Beautiful You: A Novel

  “Why should sex be any different?” ranted Max. “Everything—films, music, painting—is calculated to manipulate and excite us.” He licked two fingers and scissored them against Penny, flickering fast touches against her engorged lady-parts. Such small tricks flooded Penny with more pleasure, wiping her mind clean. Whatever she’d been thinking, it was instantly forgotten. “Drugs are designed to be as effective as possible,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we devote the same attention to the details of sex?”

  Penny shook like a criminal being electrocuted. Her limbs jangled, and her flesh jiggled like a nervous puppet. Her tongue jutted from her mouth and lapped at the air.

  “Stay with me,” he coached sternly. “You’re going into shock.”

  Penny felt something rest against her forehead.

  “The subject’s temperature is falling … ninety-eight-point-five degrees. Ninety-seven-point-five …” It was a temporal thermometer. A cold mouth pressed itself over hers. These were Maxwell’s lips. His lukewarm breath filled her throat and inflated her lungs. “The subject has stopped breathing,” he announced. His lungs once more filled her lungs. Just as his penis was filling her. “I am attempting to resuscitate the test subject.” Throughout all of this, Penny was dimly aware that he was still fucking her with the same cadence of long, smooth strokes. He was monitoring the pulse in her neck. “Use my breath,” he demanded. “Use the breath I’m putting inside you to cry out. Express your exaltation.” In a flat, expressionless voice he said, “Do not die while you have so much pleasure still awaiting you.…”

  Now Penny knew why the tabloids called him “Climax-Well.”

  That would be the first and final time Penny would see him naked. There was plenty of sex to come, too much perhaps, but none of it would involve Maxwell’s sexual organs.

  Once Maxwell had excused himself to use the bathroom, Penny rewound the recorder and tried to find her outcry. To erase it. The filth that had poured from her mouth was totally degrading. To her own ears she sounded like someone possessed by a demon. Out of her mind. The voice was less hers than it was the howl of some animal in heat baying at a primordial moon.

  If Climax-Well could be believed, it was that beastly outburst that had saved her life. With it, she had allowed the tension of a life-threatening orgasm to pass through her without lasting damage. A woman’s purpose, he claimed, was not to be a vessel, but to be a conduit. For her to survive, all things must pass through her.

  Between marathon sessions of arousal culminating in mind-shattering orgasms, Maxwell lectured Penny. He slipped a wet finger into her, matter-of-factly saying, “This is your urethra.” Rotating the finger, he said, “And this … this is your urethral sponge, often called the ‘G-spot.’ ”

  The walking tour his fingers took sent shivers through her body.

  He oiled his hands with a pink, rose-scented gel and slipped two fingers into her. “When I massage the rear wall of your vaginal vault …”

  Unseen, he must’ve done so, because Penny twitched and shivered with uncontrolled joy. Whatever Max was doing, she drove her hips against his hand, wanting more.

  “That,” he explained, “is your perineal sponge, a mass of erectile tissue that connects through the pudendal nerve to your clitoris.”

  Penny didn’t need to look to know that her clit was stiffening. Untouched, it was achingly engorged and throbbing.

  Massaging whatever he’d found, Max was stimulating her clitoris by remote control. “The perineal sponge is the reason women can achieve orgasms while having anal sex.” He slipped a third and a fourth finger inside. “Good girl, your vagina is ‘ballooning.’ ” During arousal, he explained, the inner vagina expands, lengthening to create a dead end beyond the cervix. Now his entire hand was inside.

  Penny looked down to see only his smooth, pale wrist disappearing into her. At the sight of it, she moaned.

  Maxwell’s eyes had a glazed, faraway look, not focused on anything. Through his hand, he was clearly exploring a hidden world. “This, I believe, is your cervix,” he said. “If I apply a steady pressure …”

  Penny’s fingers went involuntarily to her mouth, and she bit down on a knuckle, whimpering. She closed her eyes, embarrassed by the mewling that rose from deep in her throat. It was terrifying being coaxed this far beyond her own rational control. It was as frightening as she’d always imagined a heart attack would feel, but she never wanted it to stop.

  His voice muted with admiration and wonder, Maxwell said, “This is exceptional. Do you always ejaculate this much?”

