The Seeing Wall

A Whimsical Fantasy Ending in an Unapologetic Romp

The experiences we chose makes us predictable, the experience that chooses us changes us in unpredictable ways.

In the middle of my junior year in college I took a short vacation to the Austrian Alps, a ski chalet high in the mountains, Drachenhalle - Hall of the Dragons - one of those traditional European places operating on the pension plan: a room for the week, dinners served in a central dining room, the kind of place Americans patronize because it covers their own inability to deal in a foreign country. Me, I just wanted to get away from Clairmont, California as far as I could. I’d just lost my girlfriend to a young math professor and I was trying hard not to look back.

Dinner was served precisely at seven thirty. Everyone sat at the same table, an old grove hardwood structure that might have been made out of some spiritual oak from King Author’s forest, toted a thousand miles by knights eager to please royalty. Linen tablecloth, very serviceable pottery place settings with two wine glasses, an adornment that gave us all a rather formal feeling.

There were place cards. I was seated next to an attractive young woman who turned out to be a college student from Italy on her way to spend a semester abroad in the USA. Things were looking up. Across from her was a professor from a Midwest college, about 50 years of age, outdoors type, a bit gray at the temples and a natty manner of dress that artistically concealed a slight middle-age bulge here and there.

Directly across from me was the wife of an elderly pair from Canada returning for their yearly visit in time for some cross-country skiing. To my right was a young married couple - they would be of no use to anyone - and at the far end of the table next to the second member of the Canadian reunionists was a thin girlish woman with blond-silver hair cuffed severely in a bun, wearing delicate gold rimmed glasses. Studious type, it appeared to me. Librarian.

I concentrated on Giovanna. Turns out she was from Vernazza, one of the charming Cinque Terre towns of the Italian West Coast, a part I knew something about having vacationed there with my parents the summer before college.

We chatted about the trail from Riomaggiore to Monterosso and the ferries that even in rough seas area able to come perilously close to the concrete dock to load and unload their passengers. “Captains with the precision of a hand surgeon,” I observed.

We were doing well. The professor was engaged in conversation with the couple across from me, the married couple were talking to the studious type at the end of the table. G noticed I brought in a “silver suitcase” as she called it. I explained I was an amateur photographer.

“Portraits?” she asked.

“I’m a rocks and trees man,” I said. “And around here, snow. More like Ansel Adams than Ruth Bernhard.” I began to notice more and more about G. Dark, close-cropped hair, full eyebrows, a subtle, succulent roundness to her body - classic Mediterranean.

I told her I had tasted a wonderful white wine in Portofino that was so much like nectar you didn’t know how much you had had until you tried to stand up. It had illuminated one of those relaxed Italian lunches at Cosmo’s on the beach. As I was saying this I was trying to recall the name of the wine. Now I was to that point in conversation where either I had to produce or move forward. Instead, I stumbled. “It was, it was... ”

“Amora,” said the professor from across the table. “I know it well.”

He then launched into a detailed description of the local vintners gathering grapes by hand from the hillside around Portofino bay, delaying the process as late in September as they dared, then spreading the grapes out on the roof tops to let the Mediterranean sun burnish in the characteristic mellow sweetness.

I was abashed. I could feel G’s attention shifting to him, enchanted by his thorough knowledge of a romantic Italian tradition specific to her heritage. I was losing ground in this conversation that I myself started and I wasn’t sure how to recover. I sputtered something about the castle at the tip of the peninsula but was cut off by G. asking the professor how he knew so much about this wine.

“I made an informal study of that wine after I had been introduced to it while visiting Portofino for a colloquium on Tuscan anthropology.”

“Anthropology,” she exclaimed. “That’s my major. That’s what I’m going to the USA to study. I’ll be with Professor Arcturus. Do you know him?”

“Know him? He said. “I trained him.”

Done for, flattened, queens night to king-6, check and mate, over and out. I was a goner. And wouldn’t you know it had to be another goddammed professor.

I could see where this was going. The professor was knowledgeable and sporty. That he was twice her age wouldn’t matter to her now since she could fall for his intelligence. Seduction for women was always more about the brain than the body anyway.

I stewed in my juices. I had married couples flanking me, while on my left the professor and the Italian beauty were practically leaning over the table to get at each other. I had only the ice cube at the end of the table to try for. Not promising.

