Bad Karma & Kinky Sex
or
Drama
Michael Hemmingson
Smashwords Edition
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Published by:
The Obelisk Library
Originally published in paperback in 2002 from Blue Moon Books as Drama. An Ophelia Press edition was published in 2009 as Bad Karma & Kinky Sex. Thias edition has been slightly revised.
The Obelisk Library retains exclusive electronic rights to distribute this work.
Cover by DarkTraces. Used with permission.
There has been a wound, and I realize now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open.
—Paul Auster
The Invention of Solitude
Yeah...and...so?
—Nicky Silver
Fat Men in Skirts
ACT I
“The Torrid Affair”
ONE
It starts, sort of, with an e-mail Kristine Wilson sends to Jonathan Morely: Do you want to have a torrid affair?
Her user name is JadeCookie.
There’s a night, later, in her car, when Jonathan reaches over to kiss Kristine. She turns her face. He kisses her on the cheek. Her cheek feels fuzzy.
She is directing a play he’s written called Drive Anywhere.
The next night, they have a few beers at the bar everyone at the The Alfred Jarry Theater hangs out at. Then he is in her car again (a beat up Ford that doesn’t seem to work too well) and Kristine says, “Let’s go to my place.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve never been to my place.”
“Where is it?”
“Not far.”
She has a one-bedroom cottage that, she tells him, she used to share with her ex-husband Kyle, who is a resident actor at The Alfred Jarry Theater.
She parks the car and takes his hand and leads him into her home and says to the air, “Jonathan Morely.”
“Yes?”
“Nothing. I just like saying your name.”
It is a very cozy little place spare of furniture, a lot of bookshelves over-filled with hardcovers and paperbacks, and a small adjacent alcove where a Macintosh computer sits.
“Do you want some wine?” she asks.
A white cat jumps onto the screen door, and crawls through a hole. The cat stops and looks at him.
Kristine returns with two glasses of wine. “That’s my cat. Her name is Kat, spelled with a K.”
“Seems like she was being chased the way she came in,” Jonathan says.
Kristine sits next to him. “No. She just pretends she’s in some kind of great adventure.”
“What genre?”
“She thinks she’s a spy, a secret agent, being chased by the bad guys.”
Kat walks into the kitchen, and eats cat food from a bowl by the stove, then walks into the cat box under the sink and does her thing.
It is a warm summer night. A breeze comes in through the screen door. He feels awkward. He knows why she wanted him to come here, but he doesn’t know what to do. Kristine isn’t making any overt gestures, giving him any looks, sending him the signals that say torrid affair now.
“The play is going good,” he says, to say something. His play.
She nods. “It’s going to be real good. But I’m a little nervous.”
“Why?”
“It’s not the kind of play I usually direct,” she says. “So dark, so violent, so poetic. I think you’re an awesome playwright, but I’ve said this a million times in email.” Adding: “Among other things.”
He finishes his wine. Was that a hint? Why is he acting so timid? He should just take her. He should lean over and grab her, kiss her. He touches her shoulder-length blonde hair.
She is staring at him with her large blue eyes. “I usually do a Tarot reading for every play I direct.”
“You know how to do Tarot cards?”
She smiles. “I used to do it for a living.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. I worked three years on a phone psychic line.”
“Then you must be reading my mind,” he says.
“It’s not like that. It’s more—intuition. I bet you have some psychic ability. I feel that you do.”
“I’ve been told—”
“What?”
“That I do.”
“Can you read my mind?” she says.
“You want…another glass of wine.”
“Well,” she says, “I guess I do.”
“You have cards here?” he says. “Tarot cards?”
“Yeah.”
They re-fill their wine glasses and she takes him to her bedroom. She says her cards are under the bed: “To maintain their connection to the vibration of my body.” She has a large futon with a fluffy comforter. They sit on the futon.
She says, “You shuffle the cards.”
He does. Kristine spreads out a white kerchief, placing stones on each corner.
“What are the rocks for?” he asks her.
“Balance.”
“How long do I shuffle the cards?”
“As
long as you want. Have you been thinking about the play?”
“Yeah,”
he says, wanting to say: And
you. He is
really asking the cards:
Am I going to fuck her tonight?
He is thinking about the play, too.
“When you feel ready,” says Kristine.
“How do I know when?”
“You just know.”
“I feel ready.”
“Cut the cards.”
He does.
“Here,” holding out her hand. She takes the cards and places them on the kerchief. “This formation is called The Celtic Tree. Interesting,” she says.
“What?”
“Interesting.”
“What is it?”
“Things will go well,” she says. “A lot of power, a lot of energy.”
“It’s a good reading?”
She looks up. “A very good reading.”
He kisses her. Or she kisses him. In any event, it happens. There are fireworks. She pulls him back on the bed, on top of her body. They kiss for a long time.
“I didn’t think,” she says.
“What?” Catching his breath—
“I didn’t think you’d ever make a move,” she says.
“I was waiting for you.”
“Oh come on.”
“I was.”
“Please.”
“What?”
“Please,” she says. “I’m not aggressive. Getting you here is about as aggressive as I get. My move was to get you into my house. Your move was next. But here we are.”
“Here we are,” he says
They kiss more, and undress. Her body is thin and white, she has small breasts. She moves to suck on his cock. She likes sucking on his cock, and we will, gentle reader, later discuss her obsession with sucking cock. She says, “I want you in me,” getting on top of him.