  Penny opened her eyes and peeked. A rivulet of shimmering juice was erupting from near the top of her pussy. It flowed down Maxwell’s arm until it dripped from his elbow. “Sorry,” she whispered, instantly ashamed.

  “But why?” asked Maxwell, twisting his hand deep inside her.

  “I’m peeing on you.”

  He laughed. With his free hand he collected a smidgen of the liquid. He rubbed it between two fingers, brought the fingers to his nose and smelled it, tasted it with the tip of his tongue. “Enzymes,” he pronounced, “from your Skene’s glands. That’s why it vents from your urethra instead of your vulva.” He brought the wet fingers near her mouth and asked, “Would you like to taste yourself?”

  Excited as she was, purring and thrashing like an animal, Penny couldn’t bring herself to lick his fingers. She didn’t have to.

  He shoved them into her mouth. Gagging her. Choking her. The taste of her own sensual emissions was metallic and salty. For a short eternity she couldn’t speak or breathe.

  Maxwell’s voice was reproachful. “I thought you said you were wearing a diaphragm.”

  She wasn’t. Her diaphragm was in Jackson Heights—securely locked in a safe-deposit box at Chase Manhattan. Penny wasn’t trying to get pregnant. She just hadn’t planned to have sex tonight.

  The fingers withdrew from her mouth, allowing her to draw a new breath.

  “Don’t think you can trick me, Miss Harrigan.” The fingers within her were still roving, mapping that hidden world. “When and if I ever marry anyone it will be for love. I had a vasectomy many years ago.”

  Penny wanted to explain, but she was exhausted. Instead, she lay back, sinking deeper into pleasure as he petted the glans of her clitoris. He described how the short clitoral shaft descended into her skin. Using gentle pressure, he traced the shaft to where it divided into two legs which he called “crura.” These legs, Maxwell explained, wrapped around the vaginal cavity.

  He said more, a long, rambling travelogue about a land Penny had never visited. A history lesson about the world contained inside her.

  Maxwell explained how physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s had always been formally trained in how to bring their female patients to “paroxysm.” Using fingers and oil, it was standard practice for doctors and midwives to treat hysteria, insomnia, depression, and a host of conditions common to women. Praefocatio matricis it was called. Or “suffocation of the mother.” And even the great Galen recommended that the vagina must be vigorously manipulated until it readily expressed the accumulation of fluid.

  Vibrators, he claimed, were among the first household appliances to be powered with electricity. In 1893, a man named Mortimer Granville built a huge fortune when he invented a battery-driven vibrator. A full range of such sex toys were commonly sold through national mass-circulation magazines and the Sears, Roebuck catalog. It wasn’t until they appeared in the crude pornographic films of the 1920s that vibrating dildos became shameful.

  Galen. Hippocrates. Ambroise Paré. Penny couldn’t keep the names and dates straight in her mind. After the sixteenth century, she fell asleep. She dreamed of plummeting from the top of the Eiffel Tower. She was falling because Maxwell had pushed her.

  When she woke, Maxwell’s side of the bed was empty. The bathroom door was closed, and from the far side of it came the sound of running water.

  Was it Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem? Penny couldn’t remember,
but she thought one of them had written about the “zipless fuck,” an ideal kind of physically satisfying sex that left no emotional obligations. Sex with Maxwell might very well be what the author had in mind. It left Penny weak, feeling as if she’d suffered the flu. That was only for a few minutes; beyond that she was ravenous. They ate and fucked and ate and fucked. Endlessly. Ziplessly.

  It was official. Until now, Penny Harrigan had never experienced an actual orgasm. Not like the thrilling sensations that Maxwell coaxed from her eager body. For once, the descriptions of fireworks and convulsions she’d read so often in Cosmo, they seemed like understatements instead of exaggerations.

  Stroking her pubis, Maxwell said, “I would like to shave you. It would make the testing more accurate.” She’d acquiesced. No biggie. She’d been shaved before, and waxed, to be bikini-ready for spring break. “This time,” he warned her, “it will never grow back.” He used a special formula passed down through millennia of Uzbek tribesmen, a lotion of aloe vera and pureed pine nuts that would forever leave her as smooth as a child.

