LOOKING FOR AN EASIER WAY. 5-31-10
Roy Garde.
Jeremy Witherspoon liked to play tennis every chance that he got and he loved sun bathing too so every summer when his mother moved to her house in the Hamptons he often turned up there on Saturdays to use the tennis court and the swimming pool and then to lie around in a chaise lounge where he stayed until the sun went down before driving back to his apartment in town.
He had several friends who played at his level and they all liked to be invited to join him at weekends but one Friday he found that they’d all be busy elsewhere so, after practice at the club in town and after showering, when he happened to see the club pro who he’d just played having a beer in the bar he offered him five hundred dollars to go to the Hamptons with him the following day for a game and a swim. They arranged a time and a pick up point before going their separate ways.
When they got out there they practiced for a while and then played three sets and the pro won the first one easily, 6 – 2, and then, diplomatically because he wanted to be invited again, lost the next two, 5 – 7; 4 – 6. He wanted to be asked back not only for the money but also because he was highly impressed with the house and its grounds and the Olympic sized pool with its attractive and impressive stone surrounds and easy access to a nearly empty beach.
The pro, Cliff, congratulated Jeremy on clearly getting stronger as the game went on and Jeremy agreed and told him that maybe he should work out more.
They’d worked up a healthy sweat so they showered and then changed into bathing suits and, as already promised, used the pool to cool down. Afterwards Jeremy dried off and then slathered sun lotion all over himself and announced that, as warned, he was going to settle in for hours of broiling during which the only movements he was going to make would be of the rotisserie kind.
His guest’s full name was Cliff Lewis and he didn’t like to lie in the sun at all because, surprisingly seeing that his skin was dark brown, he’d developed polyps on his shoulders when he was a teenager and had been warned to limit the amount of exposure that he got.
Even so, he had to stick around because Jeremy was his ride home so he pulled on his t-shirt and then found some shade and he positioned a chair there and he sat and admired the big red brick house with its turreted wings and its immaculate lawns and shrubbery and ornamental trees and the clever way that the pool surrounds had been melded in with the whole.
He had played four sports in high school and had been good at all of them. His best game was tennis but when he began entering tournaments he found out quickly that his service return was nowhere near good enough at that level and his opponents always found that out quickly too and he lost a whole lot of games 15 – 40 and a whole lot of sets 6 – 7 (4) and consequently he had to abandon his hopes and because he was the principle provider for his extended family he had to accept the fact he’d have to find and hold a conventional job. He was reminded about having to make the painful decision every Friday when he was given his pay check because it contained between three and four hundred dollars as compared to the tens of thousands that he would have made at tennis tournaments if his reactions were a little quicker.
After several years of working, it was in a meat distributing plant in the Bronx, he lucked into being offered a part time job as a club pro at a tony club over on the west side which fitted in with his life nicely because his day job was from five in the morning to noon.
He didn’t get a salary from the tennis club because it was one of those situations – like being the doorman at a busy luxury hotel – in which the tips are so generous that they attract, and keep, applicants who are willing to work without fixed wages.
He’d show up for at the club at one o’clock in the afternoon and he’d hit a ball around with other club pros until a member needed someone to play with and after that the management rules were pretty simple: He’d be expected to win the first set 6 – 2 or 6 – 3 to demonstrate his ability and then lose the second one 4 – 6 to entice the member to ask for a third set – his bill for the day would be based on the number of complete sets that he played – which the pro was ‘advised’ to lose 5 – 7, or like that, to keep his opponent happy and, not a bit coincidentally, to sweeten the size of his tip.
He made out so well with gratuities that he was able to give his mother his entire pay check from his day job which was a huge – uh – relief for her because she’d been landed with the responsibility of feeding and housing her large family and Cliff’s was the only regular money that she could count on.
Another rule was that club pros were not allowed to fraternize with members but when it got to be common knowledge that one of them was both well hung and discrete he’d often luck into being slipped a piece of paper that had the woman’s cell phone number written on it.
Cliff got them regularly because he was very well hung indeed and the word got around. The first few times he called the number that same evening and each time the woman in question arranged things so that they could be alone in her apartment and he never got any complaints about the quality of his service game.
However, he always had a lot of trouble with accepting the necessity of having to tell the doorman of the woman’s building that he was a Cable TV guy, or something similar, and that he was expected in apartment 26 C, or some such, and then, after that information had been transmitted to, and verified by, apt 22 C, he’d be told something like “go out of the Lobby to the street and then turn right and go around the side of the building and down the ramp to the service entrance and then ask the service elevator operator to take you up to the 22nd floor.”
Sure, the sex would be red hot on the first few times but it would inevitably cool down and it would stop pulling enough weight to make the woman want to keep up her deviousness with her friends and family and she’d start to put him off when he called, “Oh! It’s you Cliff. Listen dear, I’m sorry but I can’t see you this week I’m far too busy. Call me next week will you? Thank you dear. I’m so looking forward to being with you again. ‘Bye.” And then he’d call one day and he’d get the message, “We are sorry but the number you called, ‘ – – – – – – – – – – ’ is no longer in service.” He knew that if he was foolish enough to go around to her building – which he did once when the woman in question was wonderful in so many ways that he couldn’t get her out of his head – he’d be told something similar to what he’d been told that night by the doorman after he’d called her apartment on the house phone, “I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs. Witherspoon is not receiving visitors.” And that would, very definitely, be that.
One of his never-to-be-forgotten adventures in the pseudo-escort business – before it soured for him permanently – began one afternoon when he found that a ‘trial member’ – that’s a visitor who’d been recommended by a club member and he or she was allowed to come in and check the place out before joining – had picked him for tuition. That particular ‘trial member’ turned out to be a woman of around fifty who was wearing a brand new standard tennis outfit and she was carrying a brand new racket of the latest design.
She had booked the court that was isolated from the others and it soon became very obvious why. Not only did she not know, or much care, about tennis but she didn’t have the necessary wrist power to handle the racquet properly either and so their practicing session resembled ping-pong more than tennis and she could manage that only because her racquet was state of the art.
Mercifully, she’d had enough after ten minutes or so and she said so and then she walked over to his side and gave him a card that had her cell phone number on it and she boldly asked him to call her, “soon, please.”
When he did so later that night she suggested that they have a tryst in her place and they agreed that he’d come around the next day, it would be Wednesday, at between seven and seven thirty.
