The Fermata

  Marian was not a committed zoophile, though—at least she didn’t think of herself as one. True, she and her best friend in sixth grade had made her friend’s black Labrador shoot two quick clear squirts of come once by gently squeezing his dense buried bulb as he lay on his back with his legs open and his eyes half closed, but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. Marian was a fan of human cock, for better or worse. (Dogdick did still have a certain appeal to her, in part because when it emerged it had a clitoral, almost hermaphroditic quality: something bisexual in her was triggered by the sight of it.) Mentally she again reviewed her dildos—how could she have (one or two late nights excepted) snubbed them all winter? The idea of running herself a bath, and then straddling the cold edge of the tub so that all her weight was on the soft place between her vadge and her ass, began to seem attractive. She could take one of the middle-sized dildi and swish it around in the bathwater and shake it off, so that it waggled obscenely, and stick it down on the edge of the tub and squirt Astroglide all over it. She could arrange herself over it, supporting herself with her hands on the edge of the tub, looking down past her hanging breasts at the slick dildo as it slowly disappeared into her sex-hair and found its thick way up inside her. She went inside to do just this, but by the time she had actually drawn the bath and gotten into it, she was much too aroused to do tame things in her bathroom. She got out and dried off and slipped on a dress. She had a new plan. She wanted to have a full-fledged Betty Dodsonian PC-muscled clasm outside in honor of her tulip garden.

  She went out in her bare feet, scouting a location. Kevin’s cat had disappeared. After some pacing and gazing, she picked a place between two of the tulip beds, near where she had seen Kevin’s ears get red when they had talked about the “Solitude stands in the doorway” song. The problem was, what could she use as a stable base to affix her dildos to? The grass blades would be a ticklish irritant. Back inside, she tried a rectangular black lacquer tray in the kitchen, but it had a raised edge that, when she put it on a chair and experimentally sat down on it, hurt her butt. She considered a Thanksgiving serving platter but didn’t like the idea of its breaking; she pondered a small plastic plate left over from a premium frozen dinner, but it wasn’t heavy enough. Finally she went into her dining room and took the tea service off of her grandmother’s brass tray. The tea service itself was undistinguished, but the tray was a Viennese beauty, chased with circles of bouquets and thick-scaled fish and pine-cones and mythical panthery creatures in high relief. In the middle was a very stylized sun—it looked like a fried egg—and this proved to be the perfect surface on which to fix a dildo’s suction cup.

  The famed male dancer at the Golden Banana, Armande Klockhammer, Jr., had only once in his distinguished career consented to have a lost-wax mold made of the trilogy-in-flesh that had opened so many doors for him. Along the underside of the slightly upcurved and alarmingly lifelike high-grade silicone cock-stalk, Armande’s own signature, taken directly from the licensing contract, ran, in such a way that the two bas-relief m’s of his surname appeared right over what would have been, had this been his actual dick, its most sensitive part. Marian arranged her virgin Armande Klockhammer Signature Model, along with many of its veteran colleagues, on a linen napkin unfolded on her brass tray and bore them out into the garden. She put the tray down in the thick grass in the chosen spot, leaving room on either side for her to plant her feet. There was a slight haze in the sky, so that it was sunny, but not uncomfortably so. When she moved the napkin aside, the light glinted on the tray’s ancient pattern, and, once she had squirted copious Astroglide over its head, on the surface of her chosen dildo as well—which looked opulently nasty poking up from that heirloom.

