Box Nine

Chapter Twenty-Two

Woo finally finds the right key on his chain and unlocks the loft. Lenore has a tremendous need to stretch, to push out the muscles of her arms and shoulders, arch her back, roll the whole trunk of her body in a great circle. But she represses the urge and simply huddles inside her coat.

A lot of people have moved into rehabbed sections of all the old Quinsigamond mills in the past decade or so. His apartment is a middle floor, above a tool and die outfit and below a printing firm. Both shops are out of business, and it appears that Woo might be the only person using the building. Lenore thinks this must give the place a mausoleum-type feel. It doesn’t help that the place is so huge. He’s got about eight hundred square feet of living space, all of it wide open, undivided.

“The rent is cheaper than what you might think,” he says to Lenore as he pushes two enormous, reinforced metal doors open. They’re like barn doors for housing mechanical horses of some smoggy future. But once she steps inside, she sees a different story. She’s impressed. The room is void of any of the dimness and griminess that always seem to haunt converted lofts. There are three trackways of recessed lighting hidden high in the steel I-beams of the twelve-foot ceilings.

“Your electric bill must cost a fortune,” Lenore says, staring upward.

“Not so bad,” Woo answers, locking and bolting the doors with levers and chains. “And it’s well worth it. Gives it a much warmer feeling.”

Lenore can’t agree with this, though she nods her head. The place is immaculate and scrupulously stylish. It could be the centerfold of some aggressive new architectural magazine for well-educated musicians. But warm is not a word that comes to mind. The ceilings are so high, the gulf of open space so huge, that there’s a hint of a gymnasium feeling. Despite herself, Lenore smells for sweat and old towels.

“You must have sandblasters come in weekly,” she says, and Woo looks at her, smiling and cocking his head to show he doesn’t quite understand the comment.

“I mean it feels so clean. So fresh,” she explains. “I’ve been in a few of these redone places and there’s always this feeling. Like there’s a century of grit and brick dust hanging in the air that no amount of scrubbing can get rid of.”

Woo nods wildly, seeming thrilled with her comment. His arm sweeps upward and his hand waves toward the ceilings. “I had an air quality control system installed when I bought the place. Essential. I’m very happy with it.”

“You own. So it’s a condo setup.”

“Something like that,” he says, starting to walk toward a long wall unit of high-gloss black cabinetry made of some material Lenore can’t identify. It doesn’t look like either metal or plastic. There’s a double sink set into the middle of a countertop that juts out, slopelike, wavelike, from below the cabinets. Its faucet is black and bizarre, rising maybe a foot and a half into the air before the head curves over and faces downward. It’s like some sleek water-spewing rattlesnake. Rising out of the floor a few feet in front of the sink is a cutting-block island that holds what looks like a customized built-in espresso maker.

“I’ll make some tea,” Woo says, and starts to work.

Lenore follows him to this kitchen area, leans on the island, and studies the rest of the room. Though the walls are all classic red brick, you can’t see much of them. They’re almost all lined, as high as the ceiling supports, with endless sections of bookshelves. It’s all constructed out of the same weird high-tech black material as the kitchen. After every few shelves, up near the top, is an arcing lamp, resembling a streetlight, with its industrial, metallic housing and its War of the Worlds, lined, wide-eyed bulb. Every other lamp is lit and they give off an eerie bluish gleam. Lenore notices one of those old-fashioned wrought-iron rolling ladders found in old libraries. Though she can’t see from this distance, she’s sure it’s workable and she flashes on an image of a naked Woo riding the ladder across his enormous collection of books, arching his body outward away from the walls, letting out a war whoop, possibly drunk, acting like an ass in the privacy of his own factory-home.

She knows she’s probably seen more books gathered together in one place. But never like this. The local library, for example, must have more books. But they’re arranged in short spurts, aisles, around corners, divided up into separate rooms. Here it feels like Woo has actually used books as his primary building matter, that books make up the walls, house him, keep him safe from the elements. No matter what happens here tonight, she’ll find a way to look at a run of spines, commit a bunch of titles to memory.