Her place turned out to be a five-story brown-house on the east side of sixty sixth street. It had an elevator and as she was escorting him to it he saw that just about every horizontal surface on the way was supporting a piece of modern art that was surprisingly – to him – both appealing and arresting, and thus interesting. Similarly, but less interesting to him, just about every vertical surface was covered with paintings that were mostly abstract and merited only a cursory look.
His frequent stops to admire the things he came on told of his interest and so she told him that later, when he was leaving, he should walk down the stairs, instead of taking the elevator, and check out all the rooms on each floor because every one of them had been ‘similarly cluttered up by my late husband.’
She surprised him by wanting all of the lights to be put out before she undressed and so they both did so in the dark and as he was doing so he made a ‘friendly’ enquiry about her family and she told him that she had one son and two daughters. His interest wasn’t friendly at all in that he didn’t care a bit about the size of her family but only about the size of her vagina in that being well aware of being overly well hung he knew that that could bring down serious complications on the woman that could well ruin both of their evenings! However, he knew for sure that if at least one baby’s head had pushed its way down and out of her birth canal then he would have had to be rigged like a horse to hurt her seriously enough to bring the proceedings to a disastrous halt.
When he closed with her on the bed she got to be very aware of the size of what she’d have to deal with but instead of gasping or balking she surprised him by congratulating him and then, mysteriously, saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” to herself.
Her body was lithe and spare and although he’d known at first touch that her breasts had been ‘augmented’ he pretended not to know and she was happy with not knowing whether he knew that she knew that he knew.
He guessed that he was being subjected to some kind of a test but he didn’t have to fake anything – which he never had to on the first time with any woman anyway – and he enjoyed the experience because her body was comely and it had just the right amount of adipose covering its bones that made it interesting and warm and soft and, yes, alluring and there was also something else – he’d been intrigued to find out that she didn’t have a racist nor a snobbish bone in her body and consequently they were man and woman in that bed and nothing else and when they were resting afterwards he found that she was genuinely interested in finding all about what made a working class black man tick.
He knew that he’d passed her test, if there had been one, because when he was holding her on top of him afterwards she lifted her head and kissed his mouth and then asked him to please come up to her house in Westchester on the coming weekend.
He followed her suggestion about walking down the stairs on his way out and he checked out all the rooms on each floor whose doors weren’t closed and he was both astonished and somehow dismayed on finding out that one family could own such treasures and keep them for their own private enjoyment.
She was waiting for him at the front door when he got down there and she clearly wasn’t a bit annoyed at being kept waiting because she kissed him nicely before opening the door for him and as she was reminding him about the weekend she pushed a small velvet covered box into his hand and then thanked him yet again as he stepped out onto the sidewalk.
He didn’t open the box until he got home and inside it was a pair of gold cufflinks that had the initials ‘NYY’ picked out with square diamonds. He cared nothing about the Yankees – and hadn’t done so since the Steinbrenner shenanigans – but the heft and the design of the cufflinks was very pleasing.
When he got to her house on the Friday evening he found that it was a huge mansion and that it stood in grounds that seemed to be as big as Central Park, which was, it so happened, close to both of their homes in the city although they were located at opposite ends of it in more ways than one.
It turned out that she was living there alone and that she’d given all of her staff the weekend off and that meant that, because she’d lost her shyness as soon as he’d gotten to ‘know her’ in her town house, they could get naked right away and stay that way as long as it suited them.
Because it wasn’t their first time they were able to get right at it and it got to be really steamy and as the time went by he took steps to find out exactly how far he could stretch her inhibitions because he wanted to get to the bottom, as it were, of why he was finding such rapport with her. He found that he wanted to do everything that there is to do and she went along with it all.
When they’d slept for a while she told him that there was a catered meal laid out in the dining room for them and on hearing that he became instantly hungry.
Because of the rapport that they were still feeling for each other they couldn’t stop touching each other and it didn’t take much cajoling on his part to get her to go along with something that he’d seen on TV and it became the first time, and the last for both of them, that they ate assorted cut meats and salad with a woman’s body, hers, as the plate. He was ultra careful when he had to wield a fork and never dared to use a knife.
It was also the first and last time that he was given a spoon to ‘fish’ for quail eggs that were buried in a huge bowl of caviar. He also found out what ‘duck breasts in aspic’ is and how to eat ‘asparagus in curdled butter sauce’ – but not why – and he was introduced to several elaborate ways to ruin perfectly good staple foods.
They slept that night locked in each other’s arms, after a lot more shared explorations and experiments, on the thick rug that was in front of the fireplace in what she called the green room – he guessed that they had to resort to using colors to avoid having to say, in exasperation, “Yes, I’ll meet you after tea in the first floor living room that’s beyond the library and to the side of the main drawing room.”
After breakfast of two boiled eggs and toast, which she made for him albeit awkwardly from lack of practice, and after reading the papers, she got him to sit facing her and her face had a rueful look on it as she told him that she wanted to make a confession, “Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t enjoy last night – indeed, I don’t remember ever having a more satisfying one – but the main reason that I asked you up here was because you are ideally suited to help me do my favorite thing with a man. Oh, please don’t be alarmed Cliff dear, I assure you that it’s perfectly innocuous – indeed, compared to some of the things that I’m now very aware that you have a proclivity for it is downright mundane, although, let me hasten to explain again, I am by no means complaining about anything, anything at all, that happened between us last night and, in fact, as I’ve already said it was wonderful and I feel a certain awe when I recall your expertise and your endurance. Well, to get back to what I was saying, the best descriptive word that I can give to what I want us to do is, ‘frolic.’ ”
“How’s that again? Frolic?”
“Well, I’d much prefer to show you what I want rather than talk about it and, in fact, we’d be on our way to doing it right at this very minute except for a miscalculation of mine. I got carried away by your enthusiasm last night and consequently my – uh – my lower central region, that is, my entire pelvic area is very sore and so, regretfully, we’ll have postpone our frolic until next weekend when I’ll have – uh – recovered some.
“I’m very sorry about this, Cliff, really I am and I’m even more sorry about what I have to ask you to do for me now.
“Well, here it is, please be kind enough to go home right now because it will be far too difficult for me to have you here while not being able to touch you. Please? Do you understand me?”
“Sure, I understand but please tell me something about this frolic of yours. I surely can’t be expected to wonder about it for an entire week.”
