himself. Or at least, he wanted to see what it would be like between just the two of them. An affair, or whatever it might be called in the circumstances. The nomenclature would need to be peculiar, but then his feelings for her were peculiar. Until that moment putting a name to them hadn’t seemed relevant, or rather, it hadn’t seemed possible.
Ava went along with it, for as far as it went. They met several times in anonymous hotels. Ferris was all over her, and she was either bored or diffident – Ferris couldn’t decide which it was. He did everything he could to make her lose control of her reserve, to orgasm, but even though he licked and sucked and fucked her until she was raw he couldn’t get her half as close as Vince and he did together. She let him do whatever he wanted, affectionate and slightly impatient at the same time, as if she were humouring a child. Whatever he thought he was doing, it was wide of the mark, and Ava gave him no hint of any alternative. Maybe she felt guilty because Vince wasn’t there. After a while, Ferris did.
Alone, he and Ava discovered they had little to talk about. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about Vince or about the menage-a-trois. They didn’t talk about being in love, or about having a child, although Ferris imagined that he might be getting her pregnant. They didn’t discuss how either of them got to the hotel, or how she would get back to the island afterward, they didn’t discuss work or children, and they barely talked about the weather. They were left with a present that had to subsist within the walls of the hotel room, and a future that they might be risking by being there.
They met in the hotel lobby, rushed to the room, made love, and lay in the darkness without speaking. If this was the real thing, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the unrealities they were cheating on. Ava didn’t get pregnant, and they stopped meeting without having to admit they were going to. Ferris was disappointed and relieved at the same time.
Now, here, he has a sudden instinct that Vince had known about it all along, and that if not, he certainly knew now. “I had some dumb ideas in those days,” Ferris says, looking at Vince and feeling guilty.
“You mean like trying to take Ava away from me?” he says. “Yeah, I knew you were trying. I wasn’t worried. I thought you’d figure it out for yourself soon enough.”
“How did you find out?”
“Ava told me she was seeing you. I told you we trusted each other completely. You didn’t believe it like you didn’t believe a lot of the rest of what I said. More tea?”
Ferris decided to leave “the rest of it” alone. “Another cup is fine. Why didn’t you stop it?”
“Why should I? Ava was crazy about you… and I thought you might see what we were offering you.”
Ava fills Ferris’s cup, tops up her own and Vince’s, and goes off to the kitchen to make more. Watching her do this simple thing, Ferris tries to fathom how she sorted out complexities like the ones he’d created for her. Did she sort them out at all? He could hardly fault her if she didn’t. He hadn’t, not really.
From the beginning of it, Ferris had difficulty living with the idea that he was sexually involved with a married couple. How many times had he sat on the ferry on the trip back and told himself it was too weird, that he couldn’t handle it any longer?
Yes, but it was also the ferry rides, together with the isolation of the island, that protected it, and him. No one knew he had this other life. To his friends, Ferris was someone who sometimes disappeared for a few days, that’s all. Not generally available on weekends. If a friend asked where he was, he mentioned business. If business associates asked, he used his friends as an excuse.
After the “affair” ended, it got harder, and he didn’t return to the island at one point for almost eight months. He found several new lovers, tried hard to stay interested in them, but couldn’t. When he started coming back to the island regularly, there were no recriminations, no oblique punishments, no reluctances. But there was a subtle erotic escalation, so subtle that he didn’t notice it at first.
Ferris was conducting his own subtle escalation. He was competing with Vince, holding off his orgasms until after Vince had his, or breaking off to watch them fuck, nestling close to Ava, cuddling her, kissing her breasts or face or neck, holding her eyes with his while Vince came. Then he’d have her to himself, and he put on performances that were as much for Vince as for Ava.
They weren’t always comfortable performances, because Vince had some unsubtle ways of watching. He’d lie with his face next to Ava’s vagina, slipping Ferris’s cock out of her and into his mouth for a few strokes. Or while Ferris was fucking with Ava, Vince would play with his balls, or lick his asshole. Several times Vince insisted on joining in on fellatio – at least once, due to last-second manoeuvres, Ferris came in Vince’s mouth. Vince seemed to enjoy all of this, and Ferris, well, didn’t.
Meanwhile, the configurations and combinations were escalating, getting wilder and weirder. Each round of love-making seemed to require a new configuration. Some of them were simply contortions – easy enough to adapt to. Then came vibrators and dildos, an uncomplicated fourth partner. There was a decipherable symmetry to the escalations. Each time, Ferris was offered the more extreme posture. At the next session, Vince began there. Oils appeared, anal intercourse was introduced. At that, Ferris at first balked.
“Don’t be a prude,” Vince said. “It isn’t painful if it’s done right. You lubricate properly, and come into her from the front, just like conventional fucking. You’ll like it. She does.”
Ava, lying between them on the bed, arched her back and licked her lips.
Then Ava wanted them both in her vagina at the same time. It was a difficult, contorted manoeuvre, and Ferris was convinced that it was painful for her. A few days afterward, he phoned and asked her point-blank.
“It was pleasant,” she said, her voice cool. “Should we be talking about this on the phone?”
“It didn’t look like it was pleasant,” he said. “It looked painful. And it felt painful.”
“It hurt you?” she answered, her tone still cool.
“No, damn it. It hurt you. I hurt you.”
“Ferris, sweetie,” she said as if instructing a child. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between pleasure and pain. In any case, if I’d wanted you to stop, I would have said so.”
“You would have.”
“Yes. Don’t you understand that?”
He told her he did.
Ferris realizes that he’s staring at Ava, remembering being in those strange and stranger embraces with her, helplessly recalling her scent and taste and the myriad erotic postures in which he’s seen her exquisite body. He knows more about her, been more intimate with her than any woman he’s been with. At the same time, he knows nothing about her, nothing comfortably human. Doesn’t intimacy leave indelible traces? Where are they, here?
“Don’t, Ferris,” Ava says. “I don’t want to be looked at like that. Not by you, or Vince, or anyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He
“So why are you here, exactly?”
Tough question. Mentally he goes over the list: curiosity about the events of the last ten years, an old friend’s and lover’s distant concern, some personal curiosity about how a beautiful woman has aged. All acceptable motives. But there’s a surprise item on the list, and it isn’t acceptable: Ferris isn’t sure he wouldn’t tumble into the sack with them right now if they proposed it.
He frowns, tries to rid himself of the thought. “Tell me what happened with the child you adopted.”
Ava looks at the floor, and Vince sinks back in his chair with a sigh.
“There’s not much to tell,” he says. “She had learning disabilities, you knew that. She didn’t improve, and by the time she was fifteen, we had a major behaviour problem on our hands. All sorts of incidents, one thing after another. Eventually she was caught breaking into the house of one of our neighbours, and she got sent to a juvenile home. We sprung her, but after that, it was worse. She’d be here for a few days, and then she’d disappear for weeks on end. Then she stopped coming. We don’t even know where she is, now. In jail, I think.”
“I’m sorry,” Ferris says. “What about Bobby?”
“What about him?” Vince replies. “He’s around. He has his own place in town, works, goes to school part-time. He just outgrew the island, that’s all. This isn’t much of a place for young people.”
“Are you two happy?”
Ava answers. “Sometimes. Yes.” There’s a long hesitation. “We’ve been in therapy for three years. That’s helped a lot.”
“What for?” Ferris asks, without thinking.
