.’
‘And what about after?’ Carol asked evenly, folding her skinny muscular arms. If there was anyone I was going to hate for being skinny, it would have been Carol because she had the athletic wiry body I’d always wanted and could never get, except I liked her far too much.
‘OK, that could be troublesome, but I’ll take care of her. You know that saying—my sister, my problem.’
Carol smiled at the joke. ‘She’ll freak out, you know.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. Then she’ll sleep it off and after that I’ll tell her Stan left town or eloped or went gay.’
‘People don’t just go gay.’
‘Sh. Julie doesn’t know that.’
After the appetizer, Carol took Fay to the bathroom, and in the middle of the entrée, Fay took Pilar. I had to go myself by then but I didn’t dare—I had nothing more to tell anyone, but not knowing that, someone would insist on going with me, and then the whole cycle would have to go round again just so everyone could be notified that I’d really had to pee. Stan was boggled enough.
‘You know,’ he said chattily as Fay and Pilar came back, ‘we used to joke about the real reason women always went to the bathroom together was so they could pass on vital information they all needed for world domination. But the way you all go, I’m beginning to wonder here.’
‘Don’t wonder,’ Fay said, waving one hand like a flamenco dancer. ‘Have another drink, think about dessert, but don’t wonder. You could strain something you’ll need later.’
We all laughed. Stan glanced at Julie; she smiled enthusiastically at him while he looked tentative. No, it wouldn’t have lasted, I thought, watching him decide to break up with my sister. She’d have needed the living daylights out of him and he just wasn’t up to her. He’d had no idea what he was taking on when she’d walked into his life. Now he was starting to get an idea, and he saw us four as the rescue squad that had saved him from making a serious mistake. Well, Stannie, guess again—but we promise it’ll be good to the last drop.
Sometime before dessert, I got Julie with a dose of pheromones and watching her cope, or try to, was both amusing and alarming. My sister wasn’t familiar with the phenomenon of naked libido; she’d been dressing hers up in emotions for so long, she thought it came that way naturally.
Now, she looked as if she were on a rollercoaster. Stan’s proximity was making her crazy, which made all of us just as crazy. Except for Stan, of course, who still didn’t have a clue; he stayed bewildered, but that was all right. It kept him off balance, and with a lot of food and drink dulling his senses as well, he’d be going over the brink before he understood what was happening.
By the time we decided to give up the table, both he and Julie were pretty drunk, which was perfect. Fay wouldn’t hear of them driving and shoehorned them into the backseat of her car with Carol and Pilar. Carol planted herself on Stan’s lap, to his everlasting delight, while Pilar made the sulking Julie sit on hers. There was only one bad moment, though, and I think that was more due to Fay’s bad shocks than anything else—halfway over to Carol’s, Julie mumbled something about being sick, which had us all holding our collective breath, but fortunately, nothing came of it.
Carol’s house had once belonged to a musician who had soundproofed the finished part of the basement—very nice. Carol had added’ some improvements and while they weren’t enormously innovative—mirrors on the ceiling, great big pillows instead of a sofa and chairs, a small wet bar with a Rubenesque nude on the wall behind it—we’d found that the surroundings only needed to be suggestive and comfortable.
Stan was very comfortable. He went right down on the pillows and settled in with a big smile. Julie picked her way around the room unsteadily as if she were searching for something but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Carol let her wander for a while before she put on some music, and Fay and Pilar got up to dance.
Julie came stomping over to me at the bar, where I was setting out glasses and looking for the absinthe. ‘B.J., are you nuts?’ she whispered. ‘Let’s get out of here. Obviously these people are weird.’
‘Not hardly,’ I said. ‘Come on, give it a chance. You might find you like this sort of thing.’
‘Yeah, I just might,’ she said, looking troubled. ‘That’s the problem. I don’t want to like it. I want things the way I’ve always had them.’
I found the absinthe. ‘Well, you can’t. Not tonight, anyway. Come on, don’t embarrass me in front of my friends?’
‘Embarrass you in front of your friends?!’ she shouted, and then turned to look at the rest of the room. Fay and Pilar stared back at her but didn’t stop dancing. Carol turned the music up and Stan lay on the pillows without trying to conceal the fact that all this had given him a world-class hard-on.
‘Oh, God, B.J.,’ Julie whispered, turning back to me. ‘This is so sleazy.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, handing her a glass. ‘And without sleaze, we’d be no better than animals. Remember that.’
