A House Full of Women

A House Full of Women (Chapter 5)

Kathryn M. Burke

In the morning Jack, leaving his daughter sleeping like the dead, staggered down to the kitchen for some coffee. He gave a start when he saw Joanna sitting at the kitchen table.

She had been staring off into space as if spooked by something. Then, when Jack wandered in, she gave him that same spooked expression.

"Hi, dear," he said nervously, sitting down beside her.

Joanna glared at him silently for some moments. Then, in a subdued undertone: "You and Eileen? Really?"

Jack had the decency to blush crimson. "How did you know?"

"I have ears. Eileen's pretty noisy when she..."

Jack had nothing to say to that.

"Jack, she's your daughter!"

Joanna thundered. "How could you?"

"It wasn't me, it was her!"

"Oh, you're blaming it all on her?"

"Well, it's not something I planned! I wasn't even going to be in her bed--but she ordered me."

"And you went along like some sort of slave summoned by his mistress."

"She was curious, that's all."

"Curious about what?"

"You know... the male organ. She called it a 'strange little object.'"

"I suppose yours has a mind of its own, irrespective of any moral inhibitions coming out of your brain."

"She's awfully pretty, Joanna."

"So you want to sleep with every pretty girl out there, including your daughter--who, by the way, is a lesbian?"

"She now thinks she may be bisexual."

"I daresay you did your best to convert her."

"She was kind of in charge of everything."

"Is that right? What exactly did you two do?"

"Gee, Joanna, it's a little embarrassing to go into details."

"Come on, out with it. I want to know what you did."

"Well, she first put my thing in her mouth."

"How'd she like that?"

"Pretty well, I think."

"How'd

you

like it? Or do I even have to ask that?"

"It was--it was fine."

Something in his tone of voice made Joanna scowl even more harshly at her ex-husband. "You're telling me you came in her mouth?"

"I couldn't help it! She may be a lesbian, but man, she's a natural cocksucker!"

"Glad to hear it. She actually swallowed?"

"Well, no. She didn't expect it, so she spit most of it out."

"You probably didn't like that very much."

"Oh, I understood. I didn't expect her to swallow."

"So what else? There must have been more. I heard you two carrying on for what seemed like hours."

"So did you and Vanessa!"

"Never mind that. What else did you do?"

Jack fell into a deep and mortified silence. That's all that Joanna needed to know.

"You went into her vagina?"

"Well, sure. She wanted it."

"Did she really?"

"Just to see how it felt."

"And how did it feel?"

"You'll have to ask her. She seemed to like it."

"Did she still have her hymen?"

"She did."

"But not anymore."

"No."

Joanna made a grimace of disgust. "You made her bleed, I suppose?"

"Well, sure. That's natural, isn't it?"

"All right, all right. Anything else?"

Again, an abiding silence.

A little shudder went through Joanna. "You're not going to tell me..." Jack thought he could see steam coming out of her ears.

"You went into her butt?"

she bellowed in high dudgeon.

"Well, I got hard again! I couldn't help it. She's lovely. And she said it'd be okay."

"And you came in her?"

"Naturally. I hate pulling out."

"Yes, I'm well aware of that. I hope that was it."

"Yeah."

"Jesus Christ, Jack, don't you have any sense of shame?"

"You'd better take it up with her!"

Just at that moment Eileen wandered into the kitchen, looking bright and cheerful. Seeing her parents in a heated discussion, she said, "You're talking about me, I gather."

Joanna immediately turned her outrage to her daughter. "Eileen, how could you?" she cried.

"Oh, Mom," Eileen said casually, "it's no big deal."

"No big deal?"

Joanna almost shrieked. "You think getting fucked by your father is no big deal?"

The profanity took Eileen by surprise: her mother almost never used such words in normal conversation. But something about the way Joanna had spoken inflamed Eileen's anger also.

"Hey! I don't like the use of that passive voice. If there was any fucking going on,

I

was the one to do it, not Dad!"

"Amen to that," Jack managed to get in.

"You keep out of this!" Joanna hissed to her ex. "Eileen, dear, he's your father. And anyway"--her voice dropped to a whisper--"you're a lesbian!"