“I think I have a condom in my wallet,” he says.
“It’s okay. When I went to the bathroom, I put in spermacide jelly.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know each other.”
She leans down. “I trust you. You seem very healthy and safe.”
“How?”
“Intuition.”
“Psychic powers.”
“Oh yes,” she says.
“The Tarot cards told you.”
“They told me a lot.”
“Like?”
“Like how good we’ll fuck,” she says, reaching down to guide him into her cunt.
“I haven’t been with anyone in almost a year,” he says to her.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t.”
“See. Healthy and safe.”
“Have you? Has it been a long time?”
“Two months.”
“With your ex-husband?”
“We’re still married,” she says. “The divorce hasn’t gone through.”
“Was it with him?”
“No.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter?”
He says, “No.”
“Be quiet now,” she says.
She is loud as they fuck, buckling on top of him, coming twice, reaching down to kiss him, perverse noises coming out of her nostrils. She gets on her back, he put her legs on his shoulders. She has a smile on her face, eyes closed. She looks beautiful under him, as she had on top of him.
Her cat, Kat, sits on the floor, watching.
He comes inside her.
She falls asleep quickly, deeply. He can’t sleep. It is always the same, with new lovers: he can’t sleep that first night, that first week even. It takes a while to be comfortable. He gets up, goes to the bathroom. It is hot. His naked body is sweating. He looks in her fridge, finds a half gallon of milk. He drinks some milk. He loves milk. He walks around her cottage. This is indeed a very nice place, nicer than the stuffy sublet he has downtown. He closes and locks the front door. He wonders how she can fall asleep with her house open to the world. The cottage is snug and safe in a secure area, away from the street, with a few other cottages near. But still. Kat has been following him. He feels like he doesn’t belong here; and at the same time, he knows that this will soon be his home. He has always trusted his sense of destiny. Maybe he’s psychic after all.
He goes back to bed, cuddling next to Kristine’s very warm body. She is lightly snoring. He wishes he could sleep.
In the morning, she wants to fuck again. She lies on her back with her legs spread open, her hand between her legs and two fingers circling around her pussy.
“How do you feel?” she says
“Good,” he says
He gets on top of her. Her cunt is strong and musty. It all seems so alien. Her hair is a mess. After, she takes a shower. He goes to the fridge and drinks more milk. He returns to the futon, closes his eyes, his body tingling—he needs sleep.
She is back in bed, dripping with water.
“We have rehearsal this afternoon,” she says.
***
He stays the next night. They have dinner, they fuck twice, and they talk in the darkness of her bedroom:
“Why a year?” Kristine says.
“I don’t know. I haven’t met anyone.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true,” he goes, kissing her. “Why two months?”
She goes, “Well, it was six months before that, when Kyle and I split up.”
“It wasn’t anything serious?”
“No. Oh, no,” rolling her eyes.
“Can I ask who with?”
“If you want.”
“Okay. Who with?”
“With Dave,” she says.
“Dave? Dave Dave?”
“Yeah.”
Dave is the artistic director of The Jarry, and he’s also cast in Drive Anywhere. Jonathan had been submitting his plays to Dave for two years before one was finally chosen. He remembers, over a month ago, sitting in on auditions in the theater, and Dave came in. He said he felt he should play one of the characters in Drive Anywhere. Kristine had nodded and said, “Yes, you’d do good in that part.” Dave smiled. Jonathan thought: You can do that sort of thing when you’re the artistic director.
“I’ve heard things about Dave,” he says.
“Like?”
“Like he sleeps around.”
“Well,” Kristine says, “he does.”
“But you’re not sleeping with him anymore?”
“No. He wants to. But no. I’m sleeping with you now.”
“Oh.”
“I only slept with him twice. Both were mistakes really. The first time, we were at this friend’s place, a few of us, we’d been drinking a lot, I couldn’t drive home. I had to share a bed with him.”
“Convenient.”
“The next thing you know—”
“I get the picture.”
“I figured why not, it’s recreational, and it’s been a while since I’ve been laid.”
“You made him wear a condom, I hope.”
“A slut like that,” Kristine laughs, “of course!”
“Of course,” he says.
“I didn’t know the trouble it’d cause. Word got around. You know how gossip goes, especially with this theater. Or any theater. People were whispering: ‘Oh, Dave and Kristine slept together!’ It got back to Kyle, and he was pissed. He and Dave don’t get along well. They used to be good friends, but then—well, Kyle did get Dave’s girlfriend, who was my best friend, pregnant.”
“The plot gets complicated,” Jonathan says.
“Lisa used to live in the cottage across the way, sometimes with Dave, when Dave felt like he wanted a steady girlfriend. One morning, I’m taking a bath, just before rehearsal for a play both Kyle and Lisa are in, and Kyle comes into the bathroom and he goes, ‘I have something to tell you. The guilt is too much and I have something to tell you.’ ‘What?’ I go, knowing it’s going to be bad, the way Kyle was talking, his tone. He goes, ‘I’ve been sleeping with Lisa.’ So I went, like, ‘Oh,’ because I’m not all that surprised, Kyle and Lisa got along well, and Lisa, well, Lisa is like Dave—a lot of fucking. ‘There’s more,’ Kyle goes, he says: ‘She’s pregnant and she says it might be mine.’ ‘It might?’ I go. ‘She doesn’t know who the father is for sure, but she says it could be mine.’”
