Mr. George Maytemper was a fat man. It was impossible for me to forget Hugh Kinsteares and the nagging sense that I had misled him-for which I deserved, now, damned little from life -but I liked Maytemper. I liked his corpulence-his Falstaffian abdominiousness-and I wondered if the hump of fuck between his thighs was a member as stout as the rest of Maytemper. But this speculation on my part was not the reason we met at Holishank's Bitters and Sprint, a tavern near Oxford at Thudder's Crossing where ladies accompanied by gentlemen were quite welcome without chaperones.
The barmaid, a shrewish, sharp-chinned biddy who answered to the name of Vivian, at last reached our table. Evidently she was on familiar terms with the university man. She ignored me absolutely.
“What will you have, Master Maytemper?” she asked, barely moving her lips. “My usual, Lady Vivian,” he said sardonically.
“Faugh,” she said, half snarl and half grin on her face as she acknowledged the order and exposed her yellow teeth in their last resting place, gums of an unhealthy whitish pink. “And an ale for my companion,” he said. Arms akimbo, she called over her shoulder to the bartender. “Harry,” she said, “a whisky and soda, and an ale.”
She turned back to the Oxford man. “Will that be all, Master Maytemper?” “I daresay, Mistress Vivian,” he said resignedly, the mass of fat about his eyes making gimlets of them. “It's my business to recommend the kidney on the bill of fare,” she said.
“You've done your business, then, Viv.” “No kidney?”
“None.” She stuck out a hip. “As you wish, Master Maytemper.
I'll be along with the chinks by and by.” “I'll be obliged,” he said flatly. After the barmaid had flounced off, he once again turned to me. “You are James's sister, are you not? There's too much resemblance to put me off.” I admitted to the relationship but begged him to keep it a confidence. “Of course, Victoria.
Certainly you're aware that I've already observed a good deal about you. Your voice is a fetching contralto and your carriage is beyond cavil, but I shall have to teach you a good deal in a very short time-even the rudiments of acting are quite complex. Maytemper's Mummers open in As You Like It in Brighton, in precisely four weeks.
I've a frightful impatience, Victoria, and will no doubt on occasion flay you from head to toe-and we shall still be taking a gamble.
Nevertheless, in deference to your bonny brother, I'm game to make the attempt to put you on the boards.” He smiled, and his eyes very nearly vanished amid the fat. “And you?” “I'm game, Maytemper,” I said.
He winced. “George, please.” I shan't bore you, gentle reader, with the details of my theatrical baptism, but there did, at last, arrive the evening when George Maytemper exacted his due-nor was I averse to Maytemper's piping. As a matter of fact, I had been more than sexually abstemious since Hugh's death-I had even actually denied myself the contrition of masturbation. It was as if May-temper were practically to take a virgin… I had maintained my abstemiousness easily enough-I still considered myself figuratively responsible for Hugh's death. At the same time I thought myself fair game for George Maytemper at any time he might decide to make the attempt. I realize that sounds paradoxical, but in the light of what occurred there was no paradox at all… We had just finished going over-for the fifth time-a scene between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and I was exhausted. I was more than ready to return to Hagen House for the night- we had been working, as usual, in Maytemper's rooms, and the early spring humidity had been stifling. I found myself staring in utter fatigue, and yet with some morbid fascination, at some rather peculiar posters Maytemper had brought back with him from his last trip to Paris-the draughtmanship was acidulous, as if the artist had been determined to eat away at his subjects, mainly currently popular cabaret performers. The artist's name was Toulouse-Lautrec, and he seemed to me an extraordinarily sharp, if obscure, observer of the demimondaine. I remarked on it to Maytemper.
“Yes,” Maytemper said, his belly a billow of fat as he sat back in one of his leather armchairs. “The French painters are altogether incomparable these years-there's quite a host of them…” His voice trailed off. “Do you really care, Victoria, at this moment?” “Not really.” 'Then we really ought to get to bed, don't you think?”
“Does that suit you, George?” He spread his hands as if he were opening a fan. “I think so, Victoria. You're terribly attractive, you know. Rather beautiful, come to think of it. I think you'll grace the stage.” “It's good to hear that from you.”
