Choke

I say, "What's with your vagina?"

Gwen looks down at herself and says, "What?" She says, "Oh, that. It's a Femidom, a female condom. The edges stick out like that. I don't want you giving me any diseases."

Is it just me, I say, but I thought rape was supposed to be more spontaneous, you know, a crime of passion.

"That shows you don't know shit about how to rape anybody," she says. "A good rapist will plan his crime meticulously. He ritualizes every little detail. This should be almost like a religious ceremony."

What happens here, Gwen says, is sacred.

In the bookstore coffee shop, she'd passed me the photocopied sheet and said, "Can you agree to all these terms?"

The sheet said, Do not ask where I work.

Do not ask if you're hurting me.

Do not smoke in my house.

Do not expect to stay the night.

The sheet says, The safe word is POODLE.

I ask what she means by a safe word.

"If the scene gets too heavy or if it isn't working for one of us," she says, "you just say 'poodle' and the action stops."

I ask if I get to shoot my wad.

"If it's all that important to you," she says.

Then I say, okay, where do I sign?

These pathetic sexaholic chicks. They're so damn dick-hungry.

Without her clothes, she looks a little bony. Her skin feels hot and damp as if you could squeeze out warm soapy water. Her legs are so thin they don't touch until her ass. Her little flat breasts seem to cling to her rib cage. Still holding her arm behind her back, watching ourselves in the mirrored closet door, she has the long neck and sloped shoulders of a wine bottle.

"Stop, please," she says. "You're hurting me. Please, I'll give you money."

I ask, how much?

"Stop, please," she says. "Or I'll scream."

So I drop her arm and step away. "Don't scream," I say. "Just do not scream."

Gwen sighs and then hauls off and punches me in the chest. "You moron!" she says. "I didn't say 'poodle.'"

It's the sexual equivalent of Simon Sez.

She twists back into my grip. Then she walks us over to the towel and says, "Wait." She goes to the dresser and comes back with a pink plastic vibrator.

"Hey," I say, "you're not using that on me."

Gwen shudders and says, "Of course not. This is mine."

And I say, "So what about me?"

And she says, "Sorry, next time bring your own vibrator."

"No," I say, "what about my penis?'

And she says, "What about your penis?"

And I ask, "How does it fit into all this?"

Settling herself on the towel, Gwen shakes her head and says, "Why do I do this? Why do I always pick the guy who just wants to be nice and conventional? The next thing you'll want to do is marry me." She says, "Just one time, I'd like to have an abusive relationship. Just once!"

She says, "You can masturbate while you rape me. But only on the towel and only if you don't slop any on me."

She spreads the towel out around her ass and pats a little area of terry cloth next to her. "When it's time," she says, "you can put your orgasm right here."

Her hand goes pat, pat, pat.

Uh, okay, I say, now what?

Gwen sighs and sticks the vibrator in my face. "Use me!" she says. "Degrade me, you stupid idiot! Demean me, you jerk-off! Debase me!"

It's not really clear where the switch is, so she has to show me how to turn it on. Then it's buzzing so hard I drop it. Then it's jumping around on the floor, and I have to catch the damn thing.

Gwen brings her knees up and they drop off to each side the way a book drops open, and I kneel on the edge of the towel and work the buzzing tip just inside the soft plastic edges of her. I work my dog with my other hand. Her calves are shaved and taper to curved feet with blue polish on the nails. She's laid back with her eyes closed and her legs spread. Holding her hands together and stretched above her head so her breasts pull up into perfect little handfuls, she says, "No, Dennis, no. I don't want this, Dennis. Don't. No. You can't have me."

And I say, "My name is Victor."

And she says to shut up and let her concentrate.

And I try to give us both a good time, but this is the sex equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head. Either I'm focused on her or I'm focusing on myself. Either way, it's the same as a bad three-way. One of us is always getting left out. Plus the vibrator is slippery and hard to hang on to. It's heating up and smells acrid and smoky as if something's burning inside.

Gwen opens one eye just a sliver, squinting down at my flogging the dog, and says, "Me first!"

I'm wrestling my dog. I'm snaking Gwen. I'm snaking Gwen. This feels less like I'm a rapist than I'm a plumber. The edges of the Femidom keep slipping inside, and I have to stop and pick them out with two fingers.

Gwen says, "Dennis, no, Dennis, stop, Dennis," her voice coming up from deep in her throat. She pulls her own hair and gasps. The Femidom slips inside again, and I just let it go. The vibrator tamps it deeper and deeper. She says to play with her nipples with my other hand.

I say, I need my other hand. My dice draw up tight and ready to trigger, and I say, "Oh yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah."

And Gwen says, "Don't you dare," and she licks two fingers. She pins her eyes on mine and works her wet fingers between her legs, racing me.

And all I have to do is picture Paige Marshall, my secret weapon, and the race is over.

The second before you trigger, that feeling when your asshole starts to clench, that's when I turn toward the little spot on the towel Gwen said. Feeling stupid and paper- trained, my white soldiers start to toss, and maybe by accident they misjudge the tra- jectory and toss across her pink bedspread. Her whole big soft puffy pink landscape. Arc after arc sprays out, in hot cramping gobs of all sizes, all over the spread and the pillow shams, and the pink silk bed skirt.

What would Jesus NOT do?

Spunk graffiti.

"Vandalism" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Gwen's collapsed on the towel panting with her eyes closed, the vibrator humming inside her. Her eyes rolled back in her head, she's gushing between her fingers and whispering, "I beat you ..."

She whispers, "You son of a bitch, I beat you ..."

I'm tucking myself back in my pants and grabbing my coat. White soldier gobs are hanging all over the bed, the drapes, the wallpaper, and Gwen's still lying there, breathing hard, the vibrator angled halfway out of her. A second later, it slips free and flops around on the floor like a fleshy wet fish. It's then Gwen opens her eyes. She starts to push herself up on her elbows before she sees the damage.

I'm halfway out the window when I say, "Oh, by the way ..." I say, "Poodle," and behind me I hear her first scream for real.

Chapter 28

IN THE SUMMER OF 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a teenage boy was accused of buggering a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. This is real history on the books. In accordance with the Biblical laws of Leviticus, after the boy con- fessed he was forced to watch each animal being slaughtered. Then he was killed and his body heaped with the dead animals and buried in an unmarked pit.

This was before there were sexaholic talk therapy meetings.

This teenager, writing his fourth step must've been a whole barnyard tell-all.

I ask, "Any questions?"

The fourth-graders just look at me. A girl in the second row says, "What's buggering?"

I say, ask your teacher.

Every half hour, I'm supposed to teach another herd of fourth-graders some shit nobody wants to learn, like how to start a fire. How to carve an apple-head doll. How to make ink out of black walnuts. As if this is going to get any of them into a good college.

Besides deforming the poor chickens, these fourth-graders, they all walk in here carrying some germ. It's no mystery why Denny's always wiping his nose and coughing. Head lice, pin-worms, chlamydia, ringworm—for serious, these field trip kids are the pint-sized horsemen of the apocalypse.