total baldness. just an attorney with a hard-on poking the front of his undershorts out of shape. And only moderately out of shape, at that.
The size of his erection wasn't the important thing, though. The important thing was the grin. It hadn't changed a bit, and that meant Gerald hadn't taken her seriously. She was supposed to protest; after all, that was the game.
"Gerald? I mean it."
The grin widened. A few more of his small, inoffensive attorney's teeth came into view; his IQ tumbled another twenty or thirty points. And he still wasn't hearing her.
Are you sure of that?
She was. She couldn't read him like a book-she supposed it took a lot more than seventeen years of marriage to get to that point-but she thought she usually had a pretty good idea of what was going through his head. She thought something would be seriously out of whack if she didn't.
If that's the truth, toots, how come he can't read you? How come hecan't see this isn't just a new scene in the same old sex-farce?
Now it was her turn to frown slightly. She had always heard voices inside her head-she guessed everyone did, although people usually didn't talk about them, any more than they talked about their bowel functions-and most of them were old friends, as comfortable as bedroom slippers. This one, however, was new... and there was nothing comfortable about it. It was a strong voice, one that sounded young and vigorous. It also sounded impatient. Now it spoke again, answering its own question.
It isn't that he can't read you; it's just that sometimes, toots, he doesn'twant to.
"Gerald, really-I don't feet like it. Bring the keys back and unlock me. We'll do something else. I'll get on top, if you want. Or you can just lie there with your hands behind your head and I'll do you, you know, the other way."
Are you sure you want to do that? the new voice asked. Are youreally sure you want to have any sex with this man?
Jessie closed her eyes, as if she could make the voice shut up by doing that. When she opened them again, Gerald was standing at the foot of the bed, the front of his shorts jutting like the prow of a ship. Well... some kid's toy boat, maybe. His grin had widened further, exposing the last few teeth-the ones with the gold fillings-on both sides. She didn't just dislike that dumb grin, she realized; she despised it.
"I will let you up... if you're very, very good. Can you be very, very good, Jessie?"
Corny, the new no-bullshit voice commented. Tres corny.
He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underpants like some absurd gunslinger. The jockeys went down pretty fast once they got past his not-inconsiderable love handles. And there it was, exposed. Not the formidable engine of love she had first encountered as a teenager in the pages of Fanny Hill but something meek and pink and circumcised; five inches of completely unremarkable erection. Two or three years ago, on one of her infrequent trips to Boston, she had seen a movie called The Belly of an Architect. She thought, Right. And now I'm looking at The Penis of anAttorney. She had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing. Laughing at this point would be impolitic.
An idea came to her then, and it killed any urge she'd had to laugh. It was this: he didn't know she was serious because for him, Jessie Mahout Burlingame, wife of Gerald, sister of Maddy and Will, daughter of Tom and Sally, mother of no one, was really not here at all. She had ceased to be here when the keys made their small, steely clicks in the locks of the handcuffs. The men's adventure magazines of Gerald's teenage years had been replaced by a pile of skin magazines in the bottom drawer of his desk, magazines in which women wearing pearls and nothing else knelt on bearskin rugs while men with sexual equipment that made Gerald's look strictly HO-scale by comparison took them from behind. In the backs of these magazines, between the talk-dirty-to-me phone ads with their 900 numbers, were ads for inflatable women which were supposed to be anatomically correct-a bizarre concept if Jessie had ever encountered one. She thought of those air-filled dollies now, their pink skins, lineless cartoon bodies, and featureless faces, with a kind of revelatory amazement. It wasn't horror-not quite-but an intense light flashed on inside her,