Eileen considered her mother for a moment. "Look, Mom, I was just... intrigued. Frankly, I'll never be really keen on a guy sticking his thing in me, but it was fun. Anyway, it seems as if everyone in this household is experimenting with different forms of intimacy. You and Vanessa seem to have had quite a good time last night."

Joanna blushed furiously. "That's different."

"How is it different?"

"She's not my daughter!"

"Okay, granted, but still--"

It was at this point that a sleepy Vanessa wandered in. Seeing all three members of the Martin family apparently at loggerheads, she began to wonder whether they had somehow crossed a line. She had heard, as much as Joanna had, the moans and groans coming from the other bedroom last night--and while it had startled her that Jack and Eileen could have done what they had done, the matter wasn't quite as personal and emotional to her as it was to Joanna.

"Hi," she said to everyone in a small voice.

"Hi, love," Jack said in a welcoming voice.

"Hello, dearie," Eileen said with her customary mild sarcasm.

Joanna said nothing, looking away from her. Vanessa poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down next to the woman she'd had such an intense session with the night before.

"What's going on?" Vanessa ventured.

"Just a discussion," Jack said at once. "So... you and Joanna enjoyed yourselves?"

"Of course we did. But it was a lot more than that. It was--very meaningful." And Vanessa extended a hand and put it on Joanna's arm.

"Thank you, dear," Joanna said. "It was meaningful for me too."

"Well, then, everyone's happy!" Eileen said jovially. "Aren't we, Mom?"

"We're fine," Joanna muttered. "Everything's fine." Then she broke out into a smile, taking in her ex-husband and her daughter. "But you two really were

very naughty

last night!"

*

With the advent of the fall semester, things in the Martin household settled down--if, in a place where everyone was sleeping with everyone else, it could ever be said that things were settling down. The bedroom arrangements were getting increasingly complicated, at least as far as Vanessa--the one most in demand by all three of the others--was concerned. Eventually a system was worked out whereby she was with Jack for three nights a week and Joanna and Eileen for two nights each. Jack had Joanna for two nights and (with his ex's grudging permission) Eileen for one night.

As she began her senior year, Vanessa felt increasingly confident that she would pass with flying colors and be able to get a good job afterwards, even if English majors were a dime a dozen in the working world. Jack, Joanna, and Eileen made sure not to tire her out too much with their demands for intimacy, lest her classwork suffer; but it was difficult to restrain Jack from doing at least a bit of cuddling in the nights he had her.

Early in the semester she found herself wandering into the student union for a snack before her next class. For some reason her attention fell on a boy--sorry, young man--sitting at a table in the cafeteria. He was not actually eating anything, although he did have a cup of coffee or tea in front of him. What he was doing was scribbling furiously in a notebook, his nose bent down almost to the sheet of paper he was working on, as if he couldn't see very well. It was in fact pretty dark in the cafeteria, and Vanessa thought to herself that this wasn't exactly the ideal place to be doing homework or working on a term paper.

All of a sudden the young man uttered an oath, tore up the piece of paper from his notebook, crumpled it up, and threw it down to the floor near his feet.

Vanessa scowled.

Hey! What's the idea of littering like that?

Maybe the guy intended to clean up after he was finished, but she had to be sure.

She stalked over to him, picked up the paper from the floor, and, sitting down next to the guy, held up the paper in her hand and said, "What's the meaning of this?"

The guy hadn't noticed Vanessa sitting down at his table, so intent was he at his work. He gave her a startled stare and stammered, "What? What?"

"You need to be a little more tidy," she said severely.

"Give me that," he said rudely, and made an effort to snatch the paper away from her.

"No, you don't!" she cried, holding the paper away from him. Her interest piqued, she smoothed out the sheet and gave it a glance. Now it was her turn to be startled.

"What is this?" she asked. "Are you writing poetry?"

A look of something close to terror came over the guy's face. "Please," he said. "Don't read that. It's awful. Total rubbish. Please..."

The guy seemed on the verge of tears. Vanessa now felt she'd been rude in trying to read something that really didn't belong to her. She handed the paper back to the guy.

"You're a poet?" she said.

The guy laughed derisively at himself. "If I am, I'm a really bad one."

"I'll be the judge of that. You have something else I can read? Something you don't intend to throw away?"

The guy gazed upon Vanessa with a mixture of alarm and anticipation. His face seemed to be getting flushed. Muttering incoherently, he fished through his notebook and tore out a page and handed it to her.

