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by Peter Magliocco |
| It was not a question of forcing his wife into adultery, for Herr and Frau Teffel had always been openly adulterous. Still the husband believed this ritual had to be meticulously worked out, and that his wife needed the proper directive prompting. Otherwise she would simply rebound from man to man like a lascivious, human pinball. Together this German husband and wife managed a modest hotel in Saarbrucken, West Germany, not far from the train station. The hotel was entered via a lift directly from street level. An American traveler named Schransky in a state of confusion boarded the lift one mid-day, almost on a whim than otherwise. True, Schransky needed a room for one or two nights, but he'd already passed up any number of available budget hotels. With his suitcase secured in a train station locker, the 30-ish American strolled aimlessly along, borne by crowd current. If the lift he was in failed to ascend he would have gotten out, but somehow it took him to the reception desk on the third floor. Frau Teffel was there as if awaiting a visitor. She was a trim-figured woman in her 40's with Teutonic black hair styled into a permanent, almost plastered wave. Her air was oriental, almost condescending yet with a threat of possible treachery masked behind it, and she seemed to be daring Schransky, immediately subjecting him to overtures of thinly concealed lechery. She was not that bad-looking of a woman, and Schransky became suddenly interested in securing "ein zimmer." He knew somewhere nearby this Frau had a proper bourgeois spouse lurking about, ready to unexpectedly appear during a delicate moment. He was not immediately attracted to Frau Teffel -- not even repelled. He was simply waiting for a mood to give credence to anything resembling desire. He followed her as she attempted to show him a room on the fourth floor. Inside the lift she told him, "You must never take the stairs. My husband is quite disturbed by anyone on the stairs, due to fire hazard." She appraised Schransky with a cool, dead-pupil stare. "Never take the stairs." "Whatever for?" Schransky asked. "I like to walk." She pretended not to notice his momentary disconcertion. She unlocked the door to a quite drab yet functional single room, which would suit Schransky all too well at 45 marks. She waited, watching with almost amused loathing as he surveyed the small room's interior and furniture, checking out the closet with its hangers and spare blanket. It was very quiet on the fourth floor at this hour, Schransky noticed, and what he saw of the hall through the opened door gave him a meditative peace. When she came on to him Schransky did not back away, though almost stupefied by her bold movement and exploratory hands. The German woman felt his ass and ran her hands over his gray slacks down to his knees, as if frisking him. All the while her dark eyes watched and studied Schransky's face. She knew his excitement was a palpable force controlled by pressuring fingertips, which had his white dress shirt halfway unbuttoned now in order to run a palm across the blond hairs of his chest. Her eyes closed as she did so, her lips contracted while issuing a low, even incantatory moan, biting him like an alien predator. YOU ARE MY SACRIFICE, her eyes wanted to tell him, MY BEAUTIFUL YOUNG SACRIFICE. The German woman was like a prostitute to Scransky. She held his paper marks later between her fingers: the perfumed leaves of love. But now she was engrossed in giving him an oral satisfaction, skillfully done. Her tongue lashed against his penis in a dream-like abandon, her mouth became a cavity of lusciousness filling with spermy essence. The door remained half-open all the while. In the room's privacy Schransky later dwelled on what had happened, how he had stood waiting in petrified expectancy for someone -- for HIM -- to appear within the doorway; and how his own labored breathing became an unbearable sound to him. He had read about such experiences in pornographic books while a G.I. stationed near Mannheim, many years before. But he'd never thought anything like that could ever happen in this reality, where sexual frustration became as paramount as anything else. It had happened -- unavoidably so -- and Schransky now tried to judge and understand the meaning of that fact as he sat by the window staring at the passenger-clogged traffic below. If she comes back, I might want to kill her, he told himself. She won't take being rebuffed easily, and I'll want to choke the crazy bitch with something, squeeze the very air from her. When she told him of the beauty of their sexual love, Schransky hated her. Thanks to the lift, he could escape the hotel easily without passing by the reception desk. He put on a pair of dark glasses during the descent, the lift's whining sound abrading his ears as an inhuman, distinctly impersonal police siren would. He trembled between an ecstasy of fearful guilt and the exciting experience of taboo, in which joy dismantled perversity. Regression was a perversity, wasn't it? he asked himself. Why then sould he be ashamed of having found something blocked-out by himself for so long. As he kissed the pores of her delicate skin a languorous sweat emerged along with an odor Schransky could not forget. Schransky later returned to the hotel with his toilet articles, though he debated doing otherwise. At the train station he had almost boarded another train, wanting to leave the city entirely. He refrained. Something in his mind abounded with a parapsychic's imaginative energy. With an intuitive certainty he felt that Frau Teffel was childless. Why this had such a great and reverberating meaning for him he did not know. But wanting to pursue the meaning's essence of uncertainty caused him to head back for the hotel. Taking the lift up again, Schransky mistakenly got off at the second floor. He was wary now of the lift and its whining sound. Something propelled him towards the white-painted stairs, which he began to ascend in a slow, determined manner. When he came to the third floor landing the sound of other