“Who were the other candidates?”
“Dave, Jake, Steve—a few others.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, I get this news, and I have to rehearse with these two that day. And later that evening I’m supposed to do laundry with Lisa. So I did laundry with her, and I’m looking at her stomach and I’m thinking: ‘She might be carrying my husband’s child.’ ‘Are you mad at me?’ Lisa asks me when we’re folding clothes, and I say: ‘No, I’m not.’ I wasn’t. In fact, I was relieved. This was the excuse I needed to get out of this marriage. I’d been looking for an excuse, and now it was handed to me.”
“You didn’t want to be married?”
“No. Not for one minute. I had no idea why—well, my parents were pressuring me. This was when Kyle and I were living in Arizona. I’d been living with Kyle for a year, and my parents were going, ‘You should get married.’ I’d just finished graduate school so I figured: ‘Okay, why not, I’ll get married, I have a Master’s degree, marriage just seems like the next step in life.’ On my wedding day, I wanted to run. My parents got this whole huge stupid wedding party assembled, I wore my grandmother’s godawful big white wedding gown and everything. I look at my wedding day photos and I see myself smiling and looking happy but inside I was screaming: GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! I did not want to be married to Kyle. I didn’t love him. I never loved him. I care for him. But I’ve never been in love with him.”
“But you married him.”
“Yes. But now he’s been having an affair, he just impregnated my best friend, so this seemed like a good time to end it. That night, I said: ‘Kyle, I want a divorce.’ He said okay. ‘I want you to move out.’ He said okay. He didn’t have to move his stuff far—he went across the courtyard to Lisa’s place. I mean, if they were going to be a family. For a while, he was all happy about it. ‘I can get into the idea of being a dad,’ he was saying. Of course, everyone was treating me so nice, like I was the hurt victim, and Kyle and Lisa were the bad guys. But I was just: ‘Well, I’m finally out of this marriage and thank goodness!’”
“Had Kyle had an affair before?”
“Never. Not that I know of. He’s very honest. He would’ve told me. I had an affair, though. A year before this incident. Anyway, so Kyle finds out I slept with Dave and he’s pissed off. He’s jealous. ‘We’re getting divorced,’ I tell him. He goes, ‘I don’t care who you sleep with, but did it have to be him?’ I go: ‘It happened once, it was a mistake, it won’t happen again.’ So a week goes by and Dave calls and he says to me, ‘Everyone’s angry at us, I think we should talk.’ So he comes over here and we have some beer and we talk about how angry everyone is with us, how what we did was a mistake, how it’ll never happen again, and we wind up fucking again.”
Jonathan has to laugh at that.
“It is absurd,” Kristine says. “That morning we’re both feeling a little awkward. In fact, when Dave and I went down to the theater, we ran into you on the street. This was about—yes, two months ago. Remember?”
“I do,” Jonathan says. He does recall, it’d just been a quick passing—he was in a hurry, Dave and Kristine were walking the other way.
“That’s when I knew I wanted you.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she says. “Because I said to myself: ‘What am I doing with Dave when I want Jonathan?’ It was a revelation. So I told Dave: ‘It won’t happen again.’ And it hasn’t. Sometimes he tries—at the bar, at parties. He comes up to me and he says: ‘Why don’t we go away?’ and I say: ‘No, Dave, no.’ I don’t know what he’s thinking.”
“Maybe he’s in love with you.”
“Dave doesn’t know what love is,” she says. “I mean, I’ve never seen him in love. I’ve seen him with a lot of women, and except for maybe Lisa—no.”
TWO
That Saturday seems like a good day, to Jonathan, to drop acid and go to the beach. He has about twenty hits of LSD in his fridge. He has been dropping at least once a week the past two months. Jonathan loves acid. He loves the beach. He loves combining the two. He goes to Black’s Beach, a nude beach, which isn’t easy to get to—you have to walk down these steep cliffs. He spends a few hours lying in the sun, and wandering around, and having a good acid trip, and having good thoughts: thoughts about Kristine and his play and life. For a while, he had been living like a hermit, as he has done often, writing plays and poetry, working dumb jobs, getting fired from dumb jobs, not having much of a social life. Now his social life is looking pretty decent. He wishes to be with Kristine right now. He wishes she were on the beach with him. She’s told him that she sometimes comes to Black’s Beach, with other members of The Alfred Jarry Theater. Black’s Beach is best during the weekday, it’s not so crowded; usually young people from the near-by university and die-hard, past middle-aged nudists, most of whom are men and are gay. On the weekends, it’s packed with naked bodies. Jonathan has long gone past his gawking-at-naked-women phase, and his embarrassment to find very secluded areas. He likes to find a spot to put his towel down where few people are, and he likes his solitude—reading a book, listening to a tape on his Walkman™, going out into the water. On days like this, when he drops acid, he just likes to wander around and think. He’s thinking a lot about Kristine Wilson and their blooming love affair, and his play, and his poems, and the essays he’d like to write, and how he probably should find a job soon before all the saved money he has (which isn’t much) goes away, and how there are things moving around by his feet and legs. He’s in the water, almost dick-high to the water, and he looks down, he sees these black moving shapes. Stingrays, and a lot of them. “Oh shit,” he says, and makes his way out of the water cautiously—telling himself that stingrays don’t sting as long as you shuffle; brush against them, they’ll move away: step on them, they’ll sting you. His heart is beating fast, his mind swirling in LSD, all kinds of crazy thoughts and images popping up like ghouls in a funhouse ride. Finally, he’s out of the water, and he’s safe! A helicopter whizzes overhead. He looks up at it. It’s getting very hot, that’s probably why the stingrays are coming in so close to shore. It’s August. Jonathan thinks his tan is getting dark. Kristine has fair skin, doesn’t seem like she tans easily. Then again, he’s seen pictures of her when she used to live in Arizona, and she has a tan in the photographs. Maybe she needs to get out in the sun more, spend less time trying to run that little theater. She does the day-to-day operations of The Alfred Jarry from three until seven at night; from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon she does administrative work for a dance troupe residing at The Old Globe Theater—the troupe only does three short-run performances a year, but they’re well-funded and well-granted and are in a position to have a few employees. Kristine gets paid ten dollars an hour at the troupe; she only gets a one hundred dollar a week stipend at the Jarry—granted that The Jarry has the money to pay her.
