It's morning and the sobbing wakes me. I go to the living room and find Clarice crying. I ask what's wrong but she shakes her head. I cancel my classes and sit with her, asking again what's wrong. She answers that she doesn't know. I hold her but the tears continue unabated for an hour or more. When she stops, she tells me to take her shopping.
I buy her clothes and gifts and afterward take her to a favorite restaurant. We drink heavily and arrive at her apartment a little drunk. She takes off her clothes and I see her naked for the first time, a waif except for the pendulous breasts hanging like filled balloons sagging to the sides, a wide gulf of bony chest between them. I kiss the dusky areoles, giant discs ending in slender nipples so long they could be fingertips.
With her mouth she rolls on a condom, pushing me back onto the sofa and climbing on top. She grips my penis with the muscles of her vagina and massages it until I reach orgasm, all the time watching, mute and impassive, her face a blank mask.
She moves into my house. We sleep in separate rooms.
Our life together does not become routine. Though she loves to tell incredible stories about her past, her present remains a mystery. As a topic, her work is off limits. Visiting or calling her office is prohibited.
Her days start early in the afternoon and often end late in the evening. I never know when she will be home, but it creates no problem for us. As a professor, my own schedule is forgiving, allowing me to go in for a few hours three days a week.
Her private therapy sessions and her group therapy sessions, also off-limit topics, are kept as religiously as if her psychiatrist held a sacerdotal office. She takes seventy-five milligram pamelor capsules under prescription with the gravity of a sacrament.
We practice no devised sexual routine. Instead, she appears naked at her whim, telling me to get it up and fuck her. Those are the words she uses. She does not respond to my efforts, no matter what I try, but controls her vaginal muscles with such expertise she drives me to fast, powerful orgasms.
Refusing to kiss on the mouth, she will not touch any part of me with her lips except for oral sex through a layer of latex. She is careful never to touch my naked penis with any part of her body, including her hands. We keep condoms in bowls scattered around the house.
She permits me to kiss her body, but at first will not allow me to eat her pussy. In time she relents, but in the beginning only with a dental dam.
Up close, the lips of her vagina open to a minute shock of livid pink set against the burnt umber flesh of her inner thighs.
I learn to talk about sex with the same vulgar expression she uses because it pleases her.
We're at the counter in one of her favorite Japanese restaurants eating a la carte sushi and sashimi. I ask her to marry me. The question pops out of a sudden deep longing for her and is as unexpected to me as to her, but I mean it. I realize I need to be with her.
She ignores me, pretending she has not heard. Instead she deftly maneuvers a seaweed roll filled with golden fish eggs to her mouth and bites through half of it.
I repeat the question. She turns to me with a quizzical look as if I suffer from some mental defect. A bit of egg has smeared against the corner of her mouth. The remainder of the fish roll follows her eyes, hovering between us pinched in the ends of chopsticks by her long, slender fingers.
She cries all the while I drive back to the house. I try to comfort her, but when we arrive she pushes me away and retreats to her room. I listen to her sob until I fall asleep.
Early the next morning I hear her rustling in the kitchen, making coffee and singing in a quiet, happy tone. She notices me standing in the doorway staring in amused wonder and she smiles, maybe for the first time.
We're going to my office, she says. Get dressed.
Behind the reception desk broods a swarthy, heavily bearded titan in jeans and black T-shirt, his massive arms a patchwork of bluing tattoos. He wears a single giant earring like a pirate. On his desk a nameplate announces Urso.
Clarice introduces us with no details other than our first names, his as indicated on the nameplate. He stands and solemnly shakes my hand. He wears a heavy chrome chain from his belt that disappears into a rear pocket. His keys hang from a belt loop.
She asks if Isabella is in and he answers yes, ma'am, in a gentle voice. She leads me to an office marked assistant, knocks, and a tall, leggy blonde in jeans and high-heeled red boots opens the door. Flashing a broad, easy smile, her green eyes command my attention. They swallow me up with an examination that would be a stare if it were steady, instead leaping over me, scanning me, frantic and filled with wonder. She turns to Clarice and, with the steady gaze she has not given me, says that one of the afternoon group members has requested a special session with her and should she set it up?
Clarice answers that it is possible within the hour if the client is ready; that I am only visiting briefly but that she is in for the rest of the day. Then she leads me away on a tour of the facilities.
We pass through a well-equipped kitchen that includes a shiny espresso machine. We stand in the doorway of a cramped closet of a room, bare except for a computer workstation. Without entering, she dismisses the room with a sweeping motion, saying it is only a necessary business concession to technology.
There are two doors marked therapy and she escorts me to the nearest, a room bright with sunlight from several large windows and furnished with identical padded chairs arranged in a circle.
The other is a larger, windowless room, the floor covered with futons. A path along one wall beside the mattresses dead-ends in a wardrobe beside a pair of doors, one marked bathroom, the other shower. The walls display an array of erotic prints. One catches my eye: a satyr playing a woman's hair like a harp while she plays his giant penis as a flute. Full of curiosity about this strange therapy room, I hold my tongue in the face of her guarded expression.
The final stop is her office, an oppressive space smelling of incense, crowded with a desk, several chairs, and three walls of built-in bookcases lined with well-used leather-bound volumes. A window in the only bare wall opens onto a park. Below the window stands a table with a bronze statue of a seated nymph, naked except for a flowing loincloth, long waisted with round, full breasts, the prominent nipples erect. Her legs are spread wide, bent at the knees, one flat, the other raised. She reclines against the support of one hand, arm extended, the other aloft before her in the mudra gesture.
This is it, she tells me. This is my office. Now you have seen everything.
