Wilde West (9 page)

“We will teach our youths to love nature more. When we can teach them that no blade of grass and no flower is without beauty, then we will have achieved much.”

She is sucking his left nipple, her tongue moving in small, even, maddening circles along its compacted crust. Taut thin ligaments within his body, their existence previously unsuspected, connect this nipple to the back of his neck, to his spine, to his groin, to the soles of his feet.

While she silently suckles, he silently sulks. He is still smarting at her prohibition. There is so much nameless new emotion dawning within him. There is so much to be said. And how will he ever know what all this actually is, unless he shapes it with language?

Words for him are toys, tools, currency, plumage; they are his métier. Denied them, how will he win her?

Could he ever really wish to win someone who refuses him the means to do so?

For the moment, the answer clearly is yes.

Her soft thick hair trails against his chest as her mouth licks and nips and sucks down along his belly. Chills unfold at his back. Finally, she engulfs him.

“What you have daily before you, what you love most dearly and believe in most fondly, that is where your art may be found. All around you lie the conditions of art. No country can compare with America for its resources of beauty.”

She is sprawled across the satin coverlet, her arms outstretched atop the red gleaming outspread fan of hair, her legs apart, one knee drawn up. His kisses explore the crook of elbow, furrow of rib, hollow of throat, swell of shoulder, curve of jaw. The vulnerable V formed by opened lips at the corner of her mouth. The cunning coil of cartilage at her ear.

His heart pounding against his temples, he does things he has never done before, because they were forbidden; does them now because they were; because somewhere they still are.

With his tongue he licks the salt from her armpits, traces and retraces the tufts of her hair. He savors the taste of her navel. He tastes the savor of her toes. (At
this little piggy stayed home
she sighs his name; and that portion of his soul not suffused with lust suddenly fills with manly pride.) His fingertip pries and prods between the cleft of her globular buttocks. His face roots in the fur and the folds at the juncture of her legs and he swallows her sweet astringent juices. Soon he employs not only tongue and lips but also nose and chin and fingers: a mole. He is crawling, Good Lord, back into the womb.

She moans and her hands clutch at his hair.

“Oscar,” she says, and her voice is frayed, hurried. “Come inside me. Please. Now.”

“Let it be for you here in America to create an art by the hands of the people that will please the world. There is nothing in the world around you that art cannot ennoble.”

Their mutual rhythm grows more rapid as their bodies, locked at the hip, buck and wallop. Her legs are coiled around him, her fists grasp at the sides of the pillow as though she fears she will soar off it into the air. Her lower lip is caught between her teeth and she is panting, her chiseled nostrils flared.

He is climbing, climbing. Once again that invincible energy begins to coalesce in the pockets and burrows of his body, the secret vents and channels. Soon, soon, soon.

She moans from low within her throat, moans once, then moans again, longer this time and at higher pitch. The moans become a wail, a slowly rising keen as she arches her body toward his, as tense as a hunter's bow.

And he is there to meet her. Ball lightning rumbles down his spine and up his legs, trembles for an instant at his center, then all at once, as he lunges deep deep deep inside her, into her very core, it erupts through him in an explosion of infinite overwhelming sweetness and power that shatters the structure of his being and sends shards and shreds and blistered fragments spinning out across the universe.

The applause began off toward the left of the auditorium—curious how it arose each time from some new locus—and then undulated to the right, growing in strength.

He stepped aside from the lectern and with slow solemn dignity he bowed once from the waist toward the crowd.

The applause thickened most satisfactorily.

He turned to the left, to the box that held a handful of beaming frontier nonentities in formal wear. He bowed.

He turned to the right, toward the box that held her and Tabor and the local eminences. Tabor had rediscovered his grin and he was clapping his small hands with a furious delight. The eminences, while showing somewhat less exuberance, in their stiff way still seemed eminently satisfied.

And she, she was smiling widely as daintily she clapped, as her violet eyes met his.

He bowed. And although he took care not to bow even a millimeter more deeply than he had before, this time as he bent forward his blood rushed, hot and thick, to his head.

A
URID GLARE SPILLED FROM
the windows of the saloons, splashed across the crooked wooden sidewalks, sputtered A through the churning crowds that bumped and jostled him as they babbled by.

The smells here were worse than any he had ever encountered. The sour, feral odor curling off the unwashed bodies of the gaunt-faced cowboys and the grime-coated metal workers. The stinking sulfurous smoke of the smelters, hanging overhead in a low gray perpetual cloud, blotting out the stars. The reek of blood and manure and animal terror drifting from the nearby stockyards. And—dense, vile, almost palpable—the mephitic stench of raw sewage floating from the river.

More intense even than the smells was the endless noise. Freight cars rumbled, locomotives groaned and hissed. Horses clopped, carriages rattled. Children bawled and whooped and screamed; grown men chittered and chattered, bellowed and roared.

It was all too much: the crowds, the stink, the confining walls of clatter.

The garish light.

He needed the darkness. His work demanded the darkness.

The dirt street on which finally he found himself was narrow and dim, lighted only infrequently by gaslamps overhead. On each side of it, wooden shacks and shanties stood in low, cramped, uneven file, like a row of worn and rotten teeth. The smells still lingered—the slaughterhouse, the smelter, the sewage—but here only a few people moved about, drunks and derelicts slowly puzzling their way through the desolate shadows.