Quiver (3 page)

The dentist chair tilts back like a bed. He pushes her down, so that her face is near his knees. He moves her legs so that they run up along his hips to his shoulders. She is lying flat against his body. His cock is still inside her, pushing against the back of her sex. They move slowly. From his reclining position he can see where he is entering her. He parts her buttocks, gently easing two fingers into her ass. She moans and claws at his legs as she swells toward orgasm. She reaches back and clutches at his clothes, her fingers tracing an embroidered insignia. McGillis. Squeezing her breasts, he thrusts into her. She cannot hold back any longer and her orgasm rips through her. She cries out as she feels him contracting with her.

The movement of her head triggers the X-ray machine. It extends its lens automatically before taking another image.

The next day Sandra is driving her blue BMW down a highway in the western suburbs. It is a humid day, the traffic is heavy. The working drawings are on the seat beside her. As she waits at a red light she glances across at them. They look
impressive, blue and pink ink trace the three-dimensional proportions of the museum, a maze of column grid and footing details. She drives into the car park of the warehouse. A sign stretches over the gateway: McGillis building corporation, Est. 1972. She has arrived.

Brian is leaning over Elsa, an attractive patient in her early thirties. As Brian taps her tooth with a dental pick, Elsa winces in pain. His assistant enters the room and touches him on the shoulder. She has Elsa’s dental X rays as he requested, but there is something else. He excuses himself, leaving Elsa wide-eyed, her mouth braced open. He follows his assistant into the next room. Silently she pins the X ray against the light. Two pelvic bones, one male, one female, are visible. The bases of both spines and two pubic bones are pushed together, bumping like white bats in the dark.

“Fucking,” he mutters under his breath.

“Sorry?” the assistant asks, not trusting her ears.

“Fucking. It’s an X ray of fucking,” Brian pronounces clearly, while instinctively twisting the wedding ring on his finger.

Sandra spreads out the drawings on the executive’s desk. He is the chief foreman of the construction company. Over a hundred men work under him. As she bends over, he notices her cleavage and the soft texture of her hair.

“I’d better call Robert, he’s handling this job.” He speaks into an intercom. She glances around the office. A girlie calendar on one wall, featuring the famous porn star Candy Perkins, advertises concrete; a photo of the wife and baby granddaughter sit on the desk. Through the glass partition, Sandra
can see the workers moving large sheets of wood across the warehouse floor.

“Robert’s the best in the business, you’ll be okay with him.”

She recognizes his aroma before she sees him, a lingering concoction of sweat, hair and a residue of aftershave. The same smell. Her heart races, she feels herself responding in scent.

She looks up. His face betrays nothing as he extends a hand. He squeezes her hand slightly as they shake. He is younger than she thought. His eyes are an intense blue. The hair on his chest curls over the white T-shirt under his blue overalls. He catches her looking at his body.

As she takes him through the drawings he listens quietly. His hands, heavy workman’s hands, slowly caress the lines of the museum, working their way through the collision of masculine and feminine, the vertical and the arched.

Outside the office he offers to drive her to the site.

“Only if I’m in control,” she says and smiles slowly.

I
’d never been one for revenge. The moralist in me always considered it too calculating and too undignified. Until I fell in love with Humphrey. Then I transformed into Medea, Jezebel and the Wicked Witch of the West overnight.

I had been celibate for six months—a reaction to a broken love affair. One of those sordid triangles full of illusion and desire, made more attractive by my unavailability. Naturally, I ceased to be so alluring when the girlfriend got pregnant. Suddenly cut free, I felt abandoned and bruised. I went into retreat, developing casual friendships with two men I’d meet for coffee. I flirted with the idea of sleeping with them, but decided I couldn’t trust the emotional consequences of any sexual involvement. I should have known then.

One of the men was a journalist—a laconic, self-effacing chap with an acidic wit. Coffee with him was like a visit to the analyst, involving much self-deprecation and a mutual despairing of Sydney society. His misanthropic sensibility was not a great sexual turn-on.

