The Shaft Read online

  The running noise of the bus soared into his ears, unmuffled and crisp. They were cruising at a dull and steady fifty-five in the slow lane. Jonathan's overhead reading light was off and no other passenger cared to differ this late at night. Their driver was a robot, a professional white-line jockey who had not uttered a syllable past his pro forma departure spiel about all the things you were not supposed to do on a Greyhound bus.

  All there was: Night and blackness and time and bus noise, and Jonathan, all by himself now.

  'No.'

  He remembered the last time he had slept with Amanda.

  Wine with dinner always felled them both on workdays. They had snuggled for an hour before coasting down into sleep. He thought he had undressed her. Sometime after midnight he had awakened and gone to work on her. Their progression had become almost ritualistic.

  He scooted down, turned on his side, and insinuated his first and middle fingers between her legs, so gently. Amanda slept soundly on her back - a trick Jonathan could never duplicate - and he was in a position that allowed him to monitor the meter of her unconscious respiration, even her very heartbeat. He set up a soft rhythm, rubbing, using his saliva as a buffer, teasing the periphery of her perception for half an hour or so, until he could tell she was floating up from sleep to vague doze.

  His first reward came in the tiny moan that escaped her, and the way her legs drifted apart across cool blue sheets to permit him better access. This was the time when pressure and tempo became important.

  Her clitoris fattened beneath his fingers, swelling up firm and prominent as she began to assist him with sleepy, tidal movements. Another fifteen minutes passed. Jonathan watched the digital clock tick over as Amanda was jolted through a pleasantly fuzzy, half-asleep orgasm.

  Now his index finger was inserted and he kept the beat with his thumb, feeling her contractions bam bam bam, the familiar fluttering in the ring of vaginal muscle. He saw her fingers grip the sheets and tighten, then relax as the afterburn warmed her extremities. Fingers, toes, forehead hot now, body demanding breath. When she rolled over, cocking one leg, she was so wet that Jonathan's fingers barely recorded the friction of her rotating pussy.

  His erection was excruciating by now.

  He guided her ass slightly higher. She was in focus enough to help him. Only just. She arched her back.

  'I don't know why I love it so much this way,' she had told him so long ago. Before they had moved in together, back when it was imperative for them to hump their brains out every single night, no gaps. Every time she mentioned this, and she mentioned it almost every time, her admission was seasoned with her characteristic guilt. 'I don't know why I like it; I just… I jussst…' She usually dissolved into sibilance, far beyond words.

  Amanda loved being entered from behind - her spine arched, face hugging the mattress, hands hanging on, her splendid rump pointed perkily up at her lover. She could never articulate why she favored this position over all contenders. It was a thing of sensation, not logic. Or her mind just refused to analyze it. Sometimes it was possible for Jonathan to nail down isolated details: The comfortably possessive grip of his hands on her hipbones; the optimum penetration; the freer rhythm that came from bearing straight into her instead of heavily atop her. But mostly, Amanda treated this as an exceedingly guilty pleasure. Maybe Mommy had warned her this was something nice girls did not do. Or worse, maybe Amanda had told herself this.

  Jonathan could never fathom who Amanda thought she was apologizing to. She had discovered a position that made her senselessly happy. Thousands had not.

  He remembered sliding into her, feeding those first few inches with no thrust at all, and the last thing he had anticipated was her voice. Amanda's voice, in the dimness, resolving to wakeful clarity to tell him no.

  Amanda enjoyed waking up in a state of sexual high-burn. He was not taking advantage of her sleeping vulnerability; no way. No fucking way. If she even thought that, she would have stopped the sequence much earlier. She had pounced and taken Jonathan by sleepy surprise just as many times. More. Predawn was one of their mutually approved favorite times for lovemaking. It offered a nice buffer of sleep, a couple of hours to either side, followed by the deeper slumber of the satiated.

  'No.'

  Lately their bedwork had become sporadic, by rote, sometimes almost a matter of resigned duty. An exterior reflection of internal problems that Jonathan had hoped would never find their way into the kingsized that he and Amanda had agreed to share for two straight, monogamous years.

  He was, he saw, a fool.

