Pinball

He was having, a nightcap at the bar in Kreutzer's after work when Donna showed up looking for him.

With her figure outlined by her faded jeans and pullover and her hair falling freely over her shoulders, she looked foot-loose, almost indolent.

"What is it that you want to learn from me?" she asked, and he sensed that she expected him to ask her about her musicianship, her studies or her piano-playing plans; but for some obscure reason that was not all malevolent, he went straight to the truth.

"Tell me about your life with that actor."

Taken aback by his words, she stared at him for a sign of hostility, but when she found none, she appeared miserable, overcome by disgust.

"Who told you about him?" she asked sullenly, then checked herself. "I'm sorry--it doesn't matter, does it? But why do you ask?"

"I want to know you, Donna," he said quietly, "and because I might not have another chance, I feel it's important to ask you about someone you cared about."

She searched his face for signs that she could trust him. Then she composed herself and began to speak. Her voice calm. her eyes resting on his, gauging his reaction as she surrendered herself to her past.

"Please keep in mind. Patrick, that I can't explain what I'm about to tell you," she said, placing her hand on his, unconsciously smoothing his skin with the pads of her finger tips as she spoke.

"One day, leafing through some magazines in the Juilliard library, I came across a scientific article about female sexuality. It said that when a woman gets excited sexually--whether by physical contact or through her imagination--the amount of vaginal blood and the rate of her vaginal pulse both increase. Yet the researchers found that during orgasm, although the rate of the vaginal pulse increases, the amount of blood decreases, and even though this information was obtained by the use of sophisticated research techniques, medicine has not been able to offer an explanation for it."

She stroked his hand, as if expecting him to answer her, and she stared at him. But he did not answer. He watched her hand on his, and the thought that she would soon go home filled him with anxiety.

"If such a simple physical thing is still a mystery to science," she said. "I guess I'll never know what it was about Marcello that made me love him."

Domostroy felt the incomprehensible world of her past rise like a barrier between them. Her green eyes stared at him without expression and, meeting her gaze, he wondered whether that barrier would ever crumble before the ground swell of his feeling for her.

She had been in love for the first time, she said, when she was 12. She and the boy used to slip out at night and meet in a burned-out building near her family's apartment in Harlem. The boy was 16 and white, and he always acted frightened, probably because everything around him was black--the night, the burned-out building, the girl he was squeezing. They met and kissed and petted a number of times, until one night the boy's parents sent the police after him. She and the boy were found necking in the ruins, and her boyfriend was no longer alone in the blackness, because the policemen were white, too. They herded Donna into a police van as if she were a stray dog, took her to the station and charged her with soliciting for the purpose of prostitution. She was locked overnight in a cell with two other women--black prostitutes who treated her as tenderly as if she were their daughter--and then released into the custody of her father, who made her promise never to see that white boy again.

The incident taught her that even though she was only 12 years old and not guilty of soliciting lovers, she could still be arrested for it. By the time her family moved out of Harlem and into a more affluent South Bronx neighborhood, she knew she was sexually precocious. The knowledge did not disturb her. She liked the idea that she could get as carried away in sex as some of her high school friends got on coke and hash, and even then, in her mid-teens, she decided that she would always be the one to take the initiative: She would solicit only those lovers who seemed to be worth the risk.

She went about her life with that decision more or less fixed in her mind, and one day, years later, she noticed a handsome man hanging around at Juilliard. He seemed to be waiting for someone, and even before she saw his face, she couldn't help seeing what his tight jeans revealed. Extreme virility, of itself, didn't interest her much, however; it was only when he looked at her that she was attracted, for his face was boyish and his expression shy and innocent.

As soon as he saw her, he began to stare, and she found his intentions so obvious and his stare so comical that she burst out laughing. He spoke to her then, asking her why she was laughing at him. He seemed hurt. She apologized instantly. Their affair began with laughter and apology.

Marcello told her that after being orphaned in early childhood, he had been brought up by a series of relatives. He had worked at a variety of part-time jobs, most recently for a video-tape company. Lacking formal education beyond high school, Marcello was nevertheless well informed and well read, and although he was not overtly musical, he seemed to respond instinctively to good music. He was a patient listener during the long hours when Donna practiced the piano, and throughout their relationship he made an effort to learn more about music. But even with his many likable traits, it was as a lover that Donna enjoyed Marcello most of all.

Just as she was occasionally surprised to find a piano that could reveal to her, by virtue of its construction and tuning, a new beauty or a hidden sense in some composer's work, or to discover a room that, by virtue of its special resonance, could alter her perception of tone and clarity in musical sound, so was she surprised to meet in Marcello a being who-- for the first time in her life--elicited a response from her that was wholly sexual.