She automatically took a sip from the glass and then frowned, holding it up to eye-level. ‘What’s this?’
‘Makes your heart grow fonder. Does wonders for your other parts, too. Absinthe,’ I added as her expression became even more confused.
‘Jesus!’ She put the glass down on the bar as Fay and Pilar danced over to get theirs, Fay taking a second glass and dancing over to Stan with it. ‘B.J., absinthe is poison!’
I chuckled. ‘Not to us, it isn’t.’
‘Or you,’ Carol put in as she leaned past Julie and took a glass for herself. Julie stepped back and glared at her. Carol laughed. ‘Oh, calm down, Snow White. Nobody here is going to do your fair young body until you beg for it.’
My sister looked to me again and I shrugged. ‘House rule—nobody does anything they don’t want to.’
‘Well, don’t tell me, tell her,’ Julie said, gesturing at Carol as she moved away from us.
‘She knows. It’s her house, after all. She just thought you might need the hint.’
Julie made a revolted face. ‘Me? Why?’
I looked over at Stan. Carol was curling up next to him on the pillows.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘You wanted to prove you could steal my boyfriend, you proved it. You wanted to show me that everyone’s got a streak of low-life in them, you showed me. Now I know how sick people can be. Now let me out of here.’
‘I would,’ I told her, sipping my absinthe, ‘if you really wanted to go.’
My sister crossed her arms protectively over her chest. She looked prim and nervous, but she was still holding her absinthe in one hand. ‘Are you one of those crazy women who thinks “no” sometimes means “yes”?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re one of those crazy women who thinks every time her libido wakes up, she’s in love. You’re the one who’s sick, Julie, but don’t worry. Tonight, you’re getting the cure.’
She looked scared. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘To you? I don’t know. The night is young. Oh, calm down,’ I added as she started to go over the brink to panic. ‘I’m not going to do anything. You are. Nobody can do anything to you that you don’t do to yourself, don’t you know that by now?’
Stan and Carol had put their glasses aside and were stretched out facing each other, touching only their fingertips together. I couldn’t really tell whether he was being patient, or just shy. Fay danced over behind Julie and gave her a nudge. ‘Why don’t you go over and ask him if he wants a sandwich?’
‘Yeah,’ said Pilar, chuckling a little, ‘it’s not like he just ate or anything.’
I poured some more absinthe into her glass. ‘This’ll help.’ It wasn’t, strictly speaking, absinthe. Or rather, it wasn’t only absinthe.
She looked down at the glass and I could see how the fumes alone were getting to her. Extra-sensitive; she’d never had this stuff before. ‘I don’t know …’ she said, mostly to herself.
Pilar gave her a little push. ‘Go on. People don’t usually get to find out what they really want.’
Suddenly, she drained the glass in one gulp, handed it to me, and went over to where Carol and Stan were still teasing each other’s hands. Pilar and Fay looked at me.
‘Vanilla,’ I said, ‘but she enjoys it.’
Julie lay down behind Stan, moving in close. Carol gave Stan a small push so that he fell back on top of Julie, who slipped one arm around his chest, holding him tight. He squirmed against her, enjoying the sensation and, coincidentally, blocking her view so that she didn’t know what Carol was doing until it was too late to object or stop it.
Carol really was athletic and quite limber; watching her was like watching Olympic-level gymnastics, or state-of-the-art ballet. She primed him, more with the sight of herself than anything, stretching up over him, muscles moving and flexing under her skin. Her nipples came up slowly, darkening as they crinkled—Carol claimed she could consciously control her heartbeat, too, and I didn’t doubt it. As he reached up for her, she slipped away and Pilar took her place. Julie still hung on, looking again as if she were on some wild carnival ride, the scariest rollercoaster in the world, trying not to like it, refusing to stop. Her bent knees came up between his legs from behind, which made him move more urgently, arching his back and lifting up until Pilar pressed him down again with her body.
Barely thirty seconds later, Pilar looked over her shoulder at me and Fay and there was no mistaking her expression. Apparently we were all just too good for him; Julie must have gotten more perfunctory than passionate as well. Pilar pulled away from him; Fay and I moved in and lifted him off Julie, who didn’t have to be told what to do next.
She was on him immediately and without preliminaries; this wasn’t the sort of serial she was used to, but then she was no longer perpetuating the love fiction, either. She was vocal this time, but there not being any lies to tell, there were no words, just noises.
