IT WAS TUESDAY, 5:00 P.M. Mel Taylor drove down to Little Saigon. The two women were waiting for him, chattering and laughing in that lovely, feminine Vietnamese way.
He wondered once again why it was that American women couldn’t be that way—exotic, erotic, inventive, always lovely and trim, willing and able to really please a man, in short, subservient and good at it. Most people bitched and moaned about the war. And every time you saw a vet on TV or in the movies or in the news, they were miserable and screwed up. Mel wasn’t. He’d had what the British used to call “a good war.” The Saigon years had been, in many ways, “the best years of his life.” No question. The women, the food, the gracious living. In Vietnam he’d been a rich man. He’d had servants: cook, house cleaner, laundry boy. He’d been a powerful man, with an adoring mistress, and he only had to keep her, he didn’t have to answer to her or be faithful to her. What did he have in America? A microwave, a Hoover, a Westinghouse, and a wife.
Mel was actually early. Not by more than three or four minutes. But certainly early. And he was erect inside his pants when he walked in. That was unusual. No delicate little butterfly touches to cleverly coax blood down to engorge the spongelike cells of the penis, causing it to enlarge and stiffen, step by tiny step. No warm bath in a pretty mouth, where it could measure its own increase against tongue, teeth, cheeks, and throat. This last being a measure that proved how large and potent he must be, for even the experienced mama-san had to retreat when Taylor swelled to his full status.
Taylor had been listening to the tape. Over and over, for days. The tape of the night that Magdalena Lazlo came home with Jack Cushing and Joe Broz punched him out. The night that the microphones heard, and the linked slo-play Panasonics recorded, the sounds of Magdalena Lazlo submitting to the lust and passion of Joe Broz. They’d gone at it for hours. Moans of desire, shouts of orgasm, subtle sounds of moisture, a variety of endearments, endless praise for each other’s body parts, encouragement and satisfaction.
A new day, a new tape. They sent Mary Mulligan away and they’d gone at it again. The first day they’d started hard and fast and ended sensual and slow, with sleepy endearments. The second, they’d started slow and tender, but it got away from them quickly and they became animals, grunting and—Taylor could swear he could feel it on the tape—sweating.
Somewhere in the middle—Taylor didn’t know why he remembered it, fixated on it—maybe because amidst all that moaning and sighing it had been so unexpected. A vividness, like a child’s bright plastic toy, cartoon colors, in the middle of a flesh-tone landscape. Somewhere in the middle, giggling, Maggie said, “You know what the best part of being your lover is going to be, Joe? Do you know?”
“No. What’s the best part?”
“It’s going to be dressing you.”
“Aww, come on.”
“We’re going to start with those gym socks of yours. No more white socks, except for running. Then we’re going to get you underwear and ties and shirts and slacks and shoes and I’m going to get Fredo to do something with your hair.”
Which is where they were now. Taylor knew. They’d finally left the house, after two days behind closed doors, except for a run on the beach and splash in the sea. He had a two-man team on them. They’d last reported in when Maggie took Joe into an exclusive men’s store on Rodeo Drive at 2:00 P.M.
Taylor stripped. He tossed his clothes on the chair in the corner. The mama-san folded them neatly. The daughter-san gaped with respectful awe at his organ. He walked over to the massage table. With each step his erection bounced up and flopped sideways, describing an eccentric oval that leaned toward the right and was wider at the bottom than the top. He hopped up on the massage table.
Mama-san rushed to hand him his brandy. He slurped it down, felt the burn, and lay back with his head on the pillow. The sheet beneath him was clean and crisp and just about body temperature.
“Oh, you are very strong today, Captain Taylor. Very powerful,” the daughter said. He’d been ROTC, entered the Army as a lieutenant, then rose to the rank of captain in Vietnam.
“Oh my, yes. You are a giant,” the mother said.
“I am afraid to touch it,” the daughter said. It was obviously fake whore talk. But fake was not the issue, was it? The issue was whether a woman wanted a man to feel good, to feel strong and manly. To feel respected and powerful.
“Do not be afraid,” the mother said. “Come, I will show you.”
She took her daughter’s hands and placed them on the stiff penis.
At the first touch, much to the surprise of all three of them, it began to ejaculate.
Always before, by design, it had taken a full hour. And then, when it did, it spurted hugely, in a high and perfect arc, like the arc of urine of an undiapered infant boy lying on his back, reaching at least as far as Taylor’s own chest, sometimes as far as his head. An ejaculation of power and grandeur.
But this. This just spilled. It spilled out the tip and dripped down and kept on spilling in small, powerless pulses until he was empty. It was a dribble. It didn’t even feel like an orgasm. The big ejaculations felt like something. You bet they did. They were timeless, wordless screams of ecstasy. This was nothing. He’d received greater sensation and achieved more release from taking a plain old piss than from this.
Taylor was angry. He felt ripped off. “You fucked up,” he snarled to the women. “You fucked up.”
They said something in Vietnamese. And giggled. Taylor found the giggles, in this situation, to be entirely without charm. In fact, the laughter was infuriating. They were laughing at him. Laughing at an American. He hopped off the table and loomed over them. “Goddamn you, you bitches, you fucked up.” The mama-san started to apologize, but Taylor said, “If you think I’m going to pay you for this, you’re out of your fucking mind.”
This started an argument as to whether he was paying by the hour or per ejaculation. There was justice to both sides of the case, and an outside arbitrator certainly could have settled it rapidly and even with good feeling all around: “Girls, do ’em again, and Mel, tip ’em an extra fifty.” But their giggles and his threat not to pay had pushed each other’s fear and anger buttons. Each immediately brought baggage to the conflict. It was no longer Mel against the girls; it had become customer versus whore, male versus female, Caucasian versus Asian, America versus Vietnam.
It got loud fast and promised to become violent almost as fast. But a slim young Vietnamese male stepped through the door. He had a large, dramatic scar on his face and a pair of nun-chucks in his hand. Gangster, pimp, enforcer, husband, or brother, Taylor had no way of knowing. But that was not the point. The point was pay and leave quietly.
Normally, Taylor paid on his Visa card, which showed up on his monthly statement as a reasonably respectable restaurant bill. In his house the man paid the bills so there was no reason for his wife to ask him why he spent two hundred dollars every week at the same Vietnamese restaurant. But if she ever did, Mel had rehearsed an answer. He would say that he and a bunch of old Army buddies met once a week to reminisce, everybody chipped in cash, and Mel put it on his card. Then he would explain that by doing that he got a free thirty-day ride on the money, pull out his calculator, and befuddle Silvia with dazzling fiscal footwork.
Taylor was not about to stand there with his own ejaculate turning cold and drying around his pubic hair while some scarred-up Vietnamese thug ran his Wells Fargo Visa through a credit-card machine and the automatic telephone dialer to register electronic approval and record the transaction. Nor was he going to pay the full amount, if he could help it. So he stomped into his clothes and grabbed for his cash. He crumpled up a bunch of twenties, flung them on the ground, and made for the door. The younger woman picked them up quicker than a snake, flattened and counted them. The kid gangster barred the door. There was only eighty bucks. They all made noises at him. He dragged out some more money. The mama-san snatched it from his hand before he could crumple it and throw it down. It was another four twenties, all he had except for five singles and some silver. Apparently, it was enough, because they stepped aside and let him go.