The Convulsion Factory

here. The utter lack of reward for living a virtuous life. And every one of these sick sons of bitches in here states his reasons for acting like a depraved monster with such eloquence it makes you want to cry.” He shrugged. “But obviously you know that.”

Her grin turned mildly wicked, and she checked to make sure they were alone. “You want to know what I found most eloquent? When Justine’s captured by the bandit, and de Sade gets across the idea of a blowjob without using one concrete anatomical reference. I loved that.”

And thus it went on, impromptu critiques and appreciation of the works of a man who’d scandalized a continent, whose debauches were legend, whose name itself had enriched the vocabulary of the erotic. Time got away from them, and once she started to laugh as she imagined what by now must have been going through Jude’s mind downstairs. The poor woman frantic, calling paramedics, priests, a SWAT team. She should go quell Jude’s fears.

“I’m enjoying this,” he said at last. “I really am. You know the way you can just tell, sometimes, that you can talk to someone and let a half-hour go by and you won’t even know it? I knew you’d be someone I could talk to.”

“And how’s that?” She had to know. He was either far more intuitive than Jude, and most of the day-herd who muddled through downstairs, or she’d let something of night inside shine free.

“You didn’t look away on the street the other afternoon. You held your ground … and watched.” His eye contact was bold, candid.

She stood there, tongue-tip wedged between her front teeth, clothed yet her garments may as well have been sheer. Caught. She was caught. Knowing it had to come someday, but always taking for granted the person would at least have legs. Caught.

“It was the look on your face,” she whispered. “I — I didn’t even think you noticed me then.”

As he laughed and rolled his eyes, she found his easy candor extraordinary. And while she’d known plenty exhibitionists, she got no sense that his pleasure had derived from being watched. It had been grounded in the physical, she was sure of it.

“I get carried away sometimes. I really shouldn’t, but when it feels that good, and the mood strikes…” He shrugged, palms up. “You know, you may think it doesn’t, but your face gives you away too. Like does know like, when it knows what to look for. I don’t think I’m completely off-base here, am I?”

A blush threatened to warm her cheeks. Embarrassment? She’d not even thought it possible anymore. The challenge in her tone of voice was merely affectation: “What is it you think you see?”

He appraised. “In your eyes. It’s always in the eyes. This look when your guard slips. Something unsatisfied, maybe a little angry. Okay. I know — it’s like someone just stole the last sliver of chocolate torte right out from under your fork.”

Ellen’s laugh was soft, low, throaty, half-pleasure and half-challenge. Chocolate and sex. This man may have had no legs, but he most definitely had her number.

“Look,” she said, “I have to be getting back to work. But I think I’m going to need your name … and some way of getting hold of you later.”

*

His name was Adam, and the address he gave took her to a dim neighborhood where her footsteps were solitary echoes against walls of brick and stone, where the pale faces of residents peeped out from behind barred windows. Everything malingered beneath a stubborn dusting of industrial fallout, and the last of the year’s greenery twined dead and brown around sagging wrought iron fences. Privacy would be valued here, and respected.

Adam played the proper host, skimming through his apartment and around corners as quickly as if he were on a basketball court. He mixed fine drinks, served hors d’ouevres that hadn’t come from a deli. He showed her his books, including the freshly reinstated Justine. He let her notice for herself his collection of fetish videos, and be the one to suggest slipping a disc into the player. There was a lot in the way of nipple clamps and whimpering, later the obligatory golden shower, and they were really just marking time here, weren’t they? She might’ve yawned once. Adam shut it off before the end.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve watched this,” he said. “Been awhile since it even did anything for me.”

“So why sit through this much if it’s that passe to you now?”

He shrugged easily. “Humoring you?”

“Oh, that’s a laugh,” she said, and she was Elle again, had become Elle without one bit of effort. Adam recognized this. Like knows like, and from here it was a very short trip to the bedroom.

Unclothed, his body was a peculiar marvel. Incomplete, but hard and sculpted, like a magnificent Greek statue that vandals had smashed in two. His genitals seemed all the more for it, large and immodest. His lower trunk flexed with new rhythms she’d never felt without the normal counterbalance of legs. As he meshed with her, braced upon two powerful arms, she could run her hands along the tapering curve of his back, cup the clenching muscles of his ass. Could run her hands farther down and cup the smooth rounded stumps where his legs just ended. She couldn’t think of him as an amputee. It felt as if Adam were complete, whole, and his hips met some other plane, where his legs existed in another dimension.

For hours they rolled, locking themselves into twisted new arrangements. Positions once denied her because of one set of legs or the other getting in the way were now accessible. And Adam was tireless, his commitment to ecstasy for a long time bordering on possession, then tipping far beyond. He had a whole body’s worth of passion compressed into half the mass. Each time he came it was with a straining convulsion of ardor, racked with groans and shudders that might’ve been endearing were they not so intensely animal. For any less experienced a woman, Elle decided, his plunge into the heart of his own pleasure would’ve been frightening.

But for herself? It was maddening, feeling for the first time ever that she had been left behind, that there was no way she could draw more from the most ravaging of fucks than her partner. He had eclipsed her, and if at the bookstore he’d nearly prompted in her a flush of embarrassment, he had now done the unthinkable: He had inspired envy.

I want whatever it is you have inside, she thought, and lay as stunned as if a new galaxy had opened before her. Lay with him in the sweat-soaked afterglow, her cunt lips puffy and throbbing. It lasted long moments, even as Adam stirred, even as he traced a hand along her face.

Even as he said, “If you stay with me, you … you may not be seeing me this whole for much longer,” and she found it a peculiar thing to say. But consider her life.

It certainly was no stranger than hearing someone confess his love.

*

Their relationship grew from that night, a happy co-existence of need and availability, willingness and daring. She didn’t know how long it would last, but this was the way things were done on their level. Emotions and attachment rarely figured in. It was more the delight of connecting with someone who didn’t judge, who understood that not everyone craved a permanent partner at his or her side through life. Who trusted the physical body’s immediacy more than a bamboozled heart.

It saved time. It saved money. It saved pretense.

Adam happily listened to her recount various liaisons at her nocturnal haunts, his erection like a club curving away from the base of his body. He would close his eyes, smiling as she conjured for him images that would drive the average man to frenzied fits of jealousy and despair: Elle, flogging the back of a submissive man until he rimmed her with a quivering tongue; coaxing an orgasm from the sluggish genitals of an uncut transsexual; bending a girlfriend over her lap and paddling her bottom cherry red while a nervous old couple watched from chairs.

Adam listened, and Adam trembled. She had read, one memorable lunch break, that artist Salvador Dali could think himself to orgasm. She wondered if Adam wasn’t far away from it himself.

“Your turn,” she demanded once, in an uncharacteristic sense of quid pro quo. “You’ve hardly told me a thing about yourself. I want to know all the dirty stuff you did before you met me.” Then, with a grin, “Besides pulling over for quickies with yourself in the alley.”

He pretended to consider sharing. “I know some people. You’re not the only one with a members-only pass.”