Pinball

  She had been in love for the first time, she said, when she was twelve. She and the boy used to slip out at night and meet in a burned-out building near her family’s apartment in Harlem. The boy was sixteen and white, and he always acted frightened, probably because everything around him was black—the night, the mood, the burned-out building, the girl he was squeezing. They met and kissed and petted a number of times, until barely a week after he had deflowered her with his hand, one night the boy’s parents sent the police after him. She and the boy were found necking in the ruins, and because the policemen were white, her boyfriend was no longer alone in the blackness. They herded Donna into a police van as if she were a stray dog, took her to the station, and charged her with soliciting for the purpose of prostitution. She was locked overnight in a cell with two other women—black prostitutes who treated her as tenderly as if she were their daughter—and then she was released in the custody of her father, who made her promise never to see that white boy again.

  The incident taught her that even though she was not guilty of soliciting lovers, she could still be arrested for it. By the time her family moved out of Harlem and into a more affluent South Bronx neighborhood, she had developed spiritually; now her sexuality was no longer awkwardly clitoric; she was rid of shame, defiance and fear, and openly resentful when other boys tried to fulfill her manually. In her erotic life she saw herself as sexually precocious. The knowledge did not disturb her. She liked the idea that she could be as carried away by sex as some of her high school friends were by coke and hash, and even then, in her mid-teens, she decided that she would always be the one to take the initiative: she would solicit only those lovers who seemed to be worth the experience.

  She went about her life with that decision more or less fixed in her mind, and one day, years later, she noticed a handsome man outside the Juilliard library. He seemed to be waiting for someone, and even before she saw his face, she couldn’t help seeing what his tight jeans revealed. Extreme virility, whether of duration or size, didn’t interest her much, however; it was only when he looked at her that she was attracted, for his face was boyish and his expression shy and innocent.

  As soon as he saw her he began to stare, and she found his intentions so obvious and his stare so comical, that she burst out laughing. He spoke to her then, asking her why she was laughing at him. He seemed hurt. She apologized instantly. Their affair began with laughter and apology.

  Marcello told her that after being orphaned in early childhood, he had been brought up by a series of relatives. He had worked at a variety of part-time jobs, most recently for a videotape company. Lacking formal education beyond high school, Marcello was nevertheless well informed and well read, and although he was not overtly musical, he seemed to respond instinctively to good music. He was a patient listener during the long hours when Donna practiced the piano, and throughout their relationship he made an effort to learn more about music. But even with his many likable traits, it was as a lover that Donna enjoyed Marcello most of all.

  Just as she was occasionally surprised to find a piano that could reveal to her, by virtue of its construction and tuning, a new beauty or a hidden sense in some composer’s work, or to discover a room that, because of its special resonance, could alter her perception of tone and clarity in musical sound, so was she surprised to meet in Marcello a being who—for the first time in her life—elicited a response from her that was wholly sexual.

  “Until I met Marcello, most of the men I had run into were pretty much alike,” she said, eyeing Domostroy thoughtfully. “Usually, my date—black or white, no matter—didn’t think there could be more to me than what he saw. But once he found out there was, to prove to me he wasn’t after a quick lay, he would take me out a lot—clubs, discos, restaurants—anywhere but home. Then, if I liked him, we would often end up at his place—or mine.” She attempted a smile, but it dissolved and she looked haggard.

  “When we were finally alone, free to step out of our clothes and free from the roles they imposed on us, my date would usually go down on me, with that humble, slightly remorseful stare—puppylike and eager to please. You see, to make me feel the pleasure was, for him, a form of usurping power over me, of turning me into a slave of my own uterus. Then, when I reassured him that he was doing all right, he would go on making love to me as if I were an insatiable, racially double-dealing ogress, never taking a chance, never surprising me with something he would want me to do for him, always afraid he might begin to use me for his pleasure alone. And every time I saw that anxious stare, I would feel as if I were hidden from him in the dark, watching a spectacle being performed by a stranger.”