“Thank you for understanding and you’re quite right, I should tell you what it’s all about and why it’s important for me. Well, this is it – for many years now I’ve had a recurring fantasy about being naked with a man in a nest that we’ve made together in a field of wild flowers in amongst tall grass and we practice some love play in it and then, when we’re both ready but especially the man, I want him to stand up and then lift me up and lower me so that I’m – uh – impaled and then he carries me without using his hands – which will mean that the only thing supporting me will be his – uh – his member plus the friction between our pelvic bones – into a copse of trees and then circle some, or all, of them and as he passes each one he has to push my back hard against the bark of it and stay still for a minute or two and then, when we’ve gone full circle, he carries me back to our nest where we make savage love.
“There. I’ve told you. Does it seem too bizarre? Have I turned you off? Oh, I sincerely hope not Cliff because the thing of it is that this fantasy of mine has strengthened over the years so much so that every detail is now vivid in my mind’s eye and I’m forced to go through the complete procedure just about every night before I can go to sleep.
“I got to be so obsessed with the project that several years ago I made my grounds-man plough up a part of one of our fields that’s down by the river, next to a copse of trees that’s always been there, and I sowed it with seeds of flowers that are native to these parts and I also scattered some tall grass seed.
“Well, I guess you’re asking yourself why didn’t I get my darling husband involved and the reason is that although he knew about my strange need and was sympathetic all along it was only after he’d seen what I’d done down by the river that he realized how serious I was about the whole thing and he agreed to help me then.
“Lamentably, when we experimented in our bedroom, we found that he didn’t have the – uh – the right equipment and so we had to give up on it after just one attempt.
“Well, the poor man died nearly a year ago but my obsession didn’t and so when a distant cousin of his – he’s been making eyes at me ever since I’ve known him – came onto me about three months after the funeral I called his bluff and he – uh – he too came up – uh – short! That left me bereft, as you’d imagine, and my health began to deteriorate so much that a good friend of mine demanded to know what was wrong and when I’d, reluctantly but to avoid self-destruction, told her all about it she, luckily, knew that her tennis club’s pros were, uh, helpful that way and – well – you know the rest.
“So, Cliff dear. Please say that you’ll come back here next Saturday. Please? I really don’t want to have to go through this again and yet neither do I want to go through the rest of my life with this obsession raging in me.”
“You can count on it.”
She rushed over to him and reigned kisses on his mouth and face for a while and when she’d calmed a little she sat next to him and, hesitantly, suggested that maybe it would be best if he came back at around noon on the next Saturday rather than on Friday night and that way they’d avoid making the same mistake twice.
She saw him to the front door and she kissed him on both cheeks and thanked him yet again and when he had opened the door she remembered that she’d been told about having to offer a ‘sweetener’ to the man and so she asked him to wait a minute because, “There’s something that I want to give you.”
When she came back she was holding a heavy gold money clip that had a crest on it and it was – well – it was clipping money. There were five one hundred dollar bills in it and as she handed it to him she spoke hurriedly to stop him from protesting.
“This was my husband’s – he called it his ‘stand-by cash’ – and it’s been in his bedside table drawer for – oh – for twenty or thirty years. Well, he never needed it and I never will either and it is kind of cluttering up the place and so I want you to have it. Please don’t be offended by the cash. I thought about taking it out and just giving you the clip but it seemed a bit silly because – well – cash belongs in it, right? That’s what it’s for, for heaven’s sake. Please take it Cliff. You’ll please me no end if you do.”
When he called her to confirm their date she said that she was looking forward to it and she reminded him that he was to come around not on Friday but on Saturday at lunch time and that he knew why that was.
He did remember why and it made sense and so he got there at noon and when he’d dropped off his shoulder bag they went to the kitchen and she opened the refrigerator and he helped her to carry out three trays of catered food to the dining room table, which was set formally for two.
There were four wonderful looking T-bone steaks, which they decided to cook up for dinner that night and so he put them back in the fridge, and the rest of it looked like it could supply a Saturday morning shopping session at Zabar’s. She’d evidently noted, the week before, his derision regarding over elaborate dishes because although there were heaping helpings of many kinds of meat and fish and cheese and pickles and olives and – etc. – they were all presented straight forwardly.
Neither of them ate much nor did they touch the various breads because they were well aware that they’d both be better able to deal with the coming heavy ‘frolicing’ much better if they weren’t lethargic from having too full a belly.
When they got out to the designated area in the field he tramped around trampling a circle to make their ‘nest’ and then she put the blanket in the middle of it and then they got undressed and laid themselves down on it.
When she told him, tremulously because the coming event had obsessed her for years by then, that she was ready and eager to go – it had been very obvious to them both for some time by then that he was – he stood up and helped her up and then he lifted her body up and lowered it until she was fully impaled.
He had to take time to find the best ‘set’ of his body for supporting her and when he’d done so it was her turn to experiment and she let go of his shoulders and she bent her spine and forced her legs to arch backwards and up which also made her upper body lean away from him. Then she spread her arms and made like an angel and then, in his turn, Cliff slowly eased his hands away from her bottom and he re-adjusted his legs and then he too spread his arms and she was delighted to find that her long cherished hopes were actually happening to her in that she was entirely supported by a man’s member.
He had to replace his hands on her buttocks when it got to be time to move towards the trees because he had to pick a path through the tall grass but she stayed as she was with her limbs splayed out.
With his very first step she realized with delight that an unexpected bonus was presenting itself in that every step of his gave her a jolt at her core that came at her both metaphorically and physically – the physical part was hardly surprising seeing that he was rove all the way up that same core – and she reveled in the marvelous feeling so much that when he got to the first of the dozen or so tree trunks – they were mostly sugar maples but there was at least one oak and an interesting knobbly paper-bark maple and he’d picked them out to form the circuit that she wanted him to walk around with her on board – and had pressed her back and bottom against it the roughness of bark pained her and the shock triggered her into having an intense orgasm.
He waited until she’d gotten herself together enough to urge him on to the next tree and he did so and with the same result.
By the time that they’d made their connection with the fourth tree in the circle she was totally satiated and when it was obvious that she wouldn’t be coming back down to the here and now any time soon he eased her up and off him and then he carried her conventionally back to the circle in the grass and flowers.
He put her down on the blanket and waited, impatiently, for her to come back to the present to let him take steps to give himself a climax of his own.