When Kristine finishes her work for The Jarry at seven, she usually goes straight to the theater Thursday through Sunday to make sure things are running well (performance nights). The theater is where Jonathan finds her at seven-fifteen, his skin burning from several hours in the sun, the acid starting to wear off. He’s still pretty high and isn’t even aware of his feet as he walks. Kristine takes one look at him and says he looks dark and he tells her he was at the beach and she asks why he’s here, she’s a little nervous. She takes him aside and says, “Nobody knows yet.”
He’s aware of this. Their affair is still quite new, they’ve only spent three nights together so far. Other members of the theater look at him, look at her.
“Maybe I should go,” he says.
“See the show,” Kristine says. “I have to house manage.”
“I saw it twice.”
“Oh. See it again.”
“No. No. I should go.”
“Don’t go.”
“Is everyone going to the bar after?”
“Probably. You wanna go?”
“No.”
“Jonathan,” she says.
“I want to fuck you,” he says.
“I have to stay here for a while.”
“Come to my place after.”
“No, no. Tell you what, meet me at my place.”
“What am I supposed to do until then? Go crazy?”
She looks around, makes sure no one is watching. She removes a key from her key ring. “Go to my pace and wait.”
He takes the key, a veiled talisman.
“You’ll be there?” she says.
“I’ll be there.”
“It’s my only key. If you’re not there, I’ll be locked out.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Feed my cat, Kat.”
“I will.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
He wants to kiss her, but this is not the place or time. He walks to her cottage. It seems to take longer than normal. The porch light is on. He wonders if any of her neighbors see him going to the door, and question who he is, a stranger who doesn’t belong here. He’s in that last phase of his LSD high where everything still isn’t quite in sync with the real world.
Kat runs up to the porch, rubbing against his leg.
“I have to feed you.”
He goes in. The place is dark. For a moment, he is scared. He turns on the light. Kat leads him to the kitchen and meows. Her food dish is empty. She seems to have no problem with him here. Then again, he’s been here three times. He finds her box of Meow Mix and pours some in her bowl. Kat is happy about this, and eats.
Jonathan explores the cottage. This is the first time he has been alone here. He goes to the bathroom and takes a piss. His urine looks neon yellow to him. He washes his hands and his face. He looks at himself in the mirror. He says to himself, “Okay, you’re not real and you’re not here. And you are on acid.” He goes into the bedroom, looks at the unmade futon, and thinks about having sex with Kristine here. He thinks about Dave having sex with her here as well, not to mention her husband, Kyle, and maybe Kyle had sex with Lisa here too. He wonders how many other men have had sex with Kristine on this futon, knowing that she’s had this futon for almost ten years.
He goes to the fridge, finds two beers. He opens one. He goes to the little alcove where Kristine’s Macintosh resides; out-dated, slow, but better than his own Macintosh.
He wishes there were a TV here, he’s in the mood for TV. Kristine hates TV, she won’t have one in her home, that’s what she has told him. Kat is still eating her cat food. Jonathan looks through her books. Most of the books are plays, individual plays and anthologies, from Samuel Beckett to Sam Shepard to Gene Jenet to Arthur Miller and David Mamet. The selections of fiction range from Raymond Carver to Anne Beattie. He finds a tattered copy of Jerzy Kosinki’s The Painted Bird, a book he hasn’t read in many years, a book whose violent and sexual images still remain in his mind, etched deep. He sits down and leafs through The Painted Bird.
He’s reading, slowly, and then hears footsteps. The screen door opens, Kat runs out, and Kristine comes in—smiling.
“I was worried,” she says.
“Why?”
“I hurried back.”
He says, “I was reading this—I was thinking about literature—I was thinking: ‘What am I doing?’ I was thinking: ‘I need to write more, I need to be great, I’ll never be like Jerzy Kosinski—’” He wants to—he wants to cry—
He knows this is the acid and his deepest fears talking. He stands on his feet. Kristine comes to him, grabs his head, and kisses him—she leads him to the bedroom—they take off each other’s clothes—
Fucking her on acid is something else. He wants to tell her. He just keeps fucking her.