  She halted, and when she spoke again her voice seemed lifelessly even. “All that time I felt that there must have been something in me—in what I’d said or done—some invisible score I’d written for them to enact that made every one of those men so passive, so obsequious. Yet, even though I became fed up with them and disgusted with myself, I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do anything about it. You know, Patrick, that in matters of sex it’s often easier to turn down what you feel than to go after what you want.

  “That was the mood I was in when I met Marcello… .”

  Marcello understood her very well, she continued. In their first weeks together, whether they were alone or in public, he would constantly surprise her, constantly insinuate his will by touching her body, sniffing her hair, warming her neck with his breath, brushing against her breasts or thighs or buttocks, rubbing her groin with his hand or knee, all the while communicating to her body that it was a hiding place for innumerable stealthy urges from within, until at last she came to expect her every ordinary moment to be turned by him into a state of sexual tension, an act of frenzy, stripped of everything except feeling. At that point it was enough for her just to follow him, no matter where he chose to lead her.

  One place he led her often was a downtown bar called Dead Heat. Located in Soho, in the basement of an old warehouse building, Dead Heat appeared to be one large room with a stone floor and rough black walls; it had a circular bar in the center, a section of tables and chairs, and a small dance floor, all lighted by a few small red lamps hanging in tiny iron cages, which cast moving circles on the ceiling and walls whenever they swayed. At the far end of this room, usually unnoticed by the newcomer, two corridors led to the most essential area of Dead Heat, called the Jam Session, which consisted of a dozen catacomblike rooms, vaults, stalls, and cubicles, all with walls and floors of rough black stone, all lighted by small, bare red or blue bulbs, separated in a few cases by a doorless toilet. Furnished with a few wooden stools, wooden platform beds, and old metal bathtubs, the larger rooms of the Jam Session could hold fifteen to twenty people, the vaults about ten, and the stalls and cubicles five or six at most.

  Open after midnight—and only on weekends—the gloomy, inhospitable place attracted people who came there to use its stark, savage spaces for their stark and savage rituals. It was a gathering place for people who dressed in leather or rubber; for women who wore heavy makeup and high stiletto heels and were accompanied by anemic-looking lovers in sweatshirts and shorts; for men in tank tops and shorts who liked to show off their muscular bodies, as well as the frail beauty of their scantily clad, if clad at all, female or male lovers; for people seeking partners who were as wild and momentary as the love they craved and whose only real stimulus to intimacy was to be found among a steady stream of strangers. At Dead Heat the beautiful mingled with the deformed, the old with the young, the naked with the clothed.

  Donna would sit with Marcello at the bar or at a table off to one side, or she would cruise with him through the corridors, talking little, watching the other patrons. Whenever Marcello noticed a couple—a man and a woman, two women, or two men—straying from the main room and starting to make their way to the Jam Session, he and Donna, and others, would follow. The couple would go into one of the empty rooms off the corridor and start to stroke each other, and immediately the othe
r men and women, as many as the room could hold, would jam and press in around them and watch in silence, like a huge predator the lovers could not escape even if they wanted to.

  The first time Marcello took Donna to Dead Heat, she was surprised to see how many of the people there—particularly the men—knew him. They came up to him and shook hands or waved at him from across the room, or they pointed Marcello out, whispering to one another or to their female dates as if he were a celebrity. When she asked him what he had done to be so popular, Marcello told her that he was one of the Dead Heat regulars and that the people there were simply friendly.

  One night, after they had had a drink or two at the bar, Marcello slowly got up, took her by the hand, and led her down one of the dark corridors. As she followed him obediently, she could feel the presence of a crowd behind them, somber whispering bulks, a moving forest of silent male and female trunks, an excited eager procession escorting her to the outermost reaches of experience.