When she was able to open up for him she did so and he hurt her because of his heavy need to get it done ASAP but she found it easy to forgive him because even though she unselfishly tried hard to stay aware enough to make it as good as was possible for him yet another benefit came to her when his ejaculation sent her over the top yet again.
They lay still and entwined and content until they both realized that they were ravenously hungry and Cliff said that he felt as if he’d been smoking munchy weed all afternoon.
On the walk back to the house she couldn’t hold hands with him because she felt so loose that she figured she’d better hug herself to be sure that she wouldn’t dissolve but she asked him what he’d meant by ‘smoking munchy weed.’
He couldn’t believe that she’d never heard of it – nor, it turned out, had she ever heard of the other two kinds of marijuana – so he explained that if a group of people get together and smoked munchy joints for a while the host had better have a good supply of cheese and crackers or bread and spread – or the like – on hand otherwise they’d start eating his furniture and the window sills and the door too if it was made of wood.
She asked what the other kinds are and he told her how music seemed to come out of the loudspeakers and flowed down the walls when you used the ‘beat’ stuff and how all kinds of music seemed very different – he told her that when he’d heard ‘Yellow Submarine’ when he was appropriately high his dislike for it turned into raging approval in a matter of seconds.
That left the ‘horny’ variety and he summarized its effect by telling her that if a guy was invited to a party where that was being used he’d better bring his woman with him and if he was moved to get it on with one of the other women present, as was often known to happen, he’d better understand that that meant that access to his woman was legit for anyone present so inclined.
She asked him what else should she know about ‘weed’ and he told that it was very important in working men’s lives – at least that applied in Harlem – in that every Friday afternoon when he got home from work a man wants to relax into the weekend and that meant either a six pack of beer or two three-dollar joints.
She asked why didn’t they use vodka and he told her that if they had a family they couldn’t afford bottled liquor and pay the rent and buy food and pay the bills but they could spring six bucks or so for a nice high.
She asked about the drug war and he laughed in derision. “Those assholes, or their wives most likely, tried prohibition once and you know how long that lasted and what it brought them. No, it’s a joke. You know what? The very cops who are employed in that famous war like as not have a stash of it at home for use on Friday nights too! They know that it’s benign and that it’s the perfect pressure relief valve for us all but ‘they’ are listening to their wives again.”
When they got back to the house and had pulled the trays of food out of the fridge they took them to the dining room where they set to and fairly demolished the beautifully arranged food in short order.
Afterwards, they rested for a while on the sofa in one of the sitting rooms and when their stomachs had dealt with most of what they’d been stuffed with they sat up and they both knew, without having to say a word, that there was no way on God’s earth that they could ever come close to topping their experience of the afternoon and that it should be allowed to stand on its own and, to that end, t’would be best if he went home.
When he was about to open the front door she said, “Oh, wait! Those T-bone steaks. You must take them with you because there’s no way that I could eat even one of them. Please wait here.”
She found a sturdy shopping bag and she put an ice pack in the bottom of it and the steaks on top of that and then she put another ice pack on top of them and then she pondered for a while and then she made room on the bottom of the bag so that a bottle of champagne could sit there nicely and then she added a bottle of olives and another one of pickled onions that had come with the food and that they’d overlooked and then she spread a tea towel on top of it all and tucked it in to stop the various glass surfaces from touching each other.
When she got back to him she handed over the bag of goodies and then she took a small box from her pocket and she told him that she wanted him to have it.
Inside was a heavy antique Rolex wrist-watch that was made of solid gold and it had an expanding bracelet of the same metal.
He protested that it was an expensive antique and a family heirloom and her children would surely want to keep it in the family but she answered, “My father gave it to my husband just before we drove off on our honeymoon so it’s not yet an heirloom and it’ll take about sixty-odd years before it gets to be an antique and, besides that, my children all have far too many things already hanging around and cluttering up their homes. Please take it, Cliff. Please? To make me happy?
“Good.”
“Oh, listen. It wasn’t engraved for my husband and I didn’t get it done for you beforehand because I couldn’t know how our time together in the fields and the woods would go. Well, now I know that it went spectacularly well so I want you to get it engraved with what I’ve written on this card.”
She handed it to him and he read, ‘For C. From J. I’ll never forget.’
“I was going to add some more words,” she said, “but when I paused to think of them it came to me that what I’d already written only needed a full stop. I mean it. I never will forget nor will I ever stop being grateful to you and not just because I’ll be able to sleep at nights from now on but because you’ve done the nearly impossible by making me content with my gender, at last.”
Cliff was really sorry to not have her in his life anymore but he knew better than to contact her again and he went back to accepting gratuities, and assignations, for several months after that but eventually the pain and the humiliation that was generated by each inevitable rejection affected him so much that, after one particularly unanticipated and overly brusque and near-public brush-off, the balancing scales came down heavily, and stayed down, on this side of self-pride and from then on he’d politely accept the slips of paper that were handed to him but he’d drop them in a garbage bin a little later without so much as reading the number that was written on them.
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Jeremy’s mother had seen them both arrive and had noticed that her son’s partner was not only someone who was new to her but was also an impressively large black man. Neither of those facts concerned her much until she saw, when she glanced down at the tennis court a half hour later as she was undressing to take the two hour afternoon nap that enabled her to stay up until two a.m. to watch mindless but entertaining TV as she sipped vodka, that the man was playing with unusual grace.
She slipped a robe on and then went to the west wing that had a balcony that overlooked the court and she stayed there, watching but unseen, while the two men played.
In the second set the level, and the gracefulness, of the stranger’s play mysteriously lessened and became ordinarily plodding so she went back to her bedroom.
She found it difficult to go to sleep, which was unusual for her, but she forced herself to stay in bed because she figured that resting had to be nearly as good as sleep and anyway she had nothing else to do and she knew that if she wandered around the house she’d be drawn to the liquor cabinet as surely as a honey bee is drawn to a patch of multi-colored, multi-perfumed flowers.
She tried to think nice thoughts but the image of a big black man dressed in silly but fashionable white shorts, the kind that came halfway down his calves, and a white t-shirt – who was running full out but full of grace to make a particularly smooth return of a lob that would have probably fallen inside the base line – kept showing up, over and over, and each time it elbowed aside all the thoughts about her darling, recently born grand-daughter that she tried to keep in the front of her mind.