  Here he sat, northbound on a Greyhound redeye in the middle of the night, with a truly Olympian hard-on straining against the button fly of his 501s… with dead batteries. He was thankful for the dark, which obviated public embarrassment. He was not thankful for the night, because it made him think endlessly of the last time he had slept with Amanda… and not made love.

  It had happened the night Jonathan had hoped to jump their lives back on track.

  That night, it had not been a Dinner from Hell. That was what he had come to call the stiff social intercourse they shared on their nights out - a mostly spidess meal punctuated by migraine-inducing silences and overpolite nonconversation. No. That night, things had gone swimmingly. No arguments, almost no snapping. Amanda had even laughed out loud once or twice, and it hurt him to think that he might be responsible for stealing the laughter from her eyes.

  Back at their place he had drawn her a hot bath dense with oil and scented bubbles. She sank in to the tip of her nose and simmered for half an hour. She surfaced just to kiss him with a mouthful of Cabernet Blanc. When she stepped from the tub to the shower stall, he joined her. They lathered each other in familiar ways and she ducked out first, to change CDs on the player in the living room. He emerged from a cloud of steam, wound into a towel. She wore her favorite blue silk robe, her hair free and damp and shaggy. The robe's hem brushed the floor, but the topography emphasized by its sheer, slinky fabric was almost too much for any mortal man to bear.

  They were tired. At least this was detente. She instructed him to lay on his stomach, on the cool blue sheets, and she straddled him to work the kinks from his back with strong and practiced fingers. Her crisp, close pubic thatch teased his butt. Then he did her. She suffered a touch of Marfan's Syndrome, a looseness of ligaments at the joints. It was perpetual bother. She could pop her entire skeleton like a trucker cracking his knuckles. Her shoulders and hands ached much of the time; Jonathan feared incipient arthritis. In ten more years those joints would begin to swell.

  For her to rub him down was a matter of caring, of saying I still love you despite our problems. For him to rub her was a matter of knowing from experience what to massage, and how rough to be with each area, because she was hurting.

  Afterward, they had fallen asleep, entwined in each other's arms, and a stranger would have said that these were two people in love.

  Until Jonathan was hallway inside of her, gliding easily into the embrace of her musky orchid cunt. Until she told him no.

  'No, Jon. Don't. Hurts.'

  He backed off, reining himself, fighting not to be a Visigoth about how badly he wanted her just at that moment. He parted her vulva with his thumbs, so gently, and tried again. No strain. She was as wet as a thunderstorm.

  'No.'

  She had jerked down and away. It was a definite physical rebuff. She had not meant that his angle hurt. She had not meant not now but in a minute.

  Jonathan popped free of her and felt a speck of moisture strike his cheek. His treacherous cock had catapulted a droplet of her lubrication right into his face. It was damned near symbolic.

  Amanda had meant no. Period.

  And Jonathan had suddenly seen himself as ludicrous. An absurd man on his knees with a hard-on jutting toward space like a cruise missile with no target to blow up.

  Useless then, useless now.

  The Greyhound's tilt-seat was a classic, slickly grimed in the manner of a
doorjamb that has suffered a million filthy hands. A disinfectant tang lingered in the cabin. It persistently reminded Jonathan of a bar men's room in Mexico. Dingy place. He had logged an unlovely half-hour or so there, hooting into the big porcelain megaphone, in another life. No hard liquor since that adventure, no thanks. Just some wine, or beer with lime at dinnertime. Amanda had smoked dope to relax for as long as he had known her. Jonathan had found that if he smoked enough to get dizzy, it made him frisky, then leadenly tired, and he would spend the next day and a half with a sore throat. He lacked any taste for the permutations - hash, bongs, half-and-half. Amanda was a browser, a sampler who used drugs infrequently and socially. She only did coke at parties. Jonathan thought sucking powder up your nose in order to be groovy was genuinely repulsive. His drug of choice was caffeine, plus that other white death, refined sugar. Jonathan was a coffee achiever.