“Did you decorate yourself?” she asks.

“Mostly,” he says.

Steam starts to rise out of a kettle built in the shape of a perfect triangle.

“Let me ask,” she says, “though I know it’s not the case with you, let me ask anyway, all right, you know how you go to some old Colonial restaurants, any of them, there are a dozen around here, five minutes outside the city. You know how you go and they seat you in, say, ‘the library room,’ ‘the study,’ right, they always call it something like that. And they bring you into this big, high-ceilinged room lined with natural-wood bookcases. And your table sort of comes right out from the bookcase. So that while you’re eating you can look at the titles, right? And then there’s that moment, right after you’re seated and they hand you the wine list and leave you alone, and you put the wine list down and turn your head to the bookshelf.”

“Yes,” Woo says, eyes squinting at her, intrigued.

“And you see that all the books, every one of them, are like these Reader’s Digest Condensed volumes, or like old high school trigonometry textbooks. And you know, again, that they just bought these things gross, right, bought them in carton loads from furniture stores or something. Bought them by the pound. And it just takes something away from the whole place.”

Woo stares at her while he fills two triangular-shaped mugs to the brim with boiling water, then he smiles and says, “I’ve not had this particular experience, but I assure you, Lenore, every book you see here was purchased with my own hand. Nothing bought by the pound.”

“Must have cost you a small fortune.”

“Spread out over a period of years. I follow the wisdom of Gertrude Stein. ‘If you have money buy books, if you have any left over buy food.’ Or something like that.”

“Most of them on language? Linguistics?”

“The majority, yes.”

He pushes the mug in her direction. “Best to drink it just after boiling,” he says. “It’s a special blend from the homeland. I have cousins who are kind enough to ship it over.”

Lenore takes a sip. The tea tastes a little bland after all the coffee she’s had, but it’s warm and she thinks it might settle her stomach.

Woo holds one hand on the side of the mug and places the other over the top. Lenore thinks this must be burning him and she starts to wonder if he’s some sort of fellow control freak, ready at all times to go beyond the limits of pain and good taste in order to prove a point. Or it could just be that he’s got a chill and has a high tolerance for tactile heat.

He stares down into the black of his utility island and says in the low voice of an actor, “You know, Lenore, I was more than a bit surprised when you agreed to come back here.”

Lenore stares at him, lets a few long seconds drag by, then, sucking back any sarcasm or anger, she says, “Yeah, well, don’t count your chickens, you know, Freddy?” She takes a sip and shrugs. “I was feeling way too closed in in that cellar. We’d gotten what we needed off the tap. I had to get out of there, come down a little. And I really didn’t want to go back to my place.”

“I see.”

“You see what? Besides, I was pretty curious how a guy like you lived, what your setup would be and all.”

“And do you approve?”

“Beautiful place, if you can afford it. St. Iggy’s must be paying sweet these days.”

“I have to say there have been a few grants. But I can’t believe in all these years no one’s ever told you it’s rude to inquire about someone’s income.”

Lenore lets out a sharp bark of a laugh that almost echoes at the other end of the loft.

“Give me a freaking break, Freddy. This is America. Twentieth century. Income is all we fucking talk about now that sex is dead.”

“My mistake. I thought it was God that was dead.”

“What do you think killed him?”

Woo smiles, takes a deep breath, finally takes his hands off the mug and sips his tea. “Lenore,” he says, “you are truly unlike any woman I have ever known.”

“You’ve got to get out more, Freddy.”

“You want to know what I think? I think you have a problem turning off, what shall we call them, certain police traits, investigator’s characteristics—”

“—Gestapo tendencies, Nazi reflexes.”

“No, no, no. That’s not what I said.”

“Comes pretty damn close.”

“I apologize, then. I should have been more clear. What I meant was that you look at me and you see a typical academic—”

“You’re not so typical, Freddy.”

