Satisfaction Read online

  And once the sale was concluded, he experienced a strong twofold feeling of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, like that of a whore after servicing a client, a sense of both relief and frustration, which to alleviate he took a short time-out in the bathroom, where, to both celebrate and cap the deal, he unbuttoned his well-pressed pants and settled his nerves with a good ejaculation.

  So that evening, when he returned home from work, Bobby had every reason to feel cool. He had earned good money, he had come and now here he was returning home to his smart house, fringed in gold by the rays of the setting sun, where his sweet wife and, hidden in the cellar, his hot mistress awaited him. He parked his Chrysler behind Babe’s Ford, and as he closed its door he felt the first stirrings of an erection.

  Tonight I’m going to take Babe out to dinner at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in the mall, he decided. Then we’ll watch some TV in bed, and if we make love I’ll give Carmen a miss for tonight.

  Or maybe I’ll have both of them, he reconsidered, feeling his crotch, where his sex was twitching at the thought of Carmen. One after the other.

  After we’ve been out, she’ll be in a good mood, he reckoned, as he looked through the living room window, somewhat disappointed not to see Babe’s face there. (Usually, on hearing his car, she’d open the curtain to watch him arrive, then would go open the front door.)

  “Hi, Bobby!” came the piercing, nasal voice of Shirley.

  Bobby turned his head toward the house next door, smiled and replied, “Hi, Shirley!” She was standing at the edge of the veranda, looking unsteady on mules studded with multicolored rhinestones, which seemed to be flashing frantic signals in every direction, as if she had the notion that her body was in danger and had to have these warning lights blinking away at the base of her being. Shirley hugged and fondled the wooden post in a lewd manner. Like some monstrous larva, she was squeezed into a leopardskin-print cotton T-shirt and shorts combo, her flesh spilling out on all sides, her helmet of black shoulder-length hair piled up around her porcine face.

  Brunettes are better, Bobby said to himself, thinking of Carmen, as he continued on up to the house. Old Stan’s lucky to have Shirley. But it doesn’t look like he’s enough for her.

  He pictured Shirley naked, in obscene poses. He was sure she wore real stockings, with a garter belt. Bobby had an eye for that sort of thing. He could recognize them from the small wrinkles they made round the ankles, which you never got with tights, or even self-supporting stockings. And she probably wore rather enticing panties on that fat ass of hers … or no panties at all …

  OK, she was a fat old cow, but Bobby wouldn’t have said no if she hadn’t been his neighbor. With her it wouldn’t even have felt like he was cheating on Babe. She wasn’t so much a woman as a thing, a concept, fundamentally no more than a hole buried in a mass of blubbery flesh. Besides, with the life she led, she was more or less a vegetable.

  He wondered whether any other of the guys in the neighborhood screwed her. Whether she really stayed shut up in the house all day waiting for her son and her husband to come home. She probably spent hours slumped on the sofa devouring trashy daytime TV or watching porn videos and shoving things in all her mouths.

  After we’ve been out, Babe won’t be able to say no, Bobby fancied, one thought leading to the other. He felt very much in love with his wife—a fit of sentimentality in equal measure to the resolve he had shown in resisting the temptations of Shirley once again. I’ll need to have a hard-on when I’m getting undressed. If I come to bed with a bulge in my shorts, she’ll get the message. It might even put her in the mood. Tonight, my Babe, we go the whole nine yards!

  God, life was good. The grass was growing, the trees were in blossom, flowers were popping out all over, the air smelled good, the whole of nature smelled of sex, of a woman open wide, hot, glistening, and tomorrow, Saturday, he’d have a quiet day at home, mowing the lawn.

  λ

  Babe planted her lips on those of Carmen. Bobby saw Babe’s tongue enter Carmen’s open mouth. Babe let out a rapacious moan, a sound Bobby had never heard come from a human mouth before. His wife kissed Carmen more languorously than she had ever kissed him. With her eyes closed, she ran her tongue over Carmen’s lips and emitted strange groans, and then, holding Carmen’s head in both hands, began to devour her with her hungry mouth, at the same time bucking her hips lasciviously beneath the throw.

