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Gracie
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
A chapter from the novel ADAM AND EVE by Marcus Van Heller,
published by Spectrum Press on floppy disks for PC and Mac. Copyright
© 1993 Spectrum Press Inc. All Rights Reserved. All queries and
requests for info to: 73774.2733@compuserve.com
GRACIE
"I just love these little English country towns---so very
picturesque. But how anyone could want to live in them for ever and
ever, I just can't begin to understand. Give me a bit of life---and
people are life, interesting people, vital, creative people. They carry
life with them and infuse it in the people they meet. All these others
are dead, just as this quaint, charming, medieval town is dead. You can
only look at it, beautifully embalmed, like a corpse in a New York
funeral parlor, and think how lovely it is and how unutterably,
unshakably and irredeemably dead. But I remember when you had other
ideas. And if you're not careful, you'll grow into a stuffed dummy just
like this place."
Mrs. Gracie Gortner was talking with all the confidence bred of
great wealth and great reputation as a personality. The reputation was
not unearned. And although few people in the lunch-time bar in the
market town could hardly be expected to agree with the opinions she was
at no pains to hide or keep to her own very small group, they did at
least find her, as a person, entertaining. It wasn't often you got
anyone quite so obviously fearless and outspoken and colorfully
sophisticated as Mrs. Gortner, twice divorced, once from the great
surrealist painter Simon Earpit, once from that talented writer Pieter
Hansohl, and many times separated from many famous liaisons in
addition. She herself was a well-known patroness of the arts, but not
everyone trusted her judgment, and nowadays she hadn't quite so much
money to give quite so many parties and keep her name in the press. She
could help painters enormously, as she always had done, but she no
longer had the power to make or break them.
Joseph Grant, the art master, smiled self-effacingly at her
tirade. She was incapable of offending him. He'd always adored her,
from the time he'd first met her at Raoul Dufy's studio many years
ago---and she liked him well enough or she wouldn't have broken her
journey from New York to Paris to see him.
"People like you never get older, Gracie," he said. "But people
like me do and we have to take it quietly."
"Anybody who lives in a morgue will grow old with the morgue," she
said. "You don't really know what's good for you, Joseph. You only
think you do. You don't realize how short life is. You really have to
fill the unforgiving minute unless you're going to sit in a rocking
chair full of regrets for the last ten years."
She glanced at Adam.
"You listen to what I say, young man. Handsome boy like you
shouldn't come under the influence of an old fuddy-duddy like Joseph.
He might be a good teacher of painting, but when it comes to Life with
a capital L, he's as out of his depth as a cocktail in a sewer. What
did you say your name was?"
"Adam Blythe."
"Adam. There's a good name for a man. You can't go right with a
name like that so you'll be all right."
Her eyes lingered on him.
"Well, let's have another, and then we'll take a look at these
paintings of yours."
Adam drank his Scotch. He didn't normally touch it; couldn't
afford it, but she'd insisted. He was quite fascinated by her. She was
no oil painting, he told himself with a grin. But she was very well
preserved and her exuberance and that hint of ever- present sensuality
gave her rather piquant looks a quality of ?lan that many younger women
would have envied. She was thin, too, which was a help to a woman of
her type, and rather unusual- --quite sinewy. And she was beautifully
dressed in a thoughtless sort of way, without any jewelry at all. He
wondered if she'd like his paintings. After all, she'd not only
studied, but had lived and loved with some of the most famous artists
of the century. Must make it rather difficult for her to adjust herself
to new talents. Though he had heard tell that she supported a number of
artists of all nationalities, and that the price of their work on the
world's market had risen sharply due to her patronage. But one never
knew how much credence to give to these stories. Such exaggerated tales
grew up around all these celebrated people, particularly if they gained
a reputation for never bothering to contradict anything that was said
about them. Fancy old Grant knowing her like this. He'd had to look
again at the old boy. What sort of wild oats had he sown in that
long-lost youth?
They left the old pub and took a taxi at her insistence for the
half mile to the evening class studio. Studio! A school classroom with
a few easels and other gear in it. There wasn't much of Adam's work
here, really. Most of it was at home in the empty attic room he used.
Sitting in the taxi, he suddenly thought of Eve and wondered if she was
having any luck with the agents. She'd be interested to hear about this
old girl.
Mr. Grant let them into the school and led the way to the art
room.
"So this is what you've come to, Joseph," she said, looking round
at the desks and the meager equipment.
