"Aaaahhhhoohh!" she grunted, taken completely by surprise. "Aw… wait… no… wait, Goddamn'ya… not like that… don't pound it… oooh no…!"
Oh boy, David was ever so happy, because he was sure he really hurt her with that first dagger-stroke, positive her cries weren't put-on and that she felt a real twinge of distortion for a minute or two, because he hadn't been the gentle, innocent Mr. Virgin-Ass and given her a cue, hadn't let her stage the whole rumble like it was some native ritual. Just plain and simple and whooshh!.. fuck-BANG!.. right up in there where a whole damned battalion of senior-citizens had dumped their pukey loads… the twisted little bitch! Even now he could feel her trying to slide his ramming cock out of her so she could rearrange it and become the smart-ass engineer again and shove it the way she wanted it shoved. But no dice. It stayed in… and up and out and deep and jabbing… and unnn! For David, there was no pain… and soon he saw that mad-girl gleam of ascendancy in her eyes and he knew he'd begun to tap this little baby's resurrection… aw, Miss Gutter-Tits… Miss Swallower of all those zombies and cadavers and Johns!.. if your Mommy never spanked you, I will… take that… and that… and this…!
They tooled the afternoon away like that, in the painless joy. A tart-ambrosia for him to sip… the taint of a poisoned blossom. The virus grew.
October gave way to November, and the Montclairs at last returned from Europe. They were swept up in plans to re-open their Hillsborough house and begin their winter entertaining, so it was some time before the old man got wind of David's deteriorating work-performance at the office. Meanwhile, David was soon seeing Valerie Hudson three times a week. And, as the lady herself had summed it up, it was pretty damned expensive. Old Wilbur's return reminded him how desperately he'd relied upon the power of nepotism to sustain his position at All-Planet Insurance Co. And since he was worried that the old man might be calling him on-the-carpet any day now, it wasn't as if he could put in for another raise. And yet, quite suddenly, David found himself facing a drastic money problem.
Valerie had this absolutely weird fixation about being paid whenever they had sex. She admitted that she loved him, although claiming what they did between the sheets bore little resemblance to a duet from New Moon. However, she said it was the purest form of reflex-conditioning: money had to change hands whenever she did it. Probably due to some form of insecurity, David decided; and perhaps it even dated back to her childhood, if she ever had one. So all right, she felt rejected unless someone paid for her fluid charms. But for David, this little mental quirk added up to a hundred and fifty clams a week; plus extras, like perfume or cashmere sweaters or "sweet little necklaces" from Joseph Magnin's.
Knowing he couldn't lessen the weekly deposits he made in his joint-account with Linda, David opened a private checking account of his own, in order to keep rewarding Valerie for her feverish endeavors. But it soon became a very close race to keep this new account from being overdrawn each week. He supposed he could borrow an ample sum of money, but didn't know how he could pay it back without dipping into the family savings, which were considerable, but which were also scrutinized regularly by that neat little bookkeeper in his family whom he called wife, mother and Linda.
Several times he jokingly told Valerie that she was milking him dry in more ways than once, and that his love for her was driving him swiftly up the walls of bankruptcy. Of course, this was what the girl had been longing to hear, so she was always ready to offer him the same, single-minded alternative: "Oh honey, you clogged-up suburban husbands all have the makings of great whores, but dammit, you guys sure take a helluva lot of convincing!" After which David would roar and rant and tell her how nauseated he was by that proposition, which did little to curb Valerie's great powers of salesmanship.
She kept citing instances and examples of her fabulous success in recruiting male prostitutes among his fellow freeway commuters. "Guys you probably went to school with, David… who live in Atherton, San Mateo, Woodside… who've been married ever since college, have great little homes and wives and babies, but those poor trapped kids, they never seem to be able to pay their damned property-taxes or buy new cars or keep themselves in home-appliances, or just keep up with the Joneses in general. What other sideline could they work at to keep ahead of inflation without paying more income-tax? Stud-service, David! It's the answer to all your problems."
David would listen to her, but keep shaking his head in shocked disbelief. "Oh wow… I've heard some talk about housewives becoming call-girls to supplement their incomes, but nothing like this."
"Look, Dum-Dum, it's part of this whole new trend towards integration and civil rights and fair employment practices. I mean… like men and women can now hold the same kind of jobs and make the same kind of money. Equal Opportunity… no more sexual discrimination, it's part of the law now… a whole new thing, baby!"
"Valerie, to my way of thinking, prostitution is one field where men and women have never competed, and I doubt they're about to start now."
"David, I really think you've kept your head buried in the sand all these years along with your ass! But let me enlighten you. In the first place, there are male-pimps whose job it is to line up all those housewives you were talking about. But here in San Francisco, the guys are my job… Well, mine, and three or four other big-time hookers who're tryin' to muscle in. We do it through escort-bureaus or ads or computer-clubs or bar-pickups, or whathaveyou. Hon, you'd be amazed how much you can make just by turning a trick a day on your lunch-hour. A lot of your pure-assed college-buddies have been doing just that ever since they graduated, not to mention how they earned those diplomas in the first place, with their keesters pointed towards Mecca while their grades went up."
However, when Valerie saw that these hard-sell spiels were not getting through to the boy, she decided on a more direct approach. By having charged him a fee each time they met she'd been trying to break him down financially, thereby hoping to create a drastic need in him to earn some extra money. David represented many things to Valerie Hudson, not the least of which was his great potential value as a money-making property. In truth, she never took money when they swung like David, but she couldn't think of any other way to get him desperate enough to do as she wished. Although the boy was a fantasy of unleashed sensuality for her whenever they went to bed, she stood to profit a great deal more from him once they went into partnership.
Consequently, Valerie decided that only some stark personal catastrophe would bring David Fortune to his senses. And now she was determined to create one. A plan! And the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced it would be a most ingenious device to swing the boy over to her side of the street.
They were having cocktails in the living-room one evening, listening to stereo and waiting for their dinner to be delivered from the highly-touted Mandarin Restaurant. Valerie didn't trust cooks or servants of any kind, much preferring the strictly anonymous style of living.
David had often told her how bitterly he hated his job and resented the power his father-in-law wielded over his life; how he'd wanted to cut out and become a musician, how arid and pre-recorded his sex life was at home. But tonight, after tripling the vodka-shot in his Martini, Valerie used all her powers of persuasion and induced him to speak of these grievances again. She prompted him whenever he paused, sympathized in order to make him feel more wronged by the forces of destiny, as David vehemently mouthed all his grudges and frustrations. Mainly his opinions regarding that "old reactionary imperialist bigot-sonofabitch Wilbur Pierce Montclair!"