  Pushing her gently ahead of him, Marcello turned her into a large room at the end of the corridor. He lifted her by her hips as he might lift a keg and set her on a table near the far wall. She closed her eyes. He rolled her dress up over her breasts and neck and pulled down her panties, and as they slipped over her feet, he spread her legs. Rubbing his groin against hers, he massaged her breasts, and with her eyes still closed, she joined him in a long kiss. She sensed the crowd in the room, hovering and sullen at first, almost silent, like frothing foam, then stirring, coming nearer, tightening their circle around the table. When she opened her eyes, she saw them all staring at her from the darkness. With no warning, Marcello slid into her, and as she folded her hands around his neck, she screamed in pain and pleasure. The crowd made a noise too, a single long sigh. As Marcello pushed rapidly and insistently in and out of her, opening her like a fresh wound, the faces in the crowd all came nearer, like sentries closing their ranks, until they pressed against the two of them. Engrossed in the feelings aroused in her by Marcello, she barely felt the multitude of hands on her, hands which seemed to belong to no particular body, or at times, to everybody, and kept on feeling her feet, stroking her calves and thighs and breasts, brushing over her shoulders, caressing her hair, her neck, and cheeks. Lost in a single sensation, her body one with the body of the man driving into her, she could feel, herself drifting away, abdicating to an inner, infinitely pleasurable turmoil, a mass glowing with its own heat, and she felt she was leaving this, swarm of lifeless figures who, while laying their hands on her body, could only gaze at her from afar, from the cage they could not leave.

  Donna looked at Domostroy, trying to gauge how he had judged her.

  “Later, when it all ended,” she went on, “and Marcello and I returned to the bar, I was still excited,” she said. “My whole body still oozed sex, and I spun from one orgasm to the next. Like heartbeats, they kept on coming—for as long as he kept on touching me, for as long as I wanted to go on.” She halted. “And I didn’t mind having people around either. I felt there was something sad in all those men and women cruising alone, back and forth through Dead Heat, in all those couples who held hands but couldn’t really feel each other, and in all those women who dress like men and those men who maybe should have been born women. Sometimes I wanted to laugh at them. Such pathetic creeps, I thought, such spiritual nobodies, such sexual frauds. But when I looked at them again, I felt I could cry for every one of them, so lonely, so desperate, so condemned to watch love they themselves could not—or were afraid to—enact.

  “It must take courage for them to come to this awful pit, I thought, to these bowels of sex, and by coming here to acknowledge to themselves and to others that watching Marcello and me and other couples like us was the only way they could participate in love, the only way to hear its music—even if they couldn’t play it themselves.”

  The next time Marcello took her to Dead Heat, he led her again into the Jam Session, and again the quiet footsteps of strangers followed them in the hazy distance. This time he turned and backed into one of the largest vaults—damp, rectangular, empty of stools—and turning her around, pulled her in after him. With his back against the far wall, he continued to pull her, unresisting, until her back was pressed tightly against his chest and groin. Then, facing the human mass that moved relentlessly in on them from the corridor, she could feel Marcello behind her, his hands under her skirt caressing her ever so faintly, while in the bleak half-light the crowd stared, quiet, enrapt. Then, at last, he sank into her from behind and she yielded to the sensation of him in her, of being impaled, and leaned down and back and onto him. Her blouse was unbuttoned, her wraparound skirt spread open behind her, falling primly in front like an apron or a shield. As she felt herself following his movement, the crowd moaned. Her flesh sealed with his, she swayed back and forth with him, lingering in the moment, clinging to his flesh convulsively, while the crowd jammed clumsily into the black cavity of the vault until they threatened to fill every inch of it. Like a monstrous centipede, men and women, breathing and sweating and pungent in the darkness, sought her with their hands, groping for her hair, her breasts and belly and thighs. She couldn’t hold them off, and Marcello’s hands had to rescue her, roughly maneuvering the intruders away, one after another, slamming the door to her shut, the door that a moment before he had so willingly opened.

  Donna glanced at Domostroy and went on talking, as if she was reluctant to give him time to speak. In the weeks that followed, she said, she often asked Marcello why he kept wanting to return to Dead Heat and make love to her there in front of strangers.