  At first he had wanted to run away, like a miscreant caught red-handed, but the extraordinary, perverse reality of what was taking place before him kept him rooted to the spot. Consequences and the future ceased to exist; there was no more decorum or embarrassment. Only the present moment counted, stretched taut between two galaxies. A precious, unsustainable moment, commensurate with that phantom body of the inadmissible now suddenly extracted from the secret in which it had been hidden, in pleasure and shame and the forbidden.

  Bobby approached the couple; rolled up in the ethnic-print rug, they looked like a two-headed totem pole. He delicately lifted the edges of the covering masking the two bodies. Babe and Carmen were naked, their legs entwined, pubis to pubis, breasts to breasts.

  “Are you going to leave us here?” said Babe in a tiny, imploring voice. “Here, feel! Our friend is cold. We should put her in our bed.”

  “Her name is Doll,” said Bobby. “Carmen Doll. I’m pleased you like her.”

  He undid the knot of his turquoise tie. His head slumped and he buried his face in his hands and started to cry.

  Tears … Tears ran down Bobby’s cheeks … How beautiful! Babe wanted to lick them, then hurt him to make him cry some more, and then make him come … It was the first time she had felt this … This desire to give both pain and pleasure at once, which spread like a thick, delicious poison into her limbs …

  Until then, her husband’s pleasure had seemed like a strange, mechanical, vaguely disgusting phenomenon, bearing no relation to her or her feelings. But these tears, which oozed from the depths of an ancient wound, cleansing it and sealing it, these tears, she didn’t know how, were of the same substance as his sperm, she had to make them flow, the sperm and the tears, that was the apogee of her female pleasure, that was the base of his male weakness, in this spurting, flowing abandon, therein lay her omnipotence, therein lay his surrender, and that’s how she wanted it, how they wanted it, Carmen and she, in their perdition …

  * * *

  It took some time, and a lot of effort, to carry Carmen from the cellar to the top floor. Babe held her round her ankles, Bobby walked up the stairs backward, his arms under those of the sleeping beauty, his hands under her bosom. The inertia and fragility of her body made it feel very heavy. They were concerned that the slightest wound might open up, run across her skin, split it wide open in an instant—then Carmen would disintegrate like Poe’s House of Usher.

  Bobby and Babe took great care not to bump her against the edge of the steps. Babe, positioned between Carmen’s legs, looked like she was pushing a wheelbarrow, and Bobby, walking with slow, measured steps, encumbered by the mass hanging in front of him, with his tired, serious features, his hands crossed and bearing the weight of heavy breasts, looked like a pregnant woman.

  When they reached the ground floor they agreed to take a rest, and laid the young woman carefully on the floor. During this pause, neither of them took their eyes off her. It was a way of closing them, of not having to look at each other or inside themselves.

  Carmen sat enthroned in the middle of their bed, naked, resting comfortably against the pink pillows. Kneeling down beside her, Babe and Bobby dusted her body lovingly with powder puffs. Carmen smiled, her lips parted. Babe had tied Carmen’s hair, and the ends of her dark plaits dangled over the tips of her breasts. She looked like a little girl or a squaw.

  Babe had slipped on a plum-colored robe. Bobby had taken off the jacket of his navy-blue suit. In spite of the antiperspirant he applied to his armpits every morning, there were large sweat rings under the arms of his sky-blue shirt. />
  “I’ll take care of her,” said Babe. “Go have a shower, would you, dear?”

  Meant to last for forty-eight hours, according to the ad, which shows an action hero bounding around a smelting plant full of blazing furnaces, only to emerge as fresh as mentholated chewing gum to embrace some cute chick whose nostrils flare lovingly right next to his sudiferous glands …

  Bobby watched Babe, completely absorbed by Carmen—Carmen, entirely free of bodily odors. He felt a sort of dizziness, like at night when you dream you are suddenly falling into a bottomless pit, and the sensation of falling wakes you up. Babe was fondling his mistress with a tenderness he hadn’t seen before, powdering her in all her folds, as if she were a baby.