I tried to catch her eye but she looked away. When I managed to lob a comment her direction she volleyed it. End of rally. Point and match. It was clear I was pushing the envelope for uninvited attention but the alternative was to sulk in solitude. Able to bear rejection better than despair, I pressed on.

I was making no progress but at least I was able to study her a bit in the process. Her name was Claire. She was as different from G. as her name implied. The hair and glasses gave a bookish appearance but there was something a bit mysterious about her. She was here for cross-country skiing and detested downhill. I didn’t tell her I was downhill all the way. Snowboarder.

She did have attractive features: a long waist (I was a sucker for long waists) and small breasts that rode high and tight behind her starched blouse as surprising as a pubescent thirteen-year-old’s, drifting there attached to her body like an evolutionary afterthought. I imagined her legs were thin and long, swimmer’s legs.

I asked her if she swam.

“No,” she said.

I was counting the many ways I could fail.

After dinner it was customary for everyone to gather around the fire with the poison of their choice from the generously stocked liquor cabinet and engage in polite conversation before retiring. G and the professor cozied into the corner inglenook and mused about Neanderthal, which was the reason he was here, to expound upon his theories to a gathering of anthropologists down in the village. He promised to take G to some of the sessions. Things were going swimmingly.

All week I kept at it. About the only thing I learned about Claire’s personal life was a comment she made as she was rushing back to her room to do her reading before bed. She said she had a boyfriend who was coming to join her later in the week on the snowfields above the village. Thursday, to be exact.

I figured she made it up. It was a hoax perpetrated to keep me at a safe distance, executed, for the effect of authenticity, with the panache of a specific time and place.

I spent a lot of time by myself. For entertainment I spent my time trying to read G and the professor. Things were moving along. Body language suggested a sexual tension that I judged was, as yet, unexpressed. Eye contact was longer and unguarded, as if pretense had given over to directness. It was the behavior I had witnessed on rare occasions, the moment when a woman’s acquired protections against the onrush of the male were undone. That gift of trust was something beautiful. I was getting turned on just watching.

Meanwhile, I was making a different discovery. My room was small by American standards, just a bed, an end table, and a poor excuse for a closet. I remembered reading that the Europeans were taxed for all the rooms in their houses, including closets. So they never built any.

Except this establishment, which catered to Americans who were used to a different set of amenities and probably badgered the owner until he finally threw in some poor excuse for closets. Anyway, an attempt had been made to add one to my room, a frail, lean-to type structure that apparently was still being worked on, or maybe abandoned mid-course. The wall in the back of the closet was open on my side, absent down to the wall of the next room, which the professor occupied.

My discovery was that the wood, knotty pine and old, was so dry that one of the knots had shrunk loose enough - with a little help from my dopp-kit tweezers - to jiggle free. The knothole, thus opened, was waist high and looked broadside into the professor’s bed.

I went to the bathroom, unscrewed a small, non-essential screw from a toiletry shelf and, using my fingernail file, turned it deliberately into the center crease of the piney knot. I could then remove and replace it at will.

It was already Wednesday and nothing between Claire and me had changed. That night, perhaps because she skied late and showered long, she came to the table with her hair down and still wet. It fell to her shoulders in open ringlets that bounced in the light as she turned her head. Her hair down accentuated the delicateness of her features which, now almost illuminated by the streaming hair, appeared like the white marble in a Michelangelo masterpiece. She was gorgeous. How could I have missed that?

Perhaps out of exasperation or fatigue she consented to sit with me with me a while after dinner. I guessed I had about five minutes to make some kind of impression. I decided I had nothing to lose, had gained nothing from the conventional approaches, and went for shock value.

We had been talking about the professor and G’s common interest in anthropology when I said, “I think tonight’s the night.”

“What,” she said, with more animation in her voice than I had heard from her up ‘til now.

“Well,” I said with an unplanned smile, “I think it’s going to happen tonight.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“They’re going to do it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. I’ve been watching them and I can tell.”

“You’re crazy. How can you tell?”

“I know human nature. I study it. Besides, I just know these things.”

“Hold on a second. I’ll bet you’re a psychology major, aren’t you? Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Yeah, so what.”

“Psychology majors. Psychology majors. You’re all alike. All feeling and no science.”

This was getting emotional, and in a strange way I was enjoying every minute of it. For the first time there was a sign of life in the corpse I’d been talking to.

“What are you,” I challenged. “Let me guess. A biostatistics major.”

“Library science,” she said straightening her shoulders and bringing an exciting tension to her blouse over her breasts.