The other man was Humphrey. Coffee with Humphrey usually took place in complete silence. Defiantly glamorous and
single, I’d wait for him at some bar in Taylor Square, surrounded by waiters—beautiful and homosexual—fluttering above me like exotic butterflies engrossed in their dramatic worlds of fecund attractions.

Humphrey would appear, dressed in some self-made contraption like sandals made of tire rubber tied with string, his face still smeared with paint, his hair covered in sawdust, his large rough hands stained with oil. Standing silently by the bar, he would watch me waiting for him. Then his scent would always give him away. Pungent and slightly oily, it would drift across and I’d swing around and see him in all his maleness, grinning his sardonic smile, his ageing, pock-marked skin still handsome. Humphrey was an original.

Humphrey’s reputation as a notorious womanizer made me curious. I didn’t consciously find him attractive, but I found the idea of so many women falling under the spell of this odd and in some ways shy man fascinating. In the same way I found certain insects fascinating. There was even a rumor that the sound of the orgasms of all the women he’d ever made come followed him around like a faint echo, like the ocean trapped in a seashell. Besides, he found me attractive. I liked that; it restored my battered confidence.

Humphrey was an artist. Primarily a sculptor. You can divide sculptors into two categories, ones that subtract to arrive at the form and ones that build to create form. Humphrey was a subtractor, as if he instinctively knew the shape that was trapped beneath the stone, the lump of clay, hidden under knots of wood. I’d been to his studio once and watched him free one of his figures. Thin and nubile, she emerged from the pink marble like a woman shaking out her hair in sunlight. I watched him working on the piece, polishing the marble as if it were
skin, drawing out the shape as if he were pulling at his own flesh. His large, heavy hands spoke of work, of instinct, bypassing intellect altogether. I guess this was one of the things I was drawn to, this communication through the flesh.

Humphrey was not a storyteller. When he did speak, it was in short, cryptic sentences or, on occasion, long monologues of lateral witty observations. When he was younger he used to stutter, so badly that until the age of thirty he was practically incomprehensible. Perversely, I found that irresistible.

It was the end of summer, a hot night when all of Darlinghurst goes in search of a party. The humidity gets under the skin and creates a sexual friction, and before you know it the streets are crawling with people in search of some kind of contact—the brush of fingertips, a kiss, anything. I was in huntress mode, adorned to swallow some man up. Dressed in a blue skintight number, stretched tightly across my breasts and pulled down to expose my shoulders, I felt hot. Let’s face it, I
was
hot, my vows of celibacy evaporating every time my garter belt rubbed against my thighs.

The party was held in a converted garage, tucked away behind high offices and a desolate row of terraces abandoned by the city planners. The basement had been transformed into a dance floor complete with colored lights, a strobe and a sound system that pounded off the walls. There must have been about three hundred people crowded into this tiny, hot building. I pushed my way through the usual collection of faces—students, journalists, fashion models, unemployed actors, junkies and would-be film directors—down toward the dance floor.

The walls sweated as people gyrated their bodies like fish in a tank. To one side of me was a lesbian couple. One of the women, resplendent in chain mail, bright red cropped hair and Viking helmet, slithered down the glistening body of her partner. Behind me a young man in sixties bell-bottoms cradled his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. Next to them a man in his fifties, dripping with love beads and feathers, undulated in his own time warp. The whole place was bouncing with a kind of childlike abandonment.

I could feel men watching me. The hunger in their faces made me wet. Ignoring them, I continued to dance on my own. The music coursed through my blood and up through my womb. It was like dancing in thick honey.

There was that scent again. Faint but totally distinctive, it floated past my face. I opened my eyes to find Humphrey dancing in front of me. Normally clumsy, he had real grace. He moved as if he was making love; every movement instinctive and sure. He wove himself around me for hours, caressing the air between us.

Outside, dawn had turned the sky a pale gray. Humphrey, not daring to presume anything, offered to walk me home. As we all know, momentous events start in the most arbitrary way; destiny doesn’t really offer us a choice. It’s a trick God plays. In this instance it started with my bursting bladder. Hobbling along in my high heels, full of beer, I realized I’d have to stop off at Humphrey’s place.