“Not at all. It really has been a pleasure working with you. I don't think you'll ever be a star, really, but your intelligence assures you of featured roles, at the least.” “Very decent of you, George.” He looked down at his fingernails. “I think so,” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “Shall we get on to bed?” “Of course,” I said. It was a night I shall long remember-for a few choice reasons. One of them was Maytemper himself-he proved to have reserves of a practically interminable nature. I never did learn whether they were interminable or no, for it was I, on each occasion I spent with him, who would throw in the breech. George Maytemper was always willing to go on. Of course, that may have had to do with the fact that, as a sexual partner, he was essentially passive-but, then, I am not completely certain of that. “Aggressive” and “passive” are, really, peculiarly slippery terms, for in a universe where there is, actually, no up or down, where there is never an absence of motion-how can one blithely believe that one individual is at a standstill while another is moving? Seemingly still-that was George Maytemper. Was he? Surely the cauldron of cream that seemed with frequent periodicity to geyser out of his spherical pits-surely they were not immobile… “Victoria,” he said-the first time. “Yes?” “You will have to be patient with me.”
“How so?” I asked. “Isn't it obvious?” “Oh,” I said. “The rolls of suet. Obviously the usual posture is ruled out.” I had supposed, of course, that the strictly conventional might prove difficult but, now that I saw George Maytemper in the pure fat of his naked flesh, it became clear to me that only one method was possible-Maytemper was obliged to lie on his back. “What a pretty picture,” I said, gazing down at him. “What you have there, sprouting from a hollow, so to speak, is quite a lightning rod.” I put a finger to pursed lips. “Do you suppose,” I continued, “that the sensualist Ben Franklin got the idea for his lightning rod from his own genital situation? The female, naturally, being the lightning that strikes from above.” So saying, I straddled my brother's friend.
“Are you about to strike?” he asked. He pouted. I had never seen Maytemper pout before-I supposed that in this sort of situation he pouted aside all inhibitions. “No,” I said. “The lightning is first going to play for a little while about one of your structures.
And it seems a very stout structure indeed, standing as it does without any visible means of support.” I grinned at my wit-I would refine it. “An erection may be defined as any member standing without visible means of support,” I said. Maytemper laughed grudgingly.
“A woman of beauty with humor,” he said. “A most extraordinary combination. Not to mention the saucy manner in which your black hairsprings contribute a small creek to your navel.” “That stirs you, does it?” “Aye, Victoria.” He was being quite candid. A series of throbs, like a powerful pillar being shaken, overtook Maytemper's battering-ram and produced a liquid pearl at the aperture.
“Such effusions can be quite useful,” I said. “How so?”
Maytemper asked as he pawed my swaying breasts, depressing the nipples. This was the first inkling that something had gone wrong-ordinarily, if anyone makes free with my nipples, a dizzying lubrication takes place at my abdomen's black delta and I am straightway an idiot ready to be mauled, pinched, masticated and penetrated by any instrument at hand, be it a male's natural virility or a dildo. On this occasion, however, I felt not in any scintilla erotic, nor did I in any way feel sensations of pain. On the contrary, I felt dry and numb. I frowned. “I can use your perfect pearl,” I said, “to make the tributary to my navel glisten as it never has before.” “Please do,” George Maytemper said. “I am at your service, Victoria.” I did more than make that tributary glisten-I applied May-temper's glutinous substance to my undistended pudenda, another sign that all was not well. My sangfroid was undisturbed.
I took the necessary further steps to prove or disprove the state of my sexual being. But I was in no great haste. George Maytemper was. “Victoria-” “Yes?” “I shall have to urge you to keep pace.” I had been consciously giving the impression to George that I was relishing each individual step. After all, Victoria Collins is, whatever she's not, very much of a human person, and my thespian mentor had been thoroughly persuaded that I was slowly savoring every aspect of our conjunction. Now, of course, I could easily promote the impression that I could ecstatically race down to the finish line. “I will keep pace, George.” “Ah,” said he.
Twice more he said “ah", each time as if he had received a jolt. I wasn't sure. The fabled Shakespeare himself in his plays has used three accented monosyllables in sequence to gain intensely dramatic effects. I myself, in order to convince George, had thrown back my head-I looked all the world like some figure of a female on the prow of a New England clipper ship-and was making some imbecilic sounds in my nose-throat system. Curious, I had never known how imbecilic I must have sounded on prior occasions until this experience with George Maytemper in which I was creating a role of feeling everything while I felt nothing. After his third “ah,” he said, “Victoria-” He sounded as if he were choking, and I did not know what to do about that. I did say, “Yes?” even as I had before, but I did not believe the interchange would be as before. I continued to rise and fall on his elephantine tusk as if I were a special emissary alternating between the down-draughts to Hell and the up-draughts to Heaven, but there was no pounding in my ears. I was as ice.
“Victoria…” He sounded now as if he were gargling.
“What is it, George?” “What is it?” he echoed laboriously, his lips writhing. For the purposes of verisimilitude I thought I had better anticipate him. “Are you there?” I asked.