“I had to get home fast,” Kristine says. “I thought I’d go crazy.”
“I dropped acid today,” he says.
“Oh, that’s why,” and she laughs.
“Take acid with me,” kissing her.
“I’ve never done it,” Kristine says, “and I never will.”
“You don’t mind me—?”
“I’ve been around people on acid all through my undergraduate years,” she says, and he remembers the experimental college she told him she went to, where people took LSD all the time.
Kristine says, “I didn’t need to take it. I felt like I was on it just by being around them...”
“This is so fantastic,” he tells her, “you don’t know—”
“I don’t need LSD for that,” she says, kissing him—kissing—
THREE
Fucking her on acid is incredible—the way her skin feels and smells; the way her pussy feels when he sticks his cock inside her. Her pussy is like an alternate universe and he wants to taste it. He pulls out of Kristine and goes down on her. This is something she likes very much. Her cunt is wet and musty and on acid it’s all very swampy and weird and he
He turns her over and spreads her ass.
“What are you doing?” Kristine says.
“I’m going to eat your ass,” he says.
“Oh,” she says, “you’re kinky.”
“It’s not that kinky,” Jonathan says, pressing his tongue into her asshole. It’s dry and puckered, but he knows she’s been fucked in the ass before.
She doesn’t respond much to his licking, not like when he had his tongue pressed into her clit.
He says into her ear, “Do you like anal sex?”
“It’s okay,” she says, “a little too intense sometimes…”
***
Jonathan says, “Tell me about the affair,” lying in the dark with her, the cottage warm—the bed warm—hot—Kat coming in and out of the house—the acid now wearing off—
“Well,” Kristine says. “Why?”
“Entertainment value.”
“Don’t know where to start,” she says, and he tells her to start anywhere and she tells him that she thinks it began—at least her affair with this man, who was a photographer, whose name was Conrad Hollis—the day her second play (Kristine is not only a director, but a playwright herself) was to open at The Jarry (Dave directed it). She was walking around downtown, up and down every block (as she had when her first play at The Jarry, nine months ago, opened, also directed by Dave) (as she had in the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, where another play had opened, starring her future husband, Kyle) and she happened to run into Kyle who was walking to The Jarry and he asked what she was doing. “Oh, I’m doing my walking thing,” she said, and he nodded, because he knew all about her “walking thing” and he said, “Well, I’ll see you there,” and she said, “Okay,” and as he walked away, she looked at him, she looked at his body—he was somewhat overweight and his ass was saggy—and she wondered why the hell she was married to this man, why she’d ever entertained some bizarre notion she loved him, when she never did, and what the fuck was she doing in this city, where he’d dragged her on a whim, and why did she have to suffer because of him? At that moment, that second, she knew she hated Kyle, she knew she never loved him, and she said to herself, “I will have an affair.” She said to herself, “I will fuck some man and get back at him for what he did to me.” The first person she thought about, standing there on the street, was Conrad Hollis. He was fifteen years older than she, tall and lanky, balding and silver-haired, a trice-divorced man who dabbled in the arts. She had recently posed for him on a series of breasts shots, as had other people around the theater—no faces, no identities, just images of the breast—male and female—the human tit alone or caressed, sucked or espied; in Kristine’s case, she’d allowed her minuscule bosom to be photographed in solitude, or with a hand cupped below, or a finger grasping the nipple. These sessions before the camera excited her—and it wasn’t all the artistic pretensions that Hollis placed on the subject matter, but the mere fact that she wanted to be in bed with the man. Kristine had never been particularly attracted to older men—other than some harmless fantasies about a professor or two from college—but she’d entertained some fuck-thoughts regarding Hollis, and walking around downtown that evening, she was as determined to fuck Hollis as much as she had been determined to fuck Jonathan.
The opening of Kristine’s second play went well, most of the seats were filled at The Jarry, and everyone partied after. Kristine got quite drunk, and she was talking to Hollis a lot.
“You’re so pretty,” Hollis said.
“Thanks,” Kristine said. “Do you want to fuck me?”
“Well,” Hollis said, “I think so. Yes.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Kristine said.
She knew she couldn’t just leave like that, with her husband there. She was drunk enough to make a bold move—she pulled Kyle away and said, “When we got married, we said—we agreed—we’d have an open marriage.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said.
“So I’m going home with someone else, okay?”
He wasn’t ready for this. He said, “Kristine—”
“I know about you kissing Kim outside the bar—”
“That means nothing,” he said.
“So does this,” she said, thinking: a kiss, a fuck, what’s the difference?
“How will I know you’re okay?” Kyle said.
“I will be.”
“Who? Who is it?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “We agreed, right? This is our marriage, the way we—”
“Right,” Kyle said.
She wanted to tell him to fuck off and die, she wanted him to fight for her, to beg her not to go. He didn’t. She took Hollis’ hand and said, “C’mon,” and they left the party and at his car he wanted to kiss her and she let him kiss her; but she didn’t like his lips, his tongue, his mouth, his body—
She kissed him anyway, she was drunk enough; and she went home with him. He had a two bedroom house in the suburbs. The sex was okay, nothing to write a ballad about, and when it was over, she thought: Now I’m an adulteress.
He had a funny cock, too – it was long and thin and curved like a bananna.
Conrad’s semen was also runny and left a bad taste in her mouth.
