Arthur Alexander - Emily_s Lips

Carla snorted, but I was warming to my subject. "I mean, we all know what we want.

We want to be drowned out completely. We want our selves, our personalities, to die. We want to be replaced with a totality, a wholeness, a… a lust, for Cod's sake!

Overcome with sex, nothing but cock, forever fucking. The thing is that lust is a totality, like hate, and greed, and all the rest. And love, charity, whatever. I'll bet you could take any one of the seven virtues or vices, express it so totally in your life that you became the thing, and then whatever you had begun with would no longer either be a virtue or a vice. It would just be it. As sinless, and subtle, and uncompromising as a god." I broke off. "Not a bad idea, that. I'll write a book about it someday."

"What do you think about all this Carla?" asked Tony.

"You talk too much, Arthur," said she, with her cat's eyes in the flames, "but I love you all the same."

"Well, it's all just for the fun of it."

"I'm cold," she answered. "Let's get into the bag, Tony. Warm me up."

"You know," I mused, after the general re-shuffling had occurred and we were all encased in our down cocoons, "I have an example of that access to lust in my own life."

Tony's voice came from the huddle across the fire. "What do you mean?"

"Emily. It all happened before we met you, about two years ago. We were going to split up…"

"We know."

"But you don't know what really happened."

"Hey, are you going to tell us a dirty story?" Carla asked.

"Well, as a matter of fact."

"Goody," she giggled. "Just let me get ready." I heard their bodies shifting around a bit and then heard Carla giggle some more. "No," she whispered, "put your hand there. Yes, oh yes. Oh, boy!" Then her voice came across to me again. "Now, Arthur, now tell me your dirty story."

The rain which had begun as a gentle drizzle now roared on the convertible top of Emily's car. In fact, it fell so heavily that she was unable to see clearly through the windshield. Her wipers hurried back and forth, doing the best job they could under the circumstances, but they could not clear the glass effectively. To make her situation even more unpleasant, she notic ed suddenly that the needle of her fuel gauge read well below the Empty point.

Oh! If only she had had the sense to fill up when she passed through that last town.

But it was too late for that now. There would hardly be another gasoline station up here in these damnable mountains, and even if she should pass one, she imagined, it would almost certainly be closed at this late an hour. In fact, it must be midnight or after. Damn! What was she doing up here anyway?

The best she could do, then, would be to proceed slowly and evenly in order to save as much fuel as she could. Perhaps if she could manage to drive as far as the pass, she'd be able to roll down onto the plains on the other side. And, in the meantime, if she did come to a station, she could, always park before its pumps and sleep reasonably well in the back seat until someone came to open up in the morning. All this practicality was perfectly sound, of course, but just at that moment she truly could not see why she had needed so desperately to leave Arthur-well, run out on him if you wanted to know the truth. For three years they had been constructing quite a pleasant life, even an exciting one. And now here she was, driving away into the night with an ache in her heart, stripped of understanding of what was happening.

She felt like some rather obvious little tart of a wife in a mediocre movie. But here she was, for all of that, lost in these endless mountains, her handkerchief, predictably, soiled with tears.

She had slowed the car to thirty-five. Lightning began to flash around her, affording her piercing views of bent treetops against a hurtling, grey void. Thunder came with the lightning to shake the car on its foundations as a dog would an impertinent stick.

The trees crept by at a snail's pace. She wasn't getting anywhere. She'd never reach the pass at this rate. The road she followed was totally deserted. For hours she had not seen another car. The black shapes of trees hemmed her in too tightly, and the winding climb allowed her no sense of relief from their embrace. She wanted space around herself, vision, a chance to rest. It was all too close, too loud. But the road kept drawing her higher and even higher, away from the range of human company, and away into a blackened and drenched landscape of fretful trees and conglomerate rocks. She tried the radio, but the storm around her so interfered with the radio waves that she heard only now and then a distant voice, thin and useless through the static.

Now too her roof began to leak. Just a little at first, a few drops, but as the storm beat upon the opening, the drops grew into a stream. Soon cold rainwater coursed down the windshield and splashed onto her skirt and knees.

She grew ever more damp. The windshield was fogging up, and the defroster worked only poorly. The water dribbling down her calves grew warm from her body before it ran into her light shoes, and she realized that her toes were growing all squishy. She had come into an area of gusty winds, and the rain was now driven through her roof almost without slowing down. The car swayed drunkenly on the long curves. She slowed further. Her headlights, even, were dimmed by the heaviness of the rain. How high was this pass? Wouldn't she ever get there? Why had she come?

Why, why, why had she left herself without gas? It was at that moment that a pair of wrought-iron gates came into view on the right. They were so out of place that she hardly realized what they were until she was nearly past. She had an impression of space though, as her headlights fleeted over them, but no lightning came to show her more. The gates had seemed to be hung on stone pillars. There had been a board, perhaps with a name or a warning upon it, which swung in the wind. She slowed the car. There had been no sign of a house. She pulled the car to the shoulder of the road and stopped. She was growing wetter by the minute. Certainly, it was far too late to call upon strangers, and yet the thought of sleeping in the car was increasingly unappealing. And she might as well admit to herself that she'd never find any gas now. Already the engine had choked once or twice. There! It missed again. Oh, God.

She looked backwards through the red glow of her taillights to where the gates had been. But this was too cliched a situation; I mean, really! A lonely house on a hill, probably Victorian, a crashing storm, a girl in distress. Straight out of Mary Shelley and the gothics. It embarrassed her, so conventional a scene was it. It embarrassed her, and she pulled the car once more out into the road.

But she was not destined to go far. Before she had traveled another mile, the car's spluttering had become so marked that she knew escape from that house back there was impossible. Had she been able to go a few miles more, she would have slept in the car, wet, but spared the necessity of appearing like a half-drowned kitten appealing for shelter in the middle of the night. She turned the car with its last drops of gas, and commenced to roll back through the storm. There was always the chance, of course, that no one would be home, and she could sleep in the car anyway, secure in her anonymity yet knowing she had done all she could.

She braked to a halt before the gate. An opportune flash of lightning showed a driveway and a copse of trees into which it disappeared. And the name upon the signboard was "Black."

The crash of thunder which followed even as the lightning was still vivid in her eyes stunned her. She panicked. She found herself clutched before the gate, wet through, tugging at the bars with frantic hands. The lightning came again, and the thunder.