  Penny looked forlornly at her shorn curls lying among the bedsheets. She told herself she’d never liked being bushy.

  The aspect of sex that Maxwell seemed to enjoy most was finding ways to coerce her to greater satisfaction. That seemed his sole source of pleasure. Whenever Penny asked whether he wanted to come, he’d simply shrug and say, “Maybe next go-round.” Beyond their first encounter he never so much as removed his shirt. Soon he came to don a white lab coat to protect his clothing.

  For a beauty like Alouette, a woman accustomed to driving men to fits of lust, Maxwell’s failure to come must’ve been maddening. Penny tried not to think of the French beauty who’d threatened her life, but that wasn’t easy. Alouette had enjoyed 136 days of intimacy with Maxwell. Gwendolyn had enjoyed 136 days. The National Enquirer never lied. Unless she’d miscounted, Penny figured she had 103 days to go. If the sex kept up like this, she doubted whether she could live that long. But what a great way to die!

  If she could just find the recording of her howling, find and erase it, Penny’s happiness would be complete. The bathroom door remained shut. Behind it the water continued to run.

  Retrieving his recorder from the bedside table, she rewound the memory. Hitting Play, she heard, “… don’t be a prudish fool.” Penny felt like a hypocrite, but she never wanted another human being to hear the insane gibberish that had spilled from her mouth. Again, she hit Play. This time she heard a scream.

  With the shower running full-blast, she hoped Maxwell hadn’t heard it in the bathroom.

  Someone was screaming in French. Not that Penny could understand French, but she could guess based on her own experience. It was Alouette under the influence of pink champagne and secret ingredients. She fast-forwarded and hit Play. “Stay with me, Penny,” the recording said.

  Even as she listened, spellbound, the device in her hands issued a shrill ringtone. It wasn’t only a recorder; it was a telephone! Penny was so startled she almost dropped it; instead she tossed the phone back onto the table, where it continued to ring and ring. When she checked the caller ID it said, “Private.”

  Penny leaped from the bed. She knocked at the bathroom door. “Max, it’s your phone!” She tried the knob, but it was locked. She could hear the shower, his voice singing a song she couldn’t identify. After a couple more rings, curiosity got the better of her. She put the phone to her ear and said, “Hello?”

  Silence.

  The bathroom door opened and Maxwell stepped out with a towel wrapped around his waist. Water dripped from his hair. At the sight of her answering his phone, his eyebrows drew together in fury, and he snapped his fingers, gesturing for her to hang up.

  “Hello? Corny?” asked a voice. It was a familiar voice. A woman. “Max,” she said. “This isn’t my fault.” She pleaded, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Penny handed the phone to Maxwell. She could still hear the voice on the line talking excitedly, loudly. Begging. He put it to his ear and listened. Gradually his eyes wandered to the floor. The longer the caller talked, the more his angry expression changed to one of brooding concern.

  “That shouldn’t be an issue,” he said. “The active ingredients don’t fall within any of the federal schedules for controlled or hazardous substances.” He listened, shaking his head. “Well, then appoint a new chairman to the FDA. Give that job to someone who will fast-track the products.”

  The caller was someone Penny had seen on television. It was a voice that brought to mind a sensible, shoulder-length haircut. A blue suit. A pearl necklace. A woman speaking behind a forest of microphones.

  Talking into the phone, but eyeing Penny, Maxwell said, “I’m in the final testing phase right now. We’re timing mass production for a summer rollout. By next month we’ll be in a half million retail outlets.” He turned his back to Penny and stepped through the bathroom door. “You know what’s at stake here. Don’t make me take any actions you’ll regret.” The door shut. Possibly to mask the conversation, the shower came back on at full blast.

  Unless Penny missed her guess, the voice, the woman calling, she was the president of the United States. President Clarissa Hind.

  Penny wondered what brilliant new invention they were almost done testing.

  This constant sexual cavorting, this would be the pattern of their days and nights. Max always had some toy, some potion, some glorious lubricant he wanted to introduce her to.

  He’d drive her to climax until her back ached and her legs wouldn’t work, and he’d gently bully her, saying, “We’re almost done. Just one more adjustment.” Saying, “We’ve got to stay on a schedule here.…”

  He’d probe with one hand buried inside her. “I’m searching for your pudendal plexus. It should be right here.”