I remark that she must do well to afford two fulltime staff and such a large building. She replies that her services are sought after by those troubled with sexual dysfunction. She has plenty of referrals and turns away new clients whose problems don't interest her.
She summons Urso and asks for coffee. He appears bearing a tray with two cups of espresso. We drink them and I leave.
Later, Clarice brings Isabella home with her and the three of us go to dinner. Isabella wears the same jeans and boots as at the office. A white nylon pullover blouse fits like a glove and doesn't flatter, betraying the beginnings of a roll around her waist and accenting high, shapeless breasts sheathed in a tight brassiere that flattens them, pushing them wide apart.
Dinner unfolds into a party. Sake flows and we stay on for a bottle of champagne, then hit one of the bars Clarice favors to watch the patrons while we drink absinthe.
At the house Clarice passes around a joint.
She asks me what I think of Isabella. Caught off guard and stoned, I am unable to gauge how long I muse the question. I see Isabella pass Clarice a pregnant glance, shrugging with her eyes. I reply she has sexy eyes. Isabella sends Clarice a physical shrug, her face full of don't-ask-me. I say her long legs and ass are sexy. The two women exchange knowing smiles.
Time skips a beat and somehow the three of us are in bed naked, Isabella stretched out on her stomach while I fuck her from behind. Clarice watches, mute and expressionless. Isabella redirects me to her anus and I slip in. She groans. She pushes against me, bucking and thrashing, then lays silent and passive while I work at ramming my dick into her guts. Her ass cheeks give like pillows, conforming to my thrusts, and I imagine my cock probing her belly.
I feel a gentle teasing of my rectum and hear Clarice singing out in high-pitched short chirps that sound more like birdcalls than screams of sexual climax. When I finish and roll over, she sits masturbating, singing her little shrieks, a condom on her tongue.
The memory of Clarice singing her birdcalls while masturbating stays with me. She never displayed any passion before our threesome with Isabella and since then we've had no sexual contact. She does not speak of it or of Isabella. I wonder if our threesome was a singular event, but I'm afraid to broach the subject.
Finally, as we sit in the living room reading, my curiosity overcomes my reluctance.
"How is Isabella?"
Clarice peers over the top of her book. "Who?"
"Your assistant at work, Isabella."
She stares at me. "Fine, I guess," she says.
She returns to her book, ignoring me, but in a while puts down the book and asks if I still want to marry her.
"Yes, of course." I reply without hesitation. It's the first she's mentioned it since I asked her.
"Then there are things I need to show you."
That night we go to the Museum of Modern Art. We sit in the bar and have a few drinks before she leads me to a video monitor on a stand in the main hall. A tape deck awaits a punch of a button. Before pushing it, she tells me the film epitomizes her philosophy of life.
A Chinese woman springs to life on the video monitor. Visible only from the mouth down, her severely bobbed hair hanging limp above her shoulders, she kneads yellow meal into a coarse yellow bread.
My eyes are drawn to the short, fat fingers working the dough to an elastic ball she eventually flattens with the palms of stubby hands.
After baking the round, flat bread, she removes it from the bowl and pulls it into pieces she chews and spits out, displaying each mouthful before letting it plop into the bowl. When finished, she kneads the wet chunks again, then cooks the masticated mass into a glop which she partially devours with more flourish than before, swallowing and then regurgitating each bite into the bowl. To these quasi-assimilated remnants, now resembling porridge or grits or malt-o-meal, she adds boiling water and mixes it into a kind of mealy slurry which she consumes with deliberate intent. The tape ends as she swallows the last of it.
Several groups form and disperse while we watch, always leaving with comments like gross or disgusting. For me, the film reaches somewhere down into the recesses of my libido, prompting an embarrassing erection. Clarice passes her palm over the bulge, then takes my hand and leads me to another exhibit.
Eight sheets of stationary framed in bright metal, all from European hotels mostly of the Accor chain, hang in isolation on a freestanding white wall. Entitled Anal Kisses and given letter-number signifiers, like Anal Kiss B-13, Carlton — Strasbourg, each but one displays a single red or reddish-purple lipstick imprint of an anus. The exception displays three anal kisses.
Clarice stands staring, transfigured before the kisses, radiant in an inwardly emanating aura. She squeezes my hand.
She brings home a videotape. We smoke a joint and watch it. Bad lighting and shaky camera work mark it as amateur. Two naked men, one a dirty blonde with a wispy beard, tall and lanky, his ribs showing, a pathetic patchwork of a few strands of hair on his sunken chest, the other covered with dark hair, muscular and tattooed, wearing a thick, full beard, sit side by side on a bed.
The lanky blonde's enormous penis lays flaccid on his thigh. The other takes it up in his hand, then leans over and engulfs with his mouth. He goes to his knees beside the bed, sucking the soft thing until it grows into an enormous fat erection he licks, slavers over, and kisses, slurping loudly, shoving it deep into his throat.
Clarice raises her skirt above her thighs and fingers her vagina around the sides of her panties. When the skinny man tenses up, ready to blow his load, she starts with the little birdlike chirps, the same stabbing peeps she emitted when I fucked her assistant and she licked my asshole with her condom-covered tongue.
The scene abruptly jumps to the muscular man laying flat on his stomach, his hairy back and shoulders mossy with sweat. The skinny one fingers his asshole, first with one finger, then two, then shoves his whole hand into the mans rectum. His forearm disappears as the other pushes against the invasion. He removes his arm, climbs on top and fucks his passive partner with enviable vigor.
By this time Clarice is singing like a bird, fingering her cunt with as much vigor as the skinny man fucks the bear. She keeps on when the film finishes. Eventually she stops and stares at me, saying nothing. After a while, she gets up and goes to bed.
