Satisfaction Read online

  Bobby’s Pistol thrusts in and out between the girl’s buttocks yes, yes, it’s bigger than usual, he’s even looking at it himself as if he is amazed by it, and at the same time his body is erect and tensing more and more, his whole body seems like a giant dick, stiff and a little twisted, it’s as if gallons of blood have petrified in his veins, he looks like he is in pain, it’s terrible, it’s fascinating how he grimaces, more and more … He bobs his head, throws it back like a man crucified, closes his eyes, opens them again, my God he’s going to bugger … His face contorts with pleasure, go on, go on, you bastard, you motherfucker, you’ll pay for this, bastard, bastard …

  Babe would rather she hadn’t, but she couldn’t restrain herself: her hands slid under her nightie, between her legs, where It was warm and moist. She came quickly, then came again when Bobby, with a quick step back, pulled out and shot his load, groaning, and with so much vigor that the first spurt hit the pink bodywork which he had so assiduously polished.

  She doesn’t hesitate in the dark, it’s as if she can see with her eyes shut. Her legs are trembling, drained of strength by the pleasure, but she is serene despite her urgency. Without a sound she closes the front door behind her and goes back upstairs. Finally her bedroom, welcoming as a womb. She slips between the sheets and pretends to be asleep as she hears Bobby’s heavy footsteps approach.

  δ

  Hello, I’m Bobby’s mom. And this is Timmy. He’s already been here for ages. It wasn’t long before he came to join me. To be honest, aren’t we better off here, in God’s breast, than on the other side, namely the kingdom of Satan?

  Oh, I don’t resent Bobby for staying alive. He has always been weak, I guess he can’t help it. All I’m saying is that if he were here with me now, like my darling Timmy, he wouldn’t have this penchant for screwing with the pseudodead, with that foul creature. But you know, Bobby has always been a wrongdoer. A mother knows these things; I’ve known virtually since he was born. He was a nasty child, like his father.

  Timmy, on the other hand, has always been an angel. A sweetie—quiet, obedient, innocence itself. And he adored me. These are things we can’t control, and it didn’t stop me loving them both equally, I won’t let anyone say I was a bad mother.

  But I swear that if I were in Babe’s shoes, I’d take a large knife to his Carmen, without a by your leave. Lord, what have I done to deserve a pervert for a son? Bobby, my baby, stop this nonsense and come to Mom …

  Mom, please, can’t you see I’m busy? I’m not a little boy anymore, you know. No, I’m not saying that to make you cry. But you shouldn’t talk like that in front of people. I’m a man. A man has his needs, Mom. And Bobby’s no faggot. It’s like Elvis. Who would dare make out Elvis Presley is a faggot? Or even worse, that he’s become a faggot now he’s dead?

  I think sometimes maybe he’s behind all this. These apparitions of my mother (always at the wrong moment—but have you ever known a mother to appear at the right moment?). It could be that Elvis is prompting her: “Go ask your son to join us; I’ve got something I want to sing to him …”

  I was young, and he was dead. I mean, he was supposed to be dead. I know, it’s strange. I’ve often thought about it since, and I reckon in the end that the man I loved that day was maybe neither dead nor alive. I’ve kept this story to myself for more than twenty years. Who would I have talked to about it?

  The reason I’ve kept quiet this long is not just that I’m afraid no one would believe me. Anyone who has had to make a difficult confession will know what I’m talking about. Elvis, I’m taking the plunge for you, you who were, and still are, great and free and generous, dead or alive.

  It was the summer of 1978. To celebrate my seventeenth birthday, I had decided to go on the road, hitchhiking. It was the third day, I was on Route 40, just past Memphis. It was nearly nightfall, the road was more or less deserted, no one was stopping, no one seemed to notice me. The light was failing, it was as if it were taking me with it; I felt like I was disappearing. Maybe the people driving past thought they could see some kind of shadow, a faint silhouette, a ghostly shape by the side of the road … or maybe they saw nothing at all. If I had any substance at all now, it was so fleeting that no one cast a glance over to where I was standing.

