The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (6 page)

She looked up out of her revery and into her mother's smiling face. The woman seemed to be reading the pictures in her mind. Wendy blushed.

"There's no way to explain it, really," she said. "Doctor Cory thinks that the desire is an inherited characteristic. It just seems to run in the family."

Wendy began to speak, hesitated, and then began again. "But I'm not the only one," she said. "Most of the other girls talk about the same thing."

"They're not allowing sex education in the classrooms, are they?" her mother shot out, ready to be incensed at the notion that the board of education was usurping what she believed to be the duty of parents.

"No," Wendy told her. "We get together at the soda shoppe and talk about our feelings. You know how girls do. And just yesterday Clarissa asked me whether I thought it was all right to let a boy shit in your mouth on the first date."

"In my day a girl would want at least an engagement ring before she'd let a boy take such liberties."

"I think so too, and that's what I told her. I think a girl and boy should know each other for a few months at least, and be going steady, before they get that intimate. But at least half the girls think that's old-fashioned."

"Well, times do change," her mother sighed philosophically. "But they'll learn the value of holding certain things back unless a man is extra good to them. If a woman gives a man everything at once, she has nothing to manage him with. You may not think that's important now, but wait until you've been married a few years."

"I don't know if I can hold myself back," Wendy pleaded.

Her mother took Wendy's hands between her own and held them to her breasts. "Jeffs a good boy," she said, "and I'm sure he's serious about your relationship. Just be careful, that's all."

"Will you give me some advice?" Wendy asked, capitulating at last to a recognition of superior wisdom in this area on the part of her mother.

"Well," the woman said, "make sure he doesn't eat spicy food or drink too much early in the evening. If he gets the runs it will ruin it for both of you. And don't get shit on your dress. It's almost impossible to wipe off and you'll stink all the way home. Make sure he doesn't think you're too easy or he'll lose respect for you."

Wendy put her head on her mother's shoulder. "I'm so lucky to have such an understanding mother," she said.

"My mother did the same for me," the older woman went on. "And you might as well start practicing how to cook from now on. After you're married you'll have to be very careful about his diet. See that he gets enough roughage. And feed him the healthiest food you can. You might as well be getting some good shit from him if you're going to get any shit at all."

Wendy's mother stepped back and the two women gazed at each other with moist eyes. "My little baby's going to be all grown up after tonight," the older woman said.

"You're the best mother a girl could ever want," Wendy told her.

Just then the door swung open and a man walked into the room. Portly, red-nosed, and kindly, he beamed at the picture before his eyes.

"Daddy!" Wendy squealed.

"That Jeff certainly is a lucky man," he said, looking at his daughter's shining face. And then he turned to his wife and in a gruff jocular tone asked, "Is there any chance of getting something to eat around here tonight?"

Wendy and her mother looked at one another for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing, leaving the man smiling in gentle confusion. He and his wife had had separate bedrooms for almost five years, and for him the ingestion, digestion, and elimination of food was no longer a process that held any trace of erotic passion.

Bluebeard's Instant Grecian Urn

Paul thought he knew why women resisted, and his unwillingness to let any external reality alter the system of his perception was, paradoxically, his greatest advantage over them. He lived in a world of images, and ruthlessly imposed his projections on everyone in his life in order to attain his ends. He had no feeling for women as autonomous creatures, but worshipped them passionately as objects of desire. He easily equated conquest with caring.

For him, a woman's sexual response functioned exactly like a neural synapse, in an all-or-nothing manner. In the same way that a large number of electrical stimuli build a charge that, at a crucial moment, fires the spark across the gap between nerve endings, a series of fucks would mount a readiness until, with shocking speed, the woman would surrender to her most uninhibited expressions. Generally, women held back, even in orgasm, sensing that once they let go, an unfathomable chasm would open up, and all that could save them from dissolution would be the continued attention from the man who brought them to that condition. They would then be, for all practical purposes, in his power.

Paul was an expert at enticing women to disregard their warning systems, their memories of broken hearts, betrayals, refusals; he was a master at pushing them to the edge of the erotic abyss and seducing them to leap. His was the knack of easing women into insouciance, yielding their essence to his demand. For Paul, only that moment of yielding counted. Before she surrendered to her need in his arms, a woman was an object of dalliance; and afterward, she had nothing further to reveal.

He possessed a rare combination of genius and lasciviousness. He might have modelled himself on de Sade, except that he lived in a technological era, and looked upon tying virgins to stone walls in hidden crypts with a certain condescension. He had more sophisticated machinery at his disposal.

From the first moment, when he was just nineteen, that a woman let drop the veils of her public countenance and revealed the terrible beauty of a face that had become no more than a pool within which to see the rigors of a soul in ecstasy, he knew that nothing else in life would have any real value for him. He dedicated himself to the elicitation of that brief moment when absolute openness flowered before his eyes. No priest ever served any god better than Paul the cultivation of women.

In the course of a decade he had found hundreds of them. He learned exactly how to manipulate himself to get them to offer their treasure to his insatiable eyes. He was handsomely endowed, a little over six feet tall, his body combining the best features of a lumberjack and a Martha Graham dancer. He wore his blond hair slightly long, and spent six hours each week at a gym, in narcissistic contemplation of his muscular development, as he lifted weights, swung on trapeze bars, or swam lustily in the pool. Otherwise, he was at work, doing a job which bored him, but which allowed him to live in fairly opulent fashion. After having taken a Ph.D. in molecular chemistry, he landed a position at Johnson and Johnson, joining a vast staff of laboratory workers whose projects included searching for ways to produce more long-lasting glue for Band-Aids.

At night, he fucked.