"This is what I've risen to," he said. "Giving the joy of
knowledge to others."
"Nonsense," she said, continuing the feud. "It's still a truism
that you can't teach painting. Anyone interested can pick up the
technique, as far as you can teach him, by himself with a concentrated
effort. What's happened to that individuality of yours? That's all that
counts in this line---and many others."
"Perhaps I should get the next plane to Paris," he said, grinning.
Adam had never seen him so relaxed, nor yet so flippant.
"Perhaps! Perhaps!" She appealed to Adam. "Don't you ever give up,
like this shining example. He should never have left. That's his
story."
"Come on now, Gracie," Joseph Grant said. "I was never really that
good. Where was my individual voice? Some of us are meant to help along
those more talented."
"How many individual voices have you known that found their
special vocal cords from the beginning?" she asked. "Some people start
with them, others find them at thirty, others at fifty, some much
later. When you don't find them is when you give up."
"Don't keep on, you'll depress me."
Grace Gortner glanced at him quickly, saw the smile and smiled
back with warmth.
"Well, where are these paintings?" she asked.
Adam went to a cupboard and slid back the door. He took out three
canvases. He turned them round and stood them up against the wall.
There were surprising for a young painter only because one didn't
expect to find such thoroughly talented and mature work stuck away in
the evening classes of a local institute in the English provinces.
Although in England, of course, that's where it usually is and where it
usually wastes its fragrance on the desert air.
They were surrealist, which Mrs. Gortner hadn't expected--- as a
matter of fact she hadn't expected very much at all. She had to put up
with approaches like this all the time, but not often from an old
friend like Joe Grant. They were well composed, electrifying in their
choice of object juxtaposition, subtle in their color blends and
containing a mystic hint of other worlds.
Grace Gortner stared at them for a minute or two without speaking.
Mr. Grant smiled quietly to himself. Adam looked at them with a
critical eye, quite forgetting that other people were looking too.
"Hmmm." Grace Gortner was impressed. She stared a bit longer, and
then she said: "There's a bit of Simon in them. Do you like my old
flame?"
"Yes," Adam admitted reluctantly. "But they're not so gloomy as
his; the colors are more interesting, and half the time he was only
kidding around anyway."
Mrs. Gortner looked slowly round at him with wide, amused eyes.
"Well, dig that," she said. "The painter speaks."
She laughed delightedly and went closer for a detailed inspection.
"You're quite right, as it happens," she said. "A gloomier man
never lived. That's why I left him. He used to sit for hours gazing at
a Camembert. He hated Camembert for some reason--- delicious
cheese---and then all of a sudden he'd pound it to a pulp with a wine
bottle. There was a lot of hate in that man. There was something he
felt in himself that he could never quite get to and that made him mean
and moody. Sometimes he produced a fake work out of spite."
"Why don't you write your memoirs, Grace?" Joseph Grant asked.
"You'd make a fortune." He laughed then at what he'd said. Imagine her
needing a fortune.
"I am," she said. "First draft, eleventh chapter. I've already got
a publisher."
Joseph Grant whistled in admiration.
"You make me feel older and more washed out with every word you
say," he said.
"I'll dedicate it to you," she said. "Or did I promise that to
Ernest Hemingway? I'll dedicate it to you anyway." She smiled another
warm smile and bent down to look at the paintings.
"Well, these are good," she said reluctantly, after a while. "Are
there any more?"
"Not here," Adam said. "I have a whole heap at home."
She gave him a long, steady look. It was a different look from any
she'd given him so far. She said: "Bring them around to my hotel
tonight at seven. We'll have a drink and discuss what's to be done."
Grace Gortner was one of those celebrities who is immediately
impressed by the potentiality for celebrity in someone else. She could
look at someone one minute and think: that's a good-looking
person---and forget it. Told that that person was so-and-so, the
painter, or so-and-so, the Earl of Whatsit, she would look again and
see them differently, in terms of people that were worth knowing,
making an effort for, etcetera. That was how she'd looked at Adam after
seeing his paintings. Suddenly he was no longer a handsome young
provincial who could live and die in this "hamlet" as far as she was
concerned. Suddenly he was a famous artist in embryo, another prot?g?,
lover, lifelong addition to the legend of Grace Gortner. Creative
people, lords and ladies, how she loved them!