  Smoking dope helped Amanda knock down some of the barriers she habitually cast in the path of her own sexual pleasure. She almost never orgasmed easily; it took caring effort and a commitment of time from both partners. Most of the guys in her past had never given half a damn about working at it. Accordingly, Amanda had matured thinking herself to be frigid, or otherwise personally at fault. She seemed most fulfilled when she could blame both herself and her partners, with the bad old world at large thrown in for filler.

  More than a hint of meanness there, Jonathan accused himself. Egg her on by telling her she enjoys being a victim. What an understanding fellow you are.

  The erosion of their relationship had become palpable at the point where Amanda insisted on smoking a joint before fucking. Rainwater patters against a marble tombstone and at last begins to wear the epitaph to unreadability.

  Unbidden, a parade of images from the past marched through his head. Mostly silly. The way she used to playfully grab his ass in the supermarket, or merely tell him what a cute butt he had. That winter drive to Birmingham during which they held a crazily civil discussion on how movies are rated while his hand was delving into her khaki shirt and making her nipples come to attention. Or Amanda, grinning like a gremlin and going down on him at four in the morning, midway through a night flight to LAX. The groping and giggling in the clothing store changing booths at the mall. The oh-so-salacious phone calls at work. Hawking computer mainframes had never appealed to Jonathan's romanticism. That one evening he had sulked home - he was to quit two days later - and found Amanda waiting in his bed, wearing the most maddening black lace nightgown conceivable. The way she had smiled and said, 'Jonathan? Do me a favor…?'

  They began playing house shortly after that one.

  He snapped to. Bus. Night. He was wallowing.

  It wasn't just the sex, of course. He was dwelling on that aspect because the sex had been so good between them, and it had been so goddamned long since he had made love to her. To anybody. They had suffered a few bouts of generic lovemaking as their relationship burned down. It had plowed on, grim and unsatisfying, for nearly a year. Somewhere along the line they'd given up making love and settled for having sex. Problems replaced caring.

  Just now he was randy enough to turn goofy whenever a pretty waitress smiled at him.

  Sex wasn't it. Nothing was it. It was… it was so damned complicated, so tangled, that trying to peg a specific catalyst or culprit would trivialize everything they had shared. Right this minute it had gifted Jonathan with a Clydesdale of a cluster headache that felt like a cinderblock being dropped on top of another cinderblock. It overran the left side of his skull, causing his eye to tear and his nose to drip. There was sweat in his eyebrows. The pain was consuming, and past meditating away. Time to grab for the Excedrin.

  He twisted his rucksack around on the vacant seat beside him, unzipped the largest pocket and pulled out a half-empty bottle of Calistoga water that still fizzed. He had an apple and some Hydrox cookies left, lost amid the cassette cases and other junk down in the pack - his Nikon plus zoom, loaded with color film at a thousand ASA, his toilet kit, his address book, a flap pouch protecting his dense, dark pilot shades. The bottle's twist-cap went fssss. He dry swallowed three of the white pills. The fourth got stuck. He tilted the bottle to his lips and felt the pill disintegrate in the grip of his throat. He tried to relax, eyes shut.

  Nope.

  It had all gotten perverted. It had all turned so complex. There were so many beginnings and endings to it that it was impossible to he it into a nice, knotty, front-to-back narrative.

  Once upon a day he had phoned Amanda at work. Just to make contact, hear her voice, ask her how she was.

  'Pregnant.' She had said it just so, on purpose, and hung up on him.

  After that had come the argument. Doom-laden, with dug heels, it started with talk of abortions, salaries, and practicality. It ended with nebulous notions of what constituted growth in a relationship between two human beings. Amanda wept a lot. Jonathan thought he had won the argument.

  Jonathan lost.

  Sharp she was, canny and diverse. It frustrated Jonathan that the apparent goal of her life was to subjugate all that made her unique, to melt into the commonweal and become what his good buddy Bash had dubbed one of the Butt People.

  Said Bash: People who watched titty channels and hung out at the Silver Bullet. People who reproduced irresponsibly and nattered about their desire to get back in shape someday. People who thought winning a lottery would solve all their problems. People to whom life improvement meant affording a more expensive pickup truck. People who counted on God to fix their plumbing, their shortcomings, their existences, because they were too lazy. Lite Beer people. The massmind, the calculatedly ignorant, the lower spiritual castes. The sort of good folks who under the right circumstances would happily form lynch mobs and book-burning parties.

