Small Town

The other night she curled up beside him and sucked on his nipple, her cupped hands fashioning a breast from the surrounding flesh. All smooth and hairless like a girl, she’d murmured. Franny, wouldn’t it be nice if you got hormone shots? You could grow tits, Franny. I could take off your bra and suck your titties.

Franny the tranny, she thought, knowing that in fact it would never go that far. He wouldn’t go out looking for a sex-change doctor, and she didn’t think she’d really like it if he did. She liked his manly chest, his firm pectoral muscles. But her words would stay with him, and he’d grow breasts in his mind, and when she stroked his chest and sucked his nipples he’d respond as urgently as if he did have breasts.

No reason she couldn’t get him to have his nipples pierced. She’d send him to Medea — no, she’d take him to Medea. She hadn’t gone back herself, wasn’t so sure she wanted labial rings after all, but if she took Franny, and hooked him up to that St. Andrew’s cross of hers, and if she could blow him while Medea did the piercing, at least for the first one, and then if she could talk Medea into letting her do the second, urging the needle through the stiffened flesh...

Her threesome with Jay McGann and Lowell Cooke was going through interesting changes. Lowell, the loser in a who-comes-last contest (which could be as easily viewed, she thought, as a victory of her left hand over her right hand) had been a good sport, giving his promising young author what he’d previously only given him metaphorically. She’d rubbed against him while he performed the act, murmuring encouragement, adding a caress or two of her own to his.

Now, several weeks later, any inhibition they’d had about inadvertent contact was long gone, and their hands were as apt to be on each other as on her. The sandwich remained their finale, and it never ceased to thrill her, having one at her back and one at her front, being impaled fore and aft. She sensed, though, that it wouldn’t be long before she now and then yielded her central role, and took a turn as one of the pieces of bread.

Meanwhile she was still the meat in the sandwich. Or, as one of them had told her, You’re in the middle, fucking a writer and a publisher simultaneously. You know what that makes you, Susan? The agent!

The Allgood show was shaping up. She’d hired a small van and picked up the artist’s new work, four of the five pieces he’d made since her earlier visit. He kept one, managing to communicate that he was not sure it was finished, but beamed happily as the rest were carried off.

Lois Appling photographed the new pieces, although they wouldn’t be in the brochure, or in the show itself. They’d be held in reserve, for private sale to select customers after the sold-out show was down, or as a start toward her next show sometime a year or two down the line. And she sent Lois out to Brooklyn to photograph the artist. Lois normally worked in her studio, but understood that this particular artist was too nuts to come into Manhattan to have his picture taken. She brought back some good shots of the man at work, capturing not only his eccentricity but also his passion.

With all that done, she’d decided there was no need to deny herself. She got Reginald Barron to come into the city, met him for a drink at Chelsea Commons, took him on a walking tour to show him where the Carpenter had thrown his firebombs, and brought him up to her apartment and fucked the daylights out of him.

He was, as she’d anticipated, a beautiful boy, with a classical physique and a beautiful penis. His skin was like velvet, and his abiding innocence was delicious. He was not without experience — how could he be, looking the way he did? — but it was clear that she was something new to him, worldly and sophisticated, a woman his mother’s age with a girl’s hairless body.

For all of that, there was something oddly disappointing in the experience. She knew that she could enmesh him in an affair, that she could lead him across new frontiers as she led the others, but she knew that wasn’t something she wanted to do. Afterward, when he came out of the shower, she brought him a glass of iced tea and told him she certainly hadn’t planned for this to happen, but that she was just as glad that it did. It was a barrier they’d had to cross once to ensure a smooth working relationship, she told him, and he nodded thoughtfully, as if the gibberish she was spouting made perfect sense. And it had been lovely, she went on, but now there’d be no need for them to do this again. In fact, she stressed, it was important that they not do it again.