She and Joseph Grant, who had begged her to stay at his home but
was not surprised at her unabated insistence on complete
independence---"I means I can be generous to my friends from the heart,
without feeling I owe it to them,"---watched Adam leave the school.
"He has real brilliance," she said. "What does he do apart from
paint?"
"Clerking," he said. "He's one of the world's outsiders.
Intelligent, quite well read, never attempted to get anything better."
"Good for him," she said. "But he mustn't waste any of his time on
a whippersnapping job like that. I'll have to see what I can do."
* * *
Adam viewed his appointment at seven with mixed feelings. He
didn't feel too much at ease in big hotels---and this was the only
really big one in the town. And he wasn't quite sure what was expected
of him. There had been something in her look . . .
Anyway, she'd been impressed with his work. There was no doubt
about that.
Walking to the hotel, carrying a dozen of his paintings awkwardly,
he glanced down at himself. Well, he'd made a bit of an effort. She
should consider herself honored. Suit for once: the new smart Italian
blue, no turnups, 17-inch hem, short jacket, small bow-tie. His mother
couldn't and never would understand it all. These enthusiasms for some
things, unconcern about others, unexpected meetings and so on. This was
what made life worth living: the unexpected boost waiting round the
corner.
He went into the hotel. It wasn't so grand, really. Just a good
county hotel with a few people in livery. He asked for Mrs. Gortner.
She'd taken one of the two suites. All the others were simply rooms,
some with private bathrooms, others without.
Adam took the lift up three floors and stepped out into a short
passage with a carpet that curled over his shoe webs. He followed the
directions he'd been given at the desk and walked to door 22. There was
a bright little highly polished knocker in the shape of a knight of
King Arthur's Court. Of course the hotel was called King Arthur's
Court.
He knocked solidly, and after a pause the door opened.
"Hello," she said. "You're dead on time. I like people to be
punctual. Everybody but me, that is."
He followed her into the suite. She was quite an eyeful. She was
dressed in a simple black cocktail dress, with three rows of diamonds
around her bronzed neck. Her stockings were so sheer that they shone
like quartz, and her black crocodile-skin shoes had high thin heels and
were long in the toe and dainty. She had a couple of Indian bangles
around her right wrist that obviously had more sentimental than
material value.
She led the way through the first room into another that looked
almost exactly the same. The motif was rose---various shades---cool and
warm from the middle rose of the carpet to the deep ruby of the velvet
curtains and the deep red of the lamp shades with their soft
yellowish-pink tassels. The only other colors were pink rosewood and an
odd bit of chrome. The effect was pretty good. Adam had had no idea
there was quite such luxury in the town. From the outside one would
have said untidy oak fireplaces and pebbled windows.
She took his canvases from him without looking at them and placed
them against a rose-colored wall.
"Time for them," she said. "What's yours? Scotch?"
"Champagne," he said, surprising himself. "If you have any."
She stared at him and smiled slowly.
"Sure there's champagne," she said. "I like a man who knows his
own mind."
She produced a champagne bucket, glittering with ice, the bottle
steamed over, enticing. She pulled the cork expertly and poured them
both a large glassful. The champagne was cool and the bubbles ran up
and down in it. Adam looked at it for some seconds before he raised the
glass towards her. He didn't feel nervous at all. He felt a beginning
of power. He felt good, as if he had finally found the world he
belonged in.
She settled herself in a large, modern velvet armchair, far from
the dim wall lights, and indicated another for him opposite her. It
occurred to him that she'd already been knocking it back- --Scotch,
probably. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. In the rose light she
looked positively alluring, her silk-clad calves and ankles seductive.
"Well, well," she said. "Tell me what you think. Tell me about
yourself."
Adam was rather taken aback. What did he think? What was there to
say about himself? But before he could answer, she said: "No, I can see
you're not ready. You can tell me later. How often do you drink
champagne? Do you really prefer it to Scotch?"
"It makes me lightheaded," he said. "I automatically associate it
with Paris. Scotch just reminds me of the local pubs and maybe a London
theater bar."
"You don't drink champagne much then?"
"Can't afford it."
"Don't make much money?"
"What do you think---I'm a solicitor's clerk."
"And hate it?"
"Naturally."
"Why not try something else?"
"Gives me a lot of spare time. Doesn't make any demands on my mind
at all. Most other work would, I imagine."
"That's the way," she said. "Let's kill this bottle and have
another."
They drank. He looked at the room; she looked at him.
"Would you like to see the paintings?" he asked after a bit.