  I began to wonder if I’d be better off heading back into town, to find someplace to sleep. The few cars still on the road vanished into the red sunset. The huge sky was just an orgy of flames. Finally I decided to carry on walking straight ahead. That’s when an enormous Cadillac loomed up behind me, drove past, then pulled over.

  It had tinted windows, so you couldn’t see anything or anyone inside. It was like a great pink hearse. It was magnificent, gleaming, caressed by the fingers of God, which filtered through the clouds in long, hot rays. I walked toward it. I wanted to touch its smooth, shiny, thoroughbred bodywork. But I just stood there staring at it stupidly, not daring to move.

  The door opened, and I took a step back. I saw the dark shape of a man at the wheel and I got in. I recognized him straightaway.

  THE KING! The previous August, along with everyone else, I had learned of his death. But once I got into the car and saw him, dressed in black leather from head to toe, tall and long and handsome, with his black hair and his chubby cheeks … The King, goddamn it, the King! I recognized him as surely as if he were my brother, or as if I had lived with him all my life. I recognized him immediately and I loved him more than ever.

  “Where are you headed?” Elvis asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, feeling intimidated.

  For what seemed like an age, neither of us spoke. The car ate up the road, which stretched ahead like an unrolled ribbon toward the last drop of sun on the horizon. I looked at Elvis now and again, and each time I was struck by his beauty. He was as slim and handsome as in his youth, even though when he had died he had looked bloated and gone to seed. Now, as he stared at the road ahead, I could see that he was older, that he really was forty-two. He had a serious look on his rosy-cheeked face, a determined, piercing, almost mean gaze that made him even better-looking. Everything he had been through in recent times—that physical deterioration from which he now seemed fully recovered, all his personal problems, the torment he had had to endure—no doubt the effort of coming through all that had etched this new expression on his face that I had never seen in any image of him.

  I knew everything about him: his style of singing, his syncopated rhythms like nervous lovemaking, the glottal modulations of his voice that evoke the trance and languor of sexual pleasure, his swaying hips, the hypersensual way he moved his legs, his body, and also his mouth and his eyes … Like everyone, I knew subconsciously that Elvis was basically a sexual invitation—he came onstage to whisper to you, to beseech you, to scream at you: “Desire me!”—that Elvis so wanted to be desired that it made him the genius of rock and the masterful performer that he was, and that he had given to millions of people; he the artist, the sensitive, generous soul, had given everything, infinitely more than anyone could give him back, had given right up to the end, had given his life. That is what I suddenly realized, and he was still giving, since the mere fact that I was sitting here next to him filled me with such happiness that I ended up sleeping like a baby, my head in the crook of his arm.

  It was his voice that woke me. It was now completely dark, and as he drove he was singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” I lay against his chest, not moving, and at the same time listened to the pulse of blood in his body. Sung a cappella, the song was even more beautiful. I’ve always known that in his voice there was not only great charm, but also a fantastic joy to be alive, and also tears. The car tunneled noiselessly through the coal-black night, and nothing existed outside of his bare voice—nothing but our two bare souls within this enclosed space.

  A while later, Elvis told me that I had caught his eye because I reminded him of Debra. He explained to me that Debra had been his first love, a little black girl with whom he had sung in gospel
choirs. She was twelve and he was thirteen. He told her his dreams, and he thought he would go mad with grief the day she was killed.

  I wondered how I, a white boy, could remind him of a little black girl … but I felt extremely flattered and touched that for him I represented some kind of reincarnation of his first love. “I love you as much as she did,” I whispered. He stroked my hair with his hand, and softly began singing “Love Me Tender.”

  It all happened like it had at the start—in other words, better than in a dream, as it were the easiest, most natural thing in the world. My fingers found the belt and buttons of his pants and undid them. My face slid down his stomach, and while Elvis carried on driving and singing, I took his penis into my mouth.

  His dick was heavy and soft and sweet as a baby’s, as Elvis himself, and I could feel my own dick stiffen inside my pants, and I caressed Elvis’s with all my soul, with both a vast maternal love and all the physical passion that little Debra had been unable to show him.

