I ring the buzzer and am greeted by an elderly white man dressed in a lavender robe and a pair of black bikini briefs. Beyond that he is naked, gray hair cascading down the back of the jacket, his body spotted, a pale trace of death about the skin but a fire to the eyes. I show him my card and he admits me with a smile. Inside I enter the locker area and strip down to my blue silk boxers. Taller than the man at the door, my body carries more hair and more heft. I am painfully ordinary.
In my ordinariness I consider leaving, uncertain of what will occur. But the same uncertainty fires my excitement. I am a single man and have had my share of loves. They have all been fine, but sexually as tepid as a cup of day-old tea. Safe. A less tepid world never entered my mind. That newness, that sparking curiosity, drives me out amongst the others.
The main area smells of vanilla candles and a soft light tosses shadows on the walls. Once my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see other bodies mingling there. Not in intercourse, just sitting or standing in states of complete or semi-nudity. None of the conformity of pornographic form exists here. These bodies droop, wrinkle or thin to the point of near transparency. They are so tenderly imperfect that they almost summon pity rather than passion.
Various tables are set up in an anteroom to replicate a casino. It is a variation on strip poker. Since we are already stripped, a winning hand exacts exactly that: a hand, or even a mouth, on a spot of the winner's choice. Here again, I experience an inner clutch around the heart, a desire to dash for the door. But instead, I join others at a table. I will remain steely in my resolve, I tell myself. This is not the worst situation I have ever been in, just one of the most deeply vulnerable.
The dealer at my table is the elderly man from the door. We do not acknowledge one another, though I don't know why. Are we both embarrassed to be present here? He licks his fingers as he touches the cards, in a way that seems far too intimate even for this setting. I glance away from him.
My fellow players are a local couple, Jack and Sandi, in their forties. Jack is craggy-faced, thin and stark naked, with a penis lying limp in the cool air of the room. Sandi is plump in her slippery silver panties. Her enormous breasts are bare. She has big, dark eyes to match her jet-black hair. I take an instant liking to Jack and Sandi and smile at them. They smile back and examine my body as I examined theirs. I don't wither under their inspection, which I take to be a good sign.
I win the first hand and Sandi's hand is on my penis, stroking it gently but firmly through the gap in the silk. We kiss. Her mouth is splendid and soft, her tongue alive, all warmth and moisture. I grow hard with her touch and Jack stares. Is he jealous? And of whom, his wife or me? I ignore him as I did the dealer. I enjoy the sensation of this kiss, my first in a while, even more than her hand, and certainly too much to worry over Jack.
Sandi wins the second hand. Jack and I each select the breast closest to us and caress it. Sandi moans. As if to quiet her, the sound of Mozart's Jupiter wafts from the next room. It skips in one spot and the repetition of notes seems to resemble the repetition of caresses we apply to Sandi, as if we were palpating her heart through the ample skin. Is it possible through such contact to raise the dead, to restore the living to a fuller functioning? I think that is the greater gamble here, more than just a hand of cards.
Some groups from adjoining tables have retreated to the private rooms nearby. Others not so fortunate line up at the peepholes in the doors to each of these rooms, gazing in at the action. I consider joining them, though it would simply be like standing in line to view a car crash, so many bodies piled up on the other side and even more against the doors. Inadvertent contact, intentional contact as well, masturbation for those who forego contact altogether.
Sandi, Jack and I remain seated, preferring activity to voyeurism. Or is what we are doing just a more proximate version to being a "peeping tom?" We don't love each other, after all. Or at least I'm not part of any loving nexus here. I know Jack and Sandi just as externalities. And yet those externalities discomfit me, arouse me, awaken me as even the deepest loves of my life have sometimes failed to do. Is it that in not knowing one another, or only knowing one another as empty vessels as it were, there is a dead space in which to impart greater life?
Meanwhile, the elderly man continues to deal out hands. Sandi wins again and this time I minister between her legs, spreading them like bars of soft butter, drawing aside the center line of panty, probing her with my tongue and then mouthing her completely. She leans back in her chair to offer herself more fully to me, while also reaching to the side to stroke Jack's penis. Soon she has it in her mouth, and he leans over to caress both of her breasts. I have never been in sexual contact with two other people simultaneously, even if one body is a conduit for the other. There is something thrilling about such a connection. If one person falters, the other remains. No other relationship can speak to that. I wish this to last forever.
When Sandi comes she clamps her hand to the back of my head and pushes my face in deeper. She has the flavor of honey and its consistency too, the way it clings to my cheeks and lips. I rise up in time to watch her remove Jack's penis from her mouth. Pale jets of come splash across her shoulder and breast. I have never watched another man ejaculate in real life before, only in films, and I find it surprisingly arousing.
Afterward we do not retreat from each other or to a private room. Jack suggests the swimming pool in the basement, which is lit and heated for such occasions, and off we go. Sandi and I remove the remainder of our clothes and enter the warm embrace of the water, bobbing up and down like buoys. Jack enters as well and soon the three of us circle each other like sharks, though there is not a trace of blood in the water.
The elderly man has followed us and removes his clothes too, attempting to masturbate in one of the corners. He does not look at us, though we might provide a visual for his arousal. He instead looks down into the pool, at his own shimmering reflection, at the steam rising from the surface. I find it harder to look away from him, as shriveled as he already appears, as if he has spent hours in the splash before we arrived and patiently awaited us all the while.
Soon our circling closes down, draws tighter and tighter, until we all touch and then hold each other. Jack and I are both hard in the shallow end. I lean against the pool's edge and he goes down on me. The water is soft, almost as soft as his mouth, so that my entire body feels sucked. Soon my knees tremble.
When I feel that I am about to come, I pull free of Jack's mouth and enter Sandi, who is similarly leaning against the pool's edge. Jack, in turn, enters me. The combined motion of our three bodies becomes like the rocking of a boat at sea, Jack's pulse more and more exquisite inside me. Then into Sandi's warmth I shudder. She holds onto me, continues the rocking, refusing to allow it to expire. Jack continues to slide back and forth within me until he too shakes and pitches forward, biting into my neck. Sandi sends up a climactic moan, something primordial, and her own shudder of exhaustion eddies the water's surface.
The three of us remain a single organism for a time, water lapping our skin, an imbroglio of kisses. I will have time to be ashamed tomorrow, I tell myself, if that need arises at all.
Meanwhile the old man remains in wait for us within his corner. It's hard to tell from this distance and declivity whether he succeeded in his efforts to please himself but he seems no less pleased with us, smiling his approval through artificial teeth. He might have been my father once. So might have anyone here. And that is why this is such a necessary story, touching everyone in the symbolic even as I am now touched in the exact, the old man's spotted hand reaching out for contact of its own.
Originally published August 2007 - "One, Two, Orgy!"