“—and you see my home and a spark goes off, a little buzz sounds, and your brain is already ahead of you, doing the math, saying ‘teacher’s salary, great big loft, something is wrong,’ and you’re off and running the possibilities.”

“So which one is it?”

“Which?”

“Possibility?”

“Oh. Yes. The most obvious one, of course.”

They stare at each other, mouths closed, shoulders squared.

Woo smiles first and says, “My parents had some money.”

“First guess,” Lenore lies. She’d had an offbeat suspicion that Woo had twenty over-the-limit credit cards in his desk drawer and a shaky and stupid mortgage destined to fall on him when the first grant ran dry.

“So, now, let me invade you for a while,” Woo says.

“Excuse?”

“This man, Zarelli, when did things start to go wrong with you and him?”

“Ooh, I’m impressed. Let me guess, you did body-language seminars in the seventies.”

Woo is genuinely thrilled and amused by her comment.

“Closer to the truth than you’d think.”

“I think I’m pretty close. We Nazis are like that.”

His smile fades. “Lenore, honestly, I’m sorry if you misinterpreted—”

“C’mon, Freddy,” she says, calm, still friendly, “I didn’t misinterpret a thing. But there’s no need for an apology. Really. I know the truth about my beliefs. You know me for a matter of hours and make a judgment. You know I’ve done the same about you. Big deal. Happens every day. It’s how adults live. It’s practically our right. So enjoy your opinion. It doesn’t change the truth. I’m the one who knows the truth. There’s no fascist inside of me, Freddy. No way.”

Woo gives up on apology and says, “Confident woman.”

“Oh yeah. Read ‘bitch.’”

“Oh no. This I reject. The chauvinism charge I reject. Absolutely not. I don’t even acknowledge the word bitch in its colloquial sense.”

“Good word. I use it all the time.”

“I’m a little sensitive about being clear on this point. Yes, I’ve made a judgment concerning your natural aggressiveness. No, I do not regard that aggressiveness in terms of your sex.”

“So, if I was standing here, minus breasts and plus penis—”

“—I’d be a very disappointed man.”

“Scuse me, we’ll get back to the jokes and the flirting in a minute. If it was Zarelli’s body with Lenore’s personality, Lenore’s character, the fascist implications would have still come out.”

“First of all, I reject the fact I implied fascist tendencies. I did not. You want to think I did. Not the case. Plain and simple. The word police, the word investigator, does not equal fascist or Nazi. Not even close. Not in the context I used. But, to your point, yes, had you been a man, and had there been an implication, it would have come out. I would have thought the same thing. And no bitch word. Vocabulary of the oppressors.”

“Okay, truce. These kinds of arguments can never be won.”

“And winning is quite important—”

“Here we go again, you don’t quit, Freddy.”

“Liability of the profession.”

“There you go. Every profession has its dangers, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Isn’t it exciting when we agree?”

“So how long have you been popping speed?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s today’s phraseology? Crank? Meth?”

“You’re a loon, Freddy.”

“Please, Lenore. I acquiesced on the money question. You balked on Mr. Zarelli. It’s still my turn.”

“What does a guy in your position know about crank?”

“Ignorance of history is a dangerous flaw, Lenore. Before speed was seized by the working class, it was certainly graduate student domain. How else does one read almost two hundred very dense texts in less than a year?”

“You did that?”

“Nineteen eighty. The year the assault on language began.”

“What makes you say—”

“To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure. I took a learned guess. My big question is … I can’t believe the others, Zarelli, Shaw, Peirce, I can’t believe they haven’t noticed.”

“Please, this is narcotics. Sooner or later, everybody has a hobby. If it’s not crank or crack, it’s shoe boxes full of hundreds and foreign cars. I think you know what I’m saying.”

“Zarelli? Shaw?”

“Zarelli, yeah. Shaw, I don’t think so, but she’s young. Give her time. See, Freddy, I’m not a Nazi, I’m a cynic.”

“You’re saying the whole department is corrupt?”