  Bobby left the room without a word. His wife scarcely seemed to notice. He raised the seat, opened his fly and pissed. The sound burbled through the house like the noise of a waterfall.

  When he walked back past the bedroom door he saw that Babe had closed it. He hesitated for a moment, then decided to open it, in a casual manner, as if he’d forgotten to take a change of underwear. Silently he took a step back to make his entrance look more natural, walked straight to the door and pushed on the knob.

  Babe had locked it.

  “Babe, darling, could you open the door? I need some fresh socks.”

  “Oh, later, if you wouldn’t mind … We’re having a little rest …”

  Her voice sounded so strange Bobby almost believed it was Carmen who had responded.

  “Everything OK, Babe?”

  “Yes, yes. Leave us alone, please. Just give us five minutes …”

  Bobby went into the bathroom, threw his dirty underwear forcefully into the plastic laundry basket and dropped his pants on the floor, rather than folding them neatly over the back of the chair, as he usually did. Then he closed the shower door behind him.

  If anyone had been there in that bathroom just then, they would have witnessed, through the steam and the frosted glass of the shower door, Bobby Wesson spending a no doubt inordinate amount of time washing, rinsing and rewashing himself, despite the hole in the ozone layer and all the ecological problems caused by overconsumption of water, especially hot water … But Bobby wanted to cleanse himself to the bone, more than that, completely scour his brain … and—why not?—wipe it clean of the memory.

  μ

  One … Two … Three … Four … Five … Six … Seven … Eight … Each wave was powerful, deep … slow … Each time, Babe felt the flesh of her vagina grip tight like a vise around her two fingers, and as she bucked like a prisoner in the electric chair, she counted the peaks, amazed at her performance, she who had never experienced such climaxes, either alone or with another person.

  On the other side of the wall the shower flowed, interminably, and this lulling sound was the best sound in the world. Oh God, Oh God, make it last forever, Babe thought in her confusion, drowning in her ecstasy, looking at the body of the naked woman next to her with a blissful smile.

  Then the water stopped running, and Babe raised herself and bent over toward Carmen, whispered some words in her ear while stroking her forehead and her hair, planted a kiss on her lips and headed to the closet.

  “God has sent her to us,” she said when Bobby appeared in the doorway, wrapped in his white flannel robe.

  The night was dark, full of suspended waters and subterranean veins. Lying on her side in the fetal position, sucking her thumb, her hair untied, Carmen was sleeping. So Babe had placed her in the center of the bed, having dressed her in a white nightshirt with long Liberty sleeves. Her right arm, lying on top of the comforter, looked so charming as it formed an acute angle between her shoulder and her mouth, in which her digit was planted.

  “It’s you that God sent me,” replied Bobby.

  “No, no. What I’m trying to say is that God sent her to us. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I know that I love you and I want you …”

  Babe saw him come toward her, his erect penis (cut like that of every good American) about to poke its head through the gap in his robe.

  “Wait,” she said, evasively. “Let her rest for a while. Poor dear! Look at her sleeping there! I’m hungry. Do you want something?” she added when she was no more than one step away from the stairs.

  “That’s fine. I don’t want to cook either,” said Bobby, after they had made their ritual sacrifice to their health by taking their garlic capsules. “Would you like some jelly on your peanut butter?”

  Babe looked pensively at her large slice of bread, as if picturing the scene in advance, then exclaimed:

  “Bobby! What a good idea! I’d never have thought of that.”

  “We could add some raisins …”

  “Oh yes! And some chocolate!” she salivated, feverishly pushing back her chair to go raid the refrigerator and the cupboards.

  “Are you serious?” Bobby asked worriedly when he saw her return with her arms full of various dangerous cocktails of carbohydrates and saturated fats. “I was only joking, you know … We saw it the other day on Columbo, do you remember? Jelly on top of peanut butter … Maybe you were already asleep.”

