Taking up every bit of surface space around the sound and computing equipment are small versions of the book stacks on the floor. There are several stacks of paperbacks with plain white covers and a couple foot-high blocks of typing paper, the top sheet which is covered with tiny type that seems to run off the page in all directions, marginless. Lenore isn’t close enough to be sure, but it’s possible the words are in another language.
She steps up next to the main table and knocks on it like it was a door.
“So,” she says, “you tell me who the Nazi is.”
Woo squints at her and pulls his head in like a turtle. “The desk,” he says.
“A desk Goebbels and Göring would fight over.”
Woo gives a small smile. “The last time I checked, furniture choice was not a characteristic of the Nazi.”
“We could argue about that, Freddy.”
“I need a great deal of room. I need to spread out when I work.”
“Ship this baby down to Latin America. There’s a whole bunch of petty dictators who’d kill for this monster.”
“You find it offensive.”
“Overwhelming. It’s the biggest desk, if you can call it a desk, that I’ve seen. You should coin a new word, Dr. Woo. This kind of thing requires an addition to the language.”
“All I can tell you is it suits my needs. Form follows function perfectly.”
“Yeah, and there’s a lot more going on there besides.”
“There’s so much room here. I decided, why not use it?”
“Uh-huh. Where do you sleep, Freddy?”
“The couches are tremendously comfortable. They fold out into beds. Often I don’t even bother pulling one open. I’ll sleep right on the couch.”
“Okay, Freddy, let’s think about this for a second. You’ve gone to the trouble of making Godzilla’s desk in here, because there’s so much room, as you say, but you don’t own a bedroom set.”
His voice goes low and his eyes shift to the floor.
“My work is quite important to me, Lenore.”
She realizes she’s offended him and she’s a little surprised that she regrets what she’s said. Whatever mood of sparring and playfulness was between them feels gone and in its absence she’s aware of how much she enjoyed it. She wants to get it back, reinstall it at once. She reaches up and places a hand on Woo’s shoulder and says, in an apologetic voice, “I’m sorry, Fred, I was just teasing. I stepped too far there. I just got caught up, carried away a little, you know. I was just riding you a little and I just … I don’t know.”
Without lifting his eyes he takes her wrist and pulls it to his mouth and plants a long kiss on the inside span of skin just below the border of her hand.
She doesn’t say a word and she doesn’t pull away. She wishes only that she had a moment to swallow some crank. She wouldn’t even need water for the wash-down.
He moves his way from wrist down the inner arm to the bend at the elbow. She knows she should find it funny, a caricature, a sloppy imitation of John Astin in a long-ago sitcom. But she doesn’t react with a laugh or a comment. She lets him go, lets him work on the inner skin of her arm, kissing it slowly, wetting it barely. Her breath starts to come a little heavier. He makes the jump to the neck beautifully. He kisses below the ear and starts to suck and lick and really taste her skin, take in her salt and maybe a bitter drop of left-over perfume. She pushes herself closer to him, works her way into a tighter embrace so that their bodies press together in longer, unbroken spans.
His mouth drops lower on her neck and he hits a spot that makes her buck slightly. He feels it and speeds up, his tongue gets more aggressive, his lips pull on her and in spite of herself she lets out a noise, a breath-grabbing sigh and it comes out as a moan and she hopes, for a second, that he doesn’t mistake it for a laugh, and then the thought is gone and their hands are at each other’s clothing, feeling for buttons and zippers where there are none, furious at working so blindly.
His hands fall to the rim of her jeans and start to unbutton them, but she grabs them at the wrist and pulls them up underneath her turtleneck, but on top of the thermal undershirt. He starts to alternately squeeze and rub her breasts, like he can’t decide which he wants to do, and while his hands move she takes a second to pull the jersey off and drop it to the floor. Then she pulls his hands away and places them at the sides of his legs. His head comes up from her neck and he looks like a horrified child, but she smiles and calms him and mourns the word slow, then she starts to unbutton his cardigan and pulls it from his arms. He makes no motion beyond the visible rising and falling of his chest and a smile that he can’t suppress. She knows she now has full control and it sets her off, gives her a charge almost as heady as swallow of meth. She goes slowly to her knees and unties his old sneakers, getting playful, improvising, dipping fingers inside the elastic band of his socks and tickling just above the ankle. He doesn’t say a word, but his body seems to tremble a bit and she loves it.
She lifts each foot and removes the shoe and the sock, slowly, with an almost detached air, like this was her profession, like she’d worked a lifetime at Kinney’s. She rises back up and strips him of his Ezra Pound shirt. She steps back for a second and stares at his chest. It’s neither hairy nor completely void of hair, but rather has a few single curly strands in a dozen or so random places.
Now she steps back up to him, very aggressive, with the same body English she’d use just before a cuffing, or better, a full-blown strip search. He seems to love it. His breathing gets more obvious. His head does a stutter on his neck. She reaches around his back, drops her hand, and squeezes his ass with all her strength. There’s a part of her that would like him to shout out her name, but she controls herself as well as Woo, lets go, and comes back around front to unfasten his chinos. They’re held at the waist by a small metal clip and she releases it fast, but takes her time drawing down the zipper. He’s got a continuous tremble going and Lenore finds it both disturbing and satisfying. For less than a second she questions the sincerity of the tremble, but she lets the thought go and pushes the pants down over his hips.
He’s wearing white boxer shorts underneath. They have a grey pinstripe in them. They feel a little brittle, starchy, as she grabs them at the sides and yanks downward. When they touch the floor, she pats his hip and he steps out of all the clothing around his feet.
He’s naked now, but she keeps her eyes on his eyes as she reaches forward and takes him in her hands. His mouth drops slightly and he makes a noise and takes some air. She squeezes very lightly and he grows. She releases and steps backward and motions that he should lie down on the floor.
He complies, moving carefully, finding a narrow strip of space between the mountains of books. He stretches out on his back, his hands folded behind his head for a pillow, his legs bent up at the knees. She likes him on the floor, likes the picture of him. She wants to remember it, press it into her memory, saved vivid for the distant future, for times when she’s void of a partner and less in control of her life and herself. She wants to save the image in her mind, not as some mild, personal pornography, but more as a symbol, a suggestion of this feeling that has no title she knows of. It’s a feeling beyond the words power, control, dominance, or will.
She walks a full, dramatic circle around Woo, taking giant steps over the smaller book piles. His eyes follow her path, stay on her face. She stops when she arrives back at his feet. She knows there’ll be no speaking, no communication using the spoken language. They’ll exchange messages, or rather, she’ll indicate what she wants and he’ll respond, a simple and efficient cause-and-effect equation.