"Until I met Marcello, most of the men I had run into were pretty much alike," she said, eying Domostroy thoughtfully. "Usually, my date--black or white, no matter--didn't think there could be more to me than what he saw. But once he found out there was, to prove to me he wasn't after a quick lay, he would take me out a lot--clubs, discos, restaurants--anywhere but home. Then, if I liked him, we would often end up at his place--or mine." She attempted a smile, but it dissolved and she looked haggard.

"When we were finally alone, free to step out of our clothes and free from the roles they imposed on us, my date would usually go down on me, with that humble, slightly remorseful stare--puppylike and eager to please. Then, when I reassured him that he was doing all right, he would go on making love to me, never taking a chance, never surprising me with something he was eager for me to do, always afraid he might begin to use me for his pleasure. Always! And every time I saw that anxious stare, I would feel as if I were hidden from him in the dark, watching a spectacle being performed by a stranger."

She halted, and when she spoke again, her voice seemed lifelessly even. "All that time, I felt that there must have been something in me--in what I'd said or done--some invisible score I'd written for them to enact that made every one of those men so passive, so obsequious. Yet, even though. I became fed up with them and disgusted with myself, I wouldn't--or couldn't--do anything about it. You know, Patrick, that in matters of sex it's often easier to reject what you feel than to seek what you want.

"That was the mood I was in when I met Marcello. . . ."

Marcello understood her very well, she continued. In their first weeks together, whether they were alone or in public, he would constantly surprise her, constantly insinuate his will by touching her body, sniffing her hair, warming her neck with his breath, brushing against her breasts or thighs or buttocks, rubbing her groin with his hand, all the while communicating to her body that it was a hiding place for innumerable stealthy urges from within, until at last she came to expect her every ordinary moment to be turned by him into a state of sexual tension, stripped of everything except feeling. At that point it was enough for her just to follow him, no matter where he chose to lead her.

One place he led her to often was a downtown bar called Dead Heat. Located in Soho, in the basement of an old warehouse building, Dead Heat appeared to be one large room with a stone floor and rough black walls; it had a circular bar in the center, a section of tables and chairs and a small dance floor, all lighted by a few small red lamps hanging in tiny iron cages, which cast moving circles on the ceiling and walls whenever they swayed. At the far end of this room, usually unnoticed by the newcomer, two corridors led to the most essential area of Dead Heat, called the Jam Session, which consisted of a dozen catacomblike rooms, vaults, stalls and cubicles, all with walls and floors of rough black stone, all lighted by small, bare red or blue bulbs, separated in a few cases by a doorless toilet. Furnished with a few wooden stools, wooden platform beds and old metal bathtubs, the larger rooms of the Jam Session could hold fifteen to twenty people, the vaults about ten and the stalls and cubicles five or six at most.

Open after midnight--and only on weekends--the gloomy, inhospitable (continued on page 194)Pinball(continued from page 114) place attracted people who came there to use its stark. savage spaces for their stark and savage rituals. It was a gathering place for people who dressed in leather or rubber; for women who wore heavy make-up and high stiletto heels and were accompanied by anemic-looking lovers in sweatshirts and shorts: for men in tank tops and shorts who liked to show off their muscular bodies, as well as the frail beauty of their scantily clad, if clad at all, female or male lovers; for people seeking partners who were as wild and momentary as the love they craved and whose only real stimulus to intimacy was to be found among a steady stream of strangers. At Dead Heat the beautiful mingled with the deformed, the old with the young, the naked with the clothed.

Donna would sit with Marcello at the bar or at a table off to one side, or she would cruise with him through the corridors, talking little, watching the other patrons. Whenever Marcello noticed a couple--a man and a woman, two women or two men--straying from the main room and starting to make their way to the Jam Session, he and Donna, and others, would calmly follow. The couple would go into one of the empty rooms off the corridor and start to stroke each other, and immediately the other men and women, as many as the room could hold, would press in around them and watch in silence, like a huge predator the lovers could not escape even if they'd wanted to.

The first time Marcello took Donna to Dead Heat, she was surprised to see how many of the people there--particularly the men--knew him. They came up to him and shook hands or waved at him from across the room, or they pointed Marcello out, whispering to one another or to their female dates as if he were a celebrity. When she asked him what he had done to be so popular. Marcello told her that he was one of the Dead Heat regulars and that the people there were simply friendly.

One night, after they had had a drink or two at the bar. Marcello slowly got up, took her hand and led her down one of the dark corridors. As she followed him obediently, she could feel the presence of a crowd behind them, somber whispering bulks, a moving forest of silent male and female trunks, an excited eager procession escorting her to the outermost reaches of imagining.