  Then, playing hard-to-get now that she knew she had Armande where she wanted him, she went for a blithe little walk. She was wearing a jumper printed with big loose flowers and nothing underneath. She went to her mailbox, checked that the mail had been delivered, but left it in there. She nodded to a bicyclist going by—he was wearing a kind of skin-tight black cycling shorts that she normally didn’t like, but now she didn’t mind seeing his thigh definition. She stood at the end of her driveway for several minutes with her arms crossed, breathing deep breaths of spring air and feeling peaceful and content, or playing at looking like the woman out in the garden breathing deeply and feeling content, while actually part of her was thinking over what dildic wickedness was waiting for her in her back yard. On her way back, she bent and felt a leaf of one of the peonies in the tractor tire in her front yard, very casually, giving the road the chance to appreciate her shape under her dress, and murmured to herself, “Hmm, I think it may be time to do some watering.” She went in and got the water temperature just right in her shower, and then drew the hose into the bathroom window and hooked it to the shower spigot. Outside, she turned the stopcock on (the plumber had fixed it so that she could turn the flow of water on and off at the end of the hose) and toured her side yard, sending a frolicsome misty spray from her mobile water-source over the grass and over the mock-orange leaves. She hummed “Private Dancer.” She heard a truck drive past on the road.

  When she rounded the back of the house, she surprised a deer who had wandered by, drawn by the tasty-looking tulip blossoms. It appeared to be licking the pink head of the Armande Klockhammer with its equally pink tongue. “Now, now, enough of that!” Marian called, and the deer sprang away. She glanced around to verify that she was indeed in private, and put her foot up on her lawn chair and hiked up her jumper, holding it in a one-handed bunch just below her breasts, and directed the crown of water-jets on her clit-site. The water was just right. “Oh, nice,” she said, watching the flow disappear into the grass. The idea that she could carry her daily shower around with her, outside, pleased her quite a lot. She dropped her dress and began watering again, working up the nodding tulip beds. Her maraschino tingled. She pretended to notice for the first time something alien and fleshy sticking up, pinkly out of place in the general verdancy beyond the near bed of tulips. “What’s this now?” She pointed the shower-water at it (making sure to rinse away any deer saliva). “What’s this sex organ doing sticking straight up in my garden? Does it need something to fuck?” She pulled up her dress. “Is this what Armande wants?” Again she pointed the showerhead up between her legs, now turning it to PULSE. Big dick-shaped bullets of water thumped against the skin surrounding her clit-pearl, against her vadge, and, as she rocked her hips, tickled against the poor-relation sensitivities of her asshole. “Oh man,” she said, loving it. “Listen you, if you liked that Bambi-tongue, you’re going to love my hot little box.” The dildo was unresponsive. She walked closer, confronting it. “Oh? So you’re not sure? You’re not even sure you want to be in my hot little ass? You’re shy? Well, I’m sorry, you have no choice now—you’re going to have to fuck me in the ass.” She took the bottle of Astroglide from her jumper-pocket and slid it between her cheeks and squirted herself with it until it trickled down her leg. Then she put her feet on either side of the brass tray and slowly squatted down until she felt the Klockhammer brushing against her butt-muscle. She directed the showerhead back on her clit. She didn’t care if her dress got soaked or not. Her thighs began to tremble with the effort of supporting herself over the dildismic pressure without sliding down on it. Finally she couldn’t help herself, and she opened her asshole to its big head and sat all the way down on it, until her cheeks touched the cold ornate metal of the tray. She rocked on the feeling of a hefty dickful of pleasure up her ass, adjusting to it. Her drenched dress hung over her thighs. She was fucking Armande Klockhammer’s autograph! God, it felt good.

  “Hello?” came a voice. Marian looked up to see young Kevin and a girl standing hand in hand a little way off. She supposed the girl was Sylvie, Kevin’s new girlfriend. Kevin was looking recently showered, spruced up and proud of himself, though momentarily puzzled. Marian saw his eyes skip down over her exposed, wet legs. The two of them were wearing matching red-and-white-striped
polo shirts. Marian made a quick attempt to pull her dress down and over some of the sex toys next to her. She began watering the tulips with little flips of the showerhead, as if she were conducting a Sousa march.

  “Hi,” she said. “Pardon me, I was just doing a little watering. Come over. Let me turn this off. I had a plumber rig it up for me. Are you Sylvie?”

  “Yes, hi,” said Sylvie. Sylvie leaned and shook Marian’s hand. She was a petite, perky, small-breasted girl with long light-brown hair and a pleasant sly sharp-nosed face. Marian liked her immediately.

  Kevin said, “My mom told me you called, so we thought we’d come over and say hello.”

