Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“Oh Jesus,” he said, gagging, “oh Jesus, oh God.”

“û(r)m,” the bear said, “wr nff.”

Brewster sank to his knees in a position of prayer and the bear abruptly sat, its stubby legs spread, her swollen cunt in her lap like a bouquet of flowers.

It was as if he had looked up the dress of someone old. He couldn’t look away and the bear, making powerful internal adjustments, obscenely posed, flexing her muscular rut, shivering, her genitalia suddenly and invisibly engined, a performance coy and proud. Finally he managed to turn his head, and with an almost lazy power and swiftness the bear reached out with one paw and plucked his cock out of his torn trousers. Ashenden winced — not in pain, the paw’s blow had been gentle and as accurate as a surgical thrust, his penis hooked, almost comfortable, a heel in a shoe, snug in the bear’s curved claws smooth and cool as piano keys — and looked down.

“OERƏKH.”

His penis was erect. “That’s Jane’s, not yours!” he shouted. “My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing!”

The bear snorted and swiped with the broad edge of her fore-paw against each side of Ashenden’s peter. Her fur, lanolized by estrus, was incredibly soft, the two swift strokes gestures of forbidden brunette possibility.

And of all the things he’d said and thought and felt that night, this was the most reasonable, the most elegantly strategic: that he would have to satisfy the bear, make love to the bear, fuck the bear. And this was the challenge which had at last defined itself, the test he’d longed for and was now to have. Here was the problem: Not whether it was possible for a mere man of something less than one hundred and eighty pounds to make love to an enormous monster of almost half a ton; not whether a normal man like himself could negotiate the barbarous terrains of the beast or bring the bear off before it killed him; but merely how he, Brewster Ashenden of the air, water, fire and earth Ashendens, one of the most fastidious men alive, could bring himself to do it — how, in short, he could get it up for a bear!

But he had forgotten, and now remembered: it was already up. And if he had told the bear it was for Jane and not for it, he had spoken in frenzy, in terror and error and shock. It occurred to him that he had not been thinking of Jane at all, that she was as distant from his mind at this moment as the warranties he possessed for all the electric blankets, clock radios and space heaters he’d picked up for opening accounts in banks, as distant as the owner’s manuals stuffed into drawers for all that stuff, as forgotten as all the tennis matches he’d played on the grass courts of his friends, as the faults in those matches, as all the strolls to fences and nets to retrieve opponents’ balls, the miles he’d walked doing such things. Then why was he hard? And he thought of hanged men, of bowels slipped in extremis, of the erectile pressures of the doomed, of men in electric chairs or sinking in ships or singed in burning buildings, of men struck by lightning in open fields, and of all the random, irrelevant erections he’d had as an adolescent (once as he leaned forward to pick up a bowling ball in the basement alley of a friend from boarding school), hardness there when you woke up in the morning, pressures on the kidney that triggered the organ next to it, that signaled the one next to it, that gave the blood its go-ahead, the invisible nexus of conditions. “That’s Jane’s” he’d said, “not yours. My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing.” Oh, God. It didn’t. He’d lied to a bear! He’d brought Jane’s name into it like a lout in a parlor car. There was sin around like weather, like knots in shoes.

“ What the hell am I talking about? ” he yelled, and charged the bear.

And it leaned back from its sitting position and went down on its back slowly, slowly, its body sighing backward, ajar as a door stirred by wind, and Ashenden belly-flopped on top of it — with its paws in the air he was a foot taller than the bear at either end, and this contributed to his sin, as if it were some child he tumbled — pressed on its swollen pussy as over a barrel. He felt nothing.

His erection had withered. The bear growled contemptuously. “ Foreplay, foreplay, ” Brewster hissed, and plunged his hand inside the bear. I’m doing this to save my life, he thought. I’m doing this to pass tests. This is what I call a challenge and a half.

The bear permitted the introduction of his hand and hugged him firmly, yet with a kind of reserve as though conscious of Ashenden’s eggshell mortality. His free hand was around her neck while the other moved around inside the bear insinuatingly. He felt a clit like a baseball. One hand high and one low, his head, mouth closed, buried in the mound of fur just to the side of the bear’s neck, he was like a man doing the Australian crawl.

The bear shifted. Still locked together, the two of them rolled over and over through the peaceable kingdom. For Ashenden it was like being run over, but she permitted him to come out on top. His hand had taken a terrific wrenching however, and he knew he had to get it out before it swelled and he was unable to move it. Jesus, I’ve stubbed my hand, he thought, and began to withdraw it gently, gingerly, through a booby-trapped channel of obstacle grown agonizing by his injury, a minefield of pain. The bear lay stock still as he reeled in his hand, climbing out of her cunt as up a rope. (Perhaps this feels good to her, he thought tenderly.) At last, love’s Little Jack Horner, it was out and Ashenden, his hand bent at almost a right angle to his wrist, felt disarmed. What he had counted on — without realizing he counted on it — was no longer available to him. He would not be able to manipulate the bear, would not be able to get away with merely jerking it off. It was another illusion stripped away. He would have to screw the animal conventionally.

Come on, he urged his cock, wax, grow, grow. He pleaded with his penis, taking it in his good hand and rubbing it desperately, polishing it like an heirloom, Aladdinizing it uselessly. Meanwhile, tears in his own, he looked deep into the bear’s eyes and stalled by blowing crazy kisses to it off his broken hand, saying foolish things, making it incredible promises, keeping up a lame chatter like the pepper talk around an infield.

“Just a minute. Hold on a sec. I’m almost ready. It’s going to be something. It’s really…I’ve just got to…Look, there’s really nothing to worry about. Everything’s going to work out fine. I’m going to be a man for you, darling. Just give me a chance, will you? Listen,” he said, “I love you. I don’t think I can live without you. I want you to marry me.” He didn’t know what he was saying, unconsciously selecting, with a sort of sexual guile he hadn’t known he possessed, phrases from love, the compromising sales talk of romantic stall. He had been maidenized, a game, scared bride at the bedside. Then he began to hear himself, to listen to what he was saying. He’d never spoken this way to a woman in his life. Where did he get this stuff? Where did it come from? It was the shallow language of two-timers, of drummers with farm girls, of whores holding out and gigolos holding in, the conversation of cuckoldry, of all amorous greed. It was base and cheap and tremendously exciting and suddenly Ashenden felt a stirring, the beginning of a faint lust. He moved to the spark like an arsonist and gazed steadily at the enormous hulk of impatient bear, at its black eyes cute as checkers on a snowman. Yes, he thought, afraid he’d lose it, yes. I am the wuver of the teddy bear, big bwown bear’s wittle white man.