Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

On the stage, a gangly young man moved swiftly and erratically toward the lead guitarist, his arms waving jerkily, demanding in a rush that he be allowed to sing. The guitarist began arguing with him, and the kids sitting on the floor or milling around the perimeter of the stage began hissing and booing till the guitarist relinquished the microphone and the spotlight. The new possessor of both said a few words to the kid behind the electric piano, presumably establishing a key, and then launched into a spaced-out, amphetamine-high imitation of Alvin Lee’s “I’m Comin’ Home,” taking particular joy in simulating the dog barks that had been an integral part of that hit record, losing the pianist completely, the lyrics trailing into an a cappella symphony of manic barking, a veritable dog pound unleashed at the microphone, yelping and screeching from the amplified speakers.

The kids crowding the stage began booing and hissing again, and the would-be rock star raised his arms like President Nixon, the index and middle finger of both hands spread in V ’s for Victory, and grinned appreciatively, mistaking the roar of disapproval for gratified applause and cries of encouragement. He pulled the belt he was wearing free of the loops on his blue jeans, held it up like a prize boa constrictor, and boomed into the microphone, “See this belt? That’s one beautiful belt, all right. Does anybody want to buy this gorgeous belt? Do I hear ten guilders? Okay, do I hear five guilders? How about two? I’ll settle for a single solitary guilder” (the boos louder and more insistent now), “the thinnest part of a dollar, the equivalent” (and here he fell into an imitation of W. C. Fields), “m’friends, of thirty cents American, ah, yes, do I have any takers? No takers? Go fuck yourselves, you fuckin’ freaks.”

When they left the place at two-thirty in the morning, the kid who’d tried to sell his belt had crashed, and was standing on the sidewalk outside, leaning against a lamppost, muttering morosely to himself. They heard his unintelligible words behind them all the way up the street, and Lissie thought she could still hear them after they had turned the corner onto the Leidseplein.

They did not get back to the apartment until almost three. Tony and the twins, apparently having discovered one another over some good Turkish hash purchased at Elysium from a British kid just back from Algiers, retired to the middle bedroom with the kingsized bed, all thoughts of his pilgrimage to Ruvo del Monte obscured by the prospects of a sexual playground unimagined in his wildest fantasies. Lissie, exhausted and unwilling even to think of spending another night trying to maneuver, however craftily, her five feet nine inches into the confines of a couch that was seven inches shorter than her body, readily accepted Barbara’s suggestion that she take the now-vacant bed in the third bedroom. Changing into a nightgown in the hall bathroom, she tiptoed past the twins’ already acrobatically reverberating room and opened the door onto the utter darkness of the end room. Paul Gillis was already asleep.

Not daring to put on a light, she stumbled across the room, banging her shins against an ottoman, muttering “Shit!” in the inky blackness, turning swiftly to see whether or not she’d awakened him, and then finally finding her bed, and spending another three minutes trying to figure out how these damn Dutch sheets could possibly be tucked in so tight that a person couldn’t find where they began or ended. At last yanking back the resistant sheets and blanket, she climbed under the covers on a sigh, pulled the bedclothes to her throat, and heard the toot of a solitary tugboat somewhere on one of the canals. The horn bleated again, echoed, faded. The city, so vibrantly alive in the daylight hours, was still and silent. She fell asleep almost at once.

He came to her bed sometime during the night.

He did not say a word.

She thought of it later as a silent, consensual rape.

She had barely said three sentences to this boy since meeting him in London, and she awoke now to find him beside her. Wordlessly, he spread his right hand on her thigh, the wrist resting lightly on the patch of pubic hair between her legs. His face loomed above hers for an instant, and then he kissed her. She loved beards, she found them a turn-on, perhaps because her one and only experience had been with bearded Judd Gordon, perhaps because they represented to her a statement of male youthfulness, defiant and brave — This is what I want to look like, take it or leave it.

As Paul kissed her now, as this boy she didn’t know kissed her, she thought instantly of that first night in Woodstock, perhaps mistaking him in that murky instant between sleep and wakefulness for Judd, opening her mouth in automatic response to his kiss, feeling the stiff bristles of his nascent mustache against her upper lip, his hand still grasping her thigh, the wrist lightly resting on her mound below. She knew instantly and instantaneously that she was not dreaming, and that this was not Judd.

Oddly, she felt neither outrage nor indignation over his violation of her turf, but instead a sense of appropriateness. In an apartment where Tony and the twins were fucking their brains out next door, and Barbara and Robby were similarly if not numerically interlocked farther down the hall, there seemed something fitting, almost preordained, about Paul’s silent nocturnal passage across the six feet that separated their beds, his body beside hers, his lips covering hers, his hand on her thigh, the wrist motionless on the bronze triangular shield that protected, she now realized, an entrance cleft already vulnerable to entreaty. Had she been dreaming erotically before he’d slipped into bed beside her? Or was her reaction prompted solely by his sudden wordless presence and lingering kiss, the hand that refused to budge a scant four inches to the right where it would have found her straining toward his questing fingers, still spread and motionless on her thigh?

A single tinny note sounded in the blackness, the small tiled clock on the living room mantel striking the half-hour. The widespread fingers on her thigh, their subtle weight, their warmth, their utter immobility; the insistent urging of his mouth upon hers, his tongue thrusting and exploring now, her own tongue responding; the wrist suspended a millimeter above her crotch, all combined to arouse her more completely than would have a more deliberate assault.

She spread her legs, silently indicating acquiescence, but his mouth remained the sole adventurer, the widespread hand burning its imprint into her thigh, the reluctant wrist motionless even when she lifted herself slightly to engage it flesh to flesh, and felt its strong beating pulse. For the first time in her life — never with Judd — she found herself in the role of active aggressor, reaching over him to find his rigid penis, clutching it in her hand, urging it with bold, hard strokes cunningly calculated to elicit a response that would rocket into his brain and trigger his recalcitrant hand, causing that hand to move from her thigh (where now she felt his fingers trembling) and onto her seething vagina.

When at last the hand moved, with a suddenness as startling as his appearance beside her in bed had been, when at last his fingers parted the seeping folds of her flesh to locate with pinpoint accuracy her throbbing clitoris, when at last he began fondling her there with a touch as wispily tantalizing as his stubborn wrist had been, she felt at once a familiar melting inside, a recognized dissolving of her interior walls, a rush of blood to her head, an unbearable mounting pressure that promised imminent inundation, and tightened her hand on him, pumping him now with an urgency dictated by her dangerously impending tidal wave, pulling him toward her in fitful jerks, crushing him stiff against her belly where he spilled his juices just as she felt herself crumbling helplessly before the torrential, crashing, blindly raging ecstasy of her own orgasm.