Pushing her gently ahead of him, Marcello turned her into a large room at the end of the corridor. He lifted her by her hips as he might lift a keg and set her on a table near the far wall. She closed her eyes. He rolled her dress up over her breasts and neck and pulled down her panties, and as they slipped over her feet, he spread her legs. Rubbing his groin against hers, he massaged her breasts, and wish her eyes still closed, she joined him in a long kiss. She sensed the crowd in the room, hovering and sullen at first, almost silent, like frothing foam, then stirring, coming nearer, tightening their circle around the table. When she opened her eyes, she saw them all staring at her from the darkness. With no warning. Marcello slid into her. and as she folded her hands around his neck, she screamed in pain and pleasure. The crowd made a noise, too. a single long sigh. As Marcello pushed rapidly and insistently in and out of her. opening her like a fresh wound, the faces in the crowd all came nearer, like sentries closing, their ranks, until they pressed against the two of them. Engrossed in the feelings aroused in her by Marcello she barely felt the multitude of hands on her, hands which kept on feeling her feet, stroking her calves and thighs and breasts, brushing over her shoulders, caressing her hair, her neck and cheeks. Lost in a single sensation, her body one with the body of the man driving into her. she could feel herself drifting away. a mass glowing with its own heat, and she felt she was leaving this swarm of lifeless figures who could only gaze at her from afar, from the cage they could not leave.

Donna looked at Domostroy, trying to gauge how he had judged her.

"Later, when it all ended." she went on, "and Marcello and I returned to the bar, I was still excited. My whole body still oozed sex, and I spun from one orgasm to the next. Like heartbeats, they kept on coming--for as long as he kept on touching me, for as long as I wanted to go on." She halted. "And I didn't mind having people around. either. I felt there was something sad in all those men and women cruising alone, back and forth through the Dead Heat, in all those couples who embraced but couldn't really touch each other, and in all those women who dress like men and those men who maybe should have been born women. Some-times I wanted to laugh at them. Such pathetic creeps, I thought, such spiritual nobodies, such sexual frauds. But when I looked at them again, I felt I could cry for every one of them, so lonely, so desperate, condemned to watch love they themselves could not--or were afraid to--touch.

"It must take courage for them to come to this awful pit, I thought, to these bowels of sex, and by coming here to acknowledge to themselves and to others that watching Marcello and me and other couples like us was the only way they could participate in love, the only way to hear its music--even if they couldn't play it themselves."

The next time Marcello took her to Dead Heat, he led her again into the Jam Session, and again the quiet foot-steps of strangers followed them in the hazy distance. This time, he turned and backed into one of the largest vaults--damp, rectangular, empty of stools--and, turning her around, pulled her in after him. When his back touched the far wall, he continued to pull her, unresisting, until her back was pressed tightly against his chest and groin. Then, facing the human mass that moved relentlessly in on them from the corridor, she could feel Marcello behind her. his hands under her skirt caressing her ever so faintly, while in the bleak half-light the crowd stared, quiet, enrapt. Then, at last, he sank into her from behind and she yielded to the sensation of him in her and leaned down and back and onto him. Donna's blouse was unbuttoned, her wraparound skirt spread open behind her, falling primly in front like an apron or a shield. As she felt herself following his movement, the crowd moaned. Her flesh sealed with his, she swayed back and forth with him, lingering in the moment, clinging to his flesh convulsively, while the crowd jammed clumsily into the black cavity of the vault until they threatened to fill every inch of it. Like a monstrous centipede, men and women, breathing and sweating and pungent in the darkness, groped for her breasts and belly and thighs and face. She couldn't hold them off, and Marcello's hands had rescued her, roughly maneuvering the intruders away, one after another, slamming the door to her shut, the door that a moment before he had so willingly opened.

Donna glanced at Domostroy and went on talking, as if she were reluctant to give him time to speak. In the weeks that followed, she said, she often asked Marcello why he kept wanting to return to Dead Heat and make love to her there in front of strangers.

"Marcello told me he was not like most men, who need privacy for their sexual intimacies. He said he could get sexually high only by making love to me in the presence of strangers. To him, the real excitement of sex came from bridging the sexual distance between lovers, not at home, where there was nothing--and no one--to distract them, but in places like Dead Heat, where their intimacy was constantly tested, onstage, on trial, almost under siege.

"Making love to me at Dead Heat, he said, was like walking a high wire without a net. Even the prospect of going there aroused him. He always wondered what the sex would be like on a particular night: whether there would be many 'eunuchs'--single, docile men who would kneel in front of me on his command and kiss my feet--or 'cannibals'--those dominant sex freaks of the Jam Session who were always ready to snatch me away and, before Marcello could find me, get to me all the way, one after another, as they had often done with other men and women.

"If I went along with Marcello for such a long time, it was because, with him. I had begun to think of myself as more alive than ever and of him no longer as my lover but as one of those who watched me from the darkness.