This was also handwritten, but it was neat and without revisions. She interpreted it as a "fair copy"--something that the author had copied over after making all the revisions he wanted to make.

She read the poem. It was in free verse, but intense, tormented, a bit harsh, even faintly misanthropic. It reminded her a bit of Sylvia Plath.

One line of the poem was so unexpectedly poignant that she suddenly teared up. Blinking rapidly and swallowing hard, she said, "This is incredible--really moving."

"It's not that good," the guy said.

"It

is!"

Vanessa cried, almost offended that the guy couldn't see the value of his own work. "You need to send this to the

Forun.

" The

Forum

was the college's student-run literary magazine.

The guy chortled cynically. "They'd never take anything like that."

"How do you know?"

"They just won't."

"Well, you'll never know unless you submit it. And if you're not going to submit it, then

I

am!"

Again that look of dread. "No, please..."

As he made an attempt to take the sheet back from her, Vanessa responded with the age-old female tactic of folding up the paper and stuffing it into her bra.

The guy stopped abruptly. Vanessa realized he was too well-bred to do any harm to a woman.

"I'll type it up and send it in," she said with determination.

"Don't put my name on it," the guy said bitterly. "You can put

your

name on it, for all I care."

"I'm going to put your name on it whether you like it or not. What

is

your name, anyway?"

It took the guy a while to say, "Sullivan."

"What's your first name?"

"That

is

my first name. I'm Sullivan James. My ditzy parents stuck me with this moniker."

Vanessa considered for a moment. "I like it. It's very unusual." She got up abruptly. "Well, I'm going to submit this. You'd better give me your cellphone number so I can let you know if they take it."

With very bad grace, Sullivan passed on his number to Vanessa.

"See ya later!" she cried happily as she rushed out of the cafeteria.

Sure enough, when she typed up the poem and sent it in, the

Forum

accepted it immediately. She called Sullivan at once and told him the good news.

"You have any other poems I can read?" she asked.

"Maybe," he muttered.

"Well, can I read them or not?"

"I guess so."

"I figure you haven't typed them up. So maybe I could... come by your place and look them over?"

There was a dead silence on the phone, and she wondered whether she'd been too "forward." Well, for God's sake, this was 2021! And she wasn't even asking the guy for a date.

At long last he gave her his address--a rooming house just off campus. They set up an appointment for her to come over the next evening.

When she got to the romming house that night, Vanessa got a better look at Sullivan and a better idea of what kind of person he was.

As he shyly let her in, she saw that he was of moderate height (five foot eight), but quite stocky--not exactly the image of the starving poet! He had shaggy black hair that seemed resistent to combing, and beneath his superficially aggressive and brooding exterior she sensed a tenderness and sensitivity that he might have been reluctant to reveal except on paper. She learned that he was, like her, a senior--and, interestingly enough, not majoring in English (he professed great disdain for the English Department) but in history. He was leaning toward going to graduate school, although perhaps with a year or two off to get a taste of "real life," as he called it.

As she talked to him, she wondered how much "real life" he had really experienced. His parents lived in Pasadena, but he didn't seem all that close to them. In fact, he didn't seem all that close to anyone: he put on an act of being a crusty old recluse (at the age of twenty-one!), but Vanessa felt that that was just a cover for extreme sensitivity. He didn't want to associate with people because he was afraid of being hurt by them.

After some idle chatter, Vanessa got down to business, asking Sullivan to show her more of his poetry. He adopted his usual air of sullen self-contempt and shuffled over to a little two-drawer file cabinet. Pulling out a thick file folder, he dumped it on the tiny desk situated along one wall of his room.

When Vanessa opened the file folder, she gasped at what she saw.

"Good Lord!" she cried, flipping through what looked like an entire ream of paper containing impeccably neat handwriting. "There must be hundreds of poems here!"

"Yeah, but most of them are rubbish," he said lugubriously.

Vanessa was now getting angry. She actually punched him in the arm and cried, "Don't say that! They're probably all really good!"

Sullivan was taken aback at her physical violence, gaping at her open-mouthed. But of course he was too much of a gentleman to respond in kind. All he did was to mutter, "They're not

all

good."

"Well, you wouldn't have taken the effort to write them out so carefully if you yourself didn't think they were worth keeping. But why haven't you typed them up?"