When the clock told her that it was time to get up she went back to the window and she saw that the tennis game was over and that both of the players were sitting by the pool.
She saw that her son was lying out in the strong sun, no surprise there, and that the young black man was sitting in the shade and even from as far away as she was she could see that the poor man was bored silly. When she saw him resorting to read the tag on the cushion that he was sitting on she felt that as his hostess she was duty bound to go down and offer him some lemonade and maybe some magazines or the use of her library while he was waiting for her sun-worshiping son to quit and drive him home.
She was about to put on the gray slacks and light gray blouse that she had worn that morning when something made her change her mind. She walked naked over to her dressing room and she took up her ‘personalized’ perfume and she sprayed a little at her hair and then she sprayed a cloud of it into the air in front of her and then stepped into it and let it settle on her skin for a little longer than was her norm.
She arranged her hair in an intricate, but easy to do, weave that she’d often been told both suited her face and made her look younger and then she picked out her favorite day dress, a light green silk one, from her wardrobe and she put on some sandals with half heels that had been hideously expensive but that lifted her spirits every time that she so much as saw them.
She fastened on a choker necklace of fresh water pearls to divert eyes from the lines under her chin that botox could do nothing for and then she went to the refrigerator and took out the jug of lemonade that her cook prepared for her every Friday before leaving for the weekend. She poured out two glasses of it and then she found a tray and realized at the same time that she couldn’t carry it and magazines all that way so the magazines stayed in the rack.
She walked on past the stranger’s chair and when she got to her son’s chair she put the tray down and said hello and then asked him if he’d had a good game.
He said, ”Hi, Mom,” and grunted a reply about the game and then roused himself enough to say, “This is Cliff and he’s a pro and I beat him fair and square,” and then he went back to absorbing rays.
She’d often told friends that she thought that this son of hers had to have been conceived on a beach under the tropical sun somewhere although she knew exactly where and when it had happened because she had carefully planned his, her second and last child, arrival so as to save her marriage.
She took up the other glass of lemonade and walked back to where Cliff was sitting.
He had been watching her since she’d left the house and he’d noted, with approval, that she was elegant indeed. She was slim but not gaunt and she had graying hair that was done up in one of those Scandinavian twist affairs. She was wearing a silky dress that was light green and that matched her casual, but clearly expensive, slippers. He saw that three fingers on each of her hands had rings on them and one was a black opal with diamonds and one a ruby with diamonds and the others were arrangements of diamonds. She was wearing a thick necklace of pearls that had gold threads in it and gold fittings. Also, he’d become very aware of her perfume when she’d walked past him and again when she came back.
He stood up and introduced himself and accepted with thanks the glass of lemonade and then he thanked her again when she invited him to come up to the house to find something to read. When he’d half drained the glass they began to walk back the way that she had come and he paused at a little glass table and emptied his glass and then left it there.
His delay meant that the woman got to be twenty-odd feet in front of him and as he hurried to catch up he saw how her dress failed to hide the movements of her haunches with their long thighbones and allowed him to see clearly the muscles in her buttocks that were writhing and squirming like a prowling panther’s muscles do. He slowed so as to enjoy more of it.
When he saw a well-dressed and suave women like her at the tennis club he felt that she’d wandered into a country that was foreign to her, as he did at that moment. When he’d been a star in high school he’d attracted plenty of relatively affluent girls but most of them had lost interest in him when they found out that he’d decided against going to college and the others had drifted away when it got to be obvious that he wasn’t going to make it in a professional sport.
Jeremy’s mother was heading for the open French windows and he caught up with her just as she got to the four steps that led up to the tiled patio that ran around that side of the house and he offered her his arm.
At the pool she’d seen that his legs and his arms were covered in a kind of fuzz but aside from noticing it, and thinking idly that his whole body was probably similarly clad, it hadn’t made nearly as much of an impression on her as had the fact that the bathing suit that her son had loaned him was the clinging type, not quite a speedo but close, and consequently she could clearly see the several parts of his manhood when he’d gotten to his feet in front of her – she knew that it was safe for her to stare because by standing up to greet her the sun got to be squarely in his eyes and consequently he couldn’t know where her gaze was directed – and she’d seen that its central component was improbably big. It was at least twice the size that her husband’s had been when fully erect and the fact that this one was lolling at ease was evident because it had a bend in it a halfway along and the top half favored leaning over to his left, that is to her right.
Her disdain for the male member began in earnest when she was horrified to find that her two sons sometimes got erections when they were having their diapers changed. When she summoned enough courage to ask her pediatrician about it, just after her second son had exhibited the same trait, he told her that it was simply Nature testing out their equipment and his answer helped her with dealing with that and more broadly too because she figured that if all males get erections at that tender age then clearly it was little wonder that they were obsessed with them all through their lives.
She’d had a sexually demanding husband and so when her sons showed signs of having inherited his traits she got bored with the seeming sameness of one-track-thinking males. Her husband had always been inordinately proud of every erection that he’d ever produced and he’d never failed to insist on presenting it to her as if it was a trophy before closing with her. From the first night of their honeymoon she’d had to learn to keep still and suffer through long sessions of frottage and as the years went by he’d insisted on more and more participation by her and she’d learned how to felate him – but never to the point of ejaculation, God forbid! – and to help him to masturbate all the way to that point on the nights when she couldn’t accommodate him ordinarily due to the time of the month or to her being full up with a baby or with suffocating ennui. He had, from the beginning, insisted that he couldn’t go to sleep – even if they’d just had intercourse – unless she held his penis and time had made that so automatic and so familiar to her that for weeks after he’d left she took a hair brush to bed with her whose handle felt about right. When she’d managed to break that habit she swore to herself that she’d never so much as look at another penis for the rest of her life no matter about handle or accommodate one.
When she put her hand on Cliff’s offered forearm, just before climbing the steps, she found that the bright sun was aiding her vision and she saw that what she’d taken for fuzz was, up close, a mat of fine black hair and she could pick out every individual one. Her white skin contrasted starkly with his dark skin and she saw how her fingers formed four valleys in his hair, which curled around and up and seemed to be clutching at them. Besides being thrilled at the knowledge that she was touching the skin of a black man for the first time in her life it came to her that what she was looking down at was an ensemble that consisted of a human connection and a distinct contrast in colors along with very fine detailing. Taken together they formed one of those compilations that all artists try to portray and all photographers try to capture.