"But," Donna went on, "Marcello kept on swearing that he loved me, saying that if I loved him too, I shouldn't be put off by what we'd done at Dead Heat. He said that even though he made love to me in front of the people there, I should know that all they could do was watch. His body was between theirs and mine, and as for them touching me, didn't the sand touch me too when I lay on the beach? These people, he said, were human sand. He told me I was, sexually, the only woman in his life; he was freer and more fulfilled with me than he had ever been with any other woman."

Donna admitted she never knew much about his whereabouts during the day. While she was at Juilliard or practicing at home, his video jobs kept him moving around, and on the few occasions when she did try to phone him at the number he gave her, no one ever answered. Eventually, they agreed that he should move in with her, and when he did she was astonished at how few belongings he brought with him--one suit, a few shirts, two pairs of slacks, two pairs of shoes, and a toilet kit. Was that all there was? she wondered. Then she noticed that he didn't carry any credit cards, or a driver's license, or even an address book, and he never got any phone calls or received any mail. When she asked him about this, he said he was a free-lancer, successful enough to be free of such mundane things as appointment books and monthly bills. He insisted on being paid in cash, he said, and he paid cash for everything he bought.

He was an indefatigable lover, and Donna found his lovemaking so spontaneous, his orgasms so frequent, his sperm so plentiful, that she never doubted that he was faithful to her. Moreover, she never detected on him the slightest trace of any perfume or lipstick or powder but her own.

Then, one day, said Donna, Andrea Cwynplaine, a fellow student at Juilliard, invited her and some other students over to the apartment of Chick Mercurio. Andrea's boyfriend, to see Ode to Joy, a porno flick that was supposed to be a parody of a Broadway musical. When the movie started. Marcello-- billed as Dick Longo in the credits-- appeared on the screen, naked, in front of a mirror in a theater dressing room, masturbating himself with one hand and a grotesquely fat, platinum-blonde woman with the other.

The shock was so sudden, so extreme, that for a moment she refused to believe the evidence before her. But she kept on watching as Dick Longo went through a string of sleazy starlets, demonstrating his--apparently proverbial--ability to produce a fresh orgasm at every twist of the flick's idiotic plot. As Andrea and her boyfriend and the other students in the darkened room cheered the hotter moments of the film and made crude jokes about bodily parts of its stars, Donna slowly realized that it was she, not Dick Longo, who was the main star of the screening.

When the lights came back on, none of those in the room indicated to Donna in any way that they had recognized Dick Longo as her boyfriend, Marcello. For their added amusement, Andrea began to distribute Xerox copies of a porno magazine interview with Dick Longo, profusely illustrated with stills from his movie, in which the star admitted to having made hundreds of porno loops every year for the past three or four years and boasted that not a single working day of that time had passed without his having had--on cue, in front of the camera--at least a couple of orgasms. Sensing the other students gazing furtively at her, Donna said, she felt naked before them, as if they were the strangers of the Dead Heat who had just succeeded in raping her.

Donna paused and looked at Domostroy, expecting some reaction, but he sat motionless, crushed and disarmed. He was wondering whether Andrea had told him the truth when she said that Donna went right on living with Marcello long after she discovered that he was Dick Longo. If it were true, what hellish need in her, Domostroy wondered, could have made her punish herself so? What was Donna's private ode to joy?

As if sensing his thoughts, Donna continued her story. She said that she went home after the screening and waited for Marcello to show up. She knew just what she would do when he entered, clean and freshly shaven and amorous as usual. She would grab a kitchen knife, the longest one she had, and, like an addict in a rage, she would stab and slash and cut him as long as his body kept on jerking and twitching and turning, until his blood filled his lungs and throat and drowned out the last gurgle of his life.

But, she said, when at last he did come home, freshly bathed, smelling of cologne, sporting a new haircut and wanting to kiss her exactly as she had imagined, all she could manage to do was ask him, just like that, why in all their time together he had never told her that every day, when he left her, he went off to fuck all those white and black and yellow cunts, front and back, one after another, one next to the other, one on top of the other, on cue in front of a camera, to be paid in cash for every orgasm--all during the time he was supposed to be in love with her.

All he answered was that, as he had told her from the start, he loved only her. He said that fucking all those countless cunts was his job; that when he was with them, his prick was no different from a masseur's hand; and that only with Donna had he been able to bridge that sexual distance which, until he had met her, had remained open like a chasm between himself and the dead heat of his life.

She neither screamed nor kicked him out, nor did she end the relationship until several more months had passed.

With sudden clarity, she saw that during those months together it was she who, with palpable abandon, had been using him in order to experience herself through him, to bridge the sexual expanse that, before she met him, she had felt gaping open in her. Now, because of what she had learned from him, that distance was bridged, and she was whole. Marcello had been, she said, nothing but a bystander in the process, one more lecherous paw reaching out to touch her from the dark recesses of Dead Heat.

"She barely felt the multitude of hands which kept stroking her calves and thighs and breasts."