He continually looked forward to the bliss of having an attractive and intelligent woman squirming under him, his cock splitting her throbbing cunt, her fingers raking his shoulders, her legs shamelessly pulling him more deeply into her, and through it all her face a mask of capitulation to unholy joy. It was the face, more than the mere sensations of the act, which transported him. When the stilted mask of civilized appearance melted and the beast emerged, the angel could be born. And if she were, in her daily life, ultra sophisticated, ultra chic, then when she broke, he was blessed with seeing the contrast between that artificiality and the ultimate gift that can ever be given to man: the perception of the naked female soul.

But it was all so fleeting! He might watch a woman edge her way toward frenzy, see her hover at the very brink, and then go wild with the joy of wanton release. As the deep-chested howls burst from her throat, he could hold her only a few seconds, using his entire body as a feedback mechanism to orient the angle and intensity of his cock and thrust so that he extracted the maximum response, before she slipped into an orgasmic fury so private that the shades came down once more over her eyes. There were never more than those few brief moments during which he could gaze upon her, with the wrapt expression of a saint in the midst of a beatific vision. And then it was gone. Gone forever.

"If only there were some way to preserve the stickiness indefinitely," he heard a colleague say one afternoon during a seminar on the relationship between the respective surface tensions of skin and plastic.

"Preserve!" The word echoed in his mind.

"Yes," he thought, "if only I could preserve that instant.”

That night he cancelled his date in order to ponder the implications of his insight. "What if I could," he mused, "freeze the woman at the very second she is producing the expression which is her most perfect, her highest manifestation of beauty?"

He thought of photography, but discarded the idea. A two-dimensional representation was not what he wanted. He desired the real thing. His mind lept from personal to social ramifications. "I would not only possess the thing that is most precious to me in the world, but will have created a work of supreme art, and in the process have immortalized a woman who would otherwise have passed into oblivion unknown. Such a piece would make the Mona Lisa seem the work of a primitive."

He was quite mad, of course, but also extremely brilliant, and with the resources of one of the nation's foremost chemical plants at his disposal, he was soon experimenting with a formula that would have the properties he required of it. It would have to be liquid, for he saw that he would need to use a syringe. It would have to work instantaneously, to keep the body he used it on in semblance of the full flush of life. And it would have to penetrate to every last cell of the person's physical structure.

Fired by the flames of monomania, he poured his genius into the project, and within a year he was ready to make his first try.

He decided to start with Cathy. He had been fucking her desultorily for several months, and she had peaked rather early in the affair. It was only a sentimental fondness for her that kept him seeing her. She was still capable of producing first-rate expressions, especially in the way her lips fell open after he came in her mouth, allowing his sperm to dribble down her cheeks and over her chin. He had seen that half a dozen times already. Her orgasm expression was neo-classic, the suggestion of pain in her furrowed brow contrasting exquisitely with the sucking gesture of her lips. After considering all contingencies, he decided to attempt to capture her reaction to being fucked in the ass. Primarily because the hypodermic would be easier to use if he was behind her, and secondly because during that particular variation she attained an attitude of licentious imbecility which he fancied.

When the moment arrived, he was very sad. His body and mind working with the skill of a master technician, he savored the depth of his emotions. In order to accomplish his aim he would, in effect, be killing the lovely woman now groaning under him.

"But, in a sense," he rationalized, "I am doing her an honor. She would have died one day anyway, aged and infirm, her body a mass of sagging wrinkles. This way, I freeze her at the height of her beauty, and in the process make her immortal." It reminded him of the fact that the samurai chose the cherry blossom as their symbol because, unlike other flowers, it falls from the branch in the fullness of its fragrance, sacrificing itself so that others might know its precious scent.

It was with mixed feelings that he pressed the needle to the base of her skull, just as she tilted her pelvis backwards to impale her buttocks on his thick cock. He slid into her, causing her to gasp, and at the moment he was imbedded completely between her cheeks, and the look of unutterable pleasure that he was seeking moved across her face, he injected the potion into her skin.

At once she was completely paralyzed. Even her heart stopped mid-beat. For an instant he was breathless at the transformation. She had become a statue. He pulled out slowly, his cock feeling as though it were stuck in a piston tube packed with axle grease. He knelt next to her and turned her over. He could scarcely believe his eyes.

She had been caught at the edge of becoming. Her face was a map of demon lust. As he gazed into her fixed stare, he had trouble convincing himself that she was dead, for even the glint of passion had been captured. For a few seconds he was chilled by the notion that she was still alive, imprisoned in that rigid coffin of flesh.

"But that's absurd," he said, as he went to get a saw.

It was not difficult to sever the head from the body, which he was not really interested in except as a curiosity. It was fascinating to observe that the entire inside of her cunt was flexed in an orgasmic spasm. He put the torso in the bathtub, where another brew of specially prepared chemicals neatly dissolved it.

He brought the head to a special laminating machine he had devised, and placed it in a hollow, where a fine electron mist covered it completely. It sealed the woman in a very delicate plastic, as securely as if she was a driver's license. When he took her out, she looked like a woman about to come, except that she had no body.

"You are mine forever," he whispered, "the real you, the true you, the you that lives eternally in beauty."

After that, his collection grew steadily. He became a regular at most of the singles' bars on the upper east side, and each evening he left with yet another candidate for immortality. Most failed to meet his increasingly exacting standards. Only the best were considered for his hall of fame.

He became adept at discerning types amidst the confusing superficial appearances. With no research ever having been done in the area, he had to construct his own system of classification, a Linnaeus of the rapturous expression. He divided women in scores of ways, such as the various degrees of opening between their lips at certain crucial check points; whether they kept their eyes open or closed, whether or not their nostrils flared. The quality of the eyes was a world of exploration in itself, and he was able to distinguish fifty-three distinct shades of cheek coloration.