  The Butt People.

  Amanda's upbringing had been different. Children had always been a part of her scenario. But too many birthdays had passed for maternity to remain a foggy, sometime-but-not-now notion. She slid down into an exitless panic. Jonathan thought seriously for a while about playing Daddy to some small someone. He was shocked to realize he did not despise kids as much as he feared he might. These miniature human beings were intriguing.

  They were the most intriguing, he found, when they belonged to somebody else, when they could be observed at will with the repulsive parts edited out.

  Too many friends insisted too fervently that everything changed when you became a parent. No big surprise there. Jonathan heard the solidarity of the trapped, seeking to seduce him. He asked Amanda why. Her response had been heated, cast in steel.

  'Because it's what people do.'

  Not enough, not for Jonathan, who did not believe in building families by accident, the way a pioneer constructs a shelter not out of choice, but out of necessity. And that was not enough for Amanda.

  It had been a slow income year, and Amanda had gotten an abortion. Jonathan wondered if he would ever be forgiven for his complicity.

  Amanda chanced upon a gray hair, then another. Then a stretch mark or two on her thighs. Jonathan noticed varicose veins on his own ankles. He did not mention them. For Amanda, a time bomb had begun ticking. The prospect of whether she had actually pinpointed a flaw in her mirror was a no-win exchange. If he noticed, it hurt her. If he pretended not to, she felt overlooked. And if he did nothing, held at neutral, her eyes silently damned him one more time.

  She stopped smiling. She erected an automatic denial response against any proposal of Jonathan's. She entrenched for a long tug of war. This irritated Jonathan. Waste pestered him. He reluctantly supplied whatever pressure was required to keep the tension equalized. Nobody was going to budge. There were egos to be preserved. He thought of the joke about the self-protecting fuse - the one that protects itself by crisping the entire circuit rather than burning out.

  Lovemaking? Call it nightmarish.

  So now Jonathan's cute butt was Chicago-bound, with Texas dwindling to the rear, Tangerine Dream tapes to supply a high
way soundtrack, and pills for the headaches that whacked chrome spikes into his brain. He brooded about the end. The damage Amanda could wreak upon him with a look, or a stolid silence. He moped about the practiced and incomparable way they had moved together, melded into one seamless, primal being, giving and receiving pleasure. Two folded into one.

  'Take the job,' she had told him. 'Sure. Go have fun with Bash.' Jonathan fancied he heard the wham of a gavel. 'You will anyway, right? You can probably make some money, so why not? Get away from me because I'm such a bitch, anyway.'

  There came times when the acid certainty in her voice made him want to start flinging wild haymaker blows. 'Well.' He had shrugged, still frustrated. 'What about you?'

  'What about me? Don't make any big sacrifices on my behalf.' Her tone said: You fucked up again, ace. What you should have asked was what about US? See? You don't really give a damn.

  They could predict each other so well. Why wasn't that a good thing, a healing, strengthening, positive thing, instead of the nastiest form of ultimate weapon?

  And where do you get off being so goddamned naive? a tiny, impish voice shot back.

  Chicago offered work. Chicago offered distance.

  Jeffrey Holdsworth Chalmers Tessier - of the New Orleans Tessiers - was burly and bearded, slope-shouldered and large of tooth. His eyes were a mellow golden-brown, radiant, absorbent, constantly storing input on his mental video recorder. His line was freelance graphics, his patter rapidfire and ceaseless, and he had been Jonathan's best friend of record since their first encounter at a university film club meeting in 1977. Jonathan had been chasing an architectural degree, Jeff had been loafing away a liberal arts scholarship. Somewhere amidst the womanizing and pool-playing he acquired the nickname Bash. He still maintained a loving hold on his Deep South accent. He told Jonathan that Amanda had been a 'shayme.' To Bash, ladies might come and ladies might go, but there were always more ladies, and if the universe worked right Jonathan would forever be able to blubber on his big shoulder.