Sand - 3

By Jim Chaffee

Behind the reception desk broods a swarthy, heavily bearded titan in jeans and black T-shirt, his massive arms a patchwork of bluing tattoos. He wears a single giant earring like a pirate. On his desk a nameplate announces Urso.

Clarice introduces us with no details other than our first names, his as indicated on the nameplate. He stands and solemnly shakes my hand. He wears a heavy chrome chain from his belt that disappears into a rear pocket. His keys hang from a belt loop.

She asks if Isabella is in and he answers yes, ma’am, in a gentle voice. She leads me to an office marked assistant, knocks, and a tall, leggy blonde in jeans and high-heeled red boots opens the door. Flashing a broad, easy smile, her green eyes command my attention. They swallow me up with an examination that would be a stare if it were steady, instead leaping over me, scanning me, frantic and filled with wonder. She turns to Clarice and, with the steady gaze she has not given me, says that one of the afternoon group members has requested a special session with her and should she set it up?

Clarice answers that it is possible within the hour if the client is ready; that I am only visiting briefly but that she is in for the rest of the day. Then she leads me away on a tour of the facilities.

We pass through a well-equipped kitchen that includes a shiny espresso machine. We stand in the doorway of a cramped closet of a room, bare except for a computer workstation. Without entering, she dismisses the room with a sweeping motion, saying it is only a necessary business concession to technology.

There are two doors marked therapy and she escorts me to the nearest, a room bright with sunlight from several large windows and furnished with identical padded chairs arranged in a circle.

The other is a larger, windowless room, the floor covered with futons. A path along one wall beside the mattresses dead-ends in a wardrobe beside a pair of doors, one marked bathroom, the other shower. The walls display an array of erotic prints. One catches my eye: a satyr playing a woman’s hair like a harp while she plays his giant penis as a flute. Full of curiosity about this strange therapy room, I hold my tongue in the face of her guarded expression.

The final stop is her office, an oppressive space smelling of incense, crowded with a desk, several chairs, and three walls of built-in bookcases lined with well-used leather-bound volumes. A window in the only bare wall opens onto a park. Below the window stands a table with a bronze statue of a seated nymph, naked except for a flowing loin cloth, long-waisted with round, full breasts, the prominent nipples erect. Her legs are spread wide, bent at the knees, one lying flat, the other raised. She reclines against the support of one hand, arm extended, the other aloft before her in the mudra gesture.

This is it, she tells me. This is my office. Now you have seen everything.

I remark that she must do well to afford two fulltime staff and such a large building. She replies that her services are sought after by those troubled with sexual dysfunction. She has plenty of referrals and turns away new clients whose problems don’t interest her.

She summons Urso and asks for coffee. He appears bearing a tray with two cups of espresso. We drink them and I leave.

Later, Clarice brings Isabella home with her and the three of us go to dinner. Isabella wears the same jeans and boots as at the office. A white nylon pullover blouse fits like a glove and doesn’t flatter, betraying the beginnings of a roll around her waist and accenting high, shapeless breasts sheathed in a tight brassiere that flattens them, pushing them wide apart.

Dinner unfolds into a party. Sake flows and we stay on for a bottle of champagne, then hit one of the bars Clarice favors to watch the patrons while we drink absinthe.

At the house Clarice passes around a joint.

She asks me what I think of Isabella. Caught off guard and stoned, I am unable to gauge how long I muse the question. I see Isabella pass Clarice a pregnant glance, shrugging with her eyes. I reply she has sexy eyes. Isabella sends Clarice a physical shrug, her face full of don’t-ask-me. I say her long legs and ass are sexy. The two women exchange knowing smiles.

Time skips a beat and somehow the three of us are in bed naked, Isabella stretched out on her stomach while I fuck her from behind. Clarice watches, mute and expressionless. Isabella redirects me to her anus and I slip in. She groans. She pushes against me, bucking and thrashing, then lays silent and passive while I work at ramming my dick into her guts. Her ass cheeks give like pillows, conforming to my thrusts, and I imagine my cock probing her belly.

I feel a gentle teasing of my rectum and hear Clarice singing out in high pitched short chirps that sound more like birdcalls than screams of sexual climax. When I finish and roll over, she sits masturbating, singing her little shrieks, a condom on her tongue.

*****************************

The memory of Clarice singing her birdcalls while masturbating stays with me. She never displayed any passion before our threesome with Isabella and since then we’ve had no sexual contact. She does not speak of it or of Isabella. I wonder if our threesome was a singular event, but I’m afraid to broach the subject.

Finally, as we sit in the living room reading, my curiosity overcomes my reluctance.

“How is Isabella?”

Clarice peers over the top of her book. “Who?”

“Your assistant at work, Isabella.”

She stares at me. “Fine, I guess,” she says.

She returns to her book, ignoring me, but in a while puts down the book and asks if I still want to marry her.

“Yes, of course.” I reply without hesitation. It’s the first she’s mentioned it since I asked her.

“Then there are things I need to show you.”

That night we go to the Museum of Modern Art. We sit in the bar and have a few drinks before she leads me to a video monitor on a stand in the main hall. A tape deck awaits a punch of a button. Before pushing it, she tells me the film epitomizes her philosophy of life.

A Chinese woman springs to life on the video monitor. Visible only from the mouth down, her severely bobbed hair hanging limp above her shoulders, she kneads yellow meal into a coarse yellow bread.

My eyes are drawn to the short, fat fingers working the dough to an elastic ball she eventually flattens with the palms of stubby hands.

After baking the round, flat bread, she removes it from the bowl and pulls it into pieces she chews and spits out, displaying each mouthful before letting it plop into the bowl. When finished, she kneads the wet chunks again, then cooks the masticated mass into a glop which she partially devours with more flourish than before, swallowing and then regurgitating each bite into the bowl. To these quasi-assimilated remnants, now resembling porridge or grits or malt-o-meal, she adds boiling water and mixes it into a kind of mealy slurry which she consumes with deliberate intent. The tape ends as she swallows the last of it.

Several groups form and disperse while we watch, always leaving with comments like gross or disgusting. For me, the film reaches somewhere down into the recesses of my libido, prompting an embarrassing erection. Clarice passes her palm over the bulge, then takes my hand and leads me to another exhibit.

Eight sheets of stationary framed in bright metal, all from European hotels mostly of the Accor chain, hang in isolation on a freestanding white wall. Entitled Anal Kisses and given letter-number signifiers, like Anal Kiss B-13, Carlton – Strasbourg, each but one displays a single red or reddish-purple lipstick imprint of an anus. The exception displays three anal kisses.

Clarice stands staring, transfigured before the kisses, radiant in an inwardly emanating aura. She squeezes my hand.

*******************

Archives

Sand - 3

By Jim Chaffee