Blue Skies, No Candy

In My Wildest and most narcissistic fantasy, I did not imagine how it would be. He thinks Kate is wonderful. He thinks she is some goddamned raving beauty. He adores her body, this time-flawed, painstakingly maintained and refurbished arrangement of skin and bones and flesh. He is so positive, so awed and admiring that even I, the great champion flawfinder, am starting to believe. Suddenly, my hair--well, I do have marvelous hair, even if it drives M. Marc to despair because I will not cut it--my hair is now a national treasure, glorious, American. My skin is baby soft. I smell so good. Not just my perfume--Cabochard, he adores it--but all my woman smells, me. Adores them. My pussy smells like peaches only better. All his life, every masturbatory fantasy has starred a woman with ass, hips, breasts precisely like mine. Cellulite ... he doesn't see it. Tit-tuck scars, oblivious. My voice, ah, my voice ... still slightly husky. (continued on page 196) Blue Skies No Candy (continued from page 105) He has never heard a voice of such elegant sexiness.

•

In the airport, that morning, standing at the Avis desk, I watch his lazy, loping stride across the floor, eyes searching, scowling, a goddamned knockout--a peacock--in faded blue denim, discreetly flared pants and battle jacket, precisely the same faded blue in his cotton turtle-neck, that hat. And in my understated Saint Laurent pants suit, I feel like a little brown wren. Then the grin. He has spotted me. "You're here." Hugs me. "I had an awful feeling you wouldn't come."

Silly. This All-American Cowboy pea-cock was worried I would stand him up. What a wonderfully ridiculous notion. As if there were such a Kate, an arrogant man-killer Kate. It was I who was worried he wouldn't be here. Bite your tongue. Don't say it. Don't spoil his wonderful illusion. Don't let him know the doubting Kate, the ugly-duckling Kate, the self-mocking Kate. Don't let him see her and maybe she'll go away.

•

He is a morning person and a compulsive organizer. Every morning he maps out an itinerary for the day. Plots our path on his Michelin maps, tracing the proposed route with his Big Red felt-tip pen. Consults his list of recommendations, restaurants worth the detour, châteaux and vineyards not to be missed, castles with stately bedrooms swathed in velvet and fireplaces big enough to cook a boar in ... as if we'd ever be bored. He wants to wake at dawn for an early start. But I convince him nine o'clock is a virtuous compromise. Anyway, he has his own internal wake-up device and it seems to be connected to his cock. I am not quite sure which wakes first. His brain or his sweet fat prick. I reach for it in my half-sleep, waking with amazing grace for a fiercely non-morning person like me. Sometimes I wake to find him inside me. Part of my dream. I wake from a dream of fucking, creamy, always ready. At night we are adventurers, research scientists, sexual pioneers. Mornings we make love.

•

He can't stop touching me. In the car, his hand on the back of my neck, at my throat ... bringing my hand to his mouth. At dinner, his hand inside my skirt under the tablecloth. He will look up from his book as we lie reading in bed--he is a scholarly cowboy in his gold-rimmed aviator glasses. He is farsighted. That is how you know you are getting older, dear love. When all the beautiful boys who love you are suddenly men cursing over the fine print on menus held at arm's length, cowboys in bed in bifocals.

I am lying here trying to work on the new script for E. Jay Eskins and he is adoring my hand. I cannot turn the page. Or he will touch my ass, examine the shape of each cheek in his palm, study my car as if it were a poem in Braille ... and my belly button. That tickles. I don't like that.

"I forgot your belly button is taboo," he says. "Good thing I'm not a belly-button man."

He talks talks endlessly. He has brought an envelope of treasures to show me--a big manila envelope with a flap and a ribbon tie. Short stories, one that he wrote, one of mine, the funniest story he ever read, cut out of an old Playboy, a letter he wrote to his father 32 years ago, family snapshots, dirty limericks.