  “Whatever, my sweet, I like it.”

  With a beaming smile, her eyes wide with excitement, she placed thick squares of chocolate on the layer of raisins crammed on top of the blueberry jelly spread on the coating of peanut butter which she had smeared on her slab of bread, itself endowed with fats and preservatives, white, soft and square like a fat compress.

  “What I mean is … are you going to eat that?”

  “Hmmm …,” she mumbled inarticulately, her mouth full on the inside and smeared with food on the outside.

  “Not worried about your figure, then? Glad to hear it!” said Bobby, apparently thinking the exact opposite.

  “You’ve always fantasized about big women, haven’t you? Shirley, for example.” (As she spoke, she spat multicolored gobbets of saliva from her mouth.) “And anyway, you don’t need two thin women in the house … pass me another beer, please …”

  “Which Shirley?” he said quietly, as if to himself.

  He moved his hand under the table, rested it on his wife’s thigh, slid it up the inside …

  Her fingers covered in chocolate, Babe continued to battle with her monster sandwich, as responsive to his touch as if she had been amputated below the waist. Bobby’s hand continued on its way. Her thighs were already open—since she had started eating, she had adopted a totally slovenly posture: her shoulders hunched, her face and hands all sticky, her plum-colored robe increasingly stained and flapping open in shameless fashion to reveal her bare breasts.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she finally muttered, as her husband’s fingers began to ferret through virgin forest at the height of the rainy season.

  And without interrupting her eating, she began to sigh— “Ah! Ah!”—breathlessly, her eyes turned up like those of a madwoman.

  When they returned to their room, with full stomachs, Bobby was shocked to discover Carmen in the middle of the bed, still lying in the same position—with her knees pulled up—but on the other side of the mattress. He turned toward Babe, who was standing in the doorway, gazing tenderly and admiringly at Carmen.

  He looked at Carmen again. When they had left her, the comforter was pulled up over her. Now her nightdress was unbuttoned, revealing one of her breasts.

  Babe hadn’t moved from the kitchen. He didn’t say anything. Probably he was just a little on edge, due to the fact that his overtures toward his wife had so far failed. He thought he had made her come with his fingers, but since she had continued eating without seeming to be aware of what he was doing, he was no longer sure of anything. And when he had tried to be a little bolder, she had undressed without compunction. Now he didn’t know how he was supposed to behave.

  ν

  The rain began to fall again. It’ll never end, thought Babe. And this thought filled her with peace. The rain sputtered in the night that enveloped the house, and it was
as if the whole of nature were lulling them, Babe and Bobby, as they lay against this personification of pleasure, this Carmen that God had placed in the center of their queen-size bed.

  Babe had closed every gap in the room so tightly that the room was completely black, a solid block of shadows. They lay on their backs in silence, on either side of Carmen, frozen in some nameless expectation, their mouths open as if their very breathing frightened them. And like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, the phantom vessel of the bed slowly shed its skin and spread its wings with an imperceptible rustle, ready to leave the dark weightiness of its previous life to sail away in the blue sky with its flashing stars, to the other side of the world, the other side of the night and of the closed eyelids, into the eternal light of the inside, the light that the mirrors drink in as soon as one opens one’s eyes.

  The night itself acted as their eyelids, the black night and the rain, erasing the world with its incessant sound. And their dilated, staring pupils were now the all-pervading, fractal shadow in its entirety.

  They lay there without moving for a long time, allowing the vessel to drift into a cathartic nonplace, allowing every atom of their organism to float in the magma, their bodies to unwind, spread out and dissolve into the general expansion of time and space. Then their beings, scattered to the four winds, began to reassemble, to concentrate and tighten in the remorseless stirrings of desire. And then, as if opening a door to flee a murderer, Babe made a move. Her hand slipped over between the comforter and Carmen’s body in search of Bobby’s Pistol.

  It was still raining. The water from the previous rainfall had had no time to drain away before the rain had started again. Tomorrow, thousands of people would be splashing through water once more and the lawn in front of the house would be soaked.