Short Story: Technique, or Death By Cunnilingus

Foreword… to a short story? Ahem. This is a story I wrote years ago, found in a file, and enjoyed enough to share. I try to avoid being vulgar as a general rule, but a noir story about cunnilingus… I hope you give me some slack…

 

TECHNIQUE

or

Death by Cunnilingus

 

They found Maggie like I left her: toes curled and dead.

I met her at the Jarred Bar. Watched her shoot pool, grind her crotch into the table while banking a combo to the far corner pocket. That was important—her susceptibility to tactile stimulation.

I stacked three quarters on the rail.

She was alone. When her margarita hit half empty, I brought its replacement.

“Put it over there.”

I put the fishbowl next to her deck of Marlboro lights. Dropped an elbow on a recessed window jamb and did my best James Dean brood. She wasn’t what I’d normally consider attractive. She didn’t spend three hours a day at the gym, and another three reading Plato. She leaned over the table and her chest swayed like a science project pendulum. No augmentation. Saddle bag thighs. Wrinkles. Forty. Average.

Perfect.

I’d read about a technique in a love manual I’d found at a used book store that featured obscure first runs and translations. Love Circle. The original was in Sanskrit, but my copy was translated into French, replete with pen drawings and printed in London during 1853 by a publisher named Routledge. Most of the sex poses were the traditional forms you’ll see on a ninety nine cent porn site, but the last…

The text urged caution. Indeed, this technique had been known to cause hysterics and fatalities.

It so happened that my girlfriend Regina, who did spend several hours a day working out and reading Plato, had dropped me. I’m an artificial guy. I like hard bodies and sharp brains. I’ve studied enough of life’s mysteries to know I’m a fool, and armed with that knowledge, I’ve created a satisfying existence. I make a lot of money, understand existentialism, and look good in black. There isn’t a hell of a lot more worth doing well.

Letting go of a woman like Regina didn’t use to be hard. Sex? Nailed her three times a day for a year. It was better than a drug. I was an addict and she was an addict. And then nothing. I could have mounted a Harley Davidson to her clit and she wouldn’t have felt it.

Love Circle would be my answer.

I tried the French version of the love secret on an anthropology student I sourced at the library. Her card had been turned off because of eleven dollars worth of late fees. I paid with a fifty, dumped the change into the leukemia bucket, and followed to her apartment.

Sure, she liked it. As a test, I mouthed twenty words from Moby Dick, starting with Call me Ishmael, and the results were no different.

I was stumped… until I thought of Babelfish.

 

 

Maggie lucked into a win. Her opponent sank the cue ball after calling the nine. She pointed her stick to my dick and said, “You’re up.”

“No, I’m not.” I slipped my quarters into the slots. Dropped the balls and racked them. “What’s your name?”

“Maggie.”

“Perfect.”

“You break,” she said.

“Sure. Care to make a wager?”

“I don’t have money to blow on a bet.”

“I’m not talking money.”

She leaned on the rail. Tight denim. “If not money…”

“I win—I get two hours. My tongue, your clit, no interruptions.”

“Damn,” she said. “If I win?”

“Four.”

She came toward me. Stopped short, swiped her margarita and gulped it. “Break.”

I lined my stick, thrust like to penetrate a concrete wall. Stripes and solids smashed apart. Dropped the three and the seven, and sank two more before missing a straight shot to a corner pocket.

She hovered over the table, ass moving back and forth, and I imagined her other half swinging in syncopation. The cue ball caromed off the rail and dropped the eight into the side. “You win,” she said.

We walked to my Porsche. I unlocked with the fob and opened her door. “Do you happen to speak Sanskrit?”

She studied me. “You’re not some kind of shithead, are you?”

I held the door with my right hand and slipped my left around her back. Pulled her close, pressed my mouth to her neck, just behind her ear.

I worked the Technique. She squirmed. Squeezed me and moaned. She trembled in my arms, my mouth. Her stomach fluttered against mine and her knees parted. Her hips rolled, pressing muff to mess. She inhaled deep.

I pulled back an inch and whispered, “That was ‘beautiful’ in Sanskrit.”

“That was beautiful in any language.” Maggie fell into the leather seat. “Let’s get a room.” She swung her legs inside. Rubbed the leather with her hand. She arched her back.

I closed the door and drove three miles to a Holiday Inn. My house sat two miles away on a hill, but I could see the Holiday Inn with a Bosch ten-inch reflector telescope on the deck. Regina was a freak and used to watch people who thought no one could see them get off in their third-story rooms.

I slipped the plastic door key into the slot.

“You already have a room?” Maggie said.

“Of course.”

“So if it wasn’t me, who would you have brought up here?”

I led Maggie by her sweaty hand. “It’s hard to imagine a woman more suited to my needs.”

 

 

I spent two weeks memorizing each swish and swoop of the forty-seven Sanskrit words Babelfish had provided. Squiggly lines, words that looked like houses and animals and geometry proofs.

I called my ex, Regina, and she agreed to go out for lobster and conversation. We’d bought a hundred DVDs together and had to discuss how to divide them. She looked tight. Red silk, tan up to where there was no tan and the skin tasted better. I knew the break-up routine. I’d get one sympathy lay, and if that didn’t turn things around, it was over.

I’d practiced until the bottom of my tongue bled. But sitting across from Regina, studying her pert curves and the lines of her neck, I knew she was my existential everything. She was all I wanted, and if I couldn’t make her scream for mercy I’d never get another chance. She played with her lobster and I worked mine, and we passed a printout of DVDs back and forth, claiming one at a time with a check mark.

All I had to do was say, “Give me one more chance to curl your toes,” and we’d have been crinkling the sheets. But the stakes were high. My Technique had to be perfect.