I resisted gawking and kept my eyes on her face. “I should have known,” I said. “Librarians. Aloof. Out of it. Suspicious of intuitive knowledge. No wonder you don’t believe me.”

She scoffed.

“But hold on,” I said, reaching for the stars. “I can prove it to you.”

Even if I was wrong, it was better than boredom and being correct. Even if I was wrong her interest would put us together with some common thread of excitement. That couldn’t be all bad. But I was going to be challenged at every step of the way so I tried a diversionary tactic.

“It was your glasses and your bun that should have given you away,” I said. “Books. No feeling. All numbers and no flash.”

She passed up the bait. “You were saying something about proving it to me.”

Even though she ignored my insult it would have its effect somewhere down under that cool façade. Maybe it would open a few invisible doors held shut by her unwavering structure of distance. Still, I was out on a limb and I knew it. I had to trust my intuition which, after all, had steered me into psychology in the first place.

But to speak the next line was a huge jump. I could take the time to set it up or just go for it. She was looking at me. Looking at me, for the first time with great interest. What a thrill. I decided to go for it.

“You’ll have to come to my room.”

She didn’t flinch.

I explained about the knothole, hoping that her level of curiosity was high enough by now to sustain us through all the implications of crime and misdemeanor. Then to make it past what surely was going to sound like a clichéd come-on line to get us there, I just told it like it happened, complete with details how I modified the knothole to accommodate a little voyeurism.

“When can we go?” was all she said.

We had reached a bold new level, Claire and I.

I looked across the room at the professor and G. I pointed out to Claire that they had consumed one more drink than usual. This little gesture of mine made her part of the observation, the clandestine excitement that comes from having a secret agenda right out in the open. I pointed out that just creeping in at the edge of perception in the familiar way they were weaving in and out of closeness, were the first signs of the effects of that extra drink.

“When can we go,” she repeated. Making her ask twice pleased me.

“Now,” I said. And we left.

My heart was jumping out of my chest as we walked up the stairs. I couldn’t decide which of several good reasons made it behave that way. Was it that I might be wrong? That’s a good one. And quite possible. In reality I didn’t care if I was wrong. I was having the best conversation of the week. It wasn’t that. It had to be that I was getting close to this woman I had, at a distance, become attached to, this woman I had once regarded as cold and distant.

We made our way to my room. I was aware of the movement of her body and soft sound her clothes made slipping over her as she raised her legs to the stairs. She didn’t seem to mind the close proximity, or even that she brushed against me from time to time as we walked.

We didn’t hesitate at the door but went right in. I knew we had a few minutes so I turned on the overhead light to show her the closet, the knot, the screw-handle I had fashioned. She sat down with her back to the wall, her head at the level of the knothole. I readjusted the lighting. It had to be almost dark on this side so as not to give ourselves away. She agreed. I turned off the overhead light and turned on a very small, maybe 20 Watt lamp at the bedside, adjusted the closet door to shadow us and sat down beside her.

In the moments we waited we talked in hushed voices. I learned she did swim, and was a champion but was too shy to say so. She was very academic but always embarrassed it showed. She would like to be more relaxed. She almost thanked me.

I was telling her about downhill skiing and the California state competitions when we heard a sound at the door of the professor’s room. I realized we hadn’t established any rules by which to share the knothole.

We took turns as we watched them come into the room and sit on the bed, but soon I realized it was frustrating to just be getting into the action and have to give it up. I decided I would let her watch, partly because I saw it was making a transformation in her, and partly because it turned me on to watch her watching them. I told her she could do all the looking on the condition that she told me everything she saw. Everything. She agreed.

This turned out to be wonderful. To hear, I had to move close to her mouth which meant I could also hear her breathing and feel her hair against my face. And the words she whispered into my ear! These rich words, describing intimate details of a love scene in the making. What could be better?

“They’re sitting on the bed,” she whispered. “Talking softly. He’s holding her hand and she’s looking into his eyes. She has no fear.”

I was a couple of inches from Claire’s mouth and I could see how it pursed and opened, how she moistened her lips with her tongue as she searched for just the right word. It was a small mouth, the lower lip receding slightly below the upper, now partly open, now giving the impression of a constant state of awe.

I was free to look at her in a way I never could before, to examine her body uninhibited by the prospect of discovery. My eyes turned periodically from her face to her hair, which absorbed the nascent light from the knothole. My vision wandered to the curve of her back, elegantly lordotic, in the manner of a ballerina. And the grace of that long, tapering waist.

