Quiver

Sandra lies motionless. She can feel the heat of the lamp on her back. She is listening hard for her husband’s footsteps. She hopes he’s in the adjoining room, although she has already heard him disappear down the corridor and into the lift. The presence of him in the other room is an irrational illusion, but she holds on to it to stop herself from screaming. She struggles with the ropes but he has tied her firmly. It is impossible to escape. She lies there open to the world. It is then that she hears the click of the door.

“Brian?” With her face against the seat, Sandra cannot see him. The footsteps are heavy. He comes up behind her. His hands are on her. They run down the sides of her buttocks to her pussy. He opens her lips, his thumb on her clit. Strange hands, heavier than Brian’s, the skin rough like a cat’s tongue. He rubs her gently. The strangeness of this man excites her. His smell is different, he smells dark, as if he has more body hair. Like soil, with a faint tinge of machine oil underneath. She feels the dull weight of his cock against her thigh. He enters her slowly. He is bigger than Brian and she stretches with his thickness. She gasps as he starts to increase his rhythm. Pushing his large hands under her skirt, he releases her breasts, pulling at the nipples. He reaches up and unties the knots around her wrists. He pulls her upright and down onto his lap, cupping her breasts as she rides him, and biting the back of her neck. She feels the mouth she hasn’t yet seen—full and strong, the bottom lip jutting over the top. She twists to see him but he firmly keeps her facing away.

The dentist chair tilts back like a bed. He pushes her down, so that her face is near his knees. He moves her legs so that they run up along his hips to his shoulders. She is lying flat against his body. His cock is still inside her, pushing against the back of her sex. They move slowly. From his reclining position he can see where he is entering her. He parts her buttocks, gently easing two fingers into her ass. She moans and claws at his legs as she swells toward orgasm. She reaches back and clutches at his clothes, her fingers tracing an embroidered insignia. McGillis. Squeezing her breasts, he thrusts into her. She cannot hold back any longer and her orgasm rips through her. She cries out as she feels him contracting with her.

The movement of her head triggers the X-ray machine. It extends its lens automatically before taking another image.

The next day Sandra is driving her blue BMW down a highway in the western suburbs. It is a humid day, the traffic is heavy. The working drawings are on the seat beside her. As she waits at a red light she glances across at them. They look impressive, blue and pink ink trace the three-dimensional proportions of the museum, a maze of column grid and footing details. She drives into the car park of the warehouse. A sign stretches over the gateway: McGillis building corporation, Est. 1972. She has arrived.

Brian is leaning over Elsa, an attractive patient in her early thirties. As Brian taps her tooth with a dental pick, Elsa winces in pain. His assistant enters the room and touches him on the shoulder. She has Elsa’s dental X rays as he requested, but there is something else. He excuses himself, leaving Elsa wide-eyed, her mouth braced open. He follows his assistant into the next room. Silently she pins the X ray against the light. Two pelvic bones, one male, one female, are visible. The bases of both spines and two pubic bones are pushed together, bumping like white bats in the dark.

“Fucking,” he mutters under his breath.

“Sorry?” the assistant asks, not trusting her ears.

“Fucking. It’s an X ray of fucking,” Brian pronounces clearly, while instinctively twisting the wedding ring on his finger.

Sandra spreads out the drawings on the executive’s desk. He is the chief foreman of the construction company. Over a hundred men work under him. As she bends over, he notices her cleavage and the soft texture of her hair.

“I’d better call Robert, he’s handling this job.” He speaks into an intercom. She glances around the office. A girlie calendar on one wall, featuring the famous porn star Candy Perkins, advertises concrete; a photo of the wife and baby granddaughter sit on the desk. Through the glass partition, Sandra can see the workers moving large sheets of wood across the warehouse floor.

“Robert’s the best in the business, you’ll be okay with him.”

She recognizes his aroma before she sees him, a lingering concoction of sweat, hair and a residue of aftershave. The same smell. Her heart races, she feels herself responding in scent.

She looks up. His face betrays nothing as he extends a hand. He squeezes her hand slightly as they shake. He is younger than she thought. His eyes are an intense blue. The hair on his chest curls over the white T-shirt under his blue overalls. He catches her looking at his body.

As she takes him through the drawings he listens quietly. His hand

s, heavy workman’s hands, slowly caress the lines of the museum, working their way through the collision of masculine and feminine, the vertical and the arched.