  I was so extraordinarily happy that I doubted the angels in heaven could have felt anything so perfect. As the song ended I felt a gush of what tasted like concentrated, sugary cream spurting in my mouth. Almost immediately, I heard the King’s resounding laughter, and once I’d swallowed I started laughing myself.

  That was the first time, and the last. With Elvis, it just happened naturally, but I could never do it with another man, even if he had the same taste of concentrated, sugary cream. In any case, no one could sing “Love Me Tender” to me like he did, no one could reproduce the miracle …

  Later, we passed through a town. Elvis pulled up in front of a Burger King and sent me to buy some hamburgers, some Pepsi and a milk shake for myself. We ate as we drove, laughing constantly at nothing at all. Now and then, Elvis would sing and I’d dance on my seat. Sometimes he spoke of his quest for God and I understood him.

  As dawn broke, I asked Elvis to drop me off at the first bar we found open on the road. I knew I couldn’t stay with him any longer. Hugging each other tight, It’s now or never, Kiss me, my darling, we exchanged a long good-bye kiss.

  At the counter, the truckers came and went, giving me curious looks, the waitress put a hot, steaming pot of coffee in front of me. I poured out cup after cup as the tears rolled down my cheeks. Again and again I could hear him singing: “Shall I come back again?”

  ε

  At a quarter to seven in the morning, MTV kicked in. The TV, which had been watching them unseeing all night as they slept, standing in front of their bed like a watchtower, switched on automatically to the music channel. Until this moment the couple, normally dosed up on sleeping pills, would be burrowed into their pillows in a heavy sleep, a kind of black hole that sheltered them from the anguished chaos of life. Then the shrill voice of a female singer, the syncopated lowing of a rap artist or the obsessive beat of a drum machine would insinuate its way into their rusted minds like a trickle of icy water on the reddened, dusty tissue of their damaged brains. Every day and every night the corrosion advanced, unknown to them: it bothered them as little as a weathercock prevented from turning by rust worries whether the direction it’s indicating is correct or incorrect.

  Out of consideration for the patients who’d chosen this manner of coming back to life, the TV came on at a low volume. But as its mission at this time of day was to act as a wakeup, not as a lullaby, it was programmed to increase the volume steeply. It reached full blast within a few moments. Suddenly the noise was so deafening that it was impossible to stay asleep a second longer. Babe opened her startled eyes, grimaced and withdrew her head into her shoulders as if to protect herself from a bombardment. Leaping like Jackie Chan into a gang of mafiosi, Bobby dived for the remote (which was still within reach on the bedside table) and, without needing to look, hit the right button first time, the one that lowered the sound to a tolerable level.

  Then suddenly they could relax, and they lay there hypnotized by the screen, watching unreal-looking girls, little whores jerking about in boots, hot pants and tiny tops clinging miraculously to their tits, leaving the rest of their chests, stomachs and thighs exposed to the awestruck gaze of the general populace. So sure of themselves, so arrogant that it was hard to imagine them having a love life or even a sex life. Dolls with sexy but untouchable bodies. In their numerous clips (the channel pumped out the same programs over and over), the girls were filmed between three walls of a corridor without doors, in a dizzying, claustrophobic trick of perspective.

  Every day, Bobby and Babe lay watching this spectacle in a bewildered fashion for a few minutes, just long enough to wipe all traces of the night out of their heads and to remind themselves of what the day had in store. “Hey, Baby, hey, Baby, hey!” some blonde singer had been repeating endlessly over the last few days. Then they got up, hurrying without realizing it, as if trying to escape some undefined menace.

  In fact this menace did have a physical form: Bobby’s morning erection. That is why Babe, despite being particularly stupefied at this difficult moment of waking, got out of the conjugal bed first and left the room as quickly as she could, leaving her husband to deal with his daily encumbrance on his own. Once they got up, one after the other, they emptied their bladders, disinfected their mouths and made the appropriate gestures to show how pleased they were to see each other again. As they performed their morning routine, their joy and excitement reached its peak. The shower flowed vigorously, the TV blared out, the smells of lotion and scrambled eggs intermingled and wafted round the whole house. Happiness.