  “I just wanted you to see all these tulips,” said Marian. “They turned out well, I think. Thank you for helping me with them.”

  Kevin nodded. “I like the crinkly ones.” He turned to Sylvie. “Last fall I helped her plant all these.”

  “They’re really really pretty,” Sylvie agreed. There was an awkward silence. From a distant part of the yard there came an odd hissing sound. Kevin’s gray cat appeared from behind one of the mock oranges. A huge golden chewn-eared stray was on top of her. Kevin’s cat crept forward a few inches and then stopped, and the gold cat, holding Kevin’s cat down and biting her neck quite hard, made tiny jerks of its hindquarters, holding its tail low and fluffed. The two animals, who didn’t seem to like each other much, stared at nothing at all while they fucked.

  “Oh jeepers,” said Kevin.

  “You really should have taken her to the vet, Kevin,” said Marian, though she said it gently.

  “I was planning to.”

  “I can take a kitten if there are some,” said Sylvie brightly, thinking ahead. “Maybe even two.”

  Marian smiled at her. “That’s solved, then. Well!” It was time for them to be off. “I’m really glad you two dropped by. It’s very nice to meet you, Sylvie.”

  “Nice to meet you. But can I ask you something?” said Sylvie. “What are all those?” She pointed to the sex toys laid out on the white linen napkin. Marian’s dress didn’t really hide them effectively.

  “I don’t know that we should get into that,” said Marian.

  “Okay, sorry,” said Sylvie. “I kind of know what they are anyway—I mean, it’s obvious, but I just want to know what you’re doing with them out here. Are you planning on burying them or planting them or something?”

  Kevin’s ears were changing color. He was readjusting his notion of his employer. Sylvie just looked friendly and sly and curious.

  Marian said, “No, I’m not burying them. I just thought it would be exciting to try out a few of them outdoors, and I wasn’t sure which ones I would want. It seemed like such a nice setting, my own back yard, with the new parrot tulips.”

  “Can I look at one?” said Sylvie.

  Marian passed her the most decorous dildo—a medium-sized clear Lucite thick-veined figurine that the catalog called the Ice Princess. Sylvie handled it carefully, using her fingertips, not, it seemed, out of repugnance, but out of politeness for another’s treasures.

  “Sylvie,” said Kevin in an undertone. “I think she probably wants us to go.”

  “She’s welcome to take a look if she wants,” said Marian casually. The Klockhammer deep in her ane was now beginning to reassert itself; it was silencing any objections she might otherwise have had to showing two teenagers wearing matching striped shirts her fuckable toys.

  “Can I see that really long one, with the two ends?” said Sylvie.

  “Ah yes—this is my Royal Welsh Fusilier. Here.”

  “Wowsers!” Sylvie held the two dick-ends together, jerking on them so that the movable foreskins wrinkled and stretched in tandem. She offered one end to Kevin, who inspected it with fascination in spite of himself.

  “I don’t exactly get why you would need something this long with two ends,” he said.

  Marian hesitated. “Any number of reasons.”

  “One of which is,” said Sylvie to Kevin, “if you misbehave with Karen in any way ever again, I’ll put one end right up your fanny and make you jump in your next meet with it in.”

  “Karen is over,” said Kevin. Deferentially he thanked Marian, handing his end directly back to her. “Where did you purchase all these things?” he asked, with an air of serious inquiry.

  “Oh, from a place in San Francisco,” said Marian. She was using every ounce of willpower she had to keep from announcing to the two of them that she had a massive dildungs-roman installed in her butt.

  “Maybe sometime you could give us the address,” said Kevin, still very serious, very grown up. “We might want to order something or other. Right, Syl?”

  “You never know,” said Sylvie.

  Marian looked at them both and laughed happily. “God it’s nice to see young love,” she said. “Are you two lovers, then?”

  They both nodded. “We’ve made love thirty-two times in two months,” said Sylvie proudly. “In fact,” she continued, putting a fond arm around Kevin’s waist, “we were just going out for a little ‘drive,’ because Kevin’s mother doesn’t like us going up to his room anymore—which I can understand.”

