Trust Exercise(40)
Rafe and Katrina and Simon and Erin and Cora and Colin no longer bothered to banter or smoke but only strove with mouths and tongues to swallow each other, and ground their crotches together, and collided their limbs with the gazebo’s unyielding walls. When Sarah flinched from Liam’s kiss he fell agreeably onto her neck and fed there like a starved, toothless dog. Apart from feeling wet, and as a consequence cold, Sarah’s body was devoid of sensation. Staring into the darkness beyond the gazebo as Liam whimpered and gummed the tendons of her neck she saw David’s profile float past, moving away, as if though mere feet of air stood between them they were no longer of the same world. Ever since arriving she’d been straining her powers of intuition to make some kind of contact with David and now he was passing so near she might have reached out and seized him. Her jaws opened but no sound came out. Yet David turned, and his gaze fell on her where she sat on the floor of the gazebo with Liam’s mouth latched onto her neck and Liam’s hand twiddling her unfeeling breast. David’s gaze swept her mercilessly and then he’d passed out of sight, toward the house. Sarah wrenched herself upright. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and escaped.
Inside the house the kitchen counters were covered in bottles and bags, the sound system had been left spattering between radio stations, shelves of smoke hung in the air performing slow disintegrations where they had been deposited by unknown persons passing through. Every room Sarah saw was empty. Yet she was certain the house wasn’t empty. Her body had come back to life, emotion pumping from her like a tide that touched all surfaces and lifted even the slightest piece of evidence, floating it into the light. Passing down the first-floor hallway to its very end Sarah flattened her hand on a door that was slightly ajar, pushed it open, and there were Martin and David, hunched in noiseless contortions of mirth. Their puckered faces were red. At her entrance they unbent, with effort and gasping.
“Oh my God,” said David, “get that thing away from me.”
The room in which she’d found them was a bedroom, vast and dim, holding a great bed lavishly made up in purple satin so dark as to look almost black. The bed stuck out from its wall like a tongue, was tumbled with pillows of all different sizes but all made of the same black-purple satin, like a crop of eggplants. The glow from two enormous lamps under zebra-striped shades would have barely outshone a candle. The far side of the room disappeared into drapery.
“Look who’s here! Catch,” Martin said and as she reached toward him in dumb obedience an object landed in her hands. David smacked it away.
“Jesus! Don’t make her touch it.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly clean. I’m sure they boil them after each use.” Shaking with laughter, Martin dropped onto the bed and started rifling through a drawer in the near bedside table. “Maybe Sarah would prefer a different color? A tad longer or fatter? More pointy?”
“What is it?” she asked David as Martin pelted David with another of the objects.
“You’re fucking sick!” David was trying to talk down to Martin, but his very desire to talk down to Martin guaranteed he could not. David wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t touch the thing, whatever it was, but dodged it like a squeamish little boy, so that Sarah, inflamed, snatched it up from the carpet.
“You really want to put that down!” cried David.
“Oh, shame,” Liam said, peering around the doorframe. “Martin’s got in the toy chest again.”
“Do you want to know what it is?” Martin asked her, with sudden seriousness. “My, David, you needn’t man the battle stations, you’re quite safe with me. Did you really fancy him?” This was to Sarah, for David had sprung from the room, he’d escaped her again. “I’d like to know his secret. He must emit some chemical. Lilly’s mad for him, she says she’s not going to come back to England, she’s staying here to shag David the rest of her life. But you, sweetest Sarah, you’re far too mature for Liam, let alone a wet-eared wanker like David. Come sit beside me. You too, Liam. Gather round, children,” and in a trance Sarah sat down beside him on the eggplant-colored bed, seeing nothing but David and Lilly, David’s blunt-fingered hands and Lilly’s sallow, pointy face and her grim, willing mouth. Liam bounced onto the bed and pulled her onto his lap so that her legs dangled just short of the floor. “I feel like Prospero blessing Miranda and Ferdinand,” Martin said, digging into the drawer. “Trade me the one you’ve got, Sarah. Give it here.”
“Tell me what it is first,” Sarah said, twisting out of Martin’s reach.
“Naughty minx!” Martin said.
How well she could suddenly do it—act a complete part, while concealing, completely, a true self that did her no good. Saucy and sharp, she baited Martin, tossed and caught the rubber thing just beyond Martin’s reach, felt Liam’s insistent erection questing into her ass as he gripped her ever tighter to his lap. And all the while she was really with David, with his fumbled efforts over Lilly which he made to evade her, Sarah, and which wouldn’t succeed. Indifferent to the stupid men for whom she played the role, indifferent to the prick pressing into her ass, indifferent to the thing dropping into her hand, indifferent to the room, she homed in on David. It won’t work, she told him calmly.
“Sarah,” came Mr. Kingsley’s voice into the newly quiet room. “Please give that to me and go home.” Beneath her Liam stood up and she slid off his lap onto her feet. Mr. Kingsley was standing before her, his hand extended, and she put the thing into it, staring into his face and at the same time past his shoulder into his husband Tim’s face, which hung in the doorframe like Mr. Kingsley’s pale shadow.