Other Earths (collection)

I hadn’t thought that I could take such pleasure from fondling a nearly comatose woman. The thought that she was submitting to me had been exciting. I had walled off such practices from my sexual life, yet I now found myself imagining variations on the act, and I believed that Lucy would be a willing partner to my fantasies. The woman I’d met in the bar had, over the course of a few hours, been transformed into a practicing submissive. I had known other women to exhibit a manner markedly different from that they later presented, women who, upon feeling secure in the situation, had changed as abruptly as Lucy. But Cradle Two’s rice-paper model was in my head, people shunting back and forth between universes without realizing it, and I thought if I could see those women now, I would view their sudden transformation in a new light, and I speculated that this Lucy might not be the same who had climbed into the dinghy with me. One way or another, I had presumed her to be a normal, bright woman who had survived a shattering blow, but it was evident that she had picked up a kink or two along the road to recovery.

In the morning I woke to a drowned gray light, the cabin windows spotted with rain. Lucy was sitting up in bed, inspecting her stomach.

“I’m all sticky,” she said, and gave me a sly smile. “You were wicked, weren’t you?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She gave the matter some study, screwing up her face, as might a child, into a mask of exaggerated perplexity. “It’s a little hazy. I definitely remember you touching me.” She scooted down beneath the sheets, snuggling close. “It made for a decent icebreaker, don’t you think? There’ll be less reason for nerves when we make love.”

“Now you mention it, I doubt there’ll be any.” I clasped my hands behind my neck. “Last night was surprising to me.”

“A sophisticate like you? I wouldn’t have believed it possible to surprise you.”

I caught her by the hair and pulled her head away from my chest, irritated by the remark. Judging by her calm face, she didn’t mind the rough treatment, and I tightened my grip.

“I wasn’t mocking you,” she said. “I’m your admirer. Honest. Cross my heart and spit on the pope.”

I released her, astonished by the behavior she had brought out in me. She flung a leg across my waist, rubbing against me, letting me feel the heated damp of her.

“Would you care to see another of my tricks?” she asked.

“What do you have?”

“Oh, I’ve got scads.” She folded her arms on my chest, rested her chin upon them, and gazed at me soberly. “You’d be surprised, I mean really, really …really surprised, how wicked I can be.”

Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same passions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat—there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television.