Her breasts were of great interest, and though my view was incomplete I was conscious of the movement of her body and imagined how, with each breath, they might be pressing slightly against her bra, shifting with each weave of her spine, skin rubbing against cloth.

“Oh,” Claire said. And she almost giggled. “He just kissed her. On the cheek. She’s turned her face directly to his and now it’s full... full on the mouth.” She sighed, My god! Claire was romantic after all.

Then she suddenly put her hand over her mouth.

“Come on,” I whispered, edging so close to her ear my lips were touching and releasing sound like a passing wind. “The deal was you have to say everything.”

She paused, then swallowed. “He just moved his hand from her face to her..... ”

“Come on, come on.

“... her breast.”

I was having conniptions. I pushed my face against hers. She didn’t withdraw but pushed against mine to keep her view. “Say more,” I said, pushing against her ear, “say more.”

“He’s stroking it.” Claire almost choked on the words but it was a good choke. “Round motions. Running his thumb over her nipple, back and forth.”

I realized I’d never heard a woman say that word. Nipple! This was fabulous!

“I can see it sticking out against her blouse.” Now Claire seemed to be volunteering more than responding to my prodding.

“Are they still kissing,” I asked, my hand reaching under Clair’s hair to her opposite shoulder.

“Yes. Open mouthed. He’s almost, uh, gobbling... gobbling for her tongue..... Oh!”

“What, what.”

“He just reached inside her blouse.”

At that point, perhaps by instinct, perhaps by suggestion, perhaps because some silent planner in me had timed it, I put my hand on Claire’s breast.

She jumped. She drew back from the knothole and gasped, closing her hand against the escaping of the sound. I jerked my hand away and froze, holding my breath.

She closed her eyes, bowed her head a split second and then, without looking at me, pushed her eye back to the hole. I took that as a good sign and but decided to be a little more subtle, maybe to link my moves to her words.

“He’s taking off her bra,” she said.

This time, so as not to startle her, I began with my hand on that long waist I admired so much, stroking up and down in the scaffoid curve of its angle and when she said...

“... Now she’s out of her bra and he’s squeezing her with two fingers... ”

... I ran my hand under Claire’s soft cotton bra to her breast, felt its firmness standing against me and gently squeezed her.

She stayed in place.

“He’s moving his mouth down her neck to her shoulder... to the edge of her breast... still squeezing her... now... ”

Claire had by now risen to her knees, which made her lean over a little to keep her eye level with the portal to the room. This made a little space between her and the wall where I could put my head. So that when she said...

“... Now... he’s sucking her... ”

I clamped my mouth, through her blouse, on her nipple, flicking it with my tongue, nibbling lightly.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Claire’s face, intent, astonished, eager to see what would come next.

A wet spot was growing on her blouse where the point of her breast pushed into my mouth. I was unbuttoning her, slipping her shoulders and arms from her blouse with a level of care equal to that of a surgeon delivering a new baby, the angular light from the bedside lamp illuminating the sides of her breasts with splashes of soft contrast, accentuating her pointed tips.

It was amazing - Claire’s eyes occupied on their carnal feast, a certain permission granted by the grace of her submission to nakedness - I was free to examine, with a level of close attention I’d never before experienced, the startling beauty of a miraculous pair of breasts.

They were a larger than they had appeared, cinched under her tight bra, but still small enough to create a feeling of separateness which conferred upon them the impression they were a perfectly matched pair rather than a unit cleaved. They had their separate identities. I was tempted to give them names.

They stood out from her as if proud and unafraid and were tightly conical, rising in a nearly straight line on all sides from the ribbed wall of her chest to the pale pink tip, so perfectly shaped, there was hardly any sag to the underside - just the slightest arc of grace.

They seemed very young, suggesting a quality of innocence in that most transcendent of moments in the maturation of the female body when the breasts first appear, still holding the future secret, pressing along the path of their perfect shape.

I watched with fascination as they rose with her breathing, swayed slightly side to side as she shifted positions, brushed against her inner arms, shaping to the form of each little pressure.

Claire was either too intrigued with her own observations or she had decided to just let me have my pleasure, for she made no move to disturb me.

I wanted to memorize her, to record that which I knew must pass from us into the slowfall of the past. I stroked upward from origin to rosy tip watching them lift and swirl to the contour of my hands.