"Later," she said. "I don't really need to. You have it all
right."
He flushed with pleasure, felt himself flush and found the flush
didn't go. He looked at the champagne. His glass was a third full. The
bottle was empty.
But why, he suddenly thought, did she ask me round here if she'd
already decided that my paintings were okay? He looked up at her and
she smiled at him and held his eyes. Cleopatra looked at him, a Queen
inviting, summoning. The flush enveloped him like a flame from the
Inferno. He didn't have to think about why, looking at her. It was all
clear and inevitable.
She brought another bucket of champagne and some cocktail
biscuits. He began to feel quite lightheaded. He looked around the room
again. This was riches. He had a quick flush of feeling about it, a
real sense of glamour, as if he belonged in this world as a rightful
owner of it with its champagne, money, comfort, luxury, promise of the
pleasures of the flesh, with way beyond it like something coming out of
the mists fast cars and aeroplanes and blue seas and yachts and hot sun
and long iced brandies by the palms near the beach. She carried this
with her, he realized. He was so unlike Joseph Grant. Movement meant
life for him: new places, new people, a new blind.
"Have you got a girl friend?" she asked suddenly. The yellow
liquid cascaded from the bottle and splashed and bubbled in his glass.
"Nobody special," he said. He couldn't admit anchors in the world
around him.
"Well, in that case there'll be nobody to get jealous if we have a
little dance, eh?"
She switched on a radiogram. He wondered if it really went with
the hotel or whether it went with her. After a second, soft dance
music, lush music, began to pervade the room. It was old- fashioned in
a way, but perfect of its type---Glen Miller, in fact. He stood up and
she came into his arms. She was surprisingly light and graceful, and
she glued her hips to his, swivelling them slightly as they turned, so
that she managed to massage his penis in a manner so subtle and expert
that she must have been learning it since she was fifteen. He had an
erection in no time, and there was no hiding the fact, no need to. She
put her hand round the back of his neck and stroked his hair. He put
his cheek against her hair, thinking: This is working out like a
woman's magazine story except for the sex.
"You're such a handsome boy," she said softly. "You'll have the
world, your own world, at your feet once you get out of this rut."
"I'm nineteen," he said, "and feel much older."
"Nineteen," she said, smiling into his neck. "Youth, youth, youth,
where is thy fling? Have you had many girls?"
"Had?"
"Been to bed with many?"
"Not many."
He realized suddenly that she was quivering. She moved her thighs
against his loins.
"I can tell you want to go to bed with me," she said.
He didn't know what to say, dropped his hand down on her moving
buttocks.
She slipped her hand down from his back between them, began to
play with his penis, first tickling it through the cloth of his
trousers, then gripping it at various places as though to measure its
dimensions.
"Let's take our clothes off," she said.
A little thrill squirmed through him. This rich, unfamiliar woman
from worlds he'd only dreamed of---what was she saying?
He glanced at the door.
"It's all right," she said. "It's locked---nobody will come in."
She unbuttoned his flies as they danced, to encourage him. She
took both his hands and placed them on her rump, so that he was holding
one of her buttocks in each hand. They were finely shaped and sinewy as
he'd expected. Her body was very warm against him, and she raised her
face to his as she found his penis in the opening of his flies and
brought it out to stroke it. He gasped at the cool pressure. He
inclined his head and kissed her. She smelled of some faint jasmine
perfume. Her lips gave in like a soft cushion and her tongue came into
his mouth like a little darting eel. She crushed the length of her body
against his and undulated furiously against him before pulling away.
She pulled off her dress. She wasn't wearing very much underneath,
as though deliberately prepared.
Adam, feeling rather self-conscious with his erection cleaving the
air in front of this stranger, began to take off his clothes. He
watched her undress to the last stitch, everything off, even her
stockings that she quickly rolled off her legs and tossed away. She had
a well-kept body, sagging a little here and there, but well dieted and
highly tanned. It was the tan that gave it a sort of luster, made it
twice as good-looking as it would otherwise have been. Her breasts were
slightly thin and long, with extended nipples that looked rubbery. As
she came towards him, her breasts swung a little from side to side. The
muscles in her thighs rippled slightly and the bones of her hips just
showed through, two tiny embossments at each side of the tuft of black
hair below her navel.
He pulled off his socks and met her. It was very warm in the room,
but their flesh met like a touch of ice-water. They both began to
breathe fast. Adam thought: I dare not think about it, or it'll amaze
me so much I'll just faint away into a dreaming sleep.