Sullivn shrugged and made a sour face. "Poetry and computers don't mix."

Vanessa nodded briefly. "Okay, I get that. Writing them out in longhand first is probably for the best. But if you're going to submit them somewhere, you'll have to type them up."

"I'm not submitting them anywhere," he said in glum defiance.

She looked at him keenly. "Well," she said with intense determination, "if you're not going to,

I

am."

Another gape. "What?"

"There's a whole book's worth of stuff here--maybe

several

books. We're going to get these ready to send out to some publisher if it kills me."

"That's the most preposterous thing I've ever heard!"

She went on as if he hadn't spoken. "That is what we're going to do. I'm going to read all these, and I'll hand over to you the ones I think are really good. You're going to arrange them in some fashion or other--you know, by theme, subject-matter, whatever. Then I'll type them up and get them ready to submit."

Vanessa got right down to work. She had to sit on the bed, as the desk wasn't really suitable for the task. As she handed sheet after sheet to Sullivan, he took them with a blank, almost stunned expression and tried to make some tentative organizational scheme. It was obvious that no one had ever taken an interest in his poetry before--maybe he'd never shown it to anyone before.

At one point she held up a page, read it, frowned in disapproval, and put it in the "rejected" pile.

He pounced. "Hey, what's wrong with one?"

"Look, Sullivan, a lot of your poems are pretty tough and grim and even pessimistic. But this one"--she picked up the paper and waved it in front of his face--"this one's just cruel and mean-spirited. It's not a good poem."

The poem was about a man who fell in love with a woman who turned out to be some sort of demon or succubus who ended up sucking the guy's blood and killing him.

As he lapsed into a sulk, she said, "Is this based on anyone real?"

Grudgingly he said, "Kind of. Sophomore year I asked this girl out, and she said no."

Vanessa waited for him to say more. "That's it? That's what led you to write this nasty poem?"

"Well, she hurt my feelings!" he cried.

"Sullivan, everyone gets turned down in situations like that. That's just part of life. You don't have to take out your vengeance on her by writing something like this."

And yet, Vanessa found the poem reassuring in at least one sense. If he'd asked a girl out, he couldn't be gay, could he? No problem if he was--but she was already getting hopeful that he wasn't.

They worked for about two hours, then Vanessa shook her head and stopped. "I can't read anymore--this stuff is too intense. Anyway, we've gotten through about half the material. We can do the other half some other time."

Sullivan seemed relieved that this nosy girl wasn't going to read any more of his precious poetry. He gathered up the poems from both the "accepted" and "rejected" pile, along with the file folder of unread poems, and dumped them on his desk.

"I can put on some soothing music," he offered.

"That would be wonderful," she said.

To her surprise, he put on a CD of some classical music--Schubert's

Nocturne in B flat

for piano, violin, and cello. It was an extraordinarily simple but beautiful piece, and its soft, dreamy tones were just the thing to settle them down after the intense literary session they'd just had.

As both of them lay back against the headboard of the bed, taking in the music, Vanessa sensed something peculiar. About ten minutes after the piece began, she heard some snuffling from Sullivan. She looked over to him.

He was crying.

The piece really was lovely--but what man cries over music? The tears were actually flowing down his cheeks, as Sullivan kept his eyes closed. Inches away from her as he was, he seemed--mentally and emotionally--a million miles away.

Well, that's not going to last very long!

she said resolutely to herself. And so she rolled over and ended up on squatting on Sullivan's lap. Then she took his head and pressed it close to her bosom.

Somehow he didn't seem surprised at her act. He instinctively wrapped his arms around her waist and started crying more unrestrainedly. It had been a warm day, and Vanessa was wearing a clingy nylon blouse without a bra and a low-cut neck. Again, almost without realizing it, Sullivan brought a hand up and pulled the blouse down so that her breasts were exposed. She now felt the tears bedewing her chest, and every so often he sucked gently on a nipple, as if seeking nourishment from his mother.

When the music came to an end, he seemed to snap out of his reverie. Startled by the small but exquisitely shaped breasts exposed to his gaze and touch, he looked up at her and said, "I--I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she said--and peeled off her top over her head.

He now brought both hands to take hold of her breasts, kissing them reverently. Almost to himself he whispered, "They're the most beautiful things I've ever seen."