Claire was speaking again. Her voice seemed slower, a little more mellow. “She’s beginning to undress him,” she said. And with that she turned away from the knothole and looked at me briefly, fingering the buttons of my shirt, then turned back to her work. As I was taking off my clothes, it occurred to me that Claire could be making all this up. She could be directing my actions by planting elements in the story that weren’t really there.

For a moment I wanted to push her gently aside and see for myself what they were doing. Why should I? How could I improve on this miraculous sequence? If the mechanism of a story line allowed her to reveal her desires while protecting her from openly identifying with them, more power to her. She wants me to take off my clothes? I’ll take off my clothes.

Claire’s face just turned dark red. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

“What?” I said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You have to, that’s the deal” I said, reaching one arm around her waist and hugging her with my newly naked body.

“Maybe you should look,” she said.

“I won’t look,” I said. “You can skip this one if you like but if it’s going to be said, I’d rather hear you say it.”

She took a deep breath. I felt her relax in my embrace as if to signal acceptance of a new and deeper intimacy.

“She’s sucking him,” she whispered almost inaudibly.

And with that she looked away quickly from the knothole and saw me, for the first time, completely naked.

I was embarrassed, being half limp, wishing I was harder. When I was inexperienced with someone new, or anxious, or mostly, I realized in retrospect, this happened when I was with a woman I idolized too much.

She looked up at my face, smiled, and although I did not see a single eyelash move, I could have sworn she winked. She reached over and tenderly took hold of me, cupping me in her hand and squeezing with a downward pulse of her thumb.

Then, without announcement or ceremony, she leaned over and put her lips around me.

This act of blessing must have given the little dogger all the reassurance it needed for it stood right up, as if hesitation had never been an issue. I, meanwhile, couldn’t move. I just knelt there while she worked it a few times, then she peeled it out of her uplifted mouth and went back to looking.

“She’s taking him deeper,” she said and turned and smiled mischievously.

I worked myself around behind her and placing two hands on her waist, lifted her into a half-standing position, her feet on the floor and her hands on the wall bracing her at the level of the eye-hole.

Her tight muscular bottom rolled into view stretching her close-fitting slacks into a sharply rounded contour which, as she described how G was moving the professor’s foreskin back and forth, I rubbed with my hands feeling her warmth.

Claire was rolling her pelvis on the axis of her hips, her sex tilting inward then outward toward me, her feet shifting and rocking. My hands found the warm spot between her legs and rubbed harder. She kept right on looking into the next room.

“He’s reaching for her pants,” Claire said. “Struggling to get them off.”

Instinctively, and with one shocking move, I slid her slacks down over her buttocks to her knees, spread her legs slightly, and worked my fingers back and forth in her wet folds.

“She’s fully naked now,” she whispered almost in a gasp. “Wow..... she’s really curvy. Tanned, even over her nipples and bottom. He’s feeling her. He’s pushing his fingers in her.”

This time I was ahead of the professor so in place of my fingers I substituted the tip of my cock, sliding it along her moistened valley, lubricating my head in her little gush.

She was describing G’s mouth on the professor’s penis, how her lips seemed to reach out to pull in more of his shaft, how he bobbed when she took him out and licked his tip... then suddenly, she gasped.

“What?” I said.

“She’s done it,” she said with undisguised admiration.

“Done what?”

“She took him right down to the root.”

A flush went though my body and, instinctively, a thrust shot through my pelvis and buried my penis about half way. She let out a shriek and stood straight upright.

Oh my god, I thought. I’ve ruined it now. And I started to withdraw.

She jerked her hands down between her legs and held me there, still inside. “No,” she said, tilting her head to one side and closing her eyes, “don’t go away.”

Partly because the shift in her body around my penis cranked me and partly because any interruption, even threatened, can call forth that instinct the body has to finish off procreation in the crescendo of intrusion, my come rushed against the bottleneck in the well of my loins and I felt my penis beat four times inside her. I was about to come.

No, no, I thought... not now. Not yet. And quickly I imagined myself somewhere else, somewhere hostile - the snow, the cold. Shivering. I imagined the face of the ugliest girl I had ever seen. Sardines. Dry heaves.

Claire held where she was. But she stood up and turned her head so that she nestled her forehead against my cheek. We just stood there for a while, for the first time, alone together, just the two of us.