I had forgotten what falling in love is like. I am becoming an addict. How did I ever agree to give it up for so long? Yes, yes, I know. You trade that roller-coaster high for something better, Jamie forever, to cherish and keep, loving eyes open, loving what really is there, everything you know. No more diving off cliffs into the arms of a stranger, never sure whether there are rocks below or crocodiles or a man to catch you, love you. The dive worth every risk. Does this sound like a Tarzan remake?

•

What do we talk about? Almost nothing else. Who was the first? What was it like? How do I feel in your mouth? Does my come taste different from other comes? What do pussies taste like? What do you think when you're eating me? Does it hurt? What did you think the first time we made love? When did you know we would go to bed together? If I had a cock, would you let me fuck you? That last line is Kate, of course, wanting everything.

•

Evening, afternoon, I don't know, can't keep track. The room is dark. After love. Me very shaky, body racked with crazy kind of shock waves. He pulls me closer, makes me still. Then he is kissing me, soft full lips and his tongue in all the corners of my mouth. His fingers fold my lips open for his tongue. What is he doing to my mouth? Oh, God, he is making a cunt of my mouth. My whole body feels it. My mouth is a cunt and I'm coming.

"I don't believe you, Jason. What you did ... to my mouth."

"No, Kate. It's you. You're unbelievable. You knew."

•

He loves our rented Mercedes. He drives with his head telescoped deep into his neck, fierce, competitive, snarling obscenities at the suicidal French drivers, challenging them to insane drag starts, Russian-roulette passing on two-lane roadways. He rides the Mercedes as if it were a horse, bucking in and out of traffic, reining in letting loose. Streaking off onto side roads or onto the shoulder to examine a ruin or to stretch his back and legs and stare across long vistas.

"Oh, those poppies," I cry, knocked out by a field of red.

He screeches to a stop, slams out of the car, picks one and puts it into my mouth.

I can't keep my hands off him. I like to tuck my hand under his thigh. That's to stay just at the edge of his perception when he seems deep in thought. On his thigh inside pressing that wonderful muscle I've come to admire when I don't want to be ignored a minute longer. Reaching close after a perilous near-fatal pass on a curve to kiss his sideburn or his tough, wrinkled, sunburned neck. He smells of suede.

"Don't fall asleep," he begs me on a boring stretch outside Roanne.

"I'm here."

"Diane could never stay awake in a car. Texans are always driving two hundred miles at a clip."

"I wouldn't dream of wasting one minute." He puts my hand on his crotch. "Oh, my, what have we here. Jason? How lovely. Have you ever been eaten on the highway between Chagny and Roanne?"

"Not to the best of my recollection."

Zip. Ah, how fresh and pink it is in my hand, how sweet with its tiny smile. Kate, suddenly shy (or possibly concerned about highway mortality): "May I?"

He pulls me closer.

I know what pleases him now. He does not want teeth, not even gentle teeth teasing. He wants to be surrounded by mouth. Fast, slow, pressure, tickles, he wants to be swallowed, to be milked between thighs, to slide between breasts. Sometimes Kate eating is cool, imperious and precise and sometimes her mouth leads her off into a feverish, wet, weeping, dribbling come-streaked frenzy. We are careening down the highway, groaning, laughing. I feel him braking the car screeching off the road into a field. He throws open his door. "Get out of the car, you bitch." Coming around the car with that fiery-red prong sticking out in front. I'm standing there laughing. He pulls down my pants, my panties, pushes me backward over the fender, coming into me fast and rough, making me come with him, then collapsing into the scratch of grass.

Kate stands there in a muddle of knit and lace and a great ribbon of road map. Laughing. "Crazy. Crazy." I fall beside him. "Too chicken to come on the highway?"

"I wanted to share it with you."

"Am I all right? Do I do it all right?"

"You give great head, lady. Didn't you tell me that?"

"Did I? You're kidding. Did I really say that?"