“Quite,” he said in something of a strangled fashion. “Like Mt.
Vesuvius or some fireplug sprinkler.” “Vesuvius, for God's sake-Victoria-Victoria-Victoria-” His mouth was open and his eyes were shut. He was as if in a convulsion. And, at the proper moment, when I felt his tidal wave break over my apparatus, I screamed.
George Maytemper smiled… I smiled back. I even lingered over his lingam. I made sure-to be vulgar but precise over the matter-that he was cleaned out. He quivered, not once-but many times, then and later. I gave him the extremely clear impression that I coincided with him all the way and that we stopped only when dawn broke not because his testicular production had gone bankrupt but because I was all fucked out-I thought I should have the grace to tell George that, and I did. He beamed-higher praise he had never received.
The strange thing was that I had authentically striven to gain the same pleasure that he was experiencing-and that I had signally failed. That night I was not fucked out. I was never fucked in. As the night had worn on, my numbness had persisted in the face of George Maytemper's shish-kebab, a near-Eastern dish of considerable pungency whose shape and form, en brochette, most nearly approximated his cock. It mattered not in the least how often I skewered myself with Maytemper's brochette-I was as if frozen. And the more I worried over this sexual state of nonbeing, the colder my responses became-if that were possible. It took no profound glimpse into my psyche for me to understand that I must be punishing myself by feeling guilty for having caused my only love's death-Hugh Kinsteare's. Although I had quite sensibly realized that I was not to be held culpable, there was something within me that singled me out for blame- almost as if I had to suffer for having dared fall in love.
What was really transpiring within my depths was quite simple-I was being frigid because I was in mourning and, when my grief would cease, then and only then would my sexual excitement revive. But I understood that only years later. Who could have foretold that a great Dane would end my grief? In the meantime I was frightened by my lack of sexual response and I took every opportunity to attempt to dissipate it. I not only went periodically to bed with the producer of Maytemper's Mummers-George Maytemper himself-but also with the leading man, Henry Quibbling, and the leading lady, Sylvia Knox-Drendendorff.
As a matter of fact, while we were touring Sussex-and I was acquitting myself admirably on the boards, receiving excellent notices in the local sheets-the juvenile lead, Stanley Widdemer, fell head-over-cock in love with me. It was in Brighton-I shall never forget, for reasons which shall shortly become clear-where Stanley, taking advantage of our surprisingly long run there, declared his undying passion for me.
We were both in our bathing clothes and strolling hand-in-hand along the shallows late that hot July morning, desultorily collecting seashells and within moments contemptuously tossing them back to whatever denizens of the deeps were there to catch them. I managed to blush prettily at Stanley's declaration and, observing the massive crowding in the crotch of his bathing clothes, I bethought myself that perhaps Stanley Widdemer might be in possession of the magic wand or, better, that Excalibur which, plunged into the core of my femaleness, might unseat the icy demon there. Accordingly I made the appropriately senseless sounds and led Stanley to an equally appropriate locus in the hollow of a dune, out of sight of the sea and of the stately, white-faced Georgian residences looking out upon the eternal waters, their windows winking in the midday sun. Stanley Widdemer was a tall lad, thin to the point of emaciation, who had that kind of open-faced, naive countenance that the many middle-aged ladies in our Maytemper's Mummers afternoon audience fell cooingly in love with. I rather felt, myself, that I was about to corrupt a minor, even though the lad was some half-dozen years older than I. Corrupt if you can, I told myself-this may be the key, literally, to unlock Victoria Collins's box. The hell with Pandora's. My own was much more apropos-where one might encounter the shrunken heads of phalli suitably mounted, a much more fascinating exhibit than any big-game hunter's trophy room, on the backgrounds of the natives' brush. Let us hope, thought I, that Stanley Widdemer's phallus will be worth the capture. As the saying goes, I minced no actions. As soon as we had embraced and kissed, Stanley having no trouble in persuading me to endure the sand, I felt for what might be called-if mild exaggeration may be permitted-the cloverleaf creature of Stanley's manhood. I swiftly unbuttoned the fly of Stanley's bathing shorts and inserted a cool hand that instantly came in contact with some highly heated ragout-I do not minimize the amount of thick sauce that Stanley in his fervent eagerness had already spilled. But he quickly reconstituted himself and in a moment he had me on my back on the sand under the mercilessly bright sun. During the whole process I cannot remember anything more vivid than my desire that a bumbershoot spread its benevolent and cooling shadow over the proceedings. An umbrella would at least have kept the sun out of my eyes. Of course, I did try to align myself with the shadow Stanley made, but that was essentially futile since I had obviously no maneuverability beyond the pit of my own making in the sand-a pit which, under the stress of Stanley, I was making deeper and not wider. Oh, for a bumbershoot, I cried within my concupiscent self-if I must counterfeit passion, let it be in a shadier world. And I was, believe me, patient reader, counterfeiting passion. I snorted, I purred. I made choking sounds, whistling sounds, nasal sounds. I screeched, I gargled, I hummed. I yipped, I ya-hooed, I yammered-forgive me my use of the occasional Americanism, but our ex-subjects across the sea do have a decided bent on occasion for the vivid verb and, altogether, for the mot juste. As I was saying, as far as sound was concerned, I gave my sexual all. I was a double concerto, for God's sake. I was seventy-seven horses' arses, simultaneously farting a broadside. I was a gymnast of unparalleled parallel bars-and, mind you, all the time enduring the grinding, knife-gnashing particles of sand penetrating my navel, my yoni and my anus, not to mention the sweaty grains of sand that Stanley brought to my mouth with his, and not to mention the dune streaking my black tresses. Yes-the juvenile lead pounded at me mercilessly. His phallus, in more responsive instances, would have been well worth the capture. As it was… As it was. Yes. Well, here it is. In one of the lulls Stanley Widdemer said, “Victoria?”