Lava settled in my pelvis and I could afford to put my arms around her without fear of finishing her off. We rocked side to side, her hands reaching around to my buttocks, holding me in. It was almost like singing.

“Well,” she said at last, “shall we keep going?”

I nodded and she bent slowly over the knothole.

As she reached it she gave a quick laugh and stood up again.

“What’s up?” I asked.

She giggled. “There’s an eye in there.”

Suddenly I realized that the tables had been turned. Claire’s little shriek called the watched to become watchers. We laughed out loud.

“Well,” Claire said. “Let’s give them something to look at.”

She took her hands away from my backside and spread her legs a little. We were facing the knothole, our pelvises exactly at the level of their eyes. They would have a very direct view, a tennenbruso, I thought, that artistic effect in painting in which the background is dimmed around the most important visual effect at the center. We were the focal point of a masterpiece.

Conscious now that we were being watched, I began to move slowly in and out of her, still at half penetration, working slowly deeper. Imagining all the while how this might look to them. Her hips pressed back against me. I liked the feeling that I had to roll over this tight cushion to penetrate her.

For her part, Claire, rotated gently side to side, shifting her weight first to one foot then the other, her hands bracing against the wall. I placed my hands on her waist to feel these shifts outside and inside.

Claire was getting in to it. Her slacks, which all this time were still sliding around down below her knees, got kicked off. She noticed the small bedside lamp, now very near to us, and by sudden inspiration she picked it up and placed it at her feet. We could feel, it seemed to me, the impact of light and the looking eager eyes on our skin, now sensitive to every nuance of motion and touch. My hands slid up her waist to her breasts, pulling her tight against me as I pushed from behind.

Applause came from the next room.

We laughed and though it broke the spell a little, we picked up the pace, concentrating on each other.

Claire was breathing deeply, at a pace that rose faster and faster until she swooned slightly, buckling at the knees. We both went down to the floor, kneeling, still attached.

We recovered to find ourselves at eye level with the little window. Claire crawled over to it. Turning to me she whispered, “surprise package.” And leaning against the wall she placed the tip of her breast into the hole. Then suddenly, she laughed loudly and drew back. I caught sight of a tongue quivering in the window. Claire looked around at me and we kissed. It was a loving kiss. Something spiritual had awakened between us.

We just sat there and held each other for a while, as if no one was watching, as if for an instant the permeable part of the wall glazed over with an impermeability of will. There was, in that moment surrounding us, a sense of blessing.

We had not been paying attention but we heard giggling we looked back to the hole to find, lo and behold, a penis sticking out of it.

Claire laughed a little sarcastic laugh and raised her eyebrows. Showtime, she said and almost with a sense of resignation grasped the professor’s penis, and tilting her head to the side in a posture of contemplation, palpated it as if to see, first hand, how this thing worked. Her palm and fingers wrapped it while her thumb rubbed the tip, lubricating it with its juices.

With all the commotion, I had fallen out of Claire and was now watching her face and hands when a sharp knock came at the door. My first impulse was to ignore it, engaged, as we were, in a private intimacy. But the knock came again, quickly... and then once more with palpable intensity.

I rose, the spell half-broken, or at least suspended, and wrapping a towel around me, opened the door part way. In pushed G. wearing the professor’s bathrobe. She shut the door behind her, then turned and looked me square in the eyes, penetrating me for what seemed like half a minute. Then, satisfied she had found what she was looking for, she let the robe, with a single gesture, slide from her shoulders to the floor. She watched me watching her. Her shoulders were fuller than Claire’s, rounded and bronzed. Her breasts were globe like, hanging in a straight line of tangent from her breast bone to the darker, puffy areola. Her waist was short, her hips beginning high and rounding down to a sharp angle with her thighs.

She reached over and loosened my hand from my towel, letting it drop. My penis stood out directly at her.

She kissed me hard, pulling me into her mouth with the curl of her hand at the back of my neck, teasing my tongue with hers. Then, in one decisive gesture, she grabbed my cock, rose on tiptoes and climbed on to me, all the way to the hilt.

I saw her eyes close just before mine did, and, overcome with pleasure I jammed her to the wall and poked her fifteen to twenty times before she pushed me away gasping for air. She grabbed me by the root and dragged me to the closet where Claire, with both hands, was running the professor’s foreskin up and down.