"You think of yourself as modest, shy unassuming but you're some kind of narcissistic nut, lady. Would you like to sit on that for a while?"

"Jason, you're unbelievable. Where did that come from?"

"I don't know. I amaze myself."

•

I'd forgotten how cozy cars used to be. With the sexual revolution, I suppose kids don't have to make love in cars anymore. What a tragic loss to the culture. Making out in cars ... I loved it. Steaming up the windows of Terry's old Dodge jalopy parked on the grass behind the high school tennis courts. Terry, the boy next door, can't remember the last name, slight, with bunched-up muscles from running track. Kate the incurable cock-tease, rubbing up against danger. Defending various Maginot lines. Retreat. He sneaking under sweaters, trying to undo bra hooks, failing, lifting the whole stern white-cotton quilted Maidenform fortress. Kate sitting there like a prisoner, bound with her own underwear. Van Johnson never did those animal things to June Allyson, you knew damn well.

Kate determined to recapture a measure of grace by unhooking, untangling and tossing everything into the back seat. Boldly naked for the second wave of attack. Below the waist. Fingers trying to get into crotch of white-cotton panties, elastic snapping. Finally, Kate, with a great ungenerous sigh of submission, peeling everything off, fighting his mouth and his fingers, to reach a mute compromise. He may pull her onto his lap. They will rub against each other, not letting it in, that thing, keeping it a few millimeters away from that must-be-preserved hymen, wherever it is, if it is still intact after all that masturbation, falling off bicycles, riding lessons, playing doctor, one doesn't really know. Oh, what a glorious struggle.

And then the cops with their flashlights. How sordid. Butterfield 8 but without the glamor. Terry beet red. Kate heart pounding to burst. "You can turn off the flashlights now. I believe, can't you?" she says.

The cop, recognizing Terry. "Not you again."

•

An innocent bath. That's how it begins. He helps me out of the tub, wraps me in a towel. I'm trying to pull him to the bed. He's choreographing the pace. He rubs me all over, rubs the towel between my legs. Pushes me into the bedroom and throws me across the back of a chair. I spread my legs obediently, hot, so hot ... limp and obedient as a life-size Raggedy Ann, waiting for that re-entry. Fingers open me up, then the cock, filling me full, driving hard into me. Epileptic climax for him, blackout for me, can't think where I am. Who. Am. I. Is. He.

•

He carries me to the bed. Even half-conscious I am sure if I were wearing red shoes I could make myself as light as Fonteyn. He fluffs the pillow beneath my head and touches my cheek and pulls the sheet high, folding it back neatly. He takes my hand in his, between us, lying side by side in the dark. "I love you, Kate."

Yes, I heard that. I am not going to answer. Men say that, you know. I love you. It doesn't mean anything much. What it means, perhaps, is ... at this moment I love you. Four seconds from now, who knows? Farewell, toots. You're on your own. Kate is not like that. Perhaps it has to do with gender. I wonder if all women are like me. I don't just toss around idle I love yous. When I say it, watch out. It doesn't mean, Thanks, baby, that was a nice fuck. It means, I love you.

•

"This is really quite extraordinary. How we get along," he says. "You know that?"

It is a sunless day with a curious pale-pink light filtering through peach gauze curtains. The French are very clever with their mirrors. By opening the armoire an inch or two, we can watch ourselves make love. There is always a mirror. In the middle of a wall, for no reason at all. Over a bureau too low to paint a face in ... just low enough to reflect myself to me stretched across the bed.

"How beautiful we look in this light," says Kate. We study ourselves in the mirror. Jason watches his hand trace the outline of my body, cupping both breasts. "Do you think we could ever be normal, everyday people together? Want to go to a movie. Be too tired to make love. Want to see people. Instead of fucking. Get up in the morning and get dressed ... without making love."

"That would be strange," he says.

"That would be real."

"It will be different," he says, putting his cock between my legs from behind.

"Maybe we'll love it."

"Maybe we could always be like this."