  “Marcello told me he was not like most men, who need privacy for their sexual feasts. He said he could get sexually high only by making love to me in the presence of strangers. To him, the real excitement of sex came from bridging the sexual distance between lovers, not at home, where there was nothing—and no one—to distract them, but in places like Dead Heat, where their intimacy or even the mere performance of it, was constantly threatened, tested, onstage, on trial, almost under siege.

  “Dead Heat was like a church to him, housing ecstasy and ritual, at once corporate and personal. Making love to me there, he said, was like walking a high wire without a net. Even the prospect of going there aroused him. He always wondered what the sex would be like on a particular night: whether there would be many ‘eunuchs’—single, docile men who would kneel in front of me on his command and kiss my feet—or ‘cannibals’—those dominant sex freaks of the Jam Session whom his presence kept at bay but who were always ready to snatch me away and, before Marcello could find me, get to me all the way, one after another, as they had often done with other men and women abandoned in the labyinth of crypts at the Dead Heat.

  “If I went along with Marcello for such a long time, it was because, with him, I had begun to think of myself as more alive than ever and of him no longer as my lover, but as one of those who watched me from the darkness.

  “But,” Donna went on, “Marcello kept on swearing that he loved me, saying that if I loved him too, I shouldn’t be put off by what we’d done at Dead Heat. He said that even though he made love to me in front of the people there, I should know that all they could do was watch. His body was between theirs and mine, and as for them touching me, didn’t the sand touch me too when I lay on the beach? These people, he said, were human sand. He told me I was, sexually, the only woman in his life; he was freer and more fulfilled with me than he had ever been with any other woman.”

  Donna admitted she never knew much about his whereabouts during the day. While she was at Juilliard or practicing at home, his video jobs kept him moving around, and on the few occasions when she did try to phone him at the number he gave her, no one ever answered. Eventually they agreed that he should move in with her, and when he did she was astonished at how few belongings he brought with him—one suit, a few shirts, two pairs of slacks, two pairs of shoes, and a toilet kit. Was that all there was? she wondered. Then she noticed that he didn’t carry any
credit cards, or a driver’s license, or even an address book and he never got any phone calls or received any mail. When she asked him about this, he said he was a free-lancer, successful enough to be free of such mundane things as appointment books and monthly bills. He insisted on being paid in cash, he said, and he paid cash for everything he bought.

  He was an indefatigable lover, and Donna found his lovemaking so persistent, his orgasms so frequent, his sperm so plentiful, that she never doubted that he was faithful to her. Moreover, she never detected on him the slightest trace of any perfume or lipstick or powder but her own.

  Then one day, said Donna, Andrea Gwynplaine, a fellow student at Juilliard, invited her and some other students over to the apartment of Chick Mercurio, Andrea’s boyfriend, to see Organ Playing, a porno flick that was supposed to be a parody of a Broadway musical. When the movie started, Marcello—billed as Dick Longo in the credits—appeared on the screen, naked, in front of a mirror in a theater dressing room, masturbating himself with one hand and a grotesquely fat, platinum-blond woman with the other.

  The shock was so sudden, so extreme, that for a moment she refused to believe the evidence before her. But she kept on watching as Dick Longo went through a string of sleazy starlets, demonstrating his—apparently proverbial—ability to produce a fresh orgasm at every twist of the flick’s idiotic plot. As Andrea and her boyfriend and the other students in the darkened room cheered the hotter moments of the film and made crude jokes about the bodily parts of its stars, Donna slowly realized that it was she, not Dick Longo, who was the main star of the screening.

  When the lights came back on, none of those in the room indicated to Donna in any way that they had recognized Dick Longo as her boyfriend, Marcello. For their added amusement, Andrea began to distribute Xerox copies of a porno magazine interview with Dick Longo, profusely illustrated with stills from his movie in which the star admitted to having made hundreds of porno loops every year for the past three or four years, and boasted that not a single working day of that time had passed without his having had—on cue, in front of the camera—at least a couple of orgasms. Sensing the other students gazing furtively at her, Donna felt naked before them, as if they were the strangers of Dead Heat who had just succeeded in raping her.