“No, you’re saying that. I’m saying that a blanket statement like that, in a situation like ours, like mine, like the department’s, I’m saying it’s completely grey, I’m saying every day is relative. No, I don’t use the word corrupt. I don’t think it applies. I don’t think it’s like anyone is on Cortez’s payroll. Unless even I’m totally blind. I’m saying there’s a huge system that employs both our side and Cortez’s. And we both work for it. We maintain a pathetic balance. We play yin and yang and keep the wheel turning. Bangkok is a pinball machine, Freddy. Zarelli and Shaw and Richmond and me are the flippers and Cortez is the silver ball—”

“Oh, please.”

“Screw you, you don’t like the way I talk. I’m saying mostly we keep Cortez and company bouncing within their borders. And sometimes someone is slow on the flipper and the ball rolls through.”

“And is that someone ever you?”

“I’ve got my own problems. According to you anyway. And I’ve got my own theory about Cortez.”

“Which is?”

“Puppet. Total, willing puppet. He’s a smart guy and a better actor. He’s probably even a pretty good manager. Maybe he knows how to move money. And maybe there are connections back in South America. But I don’t care. There’s someone above him. There’s someone who never walks into Quinsigamond. They can shred and shove every file from Interpol to the FBI to Lehmann and his Federal walking egos at DEA. There’s somebody else. I call them the Aliens.”

“The aliens?”

“You really popped crank, Freddy?”

“Through all of graduate school and for a year after.”

“How’d the nervous system do?”

“How do you think?”

“How’d you deplane?”

“Rough but intact.”

“No, I mean, was there a method or anything?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I walked about ten, twelve miles a day. Fast pace.”

“Around Quinsigamond?”

Woo nods. “Went through a half dozen Adidas in a little over half a year. And I poured gallons of this tea through my body. I drowned in tea. Honestly, I choked on it, I drank so much, but it washed everything out.”

“Must’ve made it tough walking.”

“Again, it’s easier for a man. There’s usually a tree to step behind.”

“I lift weights.”

“It’s not the same thing. It’s not aerobic. Do you still think you’re in control?”

“Absolutely. Have I looked rattled to you? I’ll know when the compass swings.”

“A classic cliché. Where do you buy?”

“C’mon, Freddy.”

“Oh, of course. Bangkok. Little Max?”

“He’s been helpful on occasion.”

“Curious drug, speed. I really fell in love. Head over heels.”

“Mine’s much more a working relationship.”

“Sure. You’ll be chasing it around the desk before you know it.”

“It’s all a matter of will, Freddy.”

“How long have you been a regular abuser? Do you find you can still think clearly? I found I could for the first year, almost two. Then things shifted. It was really as fascinating as it was terrifying. The brain images started coming faster than my ability to identify and label them. Like race cars at the Indy 500. Have you ever had a seizure?”

“That’s pleasant. No, never. Listen, enough on this topic. Why don’t you show me the rest of this place.”

Woo smiles, brings his mug up to his mouth, and stares into it as he sips.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s have a look.”

She follows him deeper into the room. Somehow, it seems to get wider as they approach the library area. There are books, most of them big, thick volumes, oversized and without dust jackets, lying in stacks on the floor. The books look like old, obscure encyclopedias. Some of the stacks are eight and nine volumes high, rising up three and four feet high like models of ragged skyscrapers.

On either side of the library area are two identical couches, both covered in black leather and looking inviting, like you’d continue to sink deep into the cushions a full five minutes after you lay down. There’s no sign of chrome or wood on them and Lenore thinks they look like weird twin animals, some mistake in genetically controlled husbandry. She stares from one to the other and thinks of a flabby, glossy black cow lying down in a rainy field at night.

The only other piece of furniture in the room is an enormous monstrosity of a desk that almost spans the width of the building. It’s actually several desks and tables cobbled and bolted together to form a startling new creation. And it is genuinely startling. It begins at either end of the room with two old-fashioned rolltops complete with an assortment of cubbyholes and tiny drawers. They face each other and jut out perpendicular from the back wall of shelving forming two secretarial L’s, two right angles turning at either end of the main desk body. The main body is comprised of two conventional mahogany executive desks, each bolted to its adjoining rolltop, and then joined to an eight-foot conference table that runs between them.