She spent the night and woke up before Conrad. She went home. Kyle was eating cereal for breakfast. He didn’t say a word to her. She desperately wanted him to say something, to tell her what a bad wife she was, to tell her she was dirty. She didn’t feel like a bad wife because she didn’t feel like a wife at all; she didn’t feel dirty because she didn’t feel as if she’d done anything wrong.
Her affair with Conrad lasted six weeks. She saw him two or three times a week.
When she’d leave to see him, and if Kyle was around, she’d say, “Well, I’m going out.”
“Okay,” Kyle would say.
“I’m probably not coming back until morning,” she’d say.
“Oh,” he’d say. “Okay.”
If he wasn’t there, she’d leave a message on the answering machine: “I won’t be home tonight.” She didn’t want him to worry.
And every time she returned, Kyle wouldn’t ask her how she was, wouldn’t say a thing to her; he acted like she wasn’t out having an affair and everything was as it had always been.
Kristine began to wonder if she was having an affair too, if this thing with Conrad had the qualities of such; if her time spent with Conrad wasn’t just a diversion for her unhappiness in the fallacy she called wedlock.
The more time she spent with Conrad, she became aware of why he had three ex-wives, and that he was, all in all, insane. He was a crystal meth addict, for one. The third night she was with him, he revealed this to her, offered her some of the drug. She’d never done meth and was willing to try. She didn’t much care for it: it made her heart jumpy, it made her paranoid, it made her grind her teeth. The drug did make her horny but it was more a cerebral thing than physical. Conrad really liked meth, and did a lot of it. She soon learned that the drug affected his libido, so he often had a difficult time performing. More times than not, he couldn’t achieve or maintain an erection. It was amusing at first, then became pathetic. She tried to help him, using her hand or mouth, to the point of irritation and exhaustion. When he did get a hard-on, he acted so—surprised; pleased and surprised, and proud. It was so sick and sad it made Kristine cry and she kept asking herself: Why am I here? But she didn’t want to go home. She asked herself: Is this better than being with Kyle?
Conrad always felt bad about his constant limp dick, and would try to make up for it by going down on her for hours. She liked the oral sex, he was pretty good with that tongue, and he’d bring her to orgasm several times; but the fact was, she didn’t find anything appealing about the man. She wasn’t sure what had drawn her to him in the first place, other than the desire to be with a man other than Kyle. There were plenty of men around she could be with.
Conrad also liked S/M. Whether this was a symptom of the meth or just his natural predilection, she didn’t know. He was cautious and weary about bringing this up to her—showing her some magazines at first, then a few videos. He wanted to know if she was into S/M. She’d never done anything of the sort, but she was willing to give it a shot. “I’ll try anything once,” she said. He was very happy and excited about this.
He initiated her into S/M gradually: light spankings on the butt, hand-cuffing and blindfolding her when he ate her pussy or—if he could get it up—when he fucked her.
Next, he would tie her up and leave her on the bed, not returning for either minutes or hours, she never knew which. She realized that this was a mental game; the point was: he had complete dominance over her, she was subject to his will and whim. She didn’t mind being immobile and captive for a few hours. She could relax and meditate. She would think about plays she wanted to write, or plays she wanted to direct, like something from Nicky Silver or Anton Checkov.
Sometimes she would lay there tied up and run lines of dialogue from David Mamet plays in her head.
He came to her as she was tied, and he had a cigarette. She’d never seen him smoke before. She wanted to take up smoking again. She wanted that smoke in her lungs, that filter between her lips. He said he was going to burn off the hairs on her nipples with it.
“Okay,” she said.
There was some pain, but more: there was the anticipation of greater pain, the smell of the sizzling hair, the adrenaline rushing up and down her body, the tingling in her spine and on her scalp.
One night, he was typing maniacally on his Compaq laptop and Kristine looked through his stack of S/M magazines, the tied up men and women, the ball gags, the gimp masks, the piercing and tattoos, when she came across a different magazines, old and worn, titled Lollipop Lolitas. The girl on the cover looked very young. Inside, there were many young girls—eight, nine, ten years old—in poses, performing oral sex on adult men, having sex with them. “Oh my goodness,” she said, and dropped the magazine. She went to Conrad. He jumped. She asked what he was writing.
“Another manifesto,” he told her.
She learned that he was creating, in his mind and on his computer, a new religion. She tried reading some of his rantings, but she couldn’t follow his train of thought. Something about computers and the new souls inside the internet, and the year 2014. She thought that if she was tweaking on meth she might understand it.
Okay, she told herself, I have to get out of this affair.
When she left, she told herself she wouldn’t go back, but four days later, she went back, much in the same way that she slept with Dave again after she and Dave said they wouldn’t.
It was pretty much the same: he snorted the meth, he couldn’t get it up, he went down on her, he tied her up and whipped her rear end with a cat o’nine tails, and he worked on his manifesto for a new religion late into the night.
That weekend, he called. From jail. He was frantic. He couldn’t get ahold of his brother, who’d bail him out. He wanted her to call his brother.
“Why were you arrested?” she asked. Kyle was siting across from her in the living room, reading a Lanford Wilson script; he looked up at her.
He told her the truth: suspected child molestation. An eleven year old girl from the neighborhood had been coming by his house recently. She told her mother what they did. “I didn’t force her to do anything,” Conrad said. “You know I don’t use force.”
