Crash, стр. 23

Vaughan was right. Catherine's sexual fantasies began more and more to involve him. At night, as we lay together in our bedroom, we approached Vaughan through the pantheon of our familiar partners like Vaughan himself tracking us through the lobbies of the terminal buildings.

'We must get some more hash.' Catherine looked up at the traffic lights sweeping across the windows. 'Why is Seagrave so obsessed with these film actresses? You say he wants to crash into them?'

'Vaughan put the idea into his head. He's using Sea-grave in some experiment.'

'What about the wife?'

'She's under Vaughan's thumb.'

'And you?'

Catherine lay with her back to me, buttocks pressed into my groin. As I moved my penis I looked past my scarred navel at the cleft between her buttocks, as immaculate as a doll's. I held her breasts in my hands, her rib cage crushing my wristwatch into my forearm. Catherine's passive stance was deceptive; from long practice I knew that this was the prelude to an erotic fantasy, a slow and circular inspection of some fresh sexual quarry.

'Am I under his thumb? No. But it's difficult to know where the centre of his personality is.'

'You don't resent him taking all those photographs? It sounds as if he's using you.'

I began to play with Catherine's right nipple. Not yet ready for this, she took my hand and placed it around her breast.

'Vaughan annexes people to him. There's still a strong element of the TV personality about his whole style.'

'Poor man. These girls he picks up – some of them are just children.'

'You keep coming back to them. It isn't sex that Vaughan is interested in, but technology.'

Catherine pressed her head into the pillow, a familiar gesture of concentration.

'Do you like Vaughan?'

I moved my fingers to her nipple again and began to erect it. Her buttocks moved on to my penis. Her voice was pitched on a low, thick note.

'In what way?' I asked.

'He fascinates you, doesn't he?'

'There is something about him. About his obsessions.'

'His flashy car, the way he drives, his loneliness. All the women he's fucked there. It must smell of semen…'

'It does.'

'Do you find him attractive?'

I drew my penis from her vagina and placed the head against her anus, but she pressed it back into her vulva with a quick hand.

'He's very pale, covered with scars.'

'Would you like to fuck him, though? In that car?'

I paused, trying to delay the orgasm rushing like a tidal race up the shaft of my penis.

'No. But there is something about him, particularly as he drives.'

'It's sex – sex and that car. Have you seen his penis?'

As I described Vaughan to her I listened to my voice rising slightly above the sounds of our bodies. I itemized the elements that constituted Vaughan's image in my mind: his hard buttocks held within the worn jeans as he rolled himself on to one hip to leave the car; the sallow skin of his abdomen, almost exposing the triangle of his pubis as he lounged behind the steering wheel; the horn of his half-erect penis pressing against the lower rim through the damp crotch of his trousers; the minute nodes of dirt he picked from his sharp nose and wiped on the indented vinyl of the door panel; the ulcer on his left index finger as he handed me the cigarette lighter; his hard nipples through the frayed blue shirt brushing against the horn boss; his broken thumbnail scratching at the semen stains on the seat between us.

'Is he circumcised?' Catherine asked. 'Can you imagine what his anus is like? Describe it to me.'

My description of Vaughan continued, more for Catherine's benefit than for my own. She pressed her head deep into the pillow, right hand in a fierce dance as she forced my fingers to manipulate her nipple. Although stirred by the idea of intercourse with Vauehan, it seemed to me that I was describing a sex act involving someone other than myself. Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers – a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum – but in the stvl-ization of posture achieved between Vaushan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest.

'Would you like to sodomize him? Would you like to put your penis right into his anus, thrust it up his anus? Tell me, describe it to me. Tell me what you'd do. How would you kiss him in that car? Describe how you'd reach over and unzip his trousers, then take out his penis. Would you kiss it or suck it straightaway? Which hand would you hold it in? Have you ever sucked a penis?'

Catherine had taken over the fantasy. Whom did she see lying beside Vaughan, herself or me?

'… do you know what semen tastes like? Have you ever tasted semen? Some semen is saltier than others. Vaughan's semen must be very salty…'

I looked down at her blonde hair that covered her face, at her hips kicking as she carried herself towards her orgasm. This was one of the first times that she had envisaged me in a homosexual act, and the intensity of the fantasy surprised me. She shuddered through her orgasm, her body in a rigor of pleasure. Before I could reach out to embrace her she turned over, lying face downwards to let my semen run from her vagina, then pulled herself from the bed and stepped briskly into the bathroom.

During the next week, Catherine drifted through the departure lounges of the airport like a queen in rut. Watching her from my car as Vaughan kept her within his aberrant gaze, I felt my loins surging, my penis pressing against the steering wheel.