  On other occasions, totally stymied, he’d use his free hand to shake open a folded anatomical chart, like a road map, on the bed beside her. He was a southpaw and kept those fingers planted in her vagina as if marking his place in a book. You Are Here. One hand inside her, he’d use the other to smooth the creased paper and trace one finger along some route while muttering to himself, “The nervi pelvici splanchnici branches here near your nervi erigentes.…” Discovering his destination, he’d wiggle something deep within her, exclaiming triumphantly, “Penny? Did you know your coccygeal plexus is displaced two centimeters to the anterior?” Feeling along blindly, he’d add, “Don’t worry. It seems to be within normal variable parameters.”

  Every so often he’d withdraw whatever pleasure instrument he was testing. He’d lay its length against a corner of the night table and bend the metal or plastic slightly. Or he might use a pair of pliers or vise grips he kept in the bedside drawer. Worse was when he’d just swing the instrument a mighty whack against the table, whack after whack, marring the elegant furniture until he’d achieved the desired curve.

  When that happened the bedroom seemed like those sepia-toned photographs Penny had seen of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. Or Henry Ford’s workshop. For her part, Penny felt less like a girlfriend than a lab assistant. Like Dr. Watson or Igor. Or Pavlov’s dog. As Max tinkered away, bringing her to new convulsions and seizures of pleasure, despite her moods, despite her growing detachment and resentment, Penny half expected him to shout, “Eureka!”

  Maxwell would hover over his task, as focused as a Swiss watchmaker or brain surgeon. Often he’d request his valet or butler to wheel a tray of sterile instruments up bedside so Max need not look away from the procedure at hand. “Calipers!” he’d bark, extending one hand, and the attendant servant would slap the tool into his open palm. “Blot me!” Max would command, and the underling would use a fold of paper towel to swab the beads of perspiration from Max’s forehead.

  At times Max crouched between her knees, a penlight clenched between his teeth, a jeweler’s loupe squeezed in one eye, tinkering. His face slack with concentration. “I chose you,” Max explained, “because you have never
experienced an orgasm. A man can tell. You remain asleep, and no one has yet to awaken you. You are so typical of the women I am trying to help.”

  “ ‘For too many years,’ ” Max recited, “ ‘women have been excluded from the full pleasure available to them in their bodies.’ ” He was reading from a printed sheet of paper. A press release. “ ‘I believe, as do many medical professionals, that a large proportion of chronic mental and physical ailments beset women because they accumulate stress that might otherwise be easily and quickly released with the right tools.…’ ”

  Even to Penny’s unsophisticated ear, the speech sounded like a string of euphemisms. According to Maxwell, it had to. It was selling sex. Even more controversially, it was selling women the means to better sex than they had ever enjoyed with any man. To some listeners, this announcement would sound like gobbledygook, like an outdated advertisement for a feminine hygiene spray. But to other listeners, namely men who valued only their own greedy sexual needs, this speech would sound like the end of the world.

  The two of them were sitting in bed. Lately, they were always in bed. Penny never donned more than a bathrobe, and that was only to accept a gourmet meal brought by the majordomo.

  “ ‘That’s the reason,’ ” Maxwell continued, “ ‘we’re proud to introduce the Beautiful You line of personal care products.…’ ”

  C. Linus Maxwell was preparing to expand his vast corporation and enter the field of empty vaginas in a big way. All of the jewel-toned gels and liquids on his bedside table. The magic pink champagne douche. The fluids engineered to modulate the coefficient of friction. He would be bringing them all to the lonely female consumer.

  The packaging would be pink, but not obnoxiously. The whole line would be marketed under the umbrella name Beautiful You. Thumbing the buttons on his smart phone, Maxwell showed Penny a prototype of the advertising, the words Beautiful You curved in curlicue white letters. A tagline along the bottom of each ad read, “Better Than Love.” The douche, Maxwell explained, would ultimately be sold as a dissolvable powder in a small envelope, which could be mixed with water or champagne. It was only one of several shockingly innovative personal care products. Soon every woman would be able to enjoy mind-bending orgasms at a moderate price.