alternated bites of vindaloo with spoons of the cooling raita. The closing chai tea came with complimentary cognac delivered somewhat unctuously by the owner himself, Ray Bannerejee; Mariko addressed him in Japanese and they seemed to be discussing whether he should move the restaurant out of this mammoth office building—it seemed being the first floor under 34 other floors made the operation vulnerable, or compressible. Besides there was no view, the owner said, smiling. As always, Mariko charged the bill to her business account. “So long as we talk in English, I can get funds for these meals. Or I can be recruiting you to teach in my language lab.”
“Ah yes, the native speaker. The idiot who makes perfect American sounds.”
“Bannerjee-san used to make tapes for me, before he opened this restaurant. And I hear he goes to South Korea to make more tapes, every time he has to leave to get his visa renewed.”
“So the English market has moved to South Korea?”
“Everything’s more prosperous over there.”
“Will the Koreans here be moving back?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said, smiling. “Time to go south.”
He smiled acknowledgment, “For my lesson in naturalness?”
“Yes, of course,” she answered.
Going south meant leaving and walking away from the water toward the dismal Etta district full of ramshackle apartment complexes and floppy single houses holding the poorest residents of the city, descendants of meat cutters and tanners, as well as never-assimilated Koreans impressed decades ago into forced labor and left in limbo after the war. On the edge of the district were the Love Hotels they always used, although lately Mariko had favored a mock American deep south mansion called, appropriately enough, “Tara”. Their first venture had been in a placed called “Cinderella’s Pumpkin” painted a lurid orange and with constant strobe lights playing on the front porch littered with giant green carriage wheels.
“Tara” seemed understated beside it. Huge columns ala Louisiana mansion and clapboard lines drawn in the white stucco walls, as if wood had somehow cohered into something more durable. The clerk always wore a Rhett Butler-length suitcoat and sported a charcoal drawn mustache—altogether a slenderer, smaller, would-be Clark Gable. As always Mariko booked the Scarlet O’Hara suite for two hours.
As always the first hour was given over to water libations. There was a mammoth marble round deep tub with the interesting touch of outside wall spigots and plastic stools so that bathers could lather up properly in Japanese fashion before entering the piping hot waters. She undressed Owen, slowly, thoughtfully, carefully folding his clothes in the wire baskets provided above the spigots. As always she encouraged him to create heavy suds over her narrow breasts, even as she lathered his genitals and slowly worked soap into foam around his stiffening penis; just as he seemed unstoppably cresting toward ejaculation, she poured a bucket of severely scorching water over his back.
“Slows down everything,” he said. They squirmed off their stools, slithered on the marble floor toward the deep mammoth , sunken deep tub. For a moment he thought they should mount there on the slick marble, but she was too quick for him and slithered into the piping hot water. She pulled at his shoulder, yanking him into the tub. The enveloping heat indeed wilted desire immediately.
“You must have thrown the switch,” he said, fighting the urge to flee from the searing water.
“You must always turn the lever before you start washing,” she answered, fitting a folded towel on her forehead.
“I think it’s burning my skin,” he sighed.
“It’s not,” she answered smiling. “We need to rest a while, to gather our strength and increase our pleasure.”
“Is that natural?”
“Ever since,” she answered.
“Ever so, is better,” he said.
“Ever so, ever since,” she said slowly turning the phrases over.
“Ever again,” he said.
“Ever green”
“Ever a tease,” he said, putting his own folded towel on his forehead.
“Oh, you have no idea,” she said.
They treaded water facing each other in the deep tub; it seemed to water got hotter still and after ten minutes she admitted as much and reached to throw the lever that turned off the heating element. He felt near sleep, his muscles melting into near jelly. Then she glided over to him and pushed gently on his shoulders, shoving him back toward the edge of the tub. When he got there she shoved harder, directing him to hoist himself up out of the water. “Leave your legs in, and lie back,” she said quietly. He obeyed, but the marble had cooled and was momentarily shudder-inducing.
The effect was dizzying and stiffening. And soon enough she was licking him and slowly enveloping him in her mouth. He rose and swoll toward her patient plying. He half sat and could not resist pushing his hands on the top of her head, guiding her. He pushed down hard as the tide of heat rose further, sending him ascending the escalator of paroxzm; she began gagging, but he could not stop himself from pushing harder on her head. She flailed her arms out from the water, attacking his arms now clamped like iron bars on the top of her head. But he was irresistible until sudden explosive deliverance that turned her gagging into vomiting. In panting relief he eyed the streaming black, white-flecked bile pouring out of her mouth and momentarily thought of Mogen’s reaction to plague gushes out of the little girl’s festering body, but realized with some relief that Mariko’s deposit was only deeply darkened palak paneer spinach. Mariko continued heaving.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t stop myself.” But she extended her hot palm across his mouth.
“Say nothing,” she said softly. “Say nothing. We’ve only started.”
2
On the next trip to see Mioko he brought Mogens’ account of that little girl’s death, but rather than review its atrocities he slumped into the rocking rhythm of the train to Suma and re-experienced Mariko’s supremely soft, slippery stomach—the incredibly inviting slopes of its deliciously lickable terrain. In an extravagant oral reciprocation he had lolled his head down those soft slopes, kissing the freshly shorn mount and plunged his tongue, his heart, his resurrected longing, into her, her calves flung out over his shoulders. Pausing only long enough to swig from the plastic cup of tepid green tea on the train window ledge, then breathing through her swaying, sweet secretions, breathing harder and harder, finally tearing himself loose long enough to continue the exploration with his longer, firmer member so that he imagined momentarily that he had found the bottom of her throat from below and inside her. She squirreled herself tighter and tighter against him, legs pushing down harder and harder on his shoulders as he rolled higher and higher into that perfect ball of delerium and delivery. It seemed at release they could have rolled across the firmament a perfect bouncing beach ball in an endless envelope of gorgeous, softly-spreading, moist darkness.
He said to Mioko, before the inevitable red bean paste sweets and the tepid tea, “Tell me how you knew Mogens Nielsen, and what you thought of him?”
But she didn’t tell him. Rather it was all girlish giggling and reticence and apparent confusion at his questioning. So he broke off and