Seeing it, while knowing that her hand was forming a part of the tableau, affected her strangely and not, she had to accept, only in an art-appreciation way. Its effect grew and got to be acute and it made her stop moving, when both of her feet were on the third step, so as to give her time to analyze the feeling and although she’d known at once that it was pleasing it took her another second or two to realize that what she felt was arousal! Sexual arousal that started deep in her loins.
She was astonished. It had been a long, long time.
She stood stock-still and the feeling changed from being pleasantly innocuous and went through several stages until it arrived at full-blown lust and out-and-out yearning for a meaning-full connection.
Cliff looked at her face when she’d stopped moving up the steps and he saw and recognized the stages that she was going through including the final one. It was unmistakable – there before his eyes was slack jawed, lip quivering, wide-eyed, open-mouthed-panting lust such as he’d only ever seen before when a woman that he was pounding away at had finally opened up completely for him and had become so caught up in experiencing the pleasure that was coming at her that she’d become incapable of helping him any more, except vocally, with his driving quest to get it done.
He was delighted. When he’d been with rich white women before he’d always known that he was with them under contrived circumstances and they’d both know that she’d have to find a way to compensate him discreetly and appropriately when it, or rather, when she was done – that way they’d both know what the score was and that not knowing it could quickly call up messy complications – but that was then and this was now and this elegant and all-round comely and desirable woman was his for the taking for the right reason for once – mutual attraction. Also, he liked the idea of making love far more than reading about it in a book.
To further that end, he removed her hand from his arm and then he put his own hand squarely on her shoulders and gently but surely propelled her up over the last step and then towards the house. She had little control of her limbs and, indeed, it seemed to her that her legs only moved in order to provide transportation for her center as it moved forward clearly hoping to be directed to someplace private, and soon, where its suddenly opened up void could get filled.
Cliff didn’t want her son to see her using that peculiar gait, he might have come to investigate, and so he used his body to shield her from view.
When he’d pulled the sliding window closed behind them he moved back to her side and he put his hand up to her neck and got confirmation of the state that she was in when she pushed her body back to get more pressure from his touch and then, when his other hand had searched out and found and cupped one of her breasts, for a final test, she fairly melted with desire and he had to support her as he made his way through the room and into a hall and then up a central stairway. At the top he asked which way was her bedroom and she, unsure of her voice, nodded to the right and he moved that way until he came to an open doorway and saw that there was a huge bed in the room and was thus clearly what he was looking for. He guided her into it and found that the room was so big that the king sized bed took up less that a quarter of it and so it needed to have a lot of furniture in it that is rarely seen in a bedroom – like a full sized desk complete with its high backed chair and, on the other side of the room, an arrangement of sofas and upholstered chairs that faced each other to facilitate conversation – he estimated that it was bigger than his parents’ entire apartment.
He put her down on the bed and when he straightened up she saw that his member was no longer leaning to his left, and to her right, but was straight up and down and was twice the size that it had been down at the pool and seeing it made her aware that she was no longer indifferent about the sameness of male behavior and she found that she didn’t want that to change one little bit. At least, not until this particular one had been fully employed in the erstwhile boring now eagerly anticipated, age-old, long-as-life-itself routine for her.
He moved around the room pulling curtains and he left the last ones a little way open so as to have enough light to find his way back to her.
She had enough awareness left to know, with a sinking heart, why he’d paused to draw the curtains at all and she also knew that what she was doing was wrong and stupid and even dangerous but knowing all of that that didn’t stop her from finding the strength to obey her deeply felt needs which commanded her to sit up and take her shoes off and then her dress.
Cliff carefully eased his bathing suit off and then he did the same thing to her panties and then joined her on the bed.
He got into position and paused and hovered over her to give her time and space to find the end of his penis and then introduce it to her entrance, and was, as usual, happy to hear her gasp in surprise that bordered on fear when her touch confirmed what her eyes had already told her.
He penetrated her easily enough at first but when he was maybe three inches inside her he had to stop because he realized that she’d become as tight as a virgin.
He’d been with several virgins in his relatively long love life and knew that they cried out with pain when he stretched and then broke their hymens and that they didn’t stop crying as he forced his way on in but, even so, they had all also urged him to continue by pulling at him with their hands while going through, he guessed, a mixture of acute pain and fundamental pleasure combined with a need to get their initiation completed once and for all. With this new woman the reverse happened. She’d groaned with very real pleasure when the head had penetrated her but had then cried out in very real pain after taking a few inches of his shaft and that continued all the time that he was striving to make their pelvis bones meet and do some grinding together.
On her part she’d known enough to put her ankles up onto his back to get to be fully open for him but even with that, and combined with her massive need to get her void filled, the acute pain that he was subjecting her to made it very difficult for her to keep on keeping on.
He’d thought that it would have been ‘slam bang thank you mar’m’ the first time and that the real love making would start with a lot of love play proceeding their second go around but her obvious distress made him slow down and he tried ‘learning on the job’ to find out what she needed from him. He found it truly difficult to understand what was happening seeing that she was a mother and so, when you get right down to it, what he was using as a love canal had been a birth canal at least once, and had passed a baby’s head on through, so why was she so tight?
Suddenly a possible solution came to him and he reached down to her belly and he felt for and found the scars of Caesarian birth and the mystery was solved. Except for one query – how small must the penis of her husband have been to have entered her, probably hundreds of times, and yet had clearly left a very minor impression of its comings and goings?
Flushed with cognitive success he took time to ponder some more and he made a bet with himself that if one of the drawers of her bedside table was holding a vibrator it would be just that, a head with a vibrator. The kind that isn’t designed for penetration purposes. Even one with a medium sized shaft would have opened her up some and the reason for her not having one was beyond his comprehension and he hoped that he’d get to know her well enough eventually to be able to ask her about it.
While he was caught up in his searching-for-a-solution détente he had been barely moving and because of her reaction to that it came to him that barely moving was what she needed because it caused her much less pain and then he realized that that was exactly what he needed too because the tiny amount of action was giving him an inordinate amount of pleasure. He examined the phenomena and did some experimenting and he found that moving back and fore as little as a quarter of an inch was sublime for him because she was so on-going-ly tight in there that his foreskin was being forced back and then made to creep back up into place on its own when he eased off a little. He delighted in the new sensation and he was careful to control himself so as to continue experiencing it.