I inhaled. It was time.

“Give me one more chance to…”

She shifted sideways. Moved her hips. Blushed above her collarbones. “Yes?”

But it hit me. The translation was from Babelfish. Put “You’re as beautiful as sunlight butterflies on a bubbling brook” into the program, and you get output like, “You smell like fish water baked in sun heat.”

I had one opportunity.

“Give me one more chance to look at that list. I think I missed a Clint Eastwood at the bottom.”

 

 

I took Maggie’s hand and walked her to the room. Turned on the light. She turned it off. I pulled her to me, parted her lips with my tongue, slipped my hand under her blouse at the back, and wedged it between her jeans and skin.

“More Sanskrit,” she said.

I lifted her and carried her to the bed.

“Not on the bedspread,” she said. “Hotel bedspreads are filthy.”

“Yeah.” I lowered her. She raked the blanket back and I tossed her to the sheets and lunged on top of her. I pulled her blouse to her midriff and spelled “Sunshine” on her navel with my tongue. She squirmed and grabbed the back of my head. Pulled.

“Do the whole Bhagavad-Gita,” she said.

“Forty seven words. And I have to see what I’m doing.”

I withdrew from her. Glanced out the window to a hill marked only by a dim shadow against a blacker sky. I hit the light switch.

“What are you doing?”

“I have to see my work area. It’s a very special technique.”

“Turn off the light. I’m not comfortable.”

“If you’re not feeling good about it in one minute, I’ll kill the light. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, but who else will?”

“We’re on the third floor. No one can see up here.”

I dropped to her navel and headed south. A finger snap and her Levis were undone. One sharp pull and they popped off her ass.

 

 

I searched the Internet for a philologist schooled in ancient Sanskrit, and found a Nietzsche-looking woman with an ivy PhD who boasted a blog and a spunky attitude. I sent her an email with a challenge.

We met for coffee at a Starbucks in Boston. Her countenance was a topography of wrinkles, hair more gray than red, and her flannel pantsuit screamed “frazzled” in each of the dozen dead languages she claimed expertise.

“You have an ancient love-text? Hmm? The original was in Sanskrit and your copy is in French?”

“And I need the symbols in Sanskrit.”

“Most interesting. Just for my own curiosity… why not read it in French?”

“It doesn’t work in French.”

“What doesn’t work?”

“Take a look.”

I placed the leather-bound text on the table. Slid it to her. She reached like a baby going after forbidden candy.

“Hmmm.” She leaned forward. “Ohhh. Interesting tropes. Yes.” She elevated the text closer to her eyes. Her face went scarlet. “Hmmmm.” She extracted bifocals from her breast pocket. Swallowed.

“Well?”

She smiled. “I can translate this back into the original.”

“Word for word? Perfect?”

“Maybe two or three scholars in the world could do so—and guarantee flawless work.”

“Are you one of them?”

“Of course!” She waved a finger. “But there is a caveat.”

Something in her cigarette-gravel tone made me say, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“You have what many would consider a holy text. Scripture.”

“Go on.”

“A text containing mystic secrets so powerful, some would argue no modern man should be entrusted with them.”

Look, it’s just cunni… “Your price?”

“This kind of secret—it’s not a matter of price! This is a sacred art! You must demonstrate proficiency! With me.”

“With you or on you?”

“I must be utterly convinced of your worthiness.”

I followed in my rental car to a snug brick house with Tudor pretensions, kept my mind on Regina while my tongue was on Nietzsche. Afterward, I found a jug of Listerine in her bathroom and drank it. She gradually regained consciousness, then scarfed down three oranges and two Snickers bars.

“Imagine if I’d finished the entire passage,” I said.

She slipped into a robe. “I’d be dead.”

I spent two more weeks memorizing the true Sanskrit marks. My confidence in the Technique grew, but not to the degree I could risk flubbing my one chance with Regina. Her clit was dead and it would take a thunderbolt from Sanskrit heaven to wake it. Although I practiced the entire love poem on a hand mirror, and could verify my tongue marks against the perfect text, I had to be certain of the effect of the entire passage.

I went to the Jarred bar to find a live subject.

Maggie.

 

 

Her panties were white. I hooked a finger underneath and pulled. She lifted from the sheets and was naked.

“The lights,” she said.

“The lights are to protect me,” I said, and then could say no more. One thigh on each shoulder, I closed with her and spent a moment getting acquainted with her geography. My tongue danced like skates on ice. Pirouettes, leaps, landings. She shook.

It was time to go Sanskrit on her.

 

 

I sat on the edge of the mattress and dialed 911.

Police swarmed. I’d left Maggie like she was when she breathed her last. I left a hair between my teeth. The only thing that had changed since the decedent deceded was the location of my face.

A heavyset black-haired detective probed with basic questions. How long did I know her? Why I was there? Why did I kill her?

I made the mistake of stating she died of ecstasy, and then spent an hour explaining that I meant euphoria. Black Hair wanted to know about this new drug I was talking about, street name, Euphoria.

I repeated my story sans change or exaggeration for the hundredth time, now in the interrogation room on Broadway. Two officers tried an anemic version of good cop bad cop. Both were bad cops. Finally they demanded I sit for a psychological evaluation. My attorney arrived and the questioning ended.

 

 

I arrive at home, unlock the  door, enter. If the doctor at the morgue suspects foul play, they’ll try to pin it on me. But I have no doubt what they’ll find: Saliva. Tongue abrasions. A heart that couldn’t tolerate a mystical dose of pleasure. She died with a smile on her face. And if the forensic geniuses can’t add it up…

I step to the Bosch telescope and the laptop beside it. I’ve got video of the last eight hours of the hotel room.

I dial the phone.

“Regina…”

 

 

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