footsteps were audible, and he looked up into the face of Herr Teffel. "Never take the stairs," Herr Teffel said in a reprimanding tone. "Always take the lift, do you understand me?" Schransky wanted to tell the man of his disorientation, but decided against it. "What room are you in?" Teffel asked, guiding the foreign straggler into the lift with him. "Forty-two." "Fine, and from now on you will take the lift, since the stairs are bad." "Of course." "You've met my wife ..." "Yes, I have." Schransky was nettled at having to corroborate obvious facts. "Is everything to your satisfaction?" "Yes, it is." "And my wife ... is attending to you well enough?" Schransky looked away suddenly, wondering if he were being put-on. "She's been very helpful." "I'm glad." They stepped out into the fourth floor landing. Schransky hoped the hotel proprietor was about to disappear. "My wife takes a great interest in our guests, as you probably know." Schransky, who had never married, voiced an affirmation. Safe and alone inside the room, he begain thinking back to his service days. He recalled how, as a young G.I., he wished he'd been married so he could live with an attractive woman like his friend Hessler did. Married life for the Hesslers however was not idyllic. The pair lived in a depressingly large and antiquated German flat which was improperly furnished. Schransky believed a large discolored metal vase in the corner was the ugliest piece of "decor" in the place, always inadequately heated that winter Schransky visited. Schransky had been invited by the newly marrieds to help relieve the discomfort of their troubled union. Watching someone, obviously such a misfit as Schransky, was the attempted therapy. This backfired curiously, since the solo G.I. watched with infinite pity the dissolving mental and emotional states of his supposed friends. Back in Germany years later as an ordinary civilian, Schransky somehow connected the young maried couple of years past with the German Herr and Frau of his current, even touchier predicament. * * * It was Saturday. Schransky enjoyed an early breakfast in the "frustruckraum" served by Frau Teffel with distant and impersonal equanimity. Very proper, businesslike, her eyes said nothing of the act which passed between them the day before, though when she smiled at him there was a trace of mockery. There was no one else eating breakfast at 7 a.m. except for a small band of suited Germans, obviously business travelers. They spoke with guttural animation as Schransky consumed his toast and coffee nearby in lone grimness. He was not imagining any of it. What had happened had obviously happened, yet the "strange" banality of everyday life now prompted him to suspect an exaggeration of facts. (He wondered what "Life" would be like without quotation marks around it.) Perhaps she had unzipped his fly for him and Schransky had masturbated. Or an erotic device had been used by the woman in lieu of her perfect, impenetrable mouth. (No, Schransky overruled himself. The Frau had performed fellatio, an inescapable fact.) He left the hotel feeling shaken nonetheless. He wanted to spend one more night in Saarbrucken at the hotel. Then he would leave, of course, the incident an ambiguous memory for him to ponder or simply forget. If the latter proved impossible, Schransky knew he would reconstrue the event somehow, changing details minor and major as he went along, until it became equal to a pornographic fantasy given a factitious weight. That day he made his way towards the St. Johann district. Along the way he stopped at several shops, buying an item here and there as he went along: a pipe, magazines and books, a switchblade knife, and even some erotic aids in a kind of sexual supermarket. (The latter purchase alternately ruffled and fascinated him, since he did not know what he was going to do with an exotic variety of condoms, in Germany or the U.S., after his now ongoing "surgery.") Something in his unconscious prompted the purchase, particularly the fact of Frau Teffel, and what had happened. Alone in the hotel room, he would try on some of these aids perhaps, and see if they inspired him into a "puissant action." During this same period Herr Teffel was confronting his wife in the hotel with his particular slyness. This confrontation too was always part of the adulterous ritual. In the past it happened in any variety of places: in the bathroom, the bedroom, or some swank restaurant with friends, or while driving somewhere in their Mercedes. It was usually a difficult scene, filled with unpredictable tensions. This time the confrontation occurred in the reception and breakfast room. It was late morning right after all the guests had been served breakfast, and Frau Teffel and her fraulein kitchen helper had finished cleaning the tables of dishes and silverware. Frau Teffel was seated at the reception desk taking coffee and going over the day's accounting when her husband walked slow-footedly in. "Has he checked out?" "Who?" "The boy in 42 ..." "No, he hasn't. He's paid for another night." "He's an odd one, isn't he. You know you like the odd ones. He walks in without so much as a tote bag and toothbrush, and spends the night." "Nothing wrong with that. He's just another lost soul." "Another lost soul with a cock you've found," her husband said matter-of-factly. His wife continued going over the records. "Another randy G.I. you've found a penchant for." The husband laughed. "You may not change the sheets in the hotel, but you've used them often enough." Herr Teffel stood looking into the large mirror which, like a picture, accented the flower-patterned wall behind the reception desk where his wife now sat. He saw the tired, vaguely handsome face of a man in his 50's, with jowly features verging on shallowness. His sun-shy skin was too pale, his lips too perennially compressed. His eyes still held the secrets of a hard drinker. "Have you been doing anything constructive instead of worrying about the occupant in 42?" "Is contemplating taking a life constructive enough?" "I don't think it is very constructive at all, Peter. I don't want you hurting yourself." "I'm