She ran her hands searchingly down over his body, pressing all the
hollows, exploring, learning it all. She got his prick between her
thighs as they swayed together to the music, and let it rest, jiggling
lightly against the moist lips between her legs.
Adam ran his hands down her back. He could feel the reticulated
line of her backbone, suddenly blossoming out into those neat, sinewy
buttocks. There was a lot of muscular strength in her body. He wondered
how those strong thighs would grip.
"You beautiful, beautiful boy," she whispered. She kissed him
again, writhing her hips against him. She dug her fingernails into his
shoulders. He gripped her buttocks, pulling her towards him, rubbing
his prick between her strong thighs.
"My god," she said. "I want you now! Put it in---quick!"
She dragged him with her to a divan and fell back, pulling him
over her in an expert manner that made him think, in passing, of a
certain judo throw. Her fingers came down and closed over his
testicles. "Tight balls," she groaned. "I love tight balls." And then
she guided his aching penis at her cunt. She was moaning into his face,
her eyes closed, her hips grinding.
Adam entered her with a rush. He had the thought as he did that
she was old enough to be his mother, but this simply added a perverse
fascination to the whole thing.
His prick rode up her tightly at first, hurting along its whole,
hard flesh---and then more easily. She let out a short howl, like an
animal. He thrust right up into her so that their pelvic flesh bruised
and bumped together.
She strained back under him, arching her loins up at him, lifting
them both up off the divan for seconds at a time. She moaned
incessantly and scratched all around her at the divan until the
coverlet was screwed up in a rag-doll mess under them. She bit his
lips, turned her face convulsively away, came back and bit his lips
again, over and over.
"Put your fingers in my ass," she coughed.
He reached under between the buttocks as he stroked rhythmically
into her juicy quim. He spread them apart, felt the sweating down,
found the puckered ring and thrust a finger in. She gave another gasp
and screwed her behind back at his hand. He moved his finger around in
her asshole. It was soft and fleshy. He felt his nail catch the flesh
and she moaned and jerked and then came back again offering her rump
for further exploration.
"Another finger."
He added a second finger, stretching her further, and she groaned
and writhed anew, pushed her ass at his hand to hold him captured.
Adam's loins were coiled up like a spring. His penis felt
monstrous, as if it were growing away from him in its own separate
existence, increasing in size all the time like some fairy tale
beanstalk, a fairy tale prick that would grow and grow and would spear
her right through and come out of her mouth and go on searching around
the room and out of the window. It expanded and contracted, throbbing
painfully.
She held him tightly in the strong thighs, clamping them round his
hips, slackening them, clamping them again.
She murmured obscenities in his face. Her own face began to turn a
deep, furious color, her neck strained back, her fingernails raked
great weals across his back and shoulders.
"I'm coming," she rasped. The first time it was almost a matter of
fact statement. And then she began to repeat it at lessening intervals
until the words all ran together in a scream. She pulled back her
thighs, presenting him with a stretched and widely open cavern of pink
at the core of her body. Her legs squirmed up over his shoulders. She
thrust her loins at him with bruising force. Her mouth opened, tried to
close, couldn't, her eyes glazed, her nostrils flared. She gave a
sudden thin unearthly whine and screwed herself onto his prick and held
herself there while her loins worked up and down. And then she expelled
her breath as if she were a diver suddenly coming to the surface at the
end of her tether. She collapsed under him and went limp, only her body
shaking and quivering like an animal in its death throes.
Adam felt a little apprehensive, even through his own mounting
passion. He was afraid he'd injured her in some way. But after a few
moments of simply lying still, moaning quietly, limply permitting him
to go on sawing into her quim, she seemed to revive.
She looked at him with a long, purring look like a satisfied cat.
She closed her eyes and uttered a cozy exclamation as he dug into her a
little further.
"That was something," she murmured.
She gave another exclamation. She held his panting mouth with
hers.
"Honey," she said, releasing his lips. "Like a damn virginal fool
I've packed my pessary in a trunk that's on the high seas to Le
Havre---and I'm not quite so old that I can afford not to have it. It's
not fair to you, I know. But I'll do my best. Turn over."
Adam allowed himself to be turned over on his back, coming out of
her with a faint plop. His penis reached yearningly up to the ceiling.
He didn't see what difference it made if he screwed her one way or the
other, but he let her move him around.
(continued)
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