G bent down and grasping a kneeling Claire by the tight curve of her waist, brought her legs to a standing position once again. Claire hardly altered her attentiveness to the professor. G. looked at me and smiled and stroking Claire’s bottom she outlined the gradual curve where the waist flared over the trim buttocks, the tight turn at the base where her legs joined, the rounded curve at the juncture of inner thighs and the soft mat of the pubis. It was as if G. were displaying, for the pleasure of an audience of one, an object of great beauty, a painting by Vermeer, adding a tactile dimension to a visual masterpiece.

She did this with one hand for she kept the other firmly attached to my penis, periodically squeezed me, keeping me fully hard and stimulated. Each time she squeezed, her eyes, full on my face, lighted with electricity.

G. was now reaching other parts of Claire’s body, the fronts of her legs, her ankles, the inner thigh just above the knee, G’s full arm made contact with her as it slid over her skin if to encircle and embrace each part.

Now she reached below Claire’s torso, cupping her hand to draw up, as if from a well, lifting the warm juices of her sex. With these she slathered the crease that runs behind, rocking the side of her finger back and forth over the tight circle of her anus, then circling it, softening it, pulsing at it in a slow, almost beseeching manner. I could see it swelling and softening under her careful attention, enough so that it would emit a finger tip now and then, as now, even to the base of the nail, as now, to the second joint - each thrust carrying before it a little bead of mucous to line and protect the tender passage.

I worried Claire might not be enjoying this, might feel used, abused somehow by all this. I looked to her face. She was licking her fingers, wetting the tip of the professor’s penis with her saliva, stroking upward with her thumb the sensitive V-shaped cleft on the underside of its bulbous head, watching him pump with each stroke. I could find no sign of displeasure.

Now G. had pushed her finger all the way into Claire. She then turned to me, pulled me by my penis and began pushing the flat side of its head against the round muscle of Claire’s anus. It seemed pliable, relaxed. The lower margin cupped slightly with each nod of my tip, the upper margin almost reached over to envelope the little slit at the end. G. spit into her hand and rubbed saliva into the little clasp where Claire and I were joined. My tip disappeared. G pushed me down, down, Claire following along, until I was direct on her hole.

I peeked again at Claire’s face to see if she was still okay.

She was working the professor’s tip just inside her lips, rolling her head side to side.

G. pushed me further into Claire with four gentle thrusts of her fist, then came around behind me. Finding my silver photo case on the floor of the closet she kicked it around behind me and stood on it so her pelvis cupped mine, in curved parallels.

She began thrusting from behind, pushing me deeper into Claire. I was aware of a great tightness around my penis, greater friction than I had ever experienced, so much so that Claire seemed both to move with me and remain stationary at the same time.

G. reached around me with both arms and fastened her hands on Claire, her fingers hooked into the little angle the body makes with the thighs when it is bent over, and pulled her further on to me, bringing her into our thrusts a synchronous motion of penetration.

Claire had gone down on the professor. He was in her half way, her hands positioned, palms against the wall, the tips of her thumbs and forefingers forming a little diamond through which the professor projected. This graceful gesture cushioned her against the impact of her face against the wall when we thrust her down on the professor and added a resilient, spring-like recoil that let her bounce back.

G. was pumping harder. Claire appeared to be opening comfortably. I realized, G. was the one fucking Claire, using my penis to do it. I added a little push of my own.

I thought perhaps G. might need a little something, isolated, as she was, working the engine back there without direct stimulation of her own. I reached around to grab her buttocks, digging my fingertips into the hard, contracting meat of her muscle. She cried out and bit my back, firmly, picking up her pace, issuing, for the first time, little cooing sounds each time she thrust her pelvis against mine.

I moved my hand between her legs and closed within my fist, the mossy wetness of hair and soft ridges. I squeezed her tight enough to let her really know that I was there. Then, slipping and slathering and kneading and probing, I found the bump of her clitoris, rubbing it and pinching it. I set my finger on top of it, so that with each motion of her pelvis she would get a direct pulse of pressure. Good, I thought. But one thing more: I thought she should feel fucked just as she was fucking Claire. So I rolled two fingers over the lip of her entry deep inside and felt the ridges of her tubular sex slide over me. Now she had a prick to ride.

The professor could not possibly know what was going on over here, isolated, as he was by the anonymity of the wall, feeling only with his penis and his imagination. Playful, quirky, he had, without hesitation, placed his penis in the dark hole of uncertainty, apparently trusting that the ethos of pleasure-making would be kind and just. It took great courage I thought, to give up any indicators by which he could anticipate what was about to happen to him, or even know who was touching him. Nothing could be certain beyond the tender layer of flesh that connected us.