“That's my name,” I said brightly. “Victoria,” he said again, as if to roll the syllables around in his spit.
“Precisely,” I said. “Victoria-” I thought for a moment I was taking leave of my senses, but it was Stanley Widdemer in the flesh and leaning on mine. It was terribly hot there behind the sand ridge and in the pit of the dune. Even salt water splashed on my loony brow would have been a boon. Anyhow, what I said was, “Yes, Stanley?” “I love you, Victoria.” He was being candid, I knew, but candor does not necessarily go jerk-in-hand with truth.
Besides, the juvenile lead might be giving me a problem-I wanted no second affair. One was sufficient, George Maytemper was quite enough on that score. But I saw no out other-than to be brutal, and I decided to try that. “Yes,” I said. “Didn't you convey that to me before we dwelt in the sand?” “Yes,” he said mutedly. I wasn't finished. Love, I thought, love. Love was what I needed-to inspire a coronary thrombosis and a dead prick in a live cunt. Exactly what I needed. “About love,” I said, taking up needle and thread.
“Yes, my darling?” Oh Christ in a hammock, I thought. Oh desperate Ben Jon-son displaying the spoils of his vocabulary. Did you hear that jockless “my darling”? “Stanley,” said I, “about love-do you love your mother?” He paled beneath his freckles. “I don't quite make you out, Victoria. Naturally, I love my mother, but what has that to do with-” “Oh,” I interrupted, “I'm sorry, Stanley-I didn't know your mother had died.” He paled a second time, and hardly anything but freckles could be seen. We were obviously down to bone. His adam's apple jiggled a few times before he could attach sound to words. “She's alive,” he said, horrified.
And he really was. He collapsed in my yoni faster than bubbles from goldfish ghosts in a metaphysical pond. He slipped out and, with his back against the rise in the dune, said-gaining strength by the moment- “Is there any bar to my loving her living rather than dead?”
He peered down at me quizzically. “I must say, Victoria, you are rather a strange one, but in spite of that I do love you, you know.”
He stared at my brilliant, nacreous nakedness in the sun and, as his eye tarried at the dense black curls of my delta, the cylindrical lizzard between his thighs-cowed only a little while before-began now to twitch. It was always to me a fascinating progression.
Twitch. Little brief leaps into the air, the penis like a terribly young ballet boy. Then the cock, rearing-crowing at full blush. Rampant. Tyrannical. The master baton.
Heavily throbbing, its jowls the testicles. The prince cock.
The monarch of all the ova he surveys- King Cock! Bow down, he cries, bow down. And I thought I might indeed be ready to bow down. Watching King Cock swelling and showing me its underbelly, as of a leviathan, methought I detected an answering ache in my gut. Actually, that was simply hunger for a good meal, but so intent was I on fracturing my frigidity that I did not want to recognize another elemental force at work. Thus-I bowed down.
In Brighton, Sussex, I took his Cornish promontory into my mouth.
