Dark Rivers of the Heart

was laughing with pure joy. She hugged herself and squealed as if she were a schoolgirl, and her sublime green eyes shone with delight.

“My God,” she said tremulously, “you’re even better than you seemed, even better than I thought, better than I could ever hope. You’re perfect, Roy, you’re perfect, perfect.”

He smiled uncertainly. He was still not entirely free of the fear that she was going to claw him.

Eve grabbed his right hand, pulled him through the kitchen, across a dining room, snapping on lights and talking as she went: “I was willing…if you wanted that. But that’s not what I want, either, all that pawing and squeezing, all that sweating, it disgusts me, having another person’s sweat all over me, all slick and sticky with another person’s sweat, I can’t stand that, it sickens me.”

“Fluids,” he said with revulsion, “how can there be anything sexy about another person’s fluids, exchanging fluids?”

With growing excitement, pulling him into a hallway, Eve said, “Fluids, my God, doesn’t it make you want to die, just die, with all the fluids that have to be involved, so much that’s wet. They all want to lick and suck my breasts, all that saliva, it’s so hideous, and shoving their tongues in my mouth—”

“Spittle!” he said, grimacing. “What’s so erotic about swapping spit, for God’s sake?”

They had reached the threshold of her bedroom. He stopped her on the brink of the paradise that they were about to create together.

“If I ever kiss you,” he promised, “it’ll be a dry kiss, as dry as paper, dry as sand.”

Eve was shaking with excitement.

“No tongue,” he swore. “Even the lips mustn’t be moist.”

“And never lips to lips—”

“—because then even in a dry kiss—”

“—we’d be swapping—”

“—breath for breath—”

“—and there’s moisture in breath—”

“—vapors from the lungs,” he said.

With a gladdening of his heart almost too sweet to endure, Roy knew that this splendid woman was, indeed, more like him than he ever could have hoped when he first stepped out of that elevator and saw her. They were two voices in harmony, two hearts beating in unison, two souls soaring to the same song, emphatically simpatico.

“No man has ever been in this bedroom,” she said, leading him across the threshold. “Only you. Only you.”

The portion of the walls immediately to the left and right of the bed, as well as the area of the ceiling directly above it, was mirrored. Otherwise, the walls and ceiling were upholstered with midnight-blue satin the precise shade of the carpet. A single chair stood in a corner, upholstered in silvery silk. The two windows were covered with polished-nickel blinds. The bed was sleek and modern, with radius footboard, bookcase headboard, tall flanking cabinets, and a light bridge; it was finished with several coats of high-gloss, midnight-blue lacquer in which glimmered silvery speckles like stars. Above the headboard was another mirror. Instead of a bedspread, she had a silver-fox fur throw—“Just fake fur,” she assured him when he expressed concern about the rights of helpless animals — which was the most lustrous and luxurious thing he had ever seen.

Here was the glamour for which Roy had yearned.

The computerized lighting was voice-activated. It offered six distinct moods through clever combinations of strategically placed halogen pin spots (with a variety of colored lenses), mirror-framing neon in three colors (that could be displayed singly or two or three at a time), and imaginative applications of fiber optics. Furthermore, each mood could be subtly adjusted by a voice-activated rheostat that responded to the commands “up” and “down.”

When Eve touched a button on the headboard, the tambour doors on the tall bed-flanking cabinets hummed up, out of sight. Shelves were revealed, laden with bottles of lotions and scented oils, ten or twelve rubber phalluses in various sizes and colors, and a collection of battery-powered and hand-operated sex toys that were bewildering in their design and complexity.

Eve switched on a CD player with a hundred-disc carousel and set it for random play. “It’s loaded with everything from Rod Stewart to Metallica, Elton John, Garth Brooks, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, James Brown and the Famous Flames, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Somehow it’s more exciting when there’s so many different kinds of music and when you never know what will be playing next.”

After taking off his topcoat but not his suit jacket, Roy Miro moved the upholstered chair out of the corner. He positioned it to one side of the bed, near the footboard, to ensure a glorious view yet to avoid, as much as possible, casting his reflections in the mirrors and spoiling the multitudinous images of her perfection.

He sat in the chair and smiled.

She stood beside the bed, fully clothed, while Elton John sang about healing hands. “This is like a dream. To be here, doing exactly what I like to do, but with someone who can appreciate me—”

“I appreciate you, I do.”

“—who can adore me—”

“I adore you.”

“—who can surrender to me—”

“I’m yours.”

“—without soiling the beauty of it.”

“No fluids. No pawing.”

“Suddenly,” she said, “I’m as shy as a virgin.”

“I could stare at you for hours, fully clothed.”

She tore off her blouse so violently that buttons popped and the fabric ripped. In a minute she was completely nude, and more of what had been hidden proved to be perfect than imperfect.

Reveling in his gasp of pleased disbelief, she said, “You see why I don’t like to make love in the usual way? When I have me, what do I need with anyone else?”

Thereafter, she turned from him and proceeded as she would have done if he’d not been there. Clearly, she took intense satisfaction from knowing that she could hold him totally in her power without ever having to touch him.

She stood before the mirror, examining herself from every angle, caressing herself tenderly, wonderingly, and her rapture at what she saw was so exciting to Roy that he could draw only shallow breaths.

When she finally went to the bed, with Bruce Springsteen singing about whiskey and cars, she cast off the silver-fox throw. For just a moment, Roy was disappointed, for he had wanted to see her writhing upon those lustrous pelts, whether faux or real. But she pulled back the top sheet and the lower sheet as well, revealing a black rubber mattress cover that instantly intrigued him.

From a shelf in one of the open cabinets, she removed a bottle of jewel-pure amber oil, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small pool of it in the center of the bed. A subtle and appealing fragrance, as light and fresh as a spring breeze, drifted to Roy: not a floral scent, but spices — cinnamon, ginger, and other, more exotic ingredients.

While James Brown sang about urgent desire, Eve rolled onto the big bed, straddling the puddle of oil. She anointed her hands and began working the amber essence into her flawless skin. For fifteen minutes, her hands moved knowingly over every curve and plane of her body, lingering at each lovely, yielding roundness and at each shadowy, mysterious cleft. More often than not, what Eve touched was perfect. But when she touched a part that was beneath Roy’s standards and dismaying to him, he focused on her hands, for they themselves were without flaw — at least below the too-bony radii and ulnae.

The sight of Eve upon the glistening black rubber, her lush body all gold and pink, slick with a fluid that was satisfyingly pure and not of human origin, had elevated Roy Miro to a spiritual plane that he had never before