Stationed behind the table, in the center of the whole setup, is the largest swivel chair Lenore has ever seen. She decides it must have been custom-built. Of course it’s black and leather with a subtle pucker design, but it’s the back of the chair that’s so attention-getting — it rises up, narrowing as it goes, almost five feet tall at the top of its curve. Lenore thinks the height is a foolish mistake. It’s humorous and ends up detracting from the rest of the power look of the office.

Stationed on top of the two conventional desks at either side of the main table are state-of-the-art reel-to-reel and compact disc players. Lenore spots three different sets of headphones hanging from hooks in the rolltops. In the center of the conference table sits an oversized computer monitor and the longest keyboard she’s ever seen. It looks more like a musical keyboard, a synthesizer keyboard, than one for a computer or word processor. There’s no logo that she can see on any of the equipment, but she can tell in a glance it’s not Apple or Wang or IBM. It’s got to come from someplace she’s never heard of.

Taking up every bit of surface space around the sound and computing equipment are small versions of the book stacks on the floor. There are several stacks of paperbacks with plain white covers and a couple foot-high blocks of typing paper, the top sheet which is covered with tiny type that seems to run off the page in all directions, marginless. Lenore isn’t close enough to be sure, but it’s possible the words are in another language.

She steps up next to the main table and knocks on it like it was a door.

“So,” she says, “you tell me who the Nazi is.”

Woo squints at her and pulls his head in like a turtle. “The desk,” he says.

“A desk Goebbels and Göring would fight over.”

Woo gives a small smile. “The last time I checked, furniture choice was not a characteristic of the Nazi.”

“We could argue about that, Freddy.”

“I need a great deal of room. I need to spread out when I work.”

“Ship this baby down to Latin America. There’s a whole bunch of petty dictators who’d kill for this monster.”

“You find it offensive.”

“Overwhelming. It’s the biggest desk, if you can call it a desk, that I’ve seen. You should coin a new word, Dr. Woo. This kind of thing requires an addition to the language.”

“All I can tell you is it suits my needs. Form follows function perfectly.”

“Yeah, and there’s a lot more going on there besides.”

“There’s so much room here. I decided, why not use it?”

“Uh-huh. Where do you sleep, Freddy?”

“The couches are tremendously comfortable. They fold out into beds. Often I don’t even bother pulling one open. I’ll sleep right on the couch.”

“Okay, Freddy, let’s think about this for a second. You’ve gone to the trouble of making Godzilla’s desk in here, because there’s so much room, as you say, but you don’t own a bedroom set.”

His voice goes low and his eyes shift to the floor.

“My work is quite important to me, Lenore.”

She realizes she’s offended him and she’s a little surprised that she regrets what she’s said. Whatever mood of sparring and playfulness was between them feels gone and in its absence she’s aware of how much she enjoyed it. She wants to get it back, reinstall it at once. She reaches up and places a hand on Woo’s shoulder and says, in an apologetic voice, “I’m sorry, Fred, I was just teasing. I stepped too far there. I just got caught up, carried away a little, you know. I was just riding you a little and I just … I don’t know.”

Without lifting his eyes he takes her wrist and pulls it to his mouth and plants a long kiss on the inside span of skin just below the border of her hand.

She doesn’t say a word and she doesn’t pull away. She wishes only that she had a moment to swallow some crank. She wouldn’t even need water for the wash-down.

He moves his way from wrist down the inner arm to the bend at the elbow. She knows she should find it funny, a caricature, a sloppy imitation of John Astin in a long-ago sitcom. But she doesn’t react with a laugh or a comment. She lets him go, lets him work on the inner skin of her arm, kissing it slowly, wetting it barely. Her breath starts to come a little heavier. He makes the jump to the neck beautifully. He kisses below the ear and starts to suck and lick and really taste her skin, take in her salt and maybe a bitter drop of left-over perfume. She pushes herself closer to him, works her way into a tighter embrace so that their bodies press together in longer, unbroken spans.