On her part, she’d been positive sure that the agony that he’d caused her at first would force her to demand that he pull out and get off her but something kept making her keep still and take it ‘just one more time’ and, after a while, the intense pain eased and the action got to be nearly bearable for her and then she realized that that was because he was only moving enough to make for tiny gains and losses of territory between frequent pauses and, a few minutes later – lo and behold! – she realized that the pleas that she was hearing that were telling that him that he wasn’t to stop were coming from her own mouth.
When she’d verified that as being the actual fact it thrilled her to know that, given time and given that he’d be a gentleman about it and would work up to it slowly, she just might be able to take all that he had ‘normally’ and would be able to match his maleness and win the game every time because she’d be able to tame his monster and could do so over and over for as many times as was required.
It turned out that he had to bring it all to an end too quickly for her because the excitement of finding this new, exquisite, titillating experience brought him to a peak and he found it difficult to stay in control and, soon after that, impossible.
Just before he came he started shouting and cursing – using words that she had only read in novels – but just as she felt herself getting flooded she found release too and she copied him and shouted out – inadvertently she thought but even so she couldn’t help correcting his grammar and changing and redirecting its alarming and unfortunate references to his mother so what she shouted out was, “Yes! Yes! You womanfucker. Fuck me, baby. Fuck me really hard, you womanfucker.”
When he was able to pull out of her without having the cold air get at the most tender part of his most tender part he rolled to one side and then turned to hold her close and when she’d calmed he asked her if Jeremy ever came up to her bedroom to look for her and she told him, dreamingly, that yes but only when the sun was about to go down and that that would be around seven thirty and what did the illuminated clock say? He told her that it said ten after five and she said, “Well then.” and then went back into her reverie.
He turned her on to her side facing away from him and then cuddled up to her and he reached for one of her breasts and was relieved to find that it was small enough to not sag and at the same time it was big enough to feel good and kind of defenseless in his palm as he was weighing it. He knew that most rich women take good care of themselves and eat right and exercise regularly and so he let his hand do some exploring and he found smooth flesh everywhere and that handling her soft little bulge of belly was particularly pleasing. He knew then that if their relationship lasted for a while, as he fervently hoped it would, he would never have to avert his eyes from her body but only from her face and her neck and her inner arms. He probed her hair with his nose and smelt her perfume which, he now realized, had lavender and rose in it but there was another essence that was elusive but intriguingly ever present and when he kissed her smooth shoulder he found it there too and guessed that she, like other women that he’d met who were affluent too, bathed with soap, or whatever, whose base contained the same scent and that, similarly, her body lotion and talcum powder and all the rest of her arsenal did too.
He knew from long experience that if he’d had a totally satisfying first bout with her he’d need around thirty minutes to get it up again but their session hadn’t been satisfying for him at all because he’d had to stay aware through most of it instead of being able to indulge himself and drive all out and get so exhausted by doing so that he’d have had to be allowed to wallow for a long time. Because of that he felt himself start to get hard again after only about fifteen minutes.
It grew and grew and he knew that she’d been aware of its presence from the start because she’d kind of tensed up. Eventually it got to be so eager that it was trying to enter her under its own volition.
She stayed stock still as if the elephant wasn’t in the room but when she gave in to the certain knowledge that it wasn’t going to go away on its own she put her hand on top of his, which was cupping one of her breasts, and she said, “Clifford dear?”
His name was Cliff and he had no idea where the ‘ford’ part had come from but so be it he thought and he grunted a reply so that she’d go on.
“Clifford, please take it away from me. I’d really like to do it again but you’ve hurt me so much inside that I can’t possibly let you. I’m sorry but you do understand, don’t you dear?”
He’d heard the same thing before but it had been easy to deal with every time. He’d say, “That’s OK baby.” and then he’d turn on to his back and fling the covers aside and then he’d reach for one of her hands and he’d put it onto his dick and then he’d say, “Well now, I guess that you’ll have to go on down and give me some head, baby. No way we can let it stay like that.” And they’d all always either oblige him that way or they’d capitulate and open up to offer it shelter.
But that wouldn’t do with this particular white bitch, now would it?
Would it? He had to do something, right?
He eased away from her and then turned onto his back and said, ”Look over here, please. See what I’ve got here? Touch it – – – There, well now, we really can’t leave it like this, now can we?”
She got recalled to her duty. After what they’d already done she was in no position to refuse him and, after all, she had invited him to her bed which surely meant that she had to do the right thing by him for at least as long as he was in it and while they were both naked.
She resignedly sat up and moved to him but it quickly became clear to her that what had been good enough for her husband was hopelessly inadequate when faced with such tremendous fire-power and he had to help her find ways to get it done.
When it was over she found that she’d learned – and had accepted the good logic in the fact – that if you’re going to do it at all you should do it well. And she’d also learned, to her surprise, that, like coffee, the taste of semen is less pungent than its smell.
When all was quiet again he wanted to have her lying full on him and so he lifted her up and it took so little effort that it reminded him that all of the girls that he’d made out with when he and they had been in their early teens had been as lithe and supple as this woman and had had just a little layer of fat under their smooth skin and over their bones, again just like this one did, but that now nearly all of them had had two or three babies and weighed as much as he did.
On top of that, all of the females in his extended family were big women, as were most of the ones outside of it that he could also call on for ‘benefits’ from time to time, so what he wanted to do, and had wanted to do from the time that he’d been down at the pool and had seen this woman’s haunches reaching and tightening and easing as she moved away from him so purposefully in that green dress, was – after having screwed her a couple of times of course – to get to have her skinny body full on his and in a position where he could feel her ribs and her hip bones and her neck bones and her spine and, when he’d had his fill of that and knew that he’d remember how they felt, he wanted to be able to hold and play with and smooth and caress her fine, fine, classy little tight ass and all the while breathe in her marvelous perfume.
His hand movements slowed more and more but they kept on until it came to him that he was doing it to stay in contact with her not just because he really liked being able to caress her smooth skin and not just because by doing so she could not move away from him but mostly because he knew that by having one hand touching her so intimately at all times he was certain sure that the elegant woman in the fine green dress who had appeared to be unimaginably unreachable by him just an hour earlier was, at this moment, indisputably his woman no matter how you wanted to cut it.
She seemed to have fallen asleep and he almost followed her example until something made him come-to with a start and he saw that the time was after six o’clock.