“What did you do with her?”
“Oh,” he said, “the same things you and I do.”
Kristine felt something tight in her stomach.
“You’re disturbed,” she said.
“My brother,” he said.
“I’ll try to reach your brother,” she said, and hung up.
“Who was that?” Kyle said.
She told her husband the truth.
He smirked. “You sure know how to pick them, K.”
FOUR
“Tell me another kinky story,” Jonathan says.
“You tell me one,” Kristine says.
“I don’t have any.”
“I’m sure you do,” she says.
“I like hearing stories.”
“Kinky stories?”
“Stories with sex,” he says.
“Do you want to hear about the time I got gang-banged?” she says. She sits up, her small breasts at an odd angle. She has a devious glare in her eyes. “Is that kinky enough for you?”
“A gang-bang? When did this happen?”
“I was twenty,” Kristine says. “I was in England. I was an exchange student for a semester. The American girl in London. Or slut. I was an American slut.”
“You? A slut?”
“I had my slutty moments.”
“Tell me more,” Jonathan says.
“I was away from home for the first time, out of the country,” she says. “It was like I was someone else. I got wild. Boy did I get wild. I was fucking a lot of British guys – the one night stand thing. Then there was the night of the party, and the gang-bang.”
“Go on.”
Kristine blushes. “Well,” she says.
“You got fucked by a bunch of the guys at the party?”
“No. I got really drunk and I woke up in this guy’s bed. I was naked, he was naked, and I didn’t know who the hell he was.”
“He was British.”
“He was a British guy with blonde hair. He woke up too, and he got on top of me and started fucking me. I figured well, why not; here I was, I might as well get fucked. Then this other guy walks into the bedroom.”
“You’re making this up.”
“I’m not,” Kristine says.
Jonathan thinks she’s getting turned on, telling this story. “Okay.”
“It was a big house, a lot of these guys lived there and went to the University. When the blonde was done, the guy who’d come in, and watched, said, ‘I want a little bit of that.’ And the blonde guy said, ‘Be my guest.’ He got off the bed. I was thinking, who was he to say ‘be my guest.’ But I was still drunk, I couldn’t move, and I wanted this other guy to fuck me. When he was done, the blonde guy was ready for another go-around. He turned me around and fucked me that way.
“This is when two other fellows came in and said, “Well, look here, is she doing the whole house?’”
“Don’t tell me, more guys came in.”
“There were seven in all. They all took turns fucking me and sticking their cocks into my mouth. I didn’t stop them. It wasn’t rape. I was enjoying the hell out of it. I’d never done it with a bunch of guys before, but I’d had fantasies.”
“Really?”
“Every woman does,” Kristine says.
“Did they fuck you in the ass?” Jonathan says.
“A few did,” she says.
“Did they come in your mouth?”
“A few did.”
“How many times did each guy fuck you?”
“Three or four times, I’m not sure. I didn’t keep track.”
“You were attracted to them all?”
“No, two were repulsive.”
“But you fucked them anyway.”
“Yeah,” Kristine says. There’s something in her eyes. Jonathan knows this memory is turning her on. She says, “When I left, it was getting dark. That’s how long they gang-banged me. I didn’t want to stay. They wanted me to stay. They said they’d call some friends and it’d be quite a party. I learned that I’d fucked two guys – one of them the blonde who started it all – during the party. I was too drunk to remember. They called me a slut. ‘C’mon you little slut,’ they said, ‘stay and fuck some more.’”
“But you left.”
“I wanted to stay,” she says. “I wanted to get fucked by more men. But I was afraid of what I’d become.”
“What?”
“The slut they thought I was, that I wasn’t,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed having those seven guys fuck me for hours. But as I walked back to the dorms on campus – I was in the dorms – I started to feel dirty. I started to feel like that slut. What the hell did I just do? Was I crazy? If there was a bridge nearby, I would have jumped off it. I felt so humilitated. When I got to the dorm, I just went to sleep. I felt better after some sleep.”
“You never did a gang-bang again?” he says.
“No,” she says.
“It makes me hot,” he says, “thinking about all those guys fucking you.”
“Me too.”
“…those seven guys making you suck their dicks.”
“I sucked every one of them,” Kristine says, “I drank all their sperm.”
“Suck my dick you fucking gang-bang whore,” he suddenly says, and Kristine makes a funny sound. He grabs her head and shoves it into his crotch. She eagerly takes his dick her mouth. He forces her head down, makes her take it deep. She gags. It seems she might puke. She tries to move her head up but he won’t let her. Her teeth scrape the skin under the head of his prick – he doesn’t mind the pain. He expects the pain. He comes in her mouth. Grabbing her hair, he pulls her head back, he says, “I want to see my sperm in your mouth,” and she opens her mouth and shows him, spitting some of it out.
“I liked that,” Kristine says.
“Tell me,” he says, “do you still have gang-bang fantasies?”
“Oh yes,” she says.
“Would you do it?”
“Maybe.”
“How many guys do you think you could take?”
She says, “Twenty or thirty.”