His mouth drops lower on her neck and he hits a spot that makes her buck slightly. He feels it and speeds up, his tongue gets more aggressive, his lips pull on her and in spite of herself she lets out a noise, a breath-grabbing sigh and it comes out as a moan and she hopes, for a second, that he doesn’t mistake it for a laugh, and then the thought is gone and their hands are at each other’s clothing, feeling for buttons and zippers where there are none, furious at working so blindly.

His hands fall to the rim of her jeans and start to unbutton them, but she grabs them at the wrist and pulls them up underneath her turtleneck, but on top of the thermal undershirt. He starts to alternately squeeze and rub her breasts, like he can’t decide which he wants to do, and while his hands move she takes a second to pull the jersey off and drop it to the floor. Then she pulls his hands away and places them at the sides of his legs. His head comes up from her neck and he looks like a horrified child, but she smiles and calms him and mourns the word slow, then she starts to unbutton his cardigan and pulls it from his arms. He makes no motion beyond the visible rising and falling of his chest and a smile that he can’t suppress. She knows she now has full control and it sets her off, gives her a charge almost as heady as swallow of meth. She goes slowly to her knees and unties his old sneakers, getting playful, improvising, dipping fingers inside the elastic band of his socks and tickling just above the ankle. He doesn’t say a word, but his body seems to tremble a bit and she loves it.

She lifts each foot and removes the shoe and the sock, slowly, with an almost detached air, like this was her profession, like she’d worked a lifetime at Kinney’s. She rises back up and strips him of his Ezra Pound shirt. She steps back for a second and stares at his chest. It’s neither hairy nor completely void of hair, but rather has a few single curly strands in a dozen or so random places.

Now she steps back up to him, very aggressive, with the same body English she’d use just before a cuffing, or better, a full-blown strip search. He seems to love it. His breathing gets more obvious. His head does a stutter on his neck. She reaches around his back, drops her hand, and squeezes his ass with all her strength. There’s a part of her that would like him to shout out her name, but she controls herself as well as Woo, lets go, and comes back around front to unfasten his chinos. They’re held at the waist by a small metal clip and she releases it fast, but takes her time drawing down the zipper. He’s got a continuous tremble going and Lenore finds it both disturbing and satisfying. For less than a second she questions the sincerity of the tremble, but she lets the thought go and pushes the pants down over his hips.

He’s wearing white boxer shorts underneath. They have a grey pinstripe in them. They feel a little brittle, starchy, as she grabs them at the sides and yanks downward. When they touch the floor, she pats his hip and he steps out of all the clothing around his feet.

He’s naked now, but she keeps her eyes on his eyes as she reaches forward and takes him in her hands. His mouth drops slightly and he makes a noise and takes some air. She squeezes very lightly and he grows. She releases and steps backward and motions that he should lie down on the floor.

He complies, moving carefully, finding a narrow strip of space between the mountains of books. He stretches out on his back, his hands folded behind his head for a pillow, his legs bent up at the knees. She likes him on the floor, likes the picture of him. She wants to remember it, press it into her memory, saved vivid for the distant future, for times when she’s void of a partner and less in control of her life and herself. She wants to save the image in her mind, not as some mild, personal pornography, but more as a symbol, a suggestion of this feeling that has no title she knows of. It’s a feeling beyond the words power, control, dominance, or will.

She walks a full, dramatic circle around Woo, taking giant steps over the smaller book piles. His eyes follow her path, stay on her face. She stops when she arrives back at his feet. She knows there’ll be no speaking, no communication using the spoken language. They’ll exchange messages, or rather, she’ll indicate what she wants and he’ll respond, a simple and efficient cause-and-effect equation.