He tried to rise up under her to meet her every movement but she was driving and she pushed him down further into the pillows. His clothes had been undone and disarranged; now she tore them off and her own as well. We were already stripped, waiting for the sign. Deep inside me, the absinthe burned, a private star, as we twined our arms and closed the circle around them.
The sound of his breathing changed suddenly and that certain smell came to us, unmistakable and potent, but we waited until Julie lifted her face and we saw the blood shining on her mouth.
As I’d expected, when Julie came out of it and saw what had happened, she passed out immediately. I put her in Carol’s tub and hosed her down while Pilar and Fay took care of the mess. There wasn’t much left this time—it had been quite a while since our last party and with an extra person, there had been barely enough to go around. Nobody said anything about feeling shorted, though Fay had the most right. I knew she was refraining out of respect to me.
I, on the other hand, felt no such compunction, since Julie was my sister and this was just more of her usual behaviour—being a hog and not cleaning up any of the mess she made.
In the middle of the second rinsing, I could feel the new tension in her body that meant she was actually awake but pretending to be asleep. I switched the spray from gentle to needle and the temperature from hot to cold before taking the shower massager off the handle and pointing it right at her breasts.
She screamed as if I were doing to her what she’d just finished doing to Stan with the rest of us. (Stan himself hadn’t screamed; he’d been too busy coming.) Then she started getting hysterical so I had to give her a faceful of cold water. I knew this was probably my way of getting back at her for using up all the hot water when I’d told her not to, so I changed the water to easy-going and blood-warm and kept it on the back of her neck until she stopped crying.
I got her into one of Carol’s muumuus but it took all four of us to get her into Fay’s car, and I seriously considered Pilar’s suggestion that we just use the trunk. Everyone else would spend the night at Carol’s while I borrowed Fay’s car and came back the next day. Truthfully, I would much rather have stayed there with them the way I always did, but Julie would have thrown a hissy fit.
She started crying again on the way home; this time, I figured the best thing to do was just let her go till she wound down, and I was right. By the time we got to the front door, all she had left in her were some sniffles.
After I got her inside, though, she wound up again and started ranting about group sex and how she wasn’t kinky or deviant, she never did that kind of thing, she didn’t like that kind of thing—
‘Dear Julie, always in denial,’ I said. ‘You’re forgetting the part where we tore him to pieces and ate him.’
She froze in the middle of my living room and stared at me with her eyes bulging. ‘That was an hallucination!’
‘No, that was real, actually.’ I chuckled. ‘Everything else that happened up till tonight—all that was a hallucination.’
She shook her head clumsily and suddenly her face looked terribly old. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘I don’t even know you, I don’t know what you’ve become—’
‘Yes, you do, Julie,’ I said. ‘I’m your sister, and I’m just like you. A little variation but really, the same tune. Only there isn’t as much evidence left afterwards.’
‘You monster—’
‘Knock it off. I do what my nature tells me to do, the same you do what your nature tells you to do. And it’s all Nature, Julie, Nature with a capital N: Pilar, Carol, and Fay and me, we’re the latest in a long line of tradition, a tradition that predates just about everything historical. And you see, you’re obviously part of the tradition, too, except you buried the feeling under a pile of niceties and outright lies until it got all twisted. You’re the pervert, Julie, because you won’t face the fact that you’re not supposed to let them live afterwards!’
She was completely flustered. ‘You … you … you serial killer!’
‘Actually, I think the closest thing would be the black widow spider. Of course, the spider’s imperative is blind Nature, without intelligence, neither conscious nor diabolical. But she goes at it with such relish that it is tempting to believe that somewhere inside whatever passes for a spider brain, there emerges something that is the arachnid equivalent of God, how I love this! before she passes out, or spins more silk, or whatever spiders do in their equivalent of afterglow.’
‘I’m not a spider, goddammit!’ she screamed at me.
‘No? Fay found this guy at another place across town. Plays tennis, great ass, same colour eyes. Says he’d like to get married if he could find the right woman.’
Julie stared at me in silence.
‘Come on, someone who’s just been through her third divorce should still have her sights set on tomorrow. I’ve still got my sights set on tomorrow. Bloody but unbowed? Life goes on? Remember?’ She still didn’t say anything. ‘Come on, Julie. If you don’t insist on some kind of big fancy church wedding, I’m-sure Fay and Carol and Pilar would be willing to work something out. Bridal party dresses are just like costumes. Lots of people like to do it in costumes.’
‘You’re on,’ said my sister.