He eased her off him and he got up and pulled on his bathing suit and his t-shirt and then he covered her up and kissed her cheek and searched out another wisp of her perfume and then he walked to the door.
He put his hand on the doorknob and was in the act of turning it when he heard, “Clifford, please wait.”
He walked back to her so that she wouldn’t have to raise her voice and as he did so he saw her sit up and reach to open a drawer in her side table and seeing her breasts spill and tumble and wobble abruptly moved him and he had to restrain himself from going to their aid. She took out a pad and a pen and she wrote something on the top sheet and then ripped it off and folded it in half.
She handed him the piece of paper and when he took it she held on to his fingers and when he looked a question at her she asked him to sit on the bed for a minute.
It so happened that both of their hands got to rest on one of his, in her eyes, impossibly massive thighs and she had the fleeting thought that could anyone, least of all her, have possibly imagined yesterday that today she’d be not only touching the naked thigh of a black man but of a black man who had already had sexual intercourse with her and whose semen she’d swallowed after actually attempting to take his penis into her mouth.
She quickly pushed those thoughts away because she wanted to say something important to him that would affect both of their lives profoundly.
“My husband used to go at me like a madman and nothing, nothing in this world, would have held him back from going in and out as fast as was humanly possible, and I used to marvel at the huge amount of energy that the otherwise mild mannered man was using and I’d feel sad at knowing that it obviously didn’t matter a whit to him which woman he was using and that he didn’t want even a tiny bit of help from whomsoever she was. It truly was man against woman for him.
“But with us, you were patient with me and we combined to defeat it together. Man with woman.
“And later, when you cradled me on top of you and caressed my body and my bottom so lovingly for so long, I realized that I’d never in my life felt so safe and so – uh – cherished and – yes – so loved. We were truly man and woman. I didn’t let myself go to sleep when you were doing that because I badly need to figure out how we came to be in that sublime situation where we were close to being one person.
“I eventually worked out what we have to do to be able to get back to that ideal state whenever we want to.
“Here it is:
“I want you to teach me to do all the things that you like having done for you and to you so that I can make your need and your drive more intense and thus your, and our, final satisfaction deeper and more prolonged.
“In a word I want to be your woman – – – – – – – your loving, capable woman.
“Well now, I know that it can’t be a long term thing. That would be ridiculous wouldn’t it? With our difference in ages? What I want is, well you already know what I want to happen over the long term, but what I want right this minute is for you to take this piece of paper. It has my cell phone number on it. I’ll need several days to heal inside but before next weekend I’m going to move back to the city where I’ll be nearer to you and I want you to call me there and I’ll tell you when it will be best for you to come and see me. Dear, dear Clifford. Please tell me that you’ll call me.”
She started crying and he stood up and then leaned over to pull the duvet, that had been pushed to one side earlier to clear the decks for action, up to her chin and then he kissed away her tears and then he searched in her hair for another wisp of her perfume and then he kissed her mouth lightly and said, “Believe me. I’ll call.” And he actually meant it.
He had to restrain himself from shouting with joy at his good luck as he went down the stairs on his way out of the house. Not only did he now have access to all of this but what else too? A town house in Manhattan for sure and, maybe, he’d even get to find out where and what Aspen is? There had to be a whole lot more too. But, besides that, he was being given access to a sweet smelling, soft skinned, white woman with a wondrous ass who he was going to be able make into a custom fit for himself and who wanted him to teach her to do what he liked best to make him get to be harder than hard!
By the time he got to the French windows reality had settled back in.
He knew that it couldn’t last and even though she was very enthusiastic she had close to no idea how difficult it would be for them to stay together for any length of time
On top of his disappointment he was saddened to know, yet again, that his fondest dream – being able to tell his supervisor when he got to work on the Monday morning, “I quit. Go fuck yourself.” – was, once again, out of the question.
In his little cabin he put his own clothes on and then went back to his chair in the shade and he sat and waited patiently for his ride back to the city and to a subway station where he could get a train up to the projects where he lived with his parents and two other families – they were more-or-less relatives – in a three bedroom apartment. Bad as it was it could get to be much worse as he well knew because across from his apartment was a two bedroom one in which no less than five adults and seven teen-agers, and who knew how many babies, had been living together for years and the whole lot were going to be evicted at the end of the month because a rival dealer had snitched on a fourteen year old boy living there and a packet of eighths and another one of dime bags had been found in a hole that had been knocked in the plaster board in his corner of the living room where he slept on a little cot as did three of his brothers.
He looked over and saw that Jeremy had hardly touched his lemonade and he was thirsty but he didn’t go over and take it because he told himself that he should follow the customs of his affluent tennis opponent’s life style and he figured that such a thing just wasn’t done.
He looked over at the guy’s supine body and resentment filled his throat like bile as he remembered what he’d told him after he’d deliberately lost to him earlier on. “You should work out more.” Really? In his job in the trucking department of a wholesale meat market he had to unload sides of beef for seven straight hours every day of the week and he got a pretty thorough work out from that, thank you.
He though again about the hopelessness of having a lasting affair with Jeremy’s mother and he pulled the piece of paper from his pocket that had her cell phone number on it and he ripped it into little pieces and let them slip through his fingers onto the floor between his legs.
He was still sitting in the same place a half hour later and Jeremy was showing no signs of calling it a day and he couldn’t help but start fuming at the unfairness of it all and he promised himself that the next time that he was invited here to play tennis he’d come in his own car and he’d beat him 6 – 2; 6 – 1 and if he demanded a third set it would end, 6 – 0.
And then, after that, he’d go up and, when he’d turned Jeremy’s mother’s bones into jelly and had her total compliance he’d move her out onto the balcony that was overlooking the pool and he’d get her to lean forward onto the railing and then he’d enter her from behind and he’d play her and tantalize her until she threw convention to the wind and then, when she started calling out to him to give it to her even harder, he’d coerce her into using the full version when she quoted him – that is, employ the twelve letter descriptive term of what he was rather than the six letter one – and to shout it out repeatedly and loud enough to wake her son so that he got to see that she was describing the situation correctly.
He was so pleased with his wit that he came close to laughing out loud but then he looked down and he saw that a breeze had come in from the sea and was actively engaged in blowing the pieces of paper in Jeremy’s direction so he hurried to pick them all up and when he’d retrieved every one of them he carefully placed them all in his side pocket.
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