The Pornographer
Tanner set down his pen and scratched the back of his head, picking at a little scab in his thinning hair. Breasts: round, soft, firm, warm. He sighed. He could never do them justice. On the bed, behind him, Marjory turned, stopping her faint snoring. Her breasts hung from her chest, little sacks of tissue he could never do justice to. He sighed again and read over what he’d written:
Her breasts, swelling behind the lace bodice, invited his cheek to press against them, to feel the eager nipples that awaited his clever hands, his burning mouth, his sharp, cruel teeth.
He sat back again, sucking at his teeth, fiddling his tongue in the gap between cuspid and bicuspid. Marjory moaned, hiccupped and turned again. Tanner rubbed his eyes, turned off the desk light and climbed back into the wide bed that took up nearly half the room. In the hot air Marjory smelled of soy sauce and garlic. He leaned over her, licked her breast, which had the texture, but not the taste, of the garlic eggplant they’d had for dinner. Only half awake, she pushed his mouth to her nipple. He suckled gently, trying to decide what vegetable.
** ** **
She reached into his pants, through the unbuttoned fly, through the open, overlapping panels of his briefs, put her cool hand around his hot, aching penis.
“I’m only doing this because I love you,” she whispered, “and because I know you love me.”
She pulled and shoved, gripping too hard, not letting the skin slide through her fingers. He was so horny he came anyway. She pulled her hand out as soon as she felt his wetness on her, wiped it on a tissue from her purse which she carefully folded and stuffed into the empty popcorn bag. On the screen, Lauren Bacall was saying “... just put your lips together and blow.”
Marjory put a cup of coffee next to his elbow and kissed his bald spot. “How’s it going,” she asked, turning back to pour herself a cup from the electric percolator in their ‘breakfast nook,’ a chair, a stool, and a three legged table they’d found in a vacant lot, it’s vacant corner supported on the window sill.
“How’s it going,” he echoed. “More sugar.” He held out his cup to her and she tore open two more packets over it. “I keep trying to get this girl horny, but she’s so fucking frigid. She’s turning me off.”
“Whyntcha work on something else for a while?”
Tanner leaned his forehead into his hand, doodling a female torso on the paper, bathroom art, ‘for a good time call Marjory’ below it.
** ** **
Tanner slid his half-soft penis from Marjory's half-dry vagina. She ‘aww’ed at him, ‘ooh’ed at the discomfort. He went to the desk, turned on the lamp. Marjory lit a cigarette, sulphur smell, followed by the dry toast of uninhaled smoke. He pulled the cap off his pen and wrote:
She lay on the bed, breathing softly, her arms above her head, her legs parted slightly, revealing pinkness beneath the delicate blond hair that spread like a fern leaf, up from the moist warmth of her womanhood.
“Womanhood.”
Marjory inhaled, exhaled a stream of smoke. “What?”
“Womanhood,” Tanner said again. “Woman-hood. Cunt. Pussy. Twat, slit, gash. Do you feel your ‘hood’ness as a woman is summed up by your vagina?”
She inhaled again, exhaled a smoky “No,” then, “Yes, sometimes.”
“Tell me about it,” Tanner said, turning around in the chair and reaching out for the cigarette. “When do you feel like a giant genital.”
“When you fuck me, sometimes. You know. Sometimes you complain I’m too passive. Sometimes I just feel like ... like I could take all of you inside me, like I could just lay back and you’d fuck all of me.” She looked over at him, his chin resting on the back of the chair, his arms dangling in front, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Don’t you ever feel like a giant penis?”
He took another drag on the cigarette and handed it back to her. “I suppose. Most times I only feel half-cocked.”
Marjory giggled. She caressed the filter of the cigarette with her lips, blew a languid stream in his direction. A bit of the glow dripped onto the sheet and she brushed it off quickly, before it could burn a hole.
** ** **
Tanner dropped the manila envelope into the post box, let the cradle bang shut, then opened it again, to make sure the envelope had fallen in. He hoped he’d never see it again. His editor had sent it back two times for revision, the second time with a note telling him to ‘snap out of it!’ He stopped at Talbot’s, found a copy of Forster’s ‘Room With a View,’ for fifty cents in ‘the jumble out there,’ the cheap read box that was wheeled onto the sidewalk each morning. He stopped at Chin’s for steamed rice, plum sauce duck, garlic eggplant. He stopped in the park, sat on his favorite bench by the duck pond. He started reading, stopped to pull a chunk of eggplant out of the white, folded paper box, and put it into his mouth. He checked his watch and went back to reading, sucking his fingers before turning the page, hoping Marjory would not be working late.