This wall, this membrane that partly concealed and partly revealed, had given us the freedom to make up a creative fiction, a healing fiction for the malady of reality in our lives. Oh, shut up, Claire would certainly have said if she were listening in on my brain. Just like a psychologist, analyzing life while the rest of us are enjoying it.

On this side of the wall a great rhythm had been established, initiated by the incantatory thrusts of G, transmitted through me to Claire, then on to the Professor. The intensity was picking up. And as it did, the ascending ladder of G’s utterances became the music by which each of us judged our place on the crescendo. She was the command that would bring us together to the brink.

I don’t remember what happened after that. Details melt into the dissolving interfaces between us. I do know that as we moved more as one, our pleasures also moved more as one, until the lines of separation dissolved.

And I don’t remember who came first. But I remember that deafening silence that preceded our undoing, a silence in which everything paused, right down to the high-pitched ringing in my ears. Even the urgent motions of G. lulled like the luffing of jib sails in slow wind. And there was a sense of spreading, as if in windless flight out over an alluvial plane, a lifting that lasted and lasted and lasted...

Then, collapse.

The two women and I huddle on the floor in a catatonic, passive embrace where we stay for an indeterminate time, caressing whatever we, by happenstance, were touching.

At last I rose, turned on the shower in the narrow stall and waited until the water was warm.

G. was stirring. I lifted and half-carried her to the shower where, using my favorite Lapi de Provance - a lavender soap from the South of France - I washed her carefully. All over, careful with each prominence and fold, the slipperiness on her skin the residue of lovemaking departing down the drain.

I left her leaning against the shower wall and went to get Claire. And with an affectionate, companionable, almost reverent sense of respect, I washed her too.

I enjoyed, in a different way, the gift of washing. There was a peacefulness to it and it felt like acceptance had been granted into a private realm of friendship, passage to a room in the house where no words were spoken.

Nor did we speak during the drying-off period, nor during the putting on of robe and clothes. The physicality that remained, fleetingly, during bathing was diminishing as it wanted to. We were returning to ourselves. We did not resist.

Breakfast was continental. People came and went at will, sampling from the modest buffet of croissant and jellies, corn flakes, and fruit. None of our group showed.

During the time that remained the professor and G became more part of the academic proceedings in the village and drifted away from us, even from dinnertime at the ancient table.

Claire’s boyfriend showed up after all. On schedule. Thursday, as she said he would. I was shocked. She spent the rest of the week with him doing I don’t know what. I spent the days snowboarding like the mad bomber, hurling myself in a projectile of dangerous and reckless abandonment down the hill. Didn’t matter. I could die that day and have absolutely no regrets.

I did catch Claire’s eye. Though only once. It was when she looked back over her shoulder as she and her boyfriend were leaving for an evening out. I glimpsed there a brief opening of tenderness, a melting forth, then, freezing up again.

I returned to school, finished my degree in psychology. Changed my thesis title from “Archetypes of Schizophrenia” to “Behavioral Differences Between Love and That Which Has The Appearance of Love.” Claire came to my campus once during my senior year, attending a conference on Advances in Library Science. I saw her standing in the cafeteria line and without hesitation, went up to her. The tenderness that had come and gone from her eyes before, came again, though it flashed just briefly. “Be well,” she said, and walked away.

When I discovered I couldn’t make a living trying to understand human nature I went back to get a MBA. These days I do what everybody else does - trade stocks on Wall Street and live with my wife and twin three-year-old daughters in the suburbs.

Over the years I have wondered what would have happened if Claire and I had stopped at the love kiss. Stopped right there and not gone any further. Would we be together now, would we be a “thing,” a couple, cohorts in highrise and coffee.

I don’t know.

But sometimes when I am making love to my wife I think of Claire, bending over the professor, G pulling her on to me. It makes me come sooner. And harder. And I get a twinge that feels a little like unfaithfulness. But for all I know my wife is thinking about the linebacker’s hand up her dress in the middle of Casablanca or the sou chef fucking her standing up in cold storage. It’s all right with me, as long as we don’t share the details - her pleasures mixing with my pleasures to lift us both.

Aren’t we, after all, the pleasures and sorrows we offer to each other? Even the love kiss, and the fading cone of possibility it opens briefly into the future.