The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [120]
There was so much she did not know, not merely about herself but about the way people behaved in general. So very much she did not understand.
Had Sully ever done things with another man? Earlier the thought would have been laughable, but now she was not so sure. How could anyone be sure of anything? If she had learned nothing else, she had learned that there was very little you could be sure of. She tried to imagine Sully with another man. She tried to picture him on his knees before another man, with the man’s cock in his mouth. But she could not bring the picture into focus.
Sully was completely male, utterly male. And she herself was utterly female, and yet she was dizzy at the thought of having sex with faggots and had been unable to dismiss the idea of having sexual relations with another woman. She even had the woman in mind. Every time she saw Karen Markarian on the street a delicious shiver went through her body, and the few times they had spoken she walked away with the feeling that her desires were reciprocated. She had done nothing about this. She could not think what to do about it, or how to go about doing it, but the thoughts would not go away. Had Sully ever had strange thoughts like this about another man? Had he ever done anything about them? She pictured Warren again and began to imagine him in bed. She tried to bring Bert into the picture but could not manage it. She did not know what they would to do, or how, and although she could imagine all of possibilities, none of them had reality because of her own ignorance.
Well, she would find out, and soon.
She could not remember what Bert looked like. She had seen him one time, and she remembered the evening well enough, the drive to Carversville, the solitary drinks, the exploration of possibilities. She remembered vividly the man she had ultimately picked up, remembered even more vividly the ecstasy she had shared with her husband afterward. But she could not remember Bert LeGrand. She did remember his hands, their assurance on the keys, the power of them, and mixed with that memory was the feel of Warren’s hand on her foot. Did a man like Warren touch a male foot and a female foot in the same way? Or was there a difference?
Again she let her mind drift to the scene at the Raparound, her foot in his lap, her toes working to excite his cock. She touched herself for an instant to heighten the memory but it was unnecessary, the memory was vivid enough without such enhancement. She found herself wrapping words around the memory, putting lyrics to its music, the words she would use when she told Sully about it.
For she would tell him all of it. From the overtures on the street to the wildness which she herself was not yet able to imagine. She would tell him all of it
Soon enough.
SEVENTEEN
The last of the sunset glowed red in the west as Karen left the house and headed back into the woods. She had paused first at the door of her father’s study, heard the typewriter chatter, pause, then start tentatively up again. She wished he would finish the book so that she could read it. It wouldn’t be much longer, she thought. He was working steadily, working every day, and sometimes she would stand silently outside his door and hear the typewriter keys click away without interruption for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
When he was out of the house she was occasionally tempted to peek at the manuscript. Once she had entered the study in his absence but had been unable to make herself look at what he had written. It could do no harm so long as he did not know that she had read it, but still she felt it would be a dishonorable act on her part.
She walked only a few yards into