  Together they slapped great shovelfuls of butter and jelly on their toast and drank bucketloads of translucent coffee. Life was full of good things.

  Then she saw him to the door and remained on the step until he got into the Chrysler parked in front of their house.

  He got into the driver’s seat, started up the motor. They still seemed full of joy, as if the day were going to be a good one.

  They exchanged looks: they found each other attractive, as well-preserved as peas in a can. Then a little wave, Babe and Bobby, Bobby and Babe,

  “Bye-bye, honey!”

  “Bye-bye, my bee!”

  A tear sometimes appearing in the corner of the eye. Then the car slid off smoothly toward the corner of the alley.

  At that moment she regretted not having made love to him the previous evening.

  This daily separation was simultaneously a deliverance and a punishment.

  And the weekends, when they were together, were at least as difficult to get through as the weekdays.

  Babe would have loved to feel as one with her husband, but the fact is she only succeeded in feeling alone, even by his side.

  It’s my fault. I’ve given up the pleasures of the flesh, I make no effort to add a little spice to our relationship. I’m cold, I don’t know where to start, I’ve put my husband off performing his conjugal duty. Yet I used to like sex. I didn’t need it as often as Bobby, but I did need it. Perhaps I should have taken a lover, to provide some stimulus. Or a mistress. With a woman, you know you’re going to come. So they say. I’ve often thought about it. I’ve even almost done it. It was with a lesbian, she looked at me as if she were in love with me, it would have happened if I’d let it. But apart from that look she disgusted me. If she had touched me I would have screamed. I don’t want a woman to touch me, and the thought of licking pussy makes me want to hurl. Oh God, you’re getting old, Babe, you feel ugly, you’re embarrassed by intimacy, you don’t like yourself; in fact, you hate yourself. When you go to bed it’s as if you consist of the single word “NO.” Your only thought is to sink into sleep. Occasionally he takes you anyway. He doesn’t abuse you, so you let him do it, you keep it as simple as possible, wham bam, for reasons of hygiene. First you pretend you can feel something, to get it over with more quickly. And by trying hard you actually manage to feel it, yes, only too late; thanks to your performance he thinks you’ve had your fill, but when it’s really starting for you it’s over for him. Anyway, you
don’t want to talk about it, you just want to be absorbed back into your black hole.

  And so now, like in the mornings, he goes away, and you are truly on your own.

  And you hate men.

  They know nothing about anything.

  When he came back to bed that night, Babe was rigid with anger. She wanted to roll over to the far side of the bed to avoid any chance of contact with this pig. But she didn’t dare move. As usual, playing dead was the safest option.

  After what she had seen, her body felt like it was chopped up into pieces. The slightest movement would scatter her all over the bed, small roundels of limb with the bone in the middle tumbling and rolling onto the floor, attempting to escape, and sowing doubt in Bobby’s mind.

  She was split between disgust and the desire to force him to have sex. That would be a good way to humiliate him, seeing as she knew he only had one round in his gun. But it had been too long since she had last woken up in a state of arousal and, in a lascivious state of half-sleep, grabbed hold of his Pistol like the mouthpiece of an oxygen mask. He would be certain to suspect something. And how could you predict what a criminal would do once he was unmasked?

  Nevertheless, she really wanted to fuck. To feel his Pistol. She could picture that girl, that girl with Bobby … Shit! It had been good to watch that without being seen. Babe started to masturbate again, without worrying about waking Bobby with her movements. No more modesty, just the need. Once again she came with a violent jolt, like it hadn’t happened since she was a teenager, when she had first discovered this miracle of her body.

  Was Bobby still asleep, or was he just pretending? What if he had realized what was going on? Little by little the question wheedled its way into Babe’s mind. She had never felt so terrorized, not since that day in her childhood, which she refused to think about. Terror was the worst feeling in the world. Babe started hatching plans to defend herself should Bobby try to stab her or strangle her.