It was after a pleasantly diverting nuncheon, supped from Eliza’s lap, that I took a stroll about the house, wrapped only in a loose qaftan, my head a-buzz with the aftereffects of the chilled frizzante and the ministrations she’d performed upon my own lap, yet sticky from her berried kisses, and as I went about the lower hall which, being open to whatever breezes might stir or, if the air is still, as it stretches along a northern face and shaded by the bulk of the house above it, is among the more pleasant spots to while away an afternoon quite as sultry as this one has proved to be, it chanced that I came upon Lucy, seated on one of the wide low sills, unaccountably sulky in her stockings and her chemise en déshabillé, and when I asked her what was the matter, she said to me the most extraordinary thing:
“I want to be randy.”
I knelt on the flagstones beside her and with what I’d hoped might have been an alluring smile began to tell her of what she’d missed at lunch, but she stopped me with an airy wave of her hand. “I want to want to hear this,” she said, her fingers pressed to my lips, “but I don’t! I want to want, oh, anything at all, but this! I wish,” she said, and as she leaned forward with the sudden passion of her argument her little breast slipped free, all unnoticed by her, “I wish to desire, Indigo. I am starving for hunger. I ache after lusting. I am not on fire! Why am I not on fire! Why am I not burning with the least little heat? Not rakish, not ruttish, not sluttish, or fuckish, or wet?”
And I, I performed the only act my half-drunk, satieted wits could devise, and kissed the fingertips she’d pressed to my lips, and licked them, once, only to have her tear her hand away, and leap to her feet, and run from me, sobbing, down the dark hall. I thought a moment to set out after her, but did not take a step, for all of that moment I was washed over by a sudden cold sobriety, and took myself instead to my rooms, to set this down, and mull over what I might next do, to ensure my girls remained for the rest of our days at a paradoxical height of joyful unsatisfaction.
“Don’t you two look fantastic,” says Mrs. Henderson. “Matching little black dresses! How adorable. You don’t have to leave yet, do you? Sit here with me.”
“What a lovely top,” says Linda, sitting at one end of the couch. Jenny, sitting at the other end, rolls her eyes.
“Please,” says Mrs. Henderson. “Call me Kathy.” A hand on a bare knee to either side of her. “Kick off your shoes and relax a minute! You’ll have plenty of time to totter about on them later.” And Jenny, scowling, starts to unbuckle her slender high-heeled shoes.
“Oh!” says Linda, setting her bare feet on the stone floor. “It’s warm!”
“It’s heated from below,” says Mrs. Henderson. “If you weren’t about to go out, I’d urge you to lie down and roll around on it.” She leans close to Linda. “It feels wonderful on your back. But we can’t mess up these pretty little dresses.”
“Maybe,” says Linda, her eyes on Mrs. Henderson’s lips, “when we get back, Mrs. Henderson.”
“Maybe when we get back, Kathy,” says Linda, kissing Mrs. Henderson.
Jenny shakes her head and folds her arms and watches them make out for a moment, Mrs. Henderson’s arm snaking about Linda’s hips, Linda’s hand restless between her thighs, twitching the skirt of her little black dress higher and higher as they kiss. “Oh, Kathy,” moans Linda. Jenny’s hand untucks itself, drifts along the couch, finds Mrs. Henderson’s free hand. She tugs the hand close to her, wraps her fingers in among Mrs. Henderson’s fingers. “Mom,” she says. “Come on.”
“In a minute, darling,” says Mrs. Henderson around Linda’s mouth. She caresses her daughter’s hip with the back of her hand.
Hey, says Shelley between kisses, shouldn’t we, turn on the, the water, or something?
We can get clean in a bit, says Amy. Let’s get dirty first.
Hey, says Shelley again, as the bathroom door opens, as a girl comes in, long dark hair and a short red robe. Hey, around Amy’s mouth, we’ve got, Amy, who’s this, what’s.
It’s okay, says Amy, kissing Shelley and kissing her again. It’s just Marie.
Marie’s letting her robe fall to the floor and naked stepping into the tub.
Look, says Shelley, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend already.
She isn’t my girlfriend, says Amy. Turn around. Say hi to Marie.
Hi, Marie, says Shelley, as Marie leans in for a kiss, and Amy kisses Shelley’s neck, and Shelley laughing a little kisses Marie, hesitant until Marie licks her mouth open and then there’s nothing hesitant at all.
Marie’s my sister, says Amy.
Oh, says Shelley.
Don’t worry, says Marie, reaching past Shelley for Amy’s hips, pulling them all quite close together in the empty tub. We share everything.
“Bareback?” said Lucy, toying with the rolled edge of her sister’s stocking, there above her knee.
“Yes,” said Eliza. She licked her lips as her sister’s hand walked its slow, meandering way up the length of her naked thigh, and swallowed as it settled on her hip. “Bareback.”
