Robert Coover - John's Wife

Big rich John, pit-stopping Bruce’s lifelong pal and partner, was at that moment, give or take a time zone or two, stretched out under a lean handsome woman on a slowly rotating circular bed in her own bachelor digs, very fanciful and high-tech, up the coast from L.A. where they’d met earlier that day, though not for the first time. The woman collected Victorian children’s book art, it was all over her walls like a giant composite comicstrip, imaginative and sensuous and richly hued, color gradations as fine as hairs and all now in vibrant flowing motion, as though stirred by a fairy wind. Everything was in motion: the lights, the furniture, the undulating music which seemed somehow more visible than audible. In short, John was stoned, enjoying a magic carpet moment with a powerful young sorceress, wild and beautiful. Life was. He said that. Wild and beautiful. She, pegged to him, riding him like the golden knight on her wall, both hands at the pommel, kneading balls, clit, and thighs, digging in their pubic hair as though searching for buried treasure, agreed. He felt very peaceful, letting the bouncing cheeks of her solid little ass slap his cupped hands like juggled fruit, feeling a world away from ejaculation, yet racing along at cliff’s edge at the same time, ready to tip at any moment, but that moment still his to choose. And meanwhile, everything, everything was as though organically fused and doing a delicious full-spectrum color dance for his fiberless optic-wired head alone. This shit lasted forever, he knew, but he was in good company and prepared to squander a few of his life’s hours, his long life’s hours, it was like a time between times. He had just bought a national trucking firm to go with his air cargo operations, his money was on the right horse in the convulsive communications and entertainment industry, thanks in part to his fiery rider, and he was headed back home to his own annual Pioneers Day barbecue to announce plans to build a racetrack on a rundown farm he’d picked up at auction. For some reason, her sexual energy maybe, this woman reminded him of Marie-Claire, though of course not so mad — in fact, this woman was not mad at all, she knew exactly what she was doing, even spaced out on acid she did. John did not share Bruce’s regressive appetite for shy little girls, the fantasy fuck of eternal playboys who cannot grow up; John was turned on only by smart mature strong-willed women with lives, power, talents, wealth of their own. And if they lacked any of that he provided it for them, as best he could. Not for their sake. For his. It made the sex better. What about your wife? What? The woman had stopped bouncing for a moment and had settled back into his broad hands, doing a slow twist around his cock. Does she ever do this? Sure, everybody does. He couldn’t remember when last, though. Couldn’t even remember if he saw her the last time he was home. Must have. This feels very fucking good, he said. It’ll get better, sweet prince, she laughed. He saw now why he thought of Marie-Claire: her teeth. When the woman smiled, she displayed Marie-Claire’s pebbly little rows of white babyteeth. But whereas Marie-Claire’s smile suggested a catastrophic vulnerability, this woman’s was more sensuously calculating, witchy in a way, not unlike the mirrored smile of Snow White’s stepmother, probably on the wall behind her though seeming to hover in the air just over her shoulder. He told her so and she grinned again, her eyes gleaming, her auburn hair coiling around her perspiring face wild as the wild Medea’s now sliding into view, and told him about a pornographic cartoon she’d seen about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all the time wriggling her hips round and round. The whole cottage got into it, humping away, shooting jism out its chimneys, and with all those dwarfs involved, of course, that girl got it every which way up every hole she had, gave me a lot of funny ideas. Not about dwarfs and princes, I hope. She laughed and, tightening up, twisted harder. I remember the first fuckfilm I ever saw, he said, fingering her circling anus. She gasped as he worked his finger in and grabbed at his nipples as though to brace herself. Saw it on a big screen. Friend of mine in town set it up, his father owned the moviehouse, the Palace, the old Palace Theater. The Palace, she repeated, her eyes squeezed shut. He thought his were, too, but he saw everything, and more besides. Home Movies , the film was called, I think. A smalltown couple with two kids, a girl and boy, have the neighbors in to look at their holiday movies. The neighbors sit around with their knees together, oohing and ahing politely, but what they’re seeing of course are all sex scenes, mostly incest in all the ways you could imagine with a few naked campers and gullible hitchhikers thrown in. The woman on top of him, still clawing at the flesh around his nipples, was pumping back and forth vigorously now, her eyes closed, biting her bottom lip with her row of little teeth. As he went on describing the movie, not really wanting to, but as though spellbound by his own voice, which seemed to be booming out of the quadraphonic speakers in the corners, he found himself at some point telling her instead about the last time he’d been up at the cabin with Bruce, together balling three women at once, two of them a mother and daughter. Nevada had apparently set it up, or some of it (the third woman might have been a scheduling mistake), but she wasn’t there. At one point when they were all in a sweaty tangle, Bruce had cast a poignantly sorrowful look at John over the ass of the woman on his face, then lifted one hand off her quivering butt and given John a brief high five, John slapping back, thinking nothing of it at the time, but worried about it since. What the hell was Bruce trying to say? Beats me, the woman groaned. But what about the neighbors? The family raped them, he gasped, and they had an orgy or something, but the strange thing was seeing that film in the Palace. The cliff, he realized, was crumbling at his feet. Or thereabouts. It was like a fucking cathedral, that moviehouse, a golden-domed two-decker with a lot of ornate detail, red plush seats, a lobby like a hotel’s, we’d all gone there with our parents to see the classics, the original Snow White , for example, it was like a part of history, something bigger than all of us, and suddenly, there we were— whoof! God! Great! Awesome! the woman rocking away on him whimpered, her head thrown back now (his view was of her slender white throat, arched chin, dilating nostrils, which seemed to be merging with the dancing overhead lights and swirling ceiling), her raspberry-tipped chest wet and heaving, her sleek belly rippling like the sails on Sinbad’s ship, listing beside the bed. He was asea on Sinbad’s sea, storm-tossed yet satin-pillowed, spume-blowing nigh at hand. But wha-whatever happened to— gasp! — that fantastic theater? The Palace? It was in the way, he wheezed. I tore it down. The woman jerked forward, her burnished hair whipping the air, her vagina convulsing. Oh Jesus! she laughed. Whoo! You fucking bastard! I think I’m coming! Pink labial folds had burgeoned around the mouth of the rabbit hole Alice was falling down, the wet red sides of the hole itself throbbing in constrictive waves like the vagina that clasped his cock, and Daphne sprouting laurel leaves while Apollo grabbed at her vanishing ass — there they came! pop! pop! pop! — was like the onset of some stupendous mythical orgasm. He felt like he was coming and not coming at the same time, and then, as she cried out, or the music did, or he did, the cry all around them like a lightning flash, there was a great quaking as though the Big One had hit, and in his balls at least, it had. John, shuddering blissfully as his loins turned explosively inside out, was intensely happy. Not as in ever after, but the genuine article. Right now. Life, goddamn it, if you lived it, really fucking lived it, was very very good.