"Give up making movies and raising cows," I say. "Just fuck all day."

"And read in between."

"Or write."

"See, your puritan work ethic is incorruptible."

I guide him to the edge of the bed, so I can kneel on the floor between his legs, eating him at precisely the right angle for the mirror.

•

I'm getting used to the way he looks. I'm falling in love with his body. There is a thick raised white scar behind his left knee. And his ass is a constant joy, tight apple ass, with those muscled indentations I can press my fists into. He smells sweet, even his sweat is mildly sweet. His asshole tastes like apple cider. I love his balls, tight and round, a neat, pleasing package. Sometimes I smell a faint perfume of milk. Or sunshine. I am soothing my hot little bottom in the lukewarm water of the bidet--dousing my overindulged pussy with lemon-scented splashings. He watches me. I cannot ever remember feeling quite so uninhibited with anyone. The light in this room is blinding white. I am naked, face naked, too. And he is watching me. Fascinated by what I do to soothe and calm and sweeten my pussy.

"Aren't you jealous I can kiss it and you can't?" he says. In bed again.

Never thought about that. But I'll humor him. No one would believe the time we spend marveling over all the assorted parts of our anatomies. "Yes, I guess I'm jealous. But I can eat your cock and you can't. Or can you?"

"I've tried a few times in moments of extreme loneliness. But you have to be double-jointed. How is my cock, I mean, compared with other cocks you have known?"

He knows damn well how is his cock. He is insufferably arrogant about his cock. I am sure women have been admiring the fat monster forever. I told him big made no difference. Now I know with a kind of rage--it matters. I'll spend a long time of my life wanting to be that full again.

I am playing the game, after all, it's my game. "I would say your cock is, among the cocks I have known, uniquely beautiful."

How solemn he looks as he rubs his cock up and down, wetting it with my stickiness. "Pretty pussy," he says. "You should see it, too."

I have seen pussies. Never really thought of pussies as beautiful. My friend Ariane, the sculptress, does exquisite erotic pink petals cast in Lucite. He hands me my evening bag from the bedside table.

"Your mirror," he says.

I open the compact. And, well, yes, I suppose it is mysterious and beautiful. He taps his cock against the clitoris, making shocks, down, dipping into the sticky cunt. I see it in my tiny mirror. Tight little curls of hair. The thick engorged rod with one throbbing dark vein burrowing into me, slipping into raw red fleshy pocket. For a few minutes I watch, fascinated. It could be boring, like Deep Throat, except the beautiful cock is Jason and the pink juicy mouth is me. Then he sits on me sideways, one leg under him, the other in his hand, my legs like a scissors. Goes into me so deep I'm forgetting everything. The compact drops. What a crazy angle. I didn't know it could feel like that. I hear lots of wild-animal growls growing into sandpaper screams.

•

"You know why I love it when you do it that way?"

"Yes, I know."

"Jason, you don't know everything."

"You love it because you can't move. You're totally in my control."

"Oh, is that why? Hmm. I thought it was because you go so deep. So maybe I'm not a true masochist. Maybe I'm just an everyday old-fashioned woman hungering for submission. Show me again where the legs go. I want to learn how you do that."

"So you can teach my successor."

My smile freezes.

•

Are other women curious to see their own pussies? I wonder. My friend Carla Giannini confessed once to me and Jamie that she'd used a make-up mirror to look at herself a few days after her second baby was born. To her husband's extreme mortification. "Carla. please don't tell that story, not here in Lutèce, please."

"I wanted to see the stitches," she explains, ignoring him. By accident, she'd used the magnifying side, terrifying herself.

I smile. Jamie grimaces. "Carla, I can't stand gynecological horror stories."

I never looked at my pussy before yesterday. Now I am studying the dear thing in repose. I'm getting rather to like it. There is a tiny freckle on my vulva. Imagine. I have been walking around the world with this freckle for who knows how many decades. Secret and uncharted.