Outside the office he offers to drive her to the site.

“Only if I’m in control,” she says and smiles slowly.

MAN OF SIGHS

I’d never been one for revenge. The moralist in me always considered it too calculating and too undignified. Until I fell in love with Humphrey. Then I transformed into Medea, Jezebel and the Wicked Witch of the West overnight.

I had been celibate for six months—a reaction to a broken love affair. One of those sordid triangles full of illusion and desire, made more attractive by my unavailability. Naturally, I ceased to be so alluring when the girlfriend got pregnant. Suddenly cut free, I felt abandoned and bruised. I went into retreat, developing casual friendships with two men I’d meet for coffee. I flirted with the idea of sleeping with them, but decided I couldn’t trust the emotional consequences of any sexual involvement. I should have known then.

One of the men was a journalist—a laconic, self-effacing chap with an acidic wit. Coffee with him was like a visit to the analyst, involving much self-deprecation and a mutual despairing of Sydney society. His misanthropic sensibility was not a great sexual turn-on.

The other man was Humphrey. Coffee with Humphrey usually took place in complete silence. Defiantly glamorous and single, I’d wait for him at some bar in Taylor Square, surrounded by waiters—beautiful and homosexual—fluttering above me like exotic butterflies engrossed in their dramatic worlds of fecund attractions.

Humphrey would appear, dressed in some self-made contraption like sandals made of tire rubber tied with string, his face still smeared with paint, his hair covered in sawdust, his large rough hands stained with oil. Standing silently by the bar, he would watch me waiting for him. Then his scent would always give him away. Pungent and slightly oily, it would drift across and I’d swing around and see him in all his maleness, grinning his sardonic smile, his ageing, pock-marked skin still handsome. Humphrey was an original.

Humphrey’s reputation as a notorious womanizer made me curious. I didn’t consciously find him attractive, but I found the idea of so many women falling under the spell of this odd and in some ways shy man fascinating. In the same way I found certain insects fascinating. There was even a rumor that the sound of the orgasms of all the women he’d ever made come followed him around like a faint echo, like the ocean trapped in a seashell. Besides, he found me attractive. I liked that; it restored my battered confidence.

Humphrey was an artist. Primarily a sculptor. You can divide sculptors into two categories, ones that subtract to arrive at the form and ones that build to create form. Humphrey was a subtractor, as if he instinctively knew the shape that was trapped beneath the stone, the lump of clay, hidden under knots of wood. I’d been to his studio once and watched him free one of his figures. Thin and nubile, she emerged from the pink marble like a woman shaking out her hair in sunlight. I watched him working on the piece, polishing the marble as if it were skin, drawing out the shape as if he were pulling at his own flesh. His large, heavy hands spoke of work, of instinct, bypassing intellect altogether. I guess this was one of the things I was drawn to, this communication through the flesh.

Humphrey was not a storyteller. When he did speak, it was in short, cryptic sentences or, on occasion, long monologues of lateral witty observations. When he was younger he used to stutter, so badly that until the age of thirty he was practically incomprehensible. Perversely, I found that irresistible.

It was the end of summer, a hot night when all of Darlinghurst goes in search of a party. The humidity gets under the skin and creates a sexual friction, and before you know it the streets are crawling with people in search of some kind of contact—the brush of fingertips, a kiss, anything. I was in huntress mode, adorned to swallow some man up. Dressed in a blue skintight number, stretched tightly across my breasts and pulled down to expose my shoulders, I felt hot. Let’s face it, I was hot, my vows of celibacy evaporating every time my garter belt rubbed against my thighs.

The party was held in a converted garage, tucked away behind high offices and a desolate row of terraces abandoned by the city planners. The basement had been transformed into a dance floor complete with colored lights, a strobe and a sound system that pounded off the walls. There must have been about three hundred people crowded into this tiny, hot building. I pushed my way through the usual collection of faces—students, journalists, fashion models, unemployed actors, junkies and would-be film directors—down toward the dance floor.

The walls sweated as people gyrated their bodies like fish in a tank. To one side of me was a lesbian couple. One of the women, resplendent in chain mail, bright red cropped hair and Viking helmet, slithered down the glistening body of her partner. Behind me a young man in sixties bell-bottoms cradled his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. Next to them a man in his fifties, dripping with love beads and feathers, undulated in his own time warp. The whole place was bouncing with a kind of childlike abandonment.