She starts to give him the full show. She brings her feet together. She grabs her undershirt at its bottom and pulls it up slowly so that it forms loose ribs, bunches of ribbed material, she holds for a minute, arms crossed and prepared to pull, under the bottom rim of her breasts, gives him the hesitation tease she knows he wants, stares at him. Then she pulls the shirt free, up past the neck and head and simultaneously off the arms. Her breasts bob as the shirt rubs past. Her nipples are hard and she brings her fingers up and runs them around the areolas. It’s a show for his benefit and his body continues to visibly respond, but it also feels as good as it looks.

She begins to unbutton and unzip her jeans. She gauges her speed to a midpoint where he’s on the verge of frustration and fulfillment. She pushes the jeans down her legs and steps out of them. She’s wearing white cotton panties, not bikinis, but close enough. Woo doesn’t seem to notice the difference. She smiles at him, places her right hand over her navel for a minute, then inches it downward until her fingertips dip into the waistband. She waits, then teases him with a few more inches of finger sliding downward into still-invisible hair.

He lets out a garbled Oh, starts to rise up to a sitting position, but she gives him a stern shake of the head and he settles back into place.

She bends forward slightly, hovers over his legs. She says, “Don’t speak, Freddy. Don’t open your mouth. No words at all.” She pauses, then says, “Now, do you want me down there? Do you want me on the floor? Do you want me on top of you?”

His mouth opens, then at once snaps closed, all jaw, alligatorlike. His head takes over with a jerking, too-fast nod and she loves it. It’s just the effect she was going for.

“We’re going to need some music,” she says, and turns to the desk area. Woo makes a throat-clearing sound that she ignores. She likes being almost naked in this place. She likes the idea of the huge, open space and the coldness of the brick. She thinks if she lived here, it’d be an effort to throw on clothes and leave each morning.

She fingers the toggle switches at the bottom of the reel-to-reel machine and says, “Let’s see what the doctor likes.” She hits the Play button and the reels start to turn smoothly, at a precise speed, the opposite of Woo’s head. A single, high-pitched electronic tone sounds and she realizes for the first time that she doesn’t know where the speakers are. The tone is followed by silence. She assumes there are probably several speakers, mounted in hidden spots in the study for the best possible acoustics. A guy like Woo would be concerned about sound quality and proper speaker placement.

“Guess we’ve got a blank tape,” she says, but Woo has stopped nodding and now he just stares up at her, maybe impatient, maybe doubtful, insecure.

Lenore slides out of the balance of her underwear, tosses them on top of the desk behind her. She comes down on her knees, in front of his feet, relaxes into a sitting position, ass on heels.

“I’ve always considered getting a tattoo, Freddy. Always wanted one. I’ve debated the question. They’re considered cheap in this country. Biker women. Junkies. Hookers. Every hooker I’ve ever known has had a tattoo. I’m not sure the general public is aware how many tattoos are out there. More than most people would think. But, as you well know, in the Orient it’s a different story. At least for the men. I don’t know what the tattooing standard is for women over there. But with the men it’s considered an art form, right? An enhancement of the skin. And I’ve got to concur. Got to agree with that. I’ve considered placement and for some reason I’m drawn to the erotic areas. I know about the pain involved, but I’m good with pain. No problem there. And, of course, I’ve thought about the design. What would I choose? We can rule out the typical red rose or butterfly right off the bat. I want something unique. Something custom-drawn and more suited to me. And I can’t quite come up with what it should be. So do me a big favor, Freddy, if you would. Give it some thought. Not right now. Don’t say a word right now. But sometime in the future, in the days ahead, give it some thought and tell me what you think would be the best sign for me. Something that would just scream Lenore permanently. From underneath my skin.”

She sits silent for a few seconds and then rises up on her knees again. She makes him spread his legs apart by slapping his feet. When they’ve opened to their widest stretch, she lies down between them, her belly to the floor, and very slowly, with her eyes locked on his face, she takes him in her mouth. He lets out a high, sucking sound and the question kicks in—Is it possible no one’s ever done this to him before? She sucks very slowly, with gradually increasing pressure, for almost a minute, then she climbs forward on her knees and straddles him, first sitting too high, on his stomach, teasing him, licking his chest.