His flat was in an old Victorian block, bleak in red brick. I had always resisted visiting him there, feeling that the proximity might have an inevitability to it. A sexual fatality.

The room was dark, with a few broken pieces of furniture. There was a model of a heart resting on a picture frame, one of
those three-dimensional plastic replicas of the organ. I remember I brought it down and began to open it up. He told me it was a present from his last lover, who had fled to England a week before. He seemed to find the plastic organ an apt metaphor for their relationship. I didn’t bother probing, but now I wish that I had. In the center of the room was a beautiful wooden model of a sailing yacht. It stood about four foot in height, with miniature rigging and brass fittings bolted to the deck. It seemed to be the only cherished object in the room. Humphrey watched me as I gravitated toward it. As I bent over the polished stern I could feel him wanting me from the other side of the room. I liked that, teasing the moment out before we touched for the first time.

He came up silently behind me. I stood pinned, feeling like a deer caught in the glare of headlights. He lifted my long hair and bit into the back of my neck. I could feel his teeth as he breathed in the smell of my hair, my body. We stood there for aeons, caught in that dangerous impasse between friendship and lust. I could feel his cock, hard in the small of my back. My head rolled against his shoulder, resting in the hollow of his neck. In the silence, I swear I heard a faint gasp, a woman’s breath caught in pleasure. Man of sighs, I thought, he is a man of sighs.

There are two kinds of men: those who are cunt-shy and those who are not. Those who are not are the connoisseurs who know where a woman likes to be worshipped. And Humphrey was the ultimate connoisseur, a sex artist, one of those rare men who was able to focus completely when making love to a woman. He was totally intuitive about what I wanted when weaving his naked body around mine. It was as if he was able to second-guess my fantasies.

He squatted over me, his cock moving slowly in me, between my closed legs. He threw back his head and I had the definite impression that he was in direct communion with the great god Pan. There was a complete abandonment of intellect in his lovemaking, as if he was tapping into a higher frenetic power. I was drunk with his tongue, his cock, his lips, the hair on the back of his neck, his hands and the danger of it all. What could I do? I fell heavily headfirst like all the women before me. Love is like vertigo. I know, I suffered from it—as a child I couldn’t even cross bridges. Falling in love with a friend is disastrous, it’s like stepping into a shower that you know will scald you.

There was no way I could plead ignorance, after all I’d been warned about his previous conquests, his tendency to evaporate at the mention of commitment. And hadn’t it been me he’d confided in over all those coffees?

We were lovers for three months. In those days I was working for the Ministry of Planning and Environment as a consultant for salinity. After days of touring around the barren districts of New South Wales, photographing the white crusty rims of saltbeds, visiting the local church halls and standing in front of suspicious beery men twenty years my senior to lecture them about the dangers of over-farming, chemical insecticides and blue algae, I’d find myself stumbling down Oxford Street, still dressed in my pin-striped suit, heading toward his apartment.

Humphrey would open the door without questioning my sudden arrival, take my briefcase from me, sit me down in front of the television and present me with a plate of spaghetti or paella, the only two dishes he knew how to cook. I’d sit there eating, losing myself in some disaster in Eastern Europe or
graphic car crash in Newcastle, but still acutely conscious of him moving around behind me. The very space between us was erotic. Once, after finishing my meal, I put my hand to the back of my hair and found he was pressing his erect penis into my tresses. Humphrey loved my hair; he called it the hair of Eve, loving the scent, the weight of it.

I don’t think he thought in language at all, but in images that were juxtaposed like some mad surrealist painting. He exuded an electricity that disrupted the linear in nature: plates would crash to the ground, thunderstorms would suddenly break out when he was around.

He would take me on the bare wooden floorboards, lifting my skirt to part my lips and pay homage to my vulva, finding every possible caress with his tongue, teeth and lips, taking me to the brink for hours before finally entering me with his blunt, hard cock. Afterward we would lie there twisted, exhausted, sated, my head against his foot, my back upside down against the corner of the room, his knee in my mouth, his cock in my elbow. When the silence became uncomfortable he would pluck out my pubic hair from between his teeth and tell me about his sexual escapades.