FIVE
The night Kristine suggests that Jonathan come live with her so they can be together all the time and make love and drink beer and talk and be happy, he is on acid. Again. It’s one of those days: he goes to the beach, he drops acid. He has a key to her place now and after the beach, the acid wearing off, he goes over to the cottage to take a shower and wait for her to come home. Inside, there is a giant brown moth on the light on the ceiling. It is the biggest moth he has ever seen. It must be a foot long. It’s very brown and has an intricate design on its wings. It looks so majestic. Jonathan just stares at the moth. He sits down and thinks he has a connection to the moth. There is, he knows, a great reason why this moth is here. And how did it get in here? He sees that Kristine left the backdoor open, probably to let air circulate. It’s strange, because while he was on the beach tripping on acid, he felt a great sense of doom, but it was an odd happy-go-lucky kind of doom. He felt that something tremendous and Karenfying would be revealed to him. Jonathan knows, from past experience, that LSD has a way of allowing the mind to manifest things in the real world. He knows that this moth is an extension of his acid brain. He is in love with the moth.
“I’m going to take a shower now,” he tells the moth.
The moth flutters its long wings, as if to say okay.
He closes the back door. He doesn’t want the moth to leave.
In the shower he masturbates, thinking of the moth. He fantasizes about fucking the moth, shoving his dick way up the moth and becoming all the more one with the creature.
When he comes out of the shower, the moth is gone. He looks around for it. He can’t find the moth. He starts feeling anxious.
“Mothra,” he sings, and images of Godzilla fill his head.
Kristine comes home; he starts rambling on about a giant moth. She looks at him like she doesn’t know what to think. She looks at his dilated eyes and says, “You dropped acid today, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
She laughs. “And you want me to believe this giant moth is real?”
“It wasn’t a hallucination!” he cries. “This was a real live in color in the flesh GIANT MOTH!”
“Yeah, right,” she laughs. “Okay, I need a shower now.”
She showers, he lies on the futon, yearning for moths. He wants to cry. He feels frightened. It must be the acid. He knows he wasn’t seeing things. He never hallucinates on acid, that’s just a myth, or a condition of people with weak minds.
He hears Kristine leave the bathroom and go to the kitchen. She screams. He runs to her.
She’s pointing at the wall. She’s naked and dripping wet with water. “The giant moth!”
It’s there, on the wall.
“I told you it was real,” he says, relieved. “I told you so.”
“I’ve never seen a moth,” she says, “so huge.”
“It is weird,” he says.
“Where did it come from?”
“My mind.”
“What?”
“There’s a reason why it’s here.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Kristine says dreamily.
The big brown moth is beautiful. They both gawk like children at the wellspring of wonders. The moth flaps its wings and flies. They both jump back, Kristine and Jonathan. The moth returns to the living room.
“Wow,” Kristine says.
They have to go now. They’re meeting some people at a bar. They say goodbye to the moth.
“I wonder if it’ll be here when we get back,” Jonathan says.
“Where would it go,” Kristine says, “the doors and windows are closed.”
Kristine drives her big old car. Jonathan feels something dreadful again. She gets on the freeway. She says the wheel feels funny. She takes an off-ramp. The wheels screech, he car wobbles, Kristine makes a sound, it seems like she’s losing control. Jonathan has a vision of the car turning over, he and Kristine injured or dead. The vision, for some strange reason, makes him sexually aroused. It’s like something out of a J.G. Ballard novel.
Kristine pulls the car over. “Oh my God. I thought we were going to crash.”
She can’t drive. He gets behind the wheel. He doesn’t really want to drive, not in his condition. Kristine takes a cigarette out of her purse and lights it.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he says.
“Sometimes now and then I have one,” she says. “I used to smoke a lot. I really need this cigarette right now.”
He drives. There is something wrong with the car—the steering wheel pulls, the tires don’t feel right. He thinks the tires are unbalanced and the alignment and axle are messed up, not to mention the suspension. This is a crappy car. She should get rid of it. He asks her why she bought it.
“Kyle got it for me, when we separated,” she tells him. “He took our car, the little Honda, and I told him he had to buy me a car. So he got this car.”
“What did he pay?”
“A thousand.”
“A rip-off,” he says.
“I know.”
They get to the bar, hang out with the people they came to meet, and leave. Half-way there, Jonathan begins to have the hee-bee jeebies. They pass cop cars and he gets paranoid. He thinks the cops have an LSD radar and know he’s coming off the drug and will pull him over and haul him off to jail. He stops the car and tells her he can’t drive, he says it’s the acid, plus he had about five beers at the bar. Kristine, smoking, drives the rest of the way to her home. She takes the backstreets, not the freeway. It takes longer to get home, but it’s safe.
“The moth protected us,” Jonathan announces.
“What?”
“We also died on that off-ramp in an alternate, parallel universe. We could’ve in this universe. The car could’ve flipped over. But I felt the moth protect us. It spread its wings of love and protected us—in this universe.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“You feel it too?”
“Sure.” He wonders if she’s humoring him. He can’t stop thinking of their dead counterparts in the alternate universe. He mourns for those two dead people, and becomes more frightened for the two live people that are in the here and now.
The moth is gone when they go inside. They look everywhere for it and can’t find it. It’s a mystery. Jonathan feels like he’s going to have a nervous breakdown. They go to bed. She wants to make love. He can’t even kiss her. He starts to cry.
“What’s wrong?” she says, holding his head to her chest.
“I don’t know,” he says, his body shaking, “we could’ve died.”
“We didn’t. We’re alive.”