“Remember,” she says, “you speak and it’s all over.”

But it’s not clear whether he hears her or not. He’s letting out these hardly audible whines, his eyes rammed closed. Lenore thinks he sounds something like a miniature dog, quaking near the back door, asking to go out.

When she thinks it’s been long enough, she moves down, pulls him inside, and starts to ride. She’s wet enough and then, in a minute, much more wet, and they fall into a rhythm that she sets but he responds to beautifully, perfectly, without any instruction, without words or gestures.

And then a voice barks into the room:

Ngaatojai

She jolts upright, sits rigid, but leaves him inside. His eyes spring open and an awful terrified look spreads on his face. He can’t speak. She doubts that even if she commanded him to, his vocal chords would respond. It’s clear he wants to tell her something, but he can’t shake the silence.

The voice barks out again. The word sounds foreign. The voice has a slightly clipped, mechanical sound to it. And then it hits her what’s happening: the tape. The reel-to-reel machine. The tape she’s turned on has come to life, hit the recorded stretch, only it’s not music. It’s words. Or maybe one word. All in different languages, a long pause between each loud, crisp, elaborated pronunciation.

“I get it,” she says softly to Woo, trying to be reassuring. “It’s not Teenage Deathcamp, but it’ll do.”

Slowly, she brings them back into their swaying rhythm.

Imperio

His legs come up and cross around her back. They pick up some speed.

Kuhilani

He starts to buck slightly underneath with this flawless timing, as if he could feel exactly what was happening inside her and knew how to facilitate the experience, deepen it, elongate it, intensify it.

Dominante

He reaches up, eyes closed again, searches with his hands until he finds her breasts. He squeezes, just the right force, positions the nipples between the notches that separate his fingers, pulls, twists, just slightly.

Vorherrschen

Lenore’s heart suddenly heaves, gives what feels like an extra, wider pump. In spite of herself she lets out a sound, a nonword, void of attachment to anything physical.

Przewaga

She picks up the speed. A new noise starts to issue at the slapping together of her thighs and ass with his pelvis. His legs around her make a new effort, bear inward, hug her like a sweaty and trembling vice.

Dominio

Woo starts to breathe out through his nose in harsh short bursts, a dragon from his own childhood nightmares. His head is snapping from left to right, his eyes shut so tight that his forehead shows a plain of creases and folds. He’s biting his lips and pushing air in hard between his gums and inner mouth.

Cumhachd

Lenore’s hands slap down onto his chest, palms flat, and she starts pushing off his breastbone like he was some accident victim on the highway. Her toes are curled up to the breaking point. A slick coating of sweat has broken everywhere and streams run down from her neck, over her breasts, over his hands squeezing her breasts, rubbing her nipples. A weird, old Three Stooges-type noise comes out of his mouth. She leans forward, inclines lower and lower over his chest, pumping her hips faster as she moves. Her hands go to the sides of his head, just above his ears, and she grabs two fingerfuls of hair and holds tight, pulling, shaking her own head now side to side.

Dominari

He’s the first to let out a yell as he comes, but within seconds she’s joining him. She had hoped to dismount and dress as soon as he was satisfied, but that isn’t an option anymore. She lets her own eyes close, lets the noise pour out of her mouth, meaningless, passionate babble. Her hips buck in a last spastic set of spasms. She comes up as far as she can on her knees and still keep him in, then rams down, draws in air, and falls completely forward onto his chest.

Time seems to pull into the breakdown lane. Her sense of taste overwhelms her. Everything is salt. Woo stays quiet, but his lungs continue to work overtime. Neither of them attempts to alter their position.

The light seems a little dimmer to her. She keeps her eyes closed, realizes she’s hugging him around the shoulders. She becomes aware of a sound, a slight, almost inaudible hiss, probably from the hidden speakers.

She’s too loose to brace herself, though she knows it’s coming, so she waits, willing listener, suddenly submissive.

And then the bodiless voice says: Dominance.