It was good to chew on but gently, gently, dear reader. One must not promote panic in the sensitive male. One does not imply, no matter how sharply one at times feels it, that the male is about to be castrated. On the contrary, one implies, if one can, that it is a supreme privilege to be worthy of the male genitals. I thus implied with Stanley Widdemer. I swabbed my mouth with his uncircumcised plume and from moment to moment, as I salivated copiously, I gazed up adoringly with my green eyes at the groaning juvenile lead. He was convulsively clutching at the sand, his head arched back, his shoulders hunched. The feeling I had was that the juvenile lead was at my mercy. Thereupon I disgorged Stanley's naming blubber and took it into my hands, toying with it.
Stanley then looked like a fish out of water as I rolled his blubber between the palms of my hands under the metallic blue sky. I could hear the distant thunder of the surf. He made several attempts to disengage himself from my hands by seizing one of my breasts, but all I had to do to loosen his hold was to run my thumbnail several times from the base of his promontory to the crown. Then, making interesting infantile gurglings, some of which sounded distinctly like “mama, mama, mama,” he released my teat and sank back on the sand.
As if in slight but unmistakable punishment, I gave his distended music roll a light slap. Stanley Widdemer mooed. It was not the expansive moo of a cow. It was the somewhat curtailed moo the human male makes when he is figuratively, as the American would have it, hogtied. In ordinary circumstances I would at such a point have exploded. I would have thrown myself on Stanley Widdemer and bellowed for him to plunge in his lightning rod and shock the living piss out of me. But these were not ordinary circumstances. In the heat of the Brighton sun I was refrigerated. I was glacial.
And, I guess, I was being masochistic-I kept seeing Hugh Kinsteare's face, the blondness of his hair, the sweetness of his features, the ripple of his musculature. I wanted to weep, I wanted to sob unrelievedly. Instead, I grimaced. Instead, I made a small gouge into Widdemer's prick-and he writhed there on the sand in the noonday sun as though he were a snake gone utterly berserk. But no drums beat in me. No bagpipes skirled.
And I was only casually interested in the creature there on the sand making a bloody spectacle of himself. The sand was sweat-smeared all over him. He resembled, somehow, a praying mantis but he was not half so fierce. And he was disproportionately bloated between his legs-I was having rather morbid ideas, I must confess. The distended corpse of the prick, I thought. The two-by-four with delusions of grandeur. The sperm-logged belaying pin. A graduated inflation of a thermometer, marked off with empurpled degrees of passion… Then I heard Stanley whisper. “Finish me off, Victoria.” I sniggered. I felt as if I were the coldest bitch in the world. I felt as if I had Jesus Christ Himself disheveled there in the pit of the dune. “The truth, Stanley, the truth-” “Anything. But hurry.” His breathing was a rasp. His buttocks squirmed. “Do you really love me, Stanley? The truth, please. I'll know if you're lying.” “You will finish me off, then, will you not?” “Yes.”
“It is a he that I love you, Victoria.” “A large lie, Stanley?” “Yes.” “A fat, maggoty lie?” “Yes, Victoria.”
“And what was the he, Stanley?” “A ploy.” “An age-old stratagem to lure both male and female into the zodiac of fuck, so to speak, Stanley?” “So to speak.” “Do you love your mother, Stanley?” Silence. I flicked a forefinger at his balls. He winced, but his erection remained undismayed. “Yes,” he said. “I love my mother.” Then he wrapped a fist about his charger and began to thrust with his loins. I waited, amused. What I expected, occurred. He groaned, stopped. “Victoria,” he said.
“Yes?” “If I think about my mother, I'll never come,” he said. His voice held a note of hysteria. Ah, those juvenile leads.
“I'll simply have a permanent erection. I can't stand that.” “All right, Stanley. You have been truthful, and you may possibly present an impressive and stimulating picture.” I had bethought to myself, gentle reader, that the sight of sperm pumping out of the male generative organ might conceivably stimulate me. It was easily done-the pumping, I mean. I coolly took Stanley's redoubtable ark in hand, bent it back so that its dorsal side was flush with his belly, and I exerted simple pressure against his apparatus with the heel of my hand. Stanley's mouth gaped. His eyeballs rolled upward. He bleated. And I applied a little more pressure. He bleated a second time. I increased the pressure. He bleated a third time-and then he shipped a flood. It was as if a tidal wave had accumulated within his testicles and were now smashing through Stanley Widdemer's grand canal. I directed the flood toward the parched sand, but I felt nothing more than a mild disdain. My groin-to stretch a figure- continued to yawn at sex. The juvenile lead smiled at me-gratefully. I lifted an eyebrow and reconstituted myself in my bathing clothes. I might just as well, I thought, go back to the hotel and rejoin the rest of Maytemper's Mummers. There certainly was no point in collecting empty shells any more. The ghost of Kinsteares continued to rule my sexual roost.