“With but a flip of this switch,” cackles Dr. Isengrim, “all of downtown Urbopolis will disappear, in the swirling destructive energies of my decoherence vortex!”
“There’s no time to reach him!” thinks Inanna, the Marvellous Mistress of Might. “But if I can push the vortex, rotate it around the eigenstate of current consensus reality until it falls out of phase—but where could I find such energy?”
As Dr. Isengrim yanks the switch down and closes the connectors with a mighty spark, Inanna, the Lady of the Skies, throws wide her arms and opens herself to the orgonic energy of the city all about her as people woke and stretched and yawned and went about their Sunday morning business, heedless of their looming annihilation. As the decoherence vortex blared to life in the laboratory, as Dr. Isengrim threw back his head and cackled again, as in buildings all about her and out on the street, in restaurants and grocery stores, in lobbies and elevators and even the occasional office, men and women stirred, shifted, winced, smiled a little at private thoughts, shook their heads, licked their lips, stroked their chins, their hair, the knees of the people sitting next to them, as they harrumphed, blushed, looked away, thought longingly of someone they’d loved in college, or high school, or that summer abroad, as they stood abruptly, turned aside, draped napkins hurriedly over laps, resettled pants or coats or skirts, as they swallowed, as they closed their eyes, as the whining tearing roar of the vortex began to be heard all about them, as it gathered strength and began decohering the table it sat on, the mechanism that had generated it, the hem of Dr. Isengrim’s ratty lab coat, the first wild tendrils of Inanna’s magnificent hair, as the walls and ceiling fell away about them she threw wide her arms to the light and the heat and gathering all of that moment to one impossible point she pushed, and the vortex fell out of the world with a sound no one had ever heard before, that would echo for days in the ears of everyone in Urbopolis, and they all, every man and woman within a ten-mile radius, careened into sudden, inescapable orgasm, juddering, spasming, grinning, laughing, crying out, coming, all of them, coming.
“Watch,” says the Queen to the Bedding Maid, as the Privy Maid kisses the Countess My Lady.
“Oh, yes,” coos the Bedding Maid. The endless afternoon light in that ruddy room licks the sweat that coats their bodies. The Privy Maid’s undone hair is heavily damp with it. The Bedding Maid’s curls are limp. The Countess My Lady spreads her kneeling thighs with a rustle on the silken pillows as their kiss too slow to be called hungry opens and deepens.
“Touch someone,” says the Queen, and the Bedding Maid leans forward, and the Countess My Lady chuckles deep in her throat at the feathery touch of the Bedding Maid’s fingers on her sex. She breaks off the kiss with the Privy Maid and swings her mouth to the Bedding Maid’s, open and waiting, sipping the thickly humid air.
“Now,” says the Queen, licking the Privy Maid’s lips, “touch someone else,” and the Privy Maid frowns. The Bedding Maid sits back on her dainty bare heels. The Countess My Lady, smirking, reaches across for the Queen’s hand. “Go on,” says the Queen. “This is the red room. You must.”
The Bedding Maid on her hands and knees crawls between the Queen and My Lady, over the pillows and into the Privy Maid’s lap. “I told you,” whispers the Privy Maid into her sister’s ear, “I told you to go before she saw you.”
“It’s all right,” sighs the Bedding Maid into her sister’s mouth, her hands on her sister’s sweat-slick thighs. “Don’t you want this?”
So the day after the awards show my next-door neighbor burst into my apartment. I came out in my robe towelling my hair to find her crawling around the living room, picking up bits of the costume the pop star had worn to the show. They were very small and hard to see in the light. Is she here? asked my neighbor, excitedly, and I shook my head. The pop star had left at about dawn. She wanted biscuits, she said. She didn’t have anything to wear but the costume which was ruined now so she borrowed one of my T-shirts. I went back to sleep. It was now three in the afternoon.
Wow, said my neighbor, holding up a glittering bit of something that had been wrapped around the pop star’s thigh, or arm. It must’ve been incredible.
I shrugged. Oscar still wouldn’t come out from under the bed.
Is that one of the shoes? My neighbor pounced on it, sitting on the couch, fondling the simple white leather pump. Such classic lines, she said.
It’s an original Irish Scull, I said.
Really? said my neighbor.
That’s why it’s so warm to the touch.
My neighbor planted her feet on the coffee table and spread her legs and stroked the heel of the shoe up and down, up and down, her eyes closed. Licking her lips. Oh, yeah, she said.
There’s a button, I said. I leaned over her. She’d just had a shower, too. Her body gel smelled like cloves. I found the button, inside the shoe, and pressed it, and the shoe began to tremble in her hands.
Oh fuck, she said, plunging the heel of the shoe inside, pumping it in and out, her back arching. Oh wow. Pulling the shoe out and licking herself off the heel of it with a wicked smile. Bend over, she said. You have got to try this.
