“We’ve got all night, baby,” she crooned to him as she held him to her breast. “And when you’re through with me, I’m going to take this”—she found the bulge in his pants and traced it with her fingers and squeezed.
She let go with a gasp, twisting away from him and snatching at her dress, just as a pair of headlights slashed the air. Above them the blazing blue gelatinous light atop a police cruiser flashed like a spaceship that had just settled to Earth.
Behind an overbright flashlight with a querying beam came a steady wide-awake voice.
“There’s no parking on the dune, folks.”
The flashlight swept across Ava’s face — the smudged lipstick, the wisps of dangling hair — and briefly Steadman’s. They were disheveled but dressed, and both of them so formal. In a tidying motion the beam lighted the empty front seat.
“You the owner of this vehicle, sir?”
Keeping his head down, hiding his hands, Steadman said yes, the car was his.
“Good. Now I want you to get out of the vehicle very slowly and show me your license and registration.”
“What for?” Ava said.
“Please do as I say.”
Steadman did not object. He flicked his wallet and found his license in a plastic sleeve, but as he swung the car door open and stepped out, he stumbled, and in a defensive reflex the cop jumped backward in what seemed a practiced move, clasping the handle of his pistol and directing his flashlight at Steadman’s face and gaping white eyes.
“He’s blind, Officer.”
As Steadman’s dead eyes accused him, the cop seemed unsure now, and he was startled into ignoring the license. He turned his flashlight from Steadman’s face to Ava’s. “You okay, ma’am?”
“This is a special occasion, Officer.” In the interval of the policeman’s confusion, she had adjusted her dress and smoothed her hair, though she looked more than ever like a prom date, rumpled, demure.
“You look kind of familiar. I’ve seen you.”
“The hospital.”
“Right. Emergency. You’re the doctor.” With each statement he became more polite. “And you’re the writer. I’ve heard about you.”
Steadman simply stared, looking ghoulish.
The policeman switched off his flashlight, another mark of respect, and said, “Sorry, folks, I thought you were summer people.”
After he had gone, Ava said, “That was perfect. Now let’s go home.”
“No,” Steadman said, touching her as he spoke, and with his touch finding a fragrance.
Sliding one hand beneath the hem of her gown, embracing her and delving into her bodice, fingering her cupped breast, he knew what she wanted from her sighs of encouragement. And when he found her warm damp panties he parted them, and clasped the wetness of her folds, stroked those lips, all the while kissing her face and murmuring into her mouth.
“Oh, yes,” she said, reaching down to guide his fingers, steadying them and chafing herself with them once again. Then through her teeth she spoke into his mouth, insisting, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and seemed to thrash inside her dress as she gripped his hand, and the rustling of the cloth aroused him as much as her voice.
A scratching on the metal of the car, the stiff leaves and thorns of a rosebush nudged by the night breeze, was strangely rhythmic — maybe the car was rocking against it? The sound was like a cat’s claws. Then it was gone, lost in Ava’s choking, as she came with a great grunt and gasp, as though, thrusting the orgasm from her body, she were giving birth to it.
They lay there breathless for a while. The claw-scratch returned on the car door. Steadman lifted himself to the window to make sure it was no more than a rose bush. The mass of blossoms was blue in the fluorescence of moonlight.
Ava, too, was luminous. She lay as if ravished, and blue-white like a fresh corpse in her soft dress, her hair tangled, her lipstick smeared around her mouth, her dress yanked down, one breast lifted from the bra cup and its own weight giving it an odd sideways twist of lovely plumpness.
She woke as he watched her, back from the dead, tucking her breast into her bra, lifting her gown to cover it, pushing down her skirt, leaning into the front seat to switch on the overhead light, and then studying her face, touching her hair, smiling, remembering.
“I look fucked.”
Still smiling and peering intently into the mirror of her compact, she wiped the smears of lipstick from her face, dabbed at her eyes, combed her hair. And just as Steadman thought she had finished, she took out a pouch of cosmetics and applied mascara and thickened her eyelashes — slowly, paying no attention to Steadman, who watched with fascination as she prettied her face. She rouged her cheeks, reddened her lips again using a brush and lip gloss, made herself a new face, a mask of desire.
Only when she was done, having put herself back together and now looking again as she had in the doorway, did she turn away from the mirror and snap her compact shut, lingering in the light a bit before switching it off. She faced him. The dusty moonlight deepened the texture of her makeup and softened the planes of her face, and what had seemed an innocently questioning smile in the small mirror was now lust lit by moonbeams.
She leaned toward Steadman and her lowering arm crushed her gown as she reached down and slid her hand along his thigh. She touched his cock and kissed him, thrusting her tongue into his mouth and moving her fingers, playing with him through the cloth of his trousers. She unzipped him and slipped her hand inside, her warm hand clutching him, as though gripping a knife handle, until it thickened. Then she pumped it, driving it downward against his groin, again and again, thrusting hard, as if she had a dagger she was using against him. And still she embraced him, held tight to him, kissing his lips and his face as she held him, not stopping, not even hesitating. She had risen, and she hovered over him so urgently hers was a posture of assault, possessing him and pounding his cock with a murdering motion.
The sound of his pleasure came slanting from deep within his lungs and seemed like an echo of a softer sighing in her throat. Her breasts were in his hands, his thumbs grazing her nipples. Her touch was surer and so finely judged that she seemed to feel in the throb of his cock the spasm of his juice rising — knew even before he did that he was about to come. Then he knew, his body began to convulse, and as he cried “No”—because she had let go — she pushed him backward onto the seat and pressed her face down, lapping his cock into her mouth, curling her tongue around it, and the suddenness of it, the snaking of her tongue, the pressure of her lips, the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.
Holding him with one hand, she devoured it and was still swallowing as he went limp and slipped out of her mouth. When she looked up at him with her smeared face and smudged eyes, she was still greedily gulping, licking droplets from her gleaming lips.
The car was warm and sour with the mingled odors of perfume and sweat and the fish glue of his semen. Ava was silent. The world was old. The moon looked brittle and barnacled, and down below in the Sound a breadbox of a ferry chugged through the greasy waves. He knew his blindness had worn off.
4
IN THE SALLOW morning light of glaucous summer seafog he could not tell whether he was blind or sighted. His uncertainty made him impatient to resume his book. He had woken alone, clearheaded, fixated on the notion that writing and sex were disappearing acts. Wrung out, too, as though, smaller and simpler, he had lost one of his limbs in an ecstatic ritual of eroticism.