  “Ah, a little ‘drive,’ ” said Marian. She looked at Kevin with amused surprise—the employer surprised at the precocity of the employee.

  “Yeah,” Kevin agreed, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the road. “We’ll probably go on over to the fish hatchery.”

  “Well, terrific,” Marian said. “Have a glorious glorious time, you two. I wish I could … I mean, I wish you well.” She shifted a little on the brass tray and felt the thick steadfast dilderstatesman issuing official pleasure-briefings down her legs and up to the warm unforgotten Fijis of her nipples. It was so fucking hard—so hard to keep from saying the things she wanted to say with it deep in there: she wanted to yank up her wet dress for them and say, “Go on and fuck each other silly! Take a good look at this monster cock jammed up my butt! I want you to look right at my asshole crammed with this big fat dick and then go out and fuck and suck each other and slam your bodies together!” Her skin prickled with the almost irresistible wish to be obscene. But all she said was, “I must say, I envy you both a little. I’m just sorry I can’t get up and see you off …”

  Sylvie was immediately full of concern. She touched Marian lightly on the arm. “Are you okay? Can we help you up? You know your dress has gotten a little wet.”

  “I know, I know,” said Marian, “I’ve been watering everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?” said Sylvie. “Isn’t it kind of cold?”

  “The water’s warm. It’s from my shower. Feel.” Marian turned the stopcock on and whisked the showerhead spray once over Sylvie’s outstretched hand.

  “Feels really nice,” said Sylvie thoughtfully.

  “The tulips love it,” said Marian. “In fact, will you two do me a favor and pick some for each other before you go? As my present to you? Pick the ones you like most. The Etruscan Prune variety is my favorite at the moment, but choose whichever ones you want.”

  Sylvie and Kevin liked this idea a lot and set to work assembling reciprocal bouquets. Now that their eyes were off Marian, she was free to move on the tray again and make pleasure noises in a whispery undertone. She watched them circle her beds. She imagined them all breathless and loving and wide-eyed in a shady spot near the fish hatchery. They were beautiful—fit, healthy, incredibly young—so inexperienced that they thought that their two-digit courtship, or coitship, made them seasoned fuckers. She knew so much more than they did. She lifted the sodden hem of her dress just a little and pointed the showerhead between her legs and let it flood her twat-cleavage. “That’s not nearly enough, Kevin—pluck more!” she called gaily, wanting to risk his hearing the irrepressible vulval surges and catches in her voice.

  When they stood in front of her again, holding their tulip bunches out to her for her admiration, she pronounced both arrangements equally lovely and told them to give them to each other. This they did
with great ceremony.

  “Thank you!” said Kevin to Sylvie.

  “Thank you!” said Sylvie to Kevin.

  They kissed. It appeared that their mouths were a good match. Marian, who normally felt squirmy and put off when she was a witness to heavy public pair-bonding, watched this particular kiss with nothing but good feeling. She was the public, after all. There was some tongue-action, but it had the license of youth and looked like it felt better than it looked. They hugged each other hard; Sylvie’s heel went behind Kevin’s and she used the leverage to press her blue-jeaned mound into him.

  When they stopped, Marian said, “What a great kiss! You two are obviously great kissers. You must be beautiful when you … make love. Your bodies fit together so well. I wish I could—” She shook her head ruefully, her hand on her heart, and let them laugh at the impossibility of what she was thinking, so that they could start to get used to the idea. Then she slapped her hands on her legs and said, “I tell you what. If you would like to borrow any of these toys, feel free. Really. I don’t make any great claims for them—I’m sure you can do without them, but who knows, just for fun …”

  They looked indecisive.

  Marian exerted the slightest additional pressure. “Pick one—or a few, even.” She felt a trickle of sweat on her back.

  “What do you think, Kevin?” said Sylvie.

  Kevin shrugged. “Sure, I guess, yeah.”

  Sylvie and Kevin knelt, not minding apparently that their knees got instantly soaked in the wet grass. Sylvie’s face, though averted, was very close to Marian’s. “Which one would you recommend?” the girl finally asked, having touched them all lightly.