trying to end hurt, Reni. I'm trying to promote joy. In myself and others." His wife was not trying to moralize, but she said, "Joy is always there somehow to promote." "What do you want me to do, Reni?" Frau Teffel gave this some thought. "To relax some of your inflexible rules, I suppose, which sometimes frighten the guests." He kept watching his face in the mirror. "Oh, fine, I'll do that immediately. I should know by now about your ultimate fantasy. You've inimated it to me often enough. You would like its coming about to be a kind of wedding present for you, wouldn't you? Something to celebrate with the boy." "Why are you calling him a boy?" "I don't know. I suppose I'm being flippant," Herr Teffel said. * * * Late that Saturday afternoon Schransky returned to the hotel, this time carrying a new suitcase he'd retrieved from the train station locker. There was also a small bag filled with parcels purchased during his outing, plus a small gray shoulder tote containing his surgical items. He placed the suitcase on the bed and opened it, removing a small box upon which was a stamped, military insignia. Inside the box were various medals, citations, and other memorabilia from his army service days overseas; all he needed was a Purple Heart. He arranged the medals and citations carefully on the hotel room desk which was walnut-stained, with a high-intensity lamp bolted upon it. An unthumbed Gideon Bible was in the bottom drawer. Schransky next placed his green barracks hat, or "cunt cap," almost ceremoniously on his head. Looking in the sink mirror, he saw the fit was a bad one, with his ample blond hair squashed out along the sides in a parabolic fashion. Still there was a tinge of wondering pride in his admiration of his naked self, even if his bandaged scrotum was unsightly. Around his neck was an impressive ribbon of sorts, while above his heart-side nipple medals were pinned like body-piercing jewels. He felt sick from blood loss. From the scuffed suitcase eventually he removed the white wedding dress, which -- carefully, with almost reverent handling -- he fitted over his sanguine and odoriferous body. Looking in the mirror again he crossed himself. Inside the room, alone, the ex-G.I. smoked some hashish in a small steel pipe until the hours blurred into infinity. The hashish had been procured during his long walk through the town, nearby streets where prostitutes patrolled at night, honing their sometimes sordid-filled craft. Schransky was like a lost one who had returned to a home where he was always lost, in a comfortable but permanent exile, forever on a lurid march through streets of decay. IN MY MIND, LIFE HAS BECOME A DRUG-DREAM OF PSEUDO-UNDERGROUND NORMALCY, Schransky wrote inside the back cover of the Bible. He would have wrote it in his own blood, in German, had he been able. Finally Schransky retrieved the sacrosanct medical items from his gray shoulder tote. Placing the items in order on the dressing bureau's scummy surface, he held up the small vial wherein a dark slab of scarlet genital floated in a semen-like liquid. Opening the vial he inserted a pair of tweezers into the liquid and removed the scabrous meat, which his tongued bathed with saliva before swooping the prize into the deep cavern of his mouth. Chewing slowly, Schransky noted the other vial -- the one for HER -- was safely secured to his kit, which he now closed and put back in the tote. All the while the bureau mirror reflected him like a picture from a god-like vision ... Shouldering the tote and straightening his olive drab cap, Schranksy rose from the bed slowly, opening the door to his room and keeping it open. Overpowering was his belief that he had achieved a transcendental orgasm no woman could take from him. He also believed he was the only person on the floor at that moment, that all the other rooms were devoid of occupants and always would be in this hallowed hotel. Long minutes passed during this narcotic silence, wherein his was the only consciousness able to hear the silent sound. Now Scrhansky stepped out into the hallway. He stood very still in the faint and gauzy hallway light, his eyes drawn toward the landing and the lift. A moment's shock nearly overpowered and propelled him backwards. The door opening onto the stairway of that floor was opened wide. A few yards beyond that, the lift was visible, its door also open. He could plainly see a naked woman's figure there, relaxed in a standing posture of habituated waiting. He knew from a distance the woman was looking back at him. Schransky moved forward, feeling the medals rubbing against his chest. He knew the woman had been waiting for him all along. On the roof in a small room where the bare pulleys of the lift were located there sat another man fully clothed, who checked his watch at this moment and drank from a large bottle of vintage Moselle. He knew his wife would be in the lift with the young man by now, that its doors would be closed and it would be his job to keep the lift moving up and down, from top to bottom, making sure the door never opened on any floor, even if someone were waiting below. It was his particular job and often his wife told him in her fantasies he was capable of performing it flawlessly. But the husband lowered the wine bottle, knowing he wasn't up to it. Thanks to some mechanical adjustments he'd made, when the lift was activated downwards it would plunge unimpeded by any controlling connection of steel and cable usually attached to it. The lift would fall four floors like a boulder hurtling through a mine shaft, and Herr Teffel guessed it would probably reach bottom faster than any feather ... Methodically the pale Herr took another drink then. Something was on his shoulders now, resembling a new-found imperative, almost a moral thing. It shocked and repulsed him. Perhaps he would not let the lift fall. He would keep the lift going up and down forever, he would finish the bottle, he would wonder if the power of his restraint did not equal a form of awe-filling emotion after all, something others might call what he dreaded, love. |
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